Friendship's Shadows: Women's Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 9780748655830

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Friendship’s Shadows

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner 978 0 7486 4253 3 Hbk The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature John D. Lyons 978 0 7486 4515 2 Hbk Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger 978 0 7486 4463 6 Hbk Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver 978 0 7486 4465 0 Hbk The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham 978 0 7486 5590 8 Hbk Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 Penelope Anderson 978 0 7486 5582 3 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc

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Friendship’s Shadows Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705

Penelope Anderson

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© Penelope Anderson, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 5582 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5583 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5585 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5584 7 (Amazon ebook) The right of Penelope Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Series Editor’s Preface

x

Introduction: Friendship, Gender, Politics

1

Part I: Friendship and Betrayal 1 Indemnity for Enemies, Oblivion for Friends: Changing Political Allegiances in the English Civil Wars

27

2 “Obligation here is injury”: Exemplary Friendship in Katherine Philips’s Coterie

69

3 The Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden: Friendship’s Counsel in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder

114

Part II: The Rewritten Legacy 4 “Women, like princes, find no real friends”: The Manuscript Tradition and Katherine Philips’s Reputation

153

5 Honoring Friendship’s Shadows: Marriage and Political Reputation in Lucy Hutchinson’s Writings

189

6 Covert Politics and Separatist Women’s Friendship: Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell

222

Bibliography

260

Index

282

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for Sarah and for my parents

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Acknowledgments

A book of this kind, which relies on extended archival work to trace patterns of thought and on the time to make sense of paradoxical arguments, is impossible without the generous support of institutions and colleagues. In the former category, I am grateful to Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute, English Department, Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, and WEST European Studies, for supporting research time and travel. The Anglo-California Foundation Fellowship from the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, supported the initial archival research for an early version of this project, and in so doing let me find the question I needed to answer. For additional support at that stage, I thank the English Department, the Graduate Division, and the Bancroft Library, all at Berkeley, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. I am likewise grateful to the archives and libraries in which I conducted that research. For access to collections and for their permission to quote from manuscripts, I thank: Balliol College, Worcester College, and the Bodleian Library, all at the University of Oxford; the British Library, London; Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Nottinghamshire Archives; Archives and Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati; University College London, Special Collections; and the University of Nottingham Library. Thanks, too, to the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Christ Church College and Magdalen College, University of Oxford; the Lilly Library, Indiana University; and Trinity College and the University Library, University of Cambridge, for their help with early printed books. Earlier versions of portions of the Introduction and Chapter 6 appeared in “The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s Friendship,” Literature Compass (April 2010), and of Chapters 2

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and 4 in “ ‘Friendship multiplyed’: Royalist and Republican friendship in Katherine Philips’s coterie,” Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, eds. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2010); I am grateful to the publishers for the opportunities. Fittingly, I began the work that became this book under the aegis of two exemplary scholars. Victoria Kahn’s rigorous criticism has come to feel like the highest form of respect and belief; her own work continually reminds me what it means to treat literature as if it really matters in the world. Lorna Hutson was first an advisor to this project and then its editor; that the book I sent to her years later differs so much from what it once was owes a great deal to what she taught me about finer historical precision and firmer arguments. Kevis Goodman, with characteristic warmth and acuity, encouraged and improved this project from its earliest stages. The deep roots of this project’s interest in poetry and politics stretch back to my undergraduate days: thanks to Jane Hedley and Sandra Berwind for setting me on the path, and to Jean Gooder and Juliet Fleming for turning it toward the Renaissance. Since joining Indiana University, I have been lucky to have my community expand forward and back through time, and outward to other fields. Thanks to Judith Anderson, Linda Charnes, Jonathan Elmer, Mary Favret, Patty Ingham, Joan Pong Linton, Richard Nash, Shane Vogel, and Nick Williams for reading my work and guiding my way. Shannon Gayk is an infallible source of sustenance, intellectual and otherwise; Ellen Mackay’s sense of what really matters is the surest I know. Outside the department, Kirsten Sword expanded my ideas of what this project might do. Constance Furey, with exceptional intellectual and personal generosity, did far more for me than I had any right to ask. My students, both graduate and undergraduate, have pushed me to define my questions and strengthen my answers. For their heroic willingness to read – and immeasurably improve – chapters of this study, my thanks go to Catharine Gray, Katie Larson, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Eric Song. I am glad to be able to thank David Norbrook, one of the readers for the press, by name, both for his comments on the manuscript and for his graciousness in sharing his own work on Hutchinson. The other reader for the press saw all that was best in the book and offered suggestions to make it better. For opportunities to present this work and conversations that benefited it, I thank audiences at the Renaissance Society of America; the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, especially Mihoko Suzuki; the Perdita Project conference; and Indiana University’s Renaissance Studies, organized by Massimo Scalabrini. Special thanks go to Alan and

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Acknowledgments

ix

Judith Nelson for opening their London home to me. Thanks to Elise Lonich for her editorial work. Edinburgh University Press’s Jackie Jones and Jenny Daly have been patient, efficient, and encouraging, the ideal editorial combination. For sustaining friendships in spite of absence, thanks to Mark and Kimberly Allison, Paul Hurh and Aileen Feng, Deborah Kamen, and Teresa Moyer. My family – both the Anderson and Engel sides – provides strong ballast from too much intellectual absorption. I wish that my father, Peter Anderson, could have seen how this particular plan came together; I am glad that my mother Susan can. I thank them both for their support and belief. Sarah Engel deserves more than thanks, and more than this book, but as with everything, all I have is hers already.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back.1 The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Rinascimento’ as ‘rebirth’, moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret

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anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, oeconomics, eros and friendship. The term ‘culture’, then, indicates a licence to study and scrutinise objects other than literary ones, and to be more inclusive about both the forms and the material and political stakes of making meaning both in the past and in the present. ‘Culture’ permits a realisation of the benefits to be reaped after two decades of interdisciplinary enrichment in the arts. No longer are historians naive about textual criticism, about rhetoric, literary theory or about readerships; likewise, literary critics trained in close reading now also turn easily to court archives, to legal texts, and to the historians’ debates about the languages of political and religious thought. Social historians look at printed pamphlets with an eye for narrative structure; literary critics look at court records with awareness of the problems of authority, mediation and institutional procedure. Within these developments, modes of research that became unfashionable and discredited in the 1980s – for example, studies in classical or vernacular ‘source texts’, or studies of literary ‘influence’ across linguistic, confessional and geographical boundaries – have acquired a new critical edge and relevance as the convergence of the disciplines enables the unfolding of new cultural histories (that is to say, what was once studied merely as ‘literary influence’ may now be studied as a fraught cultural encounter). The term ‘Renaissance’ thus retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and, while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the ‘universality’ of a local, if far-reaching, historical phenomenon. Finally, as traditional pedagogic boundaries between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ are being called into question by cross disciplinary work emphasising the ‘reformation’ of social and cultural forms, so this series, while foregrounding the encounter with the classical past, is self-conscious about the ways in which that past is assimilated to the projects of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, spiritual, political and domestic, that finally transformed Christendom into Europe. Individual books in this series vary in methodology and approach, sometimes blending the sensitivity of close literary analysis with incisive, informed and urgent theoretical argument, at other times offering critiques of grand narratives of the period by their work in manuscript transmission, or in the archives of legal, social and architectural history, or by social histories of gender and childhood. What all these books have in common, however, is the capacity to offer compelling,

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well-documented and lucidly written critical accounts of how writers and thinkers in the period 1500–1700 reshaped, transformed and critiqued the texts and practices of their world, prompting new perspectives on what we think we have learned from them. Lorna Hutson

Note 1. Terence Cave, ‘Locating the Early Modern’, Paragraph 29.1 (2006), pp. 12–26, 14.

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Introduction: Friendship, Gender, Politics

Yea, you shall reade that some although they were banished from their countrie, yet they bore in their bowels and breastes, to the hower of their death, the love of their countrie, parents, friends and familie. In which everlasting love of theirs remayned such manly and honorable motions of the minde, that many noble services of voluntarie goodwill were brought forth by them to the benefite of their countrie, and recoverie of their first credite, estate and dignitie.1

Thomas Churchyard’s 1588 description of the relation between friendship and love of country prefigures the usual story about friendship in the years of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. He tells of enduring, intertwined loyalties to “countrie, parents, friends and familie.” His version, like most Renaissance humanist accounts of friendship, is masculine, relying upon “manly and honorable motions of the minde.” It ties the friends to the commonwealth, even after banishment; friendship manifests itself in noble acts that benefit the friends’ country first of all, but then allow the friends themselves to regain “their first credite, estate and dignitie” within the country that banished them. Against a backdrop of war and political exile in the 1640s–50s, the Cavalier poets idealize this kind of friendship in lyrics of retirement and country life; with other royalists, they hope for a “recoverie” of their political roles and economic resources that does not entirely manifest itself with the return of the monarchy in 1660.2 This book tells a story of friendship that differs in almost every particular from Churchyard’s. It traces the forms and consciousness of loyalties to “countrie, parents, friends and familie” that – far from being mutually reinforcing – pull subjects in so many directions that hundreds of texts about conflicting allegiances, casuistry, and the grounds of political obligation try to explain and resolve them. It insists, contrary to the vast bulk of Renaissance writing on friendship, that a select

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few women writers not only appropriate the elite classical language of amicitia, but also put its philosophy to use, implementing its practical effects in public life through their writings. This book does agree with Churchyard in its emphasis on the inescapable relation between friendship and the commonwealth, but it follows that link back to the moment when the state casts out the friends. The friends’ banishment recurs over and over in classical and humanist narratives, from Aristotle and Cicero to Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Francis Bacon. Amicitia describes the absolute loyalty of the friends to one another as exemplary of and foundational to civic virtue. At the same time, however, both the classical sources and Renaissance rewritings of this discourse acknowledge the threat of treason latent in friendship, for absolute loyalty to the friend can legitimate betrayal of the state. Betrayal within friendship thus has a double-edged valence that does not simply show friendship to be weak, but instead makes it a useful model for understanding political obligation: each relation, of friends to each other and of friends to the state, claims to be absolute and incontrovertible; each relation can turn into treachery when the friend chooses one allegiance over the other. While most writers deflect the instance of betrayal outside of the friendship relation, a few – female – writers take up the contradiction as the apt model for their historical moment in mid-seventeenth-century England. The central importance of betrayal to narratives of friendship, and the utility of that internally conflicted model as a means of imagining political obligation, remain obscure due to a historical break in the friendship tradition. In the late seventeenth century, friendship’s associations change from being masculine, political, and consequential to being feminine, private, and ineffective. In their studies of (primarily masculine) early modern friendship, the historians and literary critics Alan Bray, Lorna Hutson, Wendy Olmsted, and Laurie Shannon demonstrate that Renaissance friendship draws together a complex nexus of issues: emotion, rhetoric, embodiment, political power, and textual exchange. The texts, speeches, and bodily expressions of emotional attachment between men signify publicly, accruing power to the friends while fashioning civic selves who can better serve the state. These literary historical studies reveal emotion, and the rhetoric that expresses and elicits it, to be playing a surprisingly central role in Renaissance public life: though attended with anxieties, the passionate attachments of the perfect friends to one another illustrate and construct ideal citizens. Of course, the heavily elaborated rhetoric of amicitia perfecta does not simply describe historical friendships as they actually take place: Renaissance writers’ intellectual investment in the discourse of friendship does not

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Introduction

3

require that historical friends, or even literary characters, follow its precepts without fail.3 Rather, the repetition of friendship language across texts and centuries indicates the efficacy of the rhetoric itself. The work amicitia does in the world occurs through the intellectual generativity of humanist textual exchange – the writing, reading, and circulation of texts – whether or not the stories it tells are true, or have happy endings. The central claim of this book is that two exceptional women, independently of one another, take up this discourse of friendship, and that in so doing they offer new ways of understanding the most important intellectual problem of their time. The women are Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. The problem is how to reconcile conflicting obligations – to spouse, family, ruler, country, God – amidst the changing political circumstances of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. The book begins by articulating this pervasive problem of conflicting allegiances, focusing on four notoriously changeable male writers: Marchamont Nedham, Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller, and Andrew Marvell. Then, two chapters detail Philips’s and Hutchinson’s uses of friendship as a political model that addresses these multilayered obligations. Philips utilizes friendship’s betrayals to produce textually generative same-sex alliances; Hutchinson locates the origins of human society in the vulnerability of Epicurean friendship. The second half of the book demonstrates that friendship’s change from male and public to female and private occurs as a consequence of the phenomenon described in the first half: women writers’ use of the discourse of friendship to explore the problem of conflicting obligations. Chapter 4 investigates later responses to Philips, showing that as early as the 1670s readers and writers prise apart politics and passions in her poems. Chapter 5 analyzes the effects of Hutchinson’s strategic gender conservatism on her reputation and her republicanism. Finally, the sixth chapter looks at two female writers, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell, who articulate the political separatism that becomes the lasting story of female friendship. From the eighteenth century forward, friendship offers, at best, a site of escape from the world: female friends prepare for marriages, or run away from familial tyranny, or offer an isolated example of private virtue. They do not reform governments. What we now think about when we think about friendship has everything to do with what particular women writers use it to do in a particular historical moment, and with how rapidly their forthright acknowledgment of political betrayal becomes unthinkable. The feminization and marginalization of friendship mean that the version of political friendship discussed here – a classical rhetorical politics theorizing the state and the citizen’s role within it – differs from later

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understandings of friendship’s politics.4 Friendship relates to politics in one way in the Renaissance and in another in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century characterizations of democracy.5 In the Renaissance, friendship is continuous with the political sphere, exemplified, in Jacques Derrida’s words, by the linguistically adept “citizen couples” whose “virtue and reason are brought to bear in advance on the space of the res publica.”6 The logic of friendship in theorizations of democracy is instead metaphoric or analogic, implying both generalization (the bond of friendship provides a model for others to follow) and disjunction (the separation of public and private spheres allows the comparison to be made). The English Civil War period serves as the transition from the Renaissance model of continuity to the democratic model of analogy, as writers appropriate longstanding friendship traditions in order to shape political thought. They do so while maintaining the classical integration of friendship and public life, a link especially vital for women writers.7 Friendship’s continuity with politics enables mid-seventeenth-century women writers to refigure the relation of gender and political life, replacing another analogy, that of the household as a microcosm of the state, with the model of friendship’s volitional associations. Friendship’s Shadows takes its title and its method from an entry Lucy Hutchinson includes in her commonplace book: even “If a friend chance to faile,” “Friendship is so venerable that wee must honor even its shadowes.”8 The passage emblematizes friendship’s fragile light, but also its persistence through the darkness of betrayal. The figure of the shadow likewise suggests the contingency of women’s place in the friendship tradition: seen from a different angle, women simply vanish into insubstantiality. In its textual history, the commonplace extract encapsulates the method of this book: Hutchinson copies it from a printed book written by a French supporter of monarchy, who borrows elements from Cicero. The turnings of literary influence and political allegiance, as well as the material histories of manuscript and print, give the perspective that makes friendship’s shadows visible. Thus, this book offers different ways of looking both at what was – the figurations of loyalty and betrayal in the period; the relations of gender and political obligation; the work of literary texts in shaping and expressing those ideas – and what might have been – a theory of political obligation modeled on friendship. In order to lay the groundwork for the larger argument, this introduction sets out three contexts: a reassessment of the classical friendship tradition and its Renaissance manifestations; a discussion of women’s political subjectivity that shows why they could exploit this tradition; and a consideration of alternative political models in relation to friendship.

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Introduction

5

Friendship The classical, and especially the Latin, texts of the friendship tradition provide the paradigm for humanist friendship’s political valences. The conjunction of effusive emotion and civic utility in friendship remains controversial, however. Classicists often debate precisely this feature of Greek and Roman friendship texts, either arguing for the political importance of friendship (and de-emphasizing passionate ties) or asserting the primacy of affective bonds (while marking friendships as apolitical).9 In part, this bifurcation derives from the tendency, also common in the Renaissance, to use philos or amicus to refer not only to the exclusive friend, but also to a circle of families and allies.10 Nevertheless, the elaboration of the ideal friend – the “other self” – seems sufficiently articulated across the range of texts from Aristotle to Plutarch to Cicero to distinguish it from, while recognizing some of its features in, this wider network of friends. In particular, the emphasis upon the scarcity and exclusivity of amicitia perfecta separates it from the more variable relations of advisers and kin: there are not numerous parties to the comradely type of friendship, and the legendary ones are said to involve just two. Those who have many friends, and greet everyone in an intimate fashion, are thought to be friends to nobody, except in the way that fellow citizens are friends.11

Aristotle clearly distinguishes between intimate friendship and the category of “fellow citizens.” However, the fact that scholars can argue that classical friendship has solely political effects, rather than emotional content, reveals the degree to which friendship permeates Greek and Roman civic life. Amicitia, in fact, models the ideal “way that fellow citizens are friends”: it offers a paradigm of self-discipline and loyalty that underlies civic obligation. Thus, in Cicero’s De amicitia, the exemplary friendship described between Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius, a general and his second-in-command, shows friendship’s goals to be coextensive with those of the state.12 While different texts stress various features of friendship, the friends’ similarity and their mutual obligations to one another remain most important. Aristotle cites the expression “ ‘Friends are one soul’ ” as proverbial, and it recurs in the Renaissance in Erasmus’ “Amicus alter ipse” and Sir Thomas Elyot’s “a frende is proprely named of Philosophers the other I.”13 Unity between friends depends on equality, which enables frankness and mutual benefits.14 Likeness between friends is both a discovery and a process: while texts ascribe the rarity of perfect friendship to the near impossibility of finding an appropriate

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companion, they also emphasize the construction of that similitude. Thus Elyot stresses the “makinge of two parsones one in havinge and suffringe,” showing not only unity but also emotional fitness to be simultaneously prerequisites for and products of friendship.15 Friendship’s focus on process, as articulated by Elyot, becomes vital in two ways to humanist friendship: the textuality of making friends (through the exchange of letters, literary manuscripts, and printed books) and the conjunction of natural and artificial in finding and making. This double process of discovering and constructing recedes in the insistence on the friends’ virtue that serves as the starting point of most discussions. Cicero’s Laelius begins his discourse by stating, “This, however, I do feel first of all – that friendship cannot exist except among good men.”16 Elyot, too, starts in this way.17 But virtue does not always prove so easy to determine, as Cicero admits in the De officiis: “It is in the case of friendships, however, that men’s conceptions of duty are most confused; for it is a breach of duty either to fail to do for a friend what one rightly can do, or to do for him what is not right.”18 The absolute bond between the friends presents a problem, as well as a resource, for the state.19 The friends’ commitment to one another can authorize treason, as evidenced by the constant worries that friends will become co-conspirators: “For supposing we were bound to do everything that our friends desired, such relations would have to be accounted not friendships but conspiracies. But I am speaking here of ordinary friendships; for among men who are ideally wise and perfect such situations cannot arise.”20 Cicero, particularly in the De officiis, makes more of the conflict between loyalties to friend and to state than most other classical writers.21 Cicero’s model has greater utility for Renaissance commentators, and especially for the years of the English Civil Wars, for two reasons. First, both Cicero’s Laelius de amicitia and his De officiis occupy central roles in humanist ethical education, through readings of the texts themselves and through dissemination of their examples. Following Cicero, Walter Dorke’s 1589 A Tipe or Figure of Friendship illustrates the persistence of worries about conflicting allegiances in friendship treatises: two of his principles of friendship are that “A man must neither grant to his Friend, nor request anie thing of him that is unlawfull or unhonest” and “If our friends conspire against the commonwealth, we ought to forsake them, and also reveale them.”22 If friends always accord with the first of Dorke’s principles, the second qualification would be unnecessary. Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship,” a text central to the friendship tradition in England since its publication in 1602 in John Florio’s translation, shows the complexity of these claims even more

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Introduction

7

clearly than Dorke does. While most commentators assert that a friend should never ask anything dishonorable or treasonous, Montaigne articulates the most extreme possibility to which friendship can lead.23 He gives the example of Caius Blosius, who confesses that he would have set fire to the temples had his friend Tiberius Gracchus asked him to do so. Montaigne comments on the Roman consuls’ dismay, asserting of Caius Blosius and Tiberius Gracchus: “They were rather friends than Citizens, rather friends than enemies of their countrey, or friends of ambition and trouble.”24 In Montaigne’s reading, friendship trumps political obligations, undoing the civic world that it elsewhere helps to construct. Not to worry, Montaigne concludes: “If their affections miscarried, according to my meaning, they were neither friends one to other, nor friends to themselves.”25 Betraying the state means that they are not virtuous, which means that they are not friends at all. In his analysis, however, Montaigne rewrites the history behind the example he takes from Cicero. Gaius Laelius, the speaker of Cicero’s dialogue, knows better: And, by heavens! [Caius Blosius] did all that he said he would do, or rather even more; for he did not follow, but he directed, the infatuation of Tiberius Gracchus, and he did not offer himself as the comrade in the latter’s fury, but as the leader.26

Montaigne’s reliance on the friend’s virtue glosses over the facts of rebellion: an absolutely committed friendship can undermine the state. The double-edged structure of friendship makes it both useful and threatening. Exclusive friendship models the state; exclusive friendship provides the greatest threat to the state, by creating loyalties that can unmake citizens. The buried history of betrayal in Montaigne’s example gains further point because his essay on friendship commemorates the death of a friend, Etienne de la Boétie, whose own writings questioned the arbitrary rule of tyrannical monarchs.27 Thus the ghostly history of rebelling friends connects to the second crucial aspect of Cicero’s thinking: the value of loyalty to the state comes into question if the state itself is not virtuous. In the case of states led by tyrants, Cicero himself repeatedly asserts the legitimacy of executing the tyrant.28 In the years 1640–60, however, English writers on various sides of the conflict apply the term “tyrant” not only to Charles I but also to Oliver Cromwell.29 Consequently, in the midst of debates about the appropriate forms of state governance that characterize the war years, virtue looks situational rather than absolute. The changeability of political circumstances has both theoretical consequences, such as arguments for the role of

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self-interest or attempts to forge irrevocable bonds through contract, and practical effects, such as the notoriously shifting allegiances of writers like Marchamont Nedham. From its earliest instantiations and its Renaissance applications, friendship’s language of absolute loyalty can condone acting for the friend and against the state, or for the state and against the friend. Friendship’s efficacy as a model for civic life derives not from the virtue of the perfect friends – the feature that commentators assert, or hope, will prevent conflicts between obligations to the friend and to the state. The reverse is the case: friendship provides a vital, flexible, and apt model for citizenship at this historical moment because it incorporates the inevitability of conflict in its structure. The centrality of political betrayal to friendship remains obscure, however, because Renaissance masculine writers tend to deflect this threat into the sexual infidelity or exchange of a woman over whom the friends contend.30 The Boke Named the Governour (1531), by Sir Thomas Elyot, can serve as the paradigm of the two trajectories, political and sexual, of Renaissance friendship’s relation to infidelity. In the chapter titled “The true discription of amitie or frendship,” Elyot describes two pairs of friends whose faithfulness reforms tyrants.31 In the first instance, Orestes and Pylades each try to die for the other, vying to take the wrath of the “tyrant who deedly hated Horestes” upon himself by claiming the name of Orestes.32 “At the laste so relented the fierse and cruell harte of the tyrant: that wondringe at their mervailous frendship he suffred them frely to dep[ar]te, without doinge to the[m] any damage.”33 The likeness of the friends enables their self-sacrifice for one another; the friends’ loyalty models appropriate justice in an unjust state. Elyot takes this example from Cicero, who derives it from the Latin Chryses of Marcus Pacuvius; in that play, now lost, Orestes and Pylades contend before the Taurian tyrant Thoas.34 But Thoas follows the friends to Chryses’ land as a consequence of an earlier contention, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.35 In an episode from that text close enough to the Chryses that the Loeb editors confuse the two, Orestes and Pylades compete for the right to die not before the tyrant Thoas, but before Orestes’ sister Iphigenia.36 She offers to spare one of the two friends if he will carry a letter home for her, though she must sacrifice the other to the goddess. When they mutually reveal their identities, Iphigenia plots the successful escape of all three – brother, sister, and friend. Behind this example of friendship, then, lies another story: not the triumph of friendship over tyranny (as in Cicero and Elyot), but rather a woman’s cleverness that allows the satisfaction of commitments to family and to friend. Iphigenia is the character who confronts a crisis of conscience, as her role as priestess forces her to sacrifice strangers

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against her will. The emphasis on the Latin tradition in Cicero and Elyot leaves out the woman’s role as political actor, ascribing political efficacy solely to male friendship. Where the example of Orestes and Pylades omits the woman’s role in civic life, Elyot’s next example of friendship reforming tyrants shows the danger of treason even behind this example of virtue. This instance of “parfeite frendship,” taken from Cicero’s De officiis, circulates very widely in the Renaissance.37 Elyot describes Pythias and Damon, “for that one of them was accused to have conspired agayne Dionyse king of Sicile, they were bothe taken & brought to the kinge: who immediately gave sentence, that he that was accused shulde be put to dethe.”38 When the condemned man requests time to arrange his affairs, his friend offers to die himself if his friend does not return. The accused man arrives just in time to prevent his friend’s execution, and each vies for the right to die instead of his friend. Their loyalty again converts the tyrant, who “desired them to receyve hym into their company,” confirming his reformation into a just ruler.39 The friends’ absolute loyalty to one another – and, as Cicero emphasizes, their willingness to abide by the laws of the state – reforms the civic polity into greater justice. Despite Cicero’s caveat that “when in friendship requests are submitted that are not morally right, let conscience and scrupulous regard for the right take precedence of the obligations of friendship,” Elyot’s addition to Cicero’s example shows the danger to the state inherent in friendship.40 For in Elyot’s version, Dionysius condemns the friend to death on a charge of conspiring against his rule. The threat of treason shadows even this perfect friendship. Indeed, ironically, only the tyrant’s undervaluation of friendship allows for the demonstration of self-sacrifice. As Cicero’s worry about co-conspirators, cited above, shows, the conspiracy of one friend could easily impugn the other.41 By misunderstanding the strength of the bond between Damon and Pythias, Dionysius enables the demonstration of loyalty in friendship that will reform the state. Elyot’s inclusion and revision of the story of virtuous friends converting the tyrant to justice shows the interrelation of monarchic and republican traditions of friendship. The virtuous friends help to educate monarchs and courtiers in appropriate governance. The persuasive force of the friends’ virtue models supremely effective counsel – so Richard Edwards can conclude his play Damon and Pithias by naming Queen Elizabeth “the gever of friends,” complimenting the monarch by linking her to the virtuous friends rather than to the tyrant.42 The friends’ transformative rhetorical power finds an application as ways of speaking to friends become ways of speaking to rulers: both decry flattery and praise plain speaking without bitterness.43 Friendship’s insistence upon

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equality between the two friends, however, means that rulers’ friendships with subjects usually become problematic (either through an insistence on false equality that debases the monarch or through maintaining hierarchy that makes the monarch unlike a friend).44 Simultaneously with its incorporation into instruction for princes, the topos of the friends persuading the tyrant to justice forms part of a republican tradition. The friends answer the threat of tyranny not only by modeling equality in their friendship, as expressed in American and French revolutionary thinking, but also by converting the tyrant to justice or, failing that, overthrowing him to found a new republic. In Aristotle’s formulation in the Nicomachean Ethics, the friends (glossed as brothers) represent democracy (as the father and son depict monarchy and the husband and wife, aristocracy).45 The plotting that elsewhere distinguishes corrupt conspiracies appears in instances of tyranny as a mark of virtue, for “we have no ties of fellowship with a tyrant, but rather the bitterest feud,” and thus can legitimately kill a tyrant.46 The rhetorical force of friendly loyalty authorizes action as well as speech. Even in texts less forthrightly republican, the perfect friends illuminate the failings of monarchy. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, Musidorus and Pyrocles provide an alternative to the failing monarchy of Basilius; while the two princes are not allied with the republican faction, the equality and rhetorical education of their friendship prepare them to rule well.47 The emphasis on the virtuous friends’ obligation to overthrow or reform the tyrant in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian friendship traditions distinguishes them from another classical discourse of friendship, that of Epicurus. Epicurean friendship occupies the imaginative space of a garden populated by philosopher-friends retired from the world. They do not engage in politics unless they have no other choice, and they spread their affections more widely among the members of the school than the citizen couples of Aristotle and Cicero (although not as widely as the Stoics, who generalize sociability to all the world).48 Most significantly for this study, the garden of Epicurus includes women as friends, although seventeenth-century accounts of the sexual libels used to discredit Epicurean women indicate that such friendships carry significant risks.49 The emphases on retirement from politics, generalized friendship, and the inclusion of women make Epicurean friendship an important strand among the classical traditions absorbed into Renaissance humanism.50 At the same time, Epicurean friendship ostensibly dissociates itself from public engagement, so that, unlike the Aristotelian and Ciceronian models, it does not provide an indisputable language of civic involvement.

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Elyot’s longest, final example relates the most influential version of friendship and conflicting obligations in the period: the contest between two friends over the same woman.51 Induced to marry Sophronia by his wider circle of friends and relations, Gysippus instantly relinquishes her to Titus upon learning that Titus, drawn by Gysippus’ account of her beauty and virtue, has seen and loved her. Relying upon their physical similarity to one another, the friends plot that after the public ceremony Titus will replace Gysippus in private, giving Sophronia a ring and consummating the marriage, thus confirming his own marriage to her. Lorna Hutson argues that this story does not illustrate a shift from instrumental to affective friendship, but instead shows that the rhetorical power of Titus and Gysippus, demonstrated in their successful exchange of Sophronia, makes their friendly bond superior to the alliances of supporters and relations.52 What looks like betrayal of the friend, motivated by love, becomes instead an instance of faithfulness between friends that promotes rhetorical and political success (Titus “for his wisedome & lernyng was so highly estemed, that there was no dignitie or honorable office within the citie that he had nat with moche favour & praise achieved & occupied”).53 Sophronia’s ability to transfer her affections (not denigrated here, but in other texts read as women’s inconstancy) enables the friends’ faith-keeping. Whether successful (as in the exchange of Sophronia between Titus and Gysippus), mocking (as in the collapse of Palamon and Arcite’s friendship on seeing Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen), or tragic (as in Leontes’ reading of his friendship with Polixenes as Hermione’s infidelity in The Winter’s Tale), the threat of betrayal moves from within friendship to without it – to a woman. Both the omission of Iphigenia and the exchange of Sophronia reveal that friendship’s civic valence depends upon a depiction of it as exclusively male. From a different vantage, the fact that Epicurean friendship includes women but rejects politics makes a similar point. Elyot’s insistence upon friendship as only masculine requires forgetting the qualities that some of the women in these stories share with the male friends: prudential reflection, rhetorical wit, national and familial allegiances. The effusive promises of loyalty between the friends try to cover over the threat of disloyalty; when that fails, as Hutson argues, male humanist writers externalize the threat of betrayal into women’s sexual infidelities. Elyot’s stories of friends demonstrate not only the barriers to women writers claiming the friendship tradition, but also the reasons they might want to lay hold of it. Through friendship and the circulation of texts about friendship, Renaissance men become more eloquent, more accomplished, and more powerful. The humanist exchange of texts contributes

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to the development not only of copia, but also of countenance, the reputation of one man enhanced by his association with another.54 In The Friend, Alan Bray shows countenance, or the public display of signs of affection between men, to be performing cultural work, conferring power through the demonstration of intimacy.55 In distinction from Bray’s emphasis on bodily signs, the women of this study insist upon the textual basis of humanist friendship’s generativity.56 The exclusion of women from the friendship tradition and the emphasis on women’s bodily reproductivity make this the more vexed, but also the more potentially revolutionary, site of women’s intervention.

Gender The possibilities of a role in public life and of a textual abundance not tied to the body suggest why women writers might find the discourse of amicitia compelling. The question remains of how they manage to appropriate it, given the explicit and widespread exclusion of women from most theoretical articulations of friendship.57 As the preceding discussion suggests, the characterization of women as unfaithful and untrustworthy adds to this tradition, depicting women as the other to friendship rather than as friends themselves. Nevertheless, the answer to how women take up friendship doctrine comes from an unusual place, a doctrine predicated upon women’s innate inconstancy and inferiority. The theoretical answer to women’s inconstancy supposedly lies in the legal doctrine of coverture, which asserts that when a wife gives her consent to be married, she consents also to have her legal personhood subsumed in her husband’s.58 According to the law, she cannot enter into contracts, go to court, or choose where to live without her husband’s approval and assistance.59 While the construction of the wife as a “negative citizen” means that she can be prosecuted for her crimes, she is not liable for most crimes committed in the presence of her husband, for the court assumes that she acts under his direction.60 A woman can always be prosecuted for one particular crime, however, whether she commits it under the direction of her husband or not: treason. The threat of letting the wife get away with treason outweighs the challenge to the husband’s power implicit in claiming that he does not control his wife’s actions. As the case of treason suggests, the construction of the wife’s loyalties as singular – to her husband – entertains exceptions, in both theory and practice. Despite the nearly all-encompassing scope of her husband’s authority, a wife still has the right, indeed the duty, to follow

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her conscience in cases where it conflicts with her husband’s commands. Thomas Hilder, in Conjugall Counsell (1653) elaborates a common view: But some woman may say, what if my husband be a Son of Belial? One who hath no grace in him? who beares not the Image of God, but of the Devill? Must a Christian be subject to a Heathen? A Saint to a Devill incarnate? I answer, that if thou be so match’d in the Marriage Estate, then thy condition is sad, and very sad, and much to be lamented. But still it is a cleare truth, that thou must be subject even to such a Husband in all his lawfull Commands, and further thou must not obey a godly husband.61

Most of the historical examples of this fault-line involve married couples of differing religious views, and most, like Hilder, maintain that the couple should remain married but that the wife should not obey the unlawful commands of her husband.62 The requirement that the couple stay married despite their differing consciences has the effect of authorizing the wife’s resistance (or at least divergent opinions) within marriage.63 Constance Jordan offers an important caveat in this regard: It is tempting to speculate that the whole concept of a legitimate resistance to political authority was developed by analogy to the wife’s traditional right to disobey the unrighteous orders of her husband, although as far as I know there is not the slightest evidence for such a conclusion.64

The wife’s right to disobey her husband on the basis of conscience, however, does offer a model of an internal rupture within a theoretically unified subjectivity. The force with which the fiction of coverture demands the wife’s singular loyalty to her husband determines the impact of that fiction’s collapse. These dual fault-lines in coverture – the extent to which the state’s interests supersede patriarchy’s and conscience’s authorization of wives’ disobedience – break open under the pressure of the events of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration.65 Practical circumstances such as long separations, early widowhood, and shifting networks of family alliances in changing political times enable and require wives to present themselves in their own persons, rather than their husbands’.66 The familial, geographical, and economic upheavals of the Civil Wars exacerbate this situation in practical terms, both for women who overtly challenge the language of coverture and for those who do not. Thus, for example, Lady Brilliana Harley stays on her estate in Herefordshire in 1642–3 rather than joining her husband, a Parliamentary supporter, in London because “my dear husband hath entrusted me with his house and children, and therefore I cannot dispose of his house but according to his pleasure,” according with the sense

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that her husband alone owns the property; but, she continues in a letter to her royalist neighbor, “I do not know it is his pleasure that I should entertain soldiers in his house.”67 Where Harley deploys the language of coverture to justify her resistance to the demands of the king’s army, other women use the exigencies of the war years to argue for the necessity of their engaging in public life, whether as petitioners to Parliament, plaintiffs seeking the rents from their royalist husbands’ sequestered lands, or prophets inveighing against the king’s beheading.68 The position of the wife under coverture shares structural similarity with the position of many citizens during the mid-seventeenth century. The crises of the Civil Wars simultaneously proliferate conflicts of allegiance and increase the numbers of Englishmen and women who must confront them. The frequent changes in political circumstance mean that even those trying to remain loyal to a single source of authority, whether king or Parliament, face the impossibility of staying consistently within the law. Parliament requires first officeholders, then men, then everyone to swear successive oaths of loyalty. The efforts of writers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Milton to find stable answers to these questions illuminate the extent of this condition, but they do not obviate the problem. Marchamont Nedham, who publishes first The Case of the Kingdom and then The Case of the Commonwealth, arguing for opposite sides in quick succession, dramatizes the dilemma with unusual vigor, but he hardly stands alone. Nevertheless, just as the doctrine of coverture makes a statement of singular authority, so too first the king, then Parliament, then Oliver Cromwell, then the king again, present the ruling authority as the only possible locus of loyalty. Although coverture importantly shapes seventeenth-century women’s subjectivities, consistent and unvarying legal realities of coverture do not govern wives’ existence unilaterally. The laws of coverture are inconsistent and varied, other legal systems compete with coverture, and legal and literary texts amply attest to women’s practical skills at manipulating these systems.69 Coverture, however, has significant imaginative force and persistence, precisely due to its form as a fiction: “Coverture not only set the conceptual contours of married women’s domestic role and legal status, but also their relation to public life, which was, by definition, understood as less important than their obligations to their families and households.”70 These conceptual parameters produce a contradiction: the fiction of the husband’s obligations subsuming the wife’s combines with the simultaneous knowledge that in certain cases of conscience her responsibilities require her to disobey him.71 The language of friendship, not of marriage, transposes this problem into an explicitly and avowedly public register, thereby refiguring

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women’s relationship to public life. As Frances Dolan observes in her account of the dilemmas and resources coverture affords recusant Catholics in seventeenth-century England, “the process of marrying offers an analogy only for hierarchizing or shifting duties, but not for holding allegiance to two equal powers in tension.”72 Friendship supplies the latter, missing, analogy: the perfect friends both model ideal citizenship and share a bond strong enough to license conspiracy. With its incorporation of betrayal, friendship provides the fittest model of political obligation in conditions of conflicting allegiances. At the same time, though, this model of friendship does not dismiss marriage entirely. This book treats friendships between women and men, including wives and husbands, as well as between women. The intermingling of different networks of affiliation is part of friendship’s strength. For if these friendships were to exclude the marital family, the locus of reproduction and patriarchy would still exist outside friendship. By showing the degree to which multiple structures of obligation and affiliation overlay, entangle, and compete with each other, friendship’s modeling of conflicting obligations restates even those relations constructed as private in a public register.73 Rather than omit marital relations, these writers recast them in the language of friendship.

Politics The theoretical model of friendship thus has the potential to refigure discussions of politics in several ways. Previous scholars have demonstrated friendship’s relevance both for the courtly and humanist monarchic systems of the Renaissance and for theorizations of democracy. Monarchic and democratic models differ in their consequences for the people (subjection to a ruler versus voting enfranchisement) and in their use of the stories of perfect friends that circulate from the classical texts (exclusivity versus generalization). They agree, however, in their ideological reliance upon the exclusion of women from friendship’s virtues. Friendship’s Shadows shows the difference that including women’s friendship makes to political thought. When women writers claim friendship discourse, they assert the continuity between volitional association and civic life. Friendship’s model of productive volitional affiliation substitutes for the patriarchal, heterosexually reproductive family’s analogous relation to the state. Thus, friendship offers an imagined solution to the problem Carole Pateman diagnoses in the liberal contractarian organization of the state: the subordination of women encoded in the sexual contract that provides the foundation for the social contract

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and hence for governmental organization.74 In the writings of Philips and Hutchinson, friendship reframes this relationship to place women within the civic realm, rather than solely within reproductive marriage. Just as Philips and Hutchinson’s version of women’s friendship does not become the dominant one, however, so too their civically central, internally conflicted amicitia disappears as a model of political life. Two more persistent stories of political bonds – natural sociability and contract theory – emerge from the same mid-seventeenth-century climate of debate, dissension, and war out of which Philips and Hutchinson construct their friendship model. Friendship combines important features of each theory, but also diverges from each in significant ways. Natural sociability, as articulated in the natural law theories of seventeenthcentury thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, posits an innate “kindness” “of each man towards every other man.”75 In contrast to friendship’s insistence on exclusivity, natural sociability explicitly encompasses all humans (and thus also refuses amicitia’s gender distinctions). Contract theory tries to answer the breakdown of natural sociability that demonstrably occurs with the outbreak of the English Civil Wars (though arguments for natural sociability, like Pufendorf’s, persist even after this crisis). Confronting the dissolution of the traditional political form of monarchy, seventeenth-century contract theorists seek a new basis for political organization by emphasizing the people’s agreement to be bound together as a means to guarantee stability, though they tend to mystify the original act of contracting in a distant origin.76 As Victoria Kahn argues in Wayward Contracts, contract theory searches for a minimal basis of agreement in an attempt to eliminate the potential for disagreement.77 In this light, friendship appears far too overdetermined to suffice as a political model: the friends simply have too much – indeed, “all things” – in common.78 The basis of commonalty creates a vulnerability, for in its incorporation of multiple, potentially conflicting, obligations, to the friend as well as to the state, friendship cannot rely on contract theory’s model of a single absolute commitment. And yet friendship incorporates elements of natural sociability and contract theory. Friendship is both made and found: made, like contracts, through a process of agreement and mutual commitment; found, like natural sociability, as a product of innate likeness and attraction.79 As Sir Thomas Elyot writes, friendship is the “makinge of two parsones one in havinge and suffringe.”80 Elyot’s statement captures the benefit and the vulnerability yoked together in friendship. Friendship incorporates the fragmentation of political dissension in its very structure. While this enables friendship to provide a particularly apt model for political

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obligations in the Civil War years, it also proves threatening in its refusal to imagine complete unanimity, whether through natural inclination or agreement. If friendship, especially women’s friendship, proves so vulnerable, and exists as a fully acknowledged model of conflicting political obligations for such a brief time, what claim can it have on our attention? First, the vulnerability of friendship provides a different perspective on the literary and political struggles of the years of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration: it shows the pervasiveness of conflicting allegiances in texts and in lives. Second, it demonstrates the practical efficacy of the writing, reading, and circulation of texts: discussions of betrayal help to forge and remake alliances. Finally, the alternative political model of women’s friendship helps to illuminate fault-lines within traditions of political thought, such as liberalism.81 Recent studies of English women’s poetry and politics in the early modern period demonstrate not only that women have a great deal to say on these topics, but also reveal the objects of this critique – public and private, gender and sexuality, marriage and the family – to be under construction.82 Women’s friendship offers a way of reconstructing these ideas on a different basis. The women writers who locate political obligation in the volitional affiliations of friendship displace the emphasis on women’s reproductive bodies, which need to be controlled in order to stabilize the continuance of the state. In On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State, the philosopher Sibyl Schwarzenbach makes a trenchant argument that sounds initially very close to what I suggest here. She asserts that “the problematic of a civic friendship between citizens is the forgotten problem of modern democratic theory” and claims that reconsidering friendship will show women’s labor to be central to society, thus reforming democratic societies on more just and equal grounds.83 Friendship’s Shadows offers a prehistory of this process: political theory’s forgetting of friendship occurs at least partly as a result of the articulation and implementation of women’s friendship revealed here. But my arguments diverge from Schwarzenbach’s insights, on both disciplinary and theoretical grounds. With regard to discipline, Philips and Hutchinson elaborate not an ethic of care but of writing: their ethical praxis consists of texts, not bodies. Theoretically, the importance of betrayal to friendship illuminates the continuing, inevitable threat within friendship, a dynamic that Schwarzenbach describes as untenable for civil society.84 The vulnerability for which women’s care compensates in Schwarzenbach’s account is instead the founding condition for all friendship in my study. Friendship answers the problem of human vulnerability by making

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alliances, yes – but it also worsens that problem by making friends more open to one another, and thus more able to hurt. This danger has the potential, in every instance, to move in two directions: harm to the state, or harm to the friend. The double bind of impossible choices shatters, under the pressure of the war years, into multiple sources of affiliation and allegiance. The threat of betrayal, shadowed in Cicero, Elyot, Montaigne, and their inheritors, stands revealed as the guiding condition of political subjectivity. It is, as Katherine Philips writes, “such a riddling fate / As all impossibles doth complicate.”85 Friendship’s existence in writing makes these impossibles possible: it gives a betrayaloriented friendship meaning in the world.

Notes 1. Churchyard, Sparke, fols. B1v–B2. 2. For Cavalier friendship see L. Marcus, Politics of Mirth, pp. 140–68 and 213–64; Miner, Cavalier Mode, pp. 250–305. 3. My treatment of the friendship tradition thus diverges from MacFaul, Male Friendship, p. 86, who points to “the inherent contradiction between the natural desire for a sexual partner and the absurd overvaluation of one-onone friendship.” My own approach hews more closely to Schachter’s on early modern French writers in Voluntary Servitude, p. 16: “the boundary between love and friendship and women’s place in friendship discourse are vexed, . . . they constellate as problems. It is also to recognize the friendship canon as political, and that we are not exempt from its politics.” 4. On monarchic friendship and the resistance to generalization, see Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 18 and 224–5. Republican ideas of friendship provide a paradigm for resistance against the king in the American Revolution. Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendship, p. 13, argues that “non-elites, persons of color, and women” appropriate the masculine discourse of friendship. Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds, pp. 1–24, focuses on Victorian literature. 5. The most famous of these studies, Jacques Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, especially pp. 1–25 and 171–93, uses an analysis of Aristotle to foreground the ease with which the friend can become an enemy. Like Derrida’s, most treatments of friendship and democracy stress the importance of Aristotle over Cicero. 6. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 184. 7. In Politics of Friendship, pp. 155–7, Derrida constructs his discussion of women around their absence from the friendship tradition; see P. Anderson, “The Absent Female Friend.” 8. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 159. 9. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, p. 5, describes friendship as “a personal relationship predicated on affection and generosity rather than on obligatory reciprocity.” He contrasts Malcolm Heath’s view that it is the “ ‘entirely objective bond of reciprocal obligation’” (M. Heath, Poetics of

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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Greek Tragedy, pp. 73–4, qtd. in Konstan p. 2). Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 79–106; Millett, Lending and Borrowing, pp. 27–44; and Syme, Roman Revolution, pp. 1–12 and 64–92, also emphasize the economic and political aspects. Millett, Lending and Borrowing, p. 127, gives the example of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, who begins his description of philiai with parents and children. Renaissance examples abound of the casual use of “friends” to refer to allies and supporters. However, commentators referring to amicitia perfecta take care to distinguish it from the wider context of friends, where differences of status prevail. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.11, pp. 220–1; Finch, Friendship, p. 7; and Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.196–201. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX.10, p. 239. Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 78–9, emphasizes the rhetorical instrumentality of confidential knowledge between Scipio and Laelius, enabling the success of their campaign. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX.8, p. 234; Erasmus, Adages, p. 31; Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. In Cicero’s De amicitia, vi, p. 131, he states that “friendship is nothing else than an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection.” Thus Erasmus, Adages, I.i.2, p. 31, joins the two proverbs “Amicus aequalitas” and “Amicus alter ipse.” See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.7–10, pp. 216–19, where status relations align with forms of political organization. The example of Scipio and Laelius (where one is the other’s commanding officer) shows that friendship can overcome some status differences, which importantly applies to wives and husbands. In the Renaissance, the most important distinction is that between monarchs and subjects; see Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 17–53, on the way that friendship makes the “subject sovereign” and the “sovereign subject.” Olmsted’s Imperfect Friend, pp. 3–19, describes friendship’s alteration of emotions through persuasion. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. So also Cicero, De amicitia, vi, p. 131: “What is sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself?” Bacon, Essays, p. 75, concurs. These texts’ dual emphasis on finding and making accords with the humanist marriage treatises of Vives and Erasmus, in which the premise of contracting marriage enables the process of fully coming to know and to be unified with the spouse. See Furey, “Bound by Likeness,” pp. 29–43. Cicero, De amicitia, v, p. 127. Elyot, Boke, fols. 141r–143v. Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 311. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 112–33, discusses this conflict in terms of the friend’s ability to become an enemy, in keeping with Renaissance treatises like Breme, Mirrour of Friendship, fol. A4: “for now friendly wordes are common, but when friendship commeth to the touch or proofe, the alteration is marvailous: yea and sometimes so daungerous that of friendes in wordes they will become enimies in deedes.” Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 313. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 165, argues that for

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22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

Friendship’s Shadows Aristotle the extent to which perfect friendship is like the state depends upon how good the state is. Dorke, Tipe or Figure, fol. A4v. See Cicero, De amicitia, xii, p. 151: “Therefore let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked. And dishonorable it certainly is, and not to be allowed, for anyone to plead in defence of sins in general and especially of those against the State, that he committed them for the sake of a friend.” Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.202. Florio’s Renaissance translation (first published in 1602), cited here, is more extreme than Frame’s: “They were friends more than citizens, friends more than friends or enemies of their country or friends of ambition and disturbance” (Montaigne, Essays, trans. Frame, p. 140). Florio more closely follows the French, Essais p. 109: “Ils estoie[n]t plus amis que citoye[n]s, plus amis qu’amis ou que ennemis de leur païs, qu’amis d’a[m]bition & de trouble.” Montaigne adds the observation, though not the example, after 1588. Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.202. Frame, intriguingly, has “if their actions went astray” (Montaigne, Essays, trans. Frame, p. 140). Cicero, De amicitia, xi, p. 149. His best-known work is The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. On the relation between Montaigne and de la Boétie, see Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, pp. 73–114. Cicero, De officiis, III.iv, p. 287. See Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, II.xxiii, p. 305, where he praises the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton. In 1648, Nedham, prefatory poem to Craftie Cromwell, p. 1, calls the trustees of the Commonwealth “tyrannical” and then warns in his proParliament Commonwealth, p. 49, that any restoration of the king will inevitably lead to tyranny, because “Tyranny ever follows a Conquest.” Milton justifies the regicide by proclaiming the right “to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked KING” on the title page of Tenure of Kings. See N. Smith and Morton, Radicalism, p. 192, on both Charles I and Cromwell as tyrants. MacPhail discusses the role of political betrayal in friendship in “Friendship as a Political Ideal,” pp. 177–87. In Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 1–15, Hutson makes the argument that male writers’ fictions of female infidelity manifest anxieties about instrumental masculine rhetoric. These pairs of friends have canonical status. See Dorke, Tipe or Figure, fols. B2–B2v: “To be short, what was the reason that the two honourable Romanes, Scipio and Laeli[u]s so greatly loued: insomuch that one house serued them both, one face, one ioint studie, one delight, one consent in all things: not onely in priuate affaires, but also in publique, in trauailes, in voyages, in soiourning, at home and abroad all were alike common: was not this a laudable kind of Friendship?” Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. Ibid., fol. 144v. For Cicero, De amicitia, vii, p. 135, this scene shows the dramatic effect of friendship’s loyalty: “The people in the audience rose to their feet and cheered this incident in fiction.” I thank Curtis Dozier for elucidating these connections. Pacuvius, a friend of De amicitia’s speaker Laelius, bases his play on Sophocles’ lost tragedy

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35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

21

Chryses, as well as to a lesser extent on Euripides’ Chrysippus (also lost). Only brief fragments of Pacuvius’ play survive. Renaissance readers would have known descriptions of Pacuvius’ play, as well as several versions of Iphigenia in Tauris. Cicero, De amicitia, vii, p. 134 fn. 2. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144v. In addition to De officiis and Elyot, the story of Damon and Pithias also appears in the medieval period in the Gesta Romanorum as a tale of two thieves, in William Caxton’s 1476 printing of Game and Play of Chess Moralized, and in Richard Edwards’ play Damon and Pithias (1571), among many others. See Mills, One Soul, pp. 29, 82, and 134–46. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144v. Ibid., fol. 145r. Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 315. See Hutter, Politics as Friendship, p. 9 for this idea in modern contexts. Edwards, Damon and Pithias, line 1759. As “gever of friends,” the queen is still not a friend herself, echoing Shannon’s argument about the impossibility of monarchs being friends in Sovereign Amity, pp. 9–11. On flattery and plain speaking in friendship, see Cicero, De amicitia, xxiv– xxvii, pp. 197–207; Plutarch, “Flatterer;” Elyot, “The Election of Friends and the Diversity of Flatterers,” Boke, fols. 165v–169v (following Plutarch); Bacon, “Of Counsel,” “Of Friendship,” and “Of Followers and Friends,” Essays, pp. 56–9, 72–7, and 134–5. On the problem of flatterers for kings’ friendships, see Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 17–53 and 125–55. See Bacon, Essays, p. 73: “It is a strange thing to observe how high a rate great kings and monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship, whereof we spoke: so great, as they purchase it, many times, at the hazard of their own safety, and greatness. For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some persons, to be as it were companions, and almost equals to themselves, which many times sorteth to inconvenience.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.10, pp. 219–20. Cicero, De officiis, III.vi, p. 299. On Sidney’s republicanism, see Norbrook, Writing, pp. 12 and 72, and Worden, Sound of Virtue, pp. 227–43. See Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 10–11. Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, p. 114. See Chapter 3 on Hutchinson’s engagement with this tradition. As Hutson demonstrates in Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 52–85, these stories transform anxieties about the instrumentality of male friendships and the friends’ social mobility, enabled by rhetoric, into accounts of the struggle over an unfaithful woman. Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 56–64. Elyot, Boke, fol. 156v. On copia, see Eden, Friends Hold, pp. 142–63, and Cave, Cornucopian Text, pp. 3–34. Bray, The Friend, pp. 140–76. Many powerful readings of male friendship, in particular, place it within

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57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

Friendship’s Shadows a history of homosexuality. See Bray, Homosexuality, pp. 7–12, and The Friend, pp. 1–41; Goldberg’s Sodometries, pp. 52–66 and 76–82; and Schachter’s Voluntary Servitude, pp. 23–38. Masten’s Textual Intercourse, pp. 28–62, studies the intersection of sexuality and collaborative authorship, raising many of these issues with a different emphasis. See Chapters 2 and 4. Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.199, trenchantly articulates this point of view: “Seeing (to speake truly) that the ordinary sufficiency of women, cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable.” See Schachter, Voluntary Servitude, pp. 115–39, for ways that Montaigne’s life belies this rhetoric. The developing ideology of companionate marriage, not coverture, most closely resembles friendship. Discussions of the development of companionate marriage, from Stone’s sweeping (and oft-challenged) Family, Sex, and Marriage, pp. 102–5, 195–205, and 325–35, to more precise and recent accounts such as Luxon’s Single Imperfection, pp. 23–55, frequently describe the shift of affect from same-sex to opposite-sex relations as a move whereby heterosexual marriage incorporates elements of the homosocial friendship tradition. However, the model of coverture more closely aligns with the problem of conflicting allegiances that inheres in friendship. Dolan, Marriage and Violence, pp. 1–7, argues that this problem continues in the economy of scarcity, wherein marriage only has room for one person. See Furey, “Bound by Likeness,” pp. 29–43, and McCue-Gill, “Fraught Relations,” pp. 1098–129, for fuller treatments of friendship and marriage. Stretton, Women Waging Law, p. 22 and pp. 129–54, argues that many of these points are contentious in law courts of the period. B. J. Todd, “ ‘To be some body’,” p. 346; Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, p. 3; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 415. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell, pp. 103–4. Milton, Tetrachordon, II.591–2, unusually, argues that couples should divorce in cases of different religions. See P. Crawford, “Public Duty,” pp. 71–5. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, p. 121 fn. 54. For women exploiting coverture to advantage, see Stretton, Women Waging Law, pp. 138–43 (on law cases), and Dolan, Whores of Babylon, pp. 60–5 (on lesser penalties for a wife’s Catholicism). Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, p. 109, writes of royalist men and of all women during the interregnum: “The lack of property rights, exclusion from public office, and various forms of physical restriction experienced by royalist men at this particular historical moment align them with the longstanding circumstances of women, imposed by law or social custom.” Calendar, I.12–13, qtd. in Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, p. 74. On petitioners, see Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, pp. 132–64; on plaintiffs, see Stretton, Women Waging Law, pp. 129–54; on prophets, see K. Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, pp. 25–61. In addition to Stretton and Staves, cited above, see Sword, Wives Not Slaves. Dolan, Marriage and Violence, p. 79.

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23

71. See Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, p. 155, on the incoherence of the wife’s subject-position: “the wife is aligned with the children, the mother with the father. These subject-positions, offered to the same woman, cannot be held simultaneously without contradiction.” Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 8, argues that the clash of multiple authorities gives women a resource for “self-definition, resistance, and writing.” 72. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 81. 73. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, p. 1, argues for the interrelations of male and female, public and private, and print and manuscript. Andreadis, “Re-Configuring Early Modern Friendship,” pp. 523–42, describes the multilayered obligations of early modern friendship. Expanding definitions of political activity, including “local office holding, political obligations of families among the governing class, as well as voting and political rights,” reveal that women had more impact on political events than previously thought; see H. Smith, “Introduction,” Women Writers, p. 4; 9: countering this “clear, widespread, and real presence in political and economic structure” was the fact “that language was so constructed as to deny both the reality and the significance of their standing.” 74. Pateman, Sexual Contract, pp. 1–18. For contract theory and gender, see Miller, Engendering the Fall, pp. 1–16 and 107–35; K. Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, pp. 25–61; and Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 171–95. My approach lies closer to Miller’s, who sees in the women writers she discusses a critique of and alternative to liberal political thought, than to Gillespie’s, who sees the female sectarians’ writings helping to form the thought of later liberals like Locke. Friendship discourse provides a significantly different model to those that triumph. 75. Pufendorf, De jure, II.iii.143, p. 208. See also Grotius, Rights, pp. 79–87. 76. See Wright, Origin Stories, pp. 3–23. 77. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 13–15. Kahn’s larger argument demonstrates the complexity of the contracting subject, who is shaped by passions and interests elicited by aesthetic means. 78. The proverb “friends have all things in common” appears in Erasmus’ Adages, I.i.1, pp. 29–30, whence it permeates many writings about friendship; he takes it from Aristotle. 79. Contrast Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship, p. 49: “moral equality between friends . . . is not so much a necessary presupposition of virtuous friendship, as it is a crucial goal.” In my reading of the tradition, moral equality between friends is simultaneously presupposition and goal. 80. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. 81. As part of a larger reassessment of the coded political meanings of literary genres, this line of argument expands the genres that count as political thought. See N. Smith, Literature, pp. 1–19, who makes a comprehensive case for genre’s political meanings in the English Civil Wars; Broad and Green, History of Women’s Political Thought, p. 7; Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, pp. 14–15, on the “literary public sphere;” and Miller, “Maternity, Marriage, and Contract,” p. 232, on liberalism’s marginalization of women. 82. See Barash, English Women’s Poetry, pp. 1–2. 83. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship, pp. xiii and 204–42.

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84. Ibid., pp. 60–2. 85. Philips, “Injuria amici,” Collected Works, ed. Patrick Thomas, vol. I, Poem 38, lines 13–14. Unless otherwise stated, all Philips citations come from Patrick Thomas’ edition and will be cited by his numbering of the poems and by line numbers.

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Chapter 1

Indemnity for Enemies, Oblivion for Friends: Changing Political Allegiances in the English Civil Wars

Render things the same, and I am still the same.1

Taking up the crown in 1660 after years of exile, King Charles II passes the “Act of Free and Generall Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion” in order “to bury all Seeds of future Discords and remembrance of the former as well in His owne Breast as in the Breasts of His Subjects one towards another.” The Act also calls for a fine against anyone who uses “words of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof,” though famously only one prosecution occurs under the Act.2 Within literary criticism, the advertised oblivion once seemed absolute, with the years of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate treated as a lacuna, in which authors like John Milton, who ought to have been writing poetry, turn their left hands to prose. Over the last twenty-five years, scholars have been uncovering the vibrant literary culture of the war years and, as importantly, showing the continuity between the literature of those years and of the Restoration.3 The manuscript evidence demonstrates that the record of changing political allegiances forms a central part of these interconnections. Well into the eighteenth century, manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books juxtapose poems of seemingly incompatible viewpoints, such as panegyrics written by the same poet to Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles II in turn. In many cases, these poems also continue to make up a central part of the poets’ oeuvres, perhaps disappearing from print for a few sensitive years in the 1660s and 1670s, but then returning. This suggests that political inconstancy plays an important role in both the reputations of individual poets and in the meanings of the poems they write. Indeed, the panegyrics of the war years and their immediate aftermath often occur alongside poems about later controversies, such as satires about the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s and early 1680s,

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or panegyrics upon the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These juxtapositions indicate that the poems recording changing political loyalties prove enduringly useful to thinking about political crises in other moments. The persistence of poems detailing changing allegiances accords with a trend in print pamphlets of the later seventeenth century. As Joad Raymond and Jonathan Scott demonstrate, controversialists writing about the Exclusion Crisis, the Popish Plot, and the Glorious Revolution invoke the memory of the Civil Wars to cast aspersions upon their opponents.4 These recollections could work to different ends: in Andrew Marvell’s 1677 Account of the Growth of Popery and the responses to it, both sides propound “[sixteen] Fourty One” as a parallel to the present crisis.5 Marvell means the threat of arbitrary government, however, while his controverters warn against another regicide.6 Whereas the prose pamphlets suggest the solidification of political parties based on past histories, the manuscript evidence reiterates the changeability of individuals, preserving a history of divided allegiances and betrayal. Thus, readers must grapple with meanings of loyalty that do not simply devolve into factions. Nevertheless, the official policy of forgetfulness encourages later readers to imagine political changeability as aberrant, rather than as widespread as it demonstrably is. Taken together, manuscript and print sources illustrate the pervasiveness and persistence of political inconstancy in the period. This defines the ground against which Katherine Philips’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s explorations of betrayal-oriented friendship emerge. The four writers considered in this chapter exhibit varying degrees of success in manipulating the meanings of shifting alliances. The prose polemicist Marchamont Nedham seems to flourish directly in proportion to the flamboyance with which he switches sides. The three poets – Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller, and Andrew Marvell – frequently appear together in manuscript collections that foreground their changing political loyalties. They experience quite different fates: Cowley bemoans his lack of preferment, Waller appears as a genial timeserver, and Marvell earns a reputation as a great patriot that belies his early poems. This chapter traces the shifting fortunes of their reputations as poets and politicians. It also attends to the ways in which these authors’ writings imagine political obligation, with a particular focus on the recurring figures of Brutus and of David and Jonathan. Brutus is the betrayer who stands against absolute rule. David and Jonathan are the perfect biblical friends who enable divinely appointed monarchy. As these poets tell their stories, however, each shows the entangled obligations that produce inevitable conflicts. As such, they emblematize the poems and poets of 1640–60, defined not by forgetting, but by reiterated betrayal.7

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Marchamont Nedham, “serial turncoat” Political inconstancy defines Marchamont Nedham (1620–78), both in his own historical moment and for succeeding generations.8 He is a “traytor;” “a Judas for Loyalty;” “a jack of all sides,” “transcendently gifted in opprobrious and treasonable Droll;” a “serial turncoat.”9 Indeed, he changes sides with dizzying frequency. From 1643–6, Nedham publishes the newsbook Mercurius Britanicus in support of the Parliamentary side, an advocacy including a stint in prison for calling Charles a tyrant. From 1647–9, he writes for the king’s party in a new publication, Mercurius Pragmaticus, surprisingly continuing in the royalist camp even through the trial and execution of the king. A few months later, though, he supports the Commonwealth and later Cromwell in Mercurius Politicus. Again, his sympathies linger longer than his contemporaries expect: despite a rash of pamphlets in 1660 anticipating his defection to the king’s side, Nedham continues to argue against the restoration, briefly leaving the country. He manages not to be excluded from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, publishes a few writings in favor of monarchy, and then forebears writing about politics for a number of years. Just before his death in 1678, he telegraphs another show of monarchic support by writing a series of anti-Whig pamphlets.10 In many ways, then, Nedham epitomizes the condition of divided loyalties that defines the years of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate. Remarkably, Nedham makes his changing allegiances the form and content of his political writing. Nedham manages his shifting positions, recorded in weekly newsbook publications, not by distancing himself but rather by claiming responsibility for them. Each of the Mercuries has a different persona, but Nedham himself – like his antagonists – calls attention to his presence behind the various names. This decision may, of course, be a pragmatic one: Nedham looms too large a figure to hide effectively. Nedham, however, turns that pragmatism into a singularly effective rhetorical strategy.11 Nedham’s forthrightness about his own changeability allows him to expose the hypocrisy of others. Repeatedly, Nedham notes moments of inconstancy in other individuals or in the public at large. Instances range from the 1649 pamphlet and poem labeling James, Duke of Hamilton, “Both this, and that, and ev’ry thing / He was; for, and against the King” to a description of the “late Tyrant Charles whose inconstancy in this kind was beyond compare.”12 The latter statement specifically references Charles’s inability to keep his promises, a failing that points toward Nedham’s most interesting skewering of the changeable people of England. Published in 1648, the

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two-page pamphlet makes its point primarily through deft citation. On those two pages, it prints, first, “The Solemn League and Covenant, Commonly call’d The Scotch Covenant,” followed by “The Negative Oath,” and concludes with a very brief remark signed by Nedham. Those who swear to the first promise “to preserve and defend the Kings Majesties person and Authority;” to the second, “not directly or indirectly [to] adhere unto, or willingly assist the King in this War, or in this Cause against the Parliament.”13 Though Nedham does not date them in the pamphlet, the first is agreed in 1643, the latter in 1645 as a way for royalists to protect themselves by opting out of the war. The question of whether those who swore to the former could in good conscience swear to the latter forms a crux of the debates about loyalty, conscience, and political allegiance in the period. Nedham invites his readers to apply the disjunction between the two oaths to the current situation: “How near this comes to our own times, I leave it to the judicious Reader to judge, so that the ill consequences may be avoided.”14 The natural implication is that this comes very “near” “to our own times,” and that readers should act accordingly to preserve the person of the king, remaining loyal. A year later, when the debates about the swearing of oaths become still more intense, Nedham offers a different perspective on “how near this comes to our own times.” In 1649–50, the Commonwealth requires first state officials, then prominent citizens, and finally all men over the age of eighteen to swear the Engagement Oath: “I do declare and promise that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a king or House of Lords.”15 Clearly in conflict with the earlier pledges (as Nedham’s 1648 tract anticipates), the Engagement touches off a crisis of divided loyalties. Those who want to retain their positions and estates need to take the oath, but both the previous oaths and residual support for the monarchy make it an agonizing decision. The outpouring of writing for and against the Engagement comprises a full range of positions: steadfast royalist refusals, casuistical accounts of how to swear with proper mental reservations, and defenses of those taking and requiring the Engagement, on pragmatic and principled grounds. Nedham’s foray into this debate comes a bit late, a year after it began, with The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated (1650). Its epistle “To the Reader” begins “Perhaps thou art of an Opinion contrary to what is here written: I confesse, that for a Time I my self was so too, till some Causes made me to reflect with an impartiall eye upon the Affairs of this new Government.”16 From its first sentence, the tract advertises its author’s change of allegiance, from the royalist party to the

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Commonwealth’s. In fact, this process begins even before the first sentence: the title page of The Case of the Commonwealth replicates almost exactly that of Nedham’s 1647 tract The Case of the Kingdom, though obviously with a rather different thesis. Nedham knows that the high Talkers, the lighter and censorious part of People, wil shoot many a bitter Arrow to wound my Reputation, and charge me with Inconstancy, because I am not obstinate like themselves, against Conscience, Right Reason, Necessity, the Custome of all Nations, and the Peace of our own.17

He reverses the values usually associated with constancy, aligning it with “lighter . . . People,” while accruing to his own “Inconstancy” the seemingly immoveable virtues of conscience, reason, necessity, custom, and peace. The list itself unites contraries: for example, debates of the period often oppose the virtuous Christian conscience to the tyrant’s plea necessity. Nedham continues to make a virtue of contradiction by citing his enemies in his defense, quoting Claudius Salmasius (whose Defensio regia, pro Carolo I provokes Milton’s vituperation in Pro populo Anglicano defensio) and Thomas Hobbes (from the De corpore politico) at length, and even quoting his own earlier royalist pamphlet.18 Nedham presents his inconstancy as saving him from faction and vilification; he describes it as a sign of his own reason, which proves the self-evident wisdom of acceding to the new power. Far from making him untrustworthy, Nedham’s change of heart makes him more reliable, more capable of accurately sifting the information at hand.19 The Case of the Commonwealth offers Nedham’s own changeability as a pattern for his countrymen to follow. He also has an earlier precedent in mind: Then (saith he) let me be accused of falshood and Inconstancy, if when all things remain the same as they were at the time that I promised, I shall not then perform my Promise: Otherwise, any alteration whatsoever leaves me wholly at liberty, and freeth me from my Engagement . . . Render things the same, and I am still the same.20

With these lines, Nedham establishes an exemplary classical heritage for his argument that inconstancy can be more reasonable than promisekeeping.21 He draws this precedent from Seneca’s De beneficiis, strengthening the connection to the present moment by using the language of “Engagement.” By using (and citing) Seneca’s treatise on benefits from the Morales, Nedham focuses the discussion on the issue of mutual obligation, not simply on the duties of subjects to the ruling power. That is, while much of The Case of the Commonwealth stresses the need to apprehend correctly the strength of the ruling power – all governments

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rise by the sword, and thus none has a more legitimate claim than any other – the passages from Seneca do not simply point toward a pragmatic assessment of the prudent action at a particular moment. Instead, they highlight the degree to which the obligations between citizen and government are mutually constitutive: citizens’ allegiance creates an obligation of good governance, even as the government’s ability to protect its citizens demands loyalty. This context, in turn, gives a different inflection to the conclusion of Nedham’s 1648 pamphlet demonstrating the incompatibility of the Solemn League and Covenant and the Negative Oath. For the purposes of deftly condemning the inconstancy of those who swear both oaths, the concluding sentence “How near this comes to our own times, I leave it to the judicious Reader to judge, so that the ill consequences may be avoided” indicates the closeness of the two times, their likeness to each other.22 Once Seneca enters the conversation two years later, the emphasis falls on the readers’ capacity to discern when the times have altered.23 This change makes the very act that the 1648 pamphlet presents as problematic – the taking of a new oath that contradicts an earlier one – the judicious response to changing circumstances.24 Unsurprisingly, Nedham’s political opponents are reluctant to permit an undisguised claim for inconstancy’s suasive powers.25 The restoration of the monarch in 1660 occasions a flurry of pamphlets denouncing Nedham.26 Scholars now identify the author of one of these anonymous pamphlets, A Rope for Pol: Or, A hue and cry after Marchemont Nedham, as Roger L’Estrange, the voice of royalist extremism who would become, a few years after the restoration, the licenser of printing.27 As Harold Love notes, L’Estrange’s views immediately before and after the restoration embarrass the crown, for he argues against the policy of indemnity and oblivion and for harsher penalties for those who did not support the monarchy.28 In A Rope for Pol, L’Estrange seeks to undo the “incredible . . . influence [Nedham’s pamphlets] . . . had upon numbers of unconsidering persons, who have a strange presumption that all must needs be true that is in Print;” no other reason could justify publishing Nedham’s words: “It will therefore, I conceive, be demanded wherefore these exceptions are now publish’d, and not rather suffer’d to perish in perpetual oblivion, and perhaps it will be judg’d that they deserve rather to be burn’d then read?”29 Reappropriating the official language of “exception” and “oblivion,” L’Estrange makes his case against Nedham using Nedham’s own words: other than brief marginal notes, the pamphlet consists entirely of extracts from Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus that refer to the monarch and his family in unflattering ways. These insults range from indelicate classical allu-

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sions, such as substituting the surname Tarquin for Stuart, to tirades against the pretending “Malignants and Cavaliers,” to descriptions of “Tyrant Charles.”30 Offering only a few instances of marginal editorializing, L’Estrange clearly thinks the simple record of Nedham’s own writings will be enough to condemn him; he does not, for example, offer a history of the Tarquins that clarifies why this use is an insult. The minimal commentary also evokes a unitary royalist audience, who will both understand and immediately resent Nedham’s construction of events. The text’s citational precision, with page references to the original locations in Mercurius Politicus, helps to establish an appearance of transparent truth. A Rope for Pol presents the polemical force of remembrance. The next year, Nedham wittily uses exactly the same strategy for the opposite end.31 In 1661, perhaps in partial recompense for his pardon, Nedham publishes A Short History of the English Rebellion, compiled in verse by Marchamont Nedham, and formerly extant in his weekly Mercurius pragmaticus. This pamphlet strings together the short poems that begin each issue of Nedham’s royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647–9). Thus, it undertakes a similar textual strategy to A Rope for Pol: it gathers the textual evidence of past argument and allegiance to make a claim for the original author’s current political orientation. In so doing, it argues for the importance of precedent and the possibility (even likelihood) of consistency. As the coexistence of A Rope for Pol and A Short History of the English Rebellion shows, however, this continuity disappears when placed in the larger frame of Nedham’s history, which provides evidence for a wide range of political positions. Both A Rope for Pol and A Short History of the English Rebellion refuse oblivion, calling upon their audiences to remember an earlier moment. They make the positions and possibilities of the Restoration out of the texts and ideas of the near past. The two pamphlets read very differently, however. A Rope for Pol, as suggested above, presents itself as incontrovertible evidence, with the apparatus of textual citation and the assumption of its audience’s sympathies. It cites evidence of disloyalty either personal (insults against the royal family, especially the incoming King Charles II) or universal (arguments against tyranny, often using classical allusions). A Short History of the English Rebellion, in contrast, carries strong marks of the moment of its composition. The pamphlet makes a history out of passing moments, recorded week by week as circumstances change, from bold assertions that the year 1648 “will place him on his Throne, / In Earth, or else in Heaven,” to records of military defeat, to false claims that the king’s party is triumphing.32

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The bravado of the language suggests that at any moment things might turn out differently. The pamphlet concludes with four stanzas from the 26 December 1648 – 9 January 1649 issue: Then let us chear, this merry New-year, For CHARLES shall wear the Crown: ’Tis a damn’d Cause, that damns the Laws, And turns all up-side down.33

The pamphlet ends, that is, with Charles I on trial but not yet executed, with hope that he will be restored. In 1661, these same lines can be read as welcoming a new Charles to the throne (a bit belatedly), gaining a different meaning from their new context. Nevertheless, the act of remembering performed by A Short History of the English Rebellion hinges on the omission of a rather long stretch of history: the king’s execution, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. In so doing, it obviates Nedham’s own writings during that period – precisely those writings that A Rope for Pol will not let Nedham forget. In these instances, memory seems to work against Nedham. After the restoration, he never achieves the prominence as a propagandist he enjoys throughout the interregnum. His acknowledgment of inconstancy thus comes to seem futile, self-defeating, deluded. And yet it is the most futile, self-defeating, and deluded of his pamphlets that shows how accurately his evocation of changing allegiances apprehends the crucial role of memory in the Restoration. On or before 23 March 1660, Nedham publishes the pamphlet Newes from Brussels, in a Letter from a Neer Attendant on His Majesties Person. As the title suggests, the pamphlet purports to be a letter from an exiled Cavalier. Raymond calls this pamphlet, like Milton’s A Readie and Easie Waye to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), “as glorious a gesture as it was dangerous and ineffectual.”34 Nedham’s Newes from Brussels plays on his audience’s fears that the king will not keep his promises: “remember that blessed line I marked in Machiavel; he’s an Oafe that thinks an Oath . . . can tame a Prince beyond his pleasure.”35 This statement marks the royalist party as pragmatic schemers who will say anything to return to power. The promises of clemency and forgetting, the Cavalier speaker claims, cannot be true: “canst fancy, that our Master can forget he had a Father, how he liv’d and died, how he lost both Crown and life, and who the cause thereof? never Monarch yet had a memory halfe so bad.”36 The wit of the last line shows Nedham at his best, exposing the absurdity of the rhetoric of clemency. It does not render the lines any less compelling to know that both Nedham and many of his fellow citizens are recipients of precisely the clemency that he scorns here: the act’s magnanimity is

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of a piece with its unthinkability. For not only the king must forgive: “Thinkest thou that we can breathe in peace, while we see a little finger left alive that hath been dipt in Royal blood? or his adherents? No, a thought of mercy more hateful is than Hell.”37 The threat posed by the returning and newly empowered Cavaliers, Nedham argues, equals that of the king himself, and those followers lack the kingly prerogative of clemency. More frightening still, the image of the “little finger . . . dipt in Royal blood” seems to extend the threat to everyone who had any part in supporting or tolerating the Commonwealth or Protectorate. Memory is prospective as well as retrospective in these pamphlets: not only do they stir up the memory of and evidence for what was, but also they imagine how memory will work, must work, in the future. As the disappointed Cavaliers learn upon the king’s return, however, memory is shiftier than that. Nedham’s suasive power encourages later loyalists to wish he had remained on the king’s side: Anthony à Wood writes of Nedham that “had he been constant to his cavaleering principles he would have been beloved by, and admired of, all.”38 He never loses the name of turncoat, and Nedham’s writings reappear in print at later moments of crisis, fittingly put to use by different parties. The pamphlet with the two oaths comes out again in 1676, just prior to the Exclusion Crisis, and The Excellencie of a Free State fuels the debates about liberty in 1767. Nevertheless, modern critics’ primary assessment of Nedham is as a popularizer of, and even innovator within, republican theory, and as an advocate for the idea of interest.39 This focus on the Parliamentary and republican side of Nedham’s views accords with another of Wood’s conclusions, when he casts Nedham as the Commonwealth’s propagandist: “He was then the Goliath of the Philistines, the great champion of the late usurper, whose pen in comparison of others, was like a weaver’s beam.”40 In his retrospective analysis of Nedham, Wood sees his Commonwealth writings as his moment of greatest power. The mention of Goliath elegantly compresses a lengthy history into a single figure: the seemingly unconquerable giant taken down by the boy who would be king. This is, naturally, a one-sided view of the relative powers of Cromwell and Charles; indeed, it is a specifically partisan view, for Wood takes his description of Goliath Nedham from L’Estrange’s A Rope for Pol.41 While it may do justice to his prominence as a controversialist, L’Estrange and Wood’s depiction of Nedham as Goliath nevertheless misses something crucial. Goliath falls because he cannot adapt to David’s more flexible tactics, whereas Nedham’s strength derives from his responsiveness.

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Abraham Cowley’s “errour of one Paragraph, and a single Metaphor”42 If Nedham’s powerful rhetorical use of inconstancy makes him into Goliath for royalists, then Abraham Cowley (1618–67) is who the Philistines think David is: unprepared, vulnerable, and alone. From his early declaration of loyalties to King Charles, when he joins the royal court in exile at Oxford in 1643 (giving up his place at Cambridge to do so), through his service to the exiled court in France, conveying coded messages between the king and Queen Henrietta Maria from the mid1640s to the mid-1650s, Cowley has impeccable royalist credentials.43 Then, in 1656, it all goes horribly wrong, and never again rights itself. After his return to England in 1654, a return variously construed as a pretext to infiltrate the Parliamentary side to spy for the king or as a desertion of the royal cause, Cowley publishes a volume of his poetry. Its preface contains a passage, less than a page in length, that will shape the rest of his life. It reads in full: In the next place, I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles, with any relation to the differences that caused them; as among others, three Books of the Civil War it self, reaching as far as the first Battel of Newbury, where the succeeding misfortunes of the party stopt the work; for it is so uncustomary, as to become almost ridiculous, to make Lawrels for the Conquered. Now though in all Civil Dissentions, when they break into open hostilities, the War of the Pen is allowed to accompany that of the Sword, and every one is in a maner obliged with his Tongue, as well as Hand, to serve and assist the side which he engages in; yet when the event of battel, and the unaccountable Will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause it self, and dismantle that, as well as our Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications of Wit and Reason by which we defended it. We ought not sure, to begin our selves to revive the remembrance of those times and actions for which we have received a General Amnestie, as a favor from the Victor. The truth is, neither We, nor They, ought by the Representation of Places and Images to make a kind of Artificial Memory of those things wherein we are all bound to desire like Themistocles, the Art of Oblivion. The enmities of Fellow-Citizens should be, like that of Lovers, the Redintegration of their Amity. The Names of Party, and Titles of Division, which are sometimes in effect the whole quarrel, should be extinguished and forbidden in peace under the notion of Acts of Hostility. And I would have it accounted no less unlawful to rip up old wounds, then to give new ones; which has made me not onely abstain from printing any things of this kinde, but to burn the very copies, and inflict a severer punishment on them my self, then perhaps the most rigid Officer of State would have thought that they deserved.44

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This paragraph ensures that Cowley will never become poet laureate after the restoration, will never receive coveted sinecures with their enviable incomes. It is hard to see why this passage occasions such lasting ire. If anything, it declares a manifesto for quietism, closer in sentiment to the king’s own Act of Indemnity and Oblivion than to the rabble-rousing of the regicides. Why does Cowley suffer what seems such a disproportionate punishment for such a mild transgression? Most of the explanations are equally unsatisfied and unsatisfying. Samuel Johnson, in The Lives of the Poets, declares that “if his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice,” while accepting the general principle that The man whose miscarriage in a just cause has put him in the power of his enemy may, without any violation of his integrity, regain his liberty, or preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality: for, the stipulation gives the enemy nothing which he had not before; the neutrality of a captive may be always secured by his imprisonment or death.45

Johnson goes on to point out that Cowley cannot have aided the Protectorate very much, since they continued to hold him under bond. Arthur Nethercot, Cowley’s biographer in the early part of the twentieth century, follows Cowley’s literary executor Thomas Sprat in thinking that Cowley might have dissembled in order to accomplish his goal of spying for the crown, though he also calls him “inconsistent” and “weak-willed.”46 The ideal and the standard are courage and consistency, even if both Johnson and Nethercot acknowledge the weight of principles on the other side. Sprat’s own explanation affords a sense of the ways in which imagination shapes ideological commitment and political success. Sprat defends Cowley from charges of inconstancy, describing instead a subtle account of influence and persuasion: And though he approved their constancy, as much as any man living, yet he found their unseasonable shewing it, did only disable themselves, and give their Adversaries great advantages of riches and strength by their defeats. He therefore believed that it would be a meritorious service to the King, if any man who was known to have followed his interest, could insinuate into the Usurpers minds, that men of his Principles were now willing to be quiet, & could perswade the poor oppressed Royalists to conceal their affections, for better occasions.47

Like Nedham, Sprat articulates the persuasiveness of inconstancy: a change in the behavior of royalists is more compelling than the loyalties of those who supported Parliament all along. Unlike Nedham, however, Sprat’s depiction of Cowley introduces the idea of concealment: quietism covers over their true, consistent, convictions. This dissembling is

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indistinguishable from what Cowley advocates in his 1656 preface: the laying down of pen as well as sword.48 While Sprat tries to dismiss the preface because it “was published before a Book of Poetry,” the poetry itself raises more problems.49 Most later critics follow Sprat in identifying the prose passage as the crux of the matter, excising it from the 1656 preface in the posthumous 1668 edition of Cowley’s works. However, the writing most antithetical to the royalist cause actually comes in two poems in the 1656 volume: the Pindaric ode “Brutus” and the Davideis, an unfinished epic poem. Sprat retains both poems in the 1668 volume, and yet the Brutus ode, at the very least, seems far more shocking than the preface. Not only does the poem hail “Excellent Brutus, of all humane race / The best till Nature was improv’ed by Grace,” but also it refutes any who would criticize Brutus’ assassination of Caesar: From thy strict rule some think that thou didst swerve (Mistaken Honest men) in Caesars blood; What Mercy could the Tyrants Life deserve, From him who kill’d Himself rather then serve?50

This is standard rhetoric about the citizen’s duty in relation to the tyrant, recalling Cicero’s “we have no ties of fellowship with the tyrant, but rather the bitterest feud.”51 Brutus, with rare disinterestedness, does not wish to take Caesar’s place: though “all men else” “Caesars usurpt place to him should proffer; / None can deserve’t but he who would refuse the offer.”52 Written during debates about whether Cromwell should accept the proffered crown, the lines model an authority that acts for the good of the people rather than for itself. Instead of stressing Brutus’ betrayal, Cowley presents him as an exemplar of republican virtue in his willingness to die rather than to accept his life as a benefit from a ruler. The cost of his virtue, however, is the denial of “Mercy,” or clemency, both to himself and to others.53 The tension between submission and clemency in the ode prefigures its reception. In a damning early reading, Matthew Tindal links the “Ode as fine as it is” to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s rebuff of Cowley when he asks for preferment on the restoration: “that Minister turn’d on him, and, with a severe Countenance, said, Mr. Cowley, Your Pardon is your Reward. Letting him know, the King’s Forgiving him that Ode, was more than he merited; that he cou’d not be ignorant, there were Enthusiastica[l] Republicans; who, notwithstanding the Turn of Affairs, still retain’d as good an Opinion of their Cause, as ever Brutus cou’d have of his: and cou’d he expect, that his Royal Master shou’d promote one, who, as far as his Poetick Vein cou’d carry him, had encourag’d

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these desperate Men, to make an Attempt on his Sacred Person.” This was the true Cause of his Retirement.54

Reading the ode as a provocation to republicans, Clarendon punishes Cowley for his persuasive poetry, so that Cowley can expect only “Pardon” for his “Reward.” Cowley’s imaginative sympathy with those who fight against the king equates him with the royalists who dissemble their true beliefs during the interregnum.55 Ironically, Nethercot suggests that “certainly these poems were circulated by those of Cowley’s friends who were interested in obtaining his release” from prison in the mid-1650s.56 In fact, this is not at all the case.57 The very few instances of manuscript circulation of these poems all appear to derive from the print editions of 1656 and after, and tend to postdate the restoration.58 The poems seem only to have been used against Cowley, in political circumstances in which they are damning, and never for him. While the Brutus ode startles for likening a regicide to “a God crucified,” the Davideis initially looks much less likely to cause alarm. Cowley finds in David a protagonist who will be king as well as one who exemplifies the virtues of biblical friendship. The biblical language echoes that of classical friendship: “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”59 The perfect friendship of David and Jonathan not only matches the classical pairs, but surpasses them, as Cowley writes in the 1656 preface to his poetical works: “the friendship of David and Jonathan [is] more worthy celebration, then that of Theseus and Perithous,” a notable parallel because Theseus is one of the few exemplary friends who is also a king.60 Cowley accords with Peter Martyr, who praises David and Jonathan’s friendship because it “was steadfast and firme; for it was founded upon love towards their countrie, and pietie towards God.”61 The link between love of country and classical friendship is never simple, and it is especially complex in the case of David and Jonathan. As Saul’s son, Jonathan has a hereditary right to the throne of Israel, a right reinforced by the people’s admiration for him. But David will become king, through God’s choice rather than his own machinations. The strength of both David’s and Jonathan’s claims to the throne makes the commonplace expression of friendship’s equality “They both were Servants, they both Princes were” suddenly quite pointed.62 While both may be princes, only one can be king. In no easy way, then, can David and Jonathan share the same love of country. Indeed, Jonathan’s friendship for David “bought’st him nobly at a Kingdoms loss!”63 Jonathan sacrifices his own claim to kingship for friendship; in his commitment

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to principle over position, he echoes Cowley’s disinterested Brutus, who does not wish to succeed Caesar. Jonathan’s father Saul thinks his son resembles Brutus in betrayal. Jonathan, however, sees his father not as the tyrant his threats against David will show him to be, but instead as himself bound by friendship: Can he to’a Frind, to’a Son so bloody grow, He who ev’en sinn’ed but now to spare a Foe? Admit he could; but with what strength or art Could he so long close, and seal up his heart? Such counsels jealous of themselves become, And dare not fix without consent of some.64

Jonathan relies upon the good king Saul once was: “spar[ing] a Foe” is an act of clemency, a particular form of generosity only a king could perform.65 In extrapolating from his father’s former clemency, Jonathan misreads the situation: whereas friendship consists of the continual exchange of services, which need not be repaid, clemency is a benefit that confers an obligation on the person saved. It requires submission and acknowledgment of superior power, which neither Brutus nor David will accept. Jonathan’s misrecognition of the hierarchy established by clemency repeats in his inability to imagine his father conceiving and resolving upon such a plan alone: “Such counsels” “dare not fix without consent of some.” While recalling the royal apologists who ascribed the failures of Charles I to evil counselors, this passage shows that Jonathan does not understand the isolation of even the clement monarch.66 Jonathan’s emphasis on “consent” propounds a fundamentally different conception of power. When Jonathan defends his friend to Saul, trying to change the king’s mind through the very counsel he finds all-important, Saul responds swiftly and brutally. Can’st thou be Mine? a Crown sometimes does hire Ev’en Sons against their Parents to conspire, But ne’re did story yet, or fable tell Of one so wild, who meerly to Rebel Quitted th’unquestion’d birthright of a Throne, And bought his Fathers ruine with his own: Thou need’st not plead th’ambitious youths defence; Thy crime clears his, and makes that Innocence. Nor can his foul Ingratitude appear, Whilst thy unnatural guilt is placed so near. Is this that noble Friendship you pretend? Mine, thine own Foe, and thy worst En’emies Friend?67

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Saul can imagine his son’s betrayal within a narrative of competing state powers, in which a foreign “Crown” hires him. The loyalty of friendship, however, seems the gratuitous product of an urge “meerly to Rebel.” Worse, it ruins the son as well as the father, with the asyndeton of “Mine, thine own Foe” reinforcing the identity between the two. Interestingly, though, Saul describes Jonathan as accomplishing the noblest act of classical friendship: “Thy crime clears his, and makes that Innocence.” Jonathan’s culpability for betraying his father outweighs, indeed eliminates, David’s guilt for betraying his king. Unlike the tyrants of classical texts, this transference of blame does not enlighten Saul to the virtue of the friends, causing him to reform. Instead, he casts his spear at his own son. By this point in the narrative, Saul appears as a tyrant, abandoned by God. Saul is not self-evidently a tyrant until David comes along and threatens to surpass him, however. In part, the fact that loyalty between friends outweighs loyalty to the state provokes the king to extended violence and tyranny. Unlike the Brutus ode, this particular intersection of poetry and loyalty could seem to support the royalist side: loyalty to companions (David and Jonathan; the royalists) and to the true king (David; Charles II) trumps submission to the power in charge (Saul; Cromwell and Parliament). But the irreconcilable conflict between Jonathan’s loyalties to David and to Saul shows that no account of unitary allegiance suffices. Saul’s animus toward David derives in part from jealousy of him, but that jealousy has a reasonable basis in the affections of Jonathan and of his people. Jonathan’s choice of David over Saul, the choice of friendship over the state, prefigures the people’s choice of David over Saul. Saul is not mistaken to see in Jonathan the friend who conspires to overthrow the state. This sight makes Saul into a tyrant. The repercussions of Jonathan’s friendship for Saul’s tyranny become clearer in an innovation of Cowley’s. Cowley, alone of the poets who write about David, introduces a second friend for Jonathan, describing the friendship with an equal intensity: “Abdon, whose Love to’ his Master did exceed / What Natures Law, or Passions Power could breed.”68 The friendship does not have the perfect equality of that between David and Jonathan: Abdon is Jonathan’s “humblest Servant” as well as “his dearest Friend.”69 Regardless, Abdon already knows Jonathan’s plan to infiltrate the Philistines’ camp, thus demonstrating their intimacy.70 Their inequality parallels that of the general Scipio and his second-in-command Laelius, Cicero’s exemplary friends, even as it participates in the difference of status that could raise the specter of sodomy.71 Cowley expands significantly upon the role of the man who

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serves, in the biblical text, as Jonathan’s armor-bearer, “illustrat[ing] loyalty.”72 By modifying the biblical text, however, Cowley introduces disloyalty as well as loyalty. In the Bible, the story of Jonathan and his armor-bearer precedes that of David, so that the lesser friendship of Jonathan and his armor-bearer prefigures the greater of Jonathan and David. In Cowley’s sequence, the episode of Jonathan and Abdon ends the unfinished poem, setting up a rival to Jonathan and David.73 Friendship in the poem thus does not simply tend toward establishing David as the true monarch, but rather provides a source of loyalty that competes even with the chosen king David. While Jonathan and Abdon are killing swathes of Philistines, Saul swears to his army that anyone who eats before evening will be cursed. Jonathan and Abdon miss this announcement, and Jonathan eats some honey that he finds; for this, Saul condemns him to death. Jonathan does not die, for the people speak out on his behalf: they now Oppose to Sauls a better publick Vow. They all consent all Israel ought to be Accurst and kill’d themselves rather then He. Thus with kind force they the glad King withstood, And sav’ed their wondrous Saviours sacred blood.74

In place of Jonathan, the people offer themselves as the object of Saul’s curse and death sentence. In some ways, this recalls the republican friends who vie for the right to die for each other. Cowley’s language, however, indicates resistance more than sacrifice, focusing on “consent,” which “with kind force they the glad King withstood.” Cowley’s language suggests systems of political organization – especially, the people’s consent required in contract theory – rather than the battlefield dramatics of the King James Bible’s “the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not.”75 The fact that the people rather than Abdon save Jonathan shapes the implications of this episode: it moves it away from the republican friends opposing tyranny toward a form of contract or constitutional royalism, a shift foreshadowed in Jonathan’s disbelief that his father could “fix without consent of some.”76 In the friendship of David and Jonathan and in the people’s rescue of Jonathan from his father’s unjust oath, Cowley impugns the worthiness and the judgment of the tyrant Saul. He also, in the people’s commitment to Jonathan, establishes competing forms of legitimacy, such that David’s kingship does not seem inevitable. The poem follows the Bible in showing Saul as first anointed by God and then abandoned by him, but the alternative sources of political authority – rival charismatic

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rulers and the people – hew rather too closely to the historical circumstances of 1656 to placate any royalists. This discomfort over Cowley’s models becomes still clearer in two final instances: the political allegory most often used by royalists to blacken Cowley’s name, and Cowley’s recasting of outright royalist defeat. Book IV of the Davideis describes the founding of monarchy in Israel. The Israelites ask God for a king following years of war and faulty rule under Samuel’s sons. Although by “just and faultless causes,” “The general voyce did for a Monarch cry,” God sees in this request a misguided desire for pageantry and spectacle.77 Accordingly, Samuel speaks against the proposition, arguing powerfully for the preservation of the commonwealth governed by judges: “You’re sure the first (said he) / Of freeborn men that begg’d for Slaverie.”78 Political readings of book IV turn on how to read Samuel’s arguments against monarchy as an affront to human freedom and as the cause of inevitable bondage. Based on book IV, critics tend to read Cowley as either condemning all monarchy79 or, more rarely, showing an instance of Hobbesian contract in which the people, having recognized Saul as God’s anointed king and affirmed his role through acclamation, cannot resist him once he turns tyrant.80 For all the shifting attempts to read the allegorical significations of the Davideis – Saul is Charles I, David is Cromwell; Saul is Cromwell, David is Charles II – none takes account of Cowley’s own clearest evidence for correspondence between historical figures and a character in the poem. Cowley shapes his unfinished biblical epic out of the materials of another, more spectacularly unfinished epic: The Civil War, the historical poem he breaks off in the midst of defeat and thence refuses to publish.81 Cowley takes descriptions of royalist heroes – King Charles, Henry Jermyn, and Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland – from The Civil War and uses them, with little modification, in the Davideis. But he applies them neither to Saul nor to David, as the allegorical readings might suggest. Instead, they all pertain to Jonathan. Like King Charles, Jonathan excels both in peace and war.82 Like Jermyn, he is “All that kind Mothers wishes can contain.”83 The most significant description, of Falkland, undergoes the most transformation. Falkland is “How good a Father, Husband, Master, Friend!”84 Of Jonathan, Cowley writes: The tendrest Husband, Master, Father, Son, And all those parts by’his Friendship far outdone. His Love to Friends no bound or rule does know, What He to Heav’en, all that to Him they owe.85

The extent of Jonathan’s friendship exceeds all other forms of relationship: the bonds between husband and wife; master and servant; father

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and child; and son and parents. The differences turn upon the crucial elements of Cowley’s biblical epic: the conflict between filial and friendly loyalty, and the unboundedness of the bond between friends. The repetition of the father–son relationship, from both perspectives, recalls the conflict between Saul and Jonathan, unsurprisingly. Less expected, though, is the generalization of Jonathan’s friendship to include “all Mankind,” who “With diffe’rent measures all are satisfi’ed.”86 The prudent decorum of Jonathan’s friendly response, in which he gives to each person what she or he needs, stops it from being excessive, though it “know[s]” “no bound.” In the shift from describing Falkland to describing Jonathan, Cowley transforms a language of mastery and equality into a language of mastery and subordination overcome by equality. The reworking of the materials of The Civil War into the Davideis illustrates a change in Cowley’s thinking. He turns a poem of defeat not into a triumph of a humble man who will become king (David’s story), nor into the humbling of a tyrant who was once a good king (Saul’s story). He takes his royalist heroes and turns them into Jonathan, a man whose friendship outweighs all other obligations, who is friend to too many (David, Abdon, “all mankind”). But perhaps this is not quite right. For Jonathan’s friendship to the people, in the last incident of the Davideis, saves his life. The people recompense the bottomless debts of Jonathan’s friendship by their own willingness to be sacrificed, “And sav’ed their wondrous Saviours sacred blood.”87 It would be possible to read this moment as a fantasy rewriting of the regicide in which the people rise up to stop injustice – if only it were Jonathan and not David who becomes king. The charismatic David, who rises to power not only through God’s intervention but also through his own cunning and skill, is a dangerous figure to praise in certain political climates. Even with God’s approbation, David presents a rival line of succession to the ruling monarch that requires Saul, now turned tyrant, to be overthrown. Jonathan’s friendship with David undoes Saul, both because that friendship leads Jonathan to conspire to overthrow his father and because that friendship helps provoke Saul’s tyranny. For friendship, Jonathan yields his claim to the throne to David; friendship permits a peaceful transfer of power. But Jonathan’s rival friendship with Abdon, which makes the heir apparent descend to the level of an ordinary soldier, risks something even more, for it leads to a threat only answered by the people’s defense of Jonathan. Jonathan thus requires the friendship of the people, their “consent” and “kind force,” in order to survive. Since Cowley transforms the royalist heroes of his earlier truncated epic into Jonathan,

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the Davideis ascribes the fate of the royalists not to the clemency of kings, but to the kindness of the people. Clarendon condemns Cowley’s Brutus ode for the effect it might have on republicans still harboring thoughts of regicide. The Davideis, perhaps more problematically, depicts multiple monarchs, legitimated on different grounds, but shows that the forces that touch off the upheavals in succession are the affections of the rebellious friends and the people’s love. In 1656, Cowley chooses to “lay down [his] Pens as well as Arms,” finishing neither the “three Books of the Civil War it self,” nor the Davideis, which does not progress to David’s kingship.88 Instead, he stops just after the people rescue Jonathan from his father’s tyrannical oath. A hopeful fantasy of a royal personage’s miraculous rescue, the poem more strongly models a transfer in power from king to people, wrought through the means of friendship.

The Style of Accommodation: Edmund Waller Where Cowley sees himself suffering for what he does not say, Edmund Waller (1606–87) says a great deal about everyone – Charles I, Cromwell, Charles II, even James II – all of it positive, and oddly none of it mutually exclusive. Samuel Johnson sums up the usual assessment in his life of Waller: “Of the laxity of his political principles, and the weakness of his resolution, he experienced the natural effect, by losing the esteem of every party.”89 Waller exemplifies the politician poised in the middle: innately conservative, with respect for the traditional forms of English government, yet respecting the limits on the king’s power as well as the power itself.90 The fact that he ends up on different sides at different points in the mid-century shows the transformation of the middle way into unwitting partisanship. Waller’s balance on the slender dividing line between royalist and Parliamentarian means that his poems provoke controversies. Few mid-century poems occasion more poetic responses than Waller’s “A Panegyrike to My Lord Protector” and his elegy on Cromwell, “Upon the Late Storm, and the death of his Highness ensuing the same,” both in manuscript and in print.91 Far from vanishing after the restoration, the record of controversy continues in manuscript well into the eighteenth century: manuscripts frequently juxtapose Waller’s panegyrics to Charles I, Cromwell, and Charles II with one another, or include a poetic reply alongside Waller’s “A Panegyrike to my Lord Protector.” In print, the royal poems replace the protectoral ones after the restoration, only to have both sets of panegyrics return in the 1686 edition of his

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poems. Far from being forgotten, the story of shifty Waller recurs insistently enough to become his defining feature. Unlike Nedham, Waller does not celebrate his changeability, but unlike Cowley, he does not suffer a great deal for it, either. Until 1643, Waller is both a Member of Parliament and a moderate supporter of the king’s party. From his arrival in Parliament in 1624, he advocates a moderate approach, trying not only to limit the more excessive instances of Charles’s personal prerogative but also to restrain the more extreme elements in Parliament.92 In 1643, Waller attempts to broker peace between king and Parliament, helping to concoct what becomes known as “Waller’s Plot.” Originally, it seems, a plan of passive resistance and rhetorical advocacy by Members of Parliament, the plot evolves into a scheme for an armed uprising that would let the king’s army enter London. Discovered and denounced in Parliament by John Pym, the plot effectively ends the developing coalition of peace parties in the Houses of Parliament, the city, and the army. Waller only just escapes dire punishment: he has his trial delayed, bribes various Parliamentarians (nearly bankrupting his wealthy estate), and argues his way into a substantial fine of £10,000 and exile on the Continent. Along the way, he implicates many fellow supporters of the king in his plot, thoroughly alienating the royalist party. Though the terms of his release initially preclude his rejoining Parliament, he later receives permission to return to England and, upon the restoration, resumes his Parliamentary seat.93 “Waller’s Plot,” and his attempts to evade punishment for it, permanently blacken Waller’s name with the slur of traitor to all sides. As his return to Parliament after the restoration shows, however, this does not definitively disqualify him from public office. This is not because his countrymen forget Waller’s plot, nor does he ask them to forget. In 1645, from exile, Waller publishes his Poems for the first time. Far from glossing over the incident, Poems incorporates poems praising the royal family and the speeches Waller gave in Parliament about the plot. As Clarendon writes, these speeches make all the difference to Waller’s fate: “in truth, he does as much owe the keeping his head to that oration as Catiline did the loss of his to those of Tully.”94 Waller’s speech deftly reshapes the languages of political thought: my addresse to you, and all my Plea shall onely be such as children use to their Parents, I have offended; I confesse it; I never did any thing like it before . . .: you have by it made an happy discoverie of your Enemies, and I of my selfe, and the evil principles I walk by, so that if you look either on what I have been heretofore, or what I now am, and by Gods grace afflicting me, shall alwayes continue to be, you may perhaps thinke me fit to be an example of your compassion and clemency.95

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In evoking the parallel of child and parents, Waller puts Parliament, rather than the king, in the role of father to the people. The evidence of betrayal, Waller continues, proves materially useful not only to Parliament but to himself: in naming names, he does not disgrace himself, but rather produces self-knowledge and aids the Parliament in identifying enemies. He concludes by granting to Parliament the right to dispense “clemency,” traditionally reserved to kings. Waller’s rhetoric thus endows Parliament with the role and rights of the king, by means of both familial metaphors and monarchic virtues. Waller’s 1645 volume repeats the poems in his 1640s presentation manuscripts dedicated to the queen, poems which tend to fall within the courtly strains of epideictic and amorous verse. Within those types, though, the poems illustrate the difficult balancing act of Waller’s moderate position, even before the scandal of his royalist plot, and the finesse with which he must present his decision to recant before Parliament. Waller’s poem “Of his Majesty’s Receiving the News of the Duke of Buckingham’s Death” depicts King Charles as managing a similarly complex set of conflicting priorities. The murder of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, by a disgruntled soldier exposes the widespread dislike of the king’s assertion of his prerogative and his handling of the wars in Europe.96 Buckingham’s death also gives Charles an opportunity to blame the failures of his policies on a now-absent evil counselor (an assessment shared by many of Charles’s critics and supporters alike). To disown Buckingham too fervently, however, would make the king look disloyal. Waller negotiates these two positions – too much grief would align the king too strongly with Buckingham; too little grief would make him appear ungrateful – by praising the king’s impassivity as a religious virtue: “So earnest with thy God! can no new care, / No sense of danger, interrupt thy prayer?”97 Charles receives the news unmoved, unlike another great hero, who with “Patroclus slain, / With such amazement as weak mothers use, / And frantic gesture, he receives the news.”98 Charles surpasses Homer’s “best pattern”: unlike Achilles, whose grief feminizes him, he does not become frantic.99 Rather than cementing his place within the canon of classical friends, Achilles’ grief transforms him from militant friend to “weak mother.” Waller leaves out the fact that this grief also provokes Achilles’ return to battle, and the Greeks’ consequent victory. Not content with depicting Charles surpassing a paragon of classical friendship, Waller also likens him to the biblical David: Yet he that weighs with thine good David’s deeds, Shall find his passion, not his love, exceeds:

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He cursed the mountains where his brave friend died, But lets false Ziba with his heir divide; Where thy immortal love to thy blest friends, Like that of Heaven, upon their seed descends.100

Charles’s “love” to Buckingham is not less than that of the exemplary David for Jonathan; his “passion” only expresses it in more measured terms. The allusion to “false Ziba” recalls David, now king, giving Saul’s land to Jonathan’s sole surviving son, after having killed all of Saul’s other sons and grandsons.101 This grant honors the covenant of friendship between David and Jonathan, the covenant for which Jonathan gives up his kingdom. Though Charles loves his friends and their children, Waller implies, he does not foolishly divide his kingdom for that love. This limitation helps to explain the odd couplet that follows these lines: “Such huge extremes inhabit thy great mind, / Godlike, unmoved, and yet, like woman, kind!”102 The lines capture the divisions between restraint and passion, pragmatic disavowal and emotional loyalty, which shape the poem. The poem makes a virtue of these “extremes,” but it can do so only because of the limits gender imposes upon kindness. For to be “like woman, kind” is to be unlike David’s kindness, the kindness that is both the likeness of friends and “covenant faithfulness.”103 As if under the conditions that govern a woman’s ability to bequeath certain forms of property, Charles cannot give his kingdom away, even if he should wish to do so. The emphasis on “their seed” reinforces the inheritance rights of patriarchal lineage: the volitional associations of friendship do not triumph here. Thus far, Waller’s Charles looks wholly unlike Cowley’s Jonathan: where Charles preserves lineal inheritance and moderates his love to his friends, Jonathan gives away his own inheritance for his passionate friendship. Even David’s attempt to give it back by honoring his covenant with Jonathan’s son does not restore order. Once he is a king, Waller shows, friendship betrays David. The poems and speeches of Waller’s Poems 1645 attempt to balance old allegiances with new realities; Waller’s controversial poem, “A Panegyrike to My Lord Protector, Of the Present Greatness, and Joint Interest, of his Highness, and this Nation,” confronts this tension more directly still. In 1655, four years after Waller’s return from exile and very soon after Cromwell becomes Lord Protector, the poem appears as a printed broadside, attributed to “a gentleman that loves peace, union, and the prosperity of the English nation.”104 David Norbrook identifies “at least four satiric responses” to Waller’s poem, from both republican and royalist writers, who fear the justification “a Cromwellian courtly

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discourse” might provide.105 The responses to Waller’s panegyric embody opposition in their very form, for two of them – the royalist “Anti-Panegyrike,” probably by Richard Watson, and the republican response, which Norbrook identifies as Lucy Hutchinson’s – refute Waller’s poem stanza by stanza. Written in the moment of controversy, these poems, particularly in manuscript, seem ephemeral by virtue of their occasionality. Surprisingly, the moment of Waller’s panegyric persists at least until the eve of the Restoration. Watson’s printed “Anti-Panegyrike” forms part of the pamphlet The Panegyrike and the Storme, which prints not only Waller’s panegyric but also his elegy on Cromwell, with prefatory poems, in 1659.106 The poems remain in manuscript collections, sometimes with poetic responses, amongst others to Cromwell well into the eighteenth century; they reappear in print, usually next to the panegyrics on the monarchs, from the first posthumous edition of 1689/90 onward.107 Samuel Johnson’s praise for the poem on stylistic grounds does not quite answer the question raised by the manuscript and print evidence.108 For if the panegyric’s value lies in its poetic style, then there would be no need to group it with other panegyrics on Cromwell, and certainly no need to juxtapose it continually with panegyrics on Kings Charles I and II.109 A brief analysis of royalist and republican responses to Waller’s panegyric demonstrates both why the poem prompts so much ire, and why it remains important for such a long time. As Norbrook argues, the promise and threat of Waller’s panegyric are the same: his Augustan portrayal of Cromwell could entice those who appreciate monarchic stability as well as those who fight against monarchic rule.110 Thus, the royalist Anti-Panegyrist (Richard Watson) and the republican author of “To Mr. Waller” (Lucy Hutchinson) attack Waller’s poem from two different directions. Watson defends most fervently against Waller’s use of monarchic language and allusions. In reply to Waller’s assertion that Cromwell’s private life prepares him to govern because “Borne to com[m]and, [his] Princely vertues slept, / Like humble David, while ye flock he kept,” Watson responds “Your Oliver had no King Davids call, / Nor was King Charles the first a second Saul.”111 Without precisely calling Cromwell a king, Waller manages to suggest that he will naturally become one by evoking his Davidic virtue in retirement. Watson hammers home the fault-lines in the parallel: God did not call Cromwell (though of course many would say he did) and Charles I was no Saullike tyrant. In contrast, the republican sympathies of Hutchinson’s poem refuse David his future as king. Her Cromwell does not even excel in private life:

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Who lavisht out his wiue’s Inheritance Ruynd the Children that he should advance And Gam’d away his little thriftless stock Slept not like David for he kept his Flock.112

Hutchinson restricts the Davidic allusion to his role as shepherd, strictly closing down the possibility of Cromwell taking the crown. In maligning Cromwell’s failure at household management, Hutchinson also marks him as ineffectual in public life, for successful domestic oeconomy both prepares a husband to govern and attests to his ability to do so. While the biblical references to David debate the divine approval of Cromwell’s becoming king, the allusions to Caesar, Brutus, and Augustus in all three poems consider more varied forms of government. Though Waller does not consistently maintain the referentiality of Caesar and Augustus – Cromwell is first Caesar, then Augustus – he clearly does not support Brutus: “Mistaken Brutus thought to breake the yoke, / But cut the bond of union with that stroke.”113 The lines certainly do not embrace Brutus’ act (they are a long way from Cowley’s savior), but they also do not fully condemn it. Waller’s “mistaken Brutus” is generous, and that gentle touch creates the poignancy of “cut the bond of union with that stroke.” This is certainly a circuitous – and an unrealistically bloodless – way of describing both the assassination of Caesar and the English Civil Wars themselves. In their mourning for English unity rather than for the body of the king himself, however, they suggest a kind of middle way. Watson is having none of it, of course: “Caesar was no such Monster, tis not sed’, / He did his Master binde, lose, then behead; / . . . / Brutus did somewhat, but his stroke not, misse.”114 The lines recall the execution of King Charles I while emphasizing the success of Brutus’ assassination. Watson replaces nostalgia for lost unity with an insistence on the remembrance of past violence. He transforms Waller’s “mistaken Brutus” into a Brutus who must take responsibility for the “stroke” that does “not, misse.” Hutchinson shifts blame from Brutus to the senators: This Caesar found in our dissembling Age Which made him desperately himselfe engage When the Mistaken Senators who broke His fetters fear’d no other galling Yoke.115

Brutus does not mistake in removing Caesar; rather, the Senators who fail to govern together do. The “bond of union” that Waller’s “mistaken Brutus” “cut” becomes, in Hutchinson’s writing, the loathsome servitude of “fetters;” thus she praises the original resistance to Charles I while criticizing submission to any single leader.116 The divergences con-

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tinue when both Watson and Hutchinson refute Waller’s depiction of Augustus: Watson hopes for a single restoration of the monarchy under Augustus, while to Hutchinson each new ruler represents a fall farther away from the ideal of rule by the Senate.117 What neither wants is what Waller describes: a government in which Cromwell is both Caesar and Augustus, both past and future. While the disagreement over the meaning of Augustus points toward the broken “bond of union,” the three poems’ different attitudes toward the kingly virtue of clemency show still more strongly the continuing relevance of Civil War debates to the political discourse of the following years. Naming forgiveness as one of Cromwell’s chief virtues, Waller assigns him the role of monarch: only one with supreme power has the ability to remit as well as to administer punishment. Less pleasure take brave mindes in battailes won; Then in restoring such as are undone, ... But man alone can whom he conquers spare. To pardon willing, and to punish loth You strike with one hand, but you heal with both; Lifting up all that prostrate lie, you grieve You cannot make the dead againe to live.118

Waller’s battlefield imagery locates the virtue of sparing enemies within Cromwell’s proper sphere. Cromwell’s generosity toward the defeated demonstrates both his desire for a unified country and his confidence in his own power. Watson refuses on both counts: More pleasure take base mindes in victorie Got by secure deceit, then chivalrie What an Apostate Poët knowes was bought, He must crie up as won, and sing Well fought. ... Who, he knowes, dare not die, he dares let live, And to them a left-handed pardon give: Whom he findes to submit and flatter loth, He strokes with one hand, but cuts off with both. Those that he can not reach, he wisheth dead, Having else litle hope to save his head.119

Denying Cromwell even the physical courage of the soldier, Watson ascribes his victories to “deceit.” Rather than the clemency of a secure ruler, Watson sees the manipulation of a Machiavellian new prince, who alternates between flattery of those base enough to submit and brutal execution of those he cannot control. The replacement of the combat

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of Waller’s “strike” with the flattery of the Anti-Panegyrist’s “strokes” makes the point. All Cromwell can anticipate, Watson suggests, is the fate of Charles I. In contrast, Hutchinson’s Cromwell is strong but cruel: Man whom hee Conquers ought to spare But he alone takes pride in Batles won, Restoreing none of those that are vndone. To punish willing, but to pardon loath He strikes with one hand, and he gripes with both. Treading on all that prostrate lye he greiues For the death only which the Wretch relieues.120

The exceptionality of Hutchinson’s Cromwell comes not from the status of the monarch, but from the unusual pride that separates him from those he “ought to spare.” Strikingly, the imagery does not evoke the executed king, as does Watson’s, but instead the plight of ordinary soldiers, “prostrate” on the battlefield, the wretched only relieved by death. Hutchinson’s universal Christian forgiveness contrasts with Waller’s singular pardon. A difference between the 1655 broadside of Waller’s poem (the version to which Watson and Hutchinson respond) and the 1689/90 edition of Waller’s poems (the first printing of the panegyric with his complete poems) demonstrates the importance of this point. In 1655, the stanza following those just discussed concludes “The onely cure which could from heav’n come downe, / Was so much power and pietie in one.”121 Both Watson and Hutchinson deny this claim of Cromwell’s piety, Watson simply saying that “For your Protectour, from heav’n came not downe” and Hutchinson calling Cromwell a “Plague Heauens anger could send downe.”122 More interesting is Waller’s own revision of the line. The 1689/90 edition reads “The only Cure which could from Heav’n come down / Was so much power and clemency in one.”123 Still more intriguing is where that power and piety go. The 1689/90 edition of Waller’s poems forms a companion volume to Waller’s complete poems, published in 1686. That edition, authorized by Waller, begins with the poem “To the King on his Navy,” which concludes “To thee his Chosen more indulgent, he / Dares trust such Power with so much Piety.”124 The textual history thus demonstrates that “power” and “piety” characterize the ruling leader, while “clemency,” a public virtue associated with kingship, belongs to Cromwell only retrospectively.125 This upends the usual expectations: in many ways it would make more sense for Waller, Cromwell’s distant kinsman, to celebrate Cromwell the public man during his time in power and the private man after the restoration of the monarchy. Why reverse this pattern?

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The reason is that the public virtue of clemency – the very thing that Charles II’s disloyal subjects most hope from him – looks most like inconstancy in Waller’s changeable hands. The ability of forgiveness to heal what “cut the bond of union with that stroke,” as Waller poignantly puts it, also shows the king’s promised forgetfulness to be a threat to his loyal subjects. The ways that clemency can look like “indemnity for enemies and oblivion for friends” mean that loyal subjects want sharply to distinguish it from the inconstancy Waller represents.

Andrew Marvell: “how . . . the measures of these states agree” The youngest of all the writers discussed in this chapter, Andrew Marvell (1621–78) survives with the best reputation. For most of the centuries since his death, it is primarily that of a polemical prose writer rather than the metaphysical poet praised by late nineteenth-century critics and beloved of the New Critics.126 Abroad during the wars, from 1642 or 1643 to 1647, Marvell writes most of his poetry and prose after the restoration, while serving as a Member of Parliament for Hull; his role as Assistant Secretary of Foreign Tongues under Cromwell remains betterknown today.127 Blair Worden usefully characterizes Marvell’s early political reputation as that of a “patriot” who prizes virtue above faction: His exertions on liberty’s behalf were prized as evidence, less of his political commitment, than of his Stoic immunity to corruption . . . . Throughout the eighteenth century – and for much of the nineteenth – phrases in his favour occur with numbing regularity. He was “an incorruptible patriot”, “the inflexible patriot”, “the British Aristides”, “of Roman virtue”.128

Marvell’s name as patriot largely derives from the continuity between his roles under Cromwell and as part of the Whig ascendancy that brought William and Mary to the throne, establishing a constitutional monarchy. The success of his later views retrospectively makes his earlier writings appear more consistent. Unlike the persistence of Waller’s Cromwell poems in print and (especially) manuscript, Marvell’s poems on Cromwell are cancelled from the 1681 volume of his poems, after being printed for it.129 “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650), “The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector” (1654–5), and “A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector” (1658–9) do not appear in print together until Edward Thompson’s edition of 1776. The story of their manuscript

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circulation and ephemeral print publication differs, however. As Peter Beal and Nigel Smith show, “An Horatian Ode” seems to have circulated amongst a select group of readers in manuscript.130 “The First Anniversary” moves more widely, first published in quarto in 1655 and then appearing in several late seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies.131 Two of these miscellanies attribute “The First Anniversary” not to Marvell but to Waller, perhaps because Waller’s panegyric responds to it. The elegy on Cromwell nearly appears in the volume of three elegies discussed above – Henry Herringman registers it in January 1659 as Three poems to the happy memory of the most renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth, by Mr Marvell, Mr Driden, Mr Sprat – but by the time of its publication Waller’s elegy has replaced Marvell’s.132 The seeming interchangeability of not one but two of Marvell’s poems for Waller’s complicates the distinction between the two poets.133 How can contemporaries read the patriot Marvell’s poems and mistake them for those of the affable timeserver Waller? If they can, why do Marvell’s and Waller’s reputations diverge sharply in later years? The clearest answer to these questions comes from a contrast in two poems of Marvell’s. One steals a strategy from Nedham’s arsenal, dramatizing the inconsistency of others; the other turns what could look like betrayal into an articulation of loyalty. The former poem, “Tom May’s Death,” draws together the themes of this chapter in its machinations of friendship, classical allusions, and shifting allegiances. The latter poem, “Upon Appleton House,” points toward the subsequent chapters of this book, for Marvell manipulates gender ideology in order to produce political constancy. While these readings have implications for Marvell’s poems on Cromwell, the combination of “Tom May’s Death” and “Upon Appleton House” forges the strongest link between the political inconstancy of this chapter and the reworkings of gendered friendship that follow. Recent arguments for Marvell’s own changing political allegiances turn upon the sequence and dates of “An Horatian Ode” and “Tom May’s Death.”134 Marvell writes “An Horatian Ode” first, following a few months later with “Tom May’s Death.” Even given the complexities of “An Horatian Ode,” especially the conjunction of King Charles’s seeming graciousness on trial with praise of Cromwell, the royalist excoriation of the republican Tom May means that not all scholars accept “Tom May’s Death” as Marvell’s.135 While usefully pointing out that Marvell’s contemporaries Cowley and John Dryden (among others) “apparently regarded the ‘Ode’ as a panegyric of Cromwell and a poetic bid for patronage from the new ruling power,” Nicholas McDowell

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reads “Tom May’s Death” as Marvell’s last bid for acceptance by the royalist circle in which McDowell persuasively places Marvell in the 1640s.136 McDowell’s attention to “Tom May’s Death” as a poem of friendship that stages the problem of how to read classical materials correctly provides a useful framework both for revealing Marvell as a poet of changing allegiances and for understanding why later audiences no longer read him in this way. The Thomas May whose death Marvell’s poem mocks himself notoriously switches sides. Under Kings James and Charles I, May is a court poet prominent enough to rival William Davenant for the poet laureateship; his 1627 translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, later historians argue, makes him sympathetic to republican sensibilities, though he does not join the Parliamentary side until 1640–2. He becomes, at that point, Parliament’s official historiographer, writing The History of the Parliament (1647) and receiving the license to publish the king and queen’s correspondence in The King’s Cabinet Opened (1645).137 Primarily spoken in the voice of Ben Jonson, Marvell’s poem lambasts May’s personal and poetic failings. It strips him of his dignity, mocking him for his drunkenness and corpulence (drawing on the rumor that May dies of suffocation while drinking because his cap is tied too tightly). In making Jonson – himself famed “for corpulence and port” – the primary speaker, however, Marvell refuses from the outset the possibility of sharp divisions.138 That is, he has one fat, drunken poet indebted to classical sources mock another poet for being fat, drunken, and indebted to classical sources. The closeness between the figures of Jonson and May means that the poem turns upon degrees of likeness. The insults directed toward May hew closely to the standard Parliamentary stereotypes of the Cavaliers as dissolute and inebriated. This, of course, effectively mocks May as hypocritical, a common move in satires that sought to expose Puritans as sexually licentious, drunken, and foolish. At the same time, though, the attributes associate May with the Tribe of Ben and the emphasis on conviviality and friendship lauded by the Cavaliers in their memory of Jonson. In criticizing May’s use of classical allusions, Marvell’s Jonson marks their other point of greatest similarity. “Or thou, Dictator of the glass, bestow On him the Cato, this the Cicero; Transferring old Rome hither in your talk, ... Foul architect that hadst not eye to see How ill the measures of these states agree;

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And who by Rome’s example England lay, Those but to Lucan do continue May.”139

As critics often note, this schematic characterization of May’s classicism does not do justice either to the Pharsalia or to his History.140 Combined with the earlier line that describes “Brutus and Cassius, the people’s cheats,” this passage misrepresents Jonson’s relation to classical sources, for Jonson’s own Sejanus depicts Brutus and Cassius in a positive light.141 Thus, Nigel Smith argues, Marvell “had Jonson the court poet and entertainer, not Jonson the classicist, in mind, although the poem contains echoes in Jonson’s ghost’s words of his great classical authority, Horace.”142 The distinction, then, must be in the application of classical materials, the just apprehension of “how . . . the measures of these states agree.”143 As much as the differences between Jonson and May, though, the poem stresses their similarities. In this moment of ambiguity, poised between the mixed allegiances of the “Horatian Ode” and the Cromwellian panegyric of the “First Anniversary,” Marvell works to maintain both his royalist allegiances of the late 1640s and his growing commitment to Cromwell’s government by mocking a republican poet for his similarities to the Cavaliers’ hero Jonson. Both trying to sustain friendship, as McDowell argues, and recording its dissolution, Marvell tries to sustain friendship by recording its dissolution. And Ben Jonson helps him do it: “But Ben, who knew not neither foe nor friend, / Sworn enemy to all that do pretend.”144 The collision of negatives produces an impossible condition of knowledge: Ben knows neither foe nor friend; Ben knows both foe and friend. “All that do pretend” are simultaneously political dissemblers and all poets, but the double negative jumbles the situation so that friend and enemy no longer remain firmly opposed. It is a brilliant move worthy of the Jonson of “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” who promises nonexistent lavish feasts while really promising the freedom to read and converse about incendiary political texts, the Tacitus and Livy that, like Lucan’s Pharsalia, gave rise to republican theory in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.145 It is “ ‘just,’ ” then, that “ ‘what torments poets e’er did feign, / Thou first historically shouldst sustain,’ ” as Marvell’s Jonson tells May.146 The problem and the triumph of May’s writings is their ability to bring the conditions they imagine into being, to make historical events out of republican poetry. If translating Lucan’s Pharsalia turns May from the king toward Parliament, it turns at least some of those who read it in the same direction. This, too, is fittingly Jonsonian. For although the speaker of “Inviting a Friend to Supper” deludes his friend with visions

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of food he cannot afford and they will not have, his friend’s presence nevertheless brings into being what otherwise would have been false: “It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates / The entertainment perfect; not the cates.”147 The exchange of texts – even critical texts; especially classical texts – between friends creates and sustains the friendship, producing the circumstances in which those texts have meaning. It is this that feeds the friends. This is not to say that Marvell’s poem praises May; it criticizes him as stumbling, malicious, petty, and damned.148 But it is to say that the Jonson who condemns May is also the Jonson who is like May: he is the Jonson who reads Tacitus as well as the Jonson who writes court masques. “Tom May’s Death” looks in multiple directions, to Marvell’s many roles: panegyrist to Cromwell, friend to royalists, and future functionary in the Protectorate government. The problem of divided allegiance, with old alliances lingering while new ones emerge, provides one way of understanding the poem’s animus, as a distancing tactic to fend off the dangerous parallels between Marvell’s situation and May’s. Another way of reading the poem sees Marvell as more like the gleeful (and risky) Nedham of the pamphlets, telegraphing his own shifting affiliations while excoriating May for his. In part, then, what has been understood as a problem of sequence – how could Marvell write “An Horatian Ode” and then “Tom May’s Death”? – may more rightly be seen as a problem of simultaneity, the difficulty of sustaining multiple opposed obligations at once. This is both part of the argument of the poem, advanced through the kinds of classical and contemporary allusions that characterize many of the poems in this study, and part of its historical context and reception. Marvell’s far more famous poem “Upon Appleton House” confronts a similar problem of competing obligations and the difficult appraisal of virtuous action. Generically a very different poem from the satirical “Tom May’s Death,” Marvell’s country-house poem addresses questions of constancy via issues that resonate throughout this book: gender, marriage, same-sex affiliation, and the politics of retreat. Most likely written in June to August of 1651, when Marvell is serving as tutor to Lord Thomas Fairfax’s daughter Maria, the poem grapples with the ethics of Fairfax’s retirement from active duty in the Parliamentary army. Skilled as a battlefield commander, Fairfax is less capable in political machinations: he futilely tries to prevent the execution of the king. Shortly thereafter, he gives up his commission as commander-in-chief, refusing to muster his forces against Scotland before it actually invades England.149 His retirement looks like betrayal to many Parliamentarians; Lucy Hutchinson writes that he “threw up his commission at such a time,

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when it could not have been done more spitefully and ruinously to the whole Parliament interest.”150 In assessing the meanings of Fairfax’s retirement in Marvell’s poems, critics argue both that the contemplative Christian life depicted is “more active” than public engagement, and that retirement itself constitutes an active engagement with political life, both through preparation for violent action and through the writing and exchange of texts.151 In order to answer the general perception that Fairfax’s retirement represents a shirking of public duty in favor of homely concerns, “Upon Appleton House” articulates the interrelations of constancy, consent, and change in the language of gender. These problems coalesce around the figures of ruly and unruly women: proper wives who produce generations of the family; and improper women who sequester themselves together.152 Thus, the problem of Fairfax’s simultaneous commitment to public war and to private family, to military duty and to his conscience, transmutes into a sequential narrative in which men manage women. At the heart of that story lies a problem of constancy: the impossibility of honoring oaths to two different authorities. In “Upon Appleton House,” the two authorities are a community of nuns and an imperious husband. Comprising twenty-four stanzas of the poem, an embedded narrative details the contest between the nuns of Appleton House and William Fairfax over Isabel Thwaites, a wealthy heiress in the early sixteenth century. Having promised to marry Fairfax, Thwaites finds herself seduced by the powerful rhetoric of the nuns, who assure her that in their order “ ‘pleasure piety doth meet’.”153 The poem presents these promises as signs of corruption and indulgence, suggesting that when the nuns “ ‘lie as chaste in bed, / As pearls together billeted,’ ” they are engaging in lesbian acts with one another.154 Nevertheless, the speaking nun reverses the usual stereotypes of an all-female community’s privacy and unproductiveness. She promises that “ ‘These walls restrain the world without, / But hedge our liberty about,’ ” a claim not unlike the expansive thinking of the Stoic in retirement in its insistence that withdrawal from the world opens new possibilities.155 Similarly, the nun both evokes and enacts the abundance of textual exchange: “ ‘But what is this to all the store / Of joys you see, and may make more!’ ”156 Though excessive and sensual, following immediately upon the description of the nuns sleeping together, these lines implicitly refute the claim that same-sex eroticism cannot produce anything.157 Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” thus models one of the versions of women’s alliances this book analyzes: the all-female community separated from the world, which nevertheless enables productivity and public engagement. The poem overtly dismisses this option, through the mechanisms of

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assumed anti-Catholic prejudice and the imperative of heterosexual reproduction, which the lush depiction of Maria Fairfax promises will continue. Thus, William Fairfax asserts, first in words and then by sword, his prior claim to Isabel Thwaites. The language of his claim transforms, as the episode progresses, from engagement to marriage: first “her promised faith,” then “The court him grants the lawful form; / Which licenses either peace or force, / To hinder the unjust divorce.”158 The move from promise to “divorce” treats the marriage as already accomplished, despite the fact that “Religion that dispensèd hath, / Which she hence forward does begin.”159 The greater claim of religion, that is, has “dispensèd” with her prior promise to be married by reason of her later promise to be a nun. The poem explicitly argues that the greater worth of the promise to marry and the deception of the nuns make the promise to Fairfax the only valid one. The later oath does not matter. But it is hard, here, not to hear echoes of the engagement controversy, especially given that Thomas Fairfax himself refuses to take the engagement because it retrospectively justifies the execution of the king.160 While the triumph of reproductive heterosexuality creates the conditions of possibility for Fairfax and for the poem, the mockery of Catholicism cannot quite suppress the memory of Isabel Thwaites’s other oath. Nor can the caricature of the nuns entirely overwrite the persuasive force of their speech, given that it can only be overcome with physical violence, William Fairfax’s words proving ineffectual. Instead, the examples of the nuns recall the ways in which the strictures of patriarchy sometimes give wives more room to maneuver in cases of conscience. This is true in claims of land in the interregnum, in which wives can sue for the revenue of their royalist husbands’ estates, arguing that they have no part in political choices. It is also true, over a longer time span, of Catholics, as Frances Dolan shows: “What makes Catholic wives a legal problem is not that they invert the process of coverture, subsuming their husbands, but that coverture shelters them, making them legally inaccessible.”161 The women’s separatist community of Nun Appleton reproduces the unprosecutable, inaccessible conscience of the wife. By looking back to the past, to Thwaites, and not just forward to Maria, Marvell insists upon the history of broken promises as integral to the future history of generations, of flourishing. He thus reiterates in little all the larger problems of the poem. Marvell’s sleight of hand in “Upon Appleton House” transforms a simultaneous question of Fairfax’s commitments to the Commonwealth and to his principles into a sequential problem of multiple oaths. Through the logic of coverture, Marvell undoes Isabel Thwaites’s later

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oath: if she has already consented to marry, she has no capacity with which later to consent to be a nun. Marvell’s peculiarly productive nuns, though, offer the trace – the memory – of another possible history, a set of alliances counter to the genealogical narrative.

Bad Memories and Clement Kings The rest of this book articulates some of the forms that women writers imagine this history taking. Their innovations emerge against the backdrop described in this chapter, with its widespread uses of inconstancy and the multifarious ways in which seventeenth-century and later readers make sense of them. Nedham, Cowley, Waller, and Marvell show the risks of friendships that shade into betrayal. Most strongly, they demonstrate the ways in which writers and readers do not forget: the record of manuscripts, print publications, and responses replays, again and again, the dramas of inconstancy both within the poets and within their poems. The problem of memory is not only insistent repetition, however, but also forgetfulness. A manuscript poem laments the faults of Charles II: His father’s foes he does reward Preferring those that cut off’s Head And Cavaliers (the Crowns best Guard) He let’s ’em starve for want of Bread Never was any King so indu’d With soe much Grace & Gratitude.162

This satirical poem records the opposite fate of that which Nedham’s Newes from Brussels imagines in 1660. Nedham’s Cavalier narrator believes that “never Monarch yet had a memory halfe so bad” as to forget his father’s fate; the writer of this satire cannot quite believe how bad the monarch’s memory is, either. The king’s problem is that clemency looks like betrayal. In order to make his former enemies submit to his power, the king grants them the benefit of his clemency. In so doing, however, he consigns his former friends to oblivion. The figures of David, Jonathan, and Saul clarify why he has such a difficult task. In Richard Brathwaite’s seventeenth-century conduct manual for English gentlemen, the tyrant and the friends illustrate one of friendship’s dilemmas: it may sometimes fall out, that a friend cannot performe the office of a friend, but by discovering the secret purpose or practice of another: For how could faithfull Jonathan advertise David of Sauls wicked purpose against him, but

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by discovering what Saul in secret had imparted to him? How could he (I say) have advertised David of his fathers fury, by shooting three arrowes, but by discovering what his father had secretly intended against him? To which objection it may be thus answered; That, as amongst evill men there can be no true friendship continued, so neither are the Secrets of such men, tending ever to mischiefe and effusion of innocent bloud, to be concealed, but by all meanes should be discovered, that such tragicall issues might be prevented.163

The passage overtly echoes the standard adage that bad men cannot be friends, and thus need not be honored as such. Though the author does not say it, this exclusion also applies to tyrants, like Saul. But the Saul of this passage, like the Saul of Cowley’s Davideis, is notable for not simply being a tyrant. For Cowley, friendship helps to make Saul a tyrant, by excluding him and offering a challenge to his line of succession. For Brathwaite, Saul is a friend to Jonathan: he shares secrets with him, and Jonathan betrays him. The prevalence and intimacy of analogous moments of betrayal – the moderated grief of King Charles for Buckingham, the closeness between May, Jonson, and Marvell – bodies forth the dilemmas of changing allegiances that shape subjectivity during the years of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson, the subjects of the next four chapters, take up those moments of betrayal to imagine a politics in which obligations do not simply cease, but instead are remade after ruptures.

Notes 1. Nedham, Commonwealth, p. 28. 2. Charles II, “Act of Free and Generall Pardon,” pp. 226–34. 3. Central texts in this effort include Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, pp. 1–22; N. Smith, Literature, pp. 1–19; Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 1–37; and Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, pp. 1–8. 4. Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 323–81; Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 162–6. 5. Marvell, Account, pp. 55–6. 6. Raymond, Pamphlets, pp. 355–7. 7. My primary concern with figurations of interregnum politics, both in their historical moment and as they are reimagined by later generations, dictates a focus on poems and tracts written in or concerning the events of 1640–60. Thus, the lively exchange of “Painter” poems between Waller and Marvell falls outside my scope. 8. While lamenting the emphasis on his disloyalty rather than his persuasive powers, Nigel Smith argues in Literature, p. 32, that Nedham “exemplified . . . the opposite of the ‘loyalism’ of so many staunch Royalists.” 9. The Committee-Mans Complaint and the Scots Honest Usage, qtd. in Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, p. 37 n. 68; True and good News from

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

Friendship’s Shadows Brussels, (c. 2 April 1660), p. 5, qtd. in Raymond, Invention, p. 261; J. Heath, Brief Chronicle, p. 492, qtd. in Rahe, Against Throne, p. 175; and Worden, Literature, p. 14. Raymond, Invention, p. 257, points out that these last pamphlets are those “upon which his reputation as a turncoat ultimately hinges.” For Nedham’s biography and political reputation, see Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, pp. 169–77; Raymond, Pamphlets, pp. 62–3; N. Smith, Literature, pp. 32–5; Rahe, Against Throne, pp. 179–244; and Worden, Literature, pp. 14–30. See Rahe, Against Throne, p. 189. Nedham, Digitus Dei, p. 31; Mercurius Politicus, p. 24. Nedham, Solemn League, pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 2. Gardiner, ed., Constitutional Documents, p. 298. Nedham, Commonwealth, fol. A2. Ibid., fol. A2v. Nedham, Commonwealth, p. 74. See Norbrook, Writing, p. 223; Rahe, Against Throne, p. 212; and Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, p. 92. In his role as the Parliamentarian newswriter Mercurius Politicus, Nedham reprints a number of selections from The Case of the Commonwealth and writes much of Excellencie of a Free State first as editorials. These reprintings do not include the address to the reader or identify the extracts as originating in Salmasius and Hobbes. See Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, pp. 182–4; and Rahe, Against Throne, p. 212. Nedham, Commonwealth, p. 28. Nedham cites these two passages from chapters thirty-five and thirty-nine of De beneficiis, respectively. On the use of Seneca, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, p. 232. Nedham, Solemn League, p. 2. My reading thus accords with Norbrook’s assessment of Nedham’s work in the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus, which Writing, p. 175, argues works to produce a politically educated public able to assess circumstances and counterbalance the army and the Presbyterians. See Nedham, Commonwealth, p. 3. Raymond, Pamphlets, p. 255, intriguingly claims that Nedham’s return to England serves as proof of the universal restoration. However, many pamphlets attack Nedham on the assumption that he will join the king’s party. Conflicts among those loyal to the king and the widespread fear of repercussions are deflected into excoriating those who obviously supported Cromwell and Parliament. See Raymond, “Nedham,” ODNB; and Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, pp. 143–5. The pamphlets include A True Catalogue, or, an account of the several places and most Eminent Persons . . . where and by whom Richard Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector (the only one by a supporter of Parliament); A New-Years Gift for Mercurius Politicus; A Rope for Pol: Or, A hue and cry after Marchemont Nedham; The Downfall of Mercurius {Britanicus; Pragmaticus; Politicus}; A Dialogue between Thomas Scot and Marchamont Nedham: The Character of the Rump [c. 17 March 1660]; and O. Cromwells Thankes to the Lord Generall

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27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

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[Monk] . . . Together with an Hue and Cry after Mercurius Politicus [10 May 1660]. In a surprising conjunction, L’Estrange publishes a translation and condensation of Seneca’s Moral Essays in 1678, having read it during his time in exile in 1649–53; see Love, “L’Estrange,” ODNB. Love, “L’Estrange,” ODNB. L’Estrange, “Advertisement to the Reader,” Rope for Pol, n.p. L’Estrange, Rope for Pol. The use of “Tarquin” has more instances than any other; see p. 11 for a particularly interesting example. For “Malignants and Cavaliers,” see pp. 20–1. “Tyrant Charles” also occurs multiple times throughout. The following instance provokes marginal editorializing: “This was remarkable in the late Tyrant Charles whose inconstancy in this kind was beyond compare; who no sooner had past any promises, made vowes and protestations, and first appeals in the High Court of Heaven, in the behalf of himself and his Family, but presently he forfeited all, and cancel’d them by his actions” (p. 24). In the margin, L’Estrange cites the page numbers and comments “falsly accusing Princes of perjury, and violation of promises” (p. 24). Surprisingly, Nedham is not excepted from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, and he returns from a brief exile in Holland in September 1660. See Raymond, “Nedham,” ODNB. Nedham, Short History, p. 12. Ibid., p. 37. Raymond, Invention, p. 256. Nedham, Newes from Brussels, pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, III.1183. Norbrook, Writing, p. 224. Raymond, who has done more than anyone to recover Nedham’s works and reputation, reads him as fairly consistently republican, even in his ostensibly royalist and Cromwellian periods; see Raymond, Invention, p. 257. Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 245–7, argues that “consistency of principle required alteration of allegiance” for Nedham, whom Scott reads as sympathetic to the Levellers; Scott suggests that Nedham goes over to the king’s side to support a coalition against the army. As Scott, p. 246, indicates, this helps explain the impractical timing of Nedham’s defection to the king’s side, which Raymond’s and Worden’s theories about covert republicanism cannot explain. While Nigel Smith, Literature, pp. 69 and 184, discovers less principle in Nedham’s works, he takes seriously Mercurius Politicus, which “resurrects or recovers a tradition of Renaissance republicanism and utopianism, and accommodates that to the natural law defenses of parliamentary and popular right.” See also Raymond, Invention, pp. 262–3; and Worden, Literature, p. 17. As Rahe, Against Throne, p. 236, writes in his analysis of Excellencie of a Free State, the convergence between the self-interest of the people and the interest of the state makes the people more constant than their leaders. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, III.1182. L’Estrange, “Advertisement to the Reader,” Rope for Pol, n.p. Sprat, Account, BL Add. MS 11492, pp. 77v–109v; quotation from p. 85v.

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43. For biographical details, see Nethercot, Muse’s Hannibal; Loiseau, Abraham Cowley; and Lindsay, “Cowley,” ODNB. 44. Cowley, “Preface,” Poems, fols. a4–a4v. 45. Johnson, Lives, pp. 10–11. 46. Nethercot, Muse’s Hannibal, p. 150. 47. Sprat, Account, BL Add. MS 11492, p. 84v. 48. Sprat, Account, BL Add. MS 11492, p. 85v, references friendship and counsel: “many of [the king’s] best Friends dissembled their Counsels, and acted the same Designs, under the Disguises and Names of other parties.” 49. Sprat, Account, BL Add. MS 11492, p. 84v. 50. Cowley, “Brutus,” p. 33, lines 1–2 and 15–18. (Page numbering starts anew in each section.) 51. Cicero, De officiis, III.vi, p. 299. 52. Cowley, “Brutus,” p. 34, lines 44–5. 53. Ibid., p. 33, line 17. 54. Tindal, Judgment of Dr Prideaux, p. 41. Nethercot and Langley both misidentify the author, as either Humphrey Prideaux (in Nethercot’s case) or R. Prideaux (in Langley’s case). 55. Most interpretations of the poem turn on the crux of how to line up Brutus and Caesar with Cromwell and the Kings Charles. Nethercot, Muse’s Hannibal, p. 153, notes that although he “had seemingly always admired [Brutus], it was nevertheless a bold stroke to single him out for praise at this juncture, with an allegory which all too plainly identified him with Cromwell, Caesar with Charles I, and Rome with England.” Langley, Image Government, pp. 43–4, argues that this “plain . . . identification” is mistaken: instead of praising regicide, Cowley was praising stability of government, which would have been a monarchy in England, though it was a republic in Rome. 56. Nethercot, Muse’s Hannibal, p. 153. 57. For the circulation history of the Brutus ode, see “Cowley,” in Beal, Index, vol. II, part 1. 58. Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 12 replicates the look of the print Davideis almost exactly, following it with Sir John Oldham’s 1692 “David’s Lamentation for the Death of Saul and Jonathan” and then John Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel.” Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 213 (c. 1670–85) has a modified extract from the Davideis, titled “On Jonathan” (p. 4v), as well as the Brutus ode. British Library Egerton MS 2326 (dated in the second half of the seventeenth century) follows the order of the 1668 print edition almost exactly. 59. 1 Sam. 18:1. 60. Cowley, “Preface,” Poems, fol. b3. Unlike Ellwood, Davideis, III.iv.76, Cowley does not mention these classical pairs in the body of his poem. 61. Common Places, part III, p. 258; cited in Pebworth, “Cowley’s Davideis,” p. 99. 62. Cowley, Davideis, II.99. 63. Ibid., II.123. 64. Ibid., II.164–9. 65. See Shifflett, “Kings,” pp. 88–109.

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74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

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See Chapters 3 and 5 on counsel. Cowley, Davideis, II.389–400. Ibid., IV.816–17. Ibid., IV.820. Guy-Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers,” p. 39, makes this point. Bray, Homosexuality, pp. 33–57. 1 Sam. 14: 1–15; the quotation is Guy-Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers,” p. 38 reading the biblical passage. Guy-Bray, “Cowley’s Latin Lovers,” p. 40, argues that Cowley’s expansion of Abdon’s role protects David from any intimation that his love for Jonathan is excessive: instead, Abdon’s love is excessive, David’s bounded. Cowley, Davideis, IV.1102–7. 1 Sam. 14: 45. The New Oxford Annotated Bible has “So the people ransomed Jonathan, and he did not die.” See D. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 62–106 and 286–7. Thanks to Catharine Gray for this observation. Cowley, Davideis, IV.148–227. Ibid., IV.232–3. Taafe, Abraham Cowley, p. 92; Trotter, Poetry of Abraham Cowley, p. 97; and Kermode, “Date of Cowley’s Davideis,” pp. 154–8, all understand Cowley to be condemning monarchy. Austin, “Saul and the Social Contract,” p. 427. See Pritchard, “Introduction,” pp. 52–3. Cowley, The Civil War, I.75–8; Cowley, Davideis, IV.482–5. Cowley, Davideis, IV.475, identical to Civil War, III.218. Cowley, Civil War, III.599. Pritchard, “Introduction,” pp. 53–4, suggests that Falkland provides the inspiration for Cowley’s portrait of Jonathan. See Norbrook, Writing, p. 86 and D. Smith, “Falkland,” ODNB, on Falkland, who advocated a legally limited but not a contractual monarchy and, despairing that the war would not end, may have committed suicide at Newbury. Cowley, Davideis, IV.498–501. Ibid., IV.491 and 493. Ibid., IV.1107. Cowley, “Preface,” Poems, fols. a4–a4v. Johnson, Lives, p. 281. Norbrook, Writing, p. 102. See Norbrook, Writing, pp. 383–6; Beal, Index, vol. II, part 2, p. 587; and Chernaik, Poetry, pp. 115–71. His poetry follows a courtly pattern, with an emphasis on occasional verse and the compilation, in the 1640s, of presentation manuscripts dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria. See Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 174 and Bodleian MS Don. d. 55, p. 24, which contains a truncated version of Waller’s poem “On the Drinking of Healths” advocating reason over excess. The longer published version reads more like a Cavalier lyric, emphasizing “ancient” liberties and drinking as a pledge of faith between friends. Chernaik, Poetry, pp. 30–4. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, III.52.

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95. Waller, Poems (1645), pp. 19–20. (Numbering begins anew with Parliamentary speeches.) 96. Lockyer, “Villiers,” ODNB. 97. Waller, “Of His Majesty’s,” Poems (1645), lines 1–2. 98. Ibid., lines 10–12. 99. Ibid., line 10. 100. Ibid., lines 27–32. 101. 2 Sam. 9. 102. Waller, “Of His Majesty’s,” Poems (1645), lines 33–4. 103. New Oxford Annotated Bible, p. 459 fn. 104. Another broadside of the poem in same year identifies the author as “E.W. Esq.” and crowns the title page with a laurel wreath. 105. Norbrook, “Hutchinson v. Waller,” pp. 61 and 64. 106. The Anti-Panegyrist (identified by Early English Books Online as Richard Watson) blames his tardy response on Oliver Cromwell’s strict control of the press; see Watson, “Anti-Panegyrike,” fols. A2 and A4. (The poem appears twice.) 107. Waller’s panegyric appears in the following manuscripts: the late seventeenth-century British Library MS Burn. 390 (which also includes Dryden’s and Marvell’s “On the first anniversary,” the latter of which is misattributed to Waller; Dryden 9–10, Marvell 19v–22, Waller 22–3v); British Library MS Sloane 655 fols. 30–35 b, which includes mostly poems from the 1680s (30–35v); British Library MS Sloane 3516 fols. 205–208 b, a mostly eighteenth-century collection of materials bound together by the British Library (205–207v); and as an abbreviated Latin translation in seventeenth-century British Library MS Add. 4457 (202–202v). Neither the panegyric nor the poem on Cromwell’s death forms part of the printed editions of Waller’s poems in 1661, 1664, or 1668; they first reappear after Waller’s death, in the second part of his poems printed in 1689/90, and then continue to appear in further editions. The British Library copy of the 1689/90 poems contains marginal annotations with much editorializing on Waller’s political convictions. Despite calling the mention of a crown and scepter in “On the war with Spain” “A very liberal return to Cromwell for recalling him from Banishment, in 1652” (p. 198), the annotator corrects the panegyric on Cromwell so that it accords with the 1655 broadside printing of that poem: he insists upon accurate renditions of changing allegiances. 108. Johnson, Lives, p. 289. 109. Elegies on Cromwell show a similar staying power: in 1659, a collection of John Dryden, Thomas Sprat, and Waller’s elegies on Cromwell appears, with no editorializing on the worth of the subject save the title: Three Poems upon the Death of the Late Usurper Oliver Cromwell. The volume is reprinted in 1682 and, with Waller’s panegyric on Cromwell, in 1709. 110. Norbrook, Writing, pp. 299–309. 111. Waller, “Panegyrike,” and Watson, “Anti-Panegyrike,” p. 17, stanza 34. Waller and Watson citations will come from this publication, with references to page and stanza numbers. 112. Hutchinson, “To Mr. Waller,” in Norbrook, “Hutchinson v. Waller,” p. 81, stanza 34. Further citations will come from this edition.

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125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

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Waller, “Panegyrike,” p. 19, stanza 38. Watson, “Anti-Panegyrike,” p. 19, stanza 38. Hutchinson, “To Mr. Waller,” p. 83, stanza 38. See Norbrook, “Hutchinson v. Waller,” p. 66. Hutchinson, “To Mr. Waller,” pp. 84–5, stanza 43; Watson, “AntiPanegyrike,” p. 20, stanza 39. Waller, “Panegyrike,” p. 15, stanzas 29–30. Watson, “Anti-Panegyrike,” p. 15, stanzas 29–30. Hutchinson, “To Mr. Waller,” p. 81, stanzas 29–30. Waller, “Panegyrike,” p. 16, stanza 31. Watson, “Anti-Panegyrike,” p. 16, stanza 31; Hutchinson, “To Mr. Waller,” p. 81, stanza 31. Waller, “Panegyric,” Second Part, line 69. Waller, “To the King on His Navy,” Poems, p. 3. The annotated 1690 edition of Waller’s poems points out this change with a marginal annotation returning the line to the 1655 reading “piety” and pointing readers to “v. p. 3 1686.” Norbrook, Writing, p. 302, characterizes this as a secularizing choice, like Waller’s tendency not to use apocalyptic imagery. See N. Smith, Chameleon, pp. 1–11 on Marvell’s reputation. Ibid., p. 45. Worden, Literature, p. 5. They survive in only two known copies of the 1681 poems: British Library C.59.i.8 and Huntington Library 79660. Edward Thompson prints them for the first time in 1776, perhaps using Bodleian MS Eng. poet. d. 49, a volume with manuscript corrections and additions of the missing poems. See Beal, Index, vol. II, part 2, p. 22. Beal, Index, vol. II, part 2, p. 31; N. Smith, Literature, p. 267. They are Bodleian MS Eng. poet. d. 49, pp. 115e–u, the 1681 edition with manuscript additions; Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e. 4, pp. 78–88; British Library Burney MS 390, fols. 19v–22, in which it is attributed to Waller; and Harvard MS Eng. 1035 (fols. 2–8). N. Smith, Headnote to “A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector,” Poems, p. 299. The virulent polemicism of the Advice to a Painter exchange between Waller and Marvell in 1665–c. 1667 compounds the irony of the misattribution. See Worden, Literature, pp. 82–115; and McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 259–72. N. Smith, Headnote to “Tom May’s Death,” Poems, pp. 116–20. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 258 and 263. For other readings of the conflicts in the poem, see Norbrook, Writing, pp. 271–80; Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 125–7; and Worden, Literature, pp. 58, 69–71, and 78. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of May’s History of Parliament. Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” Poems, ed. N. Smith, p. 121, line 11. Unless otherwise noted, all further citations to Marvell’s poems will be to this edition and will be cited by poem’s title, page, and line numbers. Ibid., p. 122, lines 47–54. Norbrook, Writing, pp. 272–5; Worden, Literature, p. 70; and N. Smith,

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141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

Friendship’s Shadows Headnote to “Tom May’s Death,” Poems, pp. 116–17, all make this point. N. Smith, Headnote to “Tom May’s Death,” Poems, p. 120. Ibid., p. 120. Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” p. 122, line 52. Ibid., p. 122, lines 29–30. See Salmon, “Stoicism,” pp. 199–225; and Burke, “Tacitism,” pp. 479–98. Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” p. 124, lines 95–6. Jonson, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” p. 12, lines 7–8. Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” pp. 119–24, lines 27, 56, 77, and 99–100. On the circumstances of composition, see N. Smith, Chameleon, p. 95; Norbrook, Writing, pp. 287–9; and Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 36–7. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 240. See Wallace, Destiny, p. 248; and Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 37 and 45, where he argues that Marvell’s martial language shows Fairfax’s continued commitment to the Parliamentary cause. I thank Catharine Gray for drawing my attention to the importance of ruly women in the poem. The dynamic gains additional point from the identification of Fairfax’s wife with the prioress, and from Parliamentary supporters’ blaming Lady Anne (Vere) Fairfax for her husband’s withdrawal. See Hirst and Zwicker, “High Summer,” pp. 260–2. See Chapters 3 and 5 for further discussion of wives as counselors. Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” p. 221, stanza xxii, line 171. Ibid., p. 221, stanza xxiv, lines 189–90. Ibid., p. 219, stanza xiii, lines 99–100. Ibid., p. 222, stanza xxv, lines 193–4. See Holstun, ‘‘Lesbian Elegy,” pp. 835–57 on the nuns’ sewing as an alternative mode of production. Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” p. 222, stanza xxv, line 197, and stanza xxx, lines 234–6. Ibid., p. 222, stanza xxv, lines 198–9. Gentles, “Fairfax,” ODNB. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 61. “The History of the Times,” British Library Harley MS 7315, fol. 73v. Brathwaite, English Gentleman, p. 282.

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Chapter 2

“Obligation here is injury”: Exemplary Friendship in Katherine Philips’s Coterie

In the 1650s and early 1660s, Katherine Philips (1632–64) writes at the center of a network of royalists, many with prominent court ties both before and after the restoration.1 She exchanges poems and letters famed for their extravagant praise of friendship and their outspoken support of the English monarchy with interlocutors such as Sir Charles Cotterell, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Edward Dering, Francis Finch, and Henry Lawes, using coterie names drawn from the royalist-identified genres of romance and tragedy.2 One of those coterie names – Antenor, given to her husband James Philips – points toward the startling complexities of Philips’s poetry and its place in the bitter conflicts of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. Most scholars stress that James Philips’s coterie name of Antenor alludes to the Trojan counselor who advocates peace with the Greeks.3 Naming James Philips Antenor casts him as an intermediary between two political sides – aptly, given that he, in contrast to Katherine Philips’s royalist coterie, supports Parliament and Cromwell, serving as a Member of Parliament from 1653–62.4 The name Antenor therefore seems to suggest reconciliation between violent extremes. Antenor reappears in the Renaissance in Dante’s Inferno, however: the second region of the ninth and lowest circle of hell, reserved for betrayers, is named Antenora. In it live those who have betrayed their political party or their homeland. The circle of Antenora thus raises the questions that animate this chapter: how could James and Katherine Philips live together with such different views and different intimates? How could James Philips countenance a language that, from one perspective, casts him as betrayer? The name Antenor limns the fragile line between peace-keeping and treachery, a line all too easy to cross and nearly impossible to sustain amidst the changing political circumstances of mid-seventeenth-century England, Wales, and Ireland.5 Given not only her husband’s but also

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her natal family’s support of Parliament, Philips’s biography foregrounds the issues of conflicting obligations to family and to friends to an almost incomprehensible extent.6 Importantly, too, Philips’s royalist convictions shape her and her husband’s everyday life to a significant degree: her coterie not only reads her poems as exemplary instances of friendship but also puts those friendships into action, assisting her and her husband James and accepting their help in turn. Philips turns this biographical fact into an occasion to investigate the philosophical and affective grounds of alliance. In the process, she demonstrates friendship’s relevance and resilience as a model for navigating incompatible political obligations during the mid-seventeenth century. The answer that friendship gives to the problem of conflicting obligations is not the expected one, that friendship offers a model of perfect faithfulness in an unpredictable and hostile world. Instead, the litanies of lyrics of failed friendship – a substantial and under-read part of Philips’s poetic corpus – investigate the uses of betrayal to reimagine the world. Philips’s vocal and steadfast commitment to the king’s party in the midst of her natal and marital families’ Parliamentary allegiances makes her case extreme, but not unique. As the previous chapter demonstrates, the rapid changes in political circumstances mean that even someone with fairly moderate views can end up on different sides at different times.7 So, too, could children and parents (like John Hutchinson and his father, who disinherits him), brothers and sisters (like Lucy Hutchinson and her brother, who commands the royalist army that invades her town) – and husbands and wives.8 The record of these disparate views shows disinheritance and violence, but it also reveals attempts at persuasion, especially in cases of cross-gender disagreement.9 For example, Sir Hugh Cholmley records in his memoirs that his wife does not understand why he left Parliament to join the king’s party: I had now been near a year from her; and she being within London, and not understanding the causes why I quitted the Parliament, or the true state of the difference between the King and Parliament, was very earnest and firm for their party; but, after I had unmasked to her the Parliament’s intent, and clearly presented to her their proceedings and the state of affairs, she then was as much against them, and as earnest for the King, and continued so to her death.10

Cholmley illustrates some of the possible reasons that husbands and wives might hold different views, including long separations from each other and varied access to information. Notably, Cholmley relies upon reason and argument to persuade his wife; he shows her acquiescing quickly to his presentation of the facts. Though this instance depicts

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the husband’s desire that his wife agree with him, in many ways it also shores up the masculine assertion of superior reason and knowledge of the world. Such a claim underscores the reason why divergent opinions between husband and wife prove especially troubling: coverture.11 English common law attempts to compensate for the wife’s presumed irrationality and ignorance by referring decisions to her husband, on the principle that marriage forges the man and woman into the single legal entity of the husband.12 The wife’s status as a feme covert also means that her husband is legally responsible for some of her crimes, particularly those committed in his presence and thus thought to be under his direction. In the early 1650s, Jenkin Jones uses the legal precept of the husband and wife as a single entity to attack James and Katherine Philips together.13 He threatens to ruin James Philips’s standing in Parliamentary circles by publishing Katherine Philips’s avowedly royalist poem decrying the king’s execution. Philips explicitly denies coverture’s conflation of her husband’s interests and her own in a pair of poems responding to this incident. Carol Barash shows that in the poem to her husband on this topic, “To Antenor, on a Paper of mine which J. Jones threatens to publish to prejudice him,” Philips plays her obligations to king and to husband against each other, simultaneously establishing her royalist credentials while protecting herself from negative consequences through a rhetoric of marital obligation.14 Further, Philips’s success in manipulating multiple allegiances derives, in part, from women’s status as “negative citizens,” “thought to be strictly accountable for acts of disloyalty to the government, even though they did not enjoy the privileges of ‘freeborn Englishmen’ ” under coverture.15 Philips turns this liability into an occasion for writing. Given that the wife can always be prosecuted for treason, even that committed in the presence of her husband, political dissent runs like a fault-line through the unitary fiction of coverture. The use of coverture’s ideology to contain protest shows clearly in an incident in April of 1649, a few years before Philips’s poem. Over several days, between three and five hundred Leveller women present petitions subscribed by thousands of women calling for the release of the Leveller leaders John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton.16 The Commons reiterates the logic of coverture by answering the women’s petition with “the House gave an answer to your Husbands,” which ought to suffice for the wives as well.17 Yet the very fact of the women’s petition, one of a number of similar protests during the Civil Wars, shows the extent to which the upheavals of the war years disrupt any effort to confine women to the private sphere.18

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The women’s reply to the Commons speaks for Philips, too: “we are no whit satisfied with the answer you gave unto our Husbands.”19 In her poem to Antenor, Philips uses the distinction between her politics and her husband’s to authorize her voice. Famously, however, Philips does not speak on her own: she speaks as a friend. By aligning herself with the humanist tradition of friendship, Philips lays claim to the rhetorical skill generated by the exchange of passions and texts between friends, as Lorna Hutson argues of sixteenth-century male friends in The Usurer’s Daughter. Unlike coverture’s exclusive ascription of public speech to the husband, the language of friendship enables both friends to build credit from the move from private to public.20 In a poem to her coterie friend Anne Owen (Lucasia)21 about the same incident as the poem to her husband, Philips writes: While I have this retreat, ’tis not the noise Of slander, though believ’d, can wound my Joys. There is advantage in’t: for gold uncoyn’d Had been unusefull, nor with glory shin’d: This stamp’d my inocence, which lay i’ th’ Oare, And was as much, but not so bright, before. Till an Alembique wakes and outward draws, The strength of sweets ly sleeping in their cause.22

The conceits of the coin, stamped from gold, and of perfume, drawn out by an alembic, play on the distinction between various publics.23 The images describe a move from interior to exterior, an extraction of something precious in order to make something useful. It is both powerful – “there is advantage in’t” – and dangerous. For the gold coin, on which is “stamp’d my inocence,” circulates promiscuously, without the guarantees of an older system of gift-giving friendship.24 It is an especially unstable system of value given that the head usually stamped on coins – the king’s – was so recently chopped off. The move from “retreat” into the world rejects the separation of spheres that the Commons tries to impose when it sends the women petitioners “home,” but it also refuses friends the separate interests Philips asserts in the poem to her husband.25 The wife can only speak when separate from her husband – “they replyed, that they were not all wives, and therefore pressed for the receiving their Petition”26 – but the friends speak most persuasively out of joint interest. This account of Philips’s public engagement diverges from the excellent criticism that posits Philips’s friendship as an idealized community of royalists, offering both a respite from and a means of critiquing the messy realities of interregnum politics.27 In those studies, Philips’s public

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role either relies upon the outright dismissal of her husband and his Parliamentary allegiances, or uses the difference between his obligations and her own to play sources of authority against each other.28 In contrast, this chapter shows that Philips exploits a fault-line in coverture by using the public discourse of friendship to explore the problem of conflicting allegiances between husband and wife. The fissures within coverture mean that the problem Philips encounters with her husband already exists within the legal fiction put forward to contain it. By recasting that contradiction within the public terms of friendship, Philips articulates the connection between their allegiances and larger debates about obligation. The rhetorically instrumental language of amicitia thus allows the status of the wife to be suspended without refusing its continuing, fraught obligations. In transferring the terms of the (un)covered wife into friendship, Philips does not entirely dismiss the marriage bond, as the women petitioners do when they say they are not all wives. By claiming the status of friend, Philips can use friendship to produce effective public speech, without needing to wait for death or separation from her husband.29 Philips utilizes her historical circumstances – physical separations between husbands and wives like the Cholmleys, public protests like those of the Leveller women, and the changes in political authority that provoke both – in making this move. She also explicitly exploits friendship’s long, though insistently forgotten, history of discussing political treachery. On the face of it, Philips’s poems of friendship may seem less like an intervention in public life than are the petitions of women self-evidently engaging in the public arena, presenting political speech in a way that refutes by their actions – though sometimes accepts in their speech – the alignments between public and male, private and female, embedded in coverture. Philips’s poems circulate within a coterie, maintain an intricate set of allusions and pastoral names, and rely upon intimate knowledge shared among the group. But the language of friendship shows the poems to be engaged in forming a political community, political both in its imagination of alternative forms of governance and in its effective construction of a coterie that provides material aid in a range of matters of political life (Parliamentary appointments, the settlement of estates, etc.). Recent scholarship reveals these latter acts to be more within women’s purview than earlier scholars had thought possible.30 Philips achieves these reimagined forms and practical effects by laying claim to the public, political meanings of the masculine friendship tradition. Before a detailed consideration of that tradition, one further example shows how the language of friendship coincides with and thus helps

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to prise open the space for negotiation within coverture. The women petitioners of 1649 not only refuse the answer given to their husbands; they say “For we are no whit satisfied with the answer you gave unto our Husbands and Friends.”31 The women petitioners call Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince, and Overton their “friends” throughout the pamphlet. Given the large number of petitioners, “friends” here indicates relations outside the family circle; it suggests bonds of obligation and trust not compassed within the patriarchal family. For the women petitioners as for Philips, then, “wife” is the identity they must set aside to speak publicly; “friend” is the identity that allows them to do so.

The Politics of English Amicitia Philips’s poems strongly emphasize the political aspects of amicitia. Her poems extol the friends’ likeness to one another, their goodness, their complete mutual knowledge, and their complementary abilities to speak frankly to one another and to keep each other’s secrets. Philips draws upon the Aristotelian and Ciceronian constructions of friendship, which circulate in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both in translation and in English treatises that borrow freely from their tenets. In addition, John Florio’s widely read 1603 English translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essayes articulates friendship doctrine in one of its most intensely passionate forms; significant linguistic parallels between Philips’s poem “A Friend” and Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” suggest that Philips read Montaigne, either in French or in Florio’s translation. Philips uses the standard adage “For none can be a friend that is not good” (recalling Elyot’s quotation of Cicero: “friendship can nat be without vertue, ne but in good men onely”).32 Of necessity, though, Philips frames the common claim with an innovation: If soules no sexes have, for men t’exclude Women from friendship’s vast capacity, Is a design injurious and rude, Onely maintained by partiall tyranny. Love is allow’d to us, and Innocence, And noblest friendships doe proceed from thence.33

Philips places the question of virtue in a Christian context in order to claim women’s place in friendship.34 She uses the ungendered soul to assert that women’s virtues are the same as men’s. In so doing, she introduces the threat of “tyranny” – an inequality antithetical to friendship – turning the materials of amicitia into an argument for women’s

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inclusion within political discourse. Thus, she refutes the long tradition that excludes women from friendship, as Montaigne does: Seeing (to speake truly) that the ordinary sufficiency of women, cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable.35

Philips’s ability to highlight the virtue of the female friends becomes crucial because the friends’ capacity to establish the continuity between the mutual passions of the friends and the prudent actions of citizens depends upon it. Thomas Churchyard states the case in his 1588 treatise A Sparke of Frendship and Warme Goodwill: And surely if a man durst discipher the deepenesse of dissimulation, wee should finde our ordinarie manner of friendship so faint-harted and lame, that it neither could goe out of the doore with any man, nor yet dwell safely with many in the house.36

Churchyard implies that only the extraordinary friendship of exemplary friends – not “our ordinarie manner of friendship” – can both model virtue “in the house” and “goe out the doore” into public life. He makes a fairly conventional argument here, for many treatises on friendship, from the earliest moments, lament the atrophied state of friendship in the modern world and canonize a very few perfect friends from the distant past. His construction also provides an apt rebuttal to Montaigne, for if the “ordinary sufficiency of women” does not make them perfect friends, neither does the “ordinarie manner” of men. Churchyard goes on to describe the affinity between friends as mysterious and inaccessible: It seemeth and may bee well advouched, that friendship of it selfe is so secrete a mysterie (shrined in an honest hart) that few can describe it, and tel from whence comes the privie and inwarde affection, that sodainly breedes in breast, and is convayed to the hart . . .37

Following immediately upon the description of inadequate ordinary friendships, this passage presents a double mystery: how does friendship form, and having formed how can one know if it is true? Using language quite similar to Churchyard’s, Philips transforms this question into an exploration of consent and will: The chiefest thing in Friends is Sympathy: There is a secret fate do’s friendship guide, Which made two souls before they know agree, Who by a thousand mixtures are ally’d,

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And chang’d and lost, so that it is not known Within which Brest doth now reside their own.38

The insistence on absolute unity separates this description from the Petrarchan conceit of lovers exchanging hearts; here, the souls (not hearts) become indistinguishable. Nor is this a simple exchange, for it becomes impossible to know “within which Brest doth now reside their own.” In Philips, the process by which this happens mingles “secret fate” and will. A priori agreement makes consent problematic: if the “two souls before they know agree,” union precedes knowledge. Friendship treatises warn against choosing friends without knowing them well – without having eaten the proverbial bushel of salt together – but Philips presents the attraction positively here.39 The idea of the friends’ natural inclination toward one another draws upon the natural law principle that human beings want to be with one another: “amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind, not in any Manner whatever, but peaceably.”40 Later in the century, Samuel Pufendorf, concerned to refute Thomas Hobbes’s characterization of the state of nature as warlike, argues an even stronger case: For by a sociable attitude we do not understand here the particular meaning of a tendency to form special societies, which can be formed even for an evil purpose and in an evil manner . . . But by a sociable attitude we mean an attitude of each man towards every other man, by which each is understood to be bound to the other by kindness, peace, and love, and therefore by a mutual obligation.41

Pufendorf’s articulation points toward a key difference between theories of natural sociability and friendship: friendship’s emphasis on exclusivity – “two souls” – can tend toward potentially “evil” “special societies,” rather than kindness toward “every other man.” This possibility shadows friendship; it also forms part of its power. In conjunction with this mysteriously unknowable, a priori attraction, Philips emphasizes the mutual transformation by which the friends become more like one another. Thus, in “To the truly noble, and obleiging, Mrs: Anne Owen (on my first approaches)” Orinda tells Lucasia that “’tis more honour that the world should know / You made a noble soul, then found it so.”42 The poem moves from Orinda’s selfabasement, antithetical to the equality of amicitia, into the construction of similarity.43 The rhetoric of the poem itself brings this about: “the way to be / Secure of fame to all posterity, / Is to obtain the honour I pursue, / To tell the world I was subdu’d by you.”44 While echoing the language of courtly lovers, this poem also highlights the ways in which

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publicity – “tell[ing] the world” – adds to the value of the friendship relation, generating the credit of the friends. This is exactly how masculine humanist friendship works.45 In addition to shaping the friends into effective citizens, the conjunction of the “two souls [who] before they know agree” with “you made a noble soule, then found it so” points toward friendship’s distinctive political form. The friends find each other and make each other: friendship is the product of both natural affinity and the construction of agreement. In addition to drawing upon humanist friendship’s applications to contemporary discourses of political obligation, Philips inflects friendship with distinctively royalist overtones. In her poem “A Friend,” Philips associates an idealized court with friendship’s virtues: secrecy, the exchange of passions, counsel, discretion, clarity, and frankness. Unlike the machinations of a corrupt courtier, amicitia draws upon humanist treatises for the frank speech that serves as the ideal for advice to princes: “Friends should observe and chide each other’s fault . . . / This they should give and take with equall mind.”46 At the same time, the textual trace of that openness can be disastrous in a time of conflict, if the secrets openly shared between friends become exposed to wider view: “They that in one Chest lay up all their stock, / Had need be sure that none can pick the lock.”47 The emphasis on secrecy has a particularly royalist valence, given the scandal caused by the publication of the king’s papers in The King’s Cabinet Opened.48 At the same time that Philips foregrounds royalist allegiances, she alters the Cavalier emphasis on male friends with female lovers to depict women themselves as friends. In the move from women’s friendship – the sexless souls – to an idealized royalist society of safely kept secrets and frank counsel, Philips predicates the success of royalist friendship upon women’s inclusion in that public life. The last stanzas of the poem show what this friendship can do in the world, even in absence: “A friend should find out each necessity, / And then unask’d relieve’t at any rate.”49 The emphasis on the friends’ assistance puts friendship into action in the world.

Neo-Platonism and the Uses of Friendship Given amicitia’s explicit exclusion of women, twentieth-century critics often look elsewhere for a tradition of female friendship: to neoPlatonism, particularly the strand derived from French préciosité.50 This discourse, which links idealized love with courtly values and entertainments, resonates both with Philips’s interests in French literature and with her royalism, since Queen Henrietta Maria introduces préciosité

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into English court culture in the 1620s and 1630s.51 In French tendre amitié, the excesses of tenderness make friendship’s expression feminine even as its virtues are masculine.52 However, friendship’s passions leave it open to the charge of sexual impropriety, its potential libertinism heightened, in an English context, by its foreignness.53 Disseminated through such texts as Thomas Hoby’s translation of Baldessar Castiglione’s The Courtier, English neo-Platonism stresses the idealization of the female beloved and passion outside marriage, rather than the female communities of the French tradition.54 Even the French authors who allow to women “all the virtues which men can also practise, make it clear that the social pressures on women give them little scope for demonstration of these capacities.”55 In the English context, consequently, neoPlatonism and préciosité emphasize heterosexual hierarchy and limited social effects. The classical and humanist discourse of amicitia thus affords Philips something that préciosité does not. The virtues of amicitia are simultaneously public and private: the friendship makes the friends into ideal citizens, whose goals coincide with those of the state. In claiming amicitia, Philips asserts a public place for women’s friendship that the idealizations of neo-Platonism do not always allow. Her heightened language does not only derive from neo-Platonism; the extravagant rhetoric of twinned souls also informs the language of classical amicitia’s soldiers and statesmen. Philips shows her claim to amicitia in the political language of friendship described above: the language of counsel, frankness, secrecy, and moderation of the passions. Philips and her coterie also mark this appropriation of amicitia through an emphasis on usefulness, which they explicitly distinguish from the abstraction of Platonic love. Jeremy Taylor, in his discourse on friendship written in response to a question from Philips, illustrates this distinction: there is a Platonic friendship as well as a Platonic love; but they being but the images of more noble bodies are but like tinsell dressings, which will shew bravely by candle-light, and do excellently in a mask, but are not fit for conversation, and the material entercourses of our life.56

Though Taylor’s emphasis on friendship between “men and women” rather than between women shows his difference from Philips, he usefully distinguishes between “Platonic friendship” and those friendships “fit for conversation, and the material entercourses of our life.” The (presumably unwitting) sexual pun on “conversation” shows how easily friendship can shade into eroticism. Eight years after the king’s execution, the Anglican divine Taylor critiques the neo-Platonism associated

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with Henrietta Maria’s court circle by denigrating the masques for which she was famous; his dismissal of “tinsell dressings, which will shew bravely by candlelight, and do excellently in a mask” has a suggestion of iconoclasm about it in its rejection of “images of more noble bodies” for “material entercourses.” This point marks a difference between the practical, dangerous royalist friendship in England of the 1650s and the idealized world of the royal court, both in memories of the 1630s and in exile in France in the 1650s. The neo-Platonic ideals of Henrietta Maria’s court still inflect the language of Taylor and Philips’s amicitia, but they do not entirely suffice for the lived realities of royalists in England. Most crucial to that distinction are “conversation, and the material entercourses of our life.” Following directly upon Taylor’s insistence on the virtue of friends, a standard requirement in friendship literature, this passage introduces the idea of usefulness. Classical sources discount friendships based solely on use as not being true friendships: “the useful is not something that lasts, but varies with the moment; so, when what made them be friends has been removed, the friendship is dissolved as well, in so far as it existed in relation to what brought it about.”57 Nevertheless, friendships based on “worthiness” also necessarily involve “material entercourses”: And it is far from being true that friendship is cultivated because of need; rather, it is cultivated by those who are most abundantly blessed with wealth and power and especially with virtue, which is man’s best defence; by those least in need of another’s help; and by those most generous and most given to acts of kindness. Indeed, I should be inclined to think that it is not well for friends never to need anything at all.58

In a friendship based in virtue, the friends’ usefulness to one another demonstrates that virtue; utility provides the occasion for continuing obligations and intimacy. As Cicero insists, the ability to render and to receive benefits also marks the power of the friends: the exchange of benefits illustrates their ability to act effectively. In emphasizing use over the “tinsell dressings” of “Platonic friendship,” Taylor accords to friendship the political utility it has in the amicitia tradition. The war years make the practical aspects of giving benefits more within women’s power than before, as the absence of male relatives who are away fighting means that women not only frequently run estates but also make decisions such as whether to keep gunpowder or give it to a demanding soldier, whether to donate plate and jewelry to the war effort on either side, and whether to allow – or how violently to resist – the lodging of soldiers in their homes.59 These practical dimensions connect with the theoretical

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structure of friendship, which praises the granting of benefits without the expectation of return. By foregrounding a usefulness that he distinguishes from neo-Platonism, Taylor follows Philips in emphasizing the political dimensions of friendship. Despite his failure to discuss friendships between women, Taylor’s discourse, written in direct response to Philips, reads her friendship as she writes it: as part of public life. Philips’s insistence on usefulness grounds her poems in the civic realm; utility both relies upon and modifies her poems’ extravagant friendship rhetoric. ’Tis not thy love I feare to loose, That will in spight of absence hold; But ’tis the benefit and use Is lost, as in imprison’d Gold: Which though the summe be ne’re so great, Enriches nothing but conceipt.60

To the standard friendship lament about absence – a lament that traditionally, as here, insists that true friendships survive absence – Philips adds an important qualification. She glides over the concerns about losing love, for “that will in spight of absence hold.” She worries, instead, that the “benefit and use” of friendship will vanish in absence. The metaphor of “gold,” “imprison’d” as ore or as the seized assets of royalist sympathizers (whose estates James Philips helps to sequester), foregrounds the material dimensions of these benefits. The double meaning of “conceipt” raises the literary stakes of this game. For “conceipt” means both arrogance and an extended literary figure. In the first instance, of arrogance, absent friendship can only enrich the friend’s good opinion of herself, rather than raise her in others’ eyes. This meaning relates to Alan Bray’s description of “countenance” in men’s friendship; Bray describes the ways in which certain marks of favor – sharing a bed, sitting together at table, publicly exchanging kisses, writing intimate letters – between friends have material effects and ethical significance.61 If friendship only adds to one’s self-regard, it fails to achieve its proper ethical effects, which include the moderation, restraint, and reciprocity that enable social bonds even outside the friendship dyad.62 Philips claims these ethics for women. The second reading of “conceipt” as an extended literary figure proves more problematic for Philips. For if “conceipt” enriches “nothing but” literary devices, then it still does very much for Philips, whose friendship’s currency is poetry rather than the publicly viewable gestures of countenance. As a poet with fewer social and economic – but seemingly with more literary – resources than the rest of her coterie, Philips

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confers the benefits of friendship in precisely the currency she derides here, the “conceipt” of poetry made still more important (perhaps brought into being) through absence. It is precisely the potential loss of friendship’s utility through absence that generates the poem, which works to strengthen friendships by displaying them in the civic realm.63 The “conceipt” of poetry answers the “conceipt” of self-regard: poetry makes friendship’s ethics available by circulating in the larger world. More, that public significance constitutes a central part of those ethics. Along with her bold claim to the civic valence of amicitia – a public expression of ethics enabled through the circulation of poems – Philips deflects a seeming resistance to that exposure. “To My Lucasia, in defence of declared friendship” opens with a plea to Lucasia (Anne Owen) to authorize the publicity of friendship. This poem helps to illuminate some of the difficulties of Philips’s claim to amicitia’s political significance, issues tied up in both the gendered societal expectations of women’s silence and the corresponding problem of ethical signification. Philips’s poem shows the struggle over this appropriation: O! my Lucasia, let us speak our Love, And think not that impertinent can be, Which to us both does such assurance prove, And whence we find how Justly we agree.64

The worry about “impertinence” positions friendship between these women either as something unimportant or as something incongruous, indecorous because out of its proper, private, place.65 Philips’s use of “impertinence” reveals a worry about the dangerous public meanings of women’s friendship; it marks the self-awareness with which she lays claim to the civic history of amicitia. The references to “assurance” and justice resolutely assert this public place, as Philips insists upon the imbrication of use and enjoyment. The ethical character of friendship, it soon becomes clear, arises from enjoyment, from the fulfillment of obligations that become apparent in the performance: “Before we knew the treasures of our Love, / Our noble ayms our Joys did entertain; / And shall enjoyment nothing them improve?”66 “Enjoyment” jars against the agrarian connotations of “improve.” “Improve” implies the increase in land’s value through cordoning off public land to make it private, and thus suggests that value compounds through the shared intimacies of friendship, through privacy. The agrarian context also recalls a pastoral tradition that links land’s fecundity with women’s; the poem reappropriates this procreative improvement by tying itself to a tradition of pastoral poetry instead of to women’s bodies. Orinda generates improvement

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by poetic means. But the economic implications of “treasures” suggest a problem in friendship’s exchange of benefits: the poem fears that enjoyment will deplete those treasures, in a womanly display of conspicuous consumption without replenishment. Friendship’s economic form answers this dilemma. In the conferring of benefits upon one another, friends establish an ongoing set of obligations, distinguished by the delay between their performance and their return.67 The return required in friendship is not that of an object or equal amount: For the most beautiful part of a benefit is that we gave it even when we were likely to lose it, that we left it wholly to the discretion of the one who received it. If I arrest him, if I summon him before a judge, it gets to be, not a benefit, but a loan.68

Seneca goes on to say that even the “most praiseworthy act” of “repay[ing] gratitude” “ceases to be praiseworthy if it is made obligatory.”69 Friendship cannot demand requital, even through gratitude, and yet it depends upon the reciprocity of mutual obligations. Philips addresses this problem through an intertwining of the emotive and economic aspects of friendship: Nay, to what end did we first barter minds, Onely to know and to neglect the claime? Or (like some wanton) our pride pleasure finds To throw away the thing at which we aym.70

This passage ties together the economy of friendship – the “barter [of] minds” – with its ethical force in the world. Francis Finch’s 1654 discourse on friendship, written to Philips and her friend Anne Owen, illuminates Philips’s use of “barter” in relation to Seneca: “The Naturall and Congeniall Return of Love in Love, it will not be barter’d for any thing else, nor admit any other thing in Exchange for it.”71 Like Seneca, Finch asserts that the exchange of love, rather than material aids, distinguishes friendship. Taken up to this point, this language seems to imply a disinterested friendship apart from the world. Philips’s line “Onely to know and to neglect the claim” modifies this, however: “A friend should find out each necessity, / And then unask’d relieve’t at any rate.”72 The claim demands action. Having claimed amicitia’s continuing reciprocal benefits for women through a rhetoric of usefulness, Philips finds an answer to worries about ingratitude or scarcity in an unusual place: the female body. The intertwining of enjoyment and use makes the friendship she describes endlessly generative:

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But we lov’d to enjoy and to behold, And sure we cannot spend our stock by use. And yet their spotless passion never tires, But does increase by repetition still. So the Soul’s motion does not end in bliss, But on her self she scatters and dilates, And on the Object doubles, till by this She finds new Joys, which that reflux creates.73

As these lines illustrate, and as many scholars also note, the dynamics of friendship in this poem take a bodily, passionate form.74 The imagery of endless motion, scattering and dilating, suggests some ways in which the intercourse of friends moves outward, generating larger effects. It is of course possible – and important – to read this sequence of images as erotic, the motions of the soul tracing the motions of bodies making love, although that interpretation may not have been as available to all the immediately contemporary readers of this poem as it would come to be for later readers.75 But Philips’s coterie member Francis Finch, who addresses his discourse on friendship to “D. Noble Lucasia-Orinda,” does read this poem as depicting the unity that serves as the paradigm of ethical commitment to a larger audience.76 And, for all that some of Philips’s poems insist on a fissure between the body and the soul, the offices of friendship include the acts of bodies, of beings, in the world. The recursiveness of a desire that generates without ever being exhausted is also the pattern of friendship’s ethical obligations. The lines of endlessly generative obligations tell another story, however: that of persuasion. With its litany of “but” “and yet,” protest structures the poem. Indeed, even the poem’s title, “in defence of declared friendship,” introduces the element of resistance needing to be answered. The poem’s emphasis on the need to speak – the ability “to convey transactions through the Eare” in order to circumvent the soul’s bondage in the body, the soul which “seeks a vent by telling the glad news” – shows the crucial role of speaking, writing, and manuscript circulation in creating the poem’s ethical content.77 As Lorna Hutson argues in an essay on Philips, Bray’s idea of countenance proves more difficult in women’s friendship: “The bodily intimacy of friendship, then, is produced as part of its capacity to signify ethically, and women will not have access to the means to signify this bodily intimacy until they effectively appropriate the ethical discourse.”78 “Telling the glad news” is part of appropriating the ethical discourse of friendship. Philips’s boldest claim is not for the ethical content of a same-sex eroticism natural to the female body. Instead, her radical innovation lies

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in the link she makes between various forms of eroticism – the pleasures of bodily touch, of a witty phrase, of a thoughtful gift – and specifically textual classical and humanist amicitia, with the connection to civic virtue and public efficacy that entails. This is the generative property of tradition in Erasmus: “For with each investment, he will labor to leave the common store in no way depleted but, on the contrary, substantially enriched.”79 This is precisely what Orinda tries to persuade Lucasia their friendship can be. Philips thus claims the instrumentality of rhetoric mobilized through friendship that Hutson describes for men: A literary assimilation of the De amicitia then, may be saying less about the age’s commitment to a new theory of non-instrumental male friendship, than it is about a displacement of the instrumentality of male friendship into the communicative action represented by the persuasive mobilization of arguments from classical texts.80

Philips’s poems, and this poem to Lucasia in particular, foreground the ways in which friendship educates the friends in rhetoric as well as in virtue, making them more effective in the world as persuasive speakers and thus as citizens. The process of persuasion, of protest and convincement, is thus not something ancillary to or later than friendship: it is both the means by which friends are made and part of its useful acts. Philips’s textually generative humanist friendship shows perhaps most clearly in relation to current debates about queer eroticism, reproduction, and politics. Insisting on the text rather than the body might look like a retreat from the painstaking work scholars have done to uncover the history of women’s same-sex eroticism, the reams of rejoinders to Queen Victoria’s lack of imagination.81 The specifically textual generativity of Philips’s friendship offers two important interventions in the history of feminist and queer criticism, however. First, in its claim to an elite masculine language, it aligns with an early – and still crucial – goal of feminist criticism: the reconstruction of women’s roles in an intellectual culture previously described as exclusively masculine. Second, it shifts the terms of recent arguments about the relations of eroticism to reproduction. Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future states this in its strongest terms, calling for radical queer politics to reject the imperative of futurity embodied in and articulated as the child. In Against Reproduction, Stephen Guy-Bray takes up this idea and investigates Renaissance metaphors of the writer giving birth to the text. Guy-Bray argues against feminist treatments of this metaphor that link it back to the female body in order to enable women writers; he asserts that this allows the teleology of reproduction, in which sex leads to children within marriage, to proceed unchecked as a mechanism of state power.82

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Edelman and Guy-Bray want to break the link between the state and the reproduction of the family within heterosexual marriage. But Philips already accomplishes this, by taking the conflicting allegiances embedded within coverture and recasting them within the terms of a textually generative humanist amicitia. Her emphasis on volitional associations between women allows for a different mode of generation by means of the humanist exchange of persuasive texts. Significantly, this generative alliance takes its ethics from a bold appropriation of a masculine humanist tradition rather than from a naturalized female body. This claim – rather than an idea of the female body generating children to be the foundation of the state – then constitutes the link between women and the state.

The Politics of Friendship’s Dissolution Philips’s friendship differs in important ways from Guy-Bray’s “dream: a pleasure and a creativity that exist without exchange, without circulation, and without use value.”83 As the above discussion of friendship’s usefulness suggests, this is not at all the dream of Philips or her coterie: exchange, circulation, and use are all crucial to what friendship can generate. This emphasis counters the ways in which women’s texts, in particular, have been considered not to matter in the world, especially the world of politics. Produced by the cracking open of unitary fictions – of absolute monarchy, of coverture – the political model of friendship does not generate a future by minimizing the bases of disagreement or by telling an origin story that marks the start of a future in which disagreements are forestalled. Instead, friendship tells a recurring story of ideals, betrayals, forgiveness, and more ruptures. It is making as process, not as origin point. And it turns out to be the norm, not an aberration. Friendship requires this recursive structure of remaking because it comes under threat in this historical moment. Friendship’s utility, on which Philips insists, simultaneously answers the conflicting demands of God, country, king, family, and friends, by providing material aid, and augments them, by rendering visible incompatible obligations. Philips’s most perceptive critics have seen friendship’s political meaning as that of permanence and coherence against the upheavals of the interregnum; they have read her use of friendship as fidelity to tradition.84 On the contrary, Philips finds subversive potential precisely within the traditional discourse of amicitia. The narrative of constancy fails to account for several crucial features of Philips’s oeuvre. First, she writes many poems excoriating her friends

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for betraying their friendships; thus the dominant version of friendship that emerges is not one of stability but of dissolution. This is often read biographically, as disappointment in her friends, who succumb to the heterosexual privileges of matrimony. Kate Lilley, one of the subtlest readers of Philips’s intertwined erotics and politics, writes: Orinda is able to defend her own singularity and fidelity by charging her apostates with multiplicity and infidelity. Even as she seems to insist on the difference of each attachment and each woman, Philips relies on the disturbing reiteration of the superlative rhetoric of exclusive and incomparable friendship. There is often little more than a name or date to differentiate between ‘Rosania’ and ‘Lucasia’ or the fate which ‘Orinda’ will suffer at their hands.85

Lilley captures the contradiction in Philips’s charges of multiplicity when she herself has multiple friends. This is the second problem with reading Philips’s poems as figuring fidelity: in violation of amicitia’s rhetoric of twinned souls, Philips writes effusive friendship lyrics to more than one woman. Nevertheless, Lilley (and others) continue to take singularity and unwavering constancy as Philips’s ideal. Many of Philips’s early critics are far less nuanced than Lilley on the poems of friendship’s dissolution. Usually applauding Rosania and Lucasia for their choice of marriage over friendship, critical responses to Philips’s disappointed lyrics range from the condescending – “sincerity” keeps Philips’s friendship lyrics “from being downright silly”86 – to the pathologizing – “In response [to her friends’ being ‘naturally unfaithful’], she nagged them with uncomfortable poems of restrained discord and/or near-derangement.”87 All these accounts misrecognize the proper place of betrayal and rupture within Philips’s politicized friendship. Rather than undoing the bonds of friendship, with the faithful Orinda on one side and the unreliable Rosania and Lucasia on the other, Philips’s lyrics of dissolution actually forge those bonds. Philips’s lyrics of faithless friends and new loves offer a model of political friendship that does not disavow the possibility of multiple obligations. In fact, the ability of Philips’s friendship to incorporate betrayal gives it relevance in the midst of the conflicting loyalties of the interregnum. Still more surprisingly, Philips’s mixedgender coterie reads her poems of women’s friendship, including those of dissolution, in this way, as political exemplars. In her appropriation and revision of amicitia, Philips excavates and lays bare the threat that lurks in the background of classical narratives of virtuous friends, a threat that most writers deflect into other forms of betrayal. It is a specifically political threat: the conflict between loyalty to the friend and loyalty to the state. While the goals of humanist friend-

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ship – education in virtue and practical advantage, both enabled by rhetorical force – support and coincide with those of the state, in practice absolute loyalty to a friend can conflict with loyalty to the state, authorizing conspiracy and rebellion. Cicero assures us that “an upright man will never for a friend’s sake do anything in violation of his country’s interests or his oath or his sacred honour,” but he continues to worry about the problem.88 This concern reappears in a contemporary friendship treatise that draws on Plutarch, M. B.’s The triall of true friendship or perfit mirror, wherby to discerne a trustie friend from a flattering parasite (1596).89 The treatise stresses the dangers of friendship: Therefore let us call to mind whether our manifest, sworne, & professed enemies have done us most mischief, or our supposed friends, our kinsmen, and allies. Surely if we would search into histories (witnesses of former times) we shall perceive more castles overthrowne, cities overcome, kingdomes and empires utterly wasted and extinguished, by false hearted frends, and outwardly sworne brethren, then by the mightie band of proclaimed enemies.90

The warning turns upon the threat of dissimulation, depicting friendship in resolutely public terms. The nightmare of those who overthrow castles, overcome cities, waste kingdoms, and swear oaths outwardly while not consenting inwardly is hardly imaginary in Philips’s historical moment. If friends who betray each other help to lay waste to kingdoms, so too do friends conspire together to overthrow governments. Philips subscribes to Cicero’s distinction between friendship and conspiracy on the basis of virtue: And hence it is we friendship call Not by one vertue’s name, but all. Nor is it when bad things agree Thought, Union, but Conspiracy.91

The harmonious agreement that Philips depicts as natural in this poem – “Thus all things unto peace do tend; / Even discords have it for their end”92 – soon shows itself as impossible in this world, however. “But onely in Eternity / We can these beauteous Unions see.”93 The union of friends provides a figure for heavenly harmony on earth. The impossibility of achieving this unity on earth, however, leads Philips to the threat of betrayal implicit in the amicitia literature. Philips consciously takes up this conflict between friendship and the state as the most accurate representation of her historical circumstances. In many ways, the obvious move for a committed royalist would have been to valorize infidelity to the current political power in Parliament.

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Philips does not do this in any straightforward manner. Instead, she anatomizes the causes and consequences of betrayal between friends. The usual way of reading her poems has been to assume that her royalism emerges in the successful poems of friendship, and that the poems of dissolution prove unfortunate aberrations, usually constructed as private. Instead, the lyrics of betrayal most accurately describe the internally riven subjectivity of the wife under coverture, whose dilemmas of conscience appear on a national scale, for all citizens, during the years of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration. They can do so because of the double-sided threat within friendship: it is not simply that friends betray each other, or that friends conspire together to betray the government. Friends always have the potential to do either. This potentiality, extended into multiple commitments, means that rather than being weak, friendship simultaneously offers a powerful source of intimate obligation, a tie to the state, and the awareness of the impossibility of fully integrating all allegiances. Philips’s poem “Injuria amici” passionately details the breakdown of a friendship. Unusually, the poem does not name the friend in question, but the manuscript context and date suggest Rosania (Mary Aubrey Montagu) as the recipient (the rupture of the poem occasioned by her “private marriage,” the secret status of which Philips resents).94 The poem explicates the requirements of friendship by articulating their violation, mixing religious and political language to portray the unfaithful friend’s betrayal. She is a “Nero” who wishes “to survey the Rome [she] set on fire.”95 The reference to “Nero” styles the unfaithful friend a tyrant. In doing so, it suggests that she proves herself uneducable in the precepts of friendship, for the emperor Nero is also the delinquent student of Seneca, author of De beneficiis.96 This allusion foregrounds not only friendship’s exchange of mutual benefits, but also its risks, for Seneca cautions his readers to choose carefully from whom to receive a benefit.97 Even in its dissolution, the poem’s relationship retains the mutuality that characterizes amicitia: the speaker depicts herself as “subject and Spectatour too” of the addressee’s “ingenious scorns,” “wounded for and by your power.”98 The speaker does not only receive “wound[s]” because the addressee has power (“wounded . . . by your power”), but also for the sake of increasing that power (“wounded for . . . your power”). This painful reciprocity extends into the odd pairing of “I / At once your martyr and your prospect dy.”99 With “martyr,” the speaker casts herself as sacrifice to the addressee’s betrayal of friendship’s religion. With “prospect,” though, the speaker links the addressee to her fate: not only the scene of current devastation, but also the future state to which she looks forward.100 In “prospect,” the speaker marks

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the public consumption of the spectacle of friendship’s dissolution and extends its effects into the future. Paradoxically, betrayal makes friendship persist. The values of friendship emerge through their violation: This is my doome, and such a riddling fate As all impossibles doth complicate: For obligation here is injury, Constancy crime, friendship a haeresy, And you appeare so much on ruine bent Your own destruction gives you now content For our twin-spirits did so long agree, You must undoe your self to ruine me.101

The friend’s betrayal signals the reversal of values, generating impossible conjunctions that draw upon physical, legal, and religious registers. The “content” elsewhere achieved through a pastoral withdrawal into the comforts of friendship here derives from “destruction,” but the lines do not only signal cruelty. The friends’ likeness to one another – their “twin-spirits” – means that the destruction of one results in the destruction of the other, making them both undone, ruined.102 This reciprocity has a double edge. “Obligation here is injury” because the faithless friend takes the bond she previously desired and treats it as a burden. But “injury” also maintains the “obligation” through the harm inflicted, the wound that even when healed records the violated promise. The poem ties this pain to the public arenas of writing and of politics. In dissolving the friendship, Orinda tells the addressee, you Kill that which gave you imortallity. Whiles Glorious Friendship, whence your honour springs, Ly’s gasping in the croud of common things; And I’me so odious, that for being kind Doubled and study’d murders are design’d.103

The texuality of “imortallity” recalls Petrarchan lyrics where the poet abases himself before his beloved but still insists upon the lasting tribute of his poems. The double meaning of “kind” shows that violence derives from the friends’ agreeableness and likeness to one another. The consequences of this kindness link inextricably to the sufferings of the royalists: “doubled and study’d murders” recalls the title of Philips’s poem “On the double murther of K. Charles, in answer to a libellous rime made by V. P.” Deeply concerned with the ways in which the “first murder,” the king’s execution, authorizes woman’s speech that would otherwise be a crime, that poem’s “second murder” is the slandering of Charles, the damage to his “honour.”104 The parallel aligns Orinda,

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through her description of herself as a “martyr,” with the beheaded Charles. In this, it recalls other politically laden criticisms of faithless friends, such as “But you I see are lately Roundhead growne / And whom you vanquish you insult upon” in the poem that follows “Injuria amici.”105 These parallels suggest that royalists are like faithful friends, while the faithless, slandering Roundheads inevitably betray friendship. Indeed, critics usually read the relation of fidelity and political identity in Philips’s poems in this way. But the erotic economy of the poem, its exchange of benefits and injuries, is not so straightforward. In the second half of the poem, the speaker reveals the ways in which the recipient’s cruelties confer benefits as well as injuries. Initially, it seems as though she wants the faithless friend to continue her cruelty to the point of Orinda’s death: “Thy least of crimes is to be Cruell Still; / For of thy smiles I should yet more complain, / If I should live to be betray’d again.”106 Finish the job, Orinda seems to be saying – turn me into friendship’s martyr. And yet Orinda releases her: “Live then (faire tyrant) in Security, / From both my kindness and revenge be free.”107 “Tyrant” marks the addressee as incapable of friendship, but the friendship paradoxically confers upon the friend that which tyrants can never have: “security.”108 Insecure in their power, tyrants cannot be certain of their countries’ support. The fact that the faithful friend can confer this benefit upon her faithless counterpart depends upon the giving up of their likeness – “my kindness” – and the granting of clemency rather than “revenge.”109 Since the right of clemency traditionally belongs to kings, this confers a legitimate – and greater – authority on the faithful Orinda, in contrast to the tyrannical betrayer. This power derives largely from rhetorical prowess, which both the friendship literature and this poem depict as deriving from amicitia. Amicitia helps to educate the friends in rhetoric, by means of humanist exemplars and treatises.110 Orinda repeats her earlier claim that she “gave [her] imortallity,” then goes even further: While I, who to the Swains had sung your fame, And taught each Eccho to repeat your name, Will now my private sorrows entertain, To Rocks and Rivers (not to you) complain.111

The lines allude to the pastoral mode of many of Philips’s poems of successful friendship, with a self-conscious wit that acknowledges the cliché of the complaining swain.112 Even more powerfully than the type of the shepherd-poet, however, the image of singing “To Rocks and Rivers” evokes the archetypal poet: Orpheus, who famously could charm even

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rocks. The tradition that has Echo, futilely beloved of Pan, torn limb from limb by shepherds (as Orpheus is torn limb from limb by the followers of Dionysius) contributes to this connection.113 Even as amicitia shows the friends’ growth of rhetorical skill, this poem shows the dissolution of friendship increasing poetic prowess. The second murder of slander finds its answer in poetry sung to a private audience. The gain in rhetorical power draws from and adds to a continuing mutuality the emphasis on rupture would seem to deny. Indeed, the breakdown in friendship actually produces pleasure: And though before our Union cherish’d me, ’Tis now my pleasure that we disagree; For from my passion your last rigours grew, And you kill me, because I worshipp’d you. But my worst vows shall be your happiness, And nere to be disturb’d by my distress.114

The first line enacts reciprocity through inverted syntax: not only “our Union” “cherish’d [by] me,” but also “our Union cherish’d” the speaker. The disagreement, Orinda claims, will bring about concord, by ending the “passion” that provokes the faithless friend’s “last rigours.” “Pleasure” does not seem simply the result of the cessation of pain, however: “disagree[ment]” produces its own rewards. The line “my worst vows shall be your happiness” fulfills and extends the paradox that “obligation here is injury.”115 The implication seems to be either that the addressee takes pleasure in the speaker’s pain, evoked in her “worst vows” of hatred; or that Orinda’s “worst vows” are those most easily broken, and the addressee takes pleasure in release from obligation. But this does not give due credit to the oddity of the line. In it, the content of the vows becomes inconsequential: the promises themselves produce happiness, just as the Petrarchan poet’s gift of immortal poems not only arises from but also recompenses his pain. The rhetorical performance of reciprocity creates and fulfills the bonds of friendship, even if those obligations are injury.116 In arguing that friendship persists and, indeed, grows stronger through its violation, Philips makes a counterintuitive claim. In doing so, she responds to her historical circumstances, the Civil Wars and the ensuing dangers, particularly for a royalist, of the interregnum. But she does not simply fantasize about a unitary community in which friendship figures stability: she acknowledges the instability within friendship and, thus, its continuity with the political community. Her innovation within amicitia becomes more legible in the context of a curious passage from Jeremy Taylor’s discourse on friendship.

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Though he writes in answer to Philips’s question about whether exclusive friendships can be Christian, Taylor famously allows women only to be friends to their husbands, not to other women. In writing to Philips in the terms of amicitia, however, Taylor acknowledges her participation in a political discourse. He specifically locates amicitia’s requirement for usefulness and faithfulness in wartime: I cannot say that Women are capable of all those excellencies by which men can oblige the world; and therefore a femal friend in some cases is not so good a counsellor as a wise man, and cannot so well defend my honour; nor dispose of reliefs and assistances if she be under the power of another: but a woman can love as passionately, and converse as pleasantly, and retain a secret as faithfully, and be useful in her proper ministeries;117

Taylor understands limitations on women’s friendships to be a function of their social position, the extent to which “she be under the power of another.” Women, however, do exhibit the virtues of conversation and discretion (this last fairly unexpected, as many authors lament women’s inability to keep secrets). Evoking the language of romance, Taylor allows that “she can die for her friend as well as the bravest Roman Knight; and we find that some persons have engag’d themselves as farre as death upon a less interest than all this amounts to.”118 Women’s usefulness – and fidelity – extend to the point of death. But the form of that death shows what Taylor wants to class as a limitation: and therefore, though a Knife cannot enter as farre as a Sword, yet a Knife may be more usefull to some purposes; and in every thing, except it be against an enemy. A man is the best friend in trouble, but a woman may be equal to him in the dayes of joy: a woman can as well increase our comforts, but cannot so well lessen our sorrows: and therefore we do not carry women with us when we go to fight; but in peacefull Cities and times, virtuous women are the beauties of society and the prettinesses of friendship.119

The obvious phallic imagery of the sword and knife comparison constructs women as inferior to men. But the violence of the image itself militates against that: for what purpose would a knife be useful, “except it be against an enemy”? We may “not carry women with us when we go to fight,” but what of the fight that comes home – what of civil war? The historical circumstances of the wars themselves, with women maintaining their households through sieges, work against Taylor’s point. Indeed, Taylor’s own imagery undermines the boundaries he tries to set, with the paradoxical result that he describes precisely how women may be useful friends in times of war: “d[ying] for her friend as well as the bravest Roman knight,” and using a “Knife . . . more usefull to some purposes.”

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The threats of conspiracy in friendship, the extent to which the benefits of friendship can lead to war, and the unexpected knife-fighting of Taylor’s women friends all indicate the degree to which Philips’s imbrication of treachery and fidelity in friendship draws upon a shared cultural discourse. Philips uses that contradiction to develop a new model of political community in the interregnum. Her model utilizes the rhetorical education of the friends, and shows friendship’s dissolution strengthening their rhetorical prowess, from shepherd to Orpheus. She complicates the account of political identity, such that she becomes both a martyr in the pattern of Charles I and a monarch dispensing clemency who converts a tyrannical friend to justice. The injuries of friendship are themselves a bond of obligation, “worst vows” both the promise and the fulfillment of “happiness.” Philips’s compounding lyrics of faithless friendships – and the construction of Orinda as the maligned, faithful friend – prove materially useful in cementing alliances in a way that transfers to other members, or potential members, of her coterie. Thus, the erotic wit of Philips’s playful “To the Lady E. Boyl” depends upon the recipient’s knowledge of her other verse: For it [“Orinda’s trivial heart”] has been by tenderness Already so much bruis’d, That at your Altars I may guess It will be but refus’d. For never Deity did prize A torn and maimed Sacrifice.120

“Tenderness” alludes to the tendre amitié of préciosité verse; “altars,” to the many altars of the religion of friendship throughout Philips’s poems.121 The poem makes a joke not only of Philips’s serial monogamy, but also of her rejections, “bruis’d” “by tenderness,” “A torn and maimed Sacrifice.” Indeed, it is precisely this history of failed friendship that provides both the lure and the challenge to Elizabeth Boyle: I will make you famous like the others, says Orinda, and you will succeed in faithfulness where they have failed. The failures of friendship become the mark of friendship’s greatness. This gives a different complexion to those who “thinke all said of friendship’s fame / But poetry and wit.”122 For friendship’s fame, in these poems, is indeed a function of poetry and wit: it derives from the rhetorical play in the poems and their manuscript circulation.123 In a reading of “To my Lady Ann Boyle’s saying that I look’d angrily on her,” Lorna Hutson elucidates the erotics of interpretation implicit in the “obliging Jealousy” of that poem: Ann Boyle’s misinterpretation of

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Philips’s expression reveals her “kindness.”124 In its revelation of the friendly and erotic potential of misunderstanding, this poem conforms to the dynamic in which the failures of friendship produce a stronger connection (here, playing on the presumption that the friends are “one soul in bodies twain,” their hearts immediately and infallibly open to one another, and thus secure from misinterpretation). The fact that this is a literary dynamic is crucial. It is also vital that what seems to separate in fact unites: “For at that quarrell I can ne’re repine, / Which shews your Kindness, though it questions mine.”125 “Kindness” marks the difference between the two friends: Boyle’s jealousy shows her to be fond of Philips in the process of questioning Philips’s fondness for her. But it also, in the sense of kinship or likeness, shows them to be the same: it asserts the friendship by questioning it. The erotics of the poem’s language enact what it proposes. Friendship’s surplus of rhetorical capital allows Philips to manage these approaches to women of demonstrably higher status.126 Philips’s allusion to her own self-abasement in failed friendships enables the assertion of “kindness,” the equality upon which friendship depends. The paradoxical generativity of the poems of friendship’s dissolution also helps to explain the repetition of Orinda’s assertions of perfect friendship. The replacement of Rosania with Lucasia presents a theoretical problem, derived from the effusive rhetoric of the exclusive friend, with its language of twinned souls: these relations of perfect friendship, the classical sources insist, occur scarcely once in a generation, and certainly not more than once for a single person.127 “On Rosania’s Apostacy, and Lucasia’s Friendship” finds in this paradox an impossibly generative economics of friendship: it retains the benefits of Rosania and Orinda’s friendship even as it dismisses Rosania as unfaithful. Where in an earlier poem Orinda praises Rosania because “to her friendships she so faithfull is,” this poem excoriates her: “That so Rosania’s darkness may be known / To be her want of Lustre, not thy own.”128 The soul protected from the threat of darkness is that of “Friendship” in the abstract, apostrophized in this poem.129 The dissolution of Rosania and Orinda’s friendship proves profoundly unsettling, as the unmoored “Friendship” commences “transmigrations.”130 This displacement does not extend to a denial of the failed friendship. Far from obfuscating the relationship with Rosania, the poem calls attention to it repeatedly, whether through the use of “recourse” suggesting that Lucasia supplies the deficiencies of Rosania, the emphasis on “new excellence and force,” or, most strongly, the “Endearments which no Tongue can e’re rehearse.”131 It would seem that by foregrounding the unprecedented nature of Orinda’s friendship with Lucasia, the poem

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would negate or downplay the friendship with Rosania. Surprisingly, it does not. Instead, the poem forges the friendship between Lucasia and Orinda from the materials of the failed friendship with Rosania. The final stanza produces an impossible economy of multiplying souls. It addresses Lucasia, rather than abstract friendship, directly; in so doing, it suggests that the poem’s persuasive rhetoric about the unprecedented nature of Lucasia and Orinda’s friendship actually has a particular recalcitrant reader in mind. Hail, Great Lucasia, thou shalt doubly shine: What was Rosania’s own is now twice thine; Thou saw’st Rosania’s Chariot and her flight, And so the double portion is thy right: Though ’twas Rosania’s Spirit, be content, Since ’twas at first from thy Orinda sent.132

The poem plays on the traditional exchange of friends’ (or lovers’) souls, with the exchanged souls residing in one another’s breasts. The poem claims that the soul now sent to Lucasia originated in Orinda, but its augmentation – the making of it into a “double portion” – occurs through the failed friendship with Rosania. Despite the friendship’s dissolution, it still increases the benefits of friendship. Indeed, it is the very act of watching that friendship fail that produces this abundance: “Thou saw’st Rosania’s Chariot and her flight, / And so the double portion is thy right.” The act of publicizing friendship’s failures in poetry creates the benefits – the endless generativity – of friendship.

Coterie Friendship It would be easy to dismiss the benefits of friendship’s failures as wishful thinking were it not for the fact that Philips’s coterie – composed of powerful royalists both wealthier and better connected than she – also reads her poems as exemplary of political allegiance. The evidence for this comes in several forms: treatises, the material organization of her poetic manuscripts, and letters. The writings of her coterie demonstrate the continuity between the highly emotional language of friendship and its practical goods, manifested in assistance with Parliamentary elections, law cases, and the manuscript circulation and printing of Philips’s works. One of the long-noted historical ironies of Philips’s coterie is that she seems to be the only female member of it whose texts survive; with the exception of a few letters from female coterie friends, most of the

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other works are written by men.133 Nevertheless, the male friends’ writings discuss the friendship of Orinda, Rosania, and Lucasia as a model for others – that is, precisely as Philips presents it. In their friendship treatises, Jeremy Taylor and Francis Finch take up the terms of amicitia that Philips herself appropriates, foregrounding features such as usefulness, counsel, and secrecy. In so doing, they articulate both a royalist identity and her claim for the civic centrality of friendship. The reading of Taylor, above, goes at least partly against the grain of his treatise – Taylor discusses women as friends only within the context of marriage – and entirely against the grain of critics’ readings of him.134 But Taylor’s language of usefulness and war, knights and knives, shows that he apprehends the political content of Philips’s poems, reading them within the amicitia tradition. Finch’s 1654 discourse falls more clearly within Philips’s terms than Taylor’s: Finch addresses it to the hyphenated “D. Noble LucasiaOrinda,” uniting the exemplary friends in a single name, though he writes the prefatory letter to Anne Owen alone. Anne Owen’s patronage, implied in that letter, provides a rare instance of the participation of female members of Philips’s coterie in its literary efforts. Like Philips, Finch ties friendship to royalism in unexpected ways: Now in Relations which have not that equality, as Father and Son, and the like, or Politick Relations, as King and Subject, the inequality and aw created thence quite destroyes possibility of Friendship; and this incapacity of the greatest happinesse here, is the sharpest Thorn in a Kings Crown. Some one King may be there is of so extraordinary a Genius, as by unvailing much of his Majesty, and descending to appear in an addresse and converse more familiar and obliging, may arrive at the felicity of Friendship: but I must not name him, lest Historians explode the Narration (as fabulous) and Politicians Him.135

Finch plays on the commonplace that kings cannot be friends because they can find no equal. Surprisingly, in 1654, he seems to make of the king’s exile a virtue: he can participate in friendship by “unvailing” and “descending,” making the unnamed king more like his royalist supporters than seems appropriate. In this, Finch, like Philips, takes advantage of the paradoxical freedom afforded to royalist writers by the court’s absence.136 He positions his printed discourse – itself a mark of wider than expected circulation – at the intersection of historical exemplars, fabulous narration, and threatening politicians where Philips also writes.137 The second form of evidence comes from the coterie manuscripts, which illustrate both the practical and the theoretical importance of the friendships whose dissolution Philips describes. Ten years after the bitter

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poems chronicling Mary Aubrey Montagu’s private marriage, Philips’s letters to Sir Charles Cotterell record the continuing intimacy of her friendship with Montagu, as she details their frequent letters and asks Cotterell to conspire with Montagu to find occasions for her to come to London.138 Sir Edward Dering’s letters to Philips, Montagu, and Anne Owen reinforce this association, for he uses his friendship with Philips to justify his writing to Montagu and to Owen (now Lady Dungannon, and thus of higher status than Dering).139 Mary Aubrey Montagu not only attends Philips’s deathbed but also receives, after Philips’s death, a manuscript of poems that declares “You alone, were her Ambition, as her Love.”140 Furthermore, the order of the manuscripts closest to Philips’s coterie reinforces this view of the persistence of the friendships and the importance of the lyrics of betrayal to the coterie.141 The manuscript presented to Rosania after Philips’s death begins with one of the angriest of Philips’s poems to Rosania, “To Rosania (now Mrs Mountague) being with her, 25th September. 1652,” and follows a series of Rosania poems with lyrics celebrating Lucasia.142 The Rosania manuscript stresses Rosania’s replacement by Lucasia, while presenting it within an ongoing sequence of alliances, rather than as a romance with a distinct ending. Even more overt in its narrative sequence, the Dering manuscript (owned by Sir Edward Dering and his wife Mary Harvey, a friend of Philips and Montagu since their days at school) groups the Rosania, Lucasia, and philosophical poems (but not the Antenor poems) in distinct sections, foregrounding particular relationships. Far more than the printed editions, the Dering manuscript associates poems by recipient and then by topic; it even puts dated occasional poems out of chronological order to foreground a progression from tentative approaches through intimacy to dissolution.143 Unlike later editors and critics, Philips’s coterie does not edit the poems of friendship’s ruptures out of her canon: on the contrary, they reinforce both the sequential narrative of friendship (and its failures) and the reiteration of effusive friendship lyrics to more than one woman.144 This evidence, coupled with the poems and treatises celebrating the exemplary amicitia of Philips and her friends, demonstrates the crucial role of rhetorics of betrayed friendship in the coterie. The third form of proof for Philips’s coterie reading friendship’s failures as exemplary of political forms comes from the letters she exchanges with Sir Charles Cotterell and Sir Edward Dering. The letters between Orinda and Poliarchus (Cotterell) – lauded by the 1705 publisher as a model for innocent and virtuous friendship between men and women145 – deploy the same language of friendship’s obligations that shapes Philips’s poems. The rhetoric of benefits and pardons threads

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throughout the letters, as in Philips’s discussion of two texts Cotterell sent to her, one in English and one in French, with interlined translation: I am extremely pleas’d with your ingenious Contrivance in making a Person, who stands in so much need of your Pardon, be once in a Capacity of forgiving you; and by thus abusing me, putting it to the Trial, whether I have profited by the Example of your Generosity.146

The generosity Philips records is Cotterell’s improvement of her French and Italian by sending her texts in those languages; she cloaks her chastisement of Cotterell’s lack of faith in her linguistic skill in the language of compliment and debt. She continues in the exact wording of her poems: “your very Injuries are obliging.”147 The elegance of the compliment – and the rebuff – turns upon their shared knowledge of Philips’s poems, with the letter’s allusion to “Injuria amici.” Philips reminds Cotterell of her rhetorical skill at the same time that she includes him in the intimacies of friendship. Friendship’s rhetoric inflects the many forms of obligations between Philips and Cotterell: his assistance in securing her court patronage for her poetry; his interventions on behalf of James Philips’s well-being and property; her attempts to effect a marriage between Anne Owen and Cotterell; and the Philipses’ successful conferring of James Philips’s former Parliament seat on Cotterell. Philips’s letters equate these benefits with one another (Calanthe is their code name for Lucasia, used for sensitive topics): “I grant that if my Interest had been as prevalent with Calanthe, as Antenor’s prov’d at Cardigan, you had possess’d, and I had still enjoy’d, what Fortune now denies to both of us.”148 Philips is comparing their success in securing the election for Cotterell with her failure in marrying Owen to him. The language of possession and enjoyment both draws a distinction between marriage and friendship and recalls the language of Philips’s friendship poems, where she criticizes those who “love to have, but not to smell the flower” and asks “And shall enjoyment nothing them improve?” in regard to the pleasures of friendship.149 The enjoyment of friendship remains superior to the possession of marriage, though both here are just as honored in the breach as the observance. Cotterell’s material assistance to Philips and her husband shows the efficacy of her rhetoric of friendship: Cotterell seems to respond to Philips with the aid of an ideal friend, and to accept the benefits she confers on him. The letters of Sir Edward Dering to Philips, Owen, Montagu, and other female members of his circle of family and friends provide perhaps the strongest evidence of a member of Philips’s coterie treating friendship as she does. In the letters, Dering’s language hews closely to

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Philips’s: he not only prizes the same virtues but also exhibits the same faults. Thus, in a letter to Philips he wonders “what would become of me, if I had not been your scholar, and learnd from you, that there is in friendship a spirituall & refined part, transcending all” “for when a great & commanding vertue hath once fixt its stamp and character upon a heart capable of reviving it, I thinke no distance can ever deface it, no absence obliterate it, the seale may be lost, but the impression remains for ever.”150 The language of the “seale [that] may be lost, but the impression remains for ever” takes up the titular image of Philips’s “Friendship in Emblem, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia.”151 Whereas Philips’s poem plays primarily on the Donnean conceit of the compass, however, Dering focuses on Philips’s own image, extending her idea that friendship continues despite absence to the mark left by the seal.152 The impression persists, Dering hopes, even when he commits precisely the same fault that Philips does: skepticism about Anne Owen’s second marriage to Marcus Trevor, Lord Dungannon. In a long, self-abasing letter to Philips, Dering laments that he has offended Owen because he asserted in her company that no one could be in love more than once; at this, “the faire Lucasia blushed and went away and I saw her no more.”153 Dering thus takes a side in the controversy that occasioned a rupture between Philips and Owen; he repeats rather than forgets the indelicate subject. Dering asks Philips to make his apologies to Owen, but he does not withdraw his point, reiterating in a later letter that other relationships are “not confind to numbers as friendship seemes to be to three, and love certainly is to two.”154 The emphasis on friendship being “confind . . . to three” indicates the stress Dering, like Philips, puts upon the triumvirate of Orinda, Rosania, and Lucasia. Dering treats the friendship of the three women as exemplary of virtue: Such Orinda are my thoughts of Lucasia and Orinda Rosania, that illustrious paire, who have conquered all that know them by their owne perfections, and all that know them not, by yours, and the just praises your immortall muse hath given them, who have obliged both sexes, yours by sharing what women can be, and ours, by shewing what they should; so that you have the honour, and I and all that have or wish to have good minds, the benefit of so excellent examples.155

Dering stresses Philips’s poems as the means by which this example communicates; the geographical distance between Lucasia, in Dublin, and Rosania, in London, makes its literary form important not only for those outside the friendship, but also for the maintenance of the friendship itself.156 Dering presents Philips’s friendship as she depicts it herself, not only in letters to her, but also in letters to other members of her

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coterie and to his larger kin network; he deploys similar language and tropes in other interactions where he wants the same effects (intimacy, shared resources, fame).157 Dering, one of the Commissioners of the Act of Settlement in Ireland, plays a crucial role in Philips’s other motivation for her trip to Ireland from 1662–3. Though she describes her aim as helping the newly remarried Anne Owen settle in to her life abroad, Philips also goes to Ireland to pursue a land claim that is part of her marriage portion. In return for Irish lands, the English Adventurers, including Philips’s father John Fowler, fund the English government’s military actions against the Irish “rebels.” Much of this money soon goes to support Parliament’s side in the first Civil War, however, making the Adventurers directly responsible for financing war against the king: “At the Restoration the implementation of the 1662 Act of Settlement generated fears that the Irish lands would be returned to any original Catholic or Royalist owners found innocent of action against Charles II.”158 Philips’s and Dering’s letters on the lawsuit demonstrate the entangled rhetorics of coverture, political loyalty, and friendship. Philips refers to herself as “putting in Antenor’s Claim, as an Adventurer in my Father’s Right here in Ireland,” thus emphasizing the transfer of property from father to husband as part of her marriage.159 Dering, however, presents the estate as belonging to Katherine, not James: “I wish you had your owne two thirds well paid you, I hope you would easily forgive us the injury of taking one third from you.”160 The “one third” refers to the widow’s portion: one of Philips’s legal cases addresses whether the Widow Cantwell is entitled to one-third of her deceased husband’s property, to which Philips otherwise has title. The case turns upon whether the widow, like her husband, supported Cromwell during the interregnum. Without specific evidence of the widow’s own disloyalty to the king, the court finds her innocent, “because she derives from Law, not from her Husband.”161 Although a frustrated Philips stresses in a letter that she has witnesses to the widow’s guilt, the legal principle that rules her innocent accords with Philips’s own presentation elsewhere of the separate culpabilities of husband and wife. While Philips has little patience for the Widow Cantwell’s distress, the “moot point” of the effect of “the Husband’s Guilt” upon the wife is in fact far from moot for her. After the restoration, James Philips stands in danger of execution: as a member of the High Court of Justice, he is accused of condemning the royalist Colonel John Gerard to death in 1654.162 As such, he would not be eligible for the free and general pardon of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. James Philips is acquitted on the basis of complicated testimony about dates of his attendance at

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the High Court and his presence elsewhere at crucial points – most of it provided by members of Katherine Philips’s extended literary circle, including Francis Finch, Sir Charles Cotterell, and John Jeffreys.163 This incident shows that the divergence between the political allegiances of husband and wife can prove materially useful in changing political circumstances: Katherine Philips’s friendships likely save her husband’s life. In its link between practical affairs and friendship, Dering’s letter to Philips about the law case shows how her writings help to produce the assistance of her husband: But madam, let us leave this discourse of business, I thinke I loose the time I spend with you, if the entertainment be onely land and acres, what securitie and how much by the years. There is something in yr company more satisfactory than the gaining an estate, & surely then much more then the taking of it. And though I know you could lead me through all the latitude of learning, and entertaine me with the greatest misteries of antiquity, and the profoundest secrets of philosophy, yet I know not how, I find my selfe always disposed to talke to you of friendship, partly that I am enclined to believe the propagating that doctrine would be of great & reall use to the world, who must of necessitie reforme much of the ruling distempers of this age if that were countenanced, partly because I believe no body understands it better then you, the nature the effects the causes, the rules the obligacon the duty and the rewards of friendship.164

Dering’s letter elevates rhetoric above estates; he flatters Philips by praising her knowledge of antiquity and philosophy. Greater than all these, though, is her “doctrine” of “friendship.” And Dering takes this moment, in a letter describing a minor failure of her law cases – a decision for which he is partly responsible – to imagine that friendship could “reforme much of the ruling distempers of this age.” Not just could: “must of necessitie.” The moment at which Dering makes the strongest claims for friendship’s role in the world is the moment at which his friendship fails Philips, when he does not help her carry her case. Many of the male members of Philips’s coterie, in Ireland as well as in Wales and London, have checkered pasts from the perspective of the returning monarch in 1660 – James Philips most of all.165 Philips and her poems thus prove useful to them for two reasons: first, because she articulates an unchanging royalism that can make them seem faithful by association; and second, because she explores the problematics of betrayal in the language of friendship, showing the persistence of obligations even after failures to perform. The members of her coterie share her exalted language of faithfulness, loyalty, and trust; they revere her “particular friends,” Lucasia and Rosania, as she does (acknowledging

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them as a triumvirate, a characterization dependent on the premise that friendships do not dissolve after betrayal). Through the exchange of poems, treatises, and letters, the royalists of Philips’s coterie preserve estates, secure positions in Parliament, find literary patrons. The practical virtues of these coterie friendships do not always succeed: Anne Owen marries Marcus Trevor, Lord of Dungannon, not Sir Charles Cotterell; Sir Edward Dering does not succeed in pushing all of Philips’s claims to Irish land through the court on which he serves. But they continue, even after Philips’s death, to see her model of friendship as something that can remake the world. They do so without ever discounting or covering over the ways in which friendship can fail, the ways in which it does not work. The paradoxical generativity of Philips’s lyrics of friendship’s dissolution is thus not merely rhetorical posturing, but a poetic strategy with distinct utility for this historical moment of conflicting obligations.

The Circle of Antenora Philips’s coterie circle and the aid it provides to James Philips after the restoration recall the conundrum with which this chapter began: the persistence of their marriage despite their political differences. Part of the answer lies in Philips’s sleight of hand: her ability to transform two problems – the husband and wife’s divergent political loyalties and the historical upheavals that put first one, then the other, on the victors’ side – into the relation of friendship. In translating conflicts of marriage and political obligation into the language of friendship, Philips makes use of a discourse that addresses these problems from its earliest instantiations in Aristotle and Cicero. In amicitia, Philips appropriates a tradition that articulates an ideal, acknowledges the failures to meet it, and then recreates the bonds of obligation. James Philips’s errors are thus not only his own. Philips’s politics emerge through tactics of literary representation. She takes up the adages and exemplars of the classical friendship tradition, filtered through French neo-Platonism, and uses them to insist upon a distinctively English royalism, but her royalism depends upon the absence of the court itself. Her incorporation of conflicting allegiances, in the interregnum and after, and her use of friendship’s failures to generate rhetorical skill and civic efficacy provide a vision of royalism that becomes more problematic after the restoration, with the official policy of forgetfulness. Philips’s vision of political community is both made and found –

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made through volitional association, found through innate similarity. In this, it seems like a union of contract theory, made through consent, and natural sociability, found through likeness. But the most important thing about Philips’s imagination of political community through amicitia is that it is remade, again and again, after and through articulations of betrayal. By requiring process and resilience, betrayal strengthens friendship, making it a union of reiterated choices and clear-eyed pragmatism. Unlike a contract invalidated by nonperformance or a fiction of sociability shattered by dissension, Philips’s political friendship shows the benefits that persist – the circulated poem, the wedding trip, the Parliamentary office – even after ruptures within friendship. Perhaps most remarkably, the manuscript evidence reveals her coterie reading her friendship poems in this way, too, and using her language to remake her vision of friendship even after death. The obligations of friendship endure. Philips’s friendship employs a self-aware artificial language that demonstrates “a blessed and stable connexion of sundrie willes / makinge of two parsones one in havinge and suffringe.”166 It is precisely “havinge and suffringe,” property and martyrdom, that are at stake. For Philips, “havinge” – the recursive generativity of friendship’s textual property and of female same-sex eroticism – depends upon “suffringe,” the litanies of friendship’s failures that produce those literary and erotic excesses. Or, more precisely, upon the rhetoric of “suffringe,” the literary representation and material circulation of those lyrics of dissolution. In order to create this possibility of “havinge,” however, Philips must accept the ways that obligations can injure, even as the literary records of injuries sustain friendship’s bonds. In Philips, property and martyrdom cleave together, the consequence of friendship’s betrayals: in “Injuria amici,” she informs the faithless friend that “I / At once your martyr and your prospect dy.”167 Just as they are the rhetorical tools by which she forges alliances, so too are “property” the Irish lands of her court cases and “martyrdom” her husband’s anger, pushed to the point just short of suicide. In her imagination of political community, Philips preserves the rights of the subject – the rights of property/ prospect – but also recognizes the degree to which martyrdom, the memory of betrayals, constitutes that benefit. In the movement between property and prospect, Philips claims both intellectual property through friendship’s rhetorical generativity and the future that rhetoric helps to imagine.

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Notes 1. Philips’s own royalism contrasts with the loyalties of her marital family and her natal family, both consistently Parliamentarian in politics. On Philips’s politics, see Barash, English Women’s Poetry, pp. 55–100; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, pp. 56–128; Gray, Women Writers, pp. 105–42; and Loxley, “Unfettered Organs,” pp. 230–48. 2. Sir Charles Cotterell serves the royal court in exile before becoming Master of Ceremonies under Charles II. Jeremy Taylor is a prolific Anglican divine and casuist. Sir Edward Dering, who during Philips’s life serves as commissioner of the Act of Settlement in Ireland, later becomes one of the commissioners of the Privy Seal. The composer Henry Lawes figures prominently in royalist performances and publications from the 1630s onward. On royalist genres, see N. Smith, Literature, pp. 233–49 and 287–94. 3. See Thomas, “Commentary,” Collected Works, vol. I, pp. 347–8. 4. James Philips also serves on the High Court of Justice (1651–60) and the Committee of the Army (1654–60); see Thomas, “Biographical Note,” Collected Works, vol. I, p. 5. 5. The Philipses live in Wales, though Katherine Philips often travels to London, as well as to Dublin, where she has her greatest literary success with the production of her translation of Corneille’s Pompey in 1663. See Gray, “Philips in Ireland,” pp. 557–85; and Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 159–73. 6. Philips’s mother, also named Katherine, marries and is widowed four times: first to Philips’s father, John Fowler, a London merchant; then, briefly, to George Henley; then to Sir Richard Phillipps, a Welsh landholder; and finally to Philip Skippon, a Parliamentary Major-General who dies in 1660. See Souers, Matchless Orinda, pp. 6–18. Fowler dies in 1642, but Philips’s stepfathers support Parliament. For Philips’s biography, see Aubrey (whose information is particularly good because Mary Aubrey, Philips’s Rosania, is his niece), Brief Lives, pp. 152–5; Chernaik, “Katherine Philips,” ODNB; Limbert, “Controlling A Life,” pp. 27–42; and Thomas, “Introduction,” Collected Works, vol. I, pp. 1–39. 7. On the fluctuation of political allegiances, see Staves, Players’ Scepters, pp. 1–42. 8. On women with different political commitments from their families, see Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 416–17; and P. Crawford, “Public Duty,” pp. 70–5. 9. See Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 401–2 for the example of Lady Elizabeth Fenton trying to persuade her son-in-law to her own Parliamentary views in 1643. 10. Reference from Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 402. Cholmley, Memoirs, p. 68. 11. For a fuller account of coverture, see Introduction. 12. P. Crawford, “Challenges to Patriarchalism,” p. 126. 13. See Chernaik, “Katherine Philips,” ODNB, for identification of “J. Jones.”

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14. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, p. 65. 15. On women as negative citizens and their culpability for crimes, see Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 414–15, quotation from p. 415. See also Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, p. 153: “in criminal or capital matters wives were required to answer without their husbands . . . Thus, while men became legally both capable and accountable when they reached the age of majority, and stayed that way, women became capable while and only while they had no husbands, but were always accountable. Their relationship to the law in its entirety was paradoxical at best, and unfixed in that it was dependent on their relationship to men.” 16. See Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 148. 17. Higgins, “Reactions of Women,” p. 203, citing B.M. E.529(21). 18. Royalist satires depicting parliaments of women show this to be especially disruptive. See Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, p. 145 on the way that dissent undercuts deference. 19. “To the Supreme Authority,” p. 1. 20. The rhetorical prowess and civic efficacy of the marriage relation accrue to the husband alone through the separation of spheres: good household management produces “the opinion and estimation of another ma[n]s goodnes & wisdom, the which revere[n]ce is not onlye honoured within the dores, but also shyneth and extendeth it selfe into the citie, so that he is taken for an honest man” (Vives, Office and Duetie, CC1v). With Vives’ move without “the dores,” he leaves the wife behind, at home. 21. Philips’s friends choose coterie names from literary sources; they use them consistently to refer to one another in their writings. 22. Philips, Poem 32, lines 53–60. 23. On this issue, see Gray, Women Writers, pp. 105–42, especially p. 122 on gold. 24. On gift-giving in traditional societies, see Mauss, Gift, pp. 60–82. On the Renaissance transformation of “the instrumentality of male friendship . . . from alliance and gift-giving to persuasive communication,” see Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, p. 11 et passim. 25. The language of “retreat” alludes to neo-Stoic retirement; see Chapter 4 for a fuller consideration of this topic. This retreat, however, does not insulate the speaker from the specifically gendered threat of slander; she still hears what cannot harm her. 26. Higgins, “Reactions of Women,” pp. 211–12, citing Bodleian Library MS Clarendon Vol. 46, fol. 131 b (“Advertisement from London July 29 1653”). 27. The meaning of her friendship evolves with changing critical concerns. From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Philips’s depiction of women’s friendship showed her concern with modest topics suitable to a “poetess,” confirming her minor status. See Souers, Matchless Orinda, pp. 252–77; Gosse, “The Matchless Orinda;” and Saintsbury, “Introduction to Katherine Philips.” In contrast, for the feminist critics of the 1970s and after, friendship demonstrates Philips’s boldness in forging stable royalist alliances counter to her husband’s Parliamentarianism. See Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, pp. 128–42; and Evans, “Paradox,” pp. 174–85. Recent critics read Philips’s friendship doctrine as an expression of or cover for

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

Friendship’s Shadows her same-sex eroticism. See Andreadis, Sappho, pp. 62–83; and Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, pp. 276–325. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, pp. 55–100; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, pp. 56–104; Gray, Women Writers, pp. 105–42; and Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 75–106 offer the most nuanced readings of Philips’s politics. Loxley’s “Unfettered Organs,” pp. 230–48 offers a brief but suggestive reading of the gendering of inconstancy in Philips’s writing. Shifflett, in “ ‘Subdu’d by You,” pp. 177–95, is unusual in considering the enmity within Philips’s friendship as having significant political meanings. Usually, critics see marriage and friendship in competition in Philips’s writings. Her letters to Sir Charles Cotterell seem to support this reading: “I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-proof . . . we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship” (Philips, Collected Works, vol. II, Letter XIII, pp. 42–4). See Chapter 4 for a reconsideration of this tension. Many critics argue that Philips can fully participate in friendship only because she discounts marriage. Thus Barash, English Women’s Poetry, p. 69, asserts that Philips places the poem “To my dearest Antenor, on his parting” first in two manuscript collections in order to “construct an alternate community . . . which does not overtly include him again.” The upheavals of family, local, and economic life resulting from the English Civil Wars expand this type of activity, from the female spies whose letters circulate uncensored (Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 413–14), to wives who shepherd their households through Civil War sieges in their husbands’ absence (Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, pp. 59–80), to the female petitioners of Parliament discussed above. Gowing, “Politics of Women’s Friendship,” p. 132 and fns. 7–9, summarizes the growing body of work on political maneuverings, particularly those of elite women. Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 231, emphasize these practical alliances obtain for women of the lower classes, while leaving less trace than for the literate nobility. Emphasis added. “To the Supreme Authority,” p. 1. Philips, “A Friend,” Poem 64, line 36; Elyot, Boke, fol. 141v. Philips, “A Friend,” Poem 64, lines 19–24. However, see Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 307, which defines “innocence” as “the historical word that Philips appropriates from the literary heritage of chaste femme love.” Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.199. Churchyard, Sparke, fol. B4v. Edmund Spenser mocks Churchyard (1523?– 1604), who contributes to several prominent publications including A Mirror for Magistrates (1563) and Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) under the name “Palemon,” which is Francis Finch’s name in Philips’s coterie. (Thomas, “Introduction,” Collected Works, vol. I, p. 331 does not mention this possible source for the name.) See Lyne, “Churchyard,” ODNB. Churchyard, Sparke, fol. B4v. Philips, Poem 64, lines 25–30. The lines recall one of the best-known passages of Montaigne’s essay: “In the amitie I speak of, they entermixe and confound themselves one in the other, with so universall a commixture,

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

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that they weare out, and can no more finde the seame that hath conjoyned them together. If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feele it cannot be expressed, but by answering; Because it was he, because it was my selfe” (Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.201). They also evoke John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy,” which uses a similar rhetoric of souls mixing. See M. B., Triall, fols. B1–B1v, which draws on Cicero, De amicitia, xix, p. 177. Grotius, Rights, Preliminary Discourse VI, pp. 79–81. Pufendorf, De jure, II.iii.143, p. 208. Philips, Poem 26, lines 23–4. See Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 17–53. Philips, Poem 26, lines 13–16. See Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 1–13 and 52–85; and Bray, The Friend, pp. 140–76. Philips, Poem 64, lines 67 and 70. See Olmsted, Imperfect Friend, p. 5 on friendship’s ideal openness and reason. Philips, Poem 64, lines 41–2. On royalism and secrecy, see Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 1–37. Finch, Friendship, pp. 9–10 also emphasizes the importance of keeping secrets. Philips, Poem 64, lines 73–4. Later readers connect Philips with préciosité through the context of the court rather than friendship. For example, BL Harley MS 6900 includes some of Philips’s poems alongside French précieuse poems, but the Philips poems are her Restoration panegyrics, not her friendship lyrics. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, p. 72, argues for the importance of Platonism to royalists, especially women. See also Thomas, “Introduction,” Collected Works, vol. I, pp. 7–10. In “Friendship, Poetry, and Neo-Platonic Thought,” pp. 441–69, Mark Llewellyn convincingly demonstrates Philips’s indebtedness to an English tradition of Platonism, although he downplays any erotic meanings in the poems. Philips’s translations of Pierre Corneille and her references to French texts in her letters to Sir Charles Cotterell demonstrate her interest in and knowledge of French literary culture. For a fuller consideration of préciosité in its French context, see Maclean, Woman Triumphant, pp. 25–87. See Veevers, Images, pp. 14–21 and 75–92 on Henrietta Maria. The queen influences Philips’s writing via such writers as Abraham Cowley and William Cartwright (whom Philips celebrates in her first published poem). On that poem’s context, see Gray, “Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” pp. 426–51. For Cartwright’s Platonic influence on Philips, see Souers, Matchless Orinda, pp. 260–4. In Women Writers, p. 108, Gray aligns Philips’s circle with the “looser tradition of the British coterie” rather than the elaborate courtly games of the French salons. Wahl, Invisible Relations, pp. 99–100 makes this argument. Both Finch, Friendship, p. 14 and Jeremy Taylor, Discourse, p. 36 describe tenderness as essential to the forming of friendships. Wahl, Invisible Relations, p. 120.

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108 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Friendship’s Shadows See Veevers, Images, p. 18. Maclean, Woman Triumphant, p. 128. Jeremy Taylor, Discourse, p. 37. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.3, p. 211. Cicero, De amicitia, xiv, p. 163. See Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 129 on Henrietta Maria’s contributions to the war effort; Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, pp. 60–80 on Lady Brilliana Harley; and Mendelson and Crawford, Women, pp. 349–419 on general conditions. Philips, Poem 49, lines 7–12. See Bray, The Friend, especially pp. 140–76. See Bray, The Friend, p. 152. Henry Lawes sets this poem to music, foregrounding the public aspect of performance. Philips, Poem 59, lines 1–4. Wahl, Invisible Relations, p. 149, elaborates: “For those who conceived of such intimacy as a social game, her friendship with other women could be seen as a trivial pursuit, scarcely worth the inflated rhetoric she used to describe it, while those who perceived a more serious emotional or sensual dynamic to these relations might well consider them ‘inconsonant’ with the respective domestic and conjugal commitments of the two women involved.” Philips, Poem 59, lines 5–7. See Introduction fn. 8 for further discussion. Seneca, De beneficiis, III.vii, p. 137. Ibid., III.vii, p. 137. Philips, Poem 59, lines 13–16. Finch, Friendship, p. 14. Philips, Poem 64, lines 73–4. Compare Seneca, De beneficiis, II.i, p. 53: “The best course is to anticipate each one’s desire; the next best, to indulge it.” Philips, Poem 59, lines 23–4, 27–8, and 45–8. See Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 306: “Able to overflow boundaries, desire is figured in the humoral terms of female orgasm: a dilation, swirling, and scattering of fluids.” See also Wahl, Invisible Relations, pp. 151–2; and Andreadis, Sappho, pp. 58–9. See Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, especially pp. 295–325 and 335–42. See Loxley, “Unfettered Organs,” p. 244 on the political body in Philips. Philips, Poem 59, lines 32 and 50. Hutson, “Body,” p. 203. Eden, Friends Hold, p. 32. Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, p. 63. Andreadis’ Sappho, pp. 62–83 on Philips, and Traub’s Renaissance of Lesbianism, pp. 276–325 on Philips, are two exemplary studies, wideranging in their scope and finely nuanced in their readings. Guy-Bray, Against Reproduction, p. 22. Edelman, No Future, pp. 1–31. Ibid, p. 23. For subtle accounts of the associations between the coterie, friendship,

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85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

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and stability, see Gray, Women Writers, pp. 119 and 123; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, p. 65; and Barash, English Women’s Poetry, p. 56, who stresses the threat of readers outside the coterie. In Stoicism, pp. 75–106, Shifflett stresses the violence of Philips’s world. More bluntly, Llewellyn, “Friendship, Poetry, and Neo-Platonic Thought,” pp. 441–68, especially p. 441, stresses the neo-Platonic context and denies any subversive or erotic effects to Philips’s works precisely because they take up a traditional discourse. Lilley, “Dear Object,” p. 171. Souers, Matchless Orinda, p. 263. Moody, “Orinda, Rosania, Lucasia et aliae,” p. 332. See also Brashear, “Forgotten Legacy,” pp. 68–79; Mermin, “Women Becoming Poets,” pp. 335–55; and Limbert, “Unison,” pp. 487–502. Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 311. M. B. also refers to Arion, an allusion that recurs in Philips’s poem “Arion on a Dolphin to his Majestie in his passadge into England” (Poem 3), suggesting she may have read his treatise. M. B., Triall, fol. B4v. Philips, Poem 65, lines 25–8. Thus also Cicero: “For supposing that we were bound to do everything that our friends desired, such relations would have to be accounted not friendships but conspiracies.” Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 313. Philips, Poem 65, lines 9–10. Ibid., lines 105–6. The variants in the Rosania manuscript (National Library of Wales MS 776b, pp. 318–19), which names the poem “Inconstancy in Friendship,” support this reading by tempering the poem’s passion. Instead of “twinspirits,” the Rosania manuscript has “two spirits” (line 19). It also substitutes “my anger” for “revenge” (line 38), “courted” for “worshipp’d” (line 46), and “respect” for “adore” (line 51). Philips, Poem 38, lines 9–10. Usually, amicitia shows the friends educating the tyrant, as in Philips’s “Parting with a Friend,” where the friends “conquer” and “teach” the “wanton Tyrant” Fortune (Poem 112, lines 13–14). Seneca, De beneficiis, II.xviii, pp. 87–9. Philips, Poem 38, lines 5–6 and 11. Ibid., lines 11–12. Though “prospect” commonly describes a view of a place, Philips uses “prospect” to describe a future state in one of her letters, where she asks Poliarchus and Rosania to assist her in finding ways to help Antenor: “I could not propose to my self any way to recover the Happiness of your Company, unless I had a Prospect at the same time of doing him some Service” (Philips, Collected Works, vol. II, Letter XXXVI, p. 102). Further references to Philips’s letters, unless specified otherwise, will be to this edition, cited by letter number. Philips, Poem 38, lines 13–20. See Lilley, “Dear Object,” p. 171. Philips, Poem 38, lines 24–8. The poem begins “I thinke not on the state, nor am concern’d / Which

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105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

Friendship’s Shadows way soever that great Helme is turn’d” but goes on to assert that “Silence were now a Sin” (Philips, Poem 1, lines 1–2 and 7). The unprecedented execution of the king requires speech from one who would have preferred to remain silent. Philips, Poem 39, lines 19–20. Philips, Poem 38, lines 34–6. Ibid., lines 37–8. Thus Cicero: “we have no ties of fellowship with a tyrant, but rather the bitterest feud.” Cicero, De officiis, III.vi, p. 299. For Seneca, De beneficiis, II.xviii, p. 89, accepting a benefit from a tyrant does not generate obligations, because of the dangers of refusal. On clemency, see Shifflett, “Kings,” pp. 88–109 and Stoicism, pp. 75–106. The locus classicus is Seneca, De clementia. Examples of humanist texts that link rhetorical education to amicitia include Erasmus’ Adages and Elyot’s Boke. Philips, Poem 38, lines 39–42. See “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia” (Philips, Poem 22), “An ode upon retirement, made upon occasion of Mr. Cowley’s on that subject” (Philips, Poem 77), and “Content, to my dearest Lucasia” (Philips, Poem 18), among others. Dering, University of Cincinnati Library, Phillipps MS. 14932, Letter 4, Lisbourne, 3 January 1662, demonstrates the way in which friendship’s rhetorical power accrues to all the friends when he depicts Lucasia as Orpheus. Further references to Dering’s letters will be by their numbers, as ordered in the manuscript. Philips, Poem 38, lines 43–8. Philips, Poem 38, line 15. Given that this poem likely commemorates Orinda’s distress over Rosania’s secret marriage, the lines evoke wedding vows. Jeremy Taylor, Discourse, p. 88. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Philips, Poem 102, lines 13–18. Altars serve as an emblem of reciprocity in “Friendship’s Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia,” Poem 17, lines 26–8. In “Rosania’s Private Marriage,” Poem 37, lines 15–16, “rites and altars” carry a more problematic sense of “Idolatry.” Philips, Poem 58, lines 3–4. Hutson, “Body,” p. 208, draws attention to the ways in which “Philips can write poems that recreate the erotic charge of social prestige in itself – the eros, that is to say, not in the embodiedness of the body-as-sign, but in the significance of the body-as-sign.” Philips, Poem 85, lines 14 and 16. Ibid., lines 15–16. Elizabeth and Ann Boyle are both daughters of Richard Boyle, second Earl of Cork at the time of these poems’ writing (and later also first Earl of Burlington), privy councillor, lord treasurer of Ireland, and one of the wealthiest men in Ireland. Cicero De amicitia, v, p. 129, qualifies this with “or at most, a few.”

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128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

111

See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.6, p. 214; and Montaigne, Essayes, trans. Florio, I.204–7. Philips, Poem 34, line 81; Poem 68, lines 11–12. See Finch, Friendship, p. 30: “its own Native Beauty and Lustre; which will appear best in the inquiry into its Use and Benefit, that being the touchstone which makes it passe for currant or not.” Philips, Poem 68, line 1. Ibid., line 10. Ibid., lines 13–14 and 16; emphases added. Ibid., lines 19–24. Mary (Harvey) Dering, a friend of Philips’s from school, provides an interesting exception to this case, for she composes the music for several songs published in Henry Lawes’s Second Book of Ayres (1655), in which Philips has a poem set to music; Sir Edward Dering, Mary Dering’s husband, writes the lyrics for the compositions. See Souers, Matchless Orinda, pp. 20 and 60. For example, see Lilley, “Dear Object,” p. 170. Finch, Friendship, p. 7. See Ballaster, “Restoring,” p. 234; and Gray, “Philips and the PostCourtly Coterie,” pp. 426–51. The vexed status of friendship in Finch’s account becomes clearer through comparison with Churchyard, Sparke, fols. C1v–C2, who simply calls friendship “the glorie of Kings, and the suretie of subiects.” See Philips, Letters X, XVIII, XXIII, and XXVII (which takes comfort in the thought of Poliarchus and Rosania meeting with each other in Orinda’s absence). See Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932, Letters 7, 32, 34, and 47. Prefatory letter from Polexander (unidentified) to Rosania, NLW MS 776b, fol. A2. The manuscript of Philips’s poems owned by the Derings (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Misc. *HRC 151 Philips MS 14,937 [D]) groups all the Rosania poems together, early in the manuscript. The sequence of Rosania poems in that manuscript is: “April 1651. L’amitié. To Mrs Mary Aubrey,” (sequence interrupted by “On the Excellent Palaemon”), “12 December 1650. To Mrs Mary Aubrey upon Absence,” “To Mrs Mary Aubrey on Parting,” “15th Sept. 1651. Rosania Shadowed,” “Rosania’s Private Marriage,” and “25 September 1662 [date probably incorrect for 1652].” This concludes the Rosania poems in the manuscript, unless “Injuria Amicitia” is taken to refer to Rosania, as it might. However, here the poem comprises part of a sequence of poems to Regina, indicating that it may refer to her. NLW MS 775b, in Philips’s hand and plausibly a clean working copy, has the same sequence as the Dering manuscript without the interruption of the Palaemon poem and without including “To Mrs Mary Aubrey on Parting” at all. The Lucasia poems, in contrast, have a less cohesive grouping in this manuscript. Yale Osborn b118 does not contain this sequence, though it does have “Invitation to the Countrey.” Cardiff Central Library Cardiff MS 2.1073 omits all of this dissolution sequence, despite incorporating two

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142.

143.

144.

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

Friendship’s Shadows passionate poems on being parted from Rosania (“To Mrs. M. A. upon Absence” and “To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at Parting”). The printed Tutin edition (1904) prints none of this series of poems, and in fact very few of the friendship poems at all. NLW MS 776b begins with the translations; this is the fourth English poem. It follows “Rosania’s private marriage” with a series of poems on Lucasia: “To ye truly noble Mrs Anne Owen, / on my first approaches;” “To ye Excellent Mrs Anne Owne, upon / her receiving ye name of Lucasia, & / Adoption into our Society, Decr 28. 1651;” “Friendship in Embleme, / Or ye Seale, to my dearest Lucasia;” “On ye 3 of Septr 1651” (not a Lucasia poem); “To my Lucasia;” and “Friendship.” For example, “L’amitié: To Mrs Mary Aubrey,” dated 6 April 1651 (p. 3; Philips, Poem 50), precedes “To Mrs Mary Awbrey / upon absence. Set by Mr Henry Lawes,” dated 12 December 1650 (p. 6; Philips, Poem 49). The Dering manuscript also omits specific references to Montagu’s marriage in the poems on that topic, so that “Rosania shadowed” does not include “while Mrs Mary Aubrey” (a caveat that recognizes that condition as past) and “To Rosania” leaves out “now Mrs. Montague” (pp. 9–11; Philips, Poem 34; Philips, Poem 42). Coolahan, “ ‘We live by chance’,” p. 22, asserts that reading Philips’s poems in sequence misrepresents how her coterie reads them. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 297, argues that the use of lyric rather than drama or prose narrative allows Philips to avoid the drive toward marriage. In contrast to these rejections of sequence, the manuscript versions closest to Philips’s own coterie (her autograph copy, Dering’s copy, and Montagu’s memorial volume) all emphasize the narrative of friendships more strongly than either the printed volumes or those more removed from the coterie. Her most intimate readers do experience these poems as a sequence with passionate and ethical meanings. See Philips, “The Preface,” Letters from Orinda, fols. A4–A4v. Philips, Letter IV, 18 March 1661/2, p. 21. Ibid., p. 21. Philips, Letter XXIX, 2 May 1663, p. 84. Philips, “To my Lucasia, in defense of declared friendship,” Poem 59, lines 20 and 7. Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932, Letter 11, Dublin 3 September 1663. Philips, Poem 29. On Philips’s use of Donne, see Gray, Women Writers, pp. 123–6; Andreadis, Sappho, pp. 57–62; and Arlene Stiebel, “ ‘Not Since Sappho’,” pp. 153–71. Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932, Letter 1, Dublin, 5 September 1662. Ibid., Letter 4, Lisbourne, 3 January 1662/3. Ibid., Letter 4, Lisbourne, 3 January 1662/3. The slippage between the women’s names, manifested in the crossing-out of “Orinda” for “Rosania,” shows the extent to which Dering identifies the friends with one another. See, for example, Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932,

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158.

159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165.

166. 167.

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Letters 30 (“to my cousin Smyth”) and 31 (to Lady Roscommon). Readers do not always recognize the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of friendship amongst Dering’s circle: thus, for instance, the University of Cincinnati catalogue follows an early auction notice in misidentifying the series of forty-six letters to a single recipient, starting at the back of the volume, as being to Philips. In fact, they are written to Lady Wilbram (or Wilbraham), wife of Sir Thomas Wilbram of Weston, Staffordshire. Gray, “Philips in Ireland,” p. 562. On the Adventurers in general, see Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, pp. 72–5; and Beckett, Making of Modern Ireland, p. 87. On Philips, see Souers, Matchless Orinda, pp. 157–8. Philips, Letter XVIII, p. 57. Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932, Letter 28, Dublin, February 1663. Philips, Letter XXXIV, p. 99. Thomas, “Commentary,” Collected Works, vol. I, p. 383. Thomas, “Appendix Four,” Collected Works, vol. II, pp. 157–63. Dering, University of Cincinnati Phillipps MS 14932, Letter 28, Dublin, February 1663. Though he goes to Nottingham for the raising of the king’s standard, Dering then completes his degree at Cambridge and absents himself on the Continent for the pivotal years of 1643–4; he also manages to have the composition fee on his estate removed. See Seaward, “Dering,” ODNB; and Souers, Matchless Orinda, p. 67. Sir John Berkenhead, another member of Philips’s coterie, spies for the royalists, but his brother Isaac betrays them. See Gray, Women Writers, p. 123, citing Underdown, p. 46. Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, fights for Cromwell in Ireland, but also serves a central role in the restoration of Charles II to the throne. See Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 174–86 on Orrery. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. Philips, Poem 38, lines 11–12.

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Chapter 3

The Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden: Friendship’s Counsel in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder And therefore it is no longer a wonder, that men Love, or Dislike each other commonly at first interview, though they scarce know why: nor can we longer withold our Assent to that unmarkable Opinion of Plato, that Similitude of Temperaments and so of Inclinations, is not only the Cement, but Basis also of Amity and Friendship.1

The epigraph comes from Walter Charleton’s 1654 Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, a translation and modification of Pierre Gassendi’s Epicurean natural philosophy. In this text, Charleton presents the French Gassendi’s Christianization of Epicurus, a philosopher widely considered atheist, to an English public in the midst of civil war. In this passage, Charleton explains sympathy and antipathy by physical means: the “Similitude of Temperaments and so of Inclinations.” The language, derived from Plato, evokes in another register the distinctive nature of friendship, repeating the key terms of made and found in cement (solidifying over time) and basis (the initial foundation). In a slightly later text that introduces and translates some of Epicurus’ own writings, Epicurus’s Morals (1656), Charleton uses the same language to present Epicurus’ appeal for the mid-seventeenthcentury reader: Similitude of Opinions, is an argument of Similitude in Affections, and Similitude of Affections the ground of Love and friendship, . . . you will soone admitt him into your bosome, and treat him with-all the demonstrations of respect due to so excellent a Companion.2

Charleton mixes the traditional language of friendship with Epicurean mechanistic philosophy in order to portray Epicurus as attractive not because of his foreign exoticism, but instead because of his likeness to English thought. Charleton’s stress on friendship in his descriptions accords, too, with the centrality of friendship to Epicurean philosophy:

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Diogenes Laertius quotes as one of Epicurus’ “Sovran Maxims” that “Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”3 Works such as Gassendi’s and Charleton’s comprise “so much discourse . . . at second hand” in the 1640s and 1650s that Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81) chooses to translate an Epicurean epic poem, Lucretius’ De rerum natura.4 In the 1650s, Hutchinson takes on the exceptionally bold – and particularly humanist – challenge of making (arguably) the first full English translation of the epic; by 1675, she disclaims “all the Atheismes and impieties in it” in the preface written to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey.5 What motivates this dramatic reversal? Can the Lucretius translation make sense within the context of Hutchinson’s other commitments and choices: her steadfast republicanism, which rejects Oliver Cromwell almost as bitterly as King Charles; her nonconformist religion, which leads her to seek out conventicles in the 1670s; her ardent love for her husband, cast in a language that seems to reinscribe gender hierarchy and female subordination; and, most significantly, her other poems, including a biblical epic, Order and Disorder, that retells more of Genesis than even John Milton attempts? The key to Hutchinson’s political imagination lies in the relation between her two epics, the De rerum natura translation and Order and Disorder. In both poems, Hutchinson tells a story of how humans came to be who they are and how best they can live in the world. In both poems, Hutchinson, like Katherine Philips, grapples with a world riven with conflict and distrust, constituted by betrayal and changeability. Hutchinson struggles with the same dilemmas that concern Philips – changing political circumstances that produce conflicting sources of obligation – but she encounters them in different ways, uses different means to address them, and thus offers quite different solutions, drawn from a different part of the friendship tradition. Whereas Philips’s royalist convictions and her husband’s Parliamentary affiliations mean that divergent commitments shape the marital family, Lucy Hutchinson and her husband John share similar republican, anti-Cromwellian, views.6 It is the Apsleys, Lucy Hutchinson’s natal family, who have royalist allegiances. Hutchinson’s answer to the problem of conflicting obligations, like Philips’s, turns this problem into a resource by understanding these threats as integral to human existence (an insight afforded, in part, by her own contradictory position as a woman).7 Drawing on Epicurean friendship doctrine and Lucretius’ modifications of it, Hutchinson describes the origin of human society in chosen associations between friends rather than biological ties within families. This

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leads, in Order and Disorder, not only to a mitigation of procreation as a dominant structure, but also to a larger scope for wifely prudential counsel.

Epicurean Friendship Hutchinson foregrounds the obligations of friendship throughout De rerum natura. This emphasis is unique among seventeenth-century translations of the poem, and in several cases her focus on friendship contravenes the literal meaning of Lucretius’ Latin. The most striking of these instances occurs at the beginning of book three of the epic, where Lucretius names the fear of death as the root of the human evils of superstition and ambition; Epicurus’ philosophy primarily aims to eliminate these ills by teaching his followers not to fear death. Hutchinson translates the consequences as follows: this vaine feare, which vertue doth oppose, Breaks the strict bond of friendship, overthrows All pietie; for men feard death t’evade, Oft have their countries and deare friends betreyd.8

In the paired threat of betrayal of country and of friend the tension within amicitia returns. But the pairing of country and friend is Hutchinson’s innovation: the Latin for these two lines is “nam iam saepe homines patriam carosque parentis / prodiderunt, vitare Acherusia templa petentes.”9 John Evelyn, the laurelled “masculine Witt,” translates them as “of’t such men the feare of death dos sway / Country, and dearest parents to betray.”10 Thomas Creech, whose complete 1682 translation serves as the standard text of Lucretius throughout the eighteenth century, also uses “parents”: “So some their Parents, and their Countrey sell, / To free themselves from Death, and following Hell.”11 In the context of the fear of violent death that requires the formation of human communities, Hutchinson insists that friends, rather than the patriarchal family, are the foundation of that bond. Hutchinson’s emphasis resonates with the centrality of friendship within Epicurean doctrine.12 In contrast to his dubious attitude toward marriage, children, and sex, Epicurus elevates friendship as “worth choosing for its own sake.”13 Though he offers the exuberant adage that “Friendship dances around the world announcing to all of us that we must wake up to blessedness,” Epicurus also notes that friends must be willing to suffer and even to die for one another.14 In this combination of extravagant praise and a commitment that extends to death,

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Epicurean friendship accords with significant aspects of the Aristotelian and Ciceronian friendship traditions. Epicurus’ version of friendship, however, differs in other important ways: the number of friends, the inclusion of women, and the relation to politics. The communal structure of Epicurean friendship distinguishes it from amicitia perfecta, which writers generally restrict to only two good men. In contrast, Epicurus’ garden provides a space of friendship for a larger group (although this friendship does not extend beyond the self-selected group, as in Stoic natural sociability).15 In this way, friendship among the students of Epicurean philosophy offers an example of remarkable concord and unanimity of opinion. Thomas Stanley, who includes an extensive discussion of Epicurus in his History of Philosophy (1660), cites the words of “Numenius, the Pythagorean, in Eusebius”: Hence, by reason, of their constant agreement among themselves, they enjoy their doctrines peaceably and quietly, and this Institution of Epicurus resembles the true state of a perfect Common-wealth; which being far from sedition, is governed by one joynt mind and opinion.16

While Stanley notes a fear of innovation that sounds stultifying, his desire for the “perfect Common-wealth,” “far from sedition,” speaks plaintively of his historical moment in 1660. Stanley also points out that the sect continued for 237 years after Epicurus’ death, “as if they had all one Soul amongst them, saith Seneca.”17 The conceit of the single soul among the friends recalls “one soul in bodies twain,” the friendship trope that permits only two friends. Stanley praises the harmony in Epicurus’ garden, but he cannot refrain from mentioning two particular members of the sect, “born the same day, followers of the sect of the same Master, Epicurus, joyned together in the common possession of estate and maintenance of that School, died very old, in the same moment of time.”18 Thus, Stanley reinstates the trope of the two perfect friends, startlingly alike, even as he marvels at the long-standing unity of the larger group. The slippage in Stanley’s history, where he reverts to the more familiar Ciceronian model of amicitia perfecta, also characterizes most responses to another remarkable feature of Epicurean friendship: the garden of Epicurus includes women among its friends. Although some writers adopt Epicurus’ model to validate women’s education, this progressive stance on learning for all causes scandal, in Epicurus’ time and in the seventeenth century.19 In De natura deorum, Cicero famously condemns Epicurus’ inclusion of women, describing a woman writing a work of philosophy as a breach of rhetorical decorum not mitigated by the fact that “her style no doubt is the neatest of Attic.”20 Rumors circulate that

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the members of the Epicurean school occupy themselves with orgies; Diogenes Laertius quotes detractors of Epicurus who conflate the pursuit of pleasure with sexual pleasures.21 In the seventeenth century, Richard Brathwaite, in his conduct manual The English Gentlewoman (1631), lambasts “Feminine Epicures” for drinking and carousing.22 Stanley notes the names of three eminent female members of Epicurus’ school, while also mentioning the obscene writings falsely published in the name of one of the women in order to discredit her.23 Most damningly, in the reports of Epicurus’ own will the dominant order of gender hierarchy reappears. In his will, Epicurus leaves a dowry for his friend’s daughter, “so long as she is well-ordered and obedient” and says that she should be married to one of his school.24 Although women can participate in Epicurus’ garden as friends and philosophers, they nevertheless remain subject to the usual requirements of marriage and subordination. Brathwaite provides a useful example of the early seventeenth-century response to Epicurus, for in addition to instructions for an English Gentlewoman, he also writes The English Gentleman (1630) and a treatise against Epicurus, Nature’s Embassie (1621). These three works, in conjunction, represent the dominant view of Epicurus, and of Epicurean friendship more particularly, in the early seventeenth century. In Nature’s Embassie, Brathwaite characterizes Epicureans as sensual and immoderate while mocking their idea of the soul’s mortality.25 He misses or misrepresents the point entirely, depicting Epicureans as afraid of death and bad at ruling a commonwealth.26 Even Brathwaite’s table of contents makes the point, for while every other target of satire appears associated with a sin, Epicurus’ listed sin is simply his own philosophy of “Epicurisme.” Friendship does not figure in Brathwaite’s discussion of Epicureanism at all. In The English Gentleman, however, it plays a prominent role, occupying seventy pages, with precepts and examples primarily derived from Aristotle.27 In The English Gentlewoman, in contrast, he omits reflection on friendship almost entirely: when he briefly holds forth on the subject, he begins by discussing the pleasures of conversation and concludes by saying that women should keep silent.28 Thus, in the first third of the seventeenth century, Epicurus has stronger popular associations with unbridled sensuality than with friendship between men and women; reading Epicurus renders Brathwaite no more likely to include women as full participants in friendship. With the rehabilitation of Epicurus in the 1640s and 1650s by authors such as Gassendi and Charleton, a fuller sense of Epicurean friendship emerges, too.29 Epicurus’ primary difficulties for a seventeenth-century Christian audience are, most importantly, his atheism, which understands the gods to be disinterested, the human soul to be mortal, and crea-

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tion to be a result of the collision of atoms in a void; and, secondarily, his perceived sensuality or libertinism.30 Gassendi answers the first charge by integrating God with Epicurus’ atomic system: Gassendi argues for divine creation, a presiding God, and an immortal human soul.31 In three works, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), Epicurus’s Morals (1656), and The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), Charleton extends Gassendi’s project to an English audience. The second work’s title measures its distance from Brathwaite’s views earlier in the century, for the simple fact that Charleton finds morals worth advocating in Epicurus. Charleton devotes the lengthy, concluding portion of Epicurus’s Morals to friendship, subtly evoking its continuity with the dominant Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions by foregrounding the devotion of the friends to one another, the initial attraction cemented by continuing intimacy, and the willingness of the friends to suffer and die for one another.32 The fact that Charleton, unlike the slightly later Stanley, does not dwell on Epicurus’ garden, with its group of friends, means that the distinct character of Epicurean friendship disappears somewhat. With the publication of The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), Charleton locates himself firmly in the Epicurean garden. As the title indicates, this work modifies Epicurean doctrine to argue for the soul’s immortality – a modification supported, in the final pages of the text, by a character named Lucretius.33 The text takes the form of a conversation between three friends in a garden: one, Athanasius, argues for the immortality of the soul; a second, Lucretius, denies it (though eventually he reveals his skepticism to be a pose); and a third, Isodicastes, acts as the neutral arbiter. As the printer Henry Herringman’s advertisement to the reader makes clear, the conversation replicates one that actually took place among displaced English royalists in Luxembourg Garden in Paris.34 The language of the text foregrounds the friendship among the three men: as Lucretius says to Athanasius, his generous inclination to oblige, by doing good offices; the happy experience I have had of that, hath long since confirmed me, that, if there be any such thing as a perfect Friend left in the World, certainely you are that thing, where once you are pleas’d to professe a Dearenesse.35

Not only the readiness to do “good offices,” but also the willingness to engage in philosophical debate and to be persuaded by friendly argument mark this text as part of the tradition of humanist friendship. The sense of a community under threat lurks in the hesitant language of “if there be any such thing as a perfect Friend left in the World,” with the suggestion that Athanasius rightly takes a long time before “profess[ing] a Dearenesse.”

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This link between royalists in exile and Epicurean friendship highlights the vexed relationship of Epicureanism to politics.36 Unlike the civic friendship Cicero advocates, Epicurean friendship generally involves a retreat from the world and public life. Seneca writes in the De otio that “Epicurus says: ‘The wise man will not engage in public affairs, except in an emergency’.”37 This does, of course, allow for participation in politics if the circumstances warrant it.38 In Charleton’s account, the choice either to enter or to abjure politics relates almost entirely to individual character: some men find that private life suits their desire for peace, while other men discover that they cannot be at peace unless they have a public role.39 Charleton emphasizes, however, that if the Republique call a Wise man to the Helm, . . . it would be downright inhumanity in him, not to do a Publique Good, when it lies in his Power; nay, he would be injurious even to himself, because unless the Common-wealth be in safety, he can very hardly obtain what he chiefly desires, Leasure and Quiet.40

Charleton’s caveat that a man can only opt out of politics if he lives in circumstances of relative safety serves as an important analogue to Hutchinson’s account of state formation in her Lucretius translation.41 In De rerum natura, Lucretius makes the case for public life more forcefully than the popular accounts of Epicurus do. In the first book’s invocation to Venus, Lucretius asks her to pray for peace so that Memmius can attend to his poem: Sweete peace for Rome by gentle prayers obteine, For neither can we with a quiet mind In time of warre, persue the work design’d, Nor can brave Memmius, full of pious cares For publique good, neglect those great affaires.42

The lines depict war and philosophy as inimical to one another, but they also name war as a circumstance warranting intervention in public life. Memmius, the poet argues, will be better prepared for public life if he learns Epicurean philosophy; the poem does not invite him to retire from civic duties to the Epicurean garden, but to use this new knowledge “for publique good.” Hutchinson’s choice of the adjective “pious” associates Memmius with Aeneas, the preeminent founder of a nation. Hutchinson also translates “Memmii clara propago” (the noble scion of the Memmii) as “brave Memmius,” foregrounding the personal quality of bravery that might lead someone to choose public action rather than retirement.43 Hutchinson’s translation stresses not the familial inheritance suggested by “scion,” but instead an intellectual tradition of public

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commitment and ethical choice. Hutchinson’s Lucretius thus presents an Epicureanism that shares didacticism and civic relevance with amicitia. Furthermore, the echo of pious Aeneas links Hutchinson’s translation of De rerum natura with state formation. She uses friendship to imagine how that state comes into being and how it persists.

Vulnerability In its original context and in seventeenth-century translations and rewritings, the threat of Epicurean friendship differs from that of Aristotelian and Ciceronian friendship. Epicureanism’s focus on a group rather than a pair of friends, the inclusion of women, and the recommendation not to engage in politics in most circumstances all mean that the emotionally charged choice between the friend and the state that distinguishes amicitia perfecta does not comprise the dominant narrative of Epicurean friendship. Nevertheless, as Lucretius’ De rerum natura and, especially, Hutchinson’s translation of it reveal, the possibility of betrayal likewise structures Epicurean friendship. The difference is that this threat provides both the motivation for founding human society and the continuing threat to that society. In Lucretius’ account, the first men, “which solid earth did first create,” do not require friendship because they are stronger and hardier than later men, more able to withstand extremes of weather without the protections of fire or shelter.44 “They did not then in Commonwealths unite,” although they do interact with (and have sex with) each other.45 People begin to join in communities for two reasons: the threat of wild beasts and the gradual softening of humans by love.46 Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, “where every man is Enemy to every man,” is in Lucretius a belated condition:47 The use of darts, skins, fire was after found; Weomen by marriage to one husband bound, Mortalls, in wedlock, chast delights possesst Their pure joys with peculiar issue blest. Mankind begun then to be mollified Whose tender bodies could no more abide, Weakned with lust, th ayres open violence, . . . youth by fond parents traind Fierce, hardie natures, now no more reteind.48

This passage charts the emergence of gentler, recognizably human emotions, as humans transition from being beastlike in the satisfaction of their needs to possessing some of the trappings of society. The language

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suggests a positive valence to these developments, with “chast delights” and “pure joys” “blest.” It also indicates a new kind of vulnerability, however, in the “tender bodies” “weakned with lust” (odd, given those “chast delights”) that cannot “abide” “th ayres open violence.” Lucretius, and Hutchinson’s translation of him, both show these conditions as originating in technological innovation and marriage. But both Lucretius and Hutchinson are equally quick to locate the answer to humanity’s increasing vulnerability in associations between friends: Then begun friendships in each neighbourhood By compacts, which did violence exclude, Weake boyes and girles, whose voyce and gestures were Just motives of compassion, to the care Of tenderhearted guardians they assignd49

Hutchinson translates Lucretius faithfully here (amicitiem coeperunt iungere), but she also mitigates the familial associations by using “assigned” “guardians” as the caretakers.50 Rather than wholly solving the problem of vulnerability by providing protection, however, friendships also produce the conditions of war, from which humans require protection, as Martha Nussbaum argues: The softer life is more human, but, in its deep needs both from other humans and from the world, it appears to be inherently unstable. The instability has its source in the fact that each individual still reasonably cares about his or her own life, bodily integrity, freedom from pain. Thus each, entering into bonds of friendship, love, and social compassion, both seeks and at the same time compromises his or her own safety.51

Nussbaum beautifully articulates the paired, inseparable risk and reward that characterize not only the origin of human relationships and human societies, but also the ongoing conditions of their possibility. Hutchinson’s Lucretius focuses precisely upon this continuing vulnerability. In so doing, Hutchinson reveals that friendship carries particular dangers of its own – but also that these threats produce compensations other forms of affiliation do not. Friendship offers the greatest security and pleasure possible: For, as it is impossible for us, to conserve the sweetnesse and security of our lives firm and lasting, without the influence of Friendship: so is it equally impossible to conserve Friendship firm and lasting, without that Cement of Loving our Friends, at the same rate, as we do our selves. This, therefore, and Pleasure are the inseparable Adjuncts of Friendship: and who so doth not hold so full a sympathy with his Friend, as to rejoyce at his joy, and condole with him in his sorrow; doth but pretend to the noble title of a Friend.52

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Even Charleton’s assurances of friendship betray an element of risk: the impossibility of conserving not only “sweetnesse” but also “security” foregrounds loss. In its echo of the “cement and basis” phrasing of the epigraph to this chapter, this passage also stresses that friendship requires continual diligence and action. The introduction of “sorrow” points toward the unusual status of friendship in Epicurean philosophy: it can prompt a wise man to choose to suffer consciously and even to die in order to help his friend (consequently, Plutarch mocks it). One of Epicurus’ sayings helps to illuminate the reason: “The wise man feels no more pain when he is tortured his friend, his entire life will be confounded and utterly upset because of a lack of confidence.”53 The bracketed materials refer to a corruption in the manuscript; another possible reading is “The wise man is not more pained when being tortured his friend : , his whole life will be confounded by distrust and completely upset.”54 In an echo of the substitutable friends of friendship lore, the two possible reconstructions render who betrays whom uncertain. In either case, betrayal of or by a friend appears worse than any physical pain. Paradoxically, the knowledge that the agony of betraying a friend exceeds any other suffering provides greater security for human society than threats from without – or above. In Charleton’s The Immortality of the Human Soul, Isodicastes, the neutral judge, first tells of the origin of human society, then its limitations: when they found (after long experience) that all those Laws were ineffectual to the coercing men from enormities and outrages; because they could take hold of only open and publick offences, and reached not to close and secret ones: There arose up among them a certain subtle and politique Governour, who invented a mean . . . to prevent clandestine and secret violations of common Right and Justice, as well as manifest and notorious. And that was, by insinuating into the peoples heads, . . . that there was an Immortal Power, or Deity above them, who took notice of all their most secret actions, and designes, and would most severely punish all injustice, in another life, which was to succeed this, and to continue eternally.55

Isodicastes goes on to conclude abruptly that although Cicero and Seneca both narrate this tale, Lucretius himself can recognize its absurdity. The account presents the soul’s immortality as a politic fiction, constructed to scare men into obedience. Human society requires this superstitious tale because of the existence of secrets: men cannot police what they cannot see. The pleasures and pains of friendship offer an alternative to

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superstitious fictions and to “politique Governour[s].” Since betraying friendship is worse than other tortures, friendship eliminates the problem of secret conspiracies in ways that other forms of agreement cannot. Its vulnerability offers a distinct kind of resource. Following an account of the development of human societies over time that includes episodes of ineffectual monarchs and widespread violence, De rerum natura propounds a solution to “close and secret” offences: The wrongs which men com[m]itt, themselves ensnare, Nor quiet pleasant lives can any share Who breake the com[m]on leagues of peace; for though Nor Gods, nor men should their offences know, They cannot hope to hide them in all times, Who in their sleepes have often told their crimes, And in their raving feavers have reveald, The heinous faults, which they had long conceald.56

In part, the lines draw upon the Epicurean idea that a wise man will not commit crimes because his fear of being caught will cause him disquiet; the desire to avoid mental agonies becomes the deterrent, rather than the punishment itself. Importantly, however, the solution to secret trespasses does not rest in the philosophy or morals of the would-be perpetrators. Instead, the safeguard lies in the intimacy of those who share a bed and thus overhear dreams and fevered confessions. Thereby, friendship makes society function in a way that an absolute monarch cannot. It does so with the recognition that stability does not disavow threat and vulnerability, but instead acknowledges and incorporates them. The intimate revelation of the bed points toward a question as yet unconsidered: is the one who hears the secrets a friend or a spouse? For Nussbaum, Lucretius presents marriage itself as a form of philia, in which he stresses the continuous need for and support of a marital partner who exists not in an idealized realm but as part of everyday life.57 For Norbrook, Hutchinson’s alterations of the end of De rerum natura book four produce a vision of companionate marriage, with stress laid upon the mutual participation of husband and wife.58 The debates about the ideology and timeline of companionate marriage are vast, but two factors about which scholars generally agree play a vital role in Hutchinson’s use of friendship in her two epics. First, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fueled in large part by the development of Protestantism, humanist writings about marriage use the classical language of friendship to recast marriage as a relation with a greater focus on emotional intimacy and conversation. Nevertheless, the injunction to procreate and the Pauline assertion of men’s superiority over women mean that marriage cannot fully embrace undifferenti-

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ated equality.59 It is these last two limitations that Hutchinson refuses in both her epics. Consequently, she depicts marriage as a friendship in the robust sense, with all the associations of equality and intellectual exchange that evokes. The strength of friendship, however, continues to depend upon its vulnerability, a threat made still more urgent by the omnipresent condition of war.

Propagation Hutchinson’s biblical epic, Order and Disorder, and its debt to her translation of De rerum natura reveal the consequences of her version of marital friendship. The most influential articulation of the relation between her translation and her biblical epic is surely her 1675 preface, addressed to Arthur Annesley, first Earl of Anglesey, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, and member of the Privy Council.60 Hutchinson disavows her earlier (c. 1650s) translation as a youthful indiscretion: So I beseech your Lordship to reward my obedience, by indulging me the further honor to preserve, wherever your Lordship shall dispose this booke, this record with it, that I abhorre all the Atheismes & impieties in it, and translated it only out of youthfull curiositie, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernicious doctrines in it. Afterward being convincd of the sin of amusing my selfe with such vaine Philosophy (which even at the first I did not employ any serious studie in, for I turnd it into English in a roome where my children practized the severall quallities they were taught, with their Tutors, & I numbred the sillables of my translation by the threds of the canvas I wrought in . . .)61

As other critics also note, Hutchinson’s disclaimer is disingenuous: her request that Anglesey preserve her preface with the text implies the expectation of manuscript circulation, and her minimization of her own skill and investment is undermined by her criticism, in the first sentence of the preface, of John Evelyn, the “masculine Witt [who] hath thought it worth printing his head in a lawrell crowne for the version of one of these books.”62 Hutchinson is quick to point out that she has translated the entire epic. Hutchinson does foreground her gender, in a way that both downplays (she translated this epic as a mere distraction) and increases (she translated this epic amid many distractions) the stature of her task. The dismissal of De rerum natura continues in the preface to Order and Disorder, where she characterizes the biblical epic as “a strong antidote against all the poison of human wit and wisdom that I had been dabbling withal.”63

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Hutchinson’s recasting of marriage as friendship, which Order and Disorder derives in part from De rerum natura, surfaces in a generally unremarked moment in the much-studied preface to Lucretius. In her move from atheistic material philosophy to wifely needlework, Hutchinson asserts that she has not “the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernicious doctrines in it.”64 The word “propagate” lies at the heart of the connection Hutchinson makes between the Garden of Epicurus and the Garden of Eden. “Propagate” suggests a garden, connoting human agency that helps plants to spread and flourish. It is specifically reproductive, evoking a sense of nature that would seem to connect seamlessly to the births of Hutchinson’s own children, studying in the nursery as she translates Lucretius. But taking Hutchinson at her word here reveals that she refuses not the manuscript circulation or the discussion of Lucretian doctrines, but their propagation – their naturalization within a reproductive model of transmission. Like Katherine Philips, Hutchinson chooses a humanist model of didactic transmission based in amicitia over naturalized heterosexual reproduction.65 Unlike Philips, Hutchinson does not privilege eroticized same-sex friendship over cross-sex pairings. The stakes of their innovations thus differ. Philips offers women’s friendship as an alternative to marriage, although one that preserves obligations to spouse as well as to friend. For Hutchinson, the spouse is the friend, which requires that she reconstitute marriage in the terms of amicitia. This does not simply mean that Hutchinson presents an early instance of the rhetoric of companionate marriage, however. Hutchinson’s vision of marital amicitia resolutely insists upon its textual, rather than biological, means and ends. Recently, Shannon Miller has compellingly argued that Hutchinson emphasizes maternal birth imagery in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder as a way of critiquing patriarchalism.66 Both De rerum natura and Order and Disorder contain the evidence for maternal dominion and birth imagery to which Miller draws attention: to take only one example, Hutchinson’s description of the curse on Eve dwells at great length on the physical pain not only of childbirth, but also of stillbirths and breastfeeding.67 At the same time, however, Order and Disorder elevates intellectual concerns above biological ones: How much more bitter anguish do we find Labouring to raise up virtue in the mind Than when the members in our bowels grew: What sad abortions, what cross births ensue: What monsters, what unnatural vipers come Eating their passage through their parent’s womb;

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How are the tortures of their births renewed, Unrecompensed with love and gratitude.68

Hutchinson’s marginal gloss to Proverbs 15: 20 marks this as distinctively maternal pain – “A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish man despiseth his mother” – but it also emphasizes wisdom: the birth imagery supports the characterization of the pain of teaching children as more potent than that of giving birth to them.69 The anti-procreative bias of the lines receives additional point from Epicurus: Charleton’s version of the philosopher’s recommendation not to marry stresses the ingratitude of children (and wives – Charleton and Epicurus imagine a male reader).70 In their positive form, the words “recompense,” “love,” and “gratitude” allude to Seneca’s De beneficiis, where the return of gratitude, rather than material goods, for a benefit distinguishes friendship from commerce.71 Thus, while Hutchinson does indeed thread images of maternity and birth throughout both her epics, she continually undercuts the importance of genealogy in order to advocate a humanist model of intellectual and textual influence. An example from one of Hutchinson’s elegies on her husband’s death, “Musings in my evening Walkes at O[wthorpe] 12:th,” shows the importance of her refusal to privilege reproduction.72 Early in the poem, Hutchinson rejects the “disperst Image” of her dead husband in their children, desiring transformative intellectual, rather than imitative biological, likeness.73 Grief disrupts the shared literary practices of friendship, in lines that reveal why Hutchinson is often read as anti-feminist: Even my bookes that vsd to be The Sollace of my life while he Was my Instructor & approued The pleasant lines I chose & Loved No more my Sicke Thoughts recreate Who all my old delights now hate And all ye new ones I haue found Doe but vnreape my hearts deepe wound74

The lines are somewhat misleading, given that Lucy Hutchinson’s interest in her books initially attracts John Hutchinson to her.75 The passion elsewhere shown for John Hutchinson alone here shapes her reading practice; she loves lines of poetry as well as him. The alienation from her books, then, does not indicate the retreat of a feeble woman who cannot learn without her husband to instruct her: it records the self-alienation of a scholar deprived of a textually based, humanist friendship. The shaping influence of this literary basis shows in “recreate,” a stronger, more theologically loaded word than the “restore” she uses elsewhere.76

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Grief lacks the productivity of the politically signifying friendship: “vnreape” suggests both a ripping open and the opposite of reaping, the reversal of the fruitful garden. Even in grief, though, Hutchinson articulates a strong model of friendship. Brathwaite, in his advice to gentlemen on how best to select friends (a category in which he only glancingly includes wives), cautions that men can “impart our griefes to a friend,” but only “with this provision, that we never unrip our bosome so farre, as to give our friend power over us, in matters which may either concerne life, state, or name.”77 In Hutchinson’s Lucretian friendship, friends do “unrip [their] bosome[s],” in an act of trust and gratitude. Significantly, too, the Lucretian friend who is also a wife cannot choose but to turn over her “life, state, [and] name” to her husband, whose own state defines hers and whose name covers hers. Hutchinson’s depiction of the possibilities of wifely friendship shows how the vulnerability of Lucretian friendship enables the recreation of the bonds of human association in Order and Disorder.

Mutual Aid Hutchinson uses friendship to reshape both the motivations for and the processes of marriage in Order and Disorder. Notably unlike Milton in her account of the creation of Eve, Hutchinson refuses to speculate about events not specified in Genesis: “Whether he begged a mate it is not known.”78 The resistance to elaboration turns to a different extension of the text: a consideration of its implications for the fallen world. Where Milton depicts God teaching Adam in response to his request for a mate, Hutchinson herself instructs the fallen reader about the meaning of the biblical text. In a digression that lasts for seventy-three lines, Hutchinson criticizes the selfishness of those who retreat from the world, praises human civilization for enabling the existence of the Christian Church, and asserts the necessity of society for both protection and shared pleasure.79 Throughout, Hutchinson focuses on community rather than the intimacy of a pair of friends or spouses. She touches on many of the traditional tropes of amicitia, including moderation of the passions through the communication of joys and suffering, education in virtue, and usefulness.80 These principles transfer to a larger group through the humanist didactic modes that Hutchinson’s narrator adopts: the imaginative force of figurative language, examples of virtue, the counsel of experience, and the animating effects of passion. The innovation of Hutchinson’s focus on mutual, communal obligations as the motivation behind the creation of Eve shows more strongly

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in comparison to Paradise Lost. While Milton argues for the necessity of conversation between spouses in his divorce tracts as well as in Paradise Lost, Adam’s petition to God joins the pleasures of companionship – “By conversation with his like to help, / Or solace his defects” – with those of reproduction – man, unlike the self-sufficient God, needs to “propagate.”81 Adam’s plea includes both friendship and procreation: But man by number is to manifest His single imperfection, and beget Like of his like, his image multiplied, In unity defective, which requires Collateral love, and dearest amity.82

The emphasis on number, with “beget / Like of his like” serving as the transition between “single imperfection” and “image multiplied,” produces “dearest amity” as a consequence of reproduction, of begetting. This focus recalls the promise to Eve that she will “bear / Multitudes like thyself.”83 For both Adam and Eve, sexual reproduction provides a compensation that it does not for Hutchinson’s figures. Milton’s multitudes suffice in a way that Hutchinson’s do not because Milton underscores more strongly the possibility of reproductive likeness; the promise to the prelapsarian Eve does not look forward, as Hutchinson’s proleptic version does, to the pains of childbirth and, especially, of ungrateful, unkind children. Though Hutchinson’s poem does include the Genesis language of “ ‘one flesh’ ” and “ ‘Increase . . . and multiply,’ ” Hutchinson continues to emphasize the “increase” in wisdom produced by friendship over the physical “increase” of propagation.84 Hutchinson’s extended discussion of human society helps to illuminate the importance of her brief, but consistent, revision of the biblical “I will make him an help meet for him.”85 Hutchinson reverses the terms of “help meet,” first stating that among the animals “Adam found / No meet companion,” then showing God’s resolution: “God, having showed his creature thus the need / Of human helps, a help for man decreed. / ‘I will,’ said he, ‘the man’s meet aid provide.’ ”86 By transforming “help meet” to “meet companion” and “meet aid,” Hutchinson privileges fitness over assistance, removing the sense of an ancillary or lesser being implied in “help meet.” Her strategy thus contrasts strongly with that of John Calvin; Hutchinson’s own firm Calvinism later in her life, at the point at which she is writing Order and Disorder, makes this divergence still more striking.87 Calvin writes that “when the woman is here called the help of the man, no allusion is made to that necessity to which we are reduced since the fall of Adam; for the

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woman was ordained to be the man’s helper, even though he had stood in his integrity.”88 After the fall, man’s lust makes the “remedy” of a legitimate sexual partner “a double benefit.”89 By omitting the language of “meet” or “fit” entirely and by emphasizing “help” in relation to “man,” Calvin’s version stresses not mutuality and likeness, but female accommodation; the friendship language of “benefits” applies not to human interactions, but to God’s gift of an outlet for sexuality. Hutchinson’s mitigation of the sexual in preference for the social appears still more strongly in her account of the creation of Eve. Hutchinson does not focus on the intimacy between Adam and Eve and their choice to marry – as a reader familiar with Milton’s articulation of their passions and motives in the same episode might expect. Instead, she describes the benefits of larger human society.90 Hutchinson evokes mutual obligation between strong and weak, but she does not gender those parties as male and female. Rather, she argues for the exchange of friendship’s benefits across hierarchical divisions: Men for each other’s mutual help were made, The meanest may afford the highest aid, The highest to necessity must yield: Even princes are beholding to the field. He that from mortal converse steals away Injures himself, and others doth betray Whom Providence committed to his trust, And in that act nor prudent is nor just.91

The political language of “necessity,” “pruden[ce],” and “just[ice]” evokes the discourse of reason of state, but the allusions work in divergent directions. “The highest to necessity must yield” portrays rulers as subject to the laws of necessity, though the usual characterization – as in Paradise Lost, where Satan uses “necessity / The tyrant’s plea” – depicts necessity as a false justification of unjust acts.92 Similarly, the conjunction of “justice,” a word that alludes to an older politics of virtue, and “prudence,” a term that always connotes practical wisdom but also comes to suggest the potentially amoral expediency of reason of state, constructs friendship as a middle ground between old and new humanism.93 Mutual aid seems to unite strong and weak, in a relation both pragmatic and virtuous. Hutchinson’s description of the origins of human society in the creation of Eve focuses almost wholly on the workings of friendship in public, political life. She depicts the desire behind Eve’s creation as communal, not exclusive, and is able to figure this as a virtue because the answer to human vulnerability – a vulnerability produced by human society, as in Lucretius – is the mutuality of commensurate aid.

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The echoes of the origins of human society, the “Weake boyes and girles” “assigned” to “guardians,” in De rerum natura underscore this point.94 Compassion provides both the motivation for and the mechanism of society. It also serves as a limit on power, as Charleton’s account of men called to public service – an exceptional circumstance, in Epicurus – shows: if he shall be Elected to the Highest Soveraignty, . . . His chief and first Endeavours will be, to provide, that the weaker, while they do their duties toward the stronger, be neither oppressed by them, nor live in want of those necessaries to life, wherewith the others superabound. For, the End of every Society of men, or Commonwealth, is only the Common Good, or that all conspiring and cooperating to the Publick interest, the life of every man may be safe, and (as far as may be) Happy.95

Charleton’s summary of Epicurus and Hutchinson’s depiction of mutual aid in Order and Disorder share a focus on complementary obligations between weak and strong. Charleton and Hutchinson also concur on a point that distinguishes them from many other thinkers: “since it is not only more honourable, but also more pleasant to give, than to receive a Benefit, it must be an Act as most honourable, so also most pleasant, to confer a benefit upon a Prince, from whom it is to redound to Millions of others.”96 Like Hutchinson’s “even princes are beholding to the field,”97 Charleton shows monarchs to be indebted to their people. In this, both writers differ from Seneca, who cautions that conferring benefits upon tyrants cannot generate obligations, because refusing a tyrant is too dangerous.98 And yet Hutchinson’s poem suggests not an idealized world in which monarchs never turn tyrant (the republican Hutchinson would hardly believe in this), but something richer and stranger: a world in which mutual obligations create an indebtedness that produces safety through vulnerability.

Contract Hutchinson’s cultivation of fragile, fitting obligations contrasts sharply with another, more common, solution to human strife: contract. Thomas Hobbes provides an especially useful comparison, because his own account of the state of nature hews very closely to that of Lucretius in De rerum natura.99 This is Hobbes’s famous description of the state of nature: In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use

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of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.100

De rerum natura’s account of the lives of the first men shares with Leviathan the absence of “Industry” and “Culture of the Earth,” “Navigation,” “commodious Building,” and “Society.”101 The history of the growth of speech and human cities after the softening of men implies the prior absence of “Knowledge,” “Time,” “Arts,” and “Letters.”102 Thus in every way except one the accounts of Lucretius and Hobbes converge. That way, of course, is Hobbes’s most famous innovation: the continual war for self-preservation in the state of nature that necessitates an unbreakable contract. Both Hobbes and Hutchinson confront the problem of vulnerability in Lucretian friendship, but Hutchinson’s answer to it is not Hobbes’s. In order to eliminate the threat of vulnerability, Hobbes articulates a wholly artificial contract that cannot be broken once made.103 Recognizing the need for linguistic consensus in order for contracts to be enforceable, Hobbes also argues for an absolute sovereign who can determine the meanings of words; Hutchinson’s Lucretius finds this imposition of linguistic concord absurd.104 In maintaining a more open system of human alliances and in rejecting the need for a sovereign, Hutchinson’s translation of De rerum natura thus offers an alternative to Hobbes. Order and Disorder illustrates the possibilities and consequences of this vulnerability in Hutchinson’s treatment of the marital contract. Unlike Hobbes, Milton, and John Locke, Hutchinson does not use the analogy between the marital contract and the political contract to figure women’s relation to the state.105 In using amicitia to reconfigure political obligations, Hutchinson goes further than contract theorists, because she does not conceive of political bonds as irrevocable, as Hobbes does, or as depending upon the separation of public and private spheres, as Locke does. Instead, Hutchinson emphasizes the fragility of shifting obligations, finding in that changeability the possibility for human intervention and persuasion. The importance of amicitia to Hutchinson’s revision of the creation of Eve appears in one final element of her account: Hutchinson elides the marital contract between Adam and Eve almost entirely.106 Directly after her consideration of human society, Hutchinson describes God forming Eve from Adam’s rib, and then the first meeting of the first humans. Or, rather, she scarcely describes that meeting at all:

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[God] . . . of the bone did a fair virgin frame Who, by her maker brought, to Adam came And was in matrimonial union joined, By love and nature happily combined.107

Hutchinson’s passage does not articulate either Eve’s or Adam’s consent to the marriage: the passive voice of “was in matrimonial union joined” leaves out Eve’s assent, but Adam seems even less present, a subject only of the prepositional phrase, not of the sentence.108 “Love and nature” are the active agent of the sentence, with the consequence that the marriage, like friendship, seems both “made,” by “love,” and “found,” by “nature.” Hutchinson does not dramatize the moment that many biblical commentators take as the source of women’s subordination to men: the wife’s consent to be subjected in marriage.109 By omitting this moment of consent, and by focusing on an ungendered dynamic of mutual aid in the lengthy passage that precedes this brief moment, Hutchinson replaces gender hierarchy with mutual obligation. Only in “by her maker brought” does Hutchinson suggest something of the elaborate negotiation between coercion and consent that characterizes the marriage of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. In Milton’s poem, Eve’s own narrative of her creation provides two moments of possible coercion. When first created, Eve finds her own reflection more pleasing than Adam’s rougher shape; she needs to be “brought” to the marriage in multiple steps. First, God leads her away from her own “watery image”: “what could I do, / But follow strait, invisibly thus led?”110 Finding Adam lacking, Eve turns away again, and Adam proceeds to persuade her verbally and, perhaps, to claim her physically: Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half: with that thy gentle hand Seized mine, I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelled by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.111

Adam’s hand is “gentle,” but he must “seize” Eve, intervening physically, before she “yield[s].” The moment evokes the fleshly bonds of marriage, the making of two into one, but it does so in a way that underscores the husband’s control over the wife. The subsequent lines reinforce the wifely subjection that Eve chooses in this moment, in an instantiation of the wife’s agreement to be subjected to her husband in the early modern marriage contract. When Adam recalls this episode in his version of Eve’s creation, he casts Eve’s second moment of hesitation as a coy feminine desire to be wooed: “She heard me thus, and though

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divinely brought, / Yet innocence and virgin modesty, / Her virtue and the conscience of her worth, / That would be wooed, and not unsought be won” make her hesitate.112 Hutchinson’s “by her maker brought” corresponds to the first of these moments, but she has no analogue for the second. Hutchinson elides the consent of both Adam and Eve to the marriage contract because she chooses the fragile, reiterated obligations of friendship over the single certain act of subjection. In Paradise Lost, the persuasive force of Adam’s speech is inextricably bound up in the physical grasp of his hand, the subjection of Eve in her assent, the speech act of the marriage ceremony. In Order and Disorder, friendship’s benefits prove necessary in the very context of vulnerability and threat that prompts the foundation of human society in De rerum natura: Thus nor are the great, The wise, and firm, permitted to retreat, Betraying so deserted innocence, To which God made them conduct and defence; Nor may the simple and the weak expose Themselves alone to strong and subtle foes113

Foreshadowing Eve’s exposure of herself to the serpent’s machinations (and thus introducing the only hint of gender disparity in these lines), Order and Disorder reworks De rerum natura’s formation of contracts between the strong in order to protect the weak into a symbiosis between strong and weak. The obligations are mutual, if of different kinds. By deemphasizing the marital contract, Hutchinson maintains the constitutive fragility of the narration of human origins in De rerum natura, with which Order and Disorder shares a focus on volitional rather than reproductive inheritances and the acknowledgment that vulnerability both provokes and protects from violence. Hutchinson also puts the question of gender subordination in suspension, expanding the possible role of the wife in ways that a later moment in her biblical epic extends.

Prudence Rather than the more rigid contract, Hutchinson’s emphasis on continuing vulnerability creates flexibility for human action. At the same time, however, the idea of volition in a world of Lucretian atomism and Christian predestination, which is the world Hutchinson constructs in Order and Disorder, presents a problem. Can willed human action exist at all in this world? In the revision of Epicurean atomism to make

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it accord with Christianity, Gassendi and his English interlocutors take Epicureanism’s insistence on free will and denial of providence and propound a philosophy in which God foresees but does not preordain. He explicitly links this debate to post-reformation predestination, arguing for a modification of the stricter, Calvinist form.114 Critics often read the providentialism of Order and Disorder as a rejoinder to the uncontrollable motion of atoms, but that reading downplays the moments Hutchinson presents as corrections to the course, human interventions required to ensure events unfold in their proper order.115 In Order and Disorder, Hutchinson exploits the play within the Lucretian system in order to demonstrate humans’ role in fulfilling God’s plan. Hutchinson uses an unusual tactic to make events accord with God’s designs: wifely prudential counsel.116 Hutchinson creates a space for prudence by eliding the marital contract again, as in her depiction of Adam and Eve. When Isaac’s representative comes to ask for Rebecca’s hand, Rebecca’s parents “freely” “resign [her] into [his] hands,” without consulting her.117 Most biblical commentators see Rebecca consenting in this moment, reading the Genesis passage “And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go” as her agreement to marry.118 Hutchinson, however, recasts these lines as Rebecca’s choice to leave immediately, rather than waiting the ten days her mother requests: “The friends at last / Referred it to Rebecca, and she cast / It for the present voyage.”119 Hutchinson’s immediate response to this action is a sexist one, as she praises women of biblical times for “with due respect / Obeying their own husbands.”120 The following lines undermine that subordinate reading, however, for they introduce two politically loaded words that will characterize all of Rebecca’s future actions: “occasion” and “prudence.” She wisely chose occasion now to come With obligations to her future lord, Who needs must kindly take her quick accord, Without impeachment to her modesty So freely given, but yet not till she Was by her parents first disposed; and then With prudence maids incline unto those men To whom their future service is designed When it becomes their duty to be kind.121

As Norbrook notes, the language of occasio depicts Rebecca as a Machiavellian politician, seizing the circumstances in order to generate “obligations” from the “lord” to whom she must submit.122 This is “prudence,” given “their future service.” But, while “duty to be kind”

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recalls the “duty to love” that early modern marriage manuals enjoin as a central obligation of marriage, it also evokes the dual meanings of “kind”: loving and gentle; and similar, of the same type.123 Rebecca’s prudent seizing of the occasion in order to oblige her husband to her thus not only generates marital affection, but also likeness – the similarity of friendship.124 The difference between the continually generated obligations of friendship and the contract of marriage becomes clear when recalling Adam’s retelling of Eve’s consent to marriage in Paradise Lost: there, he recasts Eve’s hesitation and his seizing of her hand as “virgin modesty.”125 Here, Rebecca is able to go “without impeachment to her modesty” because her parents bestow her first – but it is her own actions, her own prudence, that produce the obliging affections of marriage, not coercion rewritten as modesty. Hutchinson’s revision of the marital contract in order to preserve wifely prudence rather than to create wifely subordination provides her model for all politics, as her generalization from this instance shows: Tedious consideration checks the bold; Whilst cautious men deliberating be, They oftener lose the opportunity Which daring minds embrace than with their wise Foresight escape the threatened precipice. Where choice is offered we may use the scales Of prudence, but where destiny prevails, Consideration then is out of date Where courage is required to meet our fate.126

The profitable example of Rebecca is specifically relevant to public life, and indeed seems to recommend boldness over caution. The lines advocate “prudence” in circumstances where human choice obtains, but they also counterpoise this pragmatic term to an unavoidable Christian “destiny.” Sometimes, however, as Hutchinson’s poem shows, the connection between prudence and destiny requires the intervention of artifice. In order to establish Rebecca’s reason as legitimate, Hutchinson does something very rare for her; she embellishes the biblical text. Still more strikingly, she adds to Rebecca’s story what she denies to Adam and Eve: talk with an angel guest. In order to answer Rebecca’s laments over the excessive pain caused by Esau and Jacob’s struggles in her womb, an angel descends and tells her that her twins’ fighting will continue to the two races they will found. Most significantly, the angel also asserts that the younger will prevail: “He shall his elder brother subjugate, / Courage and strength in vain opposing fate.”127 Ineffectual courage opposing fate ties this instance to the earlier example of Rebecca’s prudence, marking

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the inadequacy of courage without that interpretive capacity. This visitation gives Rebecca evidence that justifies her later actions. Later, Esau’s wives’ refusal to let Rebecca educate them affirms her preference: “Confirmed with powerful reason, she professed / And justified her loving Jacob best.”128 The emphasis on reason, experience, and educability illustrates the appropriate interaction between divine and human knowledge: Rebecca does not simply accept and act upon God’s edict, but uses evidence to support and determine her own proper actions. The way in which Rebecca contrives to have Jacob receive Esau’s blessing from Isaac demonstrates the complex interaction between her earlier knowledge and reason and the ascription of all power to God. After Jacob, dressed in Esau’s cloak with goatskin mimicking his brother’s rougher hands, fools his father into granting him Esau’s blessing, Isaac realizes his error: Isaac too late doth now the fraud perceive; But pious fraud whereby his zealous wife Strove to correct the errors of his life Who, governed by a partial blind affection, Stuck to that choice which was not God’s election, Who in their birth, without a reason shown, To make his boundless will and free grace known, Declared love to the one, to th’other hate; Well pleased in this, makes that a reprobate.129

The passage insists upon double predestination as the incontrovertible mark of God’s power. The language of piety and zeal justifies Rebecca’s actions as religiously motivated. But the lines also forcefully argue for the role of artifice in educating humans in proper behavior: her “pious fraud” “correct[s] the errors of [Isaac’s] life.” Isaac’s realization of his own faults demonstrates the success of Rebecca’s intervention – motivated, certainly, by divine will, justified by the angel’s visitation, and aided by Isaac’s delay in granting the blessing, but nevertheless a powerful example of teaching within marriage, of human education fulfilling the divine plan. The final instance of Rebecca as the prudent counselor exposes the gendered contradiction at the heart of Hutchinson’s revision of marriage through amicitia. Rebecca learns that Esau plans to kill Jacob once Isaac dies: This by Rebecca’s spies Made known to her, she, prudent, doth advise Jacob to make a politic retreat Till length of time had cooled the violent heat Of Esau’s fury. He, persuaded, next

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Pretends to Isaac that, her soul being vexed With Esau’s insolent wives, she to prevent Jacob from marrying so would have him sent To her own kindred.130

Again, Rebecca appears as the Machiavellian counselor, “prudent[ly]” “advis[ing]” Jacob in the “politic” thing to do. The emphasis on Rebecca’s agency even twists the grammar of the lines: though Jacob seems to be the subject of the sentence that begins “He, persuaded,” it is in fact Rebecca who both persuades and “pretends.” The method of her prudent persuasion is precisely what, in the account of her marriage to Isaac, appears to signify her subordination: parental control in marriage. Rebecca here uses the resistance of Esau’s wives to education as the means to persuade Isaac that Jacob should marry differently. She seizes the occasio of parental control over marriage to orchestrate the safety of her favored son. Hutchinson’s response to Rebecca’s suasive force seems both admiring and rueful: What power like that of subtle women when They exercise their skill to manage men, Their weak force recompensed with wily arts! While men rule kingdoms, women rule their hearts.131

The lines construct women’s power as without parallel, as they offer no answer to the rhetorical question. The final line, in its conjunction of “kingdoms” and “hearts,” forcibly recalls Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson’s derisive treatment of Charles I, regrettably subjected to his wife by means of his heart. But that negative version of counsel receives an unexpected rebuttal: “Her good persuasions happily succeed.”132 In the compact space of five lines, the poem traces the movement from a negative portrayal of wifely counsel to its characterization as “good persuasions.” In Rebecca, Hutchinson depicts the prudential workings of an artifice directed toward the accomplishment of God’s will. The productivity of prudential wifely counsel derives, surprisingly, from its nearness to betrayal. Hutchinson calls Rebecca’s plan to have Jacob receive Esau’s blessing from Isaac “pious fraud whereby his zealous wife / Strove to correct the errors of his life.”133 In an extended epic simile describing Isaac’s response, the poem links the didactic role of artifice to the double-edged threat of betrayal within friendship: As a stout man who with prevailing might In civil war had slain his opposite,

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And, with glad haste run to despoil the dead, Under the gilded helm had owned the head Of some dear friend whose dislodged soul had found Unkind extrusion through his cruel wound, Amazing horror all his senses fills; From every limb cold clammy sweat distils; The murderer like a marble statue stands By the pale corpse; his feeble knees and hands By trembling only show he is alive.134

The person Isaac thought was his enemy is in fact his friend. Isaac’s response to the “good persuasions” of his wife exposes the self-betrayal of the fiction of invulnerability: the soldier who slays “his opposite” “with glad haste” mistakenly believes in his separation from that opposite, only to discover their likeness – their friendship. This revelation makes him into “a marble statue,” an artificial man. In Order and Disorder, Rebecca’s wifely counsel acknowledges rather than ignores the problem of human vulnerability that De rerum natura first exposes. In using the friend mistaken as an enemy as the figure for successful wifely counsel, Hutchinson claims for women an intellectual rather than a procreative genealogy explicitly linked to the public language of prudence, necessity, and occasion. But the friendly education by which the wife brings her husband into line with divine will is also, necessarily, a betrayal, the betrayal that is inherent within amicitia and within the human vulnerability produced and answered by society. Indeed, the soldier who mistakenly kills his friend rather than his enemy illustrates Seneca’s example of the mistake that does not impugn intentions. We should not conclude from such an accident that we were wrong, Seneca says, but we should anticipate changes of fortune: It is the imprudent man who is confident that Fortune is plighted to himself; the wise man envisages her in both of her aspects; he knows how great is the chance of mistake, how uncertain are human affairs, how many obstacles block the success of our plans.135

The Stoic Seneca is not the Epicurean Lucretius, of course. But neither is Rebecca’s “pious fraud” actually a mistake of the magnitude of killing one’s friend instead of one’s enemy. Her “fraud” is “pious” because it fulfills God’s plan; notably, God’s plan requires “fraud” to succeed. Whereas the Stoic Seneca must steel himself against changes of fortune, Hutchinson’s Lucretian wife must wreak those changes. Rebecca’s wifely counsel, her “pious fraud,” is the clinamen, or swerve, of Lucretian atoms. Her poetic deception is the swerve by which contingency becomes providence.

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Into Epicurus’ world of eternally falling atoms, Lucretius introduces the idea that atoms can swerve, thus colliding with each other and generating new forms. In Gassendi’s words, he does so in order to “ ‘shatter the necessity of fate and thus ensure the liberty of souls’.”136 In effect, Lucretius uses the clinamen to preserve the idea of free will (though commentators from Cicero through Machiavelli dismiss this as a convenient fiction).137 The world of Lucretian atoms is a world of contingency and chance, but also a world in which transformation becomes possible. In Hutchinson’s reworking of these ideas in the Christian context of Order and Disorder, she depicts a prudential assessment of the situation, including a rational testing of God’s plan, and the human fulfillment of that plan through the tactics of counsel, deception, and poetry.

War and Sweetness Desiderius Erasmus’ Adages disseminate many of the commonplaces of friendship among the learned, and form a central part of the literature of amicitia to which Hutchinson responds. Erasmus begins the fourth chilias of his 1515 edition with “Dulce bellum inexpertis” – “war is sweet to those who have not tried it” – to which he devotes an extremely long essay.138 In lamenting the unnaturalness of war, Erasmus argues that man’s helplessness fits him for friendship – indeed, even requires friendship of him: only man is born in such a state that he must be long dependent entirely on the help of others. He cannot speak, he cannot walk, he cannot feed himself, he only wails for help, so that we may conclude that this creature alone was born entirely for friendship, which is formed and cemented most effectively by mutual assistance.139

With its language of “formed and cemented,” Erasmus’ essay echoes the passage with which this chapter began: Walter Charleton’s discussion of Epicurus, in which “Similitude of Temperaments and so of Inclinations, is not only the Cement, but Basis also of Amity and Friendship.”140 The combination of made and found distinguishes friendship from other types of bonds, like contract, which is only made, and natural sociability, which is only found. The “mutual assistance” Erasmus advocates resonates with Hutchinson’s strong insistence that “Men for each other’s mutual help were made” in Order and Disorder.141 But here Erasmus encounters a problem. For how can a person “long dependent entirely on the help of others” offer assistance? By what means do human bonds become mutual?

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Erasmus answers these questions with a warning about the threat inherent in this dynamic of need: You can have no idea of the dangers and evils of some aspects of human affairs until you have tried them. It is pleasant, for those who have never tried, to seek the favour of a powerful friend, But the experienced dread it.142

In language that closely follows that of the opening adage, Erasmus limns the risks of friendship. The dangers are particularly those of power and inequality – the ambitions of powerful men that cause war, but also the relations that govern the natural helplessness of man from birth. Seneca’s warning about the care with which we should choose from whom to receive a benefit haunts these lines.143 The benefits of friendship, rather than opposing war, can lead to it. The threat and its relevance to Hutchinson become starker because it is specifically civil war – “brother falls on brother, kinsman on kinsman, friend on friend” – that Erasmus deplores.144 The link between friendship and war, enfolded within Erasmus’ exposition of friendship’s naturalness and war’s unnaturalness, shows the prevalence of the threat that Hutchinson foregrounds. Like Erasmus, Hutchinson draws on experiences of widespread wars for her articulation of friendship and fidelity. But where Erasmus seems to locate that danger solely in inequality, the indebtedness to one more powerful, Hutchinson reveals that no friendship exists without vulnerability, even friendships of “mutual assistance.” Even further back than the exemplary humanist Erasmus, Lucretius demonstrates not only how someone “long dependent on the help of others” can grow to be helpful her- or himself, but also whence the dangerous sweetness of war derives. In a famous passage in the first book of De rerum natura, Lucretius describes his reasons for expounding doctrine in poetry: soe strive Phisitians childrens weake age to deceive, And when they give a bitter potion, baite The verges of the cup with honie, that While th’outward sweetenesse doth their lips invite, They may receive their cure with their delight;145

The honey of poetry sweetens the bitterness of philosophical truths. These philosophical truths help to warn against the false, untried sweetness of war: unlike other epics that glorify triumphal war, Lucretius’ De rerum natura shows its bitter pains. The metaphor of the children,

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induced to take their medicine through a trick, recalls Hutchinson’s insistence on humanist intellectual genealogies rather than procreative likeness. It also recollects a metaphor from the famous preface to Hutchinson’s translation of De rerum natura: Hutchinson writes that she leaves the preface in the presentation copy of her translation “as an antidote against the poyson of it, for any novice who by chance might prie into it.”146 The antidote and the honey work to opposite ends: one prevents the ill effects of a poison, the other enables the good effects of a medicine. But the poison and the medicine are the same poem, as the double-edged potential of friendship is the same in De rerum natura and Order and Disorder. Children, like adults, learn of the risks of friendships only by trying them, and the consciousness of the vulnerability generated by those bonds is the only antidote to the false sweetness of war. Friendship is both the solution to and the source of human violence – the cleaving which is both a coming together and a falling apart.

Notes 1. Emphasis in original. Charleton, Physiologia, p. 347. 2. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, p. A4. Norbrook, “Introduction” to The Works of Lucy Hutchinson: The Translation of Lucretius, p. 81, identifies this text as a translation of Gassendi. As Friendship’s Shadows was in the final stages of revision, David Norbrook kindly shared the proofs of Hutchinson’s translation in the forthcoming Oxford edition with me; when published, the Oxford Complete Works of Lucy Hutchinson will enable much fuller consideration of all Hutchinson’s works. 3. Laertius, Lives, II.x.148, p. 673. 4. Hutchinson, De rerum natura, ed. de Quehen, p. 23. Unless otherwise specified, quotations will be cited from this edition with the abbreviation DRN and page (for prose) or book and line (for poetry) numbers. Other Epicureans include Descartes, Kenelm Digby, and Daniel Sennert. In the 1640s and 1650s, Hutchinson may be in contact with William and Margaret Cavendish, who become acquainted with the mechanistic philosophy of Gassendi in Paris in the 1630s. The Hutchinsons live near the Cavendishes in Nottinghamshire in the 1640s, and Hutchinson’s early portrait of William Cavendish at home in Nottinghamshire, before “a foolish ambition of glorious slavery carried him to Court,” is grudgingly favorable; see Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 84. See also Barbour, “Atheist Dog,” p. 127. Margaret Cavendish is particularly interested in atomism. It seems likely that a reader as voracious as Hutchinson would read Leviathan. 5. Hutchinson, DRN, p. 23. In “Hutchinson, Memoirs,” p. 183, Norbrook points out the humanist pedigree of Hutchinson’s task of translation. As several critics note, most trenchantly Goldberg, the creation of a presentation manuscript in 1675 indicates that Hutchinson does not want to

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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bury her translation. Goldberg first advances this argument in “Writing Matter,” pp. 275–301 and expands it in Seeds, pp. 152–7. Given the vagaries of practical politics, their anti-Cromwellianism sometimes has more in common with royalists than Parliamentary supporters in the interregnum. On Hutchinson’s politics and reputation, see Chapter 5. Hutchinson, DRN, III.87–90. Emphasis added. Lucretius, De rerum natura, III.85–6. Emphasis added. Hutchinson, DRN, p. 23; Evelyn, Translation, III.87–8. As Hutchinson notes, Evelyn publishes only book one in 1656; his translations of books three through six exist only in manuscript until their publication in 2000. The manuscripts are British Library Add. MSS 78353 (Book 1 and commentary in the 1656 printing, with manuscript emendations), 78354 (Books 3–5, with part of 6), 78355 (the conclusion of 6), and 78356 (the commentary to Books 3–6). Emphasis in original; Creech, T. Lucretius Carus, p. 71. See D. S. Hutchinson, “Introduction,” Epicurus Reader, pp. xi–xii. Inwood and Gerson, Epicurus Reader, p. 37, citing Vatican collection of Epicurean Sayings, p. 23. See Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, p. 54: “The outward things that Epicurus rejected included marriage, children, any sort of political involvement – in short, everything associated with society rather than the individual – with the notable exception of friendship.” Inwood and Gerson, Epicurus Reader, p. 38, citing Vatican collection of Epicurean Sayings, p. 52; Laertius, Lives, X.120, p. 647; Inwood and Gerson, Epicurus Reader, p. 37, citing Vatican collection of Epicurean Sayings, p. 28. Plutarch, Epicurus Reader, p. 71, finds this willingness hypocritical in a philosophy that advocates removing pain and embracing pleasure. See Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 10–11. Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, pp. 124–5, borrows most of his discussion from Charleton, but adds this biographical information. Ibid., III.v, p. 124. Emphasis in original. Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, p. 111, quoting Valerius Maximus. See Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, pp. 117–18 on Epicurean women in antiquity. Norbrook, “Sublime,” n.p., notes that Gassendi praises the learning of Anna Maria van Schurman, who asks him to write on the topic of women’s education. Cicero, De natura deorum, xxxiii, p. 91. Laertius, Lives, X.6, p. 535. Brathwaite, English Gentlewoman, p. 51. Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, p. 114. Laertius, Lives, X.19, p. 547; also in Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, p. 120. See the first satire, as well as the discussion of Epicurus’ own death in Brathwaite, Nature’s Embassie, pp. 77–80 and 127–30. Brathwaite, Nature’s Embassie, pp. 80 and 115. Brathwaite, English Gentleman, pp. 237 and 293–4. Brathwaite, English Gentlewoman, pp. 40–1.

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29. Even Charleton resists at first, in The Darknes of Atheism. On the history of Epicureanism in England, see Norbrook, “Sublime,” n.p.; Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 36–8; and S. Gillespie, “Lucretius,” pp. 242–53. On Gassendi in particular, see Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, especially pp. 58–60; and Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 24–7. 30. See Barbour, “Atheist Dog,” pp. 122–37; Barbour, English Epicures, pp. 9–10; Kroll, Material Word, pp. 85–179; de Quehen, “Introduction,” DRN, pp. 7–10; and Røstvig, Happy Man, pp. 229–88. 31. On Gassendi’s modifications, see Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 26–7. Barbour, English Epicures, pp. 9–11 argues that atomism could evoke quite opposite associations: the gods’ blissful disinterest could look both like atheism and like proof of God’s existence (if even the Epicureans deduce the presence of God, he must exist). Indeed, the atomic world, some argue, has even more need of a divine organizing force than a world built on other scientific principles, such as the four elements. 32. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, pp. 178–84. 33. Charleton, Immortality, p. 186. 34. Henry, “Charleton,” ODNB, identifies the three figures as Charleton (Athanasius), John Evelyn, who translates De rerum natura (Lucretius), and Henry Pierrepoint, first marquess of Dorchester, the dedicatee of the text (Isodicastes). See also Barbour, “Moral and Political Philosophy,” pp. 158–9. 35. Charleton, Immortality, p. 2. 36. Later readers and writers turn Epicurean philosophy to divergent political ends. In Happy Man, pp. 229–31, Røstvig articulates the once widely accepted narrative: the restoration of the monarchy occasions a shift from a neo-Stoic retirement that sustains simultaneous consciousness of private and public life to an Epicurean retirement that signifies indulgence and neglects cares of state. This accords with the understanding of Lucretius as libertine, prevalent in the Restoration. Kroll, Material Word, pp. 95–6, argues that atomism appears royalist because its post-Restoration libertine associations influence critical readings of the earlier period. Kroll attributes the influence of the royalist/libertine reading of Epicureanism to Thomas F. Mayo’s 1934 Epicurus in England; Kroll challenges the Whiggism of Mayo’s narrative. However, the counterexamples that Kroll advances are, with the exception of Hutchinson, neither republican nor Parliamentary. Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 36–7, agrees with Kroll about the influence of Mayo, although she finds his conclusions natural ones given the falling off of interest in more radical doctrines of Civil War sects, which advocate a totalizing equality similar to that in Lucretius. Goldberg, Seeds, pp. 152–6 draws extensively on Kroll’s argument to challenge the oddity of Hutchinson translating Lucretius. In contrast, Rahe, Against Throne, pp. 32–45, shows that Epicureanism and particularly Lucretius’ version of it give rise to political imaginations from at least the early sixteenth century forward. Wilson, pp. 11–12, theorizes that long-standing republican associations may have motivated Cicero’s decision not to engage Lucretius. 37. Seneca, De otio, III.ii, p. 185. On Epicurean retreat, see Barbour, “Moral and Political Philosophy,” pp. 150–1.

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

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See Barbour, English Epicures, p. 62. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, pp. 48–61. Ibid., p. 64. Rahe, Against Throne, pp. 42–5, notes that Machiavelli, discussing Lucretius, uses the instability of politics to argue that one can never be secure enough to retire from public life. Hutchinson, DRN, I.38–42. Evelyn, Translation, I.45, also translates this phrase as “brave Memmius.” In BL Add. MS 78353, p. 101, his printed commentary to book one, he advertises a different political affiliation by calling Memmius a “loyal Cavalier” who “could not but be engaged.” Hutchinson, DRN, V.966–1050; quotation from V.966. Hutchinson, DRN, V.1000 and V.1004–8. Friendship distinguishes humans from beasts, as in Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, p. 179: “To eat ones meat alone, and spend ones daies in Solitude; indeed, is to live the life of a Lion or a Woolf: and yet no Friend is better than such a one, that is not as well pleasant, as faithfull.” Having no friend is still better than having an unfaithful one. Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, p. 89. Hutchinson, DRN, V.1052–61. Ibid., V.1062–6. Her translation is also more feminist than her seventeenth-century contemporaries: where Evelyn names the weak as “children and wife” and Creech as “Infants, and the Women,” Hutchinson makes age the distinguishing factor with “boyes, and girles” (Evelyn, Translation, V.1132; Creech, T. Lucretius Carus, p. 171; Hutchinson, DRN V.1063). See Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, p. 266 fn. 33 on contract and friendship in this contested passage. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, p. 268. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, p. 181. Inwood and Gerson, Epicurus Reader, p. 39, citing Vatican collection of Epicurean Sayings, pp. 56–7. Epicurus, Extant Remains, p. 115; commentary on textual status, p. 384. Charleton, Immortality, pp. 136–7. Stanley, History of Philosophy, III.v, pp. 265–6, argues that contracts limit princely powers. Compare Hutchinson, DRN, V.1151–97. Hutchinson, DRN, V.1198–205. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, p. 187; see also pp. 140–91, especially pp. 185–91, which argue that this distinguishes Lucretius from Epicurus. Norbrook, “Sublime” n.p. and fn. 66. On companionate marriage, see Luxon, Single Imperfection, pp. 23–36; and Wayne, “Introduction,” Flower of Friendship, pp. 1–38. Dolan, Marriage and Violence, pp. 1–7 emphasizes the struggle inherent in the doctrine of two into one. For marriage as a friendship that incorporates difference, see Furey, “Bound by Likeness,” pp. 29–43. The fact that Greenblatt, Swerve, pp. 257–62 devotes his discussion of Hutchinson solely to the preface suggests its disproportionate influence. Hutchinson, DRN, pp. 23–4. Hutchinson, DRN, p. 23. See de Quehen, “Introduction,” DRN,

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63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Friendship’s Shadows pp. 10–13; and Norbrook, “Introduction,” Order and Disorder, pp. xvii–xviii. Paradoxically, the Robert Walker portrait of Hutchinson on the cover of Norbrook’s edition of Order and Disorder depicts her holding a laurel wreath. The modest disclaimer is standard procedure for both manuscript and print prefaces; see Wall, Imprint of Gender, pp. 169–226 on print and Love, Scribal Publication, pp. 3–9 on manuscript. Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. Norbrook, p. 3. Unless otherwise specified, quotations will be cited from this edition with the abbreviation OD and page (for prose) or book and line (for poetry) numbers in the notes. Hutchinson, DRN, p. 23. See Chapter 2 on Philips. Miller, “Maternity, Marriage, and Contract,” pp. 340–77; she expands upon this argument in Engendering the Fall, pp. 107–35. Hutchinson, OD, V.119–60. In contrast, Milton spares four lines for Eve’s curse; Milton, Paradise Lost, X.193–6. Hereafter abbreviated PL. Hutchinson, OD, V.161–8. The “unnatural vipers” eating their way out of their mother’s womb recall the offspring of Sin and Death in Milton, PL, II.779–809. Children’s education is especially important to Puritans and, Raymond, “Where is this goodly tower?” pp. 289–97, argues, to republicans. On the education of children and companionate marriage, see Leites, “The Duty to Desire,” pp. 383–408. In her treatise On the Principles of Christian Religion, pp. 7 and 90, Hutchinson notes the centrality of teaching others for educating one’s own understanding when she encourages her daughter to teach her children and servants. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, pp. 53–4. Seneca, De beneficiis, III.vii, pp. 137–41. Hutchinson’s elegies on her husband’s death exist only in manuscript, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU2, until their 1997 publication in Norbrook, “Elegies,” pp. 487–521. Unless otherwise specified, citations of the elegies come from this publication. Hutchinson, “Elegies,” Poem 12, p. 509, line 29. Ibid., lines 37–44. John Hutchinson first asks about Lucy Hutchinson (then Apsley) on seeing her Latin books; see Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 47. Hutchinson, OD, VIII.27–8 reclaims the theological meaning of “restore” from its immediate political context: her beautiful description of the world after the flood abates asks “What will full Restoration be, if this / But the first daybreak of God’s favour is?” Brathwaite, English Gentleman, pp. 282–3. Hutchinson, OD, III.312. Ibid., III.313–86. Ibid., III.332–40, III.345–50, and III.351–68. Milton, PL, VIII.418–20. Ibid., VIII.422–6. Ibid., IV.473–4. Hutchinson, OD, III.416 and 419. Miller, Engendering the Fall, pp. 118–19, argues, in contrast, that Hutchinson’s innovative formulation

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85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

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“Children in one flesh shall two parents join” makes reproduction more important for Hutchinson, not less. Gen. 2: 18. Hutchinson, OD, III.306–7 and 387–9. Hutchinson’s religious commonplace book (Nottinghamshire Archives, MS DD/HU3) includes an extensive selection of notes from and responses to Calvin’s Institutions. Calvin, Commentaries, I.130. Ibid., I.130. Again, Calvin provides a useful analogue. He stresses the social elements of Eve’s creation but mingles them with procreation in Commentaries, I.128: “man was formed to be a social animal. Now, the human race could not exist without the woman.” The capacity of “the woman” to bear children marks her distinctive contribution. Hutchinson, OD, III.361–8. The marginal biblical citation, “Moreover the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself is served by the field,” reinforces the leveling tendency, especially since in Eccl. 5: 9 it follows on a verse assuring readers that God perceives the oppression of the poor and the perversion of justice. The change from “served by” to “beholding to” shifts the power from the princes to the field. Milton, PL, IV.393–4. In PL, IV.389, Satan alludes to reason of state, arguing that he acts with “public reason just.” On prudence and reason of state, see Burke, “Tacitism,” p. 482, who shows the shifting valence of prudence from the late sixteenth-century onward. On the longer history of prudence’s associations with expediency, see J. Anderson, Reading, pp. 91–105. Hutchinson, DRN, V.1062–6. Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, p. 65. Ibid., p. 66. Hutchinson, OD, III.364. Seneca, De beneficiis, II.xviii, p. 89. On the similarities between Lucretius and Hobbes, see Rahe, Against Throne, pp. 291–320, especially pp. 308–12; and Wilson, Epicureanism, pp. 31–2 and 178–94, who notes on p. 180 that Creech makes this argument. Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, p. 89. Hutchinson, DRN, V.974–9, V.1041–7, V.997–9, and V.1000. Ibid., V.1071–205. On Hobbes and artifice, see Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 134–70. See Hutchinson, DRN, V.1083–8, V.1092–7, and V.1129–31. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, V, pp. 31–6 and 51–2. I thus differ from Miller, “Maternity, Marriage, and Contract,” p. 375, who argues that Hutchinson’s reinsertion of maternal authority in Eden and after anticipates Locke, and like him draws upon contract theory as a challenge to patriarchally derived authority. Like Miller, I see Hutchinson claiming continuity between the private and public spheres. My account of coercion and consent in Paradise Lost draws on Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 196–222. Hutchinson, OD, III.395–8.

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108. In Hutchinson, OD, III.405–16, Adam speaks the marriage ceremony’s language of “one flesh” and cleaving, but only after the marriage has taken place, not during it. 109. See Turner, One Flesh, pp. 96–123. 110. Milton, PL, IV.480 and 475–6. 111. Milton, PL, IV.487–91. 112. Milton, PL, VIII.500–3. 113. Hutchinson, OD, III.355–60. 114. On Gassendi, free will, and predestination, see Osler, Divine Will, pp. 81–93. See also Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, pp. 118–41. 115. See Barbour, “Atheist Dog,” pp. 122–37, and “Between Atoms,” pp. 1–16; and Norbrook, “Cavendish and Hutchinson,” pp. 179–203. See also Goldberg’s critique of this position in Seeds, pp. 152–78, especially pp. 171–5. 116. See Chapter 5. 117. Hutchinson, OD, XVI.154. 118. Gen. 24: 58; Norbrook, OD, p. 208 fn. 375. 119. Hutchinson, OD, XVI.171–3. 120. Ibid., XVI.180–1. 121. Ibid., XVI.194–202. 122. Norbrook, “Introduction,” OD, p. l. 123. See Kahn, “Duty to Love,” pp. 84–107. 124. Prudence similarly plays a primary role within seventeenth-century interpretations of Epicurean philosophy, where it connotes the “art of living well,” in Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals, p. 45. In this form, it encompasses friendship. On Epicurean prudence, see Laertius, Epicurus, X.132, p. 657; and Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, p. 65. Although Rahe, Against Throne, p. 83 says that Epicurus is hostile to political prudence, he primarily refers to the more limited sense of education for the multitude, rather than the few. The seventeenth-century English authors sympathetic to Epicurus certainly do not read him in this way. 125. Milton, PL, VIII.501. 126. Hutchinson, OD, XVI.216–24. 127. Ibid., XVII.137–8. 128. Ibid., XVII.541–2. 129. Ibid., XVIII.74–82. 130. Ibid., XVIII.209–17. 131. Ibid., XVIII.219–22. 132. Ibid., XVIII.223. 133. Ibid., XVIII.75–6. 134. Ibid., XVIII.111–21. 135. Seneca, De beneficiis, IV.xxxiv, pp. 275–7. 136. Osler, Divine Will, p. 91, quoting Gassendi, Opera Omnia, II.837. 137. On the swerve and modern critical responses to it, see Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, p. 57. On Cicero, see Inwood and Gerson, Epicurus Reader, pp. 48–9 and 54–5; see also Rahe, Against Throne, p. 41 on Cicero and Machiavelli. 138. The adage appears in Erasmus, Prouerbes or adagies, but with only a brief translation, not the full essay. In 1534, however, Erasmus, Bellum Erasmi,

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an English translation of only this adage and its essay is published. As Eden elucidates in Friends Hold, p. 164 et passim, this adage continues Erasmus’ emphasis on friendship and property throughout the collection. Erasmus, Adages, IV.i.1, p. 402. Emphasis in original. Charleton, Physiologia, p. 347. Hutchinson, OD, III.361. Erasmus, Adages, IV.i.1, p. 400. The internal quotation comes from Horace, Epistles I.18, pp. 86–7. Seneca, De beneficiis, II.xviii, p. 89. Erasmus, Adages, IV.i.1, p. 404. Hutchinson, DRN, I.941–6; it recurs verbatim at IV.11–16. Hutchinson, DRN, p. 27.

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Chapter 4

“Women, like princes, find no real friends”: The Manuscript Tradition and Katherine Philips’s Reputation

He may be in his own practice and disposition a Philosopher, nay a Stoick, and yet speak sometimes with the softness of an amorous Sappho.1

Abraham Cowley’s qualification that the poet may sometimes be a Stoic philosopher and yet speak as Sappho delineates the two contradictory traditions that emerge from Katherine Philips’s poems of mixed obligations in amicitia. These two poles, Stoic and Sappho, come to define Philips for posterity. In the process of opposing, rather than combining, the political and the passionate, later readers reach the conclusion that titles this chapter: “women, like princes, find no real friends.”2 This assertion, in a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript miscellany, characterizes self-interest as the threat to women’s and princes’ friendships, for “All who approach them, their own Ends pursue, / Lovers, & Ministers are never true.”3 This poem denies friendship to women twice over: first overtly, then in the substitution of “lovers” for “friends.” This chapter explores the path from Philips’s politically engaged women’s amicitia to this outright dismissal of women’s friendship. Chapter 2 demonstrates the political value of Philips’s amicitia: she uses lyrics of friendship’s dissolution to shape political alliances and exemplify political virtues in the interregnum and afterwards. Philips offers a model of political obligation simultaneously clear-eyed in its acknowledgment of the inevitabilities of betrayal and hopeful in its assertion that the most resilient political system therefore focuses on reconciliation, rather than a fantasy of complete agreement. Her coterie readers respond to Philips’s poems in this way, using the language of political friendship amongst themselves and figuring friendship’s bonds as vital to political life. The legacy of Philips’s poetry is not one of politically central, passionate friendship, however. As early as the 1670s, versions of Philips’s poems in manuscript miscellanies separate friendship and politics, rewriting the poems to emphasize one or the other.

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This gives rise to two main traditions deriving from Philips’s writing: an emphasis on Neo-Stoic retirement (in which retreat and moderation of the passions prepare the speaker for public life) and a focus on emotions and attachment (which, variously, foreground an aggressively heterosexualized marital passion, worry about the lesbian aspects of her poems, or treat women’s friendship as a minor distraction before marriage). Thus, Philips’s innovative use of the entangled politics and passions of amicitia becomes illegible. One consequence of this is the characterization of Philips as a minor writer, the well-behaved modest poetess who wrote verse about the inconsequential subject of women’s friendship. The larger consequence is the truncating of the possibilities of political community that Philips imagines through her lyrics: their complicated negotiation of multiple obligations disappears. The legibility of intertwined political and passionate commitments vanishes for two primary reasons. First, the increasing focus on companionship in marriage creates a challenge to other affective claims, such as friendship. Valerie Traub argues that “domestic heterosexuality,” which requires primary erotic and emotional attachment to the spouse, develops in concert with companionate marriage; consequently, even affective ties that do not interfere with property relations come to look like threats to marriage.4 Traub sees Philips as the turning point in the shift from innocent to dangerous perceptions of intimacies between women.5 In addition, this chapter shows the change in erotic meanings to be inextricably bound up with the second factor, the alteration in political meanings. The official emphasis on pardon and forgetting in the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion transforms Philips’s acknowledgment of betrayal and conflict from an alternative form of loyalty to a displaced regime into disloyalty to the monarchy. The difficulties of Philips’s position in the years after the restoration appear clearly in the afterlife of two mid-century writers evoked in this chapter’s opening paragraph. The preface in which Cowley articulates the poles of Stoic and Sappho appears in his 1656 Poems, which contains the advocacy of poetic retreat that other royalists read as his capitulation to Cromwell’s government, and which hampers his hopes for preferment after the restoration. The eighteenth-century miscellany’s allusion to interest recalls another mid-century author, Marchamont Nedham, whose only consistent stance prescribes rigorous attention to self-interest; his copious talents for changeable polemic do not translate into post-1660 successes.6 The legacies of all three writers take their shape from the refusal of late seventeenth-century and later readers to see the uses of betrayal. This chapter demonstrates the impoverishment of Philips’s legacy as

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her complex negotiation of conflicting obligations diminishes into two disjointed traditions, one of politics and one of passions. It thus treats multiple types of evidence: manuscript miscellanies that both rewrite the words of Philips’s poems and recontextualize them in new ways; influential political theories that intersect with elements of Philips’s thought while abandoning some of her innovations; and poems written directly to or about Philips, which use the cultural valence of her persona to intervene in various debates. Several of the most significant strands of political thought of the seventeenth century – Neo-Stoicism; Ciceronian and Tacitist humanism; anti-patriarchalism; and contract theory – share important commonalties with Philips’s poems. Nevertheless, they do not fully exploit the possibilities for revising women’s relation to the state that her amicitia offers. Strikingly, many of the tropes established by Philips’s readers soon after her death persist until the present day; they set the terms for discussions of women in politics, the relation between marriage and friendship, and figurations of lesbian eroticism.

Neo-Stoicism and Political Rewritings The late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century manuscript evidence reveals that some of Philips’s early readers saw her as a Stoic. The publicly oriented reading of Philips’s poems primarily focuses attention on her prominent theme of retirement (while paradoxically including a few celebrations of the kind of war poems she did not write, celebratory lyrics exhorting the common soldier to glory).7 In these manuscripts, Philips’s philosophical poems occur alongside those of other Neo-Stoic poets, such as Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. More importantly, her poems cluster with others on Neo-Stoic topics: in addition to retirement, a preference for the country over the city and the futility of earthly fame and riches. While some of these poems, including Philips’s, have Christian resonances, they also draw upon the classical tradition of Stoicism, translating and imitating writers such as Seneca and Horace.8 These manuscripts exhibit distinct thematic groupings, with a series of love poems followed by political satires, for example. The Neo-Stoic lyrics of retirement thus form an identifiable classification in the manuscripts, with Philips’s poems fully integrated into this category. The competing focus on Philips’s passionate friendships that emerges at the same time comes to dominate readings of Philips so thoroughly, however, that most recent critics do not see her friendship poems as relating to Neo-Stoicism at all.9 The Neo-Stoicism of England in the mid-seventeenth century draws

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largely on the figures of Seneca and Tacitus, united through Justus Lipsius’ definitive editions and compilations.10 English Neo-Stoicism links reason of state theory, skepticism, and Tacitism to produce a political theory focused on action in actual circumstances rather than ideal states; as with older humanist models, however, Neo-Stoicism takes many of its patterns for behavior from exemplary readings of history.11 Neo-Stoicism has particularly strong affiliations with protest and insurrection, because the philosophy plays a central role in the dissatisfaction of the Sidney circle and the Essex uprising at the turn of the seventeenth century. Consequently, Tacitism in particular comes to signify republican commitments, an association strengthened by the Basilikon Doron of James VI and I, who attacks the Stoics while asserting the right of absolutist monarchy.12 Critics of Tacitism and Neo-Stoicism, like King James, cite its focus on self-interest rather than the good of the state.13 Philips’s Neo-Stoicism manifests itself through an emphasis on characteristic themes, most notably interest, governance of the passions, retirement from the world, and constancy.14 Her firmest affiliations seem to be with Seneca, both in De beneficiis and De constantia.15 Through her friend Sir Charles Cotterell, the Poliarchus of her letters, Philips also has connections to Tacitism.16 Philips’s writings combine features of Tacitist Neo-Stoicism with Ciceronian amicitia, thus making the “old humanism” influenced by Cicero respond to her historical circumstances.17 What does it mean to claim Philips as a Neo-Stoic during the Civil Wars, and what does it mean to classify her as one after the restoration? While an earlier critical tradition sees the language of Stoic retirement as proof of Philips’s marginalization – describing her as a writer of “innocent little verses about her private life in Wales”18 – in fact retirement foregrounds the political meanings of Philips’s work, as Andrew Shifflett demonstrates. In his trenchant reconsideration of the legacy of Stoicism in mid-seventeenth-century England, Shifflett argues that Stoic retirement often meant retreat from the state, not from political action. . . . Stoicism in its most powerful forms is not about actual withdrawal from the world but about the meaning of action and the manipulation of anger for political ends.19

The language of Neo-Stoicism allows for a retreat from the world in order to reshape that world. This rhetoric of political involvement through retreat enables Philips to turn her provincial residences in Wales and Ireland into a political virtue.20 Retreat from the cares of the world proves particularly appealing amidst the dissension and violence of civil wars; it also tends to be the recourse of those who have fallen

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from political favor. Thus royalists in the interregnum find retirement, and its association with country life, particularly congenial.21 As with pastoral, however, the emphasis on an alternative set of country values can serve as a commentary upon, and challenge to, the current regime. Neo-Stoicism’s governance of the self – “Rightly to rule one’s self must be / The hardest, largest Monarchy” – can also question the political governance of the time, for self-rule removes the Stoic from the sway of the existing powers.22 The tradition of Neo-Stoicism helps to illuminate the ways in which Philips’s readers turn her poems to divergent ends. The retirement poems in particular offer especially strong evidence of her later readers’ attempts to separate her politics and her friendship, with one of the most popular of Philips’s poems in manuscript providing a vivid illustration of this process. “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia. 23d Augo 1651,” a nine-stanza lyric persuading a friend to the country, occurs in seven manuscript copies.23 In fact, although Philips only mentions Ardelia in this one poem, it proves popular enough that two late seventeenthcentury manuscripts list Ardelia in short keys to Philips’s coterie members.24 In a laudatory poem “Upon the Poems of Mris Philipps,” one of these manuscripts even includes Lucasia and Ardelia, not Rosania, as Philips’s exemplary friends.25 This rewriting removes Rosania, the clearest evidence of friendship’s dissolution, suggesting that a privileging of Neo-Stoic constancy might have abetted the neglect of Philips’s narratives of betrayal. An exemplary case of the rewriting of Philips’s legacy into Stoic and Sappho, “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia” actively engages both political life and a potentially erotic friendship in Philips’s original.26 Later readers divorce the strands of political engagement and passionate friendship, with James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, rewriting “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia” as a poem of political retirement, while another manuscript compiler, “J. Baynes,” brings out its status as a poem of committed friendship.27 The bifurcation in later readers’ appropriations of Philips allows for bold recontextualization: Monmouth’s use of her royalist lyrics to support a challenge to the crown. When Monmouth is discovered hiding in a ditch in July 1685, after his second failed attempt to seize the crown, he has with him a manuscript pocket-book that includes a reworking of Philips’s poem alongside other pastoral lyrics that emphasize heterosexual courtship.28 Monmouth’s use of Philips raises questions about his political loyalties: he initially refers his right to the crown to Parliament’s judgment and relies upon republican supporters, but he also draws upon his royal blood as the illegitimate son of Charles II.

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The Duke of Monmouth’s rewriting of “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia” adopts Philips’s Neo-Stoic preference for a retired life. Titled only “Song,” Monmouth’s version retains a great deal of Philips’s language. His poem emphasizes the danger of the outside world and the peace of his present moment: “With joie do we leave thee / Falce world and do forgive / All thy beace treachery.”29 His failed struggles for the crown heighten the verse’s impact. Monmouth’s poem further stresses its occasion with the alternative reading written in the margin by the last three lines. While the main text reads “W’ill sit and bless our stars / That from the noises of wars / Did this glorious place give / That thus we happy live,” the margin proposes “or: Did us / Teding- / ton / give.”30 Tedington (usually referred to as Toddington) is the home of Henrietta, Baroness Wentworth, Monmouth’s mistress. Monmouth hides out at the estate for five months after his first failed uprising in the west in 1683, until he briefly gains Charles’s pardon and retires to the Netherlands to plot his final rebellion of 1685. The reference to his mistress’s home helps draw out another context for this poem: the playful pastoral love lyrics elsewhere in Monmouth’s manuscript book, in which the speaker takes on the role of a shepherd debating between two loves.31 With its royalist associations, pastoral emphasizes Monmouth’s royal pedigree rather than his republican allies. Also, the series of pastoral lyrics shows the attractions of a romance plot: like the disguised prince in a romance, Monmouth simply awaits the unveiling of his legitimacy. However, these features raise other questions: why choose Philips? Why not, like his grandfather’s ghostwriter in Eikon Basilike, turn to Philip Sidney’s Arcadia for an apposite prayer? The heterosexual inflection of these lyrics contrasts strongly with Philips’s same-sex passions, and illuminates what is missing from Monmouth’s rewriting of Philips’s poem: her emphasis on the compensations of friendship and their political consequences. While Monmouth’s poem employs “we” to suggest at least two people united in their retreat from the world, it lacks Philips’s strategy of direct address. Monmouth’s verses start with the speaker and company leaving the world “with joie.”32 Philips’s begins with an invitation: Come, my Ardelia, to this bowre, Where kindly mingling Souls a while, Let’s innocently spend an houre, And at all serious follys smile.33

Philips’s persuasion becomes description in Monmouth’s revision. The solace of retired friendship is not an achieved fact; it is something shaped, rhetorically, from a Neo-Stoic disciplining of the passions and

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humanist textual exchange, in response to the “serious follys” of political life. Philips’s poem enacts this process through its deployment of persuasion: it tells Ardelia how friendship works in order to make it so. Even the pathetic fallacy works to this end: the bower is “calme as are those looks of thine.”34 Similarly, in ending his poem – roughly a third the length of Philips’s – where he does, Monmouth cuts off the move to interiority that Philips makes in these lines: Here let us sit, and blesse our Starres Who did such happy quiet give, As that remov’d from noise of warres In one another’s hearts we live.35

The ability to remain impervious, it appears, derives not only from friendship, but also from what it confers: innocence. “For mischief’s self can doe no harme / To friendship and to innocence.”36 The conjunction of mischief and innocence suggests the two readings of Philips sketched earlier: mischief alludes to political entanglements, innocence to erotic ones. To take the latter first: “innocence” suggests the “chaste femme love” that Traub describes in Philips’s poems; it falls within the tradition of inconsequential lesbian love.37 “Mischiefs,” in contrast, alludes directly to a Restoration political context through one of Philips’s own poems. Writing of the restoration of Charles II in “To the Queene on her arrivall at Portsmouth,” Philips says that Fortune will requite Charles with “courtships greater then her mischiefes were.”38 In the context of that poem, “mischiefes” forcibly recalls the English people’s culpability for the execution of Charles I. Written during the interregnum, “A retir’d friendship” depicts royalists living with this guilt, in another instance of Philips’s recording, rather than covering over, experiences of betrayal. At the same time, “mischief’s” legal meaning pertains to a harm done to an individual, rather than to the commonwealth; as such, it foregrounds the king’s private rather than public personhood as a larger consequence of the Civil Wars.39 The fact that Neo-Stoicism and amicitia carry both royalist and republican associations means that friendship does not cloister the friends from these betrayals, but shows their responsibility for them. At the same time, the idealizing rhetoric of friendship continues to offer the possibility of an alternative faithfulness. Indeed, “A retir’d friendship” argues, the failure to value friendship properly, to choose it and retirement above the struggles of the world, renders one guilty: In such a scorching Age as this, Whoever would not seek a shade

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Deserve their happiness to misse, As having their own peace betray’d.40

Philips places the responsibility and the blame for the outside world on those who should choose retirement. Friendship models a virtuous peace counter to “the noise of warres” and prepares the friends to oppose that world – whether as royalists, as in Philips’s case, or rebels, as in Monmouth’s. As Shifflett argues and Philips demonstrates, the Neo-Stoic choice of retirement does not provide an escape from politics, but an alternative participation in politics. And, in lines that perhaps feel too close to home for Monmouth, Philips notes retirement’s compensations. Where Monmouth closes his poem with two readings, of a happy life or of Toddington, Philips ends, But we (of one another’s mind Assur’d,) the boistrous world disdain; With quiet souls, and unconfin’d, Enjoy what princes wish in vain.41

Understandably, Monmouth’s own vain wishes to be prince might make this a bit hard to take. However, it raises another question: what does leaving out the friendship in Philips’s poem achieve for Monmouth? As in Philips’s other poems, in “A retir’d friendship” self-knowledge derives from the mirroring of the self’s passions in the friend; this knowledge enables the self-discipline of Neo-Stoicism, and thus the ability to transform retirement into political engagement. By omitting this self-construction, Monmouth’s poem deflects attention from his homosocial associations, shifting the emphasis onto his heterosexual dalliances; while Philips uses friendship to forge political alliances, Monmouth excises it in order to obscure them. The poem’s context then becomes the seemingly loyal world of Philips’s royalist associations. In eliminating Philips’s friendship, Monmouth also leaves out the threat of conspiracy that always shadows that friendship. An imitation of the Ardelia poem in another manuscript notebook, contemporaneous with Monmouth’s, highlights some of these differences.42 In contrast to Monmouth’s rewriting, this version foregrounds friendship, drawing upon Philips’s other poems for its language. The poem “On Friendship” sits in the midst of Neo-Stoic extracts, from Philips and other authors such as Andrew Marvell.43 “On Friendship,” attributed to a “J. Baynes” (one of several compilers), takes Philips’s work as literary model and source of aphorisms. Most strikingly, “On

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Friendship” downplays the seriousness of the encroaching world: where Philips’s stars “remov[e]” the friends “from noise of warres,” this poem describes the stars “danc[ing] their fairy-round about us.”44 Instead of wars, Baynes’s imitation worries about the lost friendship that informs so many of Philips’s poems: Nor Age nor death shall alter me Nor absence which at last will make The greatest Friends seek liberty – And new ones to their bosomes take.45

Of course, the poet claims, this friendship is different: it will last even past the grave. The speaker assures its reader that “Our Loves tho sever’d ne’r shall die / But shall be constant to the End.”46 This compensation is quite different from that in Philips’s poem, where the friends, “of one another’s mind / Assur’d,” “Enjoy what princes wish in vain.”47 The Baynes rewriting does evoke Philips’s political friendship in “liberty,” the suggestion of involuntary servitude between friends; in this, Baynes seems to read Philips’s lyrics as modern critics do, understanding the poems of friendship’s failures as evidence that Philips’s investment in her friends exceeds theirs in her. For Baynes and for later critics, unlike for Philips, politics occurs not through friendship, but outside it. In the minds of Philips’s later readers, it seems, poems can be one thing or the other: passionate assertions of friendship, or strategic acknowledgments of political retirement. They cannot be both: they cannot be, as Philips makes them, dependent upon one another, the obligations of friendship turning political defeat to victory, the passions of friendship forging politically efficacious bonds. Her later readers each take one part of this mixture: Monmouth the political re-entrenchment of retirement, Baynes the affective overflow of friendship. Consequently, they fracture the other-oriented self-discipline that creates political subjectivity and community. In the very act of choosing to rewrite Philips, however, both Monmouth and Baynes retain the shadow of those earlier obligations, an allusion to their meaning. For Monmouth especially, Philips’s poems allow for a gathering of rebellious forces in the language of loyalty, the use of a royalist predecessor to cast opposition as a return to an older politics of royal virtue and country values. These two rewritings of Philips’s poems at the moment of the struggles over the successor to Charles II reinforce how important the memory and reinterpretation of Civil War debates are to that later moment. The vital issues of the mid-century – the origins and consequences of royal power, the metaphors and narratives of public consent, the grounds of legitimate authority and resistance to it – recur in the 1670s and

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1680s. Sometimes the 1640s appear as a nightmare version of what might happen if the royal line undergoes any disruption. Sometimes, as with Monmouth, nostalgia for resistant royalism undergirds an alternative account of royal legitimacy. In the later moment, however, the dynamic uses of betrayal, startlingly present within Philips’s poems and the uses made of them in the 1650s and 1660s, rigidify into opposed alternatives.

Neo-Stoic and Tacitist Uses of Gendered Inconstancy The specifically gendered force of Neo-Stoic constancy reveals Philips’s affinities with political discourses earlier in the century, while also showing her innovations. Though constancy is the guiding tenet of Stoicism, early modern detractors of Neo-Stoicism tend to stress the opposite: inconstancy. Thus, in succeeding editions of the Basilikon Doron, King James calls first Lipsius, the Renaissance scholar most associated with Neo-Stoicism, and then all “Stoicks” inconstant. James’s 1599 criticism of “that Stoick insensible stupidity that proud inconstant Lipsius persuadeth in his Constantia” draws on Lipsius’ changing religious commitments; the charge thus has the force of particularity undermining theory.48 By 1603, the expanding popularity of Neo-Stoicism makes James treat inconstancy as characteristic of the philosophy itself: “that Stoicke insensible stupiditie, wherewith many in our dayes, preassing to winne honour, in imitating that ancient sect, by their inconstant behaviour in their owne lives, belie their profession.”49 James lambasts the Stoics for hypocrisy, but he also critiques their mode of reading, pointing to the difference between precept and practice. In so doing, however, he reads current events in the Tacitist fashion he decries: he measures the theory of constancy against inconstant behaviors. James’s criticism supports his point in meaning but undermines it in form. His rejection of Lipsius thus delineates a problem central to reason of state: the simultaneous acknowledgment of contingency and codification of political method.50 Philips follows in the model of Tacitist reading by refusing to cover over the narratives of inconstant friends. Philips’s forthright incorporation of betrayal in friendship aligns her with the Cicero of De officiis more than De amicitia, thus moving her toward a Tacitist Neo-Stoicism. Philips’s gender shapes in important ways the meanings and consequences of this move, as exemplified in the permutations of the metaphor of the river. In Lipsius’ Neo-Stoicism, the river represents constancy amid turmoil:

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As some rivers are said to runne through the sea and yet keepe their streame fresh: So shalt thou passe through the confused tumultes of this world, and not be infected with any brynish saltnes of this Sea of sorrowes . . . let showres, thunders, lighteninges, and tempests fall round about thee, thou shalt crie boldlie with a loude voyce, I lie at rest amid the waves.51

Rivers figure friendship’s generativity for Philips: curling and playing back upon themselves, they illustrate the textual and rhetorical abundance produced through the poems of friendship’s dissolution. Rivers also symbolize the specifically feminine form of inconstancy created by the obligations of marriage, however, as when Philips writes of Anne Owen’s marriage that “all former Endearments run naturally into the Gulf of that new and strict Relation, and there, like Rivers in the Sea, they lose themselves for ever.”52 Thus far, the river’s course from NeoStoicism to marriage seems to depict women as incapable of constancy, forced to be changeable by alterations in their married state. This suggests that marriage renders friendship unsustainable, with the river metaphor furthermore enshrining marriage’s triumph as natural. Indeed, most critics read the narrative of Philip’s poems and letters in this way. This is not the case for all women, however, as a contemporary of Philips’s demonstrates. Writing of her first two marriages (to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, and to Philip Herbert, first Earl of Montgomery and fourth Earl of Pembroke), Anne Clifford says that a wise man that knew the insides of my fortune, would often say that I lived in both these my lords’ great familys, as the river of Roan, or Rodamus runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling any part of its streams with that lake, for I gave my self wholly to retiredness, as much as I could, in both those great families.53

Using precisely the same metaphor as Philips, Clifford reaches the opposite conclusion: a married woman can preserve her identity amidst her marital families’, by using the Neo-Stoic strategy of retirement. Unlike Clifford, Philips stresses the loss involved when a later affection overtakes a prior one. In one of her most famous poems on the dissolution of a friendship, “To Rosania (now Mrs Mountague) being with her, 25th September. 1652,” Philips writes: Devided Rivers loose their name; And so our too unequall flame Parted, will passion be in me, And an indifference in thee.54

The conjunction of plural – “their” – and singular – “name” – heightens the pain of a parting caused not by physical absence, but by disparate

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affections. The trope of renaming gains further point from the fact that this is a poem about the dissolution of friendship after marriage, the wife’s loss of her name recorded in the title’s “To Rosania (now Mrs Mountague).” Philips, however, turns these poems of dissolution into resources.55 Two years after the above poem to Rosania, Francis Finch, a member of Philips’s coterie, uses almost exactly the same language in his discourse Friendship: “For Burthens, like Rivers, divided loose their Name.”56 Finch reappropriates the language of lament to describe an exemplary friendship in a discourse dedicated to the ““D[ear]. Noble LucasiaOrinda,” the hyphenated name stressing the closeness of the new pair. The metaphor of the rivers and the sea illustrates the particularly feminine form of inconstancy, as marriage’s obligations supersede all others. Philips’s use of it in a friendship context, though, shows this conflict to be a resource for Philips’s imagining of political bonds. Richard Tuck describes the Ciceronian “old humanism”: The king is above the laws in the sense that he makes them but below them in the sense that he must himself abide by them; a liberal political structure is underpinned not so much by a legal as by a moral order, with promise-keeping the crucial political virtue – a king must keep faith even with enemies.57

The crises of the English Civil Wars undermine the moral basis of this philosophy – in no small part due to the accumulated evidence of King Charles’s own promise-breaking. Philips responds to this crisis by using the rhetoric of Ciceronian amicitia, with its emphasis on moral faithfulness, to make – and, crucially, remake – alliances in the face of their demonstrated collapse. Philips is Tacitist in the sense that she depicts the breaking of faith, over and over again, but she is Ciceronian in the sense that she shows the reforming of that faith, over and over again, through the circulated texts of humanist rhetoric.

Natural Sociability, Social Contract, and the Afterlives of Philips’s Poems The impact of Philips’s poems on later thinkers demonstrates both the extent of her innovation in friendship discourse and political thought, and the difficulties that the official policy of forgetfulness after the restoration of the king raises for her model. The authorized 1667 edition of Philips’s poems, published after her death from smallpox, contains a commendatory poem by political theorist James Tyrrell. Though his first publication of 1661 is pro-monarchic, Tyrrell becomes a prominent

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Whig theorist and one of the leading exponents, with John Locke and Algernon Sidney, of anti-patriarchalist theory.58 Both personally and theoretically, Tyrrell is especially close to Locke. His version of antipatriarchalism relies more upon the analogy between the family and the state (a central feature of much royalist thinking, and one rejected by Philips’s focus on friendship) than those of Locke and Sidney.59 In contrast to Philips’s forthright acknowledgment of friendship’s betrayals and conflicting obligations, Tyrrell’s commendatory poem seems to want to protect both Orinda’s body and her poems from dangerous influences: And thou impartial, powerful Grave, These Reliques (like her deathless Poems save) Ev’n from devouring Time secure, May they still rest from other mixture pure: Unless some dying Monarch shall to trye Whether Orinda, though her self could dye, Can still give others immortality; Think, if but laid in her miraculous Tomb, As from the Prophets touch, new life from hers may come.60

Tyrrell initially wants to keep Philips’s body inviolable, locked within the grave. However, Tyrrell is more like Philips than he first appears to be, for he relinquishes the fantasy of purity for the reality of usefulness. In a play on the ceremony of touching for the king’s evil, Tyrrell suggests that Philips herself can heal the monarch. Her cure answers forgetfulness rather than disease: she “give[s] others immortality” not through the relics of her body, but through her poems. Tyrrell thus praises Philips as a court poet while reminding the king that the dangers of forgetfulness apply to him as well. In allowing for the possible resurrection of Orinda’s poetic powers, Tyrrell, like Philips, links her royalism to the remaking of friendship even after betrayal, and rejects the official policy of oblivion. Tyrrell’s poem to Philips illuminates the intersection of her thought with two central seventeenth-century discourses: natural sociability and the analogy between the marital contract and the political contract. Although Tyrrell writes on these topics well after Philips’s death, his commendatory poem’s selective response to her legacy shows the ways in which her poems diverge from his early thinking. In many ways, amicitia would seem to be like natural sociability, in its emphasis on affection and likeness between the friends. Tyrrell demonstrates some of the differences between the two. In his refutation of Thomas Hobbes, Tyrrell asserts a “natural sociableness among men, which we look upon as most necessary and agreeable to the nature of

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man.”61 Tyrrell depicts a “stricter League of Amity, called Civil Society,” arising out of natural benevolence, in order to curb the selfishness of the few men who do not take others’ interests into consideration.62 Only then might fear and coercion arise: So that this Common Amity or Benevolence, cannot be omitted to be first supposed, even in the very constitution of Commonwealths: Since those who founded them, must have been before united, either by some natural relation; and a mutual confidence in, or benevolence toward each other; although perhaps, others might afterwards, out of fear of their Power, or a liking of their Government, be compelled or allured, to joyn or associate themselves with them.63

In contrast to Hobbes’s fearful state of nature or Philips’s exclusive amicitia perfecta, Tyrrell posits “Common Amity,” on the foundation of “some natural relation” or “mutual confidence in . . . each other.” The reason why Philips’s friendship does not simply move into this larger “stricter League of Amity, called Civil Society” becomes clear through an allusion: Tyrrell, at Oxford and in a later exchange of letters with Locke, uses the pastoral name “Musidore.” This suggests that “A dialogue of friendship mutiplyed,” a Philips poem in which the speakers Musidorus and Orinda debate the advisability of multiple friendships, specifically answers Tyrrell’s conception of “Common Amity.”64 In “A dialogue of friendship mutiplyed,” Orinda scores a rhetorical triumph for exclusive friendship over Musidorus, who advocates for multiple friendships, only to have that victory undermined by the next poem, “Rosania to Lucasia on her Letters,” which recreates her extravagant, exclusive friendship rhetoric for two other friends.65 In the conjunction of these two poems, which allude to the debate about appropriate governance conducted by the Musidorus of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Philips commemorates the history of changing allegiances out of which her poems emerge and from which they gain their rhetorical force. From the story of the Arcadia, Philips takes two elements that help define the relation between friendship and political governance. First, patriarchal authority cannot legitimate the king in exile: this model, as the Arcadia demonstrates in the figure of Euarchus, devolves into legitimation on the basis of the people’s consent. Second, the exiled monarch cannot exercise clemency, leading to the agonizing choice of one obligation over another, as in Euarchus’ decision to set the law above his kindred. In her poems addressing the question of multiple friendships and conflicting obligations, Philips finds another answer. By locating political virtue in friendship rather than in patriarchalism, Philips establishes a network of alliances that is both consensual and natural, both made and found.

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The continuance of friendships beyond – and by means of – the poems of friendship’s failures demonstrates clemency, a virtue traditionally reserved to kings but transferred, in the absence of a single monarch, to the royalist group of friends.66 Thus, Philips’s allusion to Sidney relates to her rejection of a patriarchally based monarchy for one founded on the consent of a group. This consensual basis suggests the model of social contract theory. In the years of the English Civil Wars, both royalists and republicans use the analogy between the marital contract and the political contract to their own ends.67 Royalists find in it a contract that is both consensual and irrevocable, thus arguing that citizens cannot legitimately overthrow their ruler. Republicans end up arguing that the revocability of the political contract extends to the marriage contract – thus John Milton argues for divorce. Contract theory is unlike amicitia in that it insists upon a single absolute commitment, in contrast to friendship’s totalizing, yet changeable, commitment. Tyrrell’s stance on patriarchalism in marriage is a conflicted one: where his Patriarcha non monarcha (1681) aims to refute Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680) by insisting on consent as the basis of subjection, he also asserts that the husband, as naturally wiser and stronger, should rule his wife.68 In Bibliotheca politica (1691/2), he extends this basis in nature still further by arguing that women’s subjection to men precedes the fall.69 Tyrrell’s thinking illuminates his response to Philips: he allows for the royalist intervention of her poems, but not for the advocacy of women’s autonomy that demonstrates the centrality of conflicting allegiances within that royalism. Tyrrell’s initial refusal of “mixture” in Philips’s grave is a way of limiting the transference of her political model, as a counterfactual earlier in his commendatory poem imagines it: Had she [Nature] such Souls plac’d in all Woman-kind, Giv’n ’um like wit, not with like goodness join’d, Our vassal Sex to hers had homage pay’d; Woman had rul’d the World, and weaker Man obey’d.70

But, Tyrrell insists, this is not the case, and he ensures that it is not the case by leaving out the instances of those with souls and wit like Philips’s: her friends. The case in which Tyrrell does allow the political valence of Philips’s poems to take hold is in the revision of monarchy: her poems’ “mixture” can cure the king by teaching him to remember not only the events of the Civil Wars, but also the history of his coming to power. That is, Tyrrell wants the king to understand monarchic power as historical, constructed through an instance of consent rather than existing since

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time immemorial through divine right. What Tyrrell cannot see – what his investment in gender hierarchy blinds him to – is that Philips’s appropriation of amicitia’s textual generativity for women disproves patriarchalism more thoroughly because it enables the reforming of bonds after their rupture, constructing political power as process.

John Locke and the Labor of Friendship Of course, James Tyrrell does not tell the most famous story of consent to be governed in the late seventeenth century. John Locke does. And Locke also reads Philips: his commonplace book contains several of her panegyrics upon the restoration, including one attributed to her (though found in no other versions) that boldly claims “Kinges are Gods.”71 Like Tyrrell, Locke frames part of his most famous political work, the Two Treatises of Government, as a refutation of the patriarchalism of Filmer. Like Tyrrell, too, Locke in the 1680s demonstrates the persistence of some of the ideas Philips uses friendship to articulate in the 1650s and 1660s, but he shows still more strongly the ways in which the feminist implications of Philips’s claims dissipate in later political theory. Locke occupies a vexed but central place in feminist thinking about political theory. Those who critique Locke, most indelibly Carole Pateman, point toward his rigid separation of public and private spheres, leaving women no place in civic life. This occurs, Pateman asserts, because the rights of the (male) subject to enter the social contract rely upon a prior subordination of wives to their husbands, a hierarchy rendered more pernicious by its naturalization.72 Feminist thinkers who want to claim Locke stress his emphasis on the “parental” rather than solely “paternal” grant of authority, extrapolating from mothers’ authority over their children into other kinds of female power. Feminists also argue that while Locke circumscribes women’s roles, the liberalism of contract theory nevertheless provides the best model for women to take on equal roles in society, if we follow Locke’s ideas to their logical conclusions (as he does not).73 The philosopher Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s On Civic Friendship reveals another connection to Locke, one that demonstrates the potential of Philips’s friendship to present these issues in a new light. Schwarzenbach focuses on Locke’s metaphor of “mixing” as the means by which the right to property emerges. In the chapter “Of Property,” Locke writes that “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”74

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Schwarzenbach’s critique of Locke shows the extent to which this right to make property through labor depends upon the a priori ownership of the laboring man’s body: that is, the man who comes to own property can do so only if his labor is his own, if he is not a slave.75 The laboring person must also not be a woman, Schwarzenbach argues, because women’s characteristic labor involves caring for another subject rather than modifying an object; if we reject ownership of people, the mixing of female labor does not establish a claim to property.76 Schwarzenbach’s emphasis on the mixing metaphor and her caveats about its presupposition of a free male worker illuminate Philips’s distinctive account of poetic and friendly labor. Where Tyrrell hopes that Philips’s poems will “rest from other mixture pure,” allowing only the mixed form of historicized monarchy, Philips herself presents mixture as friendship’s characteristic metaphor. As Tyrrell’s language of purity suggests, mixture threatens unnaturally to commingle unlike types, often through the sexual reproduction of different races or religions (“miscegenation” literally means mixing).77 Philips makes something very different of mixture, claiming for it a strong aesthetic and ethical value in the poem addressed to Lucasia (Anne Owen) in response to the inflammatory poem written by Jenkin Jones against Katherine and James Philips. As Chapter 2 suggests, Philips’s poem uses the joint interest of friendship to generate political power and public speech. Mixture renders this possible: We see in beauty certain Ayres are found, Which no one grace can make, but all compound. Honour to th’ mind, as beauty to the sence Is the result of mixed excellence.78

The move from multiple to singular – one grace to compound graces – evokes the coterie’s idealized concord of opinion, thus seemingly avoiding the problem of mixing unlike elements. “Mixed excellence” is Philips’s distinctive term for the rewards and habits of friendship. It gathers together the paradoxes of single versus multiple and unique versus sequential that everywhere distinguish her poems. Thus, “L’amitié: To Mrs. M. Awbrey” names Orinda and Rosania “by an incomparable mixture, One.”79 Their friendship elevates them politically, enabling them “To pitty Kings, and Conquerours despise, / Since we that sacred union have engrost, / Which they and all the sullen world have lost.”80 But, of course, that “incomparable mixture” of Orinda and Rosania is exactly comparable to the “sacred union” between Orinda and Lucasia. This paradox marks the characteristic form of Philips’s friendship, in

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which the pair lauded as exclusive and exemplary in fact gains its value from a chain of textual exchange that includes other, failed, friendships, themselves once praised as exclusive and exemplary. This process also reintroduces difference, in a productive sense, as the pattern of betrayal and reconciliation confirms the individuality of each friend. The idealizing poem “Friendship” presents a conjunction of uniqueness and transformation: “For when two soules are chang’d and mixed soe, / It is what they and none but they can doe.”81 Given that “soules” – rather than a laborer and the object on which he works – “are chang’d and mixed soe,” Philips here provides a mixture that answers Schwarzenbach’s critique of Locke: Philips’s “mixed excellence” shows the labor of subjects to produce textual property. Even as Philips shows a way to think of the subject-oriented labor of women as productive, this does not solve the second problem inherent in the feminist focus on Locke granting “parental” rights to mothers as well as to fathers. While that moment of equality certainly improves upon patriarchalism’s sole emphasis on the father’s authority, it nevertheless reinstantiates the heterosexual model of reproduction as the foundation of women’s relation to the state. This problem recurs even in Wolfram Schmidgen’s revisionary account of mixture in Locke’s Two Treatises and Essay on Human Understanding. In the Essay, Schmidgen reveals, Locke revises Aristotelian sexual reproduction, in which male form gives shape to female matter: “When he refers to the ‘mixture of Male and Female’ in the Essay, Locke denies that form belongs to the male and asserts the generative ability of mixture.”82 Like the grant of parental power, this form of mixture partially equalizes the roles between men and women; like that grant, too, the mixture of sexual generation does not alter the reproductive basis of women’s relation to the state. Philips’s poems describe and enact not sexual but textual generation, however, and as such her “mixed excellence” offers a model of intellectual labor that explicitly includes women’s thinking minds rather than reproductive bodies.83 As the next section shows, Philips’s early readers recognize this link between gender, generativity, and labor, but they proceed to transform it into something else.

Sapphic Productivity and Poetic Manure Starting with the commendatory poems to the 1667 authorized edition of Philips’s poems, published after her death from smallpox, Philips’s readers respond to the textual generativity of her “mixed excellence” with a blend of perplexed compliment and bawdy invective. As early as

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the late 1660s, her readers start to interpret and rewrite her poems in a way that misrecognizes the textual generativity of amicitia, replacing it with usually unproductive sexuality. Sometimes these poems portray her as inspiring heterosexual desire, but more often they worry about the threat of a lesbian eroticism that lures women away from marriage while not producing anything of its own. Abraham Cowley’s commendatory poems exemplify these strategies, as they lavish praise upon Philips while entirely failing to understand how her poems work. This misreading appears all the more striking in the context of Cowley’s own meditation on perfect friendship in his Davideis; in that poem, Cowley acknowledges the radically disruptive consequences that follow the friends who prize friendship above all else.84 While Cowley portrays challenges to the friendship of David and Jonathan (Jonathan’s duty to his father Saul and Jonathan’s friendship with Abdon), he does not use those conflicts, as Philips does, to generate friendship’s rhetorical power. Thus, in his commendatory poem Cowley searches for an explanation for the force of Philips’s poems, considering female beauty – “We allow’d you beauty, and we did submit / To all the tyrannies of it. / Ah cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?” – as one option before suggesting that Philips “Turn’d upon Love himself his own Artillery,” aligning his depiction with the manuscript tradition associating Philips with anti-marriage polemic.85 The option upon which Cowley settles in his first commendatory poem becomes the description that defines Philips for most later readers: “They talk of Sappho, but, alas! the shame / Ill Manners soil the lustre of her fame.”86 As Harriette Andreadis shows in her comprehensive study Sappho in Early Modern England, Sappho simultaneously signifies poetic greatness and same-sex female eroticism.87 Cowley’s use of “lustre,” a loaded word for Philips, heightens the worry of this joint characterization. While Philips sometimes uses “lustre” to harmonize the divergent opinions of the coterie into a single dazzling image, more often it marks distinction, as in one of her first poems to Lucasia: “And we by this relation are allow’d / Lustre enough to be Lucasia’s cloud.”88 Far from asserting the likeness of equal and intimate friendship, these lines reinforce the difference between Lucasia and the coterie. Furthermore, since in Philips the construction of likeness out of difference paradoxically occurs through the poems of friendship’s dissolution, Rosania’s “want of Lustre” generates the rhetorical force of the friendship between Lucasia and Orinda.89 The “lustre” of the coterie derives from the poems chronicling “want of Lustre.” The “ill manners” that “soil the Lustre of [Sappho’s] fame” are thus, for Philips, precisely what generate the luster in the first place.

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Cowley reads the generativity of coterie exchange and its “lustre” as wanting, because he wants to insist on another model of poetic productivity. He collapses the metaphor of the woman as fertile field with bodily description, resulting in gruesome conjunctions: Woman, as if the Body were the whole Did that, and not the Soul, Transmit to their posterity; If in it sometimes they conceiv’d, Th’abortive Issue never liv’d. ’Twere shame and pity, Orinda, if in thee A spirit so rich, so noble, and so high, Should unmanur’d or barren lie. But thou industriously hast sow’d and till’d The fair and fruitful field: And ’tis a strange increase that it doth yield.90

Cowley starts with a standard critique of women’s supposedly greater focus on the body than the soul. The lines, cruelly, figure this bodily production in terms of abortive birth: the body does not provide a fit legacy. The metaphor gains additional point from the common equation between poetic creation and birth (a metaphor usually applied to men).91 Cowley moves from there to another cliché, the idea of the female body as fecund land that requires cultivation – or manuring – to flourish. Philips escapes this critique, though, for she “industriously hast sow’d and till’d / The fair and fruitful field.” In this, Cowley preemptively casts Philips as a Lockean property owner, making the fruits of the field hers by mixing her labor with them.92 Cowley’s Philips produces through masculine labor, by the sweat of her brow, not through feminine labor, with the agonies of childbirth. Nevertheless, the alignment of Philips’s poems with masculine labor does not quite solve the problem Cowley intimates: what is so “strange” about Philips’s “increase”? The answer to that question lies in what Cowley leaves out, an omission that shows the transformation of the textual generativity of Philips’s friendship into the unproductivity of female friendship and same-sex desire. Just as the “shame” of the “unmanur’d or barren” field echoes the “shame” of Sappho in Cowley’s poem, so too the “umanur’d” field itself has a precursor in John Donne’s “Sappho to Philaensis”: Thy body is a natural paradise, In whose self, unmanur’d, all pleasure lies, Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man?93

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The parallels between the two poems underscore the ways in which anxiety about Philips’s potential lesbianism threads throughout Cowley’s poem. Since Cowley’s stanza concerns poetic productivity, the parallel links Philips’s poetic achievements to her same-sex erotics. But in Donne’s explicitly lesbian poem, the female speaker and her beloved require neither fertilization nor tillage – those tasks that Philips, according to Cowley, accomplishes for herself. The difference between removal from the ministrations of men in Donne’s poem and accomplishments within the world of men in Cowley’s is a crucial one for understanding the literary-historical place of Philips’s poems. Donne’s “Sappho to Philaensis” stresses that despite the “pleasure” of lesbian eroticism, it still suffers from a lack of productivity. In Donne’s poem, this appears to be a virtue: Men leave behind them that which their sin shows, And are as thieves traced, which rob when it snows. But of our dalliance no more signs there are, Than fishes leave in streams, or birds in air.94

By likening heterosexual intercourse to a theft, Donne presents women as the property of other men. Women’s same-sex erotics avoid this problem, but they do so by relinquishing any outcome other than pleasure. The love that does not produce children produces nothing, not even a trace. In Cowley’s “Upon Mrs. K. Philips her Poems,” the production of Philips’s poetry depends upon the reinstantiation of the heterosexual reproduction of children – “A Child for ev’ry day of all the fertile year” – but Cowley needs to isolate Philips from the subject of her poems – friendship’s productivity – in order to “yield” that “strange increase.”95 Donne’s poem thus shows the roots, and Cowley the containment, of the paradoxical generativity of friendships’ dissolution in Philips’s poems. This shift in the productivity of Philips’s poems depends upon Cowley’s refusal of friendship’s public register, enabled by the move into a language of sexual reproduction. Philips’s poems signify publicly insofar as they participate in Lockean labor, not via the civic valence of friendship. To the figurations of unproductive female same-sex eroticism (both positive, in Donne, and negative, in Cowley), Edmund Waller’s 1645 poem “On the Friendship betwixt Two Ladies” adds the crucial element of society’s economic interest. Waller laments that the women’s absorption in one another makes them harsh to (presumably male) others: “Why so careless of our care, / Only to yourselves so dear?”96 The poem plays on the courtly love – and friendship – conceit of trading hearts, stating that the friends’ exchange of hearts with one another confuses Cupid. This substitution produces a sense of strangeness; when “still

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beguiled love” tries to pierce the women with his arrows, “he finds a foreign guest, / Neither of your hearts at home.”97 Waller almost seems like Philips here: friendship between women makes them leave “home” to circulate abroad in the public world. The next stanza, however, shows how different he is: Debtors thus with like design, When they never mean to pay, That they may the law decline, To some friend make all away.98

In direct contrast to friendship’s textual and erotic surplus – Philips’s “sure we cannot spend our stock by use” – Waller figures friendship between women as a means of evading what they owe to men, a deliberate cheating of the forces of law and the economy.99 For Waller, the withdrawal of the two female friends creates a debt to heterosexual society by taking women’s reproductive power out of circulation.100 Nevertheless, Waller, like Donne, depicts the women with resources to squander: they have an “all” to “make . . . away” “to some friend.” By the mid-eighteenth century, the separation of public and private spheres leaves women without that possibility. Ashley Cowper’s family miscellany, inscribed 1747, contains several original poems addressed to Orinda. In “Business – to Orinda,” the speaker laments that “In vain I plod and strive to get, / Still Business follows to my Cost, / I rake and scrape myself in Debt – / How can I gain who have Orinda lost.”101 The poem does not only detail the worthlessness of life without love, however: “For Gold I truck away my Peace. / And from Orinda’s arms remove.”102 Unlike the passions of friendship, which increase alliances and productivity, here heterosexual love and financial gain work against one another.103 The distinction shows the distance between even Waller’s frustration over the female pair and the still greater limitations that develop from the 1670s forward: where Philips’s amicitia produces credit in the world for the friends, here the female beloved and worldly success exist in wholly different realms. The association works against, rather than enables, public life.104

Furies and Orators In the afterlife of Philips’s political friendship, her poems’ political involvement and passionate friendship become increasingly opposed to each other. Even the political discourses with which some of her later readers associate Philips – such as Neo-Stoicism – contribute to a

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bifurcation in the meanings of politics and of emotions. The ideology of companionate marriage, with its emphasis on emotional attachment within marriage, and the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, with its official advocacy of forgetfulness, both cause later discomfort with Philips’s foregrounding of betrayal within amicitia. Demonstrating that these changes reverberate beyond Philips’s own coterie – and thus that they participate in larger cultural formations – requires a return to the mid-1650s and 1660s, to two poems from outside Philips’s coterie that nevertheless read her more on her own terms than any other. One, remarkably, is a bitter condemnation of her; the other is the only poem in the encomia to the 1667 authorized edition written in the voice of a woman. The argument for the separation of sexual and political meanings over the latter half of the seventeenth century receives confirmation from an unusual source: the most vitriolic of the sexualized attacks on Philips. In his book In Praise of Scribes, Peter Beal identifies a manuscript by John Taylor, the “Water Poet,” which attacks Philips in highly sexualized language.105 Both the occasion, before 1653, and the language of the poem show Taylor attacking Philips for her royalist tendencies. His language is notably misogynist, charging Philips with “Rape. / Upon the Muses be not bold” and with cuckolding men “When Staggs & Men / Are made Identick by yr power.”106 Taylor compares her to Sappho not to praise her talent, but to wish her death: “May you a second Sapho prove / To write in Love; / And if like her you do not die” then Taylor will rhyme her to death with his poems.107 The generalized charges accuse Philips of all manner of sexual infidelity, linking these failings with the libertinism of the court. Most strikingly, however, Taylor tells Philips that “Alecto’s Cell / Ownes thee, the mistresse of her Schoole.”108 Alecto, one of the three Furies, evokes war, pestilence, and unmitigated vengeance.109 In Virgil’s Aeneid, Juno chooses Alecto, as the Fury most pleased by war, to destroy Aeneas’ success. Alecto does so by turning Amata against her daughter Lavinia’s marriage to Aeneas; when Amata fails to convince her husband Latinus to stop the marriage, she goes mad and commits suicide. The allusion to Alecto thus highlights ruptures between wife and husband as both cause and consequence of civil war. The allusion also perverts the friendship exchange of souls, for Alecto invades Amata’s breast to fill her with rage. But the Furies punish, in particular, wrongs done against family members and violations of the natural order.110 In aligning Philips with Alecto, Taylor consequently gives her claims justice while stressing precisely those ruptures in family and community that Philips also addresses in her poems. The criticism of Philips as one of Alecto’s school, in the

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context of charges of infidelity, thus reads Philips more accurately, in some ways, than those who come to praise her in the commendatory poems. The paradox of gender and political obligation plays out more boldly in Taylor because he has neither the poetic skill nor the political inclination to cloak those contradictions in the politic compliments of Cowley. However paradoxically, then, Taylor provides a way of reading the problem of female inconstancy and political loyalty generated from Philips’s language of amicitia. Taylor, more acutely than the Restoration commenders, apprehends the necessary relation of gender and marriage to the themes of political dissent and civil war in Philips’s poems: he can see the explanatory force that gendered inconstancy gives to her figuration of political obligation. Although he tries to turn that force against her by reading her inconstancy as sexual rather than political, his emphasis on conflicting obligations means that he cannot assert, as her readers later in the century will, that the triumph of marriage over friendship solves these dilemmas. “Philo-Philippa” (lover of Philips) adds a woman’s voice to the 1667 edition’s prefatory materials. Like Taylor, she understands the importance of conflicting obligations to Philips’s poems, but she uses them to imagine a community with revolutionary potential.111 In a neat reversal, Philo-Philippa pays Orinda the compliments that Orinda pays to Rosania and Lucasia. In doing so, she unites the arts of rhetoric and the arts of war: Ask me not then, why jealous men debar Our Sex from Books in Peace, from Arms in War; It is because our Parts will soon demand Tribunals for our Persons, and Command.112

“Tribunals” marks the specifically Roman inheritance of this paradigm: Philo-Philippa, like Philips herself, sees rhetoric as contributing to public life, and she polemically asserts this continuity for women. She links these public values to friendship. Philo-Philippa praises Philips’s “acts” of friendship in traveling to Ireland with Lucasia, a trip which gives her the opportunity to meet Philips. She depicts friendship working in the world: Fearless she acts that friendship she did write: Which manly Vertue to their Sex confin’d, Thou rescuest to confirm our softer mind; For there’s required (to do that Virtue right) Courage, as much in Friendship as in Fight. The dangers we despise, doth this truth prove, Though boldly we not fight, we boldly love.113

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The poem emphasizes the utility of friendship. The need for courage equates friendship and war, showing women to be particularly successful in both. Friendship’s active virtue relies on rhetoric rather than fighting, but Philo-Philippa argues that it proves equally useful in times of war. Philo-Philippa describes a precursor for Philips who would seem to highlight the private, domestic realm, but that assumption quickly collapses: The Gracchi’s Mother taught them Eloquence; From her Breasts courage flow’d, from her Braine sence; And the grave Beards, who heard her speak in Rome, Blush’d not to be instructed, but o’recome. Your speech, as hers, commands respect from all, Your very Looks, as hers, Rhetorical: Something of grandeur in your Verse men see, That they rise up to it as Majesty.114

The reference to Cornelia, mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, comes from Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, where he praises not only her but also Laelia, the daughter of Gaius Laelius.115 Those names give one friendship context for these lines, for Cornelia is daughter to Scipio Africanus, Gaius Laelius’ great friend and the inspiration for Cicero’s De amicitia. Friendship thus appears to confer rhetorical skill through familial relations as well: the example draws together the reproductive family and the friendship tradition.116 The other friendship context behind the allusion leads in another direction, however. For the Gracchi are Cicero’s limit-case of friendship’s obligations. Caius Blosius, whose friendship with Tiberius Gracchus would have led him even to set fire to the Capitol, also conspires with Tiberius against the state.117 Cicero derives a law of friendship from this example: “neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.”118 Tiberius Gracchus pays for his dishonorable acts with his life, but his brother rises to power after his death. Of the rise of Gaius Gracchus, Cicero declares: “I am not inclined to prophecy; however, revolution creeps on imperceptibly at first but once it has acquired momentum, rushes headlong to ruin.”119 Cornelia’s sons, the Gracchi, exemplify the threat of rebellion against the state always latent in the friendship tradition – the threat that Philips foregrounds. In the reference to Cornelia’s eloquence, Philo-Philippa thus captures the contradictory histories that emerge from Katherine Philips’s poems: exemplary daughter, wife, and mother, the modest poetess; and the woman who gave birth to “revolution creep[ing] on imperceptibly, . . . rush[ing] headlong to ruin.”120

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Unproductive Lesbians But if so much of Philips’s history is about being rewritten or written over, to what kind of revolution might she have given birth? Many later critics would name that revolution as sexual – the articulation of lesbian eroticism. They are partly right. The history of Philips’s reception charts a transition from Philips’s own generation of public credit through friendship and textual exchange through Cowley’s perplexity at her poems’ “strange increase” (generated by the friendship he needs to discount in order to recreate her as a Lockean property owner) to the full manifestation, in the mid-eighteenth century, of women’s passions as not just separate from but antagonistic to a new public life of business. Whereas amicitia shows politics and passions to be intertwined, readers from the 1670s forward decouple them. This shift has several consequences. First, it assigns women to the role in public life codified by Locke: women reside in the private sphere, focused on the mechanisms of reproduction in the family and exercising power only as a feature of their familial role. Second, it transforms the danger of women’s friendship, taking it from a political threat, aligned with the classical and humanist tradition of amicitia, to an affective challenge to heterosexual marriage, to which women’s friendship now seems a rival. Third, and consequentially, it works to diminish that competition with marriage by depicting women’s friendship as a stage in emotional development overtaken by marriage or, conversely, by demonizing same-sex desire as something unnatural. Correctly apprehending the political valence of Philips’s poems can not only help refigure women’s relation to public life, but also challenge the tradition that sees same-sex eroticism as unproductive.121 This rebuttal is especially important because the idea of unproductivity colludes both with patriarchal assumptions about women’s private role and with the trope of inconsequence, which distinguishes lesbian more than it does gay male eroticism. Later readers consistently imagine lesbian sexuality as unproductive; its usual narrative, which becomes the narrative of female friendship for later generations, has marriage replacing those earlier, girlish passions. In Inconsequence, Annamarie Jagose draws attention to the narrative and temporal meanings of this trope, arguing that the positing of heterosexuality as origin requires the inconsequentiality of the lesbian.122 In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Valerie Traub places Philips as a crux between chaste readings of femme same-sex love and interpretations of love between women as dangerous. She argues that Philips’s poems “figure love between women as utopian in its possibilities for unity, pleasure, and

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merger, and absolutely inconsequential in its social effects . . . the political work they perform is to depoliticize lesbian desire, to place it safely outside the realm of social relevance.”123 On the contrary, Philips’s use of amicitia allows her to refuse this sense of inconsequence: she takes up the male friendship tradition in order to assert the “social relevance” of women’s friendship. In part, Philips does this by disrupting similitude through privileging “mixed excellence” as the model of friendship. In part, she does it by insisting not on unity, but on dissolution: on generating additional friendships – which act as models of political community for a larger, mixed-gender coterie – from the litany of failed friendships. One reason that the history of representations of lesbian eroticism is a history of separatism and inconsequence is because we have not seen the public, political meanings in Philips’s lyrics of friendship’s dissolution. Traub rightly argues that Philips serves as the hinge in the move from innocent to dangerous sexualities, but the use of women’s same-sex alliances to imagine political obligations persisting after betrayal creates part of that danger. Like the incorporation of difference in her poems, Philips’s lyrics of friendship’s dissolution challenge the temporal order in which marriage supersedes friendship. In their coterie manuscript contexts, Philips’s poems demonstrate both a sequential structure – the replacement of Rosania by Lucasia – and a recursive one – the persistence of poems and coterie members even after the lyrics of dissolution.124 Philips’s works thus do not wholly align with an atemporal lyric subjectivity.125 Nor does marriage serve as the endpoint of her poems’ narrative, though later writers will rewrite the ending to make it do so. Amicitia, with its emphasis on the exclusive pair of friends, would seem to fall into the danger of socially irrelevant similitudes that Traub describes. But the continuity between the goals of the friends and the goals of the state, coupled with the endlessly sequential logic of friendship’s benefits, ties amicitia, and Philips’s use of it to imagine women’s same-sex bonds, to the public realm. Thus, the contest between female friendship and heterosexual marriage originates at a later date than Philips’s poems; more, the political meanings of women’s friendship in her poems help produce this crisis. Her poems’ focus on the problem of conflicting obligations in the public realm leads to an articulation of a narrative of private passions. The Gentleman’s Journal, a magazine with lyrics and short articles, illustrates this point in the poem “Friendship. An Elegy, by Lucasia” (1694). Although the real Lucasia (Anne Owen) died in 1692, in the poem the speaker Lucasia laments that Orinda’s totalizing love for Antenor means that Orinda neglects the duties of friendship: “In vain she vows She’s

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still both kind and true; / Antenor robs Lucasia of her due.”126 In clear contrast to Philips’s own impassioned laments for Lucasia’s absence and reasoned response to Antenor’s, this poem uses Philips’s own language to reverse the values she places on friendship and marriage.127 After staging it more boldly than Philips’s own poems, “Friendship. An Elegy, by Lucasia” offers an imagined resolution to the conflict between friendship and marriage: For were she sure to see him safe on Shore, She’d dry her Tears, be friendly as before: She’d only pray the Guardians of her Love With am’rous speed to let him homeward move; That, free from Toyls, he may for ever rest In the safe harbour of her tender brest. Thus in his absence I might Reign a while, And rival Love and Friendship reconcile!128

The poem’s conclusion begins by arguing that Antenor’s return will resolve the conflict: once Orinda no longer worries over him, she can give friendship its due. The final couplet contradicts this, however, by stating that Lucasia would reign only in Antenor’s absence. For this poem, it seems, neither Antenor’s presence nor his absence would restore friendship to its central place in Orinda’s heart. Philips’s poem “On Rosania’s Apostacy, and Lucasia’s Friendship,” which shares with this poem the phrase “Go, weary’d Soul, find out thy wonted rest / In the safe Harbour of Orinda’s brest,” provides an instructive parallel.129 In that poem, the incorporation of the failed friendship of Rosania and Orinda provides an impossible abundance, the “double portion” that is Lucasia’s “right.”130 Here, the economy of marriage, with only the single Antenor going into the world, leaves no “portion” for the friends’ share. The prioritization of marriage renders female friendship private and unproductive. The 1694 “Friendship. An elegy, by Lucasia” shows, in its anxious reversal of the values Philips places on marriage and friendship, the spread of the ideology of domestic heterosexuality through the latter half of the century. That shift signals an impoverishment, as the friends’ “double portion,” originally enriched rather than diminished by conflicting obligations, turns to nothing at all. Earlier in the century, coverture’s assertion that the wife’s obligations are subsumed in the husband’s creates the wife’s subjectivity as a model of contradictory allegiances, a conflict that Philips exploits to imagine a political community made out of the bonds of its dissolution. In moving into a rhetoric of companionate marriage in which marriage has to win and friendship to lose, in which men go abroad and women stay at home, this space for imagining otherwise closes.

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The threat of Philips’s poems is never simply a sexual threat, never simply about a competition between marriage and friendship in which Philips opts for friendship (and a sexual friendship at that). The threat of Philips’s poems – the threat that later readers, and contemporary critics, cast as a sexual threat – is also about her combination of Ciceronian amicitia with Tacitist Neo-Stoicism, the mixture of a politics of virtue with a politics of pragmatism. She casts the irreconcilable obligations of ethical and political life as narratives of disappointed friendship, but she uses amicitia’s rhetoric to idealize those dissolutions, to give them the status of historical exemplars. In so doing, she offers a way of rethinking the dominant political discourses of her day – Neo-Stoicism, patriarchalism, contract theory – that does not rely upon women’s exclusion from the public sphere and that draws upon women’s same-sex eroticism to figure textual generativity. In the century following her death, Orinda comes to be the “modest poetess,” the paradigm of feminine virtue, only because her early manuscript readers forcibly remove the political meanings of amicitia from her poems, imposing upon women’s same-sex alliances a sense of inconsequence.

Notes 1. Cowley, “Preface,” Poems, fols. A4v–B1. 2. Cowper family miscellany, c. 1747, British Library Add. MS 28101, fol. 9. The poem “Advice to Belinda” is by a Mr. Littleton, imitating Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” 3. Ibid., fol. 9. 4. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, pp. 261–70. 5. See Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 325: “Before Philips, intense female intimacy was rarely in danger of social condemnation; after Philips, such intimacy was rarely completely free from it.” 6. See Chapter 1 on Cowley and Nedham. 7. See British Library Add. MS 29921 fol. 36 (this manuscript quotes excerpts from Philips’s poems on the themes of constancy and selfgovernance); Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawl. poet. 90; BL Egerton MS 1527; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 94; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 65; University of Nottingham MSS PwV 337 and 338; and Yale University, MS Osborn b118 (Trevor MS). 8. Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 90, “Titled: A Collection of Verses ^Fancyes, and Poems, / Morrall and Devine,” contains poems by Philips, Cowley, and Marvell with classical allusions. The early eighteenth-century The Muse’s Magazine (Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 173) incorporates Philips into its verse miscellany section with lyrics on retirement and country life; the manuscript includes many of Cowley’s classical poems. 9. Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 75–106, a notable exception, focuses primarily on

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Friendship’s Shadows her dramatic translations. Compilers who take note of her passions tend to see them as a challenge to Stoicism, as in “To Mrs. Behn on the publication of her poems,” BL Add. MS 29921 fols. 105v–107v: “Come, ye Stoickes, come away, / You that boast an apathy, / . . . / And tell me, tell me, where’s the eye / That can be dry.” Lipsius, ed. of Tacitus (1574); De Constantia (1584; English trans. John Stradling 1594); ed. of Seneca (1605). On Stoicism in Renaissance literature, see Braden, Anger’s Privilege, pp. 167–223; and Zurcher, “Untimely Monuments,” pp. 903–27. On Tacitism and Neo-Stoicism, see Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism,” pp. 127–55; Burke, “Tacitism,” pp. 479–98; Salmon, “Stoicism,” pp. 199–225; and Tuck, Philosophy, pp. 31–64 and 202–78. See Grafton and Jardine, “ ‘Studied for Action’,” pp. 30–78. James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, p. 48. Burke, “Tacitism,” p. 482. On Philips’s neoclassicism, see Loscocco, “ ‘Manly Sweetness’,” pp. 259–79. Philips’s association with Neo-Stoicism, rather than Epicureanism, foregrounds her politics; see Chapter 3. At Oxford in the 1640s, Cotterell and William Aylesbury (brother-inlaw to Clarendon) translate Enrico Caterino Davila’s Historia delle guerre civili di Francia into English; King Charles I and Clarendon read it eagerly. Cotterell eventually asserts his primary role in the translation: the 1647 title page includes both Aylesbury’s initials and his own, the 1678 only Cotterell’s. For Cotterell’s translation of Davila, see Seaward, “Clarendon,” pp. 289–313. See Tuck, Philosophy, pp. 65–119 on the old (Ciceronian) and new (Tacitist) humanism. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, p. 56, uses this phrase ironically, to argue for the political meanings of Philips’s poetry. Shifflet, Stoicism, p. 3. See Gray, “Philips in Ireland,” pp. 557–85; and Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 159–73 on Philips in Ireland. See Røstvig, Happy Man, pp. 13–69 on royalism and retreat. Quotation from Philips, “L’Accord du Bien,” Poem 65, lines 97–8. See Zurcher, “Untimely Monuments,” p. 910 on self-governance as a challenge to monarchy and Shifflett, Stoicism, pp. 76–106 on Neo-Stoicism’s affiliations with republicanism. BL Egerton MS 1527 (fols. 56–58v); NLW MS 775b; NLW MS 776b; Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 90 (which removes the name “Ardelia”); BL Add. MS 29921; University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Misc. *HRC 151 Philips MS 14,937(D); and Worcester College, Oxford, MS 6.13 (Clarke MS). Nicholas Crouch, in Balliol College, Oxford University MS 336, p. 6v lists Ardelia in his key to Philips’s coterie names, but is unable to identify her. BL Add. MS 81607 is the other. Moody’s “Orinda, Rosania, Lucasia et aliae” pp. 325–54 identifies Ardelia as Mary Harvey (Dering), but does not give the source. “Upon the Poems of Mris Philipps,” BL Add. MS 81607, fol. D4: “Orinda if alive could write a Verse / Fit for Ardelias or Leucasias Herse.” As far as I know, no other scholars have consulted this manuscript, which includes

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26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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praise of Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Norton, and Andrew Marvell, as well as asserting that Orinda will bring more honor to Wales than Homer to Greece. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, p. 70 identifies the source of Anne Owen’s coterie name as Cartwright’s “The Siege,” which also spells it “Leucasia.” In contrast, see Røstvig, Happy Man, p. 255: “Like the Lucretian gods, Orinda’s retired friends enjoy complete detachment from everyday affairs; they are not even faintly stirred by a wish to engage in any action outside their own circle.” James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, BL MS Egerton 1527, fols. 56–56v; and “J. Baynes,” BL Add. MS 29921, fols. 82–83. The manuscript seems to have had several contributors, but this particular section is signed “J. Baynes.” Hageman and Sununu, “More copies,” p. 136, identify the ascription that closes the poem as “J B de [or a] K [or R] W.” The initials are difficult to read, given their elaborate script. BL MS Egerton 1527, fols. 56–56v. The manuscript also contains a rewriting of Philips’s “A Countrey Life” (also titled “Song”), fols. 56v–57v. Hageman and Sununu, “New Manuscript Texts,” pp. 209–14 discuss Monmouth’s poems. Monmouth, “Song,” BL MS Egerton 1527, fol. 56, lines 1–3. Ibid., fol. 56v, lines 15–18. For a different view, see Hageman and Sununu, “New Manuscript Texts,” p. 214. Monmouth, “Song,” BL MS Egerton 1527, fol. 56, line 1. Philips, Poem 22, lines 1–4. Ibid., line 12. Ibid., lines 13–16. Ibid., lines 23–4. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 307. Philips, Poem 5, line 34. See J. Anderson, Reading, pp. 168–79, especially p. 169. Philips, Poem 22, lines 29–32. Ibid., lines 33–6. BL Add. MS 29921, fols. 82–83. The manuscript’s scrupulously dated and attributed extracts include pieces from 1685, but not after. The Philips quotations are from the 1678 edition, cited with page numbers. BL Add. MS 29921 includes Marvell’s pastorals “Dialogue between the Soul and the Body” (fols. 80–81) and “Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda” (fols. 123–123v), as well as his very popular translation of a lyric about retreat from the world from Seneca’s Thyestes (“Climb at court for me that will”, fol. 81v). BL Add. MS 29921, fol. 82v, line 22. Barbour, English Epicures, pp. 44–8, suggests fairies could also evoke atomism in the Stuart court. BL Add. MS 29921, fol. 83, lines 29–32. Ibid., lines 35–6. Philips, Poem 22, lines 33–4 and 36. At various times, Lipsius studies and works at Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist universities; see Salmon, “Stoicism,” p. 202. 1599 quotation on Lipsius cited in Salmon, “Stoicism,” p. 223; 1603

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

Friendship’s Shadows expansion from James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, p. 48. For a fuller discussion of Lipsius and inconstancy, see Salmon, “Stoicism,” pp. 202 and 223; and Zurcher, “Untimely Monuments,” p. 910. See Ibbett, “Productive Perfection,” p. 46, which discusses conservation and change in French reason of state. Lipsius, De constantia, I.vi, p.14. Philips, Collected Works, vol. II, Letter XIII, p. 43. Clifford, “The Great Book,” p. 97. Philips, Poem 42, lines 29–32. See Chapter 2. Finch, Friendship, p. 33. Tuck, Philosophy, p. 34. On Tyrrell, see Goldie, “Tyrrell,” ODNB; Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees, pp. 19–61 et passim; Tully, “Locke,” pp. 615–52; and Weil, Political Passions, pp. 59–79. See Weil, Political Passions, p. 59. Tyrrell, “Memory,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. e1v. Tyrrell, Brief, p. 262. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 263. Philips, Poem 97. Tyrrell is at Oxford from 1657–63; he goes to the Inner Temple after Oxford, and thus would be in London during Philips’s final residence and illness there. A letter of Philips’s to Sir Charles Cotterell dated 8 April 1663 mentions sending printed editions of her play Pompey to London by means of Lady Elizabeth Tyrrell, James’s mother (Philips, Complete Works, vol. II, Letter XXVI, p. 77). “A dialogue of friendship multiplyed” appears for the first time in the 1667 printed edition of Philips’s works, so the probable composition time of the poem and Philips’s acquaintance with the Tyrrells coincide. Philips, Poem 98. For a fuller account of this issue, see P. Anderson, “Friendship multiplyed,” pp. 131–45. See Shanley, “Marriage Contract,” pp. 79–91; and Pateman, Sexual Contract, pp. 154–88. See Tyrrell, Patriarcha, p. 14: “the woman, as the weaker vessel, is to be subject to the Man, as the stronger, stouter, and commonly the wiser creature.” See Shanley, “Marriage Contract,” pp. 85–7 for a discussion of Tyrrell and the marital contract. Tyrrell, Bibliotheca politica, p. 11. Tyrrell, “Memory,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. e1. Philips, “On the Coronation,” Poem 124, line 28; Bodleian MS Locke e. 17, fol. 96. Thomas says the manuscript hand for the Philips poems is not Locke’s. In the commonplace book, Philips’s panegyrics occur alongside other poems from the 1650 and 1660s, including several poems on Cromwell (one parodying Waller’s elegy). See Pateman, Sexual Contract, pp. 1–18. For recent surveys of the history of feminist responses to Locke, see Hirschmann and McClure, “Introduction,” pp. 1–15; and Weil, Political Passions, especially pp. 1–19 and 67–79.

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78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

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Locke, Two Treatises, p. 306. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 11–13. See Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 41 for a discussion of mixture in relation to Catholic/Protestant distinctions. Patricia Parker points out the etymology of miscegenation as mixing in Shakespeare from the Margins, p. 5 (cited by Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 41). Philips, Poem 32, lines 25–8. Philips, Poem 50, line 4. Ibid., lines 20–2. Philips, Poem 57, line 25–6. Schmidgen, “Politics and Philosophy,” p. 207, quoting Locke, Human Understanding, book III, chapter 4, section 23. See Chapter 2. See Chapter 1. Cowley, “Mrs. K. Philips,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. b2v. The widespread view of Philips as hostile to marriage is supported by the extraordinary manuscript popularity of Philips’s poem “A marryd state” (Poem 130, classified by Patrick Thomas as juvenilia). “A marryd state” exists in no fewer than five manuscript versions of varying length, most of them longer than the published version of sixteen lines: Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 173; Bodleian MS Eng. Misc. c. 292, fol. 110; Bodleian MS Firth c. 15, fols. 335–337; National Library of Wales Orielton Estate MSS parcel 24; University of Nottingham archives PwV40 and PwV41. The National Library of Wales manuscript is in Philips’s hand, signed with her unmarried name “C. Fowler.” “A Virgin,” which details an unmarried woman’s most desirable attributes, frequently appears in this context as well: Bodleian MS Rawl. D.214 and MS Rawl. poet. 173; University of Nottingham archives PwV989. See Limbert and O’Neill, “Composite Authorship,” pp. 487–502. Cowley, “Mrs. K. Philips,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. c1. Other manuscripts describe Orinda as Sappho – “Orinda! Sappho! Sister! Friend!” – but do not explore the sexual implications of that allusion (BL Add. MS 4457, fols. 163–164, poems by Thomas Birch). While this poem may have some sexual overtones – “in Spite / Of all odd Humours shewn Last Night, / You’ll re-instate me in your Favour” (fol. 163v) – it primarily treats Orinda as “Muse” who can bring poetic compensations greater than those of “Grubstreet-Realms” (fol. 163v). Cotterell, “Preface,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fols. av–a2, touches on these implications: “We might well have call’d her the English Sappho, she of all the female Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Vertues both, the most highly to be valued . . . And for her Vertues, they as much surpass’d those of Sappho as the Theological do the Moral, (wherein yet Orinda was not her inferior).” The primary meaning here is a Christian one: Sappho is questionable insofar as she is pagan, not for her desires. See Andreadis, Sappho, pp. 62–83. Philips, Poem 25, lines 17–18; “To the excellent Mrs A. O. upon her receiving the name of Lucasia, and adoption into our society. 29 Decemb. 1651.” The lines suggest the disguises Zeus dons for his sexual escapades with Io and Semele.

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93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

Friendship’s Shadows Philips, Poem 68, line 12. Cowley, “Mrs. K. Philips,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. b2v. See Guy-Bray, Against Reproduction, pp. 3–43 on this trope. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship, p. 9, claims that “to mix” originally meant “to manure,” thus strengthening this claim. The only support I can find for this etymology is in the noun form of “mix,” which has roots in the Middle English “dung”. Donne, “Sappho to Philaensis,” lines 35–8. Ibid., lines 39–42. Cowley, “Mrs. K. Philips,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fols. c1 and b2v. Waller, “On the Friendship,” Poems (1904), lines 3–4. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, pp. 310–12, emphasizes the erotics of similitude in Waller’s poem. Waller, “On the Friendship,” lines 10–12. Ibid., lines 13–16. Philips, Poem 59, line 24. For Waller, political inconstancy creates debts needing to be paid rather than generative textual exchange; see Chapter 1. Ashley Cowper, “Business—to Orinda,” BL Add. MS 28101, fol. 28. Ibid. See Hirschman, Passions, pp. 31–66 on the countervailing passions of lust and greed for the history of this tension. Other manuscript poems treat the language and tropes of her friendship poems as a front for sexual activity. See “Song,” in a miscellany dating from c. 1680–90, Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 94, p. 121: “Come my Orinda and now let us prove / The secret enjoyments of innocent love.” Still more overt is the mid-eighteenth-century BL Add. MS 28101, fol. 29, in a poem titled “To Orinda. In Answer to a Letter – / – chiding the Author for not Writing”: “You are my Ark, with you my Soul’s at home, / Therefore I neither write nor send, but come.” The sexual pun, heightened by the other bawdy lyrics in the manuscript, raises the question of what the friends do when not absent from one another, while rewriting the suspicion about the female friends into a heterosexual pairing. Similarly, Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 173 (a commonplace book from 1724, inscribed “John Dunton his book” on the endpaper) suggests a connection between worries about lesbianism, the rejection of male suitors, and Philips’s friendship poems: it has a sequence containing Waller’s “On the friendship betwixt 2 Ladyes” (fols. 100–100v), Philips’s “Against Love,” (fol. 100v), “Advise to the old Beaux” by Sir Charles Radley (fol. 101), “The young man’s plea against women” (fols. 101–101v), “The Penitent Lover” by Thomas Flatman (fol. 101v), Philips’s “Friendship” (fols. 101v–102v) and her “A Friend” (fols. 102v–103v). See Beal, Praise of Scribes, pp. 150–3 and Appendix VI. The manuscript of the poem is University College London MS Ogden 42, pp. 225–6. Since Taylor dies in 1653, he must base his criticism of Philips on her encomium to William Cartwright (published in 1651) and on some (through presumably few) of her manuscript poems, most likely “Upon the Double Murther of Charles I,” which answers Vavasour Powell’s poem on the same subject.

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110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

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John Taylor, UCL MS Ogden 42, lines 2–3 and 24–5. Ibid., lines 43–5. Ibid., lines 14–15. Beal, Praise of Scribes, p. 282 fn. 3. The classical source for Alecto is Virgil, Aeneid, book VII, lines 324, 341, 415, and 476. Alecto is also prominently named in two Renaissance texts: Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (published in English translations in 1594 and 1600), where she encourages strife; and Thomas Heywood’s Gynaikeion: or, Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women (1624), which would have given Taylor ample material for his catalogue of questionable women (Heywood’s dedication of his book to the muses aligns with Taylor’s charge that Philips commits rape upon the muses by writing). Rose, “Erinyes,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, p. 406. The poem seems to have circulated in manuscript after the performance of Philips’s translation of Corneille’s Pompey in Dublin. Philips discusses it in a letter to Cotterell, Collected Works, vol. II, Letter XXVI, p. 78: “One of them, who pretends to be a Woman, writes very well, but I cannot imagine who the Author is, nor by any Inquiry I can make, have hitherto been able to discover. I intend to keep that copy by me . . . .” PhiloPhilippa must have known much of Philips’s poetry in manuscript, for the poem employs more of Philips’s characteristic images and phrases than any other: “lustre,” “gold,” “diamonds,” the “Bee” which “in Amber tomb shall lie” (“To the Excellent Orinda,” fols. c2–d2v). The bee in amber features prominently in Philips’s “To my Lucasia,” where it serves as a figure for art’s ability to confer eternal fame. Philo-Philippa, “To the Excellent Orinda,” in Philips, Poems (1667), fol. c2v. Ibid., fol. d1. Ibid., fol. d1. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I.i.6, p. 23. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, I.i.6, p. 23, describes Laelia, “said to have reproduced the elegance of her father’s language in her own speech.” See Introduction on Montaigne’s use of this episode. Cicero, De amicitia, xii, p. 151. Cicero, De amicitia, xii, p. 153; the full story is in Cicero, De amicitia, xi–xii, pp. 149–53. See Williamson, Raising their Voices, pp. 14–33 on the (well-behaved) “Daughters of Orinda” and the (transgressive) “Daughters of Behn.” See Chapter 2. Jagose, Inconsequence, pp. ix–x argues that “inconsequence” defines the lesbian, who is “the figure most comprehensively worked over by sequence.” Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 340. I thus disagree with Coolahan, “ ‘We live by chance’,” p. 22 about the danger of reading Philips’s poems as a sequence. See Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, pp. 296–8 on lyric subjectivity. “Friendship. An elegy,” p. 198. Unlike Philips’s poems, Lucasia’s poem describes friendship as moderate, love as consuming: “Friendship’s the kind warmth that chears the Blood, /

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While Love like Fevers fires the vital Flood” (p. 198). The 1694 poem also reverses the values of public and private, showing Antenor going abroad into the world, while Orinda waits wretchedly at home; in Philips’s poetry Lucasia and Orinda move abroad, as is historically the case. The 1694 poem repeats language from Philips’s poems and letters, reusing her characteristic imagery of “tempests,” for example, to value marriage above friendship. See “Friendship. An elegy,” p. 198; Poem 100, line 23; and Letter XIX, p. 61. 128. “Friendship. An elegy,” pp. 198–9. 129. Philips, Poem 68, lines 7–8. 130. Ibid., line 22. See Chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of this poem.

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Chapter 5

Honoring Friendship’s Shadows: Marriage and Political Reputation in Lucy Hutchinson’s Writings

The manuscript of Lucy Hutchinson’s elegies (composed 1664–71) includes a lyric passage in the hand of Lucy Hutchinson’s descendant Julius. The title reads “These verses transcribed out of my other book J: H:” and the text contains the concluding note “Memdm these verses were writ by Mrs Hutchinson on ye occasion of ye Coll: her Husbands being then a prisoner in ye Tower: 1664.”1 In fact, these forty-two lines come from Hutchinson’s biblical epic Order and Disorder: they are Eve’s lament after the fall, her acceptance of responsibility and exclamation of regret for her act. The lines mix the mutuality of friendship with bitter self-criticism: Seeing the man I love by me betrayed, By me, who for his mutual help was made, Who to preserve thy life ought to have died, And I have killed thee by my foolish pride, Defiled thy glory and pulled down thy throne. O that I had but sinned and died alone! Then had my torture and my woe been less, I yet had flourished in thy happiness.2

This passage exhibits, in miniature, Hutchinson’s complicated reworking of the friendship tradition to reimagine marriage.3 She entwines the central themes of betrayal, mutuality, and self-sacrifice. With the image of the self who flourishes by giving herself up for her friend, Hutchinson links together the republican trope of friends rebelling against tyrants and the humanist textual generativity that she elevates over physical reproduction. The allusions to a heavenly “glory” and “throne” stress her republican sense that the only just monarchy exists in heaven. In all these ways, the passage fits perfectly into its context in Order and Disorder, reinforcing the epic’s emphasis on the vexed but productive relationship between the vulnerabilities of friendship and uncertain human action.4

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In another way, however, Julius Hutchinson (1678–1738) does not mistake the meaning of these lines. By ascribing them to the moment of John Hutchinson’s imprisonment on suspicion of conspiring to overthrow the restored King Charles II, Julius Hutchinson aptly encapsulates the contradictory traditions that shape Lucy Hutchinson’s reception. Until very recently, Lucy Hutchinson’s literary legacy did not center on her poetry, which seems not to have circulated widely in manuscript, is published anonymously and partially in her lifetime, and is misattributed afterwards.5 Instead, later generations come to know Hutchinson with the publication in 1806 of the text popularly known as Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, edited by another Julius Hutchinson, grandson of the earlier Julius.6 The moment of betrayal that the earlier Julius Hutchinson thinks is the occasion for the transcribed poem figures centrally in the Memoirs and later audiences’ responses to it. With the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion that pardons most Parliamentary supporters deliberately excludes the regicides; having signed the death warrant for Charles I and attended every day of the king’s trial, John Hutchinson runs a clear risk of retribution. In large part due to a letter recanting his role as regicide and the interventions of royalist friends (many of them Lucy Hutchinson’s family), John Hutchinson receives a pardon. Lucy Hutchinson asserts that she alone “contrived and [wrote]” this letter, thus taking full responsibility for his one recorded act of disloyalty to the republican cause.7 She writes that he condemns her for the letter, and when the king’s soldiers arrest him for conspiracy a few years later, in 1663, he successfully enjoins her not to intervene. He dies in prison the next year, still awaiting trial. Despite – and because of – Hutchinson’s insistence that she disobediently pens the letter recanting her husband’s republican loyalties, Hutchinson’s nineteenth-century readers praise her for two things: her excellence as a wife and her republican convictions.8 While Hutchinson herself states that she “never displeased him more in her life” than by writing the letter, at least one later editor can write of the same incident that “Nothing else that she says or does in her long narrative is likely to please [readers] more.”9 Still more strikingly, Hutchinson’s later readers remain entirely convinced of Lucy Hutchinson as “a decided republican,” while they are much less sure of John Hutchinson, despite her best efforts.10 The two views ought to be incompatible: either Lucy Hutchinson writes the letter, sacrificing her republican principles to marital affection; or she does not write it, sustaining her convictions without intervening to save her husband.

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The fact that John Hutchinson’s reputation suffers from the letter incident while Lucy Hutchinson’s flourishes points toward an incoherence between ideologies of gender and politics as Hutchinson expresses them and as her later readers understand them. In an odd way, the very ideas of public and private that restrict women’s participation in civic life help to preserve Lucy Hutchinson’s paradoxical reputation as the consistently virtuous republican wife. The language of amicitia, in particular the republican tradition of rebellion against tyrants, allows Hutchinson to manage all these conflicting registers simultaneously. She forges her constancy as a republican friend from an act of wifely betrayal. Hutchinson uses the language of betrayal-oriented friendship in order to preserve both her husband’s republican reputation and her own. Later readers, seeing the Hutchinsons’ marriage through the lens of companionate marriage rather than the conflict-ridden language of friendship, miss some of the forms of republicanism and dissent, within and without marriage. The conjunction of coverture and friendship thus helps to cast the vexed critical conversation about gender conservatism and political radicalism in Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson in a new light.11 Hutchinson’s gender conservatism strategically exploits ideologies of wifely obedience in order to rescue her husband’s reputation while maintaining her own principles. Hutchinson draws on the republican tradition of friends who stand against tyranny as one way to claim a political identity; her intervention shows more strongly as part of a range of responses that chart friendship’s meanings for royalists, Cromwellians, and republicans. The tradition that depicts wives as false counselors – a tradition to which Hutchinson contributes – illuminates the difference gender makes to this discussion. In her treatment of the recantation letter in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Hutchinson manipulates this complex system of associations in order to preserve her political principles while trying to assert her husband’s. In the years after her husband’s death, Hutchinson transforms the language of friendship into a charity that still enables dissent. This chapter thus moves across a historical sweep, from Hutchinson’s early writings about her husband’s wartime life in the 1650s, to the effects of the restoration in the 1660s, into her religious writings in the 1670s. It takes its guiding questions from the impossible conjunctions of Hutchinson’s later reputation, looking to both manuscript and published materials in order to uncover the means by which those contradictions are effaced as contradictions.

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Royalist, Cromwellian, and Republican Friendship Amicitia both provides part of the language of Lucy Hutchinson’s republicanism and offers a way of managing changing political circumstances. The discourse of friendship helps to reveal the ways in which Hutchinson’s interest in classical texts, rejection of naturalized monarchy, and contempt for the foolish populace combine to produce a classical republicanism that nevertheless abjures the equalizing impulse of the Levellers and other more radical groups.12 Her republicanism stands even further from a modern conception of universal equality or suffrage, into which slightly later democratic thinkers will transform the republican tradition of friendship.13 The distinctive emphases of Hutchinson’s use of the friendship tradition to imagine republicanism and manage reputations emerge most clearly as part of a spectrum of politicized friendship, from royalist to Cromwellian to republican. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon; the newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus; Thomas May; and Edmund Ludlow illustrate this range. These materials cluster around two distinct historical moments: the more delimited years of 1646–8 and a longer period in the Restoration, from 1664–72. Mercurius Pragmaticus and May belong to the earlier moment, Clarendon and Ludlow to the later one. Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson encompasses both: she first writes material that becomes part of her husband’s biography in the 1640s, as a defense of his actions as Governor of Nottingham Castle, and she finishes the complete text of the Memoirs after his death in 1664.14 This historical distinction demonstrates both the persistence of friendship as an important language of loyalty and betrayal and its transformations in changing political circumstances. In his magisterial History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England and in his Essays, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, takes up the counsel-oriented model of friendship from amicitia’s appearance in the Advice to Princes manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 He emphasizes many features of friendship familiar from its classical instantiations: the need for friends to be good men, the value of frank speaking, the obligation to assist one’s friend, and the importance of constancy. His insistence on secrecy has a particularly royalist inflection, especially after the publication of the private letters of King Charles I in 1645.16 Clarendon’s version of friendship draws explicitly on the events of the Civil Wars, which lead to a new understanding of the monarch’s relation to friendship: but princes and great men, who can have few friends, (because friendship presupposeth some kind of equality) whose counsellors are commonly

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compliers with their humours, and flatterers of their infirmities, who are seldom checked by want of success in what they propose to themselves, have little help but their own observation and experience to cure their follies and defects; and that observation and experience is never so pregnant and convincing, as under adversity, which refreshes the memory, makes it revolve that which was purposely laid aside that it might never be remembered; reforms and sharpens the understanding; and faithfully collects all that hath been left undone, or hath been done amiss, and presents it to the judgment.17

The passage depicts a curious equality between “princes and great men,” undermining the uniqueness of the monarch. Still more strikingly, it suggests that the value of the Civil Wars lies in their ability to educate the monarch, with his subjects’ rebellion paradoxically preparing him to rule. Against the official policy of clemency and forgetting, it values suffering, “which refreshes the memory, makes it revolve that which was purposely laid aside that it might never be remembered.” Clarendon’s language recalls Sir Thomas Elyot’s description of friendship as “a blessed and stable connexion of sundrie willes, makinge of two parsones one in having and suffringe.”18 In almost every way, however, Elyot’s definition ought not to apply to the monarch, whose will should be absolute and singular, who possesses the country and all its contents, and who (if he is Charles I) suffered an incomparable martyrdom.19 Clarendon, supporter of monarchy, thus uses the language of friendship to offer an alternative to absolutism. Elsewhere, Clarendon argues that kings and princes ought “to make themselves fit to that which Nature had not made them” by condescending to friendship, given its great value.20 In contrast, another royalist, Margaret Cavendish, asserts in her 1655 collection The World’s Olio that “a King that hath Loyal Subjects, wants no Friend.”21 Clarendon’s friendship writings close the distance between king and subjects: they foreground the loyalty of the king’s supporters in order to mitigate the king’s absolute authority.22 In this, they resonate with the writings of royalists, like Katherine Philips’s coterie friend Francis Finch, during the war years. Finch, too, presents the king’s exile as a virtue, and recommends that the king “descend” to make himself fit for friendship.23 Clarendon completes his history and writes his essays after his fall from power; consequently, nostalgia for a remembered but inconsistent friendship colors his idealization. By stressing the association between social fidelity and royalism, Clarendon excludes the rhetoric of betrayal from his own situation, presenting his suggestions of modified monarchy as a form of loyalty. Clarendon reserves his charges of false friendship for Oliver Cromwell, and he is not alone. Even writers with questionable loyalties of their own depict Cromwell as the friend who betrays. Clarendon writes

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of Cromwell that he acts “without any rational dependence upon the friendship of one man who had any other interest to advance his designs but what he had given him by preferring him in the war.”24 For Clarendon, Cromwell operates in a world without true friends; interest governs his actions and those of his allies. The royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus makes the same point, with a twist. Several issues of Mercurius Pragmaticus from December 1647 utilize the theme of friendship to castigate Cromwell and his supporters. The pamphlet depicts Parliamentarians as those who “forget their old Friends, and make much of one another” for money; all the obligations, Oathes, and Covenants, that either Divinity or Policie can fasten upon them, are not bands strong enough to hold them from wandring out of their Principles, but they will Sacrifice their God, Cause, Friends & all, as well as enemies, to their own Lusts.25

The mention of “Oathes, and Covenants” drives home the royalist resentment over the repeated oaths of allegiance, each one contradicting its predecessors. No loyalties remain firm, not religion, politics, or personal affection. Cromwell fares even worse in the newsbook than his Parliamentary allies, for his portrait combines servile deception with inconstancy. He flatters “their Lordships” with the Machiavellian motive “to make an enemy secure before they strike him.”26 He and his co-conspirators even manage to flatter the king into foolish decisions: “they went a subtile way in pretending friendship to him by high promises,” successfully luring Charles away from the relative safety of Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight.27 Parliamentary and Cromwellian friendship in Mercurius Pragmaticus exists only for the purpose of manipulating royalists, whose superior fidelity makes them vulnerable. The irony is that the person airing this view of loyalty in the Mercurius Pragmaticus of 1647–8 is Marchamont Nedham, who has already switched sides from the king to Parliament and back to the king again.28 The figures of loyal royalists and scheming Parliamentarians thus appear very much to be stock characters, strategically deployed “according to Machiavel’s Gospel” in order to elicit readers’ emotional responses.29 This strategy testifies both to the cultural importance of friendship, the violation of which could provoke disdain, but also to a sense of the improbability of it enduring. The poet, translator, and historian Thomas May has changeable political allegiances of his own: he goes from being a poet of the court to the official historiographer of Parliament in The History of the Parliament of England (1647). Hutchinson draws on May’s history for portions of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, making May’s version

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of friendship an especially important analogue to her own. In contrast to Hutchinson’s use of amicitia, May primarily reads friendship as the province of royalists in his history. Unlike the positive portrayals of Clarendon and Mercurius Pragmaticus, May depicts the king’s friendships as corrupting relations of flatterers and false counselors.30 Among the wider populace, friendship appears to spread dissent and promote factions, increasing the people’s dissatisfaction with Parliament.31 Virtuous Parliamentarians stand out precisely because they do not need friendship: “Not all these disadvantages, by the growth of Enemies, and revolt of friends, could dishearten the Lord Fairfax and his Sonne.”32 Indifference both to enemies and to friends’ betrayals confirms military virtue in May’s account. The most emotionally fraught description of friendship in May’s history occurs in his discussion of events in Ireland. With a myopic bias toward the English side, May writes of the peaceful comingling of English and Irish, thanks to so long intermixed cohabitation, and friendly Relations betwixt them. Both these were the causes which afterward encreased the Massacre of the English, who when the fire brake out, implored the friendship of their Irish neighbors, Landlords, or Tenants; committing into their hands and protection their treasure, wives and children, with all that was dear unto them, in hope that former friendship might prevail. But they generally either betrayed them into the power of other Rebels, or perfidiously, and cruelly murdered them with their own hands:33

May’s skewed viewpoint ignores all the violence that led up to this incident, and thus understands this moment to be unprecedented and unexplainable. May’s version of events presupposes a false likeness between the English and Irish, the equality of friendship. In this view, Irish rebellion can only be the result of Irish perfidy, the former friendship a ruse perpetrated upon the innocent English. His own language of “Rebels” reveals, however, the unacknowledged system of tyranny and oppression enacted by the English upon the Irish. What May leaves out in his understanding of the Irish falsely betraying their English friends is the unlikeness produced by martial and political power. He omits the legitimate occasion for rebellion that allows (Irish) friends to stand together against the (English) tyrant. Writing from his exile after the restoration, the republican Edmund Ludlow sees betrayal, which May limits to particular perfidious cases, as a nearly universal condition.34 Ludlow is among those who doubt John Hutchinson’s loyalty to the cause after his pardon under the Act of Oblivion.35 In part, Ludlow’s sense of betrayal seems to derive from his early faith in the transparency of his cause and its supporters, for

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“when I first took arms under the Parliament in defence of the rights and liberties of my country, I did not think that a work so good and so necessary would have been attended with so great difficulties.”36 He proceeds to decry the indebtedness of particular individuals to the king, concluding that “adding to all this the great corruption of the nation, I became convinced of my former error, and began now more to wonder that they found so many friends to assist them in their just and lawful undertaking, than I had done before at the opposition they met with.”37 Far from the grounding expectation assumed by Clarendon, friendship for Ludlow becomes a wonder, entirely unlikely given rampant corruption. Significantly, too, he depicts himself as external to this dynamic, describing Parliament as “they.” The afterlife of republican identity recalls the preeminent example of friendship in its political context. The 1698–9 edition of Ludlow’s Memoirs opens with a preface by his first editor (probably John Toland, the prime candidate for the reviser of Ludlow’s Memoirs).38 The second sentence of the preface reminds its readers that The vertues of Scipio and Cato, the best and greatest of the Romans, could not preserve them from the assaults of envy and calumny; of which, the groundless accusations of the former to the people, and the volumes of aspersions published against the latter by the usurper Julius, are a sufficient testimony.39

Exemplary republicans both, Scipio Africanus and Cato the Younger illustrate the vagaries of political reputation, including the realization that republican leanings and military prowess do not guarantee the loyalty of the people. Scipio demonstrates something else as well: the death of this exemplary friend provides the occasion for the writing of Cicero’s Laelius de amicitia, in which Laelius’ mourning prompts a disquisition on the virtues of friendship. The shadow of amicitia – the exemplary friendship that supports the goals of the state – haunts Ludlow’s text from the very beginning, but only in the guise of its later betrayal. That betrayal, however, remains safely located in “the people,” outside the virtuous friendship that provides its other. Hutchinson’s use of amicitia emerges against the ground of these other writings. From Clarendon’s equation of the king and his subjects under the sign of friendship, to characterizations of Cromwell and his supporters as false friends, to May’s implication that the only good Parliamentarians are those who need no friends, these writings associate faithful friendship with royalists and deception or praiseworthy independence (according to the writer) with Parliamentarians. The texts do hint at the use of friendship to reorganize political relations, most notably in Clarendon’s depiction of friendship as a good to which the

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king should aspire. Ludlow’s editor comes closest to Hutchinson when he evokes Scipio and Cato, placing Ludlow’s laments about betrayal in the context of the longer history of republican friendship. Cato, who kills himself rather than submit to Caesar, offers one version of republican fidelity: he remains steadfast in his principles.40 The friends who rebel against or reform tyrants, like Damon and Pythias, and Orestes and Pylades, offer another: their loyalty to each other wreaks change in the political system. In each case, keeping faith with an idea or person entails acting against the power in charge – what some would call betrayal. Hutchinson draws on both royalist and republican sources in her treatments of friendship. Many of her explicit references appear in her secular commonplace book, in her notes on the French Jesuit Nicolas Caussin’s The Holy Court (1638).41 In her transcription and modification of Caussin, Hutchinson records his insistence on fidelity with several crucial omissions. She writes: “Of all the plagues that murther friendship treachery and infidellitie is the most banefull and most execrable.”42 Caussin, however, makes a great deal more of the necessity of secrecy: he laments the “generous heart” “abandon[ed] . . . to the discretion of such as persecute him” by a false friend who reveals his secrets.43 By omitting the reference to secrecy, Hutchinson cuts away some of the royalist associations. She further dismisses monarchy in her next note on faithfulness; she cites only “Fidellity which includes consistency perfects the whole building of friendship and setts on the crowne.”44 While Hutchinson keeps the image of the crown, she leaves out Caussin’s extensive naturalization of monarchic society on the basis of fidelity, that, which maketh maisters, and servants, families, and Provinces, states and Empires. All is quickned, all lives, all under the divine hands of the great Mistresse. By it, Kings have subjects, Lords their officers, Commonwealths Magistrates, Communities Administratours, fields Labourers, Civill-life Merchants and Artificers, by it the whole world hath order, and by it, order prospers in all things.45

Caussin’s account makes fidelity the organizing principle of a hierarchical world. While Hutchinson certainly supports some elements of natural hierarchy, such as distinctions between social classes, she rejects the centrality of the king and his subjects, with the sense of possession Caussin’s language conveys, to this system. Caussin’s naturalization of hierarchy also runs counter to the more complex system Hutchinson builds from the materials of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, where artificial and natural bonds combine to form human societies.46 The passage immediately following the crowning virtue of fidelity in

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Hutchinson’s version and the naturalization of hierarchy in Caussin’s addresses the consequences of friendship’s failure. Hutchinson’s notes hew closely to Caussin’s language here: If a friend chance to faile whithso by evill life or through manifest contempt of you or out of other ill dispositions yet you must on the rotten trunk honor the last characters of love rather unstick then rend keepe the secrets formerly com[m]itted to you nor publish his defects Friendship is so venerable that wee must honor even its shadowes and imitate the Pythagoreans who celebrated the obsequies of such as forsooke their society to bury them with honour.47

The lines make a powerful argument for the persistence of friendship even after rupture. The fidelity advocated by Caussin and reiterated by Hutchinson, it seems, does not mean perfect agreement. Instead, it is something simultaneously more difficult and more fragile, like the friendship that emerges in Hutchinson’s translation of De rerum natura and in Order and Disorder. Friendship is vulnerable as well as “venerable.” Even if a friendship dissolves, its obligations retain their hold on the friends. The passage recalls, too, the exemplary republican precedents in the preface to Ludlow, for Caussin takes this passage from Cicero. Describing the end of a friendship in the Laelius de amicitia, Scipio recommends, “as I have heard that Cato used to say, ‘They should be unravelled rather than rent apart’.”48 “Rather unstick then rend” thus has a peculiar genealogy: advocated by republicans twice over, it nevertheless comes to the republican Hutchinson through the monarchist Caussin. This entangled history speaks to the difficulty of “bury[ing]” the dead “with honour,” a difficulty that precisely captures Hutchinson’s struggle in writing Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.

“Herein only in her whole life”49 In Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson sets out to rescue her husband’s reputation from the Parliamentarians who condemn John Hutchinson for not having been executed as a regicide, asserting that this meant his capitulation to royalist demands. The threat to John Hutchinson’s consistency centers on the letter recanting his actions during the Civil Wars. Lucy Hutchinson claims sole responsibility for the letter, in an attempt to present the retreat from republican principles as her own, not her husband’s. Almost none of her readers have believed her, however: “our own party . . . because he was not hanged at first, imagined and spoke among themselves all the scandals

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that could be devised of him as one that had deserted the cause.”50 Hutchinson’s description foregrounds two features central to her own account: the Hutchinsons’ shared political conviction, expressed in “our own party,” and the importance of narration, “imagined,” “spoke,” and “devised.” The doubters and devisers extend from the Hutchinsons’ contemporaries the republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney to twentieth-century scholar Christopher Hill: “She covers up for him at every stage, especially in his momentary weakness of 1660, which he later so bitterly repented. She took the blame for this on herself, a really noble sacrifice since she was writing for her children.”51 Rather than debating whether Lucy or John Hutchinson wrote the letter, the more interesting questions seem to be why most readers believe that Lucy Hutchinson did not, and why, even if she did, her reputation as a republican would not suffer in the same way as her husband’s. The answers to these questions lie in the conjunction of coverture, friendship, and betrayal. Coverture, while promoting the fiction that the husband’s selfhood and political personhood subsume his wife’s, in fact allows for room to maneuver under the rubric of conscience.52 Conscience can authorize wives’ dissent within marriage. During the years of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate, coverture also gives women legal recourse not available to men: wives of royalists could petition for maintenance from their husbands’ sequestered estates, because authorities argue that women are not responsible for their husbands’ political mistakes. This practice presupposes a split between the loyalties of husbands and wives; it assumes that wives either support a political authority their husbands defy, or remain indifferent to and unimplicated in all political affairs. The ideology of women’s noninvolvement does not hold absolutely, however, as the example of Margaret Cavendish shows. From 1651–3, Cavendish goes to London to petition for her portion of her husband’s sequestered estates.53 The Parliamentary committee denies her claim, she writes, “by reason I was married since My Lord was made a delinquent, I could have nothing, nor should have any thing, he being the greatest traitor to the state, which was to be the most loyall subject to his king and country.”54 The dual grounds of Parliament’s refusal – William Cavendish’s great treachery and Margaret Cavendish’s knowing marriage – illustrate the means by which a wife takes on responsibility for her husband’s politics in the moment that she marries. The logic of coverture would thus protect Lucy Hutchinson, who marries John before the outbreak of hostilities, from retribution for her husband’s support of Parliament, though this is not her concern. Instead, Hutchinson exploits coverture’s aim “to maximize

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the husband’s authority while limiting his responsibility” for his wife’s illegal acts, in order to cast blame on herself, rather than her husband, for the letter.55 She does this, first, by attributing to herself a power that the most extreme articulations of coverture do not allow. The logic of not making a wife liable for her husband’s political actions assumes that she cannot influence him; the husband bears sole responsibility for these decisions. In contrast, Hutchinson describes the role of “his wife” (the thirdperson term she uses to refer to herself throughout the Memoirs) in the incident: his wife . . . had much ado to persuade him to be contented with his deliverance; . . . But while he saw others suffer, he suffered with them in his mind and, had not his wife persuaded him, had offered himself a voluntary sacrifice; but being by her convinced that God’s eminent appearance seemed to have singled him out for preservation, he with thanks acquiesced in that thing.56

In the space of a few sentences, “his wife” “persuade[s]” John Hutchinson again and again, until, “convinced” by God’s role, he “acquiesced.” The lines bear traces of the humanist workings of persuasive rhetoric within friendship. Importantly, however, John Hutchinson’s imaginative sympathies remain elsewhere, as he suffers with those condemned: “he looked upon himself as judged in their judgment, and executed in their execution.”57 John Hutchinson’s emphasis on his shared likeness with the other regicides collides with the incontrovertible fact that he is not “executed,” a fact his fellow republicans will not let him forget. Nevertheless, by aligning his sympathies with the Parliamentary supporters who suffer consequences, the Memoirs suggest a friendship alliance counter to the persuasions of “his wife.” The later reinterpretation and presentation of events in the Memoirs have an earlier precedent in the letter itself. The letter tells of a John Hutchinson led astray by bad examples: They who yet remember the seeming sanctity and subtle arts of those men, who seduced not only me, but thousands more, in those unhappy days, cannot, if they have any Christian compassion, but join with me in bewailing my wretched misfortune, to have fallen into their pernicious snares, when neither my own malice, avarice, or ambition, but an ill-guided judgment led me.58

With its emphasis on subtle, seductive persuaders, the letter evokes two distinct sets of associations: the attempts to excuse the behavior of Charles I as resulting from the influence of evil counselors, and the depiction of those false counselors as wives. The Memoirs make both

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these claims: Hutchinson writes that the king had “given himself up to be governed by the Queen in all affairs both of state and religion.”59 Still more damningly (and famously), she asserts that Queen Elizabeth ruled well thanks to “her submission to her masculine and wise counsellors,” because otherwise the kingdom “never is in any place happy where the hands that are made only for distaffs affect the management of scepters.”60 This statement exemplifies a version of Lucy Hutchinson’s conservative gender politics, content to reinforce male hierarchy while pulling down monarchic rule. It also sets the precedent for Hutchinson depicting herself, in the role of “his wife,” as one of these wifely false counselors when she persuades John Hutchinson to accept the benefits wrought by the letter’s recantation. The idea that wives offer a particularly noxious form of false counsel colors misogynistic writings, but it also pervades friendship discourse. Richard Brathwaite, in his conduct manual The English Gentleman (1630), warns of betrayal by “not onely our common friends, but even those who sleep in our owne bosome; as Dalilah plaid with Samson, either simply or subtilly will discover our secret’st counsells to our enemie.”61 The reference to Samson and Dalilah, with their different nationalities, casts the sharing of “secret’st counsells to our enemie” in the light of telling state secrets. The Triall of True Friendship (1596) aims to help its readers distinguish between true friendship (which it portrays as almost unimaginably rare) and the flattery of parasites. Despite this focus on friendship in general, wives make up most of its examples of false friends. From Clytemnestra to Dalilah, the author M. B. finds the intimacy between husband and wife especially susceptible to betrayal.62 Interestingly, he takes pains to note that women are not more false than men are: “neither was Clitemnestra so cruel unto her husband because she was a woman, but because she was a most wicked and unnatural woman, therefore we may beleeve a woman as wel as a man.”63 This is an important distinction: wives serve as the examples of false friends not because women are especially false, but because the intimacy of the relationship produces the possibility of betrayal. From the example of the false wife, M. B. generalizes to find all friends treacherous. The link between wives and false counselors gains additional force from the identification of the husband with imperium, or the sovereign power, and the wife with consilium, or the advisory council. As Francis Bacon writes in his essay “Of Counsel,” “sovereignty is married to counsel.”64 This association, as Julie Crawford observes, genders counsel female, and makes consiliary or secretarial relations between women a potent rejoinder to abuses of male sovereignty.65 Hutchinson exploits this potential in her narration of the recantation letter. The success of

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the letter depends, in part, on her having stood in for John Hutchinson before in a secretarial function: “She writ her husband’s name to the letter and ventured to send it in [to Parliament], being used sometimes to write the letters he dictated, and her character not much different from his.”66 The likeness of handwriting – of “character” – illuminates what she is trying very hard to keep apart: their moral culpability for this act. The similarity in their handwriting and her practice of serving as his amanuensis thus facilitate this deception. Before, she only writes what “he dictated;” here, she repeatedly underlines her autonomy, “having contrived and written this letter.”67 By emphasizing that she acts alone, Hutchinson moves her writing from the advisory status of consilium to the disobedience of a wife within coverture. Like the feme covert who remains liable for treasonous acts, however, Hutchinson tries to portray herself as the wife who acts without her husband’s knowledge or consent. The choreography of blame and responsibility for the letter turns upon degrees of likeness and unlikeness between Lucy and John Hutchinson. Up to the point of the letter, they share republican convictions. At the letter, they diverge, with either husband or wife capitulating to politic pro-monarchic sentiments. After the letter saves John Hutchinson, they converge again in their regret over the retraction and determination not to repeat this mistake. In acting on her husband’s behalf by writing the letter or saying she wrote the letter, Hutchinson tries to cover him. She covers him not with political conformity, but with the role of wife, with its associations of emotion untouched by political loyalties. In the first instance, the submission of the letter, the relation of John and Lucy Hutchinson resembles the situation of recusant Catholic families: the husband seems to conform by attending Anglican services in order to avoid fines and other repercussions, while the wife, less liable to prosecution, sustains the family’s Catholicism.68 Later readers, especially those sympathetic to republicanism, read the incident in this way: John Hutchinson capitulates while Lucy Hutchinson maintains her principles. That is, they read the incident through the logic of coverture. Lucy Hutchinson, however, transforms that covering through the model of friendship, when she says that she wrote the letter. She presents herself as the negative other of friendship, the wife who is the false counselor, in order to sacrifice herself for her friend, like the republican friends who rebel against the tyrant. Like Damon and Pythias or Orestes and Pylades, each vying to die for his friend, Hutchinson tries to offer up herself – in this case, her republican principles – before the monarch in order to save John Hutchinson. She

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saw that he was ambitious of being a public sacrifice, and therefore, herein only in her whole life, resolved to disobey him, and to improve all the affection he had to her for his safety, and prevailed with him to retire; for she said she would not live to see him a prisoner.69

In its seventeenth-century context, “improve” means not only “to turn his love for his wife to the cause of his own safety” but also “to increase or better,” in an agrarian sense.70 The former meaning turns the colonel’s affection for his wife, through her influence, into care of the self. The Memoirs also present his self-preservation as concern for her wellbeing: “she would not live to see him a prisoner.” The latter meaning of “increase” echoes Hutchinson’s motive for writing the Memoirs: not only “to moderate [her] woe,” but “if it were possible to augment [her] love.”71 But it remains importantly distinct, for the agrarian connotations of “improve” recall the propagation Hutchinson refuses in the preface to De rerum natura. Hutchinson aligns that propagation with the more limited reproductive goals of marriage, which she rejects for the humanist textual productivity of marital amicitia. The foolish wife tries to improve his affection; the wise friend knows “to augment [her] love.” Augmenting her love does not lead Hutchinson to outbursts of passion in the Memoirs: the revisions of the Memoirs tend to minimize the personal voice.72 This chastening shows the act of writing the Memoirs as a disciplining of passion, a moderation that produces an exemplary John Hutchinson at the cost of his wife’s political consistency. The much-noted split in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson between the self-abnegating “wife” and the assertive narrator is also the difference between the wife and the friend.73 The distinction between wife and friend helps to clarify the distance between John Hutchinson’s reaction to the letter, wherein his “wife” “never displeased him more in her life,” and the Memoirs’ later editor James Sutherland, who writes of the letter incident that “Nothing else that she says or does in her long narrative is likely to please [readers] more.”74 In the text of the Memoirs, Lucy Hutchinson manages to prise apart two figures: the wife loyal only to her husband, and the friend faithful both to her principles and to her friend, willing to give up her reputation to save the latter and in so doing saving the former, too. This helps to explain why Lucy Hutchinson fares so well, but why do readers doubt John Hutchinson? In part, this suspicion derives from the ways in which John Hutchinson navigates his own loyalties, both during the Civil Wars and in their aftermath. The criticisms of John Hutchinson by “our own party” resonate with accounts of his dubious friendliness in the war years, when he is Governor of Nottingham:

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But not only to him, but to many others of his enemies, the Governor upon sundry occasions, when they fell into his power to have requited their mischiefs instead of vengeance rendered them benefits; so that at last his own friends would tell him, if they could in justice and conscience forsake him they would become his adversaries, for that was the next way to engage him to obligations. But although his friends, who had greater animosities against his unjust persecutors than he himself, would say these things in anger at his clemency, his nature was as full of kind gratitude to his friends as free from base revenges upon his enemies, who either fell down to him by their own just remorse, or were cast under his power by God’s just providence.75

The lines foreshadow the accusations of betrayal that will haunt John Hutchinson after his initial pardon. The language of the passage, especially “instead of vengeance would render them benefits,” evokes the duties of friendship, in which allowing a friend to perform a service is a greater kindness than helping that friend.76 The most comprehensive discussion of this is Seneca’s De beneficiis, which emphasizes the dangers of accepting help: And so it is necessary for me to choose the person from whom I wish to receive a benefit; and, in truth, I must be far more careful in selecting my creditor for a benefit than a creditor for a loan. For to the latter I shall have to return the same amount that I have received, and, when I have returned it, I have paid all my debt and am free; but to the other I must make an additional payment, and, even after I have paid my debt of gratitude, the bond between us still holds; for, just when I have finished paying it, I am obliged to begin again, and friendship endures.77

By rendering benefits, John Hutchinson generates continuing reciprocal obligations. His friends argue that this shows his lack of gratitude to them, for “it is the first demand of duty that we do most for him who loves us most.”78 In exercising his clemency against vengeance, John Hutchinson turns his enemies into friends, but he cannot do so without also turning his friends into enemies. John Hutchinson puts his former enemies in his power by rendering them benefits. Moreover, he puts himself in their power: these acts of clemency will support his plea not to be executed on the king’s return, but they destroy his reputation with his fellow republicans. The language of clemency, enemies, and benefits proves particularly problematic for John Hutchinson’s republican reputation because it shares strong associations with royalism. Most broadly, the right of clemency is traditionally reserved to kings, a fact which could simply serve to confirm John Hutchinson’s powerful role during the wars.79 The problem, as John Hutchinson’s interregnum clemency shows, is that “clemency merges the identities of victor and victim,” before “the

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glory goes finally to the prince” who grants pardon.80 In addition, at the moment that Lucy Hutchinson writes the Memoirs, this language of undue generosity to enemies functions as both praise and blame of King Charles II. As a satirical poem puts it: “His father’s foes he does reward / Preferring those that cut off’s Head.”81 John Hutchinson in the wars and King Charles II in the Restoration share precisely the same problem: each renders benefits to enemies rather than solidifying relations with friends. From one perspective, this can look like kingly clemency or Christian charity; from another, it appears to be betrayal. The focus on enemies shares a further context that links it to the royalist side. John Hutchinson’s attentiveness to proper treatment of enemies also marks him out as a military commander. As May’s praise of Fairfax for his indifference to friends and enemies shows, however, not everyone values this ethical standard equally. Where May understands separation from friends and enemies to be a sign of virtuous independence, the royalist Margaret Cavendish, in her compendium The World’s Olio, stresses the obligation to enemies rather than to friends: “for an honest man would not betray the trust of an enemy either by threats nor torments, nor fear of death, nor love to life, nor perswasions of friends, nor the allurements of the world, nor the inchantments of tongues.”82 For Cavendish, the relationship that holds amidst extreme circumstances is not that between friends but between enemies. Her version of friendship is thus more like John’s than Lucy Hutchinson’s. Where Lucy Hutchinson stresses the continuing obligations of friendship, even after betrayal, John Hutchinson, like Cavendish, distinguishes between friends and enemies. John Hutchinson’s generosity toward his enemies leads to a corresponding contraction of his circle of friendship. His version of friendship, like Cavendish’s, opposes friends to enemies, rather than acknowledging the ways in which loyalties and affiliations shift. Thus, the complicated betrayals and obligations that Lucy Hutchinson traces through the language of friendship enable her to imagine a community that John Hutchinson, in his last moments, cannot. As he lies dying in Sandown Castle, his wife still in Nottinghamshire, John Hutchinson moves to speak: Then, as he was going to utter something, “Here’s none,” said he, “but friends.” His brother minded him that the doctor was present: “Oh, I thank you,” said he; and such was their amazement in their sorrow, that they did not think of speaking to the doctor to retire, but lost what he would have said, which I am confident was some advice to his son how to demean himself in public concernments.83

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In a moment of complete vulnerability, John Hutchinson requires friends who are certain to be loyal. Without that, he cannot speak – a silence that means he fails to give his son political counsel. Of course, it is Lucy Hutchinson herself who supplies this interpretation of her husband’s deathbed intentions: she is “confident” that his silenced speech “was some advice to his son how to demean himself in public concernments.” Without diminishing the extremity of John Hutchinson’s circumstances, it seems important to note that his opposition between friends and enemies does not provide a way forward amidst the changed, and changing, political climate of the Restoration. His only solution in these circumstances is to martyr himself for his political principles. In that act of martyrdom, John Hutchinson makes himself like another republican, who also gives up his life rather than submit to monarchy. The death of Cato the Younger, the same Cato in Ludlow’s preface, offers a paradigm of resistance and integrity. On his death by suicide, the people of Utica gather at his door: With one voice they called Cato their saviour and benefactor, the only man who was free, the only one unvanquished. And this they continued to do even when word was brought that Caesar was approaching. But neither fear of the conqueror, nor a desire to flatter him, nor their mutual strife and dissension, could blunt their desire to honour Cato. They decked his body in splendid fashion, gave it an illustrious escort, and buried it near the sea, where a statue of him now stands, sword in hand.84

Cato’s death and burial serve as a means of protest against Caesar; like Hutchinson’s notes on Caussin, they point toward the importance of “bury[ing] the dead with honour.”85 The act of burying this virtuous republican cures some of the ills of monarchy and friendship, such as the “desire to flatter” Caesar and “mutual strife and dissension.” The language of “benefactor” and “only one unvanquished” indicates another important element of Cato’s death: it denies Caesar the chance to pardon him, which “would not be thought to have defiled his own fair fame, but rather to have adorned that of Caesar.”86 This is the virtue of clemency, and by denying Caesar the chance to grant it to him, Cato refuses the obligation under which this benefit would place him. After the initial error of the letter, so does John Hutchinson. Lucy Hutchinson, in her life of her husband, honors him both by portraying him as granting benefits to his enemies and by showing his refusal to accept a commensurate benefit from the restored monarch. In so doing, she reconstructs his reputation in the republican pattern of Cato, conferring upon him the benefit of her attempted sacrifice of her own republican reputation in his honor. Cato also functions as a warning of the

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limits of John Hutchinson’s example, however, for Cato’s suicide does nothing to halt Caesar’s reign.

“Knowledge managed with charity”87 Lucy Hutchinson finds a better answer than Cato’s – and John Hutchinson’s – in the language of Christian charity. By combining elements of classical amicitia with charity, Hutchinson addresses two problems of post-restoration England: how to live peaceably with the neighbors she fought against in the wars, and how to preserve a sense of republican commitment under the new regime. As with Katherine Philips’s use of the discourse of friendship, Hutchinson’s friendship language after the restoration provides a way of coming to terms with the traumas of the wars without obliterating difference. The strength of friendship lies in its ability to persist and reform even after rupture. Hutchinson, in her secular commonplace notes on Caussin, modifies his account of the relation between friendship and charity. She emphasizes the fragility of friendship, writing that although moral virtue, which with utility and pleasure forms one of the three foundations of friendship, “is more firme but the frailty and mutability of man makes it that there is no firme cement no sure foundation of friendship but christian charity.”88 In Hutchinson’s notes, even virtue provides a vulnerable basis for friendship; the more encompassing, more explicitly Christian, charity offers welcome stability. For Caussin, however, as for other writers on friendship, charity and friendship appear to be in tension with one another in the present age: Such was the Amity of the first Christians, of whom with much wonder the Pagans sayd, Behold, how they love one another; See how ready they are to dy each for other; and that which the Poets found to be a matter so rare, reckoning up some few payres of true friends. Christianity made it appeare at that time in as many subjects as it had men. But at this present the multiplication of persons hath abbreviated the extent of charity.89

In Caussin’s more extended narrative of the phenomenon Hutchinson abbreviates, Christian charity once encompassed all Christians, but no longer does. Caussin’s description of early Christians, all of whom are friends to one another, likens them to the pairs of exemplary friends lauded by Aristotle, Cicero, and their inheritors; their willingness “to dy each for other” confirms their place amongst this distinguished company. Laments like Caussin’s over the limitations of charity in modern life appear frequently in other texts. Jeremy Taylor, whose

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discourse on friendship Katherine Philips elicits by asking him to discuss whether particular friendships accord with Christian charity, notes this failing as well: only where the restraint begins, there begins our imperfection; it is not ill that you entertain brave friendships and worthy societies: it were well if you could love, and if you could benefit all mankinde; for I conceive that is the sum of all friendships.90

Rather than the foundation of friendship, Taylor presents charity as the more perfect, because less limited, form of friendship. As the above discussion of John Hutchinson’s benefits to enemies suggests, however, such universal benevolence carries significant risks. The challenge to charity in the English Restoration derives not so much from “the multiplication of persons” as from the multiplication of ideas, especially ideas about worship, governance, and the relations between them. Hutchinson’s post-restoration thinking about charity takes place over a shifting religious and political landscape from 1660 to her death in 1681. Bursts of prosecution of nonconformists – such as those immediately following the restoration of Charles II, the passage of the Second Conventicle Act in 1670, and the period after the Exclusion Crisis and the accession of King James I – alternate with periods of greater tolerance. Unlikely alliances form, with Declarations of Indulgence benefiting both Dissenters and Catholics. Refusal to attend the Anglican church makes Dissenters ineligible for state and university offices, as well as vulnerable to fines and persecution.91 Hutchinson’s writings on these questions illuminate the distinctive form of her charity. In her religious commonplace book, Hutchinson writes two treatises on her own “faith and attainment,” dated 1667 and 1668, a few years before another outbreak of persecution with the Second Conventicle Act.92 These statements illustrate the consequences of charity in Hutchinson’s writings: the injunction to attend local churches, even those of faiths different from one’s own. She describes this as an act of neighborliness.93 Though she acknowledges that she might dissent from some precepts of nearby churches, Hutchinson emphasizes the importance of the “league with God and each other,” a community that church attendance enables.94 Hutchinson’s own dissension from Anglican ceremony and doctrine magnifies the absence of like-mindedness with her neighbors – but it also makes her insistence on church attendance as an act of charity even more compelling. In this way, Hutchinson’s practice resonates with Alan Bray’s argument for the role of communion in traditional friendship. Bray demonstrates that taking communion together functions as a means of repairing broken

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relationships in a community, a proffer of peace that allows both participants to preserve their dignity. It offers a type of mutual forgiveness: “to receive that gift we must also give it, bear with one another’s infirmities, and not bear malice in our hearts.”95 The peace-making of church attendance confers the continuing benefits of friendship without the hierarchical indebtedness of clemency. Hutchinson’s praise of the conformity of attendance, if resolutely not of belief, becomes still more significant in its divergence from her husband’s convictions. The evidence for this difference comes from an examination of John Hutchinson in October 1663, a period of increased punishment for those not attending Anglican services.96 After his pardon at the restoration, John Hutchinson remains an object of suspicion. In part, this is because he will not conform and attend church, as Chancellor Edward Hyde’s oft-quoted remark to Lucy Hutchinson’s brother Sir Allen Apsley indicates: “ ‘Salloway conforms to the government, and goes to church, but your brother is the most unchanged person of the party.’ ”97 In 1663, John Hutchinson is arrested on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the king and restore “the old Parliament, Gospel ministry, and English liberty;” though his sympathies certainly lie with the plotters, Hutchinson’s protestations of innocence in this regard seem accurate.98 He dies in jail eleven months after this arrest, never having been formally tried. On his initial examination by Secretary Henry Bennet, he asserts his religious Independence. Hutchinson tells Bennet that he does not attend church to hear “Divine Service, CommonPrayer,” nor does he have it read in his house. To Bennet’s next query “How I then did for my Soul’s Comfort?” Hutchinson answers “Sir, I hope you will leave that for me to account between God and my own Soul.”99 This ends the interrogation, though not his imprisonment. John Hutchinson’s refusal to attend church persists even in the most compromising of circumstances; prompted by his questioner, he emphasizes conscience and salvation, rather than the public aspects of church attendance. As John Hutchinson’s insistence on nonconformity indicates, the parish church can be a site of dissension as easily as one of reconciliation. These divisions become particularly intense with the debates over toleration and conformity in the 1660s and 1670s, but their roots stretch back into a tradition in which friendship has particular resonance. While the depiction of an ethical friendship whose ends coincide with the goals of the state follows the same pattern as the reconciling rites of communion, both friendship and neighborly church-going have obverse sides. Bray notes the potential of traditional friendship, solemnized in the eucharist, not only “to help men and women to live in peace and friendship among

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themselves, across their divisions, but also its capacity to intensify those very divisions.”100 Friendship’s dangerous possibilities – its shading into conspiracy and collusion, its emphasis on secrecy, its privileging of particular loyalties over more general ethical claims – are also precisely the worries articulated by those who would stamp out nonconformity. Alternative communities of worship can foment rebellion, are necessarily concealed from the authorities, and forge bonds between members in opposition to those of the larger society. This revolutionary potential, in both its virtuous (the friends who rebel against tyrants) and corrupt (the friends who conspire against the just state) forms, exists as part of friendship from its earliest instantiations. Lucy Hutchinson’s focus on the neighborly value of church attendance does not indicate a political conformity, or even quietism, as the revised 1668 statement of her religious faith makes clear. In this treatise, she moves directly from an abbreviated account of church attendance to a consideration of citizens’ duties to magistrates: Publick Assemblies are very bearable And it is our duty to frequent them . . . Civil Magistrates are to be obeyd in all commands which are not contrary to the law of God . . . It is the duty of kings to be nursing fathers to the Church, and when they are so they are to have the blessing, and prayers of the Church, with double love and honor to their persons, and when they are not so, God is to be supplicated to make them soe, that under them wee may live quietly and godlily, at least to curb and restreine their violence, till the Lord shall take from them that power which they abuse, and give the kingdome to him whose right it is.101

Though Hutchinson largely refers protest to prayer, it remains unclear whether believers can actively “restreine” the “violence” of corrupt kings. The 1667 treatise elaborates more fully, and offers a less circumspect account of the grounds for rebellion: As for Magistrates I owne Magistracy to be an ordinance of God and obedience to be due to them who abuse not his & the peoples trust declining into tirants and comanding things contrary to the Lords com[m]ands who is still to be obeyed before men and although many remedies may be lawfull in such cases for those who are lawfully calld to it yet I hold suffering the safest way.102

In moving from church attendance to rebellion, Hutchinson shows that peace-making does not require political quietism. Hutchinson carefully restricts rebellion to those “lawfully calld to it,” but she nevertheless acknowledges the existence of illegitimate magistrates, and insists that God calls some – though she will not say who – to find remedies against tyranny. Given the inevitable absence of political consensus

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in post-restoration England, Hutchinson uses charity to envision a republican political future, while her husband’s insistence on absolute unity of opinion leads only to silence. Amicitia joined to charity allows Hutchinson to imagine both the remaking of bonds between neighbors and legitimate resistance against “tirants.” The distinctive features of Lucy Hutchinson’s melding of neighborly love and political resistance become clearer when juxtaposed with the thought of John Owen, the nonconformist divine who is Chancellor of Oxford under Oliver Cromwell and remains a prominent voice for toleration after the restoration. Hutchinson likely attends Owen’s London conventicle in 1673 and translates his Theologumena pantodapa from Latin.103 During the time that Hutchinson is articulating the above statements of her own faith, Owen writes a series of arguments for indulgence in religion. In these tracts, he insists that the dissenting congregations, because they differ from the established church only in regard to things indifferent, cannot be accused of causing schism in the church. Such religious debate, Owen argues, does not cause civil unrest, because it leaves unchanged God’s dictate to obey civil power: And why should it be supposed that men will answer the Obligations laid by God on their Consciences in one thing, and not in another; in the things of his Worship and not of obedience unto Civil Power, concerning which his Commands are as express and evident, as they can be pretended to be in the things which they avow their obligation unto.104

Thus, Owen asserts, the requirement that a believer not follow his or her conscience, but submit instead to the magistrate’s authority in matters of religion, creates a compromised subjectivity that paradoxically undermines the grounds of authority to the magistrate: the obedience to God’s dictates. He insists that conscience, rather than obedience to state forms of church worship, upholds civic order. Owen, however, does not condone resistance to an illegitimate magistrate in these tracts of the 1660s and 1670s, as Lucy Hutchinson does at that time. It is not until after Hutchinson’s death in 1681 that Owen will argue for resistance, and then on historical grounds.105 Owen locates the rights of resistance not in religious ideology – the imposition of certain forms of worship on others, or even the protection of one’s own worship – but in the conjunction of religious persecution with the curtailment of civil rights. The Anglican insistence on incorporating religious worship into civil government means that religious oppression equates to civic harm. Compared with Owen, Hutchinson insists earlier, and more explicitly, on the rights of resistance; she emphasizes the neighborliness in church attendance, where Owen sees it as a mark of conformity that

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will lead to greater restrictions. Owen assumes that the fissured subjectivity produced by a conflict between conscience and obedience will necessarily undermine the state. Lucy Hutchinson’s version of the relation between conscience, governance, and church attendance differs from Owen’s because she starts from a different model. Drawing on the acknowledgment of conflicting allegiances in classical friendship and on the incoherence of the ideology of coverture, Hutchinson understands following her conscience to be compatible not only with acts of resistance but also with gestures of peace-keeping with neighbors. In so doing, she justifies the fears of people like the Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards, who “claims that the toleration of separatists ‘will breed divisions, and Schismes, disturbing the peace and quiet of Churches, and Townes’; and it will also ‘breed divisions in families betweene husband and wife, brother, and brother’.”106 But Hutchinson also shows Edwards’ ideas of causality to be faulty. In their reading of Edwards’ exchange with the nonconformist and Leveller Katherine Chidley, the historians Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green stress that women petitioners like Chidley do not extrapolate freedom of conscience into a critique of gender hierarchy and oppression.107 Within the logic of analogy, in which the family functions as a microcosm of the state, Broad and Green’s qualification holds. As nearly all early modern writers on marriage acknowledge, however, the wife retains the right to disobey husbandly commands that contradict her conscience.108 Amicitia takes this tension and articulates it in the public realm. It thus enables Hutchinson to return to the language of neighborliness with a crucial difference. Filtered through amicitia and charity, Hutchinson’s simultaneous advocacy of church attendance and resistance against false magistrates shows a community forged not from the compliance of conformity, but rather from a continuing awareness of difference.

“To discharge its duties with the most scrupulous care”109 This chapter begins with what seems to be a textual misattribution by one of Lucy Hutchinson’s descendants. He confuses her with Eve, the recantation letter with the fall. This vagary of textual identification provides a fitting figure for Hutchinson, whose full range of writing has been slower to come to light than any other figure in this study. Most of her manuscripts stay within a fairly close family circle during her lifetime. Some of them, like the early narrative of her husband’s wartime actions, have a public purpose within the halls of Parliament. Others, like the

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first five cantos of her biblical epic Order and Disorder, find their way into print without her name, only to earn another misattribution, to her royalist brother Sir Allen Apsley. Some writings her family holds more closely than Hutchinson herself might have wanted: her family refuses all of the eighteenth-century republican historian Catharine Macaulay’s requests to examine Hutchinson’s materials. Only in recent years, with the publication of her translation of De rerum natura, her elegies, and the full text of Order and Disorder, has a fuller sense of Hutchinson’s intellectual and literary commitments emerged. The afterlife of Lucy Hutchinson’s writings, thus, differs from that of Katherine Philips’s: rather than the widespread rewriting of Philips’s poems, Hutchinson’s legacy emerges in a more fragmentary fashion, until the efflorescence of responses to the publication of Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson in 1806. Those readings, too, are partial, in both senses: they firmly advocate for Lucy Hutchinson the exemplary wife and republican without realizing the extent of her writings. Nevertheless, they are often brilliantly apt. In a note to his edition in response to the discussion between Lucy and John Hutchinson on the wisdom of infant baptism, Julius Hutchinson objects “Surely this shews an unbecoming propensity to speculate in religion.”110 This moment stands out as one of the clearest examples of the humanist texture of the Hutchinsons’ marriage: she has doubts about the wisdom of infant baptism, investigates in the Scriptures, talks over the issue with her husband, whereupon he does more research and discusses it with local clergy, until finally, unconvinced by the arguments, they resolve not to baptize their newborn child.111 In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of the 1806 Memoirs, he responds with exasperation to Julius Hutchinson’s objection: “Surely this is the strangest note that ever came from a man of the Editor’s sense. Mrs. H., has been speculating in Politics from the very commencement and all to the Editor’s approbation and admiration.”112 Coleridge and Julius Hutchinson unite in their “approbation” for “Mrs. H., . . . speculating in Politics” (though not in religion). Coleridge and Julius Hutchinson’s “admiration” for her “speculating in Politics” suggests that, in some ways at least, Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson finds its appropriate readers in the years following the American and French Revolutions. It is a future she imagines, in one of her more publicly minded epitaphs on her husband. The poem reads in full: Ye sons of England whose vnquenched flame Of Pious loue may yet yt title Clayme Let not y:r rash feete on y:t Marble tread Before you haue its Sade Inscription read

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Beholde it weepes doe not These tears presage Decending Showers on This prodigious age Where only Rocks for Innocent bloodshed mourne While humane hearts to flintie quarries turne Now read, This stone doth Close vp ye darke Cave Where Liberty sleepes in her Champions grave.113

The epitaph imagines a future time in which the “sons of England” will be pious, a condition characterized by their responsiveness to the republican cause.114 The act of reading the monument stone in its physical place, rather than walking upon it and disregarding it, helps to transform these sons into the poem’s ideal readers: their respect sets them apart from the ungrateful country (and apart from those who dig up graves and desecrate the corpses of Cromwell and Fairfax). The stone itself weeps, but it also helps to provoke that response in others, to foreshadow the weeping that will come. The imagery of Liberty sleeping depicts this time as resolutely future. Interestingly, though, the “flintie quarries,” which mark Hutchinson’s contemporaries as inhumane, as hard as rock, are also quarries, sources for the very rocks that mourn. The poem’s imagery suggests that the resources of the republican transformation it presages lie in the ungrateful hearts it decries. Hutchinson’s generous account of charity and neighborliness places that stone in a parish church, where it bears witness to the past while looking to the future. A rock, though a different one, serves as Jonathan Goldberg’s image for transcendence in Hutchinson. He stresses the “inextinguishable material principles” of her idea of survival past death, and finds their expression in Hutchinson’s Lucretius: Her wise behavior, and her gentlenesse Will yeild her husband a contented life, And custome will encline him to his wife. The least attempts in long time will prevaile, And make the strongest oppositions faile, So on hard rocks, still-dropping water weares The solid stone, by its continued teares.115

Goldberg presents this as a figure for the couple, two made one by the process of time.116 But this is an image of incompatible spouses who grow to love each other over time on the basis of the wife’s “gentlenesse” and the force of “custome” – precisely the kind of marriage Hutchinson does not portray in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, where Lucy and John Hutchinson not only love at first sight (of her poems and Latin books), but also continue to engage in humanist debate that ques-

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tions “custome[s]” like infant baptism. She shows not the wearing of husband and wife into each other by the slow progress of “teares,” but rather an articulation of difference both careful and bold, the friend who is like enough in character to be willing to sacrifice her own reputation for her friend’s. The discourse of friendship thus offers a different way of looking at the language that most often signifies Hutchinson’s subordination to her husband: Hutchinson’s description of herself as John Hutchinson’s “shadow.”117 “Shadow” marks Hutchinson’s grief over her husband’s death, and in this it explicitly evokes the elegiac tradition of friendship, present in the commonplace entry discussed earlier: “Friendship is so venerable that wee must honor even its shadowes and imitate the Pythagoreans who celebrated the obsequies of such as forsooke their society to bury them with honour.”118 Friendship’s shadows are the dead, like John Hutchinson, who deserve to be buried with honor in the way that Lucy Hutchinson honors his memory, in the Memoirs and in the elegies. Friendship’s shadows are also those who “forsooke their society,” like the neighbors with whom Lucy Hutchinson remakes peace even after war. Friendship thus shows not only that Lucy Hutchinson is not merely a shadow of her husband, but also that shadows are not mere at all: they are the locus of memory and monument. Monuments, like the stone Hutchinson describes in her epitaph, provide the final twist in this chain of images. In the Memoirs, a few lines after calling herself her husband’s shadow, Hutchinson writes that her husband loved her not for beauty’s sake, but for “her honour and her virtue,” which “he polished and gave form to what he found with all the roughness of the quarry about it.”119 Certainly, the language casts John Hutchinson as maker and Lucy Hutchinson as his raw material, which cannot fail to carry some taint of subordination. By linking herself to a “quarry,” however, Hutchinson claims the republican future imagined in the epitaph. As in De rerum natura, tears fall on rock in the epitaph. Unlike the wearing of husband and wife into one another by time, the epitaph’s tears unleash a deluge, “Decending Showers on This prodigious age.” Shadows, quarried rock, and tears. The images repeat, but the meaning differs: Lucy Hutchinson honors friendship’s shadows in order to turn wifely subordination into a republican future.

Notes 1. Hutchinson, “Elegies,” pp. 490–1. 2. Hutchinson, OD, V.435–42.

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3. In contrast, Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, p. 229, reads Hutchinson as unsympathetic to Eve. 4. See Chapter 3. 5. Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU2, Hutchinson’s elegies on her husband’s death, appear in a clean scribal copy and are clearly read by the family, but do not come out in print until 1997, in “Elegies,” ed. Norbrook, pp. 487–521. BL Add. MS 19333, the De rerum natura translation, and Beinecke Library, Yale University MS Osborn b118, Order and Disorder, both take the form of presentation manuscripts, with prefatory material addressed to a limited audience. The first five cantos of OD are anonymously published in 1679. Scholars thus understand Hutchinson’s works to be scribally published, in the terms of Love, Scribal Publication, pp. 3–9. See Looser, British Women Writers, p. 32; Norbrook, “Manuscript Evidence,” pp. 257–91; and Salzman, Reading, pp. 170–1. 6. Hutchinson calls the text Life of John Hutchinson; Julius Hutchinson’s title Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson has persisted through numerous editions. While keeping in mind Norbrook’s caveat that the plainer title suits Hutchinson’s religious inclinations and Looser’s reminder of the anachronism of the term “memoir,” I use the popular title of the Memoirs to reflect the construction of Hutchinson’s later reputation via the text. See Norbrook, “But a Copie,” p. 120; and Looser, British Women Writers, p. 36. 7. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Keeble, p. 281. Unless otherwise specified, citations come from this edition, abbreviated MLCH. For the suggestion that John Hutchinson has royalist inclinations after the regicide, see Hirst, “Remembering,” pp. 686–8. 8. Some of Hutchinson’s readers, including her descendants, do not praise her republicanism. Looser, British Women Writers, pp. 47–60, notes that some nineteenth-century readers reimagine Lucy Hutchinson in the guise of a romantic Cavalier heroine. 9. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 286. The editor is Sutherland, “Introduction,” p. xviii. 10. Jeffrey, “Rev. of Memoirs,” p. 1. 11. Keeble defines the central issues in “Colonel’s Shadow,” pp. 227–47. Norbrook argues in “But a Copie,” pp. 109–30, that the Memoirs’ later editors counter her republicanism by introducing more conservative gender politics. Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, p. 191, insists on the separation between Hutchinson’s gender politics and her republicanism: “Her concern for higher, ungendered truths is precisely that, with little or no implication for relationships between human men and women.” Goldberg, Writing Matter, pp. 162–7, argues against Keeble and Norbrook. 12. To call Lucy Hutchinson a republican both during the interregnum and after the restoration places her within a small group. Norbrook, Writing, p. 2, offers a short list of names: Payne Fisher, John Hall, James Harrington, Henry Marten, Andrew Marvell, Thomas May, John Milton, Algernon Sidney, George Wither. He notes the limitations republicans often put on suffrage, in contrast to more radical groups (pp. 18–19).

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

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Though they pay less attention to women writers, other defining studies of early modern English republicanism include Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 333–422; and Rahe, Against Throne, pp. 179–346. See Introduction. Norbrook, “But a Copie,” pp. 110–12, stresses that the earlier text does not function merely as a draft. The History of the Rebellion combines material that Clarendon writes in Jersey in 1646–7 with his Life of himself, composed 1668–72. See Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 1–37. Clarendon, “Patience in Adversity,” in Essays, pp. 91–2. Elyot, Boke, fol. 144r. See Chapter 2 on Philips. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 125–55. Clarendon, “Friendship,” in Essays, p. 123. Cavendish, World’s Olio, p. 154. This claim resonates with Catharine Gray’s argument about royalist counter-publics in Women Writers, pp. 105–23. Finch, Friendship, p. 7. See Chapter 2. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, V.278. Mercurius Pragmaticus, 7–14 December 1647, fol. N1v; Mercurius Pragmaticus, 14–21 December 1647, fol. O4v. Mercurius Pragmaticus, 7–14 December 1647, fol. N3v. Ibid. Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, pp. 47–8. See Chapter 1. Mercurius Pragmaticus, 7–14 December 1647, fol. N3v. See May, History, Book I, pp. 7–8 on the “intire friendship” between the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I. May, History, Book I, pp. 114–15. May, History, Book III, p. 66. May, History, Book II, p. 8. On betrayal, see Ludlow, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 9; his discussion of Cromwell at vol. I, pp. 357–83; his description of the restoration, vol. II, p. 265; and his narration of the king’s reinstatement, addressed to the commissioners at Breda, vol. II, pp. 355–7. Ludlow, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 286 writes “Lambert, was not except from the Act; nor Colonel Hutchinson, though he had bin as zealous against the late King, at the time of his tryal, as any other of his judges.” Hirst, “Remembering,” pp. 682–91 argues for John Hutchinson’s royalism in Ludlow, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 217: “But the person I most wondered at was Col. Hutchinson, who having exceeded most of the members of the High Court of Justice in zeal for putting the King to death, at this time acted a very different part, pressing the House with an unbecoming importunity to proceed against Sir Henry Vane, for not removing into the country according to their order, when it was well known he was so much indisposed, that he could not do it without the apparent hazard of his life.” However, this attitude seems to accord with the Hutchinsons’ characteristic disdain for certain powerful individuals. Ludlow, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 96. Ibid. For the revision of Ludlow’s Memoirs and the attribution to Toland, see

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Friendship’s Shadows Worden, “Whig History,” pp. 209–37, and “Introduction” to Voyce, pp. 17–39. Ludlow, Memoirs, vol. I, p. 5. See Plutarch, “Life of Cato the Younger,” lxviii–lxxiii, pp. 401–11. Thanks to David Norbrook for alerting me to this reference. Hutchinson, secular commonplace book, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 156. Caussin, Holy Court, p. 31. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, pp. 158–9. Caussin, Holy Court, p. 36. See Chapter 3. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 159. Cicero, De amicitia, xxi, p. 185. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 280. Ibid., p. 298. Hill, “Colonel John Hutchinson,” p. 87. See also MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, p. 173: “Her husband managed to escape death at the Restoration, partly because of his servile submission to the new authority . . . In a passage of magnificent defiance . . . Mrs. Hutchinson describes.” Hirst, “Remembering,” p. 690 concludes that John Hutchinson wrote the recantation letter, and that Lucy Hutchinson took responsibility for it as “an early case of . . . false memory” or “attempts to persuade herself and others of what might have been or what ought to have been.” Stretton notes that a married woman could persuade her husband to sell her land, even confirming in writing that she would never make a claim on it, and then make precisely that claim as a widow, in which case she would have the right to the land legally. She would, however, be “bounde in conscience” (though not by law) to make restitution to the buyer; Stretton, Women Waging Law, pp. 130–1, citing Hargrave, Collection of Tracts, p. 346. Though Stretton cites this as an instance of women’s double bind, it seems more interesting as an example of a wife’s conscience being “bounde” separately from her legal personhood. See Introduction and Chapter 2. See Whitaker, Mad Madge, pp. 130–53; and Chalmers, Royalist Women, pp. 22–4. Cavendish, Memoirs, p. 200. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, p. 65. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 286. Ibid. Hutchinson, “Letter from John Hutchinson to the House of Commons, June 1660,” p. 447. Quotation from Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 200. On this in relation to Charles and Henrietta Maria, see MLCH, pp. 67 and 70; on Sir Thomas and Lady Fairfax, see MLCH, pp. 210 and 241. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 70. Brathwaite, English Gentleman, p. 280. M. B., Triall, fols. E1–E4v. Ibid., fol. E1v. Bacon, “Of Counsel,” p. 56. J. Crawford, “Women’s Secretaries,” pp. 126–7, adds a new strand to a

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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tradition of writing about secretaries largely focused on male homosocial relations. See Goldberg, Sodometries, pp. 75–6; Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 128–36; and Stewart, Close Readers, pp. 185–7 et passim. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 281. Ibid., p. 281. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, pp. 64–5. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 280. The imagery of growth resonates with the pathetic fallacies of Hutchinson’s elegies. See Scott-Baumann, “ ‘Paper Frames’,” pp. 1–13. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 16. Cf. the revisions in British Library Add. MSS 39779, 46172, and 25901 and the full draft of the Memoirs in the Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU4. For example, she revises the descriptions of their marriage to greater brevity in depicting John Hutchinson, who had “an indifferency for the most excellent of womenkind, should have so strong impulses towards a stranger he never saw and certeinly it was of the Lord, though he perceivd it not, who had ordeind him, through so many various providences to be brought yoakt with her, whom the Lord had chosen for him andwhich many years after when he found himselfe pleasd in the Lords designation he hath acknowledgd resolvd with himselfe how admirably it was brought about and praysd God for it whither she were so in herselfe or whither his greate thankfulnesse in god made him esteeme her so he would often recounting gods mercies, sett this in the first ranke and in whom he found so much satisfaction” (Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU4, p. 51; strikethrough in ms). Also, of their marriage, she writes: “he loved her better than his life . . . yet still consider honour religion and duty above her. never was woman more truly nor more honorably beloved nor lesse flatterd instead of commending her imperfections he was her, nor ever suffered she instruction above such a dotage” (Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU4, p. 56; strikethrough in ms). The question of the split between the subservient “wife” created in the text of the Memoirs and the assertive narrator of the same text, as articulated by Keeble, “Colonel’s Shadow,” p. 240, forms the crux of Goldberg’s disagreement in Writing Matter, pp. 162–7. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 286; Sutherland, “Introduction,” p. xviii. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 179. Cicero, De amicitia, xiv, p. 163, argues that this does not demonstrate the need of the parties, but rather their love: “Indeed, I should be inclined to think that it is not well for friends never to need anything at all. Wherein, for example, would my zeal have displayed itself if Scipio had never been in need of my advice or assistance either at home or abroad?” Seneca, De beneficiis, II.xviii, p. 89. Cicero, De officiis, I.xv, p. 51. On clemency, see Shifflett, “Kings,” pp. 88–109. See Chapter 1. Shifflett, “Kings,” p. 96. “The History of the Times,” BL MS Harley 7315, fol. 73v. See Chapter 1. Cavendish, World’s Olio, p. 46. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 330. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, lxxi, p. 407.

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85. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 159. Cato’s funeral thus works similarly to the Dissenters’ funerals Achinstein analyzes in Literature and Dissent, pp. 23–48. Hutchinson’s portrayal of her husband’s death-bed scene has a similar force. 86. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger, lxxii, p. 409. 87. Hutchinson, Christian Religion, pp. 126–7. 88. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 153. The language of “cement” and “foundation” recalls Charleton and Erasmus; see Chapter 3. 89. Caussin, Holy Court, p. 14. 90. Jeremy Taylor, Discourse, p. 9. 91. The account of dissent in this paragraph is indebted to Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, pp. 6–10. 92. Hutchinson, religious commonplace book, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU3, pp. 53–129. 93. See Tadmor, “Friends and Neighbors,” pp. 150–76 on biblical translations and this tension between particular attachment and universal love. 94. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU3, p. 100. 95. Bray, The Friend, p. 91. 96. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, p. 24. 97. Qtd. in Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 312. 98. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 301. 99. This dialogue exists in two versions: the better-known, MLCH pp. 304–5, has identical wording except for the use of third rather than first person. The less well-known, from which I quote here, comes from “A Narrative of the Imprisonment and Usage of Col. John Hutchinson,” Harleian Miscellany, pp. 34–5. I can find no evidence of the 1664 printing cited by the Miscellany (and, indeed, no earlier edition than the 1745 Harleian Miscellany). If the pamphlet did not appear in an earlier printing, the question becomes how the Earl of Oxford obtained the manuscript, as the Memoirs did not appear in print until 1806. All the material from the pamphlet, in augmented form, exists in the Memoirs, in both its printed editions and in Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU4; since it concerns a later episode, none of it is in the manuscript drafts of John Hutchinson’s Life (BL Add. MSS 39779, 46127, and 25901). If John Hutchinson did write this account of his imprisonment, it complicates Lucy Hutchinson’s authorship of the Memoirs, for she weaves verbatim portions of this narrative into her own. 100. Bray, The Friend, p. 137. 101. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU3, pp. 128–9. 102. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU3, pp. 111–12. 103. On Hutchinson and Owen, see Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, p. 186; and Norbrook, “Introduction” to Order and Disorder, pp. xix–xx. 104. Owen, Truth and Innocence, p. 146. 105. Owen, Brief and Impartial, p. 12. 106. Broad and Green, History, p. 155, quoting Edwards from Chidley, Justification, p. 25. On Chidley, see also K. Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent, pp. 62–92.

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107. Broad and Green, History, pp. 154–6. Chidley is one of the Leveller petitioners discussed in Chapter 2. 108. See Introduction and Chapter 2. 109. Cicero, De amicitia, ii, p. 115. 110. Hutchinson, Memoirs, ed. Hutchinson, p. 270 fn. b. Julius Hutchinson’s note accords with his attempts to minimize Hutchinson’s religious enthusiasm throughout the Memoirs, as Norbrook argues in “But a Copie,” pp. 118–20. 111. Hutchinson, MLCH, pp. 210–11. 112. Coleridge, marginal annotations, p. 270. 113. Hutchinson, “Elegies,” Poem 20, p. 519, lines 1–10. 114. Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, p. 199, notes the poem’s echo of Christ’s tomb and resurrection. In Hutchinson’s view, I argue, reading the poem correctly – recognizing the allusion to Christ’s tomb and thus realizing the transience of Liberty’s incarceration – helps to bring about a republican future. 115. Hutchinson, DRN, IV.1315–21. 116. Goldberg, Seeds, pp. 166–7. 117. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 51. 118. Hutchinson, Nottinghamshire Archives MS DD/HU1, p. 159. 119. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 52.

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Chapter 6

Covert Politics and Separatist Women’s Friendship: Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell

Throughout this book, I have been arguing for the presence of politicized women’s friendship in the mid-seventeenth century. Later writers and readers cover up these traces, with their claims on the long tradition of civically engaged classical and humanist masculine friendship, effectively and eventually separating women’s friendship from politics. From this depoliticization a familiar story emerges, recognizable in countless novels of courtship and marriage from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond. At this point, friendship itself becomes feminized, in contrast to the long-standing emphasis on masculine friendship from the classical through the Renaissance periods.1 It is the friendship of two girls embracing under the bedcovers at boarding school (Jane Eyre), of passionate letters detailing the inner workings of families and courtship (Clarissa), of one woman supporting another after romantic disappointment (Aurora Leigh). It is everywhere, and it seems to have nothing to do with the wrenching decisions about conflicting allegiances that characterize the years of the English Civil Wars and Restoration. William Rounseville Alger’s The Friendships of Women (1868) articulates a remarkably resilient account of the meanings of women’s friendship. He writes, In the lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly, it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the purified fulfillment and repose into which love subsides, or rises. Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting substitute for love.2

As Martha Vicinus notes, love for Alger means heterosexual love, and scholars challenge these categories largely by drawing greater attention to the existence of same-sex eroticism and by undoing the opposition between chaste female friendship on one side and heterosexual erotic

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fulfillment on the other.3 With that qualification in mind, and with the caveat that what Alger terms “the lives of women” might more accurately be limited to literary representations of women’s friendships, his categories still seem apt.4 In the dominant cultural manifestations of women’s friendship, codified in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, friendship prepares women to love their husbands, aids them in finding husbands, mingles with their love for their husbands, or offers a “second-best” alternative when they cannot find husbands.5 None of these possibilities carries the self-conscious attention to civic efficacy that characterizes women’s amicitia of the mid-seventeenth century, and indeed each type of women’s friendship appears in relation to romantic love and marriage, imagined as private. A representative instance can help to illustrate this shift away from public life. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) tells of the almost impossibly virtuous Clarissa Harlowe who, in order to avoid marrying the odious man her family has chosen, runs away with the libertine Robert Lovelace, who proceeds to rape and abandon her. Clarissa wills herself to die in repentance and self-sacrifice, prompting her family’s belated regret. Much of the epistolary narrative unfolds through letters between Clarissa and her intimate friend Anna Howe. Their language, especially Anna’s, encapsulates the fervor not only of traditional friendship discourse, but also of the age of sensibility: Anna loves Clarissa “as never woman loved another.”6 Their intense feelings – and Anna’s distrust – trouble the rake Lovelace, who understands Anna to challenge his sway over Clarissa. Anna could provide an alternative to both the violence of the patriarchal family and the uncertainties of the untrustworthy suitor: she offers to flee with Clarissa and to live with her, using Clarissa’s personal inheritance to support them. Clarissa, however, rejects Anna’s offer out of the fear of harming her friend’s reputation. She even refuses to let Anna visit her on her deathbed. Although the friendship receives praise from witnesses, it defines inconsequentiality in its practical effects. Publicly preferring her friendship with Anna could have offered Clarissa a way out of the patriarchal and marital systems that effectively kill her, but Clarissa does not choose it. Clarissa and Anna’s story throws into high relief the attenuated possibilities of women’s friendship as it moves into the private sphere. Even as – indeed, because – women’s friendship becomes more celebrated and more prevalent, its efficacy in civic life dwindles. As a bridge to those well-known depictions of women’s private and inconsequential friendship, this chapter takes a slightly different approach, looking at the limited form in which the politics of women’s friendship persist. It takes its cue from Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), one

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of the earliest feminist analyses of women’s friendship and same-sex eroticism: “Perhaps for romantic friends of other eras their relationship was also a political act, although much more covert: With each other they could escape from many of the externally imposed demands of femininity that were especially stringent throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”7 Faderman points out the constrained political potential of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s friendship by way of contrast with lesbian feminists, whom she praises for their overt dismissal of patriarchy and matrimony. This chapter investigates early instantiations of those rejections by looking at separatist female communities. It also preserves the earlier history of “covert,” by asking what happens to the room for negotiation within coverture when the options for women’s friendship bifurcate into the choice between female separatism and oppressive marriage. By maintaining a primary focus on female separatist communities, which engage politics through idealized critique and through rejection of larger society, this chapter acknowledges that women’s friendship does not lose all its political valences. Its politics, however, differ profoundly from what came before. The writers Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell, the main subjects of this chapter, both show some traces of the women’s amicitia present in Philips’s and Hutchinson’s writings. In many ways, Cavendish and Astell are peculiar choices to exemplify the attenuated political meanings of women’s friendship. Each writer involves herself overtly in the public sphere, publishing widely on questions of politics and gender. Each explicitly addresses the question of women’s relations to one another, and each presents these relations as foundational to the commonwealth. Both writers, however, abandon amicitia for other modes of public engagement. They still discuss friendship; they still intervene in politics, but they separate those two strands, just as later readers prise apart those discourses in their readings and reinterpretations of Philips and Hutchinson. Neither Cavendish nor Astell takes up the betrayal-oriented amicitia to which Philips and Hutchinson lay claim, and this difference of emphasis has far-reaching consequences.8 Without the structural similarity between the conflicting obligations of women and of citizens, women’s friendship loses its continuity with public life. In Cavendish and Astell, two writers who do insist on the political valences of women’s friendship (as many later writers will not), this split between friendship and public life casts the politics of women’s friendship as separatist critique.

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“We are no Subjects, unless it be to our Husbands”: Margaret Cavendish Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), overlaps in various ways with her contemporaries Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson. With Philips, she shares a qualified dedication to royalist politics and an interest in its associated literature of plays, lyric poetry, and stylized letters. While Cavendish’s political views diverge strongly from Hutchinson’s, the two women live as neighbors in Nottinghamshire, have intellectual interests in materialist philosophy, and write laudatory lives of their husbands.9 Cavendish’s wide-ranging oeuvre offers a variety of different perspectives on the politics of her day, well-mapped by scholars.10 Frustratingly, however, Cavendish often disavows women’s involvement in political affairs, as in her famous claim that “though there hath been a Civil War in the Kingdom, and a general War amongst the Men, yet there hath been none amongst the Women.”11 This statement implies a pacifist rejection of the violence and upheaval that devastate her family and her husband’s estate.12 The famous assertion occurs at the end of a letter discussing whether opposed political allegiances would disrupt a friendship between two women. Part of Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664), the letter argues that divergent political opinions should not turn friends into enemies, for God ultimately decides these matters. Besides, Cavendish continues, these debates apply even less to women, who are “excluded from intermedling” in “the matter of Governments,” we are not tied, nor bound to State or Crown; we are free, not Sworn to Allegiance, nor do we take the Oath of Supremacy; we are not made Citizens of the Commonwealth, . . . we are accounted neither Useful in Peace, nor Serviceable in War; and if we be not Citizens in the Commonwealth, I know no reason we should be Subjects to the Commonwealth:13

The lines resonate with irony, for Cavendish herself is asked and refuses to take the Oath of Engagement in 1653, when she goes to rejoin her husband in Antwerp after unsuccessfully petitioning Parliament for a portion of his sequestered estates.14 Cavendish’s language captures the dilemma of women enjoined to obey a state authority that does not fully recognize their legal personhood.15 Cavendish continues, exploiting the paradoxes of gender, to point out that “we are no Subjects, unless it be to our Husbands,” but women can rule over husbands by “flattery,” “usurp[ing] their Authority,” and careful manipulation of women’s “Beauty.”16 This discussion of women’s suasive force comprises more

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than half of a letter ostensibly concerning female friendship, with the conclusion, cited above, reiterating women’s lack of participation in the recent Civil Wars. By characterizing women not as citizens but as subjects of their husbands and by separating female friendship from politics, Cavendish’s letter marks a strong break from the politicized female friendship in Philips’s and Hutchinson’s writings. Cavendish does suggest means for women to negotiate power in their marriages, opening space within the fiction of coverture, but she explicitly sets these tactics apart from political opinion. Even the palpable irony of Cavendish’s letter does not undermine this claim, for the fact remains that for Cavendish women’s friendship does not function as a language of civic engagement. She does not use the discourse of amicitia to allude to the problem of conflicting political obligations through an acknowledgment of the omnipresence of betrayal. Cavendish’s writings, however, do pick up on earlier friendship traditions and transform them in ways that provide lasting models for later generations. Indeed, Cavendish articulates not only the triangulated jealousy plot of friends and lovers, but also separatist female communities, both of which endure when civically engaged female friendship fades away. The following sections first sketch Cavendish’s idealization of friendship, then briefly discuss the well-known jealousy plot, and thirdly turn to the friendship model whereby a separatist community offers an ideal alternative to the world. The final section investigates why Cavendish responds to the same volatile circumstances very differently than Philips and Hutchinson.

Traces of Amicitia In its premise and content, Cavendish’s Sociable Letters offers her fullest account of idealized friendship. Much of the framing language echoes the tropes of amicitia, as when the preface calls letters the “Tye in Friendship” or the final letter mentions the “Laws of Friendship.”17 One letter even laments the friend’s absence with emotion approaching the heights of Philips’s poetry.18 Crucially, however, Cavendish omits the depths of friendship: the friendship between the Cavendish persona who writes the letters and the “Madam” who receives them never encounters disagreement.19 Like the women who stand outside men’s wars, Cavendish and her imaginary addressee are exempt from friendship’s strife. As the prefatory poem “Upon her Excellency the Authoress” suggests, this derives from the imaginary status of the interlocutor:

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This Lady only to her self she Writes And all her Letters to her self Indites; For in her self so many Creatures be, Like many Commonwealths, yet all Agree.20

The poem continues to say that “Reason” rules successfully in Cavendish’s mind, so that she can gather knowledge of the “wars” and “factions” that trouble other states without being part of them. By writing only to herself, Cavendish creates not only a perfect friendship, but also perfect relations among “many Commonwealths.” The poem explicitly parallels mental and actual worlds, self-governance and state government, and friends and states. As with her disavowal of women’s citizenship, eliminating conflict entails separation from reality. The image of densely populated mental worlds evokes one of Cavendish’s best-known texts, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World (1666). This fantastical narrative defies summary, but it includes two characters, the Empress of the Blazing World and the Duchess of Newcastle, who each represent aspects of Margaret Cavendish herself. Eager to record her thoughts, the Empress calls for a scribe, only to be offered the Duchess so that “neither will the Emperor have reason to be jealous, she being one of my own sex.”21 Presented as a solution to heterosexual jealousy, the relationship between the Empress and the Duchess has the potential to be a textually productive female friendship. Both the textual focus and the relationship itself soon end, however, through the intervention of marriage. In this case, jealousy comes from a source other than the Emperor. After some time with the Empress, the Duchess begins to miss “convers[ing] with the soul of her noble lord and dear husband.”22 “Convers[ation]” and “soul” stress intellectual friendship rather than bodily desire. Amusingly, the friendship trope “one soul in bodies twain” then becomes a pile-up of three souls in one body. The Empress and the Duchess, who have travelled into the Duchess’s world as disembodied souls, observe the Duke for a short time, until the Duchess enters into his body as a soul: The Empress’s soul perceiving this, did the like: and then the Duke had three souls in one body; and had there been but some such souls more, the Duke would have been like the Grand Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been a platonic seraglio.23

Despite being “platonic,” “seraglio” still evokes a sexual context of multiple women oriented toward the desires of one man. Observing the animated conversation between the Empress’s and the Duke’s souls, the Duchess tries to reassure herself “that no adultery could be committed

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amongst Platonic lovers” and enjoin herself to “cast forth of her mind that Idea of jealousy.”24 The Duchess only feels truly secure once the Empress leaves shortly thereafter to return to her own world and her own husband. In contrast to the traditional friendship figure “one soul in bodies twain,” Cavendish offers here a different model for intellectual and affective ties: three souls in one body. This overcrowding emblematizes important commitments of Cavendish’s thought: the emphasis on mental worlds, the play between materiality and imagination, and the centrality of the marital relation. Cavendish’s female friends exist either in triangulation with a male figure or solely in imagination, without the pressures of outside obligations to force difficult choices. The Blazing World stages the simultaneity of marriage and friendship as a competition that occasions jealousy between the two female friends, in contrast to the female amanuensis who assuages the Emperor’s potential jealousy. The impossible abundance of Philips’s poetry, in which building new friendships from the failed materials of earlier friendships gives Orinda a superfluity of souls, throws into relief the difference between the two writers.25 Where Philips uses friendship’s failures to generate textual productivity, Cavendish constructs her writings to disallow the possibility of conflict in friendship other than sexual jealousy, which undoes the friendship entirely. The Blazing World presents a fantastical version of jealousy’s effect on friendship, rendered not quite safe enough through its Platonism. In Sociable Letters, Cavendish places female friendship undone by jealousy within the social world of courtly intrigue. In Letter 23, Cavendish tells a twisting story of two female friends and their husbands, who become jealous of and erotically entangled with each other.26 The husbands pay attention to their wives’ friends, and the wives envy their friends; the sight of the “She-friends [who] Imbrace, and Kiss, and Sport” encourages the husbands to do the same, though with the friends rather than their own wives.27 Throughout the letter, fragile female friendship, easily undone by jealousy, serves as an inducement to heterosexual adultery, while the husbands never become jealous of the friendship between the women. In this way, Cavendish articulates two complementary plots of friendship that persist for centuries: the plot of two friends torn asunder by love for the same person, and the plot of sexual initiation through friendship, in which female friendship readies a young woman for marriage. The first of these plots comes from medieval romances through Renaissance prose and drama, usually in the form of male friends in love with the same woman.28 It extends into eighteenth- and nineteenth-

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century novels of courtship in which two women want to marry the same man.29 The latter plot continues both in a chaste form, in which the innocent devotions of friendship mark a woman’s emotional fitness for matrimony, and in a sexualized register, where a corrupt older woman undertakes a younger woman’s sexual initiation.30 Cavendish describes these dynamics with a lighthearted, courtly knowingness, stating that “Women for the most part take delight to make Friendships, and then to fall out, and be Friends again, as so to and fro, which is as much Pastime and Recreations to them, as going abroad and staying at home.”31 This casual articulation of the process marks its inconsequence, even as the ghost of the politically fraught meanings of friendship lingers in “going abroad and staying at home.” The letter ends by swiftly asserting that Cavendish’s addressee and she are “constant Friends,” unlike these other women, who are mere acquaintances.32 The fact that Cavendish writes her loyal recipient into existence means that faithful female friendship exists only as an ideal.

Female Separatist Communities in Cavendish’s Drama Cavendish’s discussion of the jealousy put into play by, but not directed toward, female friendships marks their inconsequentiality as a relation in themselves. In her compendium of varied writings, The World’s Olio (1655), Cavendish again notes the superficiality and the negative effects of women’s associations, in order to make the point that cross-sex interactions are worse: “women with women can do little inconvenience, but spights, and effeminate quarrels, for place, and gadding abroad, and neglecting their huswiferie at home: the worst is in learning vanity to spend their husbands estates, and giving one another ill counsel, to make disquiet at home.”33 This hardly rousing endorsement of relations between women makes it all the more surprising that Cavendish devotes considerable attention in her dramatic works to communities of women who choose to associate exclusively with each other. In both The Female Academy (1662) and The Convent of Pleasure (1668), Cavendish constructs all-female retreats besieged by men. In neither case do these female communities function on the model of “women with women” that Cavendish outlines in The World’s Olio, for one crucial reason: the women have no husbands, and thus no “huswiferie” to neglect or “husbands estates” to spend. The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure thus model idealized retreats from the world, in which selfsustaining communities of women opt out of the marriage economy. Without the possibility of inciting jealousy, attracting their friends’

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husbands, teaching each other to spend wantonly, and promoting arguments with their husbands, what do Cavendish’s sequestered women do with one another? Can these separatist female communities offer a model of women’s friendship, and if so what effect does their separatism have on their politics? The Female Academy begins in medias res, with an unnamed Lady resolving to put her daughter into the academy. Without elucidating the motivations behind the founding of the school, the characters explain that young, unmarried women receive instruction from elderly matrons, who teach them to speak well and to live virtuously. Extended speeches on philosophical topics, in the manner of an academic disquisition or Cavendish’s own Orations of Divers Sorts (1662; reissued 1668), make up the bulk of the play. The play’s dramatic action results from the male population’s objection to the women sequestering themselves. From the very first scene, the characters remark upon the exclusion of men from the academy, and the men themselves progress from listening to the women’s orations at the grate provided for them, to establishing a rival academy in which they try to compete with the women’s speeches, to attempting finally to drown out the women’s discourse with trumpets. The structure of the play, with most of the conversation taking place outside the academy and primarily orations assigned by the Matron going on within it, means that the action of the play does not showcase bonds between residents of the female academy. Consequently, the most relevant passage, a discourse by a young woman in response to the theme “Friendship,” treats the topic abstractly rather than experientially.34 The female speaker notes the ease of describing friendship in comparison with the difficulty of “mak[ing] a right Friendship.”35 Like many friendship theorists before her, she stresses the need for friends to be like each other: “Souls, Bodies, Education and Lives, must equally agree in Friendship; for a worthy honest man cannot be a friend to a base and unworthy man, by reason Friendship is both an offensive and defensive League between two Souls and Bodies.”36 The female speaker follows a standard argument in stressing that the virtue of the two friends must be equal; somewhat unusually, she does believe that “unworthy Persons with unworthy Persons, may make a Friendship,” rather than barring those who are not good men from friendship altogether.37 The problem with this more encompassing view appears later in the speech, where she worries that if, “in such friendships, my Friend should desire me to do a base Action for his sake, I must either break Friendship, or do unworthily.”38 Cicero imagines this possibility only to reject it: “I am speaking here of ordinary friendships; for among men who are ideally wise and perfect such situa-

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tions cannot arise.”39 Cavendish’s female speaker thus acknowledges a central problem of virtuous action within friendship, while not solving it any more successfully than Cicero, who merely deflects it. The speaker’s language, with the militaristic overtones of “an offensive and defensive League between two Souls and Bodies,” also suggests a public context. Although spoken to a community retired from the world, the disquisition on friendship thus appears intellectually engaged with the politics from which Cavendish excludes women in her other writings, such as Sociable Letters. According to the male observers who harass the academy, however, women seem particularly unable to put their speech into action, and thus to function effectively in the larger world. In the exchange between two gentlemen immediately following the lady’s speech on friendship, the men momentarily puzzle over the greater eloquence of the women’s speech than the men’s. They comfortably conclude that “the weaknesse of women lyes in their Actions, not in their Words; for they have sharp Wits and blunt Judgements.”40 The gentlemen’s opinion contravenes not only the stated aim of the academy to encourage virtuous behavior as well as eloquent speech, but also any firm link between words and actions at all. It is no wonder that the men’s academy has no effect upon its intended female audience until the deafening trumpets: the male characters in The Female Academy have no conception of a humanist rhetoric in which speech can move action.41 The men only object to one action of the women’s, because they think women have only one purpose: Those women that retire themselves from the Company of men, are very ungratefull; as, first to Nature, because she made them only for breed; next to men who are their Defenders, Protectors, their Nourishers, their Maintainers, their Instructers, their Delighters, their Admirers, their Lovers and Deifiers.42

The indelicate phrase “she made them only for breed” throws into relief the absurdity of the romantic clichés of “Delighters,” “Admirers,” “Lovers and Deifiers” that follow. The language suggests the unpaid debt to nature and society that characterizes same-sex female pairs: the students of the Female Academy are like Edmund Waller’s “lovely, loving pair” who like “debtors” “never mean to pay.”43 Valerie Traub, in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, sees this refusal of the heterosexual marital economy as the threat of all-female spaces; unlike a female friendship that can coexist with marriage, allfemale communities register as erotically suspect and dangerous to society.44 The joke of The Female Academy is that its students are not opting out

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of the marital economy at all. In the final scene of the play, the Matron confronts the men about their trumpet-playing, which has finally made it impossible for the ladies to discourse at all. As the gentlemen again launch their complaint that “if all women should take a toy in their heads to incloyster themselves, there would be none left out to breed on,” the Matron responds not with chastisement but with reassurance: Gentlemen pray give me leave to inform you, for I perceive you are in great Error of mistake, for these Ladies have not vowed Virginity, nor are they incloystred; for an Academy is not a Cloyster, but a School, wherein are taught how to be good Wives when they are married.45

The ends of eloquent speech and virtuous behavior are matrimony and good housewifery, after all. Instead of the threatening possibility Traub articulates, the female retreat of the academy actually proves more conducive to marriage than women’s friendships in the world. While women outside the academy can incite adultery or neglect the domestic economy, women within the academy learn to discipline themselves and to think virtuously, making them better wives. In The Female Academy as in The Blazing World, intellectual women’s friendships result in marriage. The Convent of Pleasure provides both a sustained, full-scale critique of the heterosexual marriage economy and more fully developed characters who seem to desire that system almost against their own wills. Lady Happy, the young, beautiful, wealthy heroine of the play, declares her intention not to marry, much to the dismay of her many suitors. She asserts that “Women, where Fortune, Nature, and the gods are joined to make them happy, were mad to live with Men, who make the Female sex their slaves; but I will not be so inslaved, but will live retired from their Company.”46 Unlike The Female Academy, where none of the residents articulate their motivations, here Lady Happy offers a feminist critique, clearly stating not only her intention to continue single but also depicting the retreat as “a place for freedom.”47 This difference disallows an ending similar to The Female Academy, where the gentlemen learn they misunderstood the meaning of the academy; The Convent of Pleasure instead requires an internal transformation of a fully developed character to reach the same end. Consequently, the ladies’ retirement threatens the state, in the manner that Traub describes: the male characters want to call a clergyman to “persuade her out, for the good of the Commonwealth,” and Madam Mediator (a go-between who communicates with both male and female characters) advises them “to make your Complaints, and put up a Petition to the State.”48 The male characters’ excessive laments form part of Cavendish’s feminist

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reading of the marriage market: marriage and reproduction are the foundation of the state. The play shows why women would want to opt out of this system in a series of scenes, performed by the residents, portraying the miseries of marriage and childbirth.49 Lady Happy’s convent thus offers a valid alternative way of life, strengthened by the parallel between the necessities and luxuries she provides for the convent and those that the men in The Female Academy say husbands provide for wives.50 She can fulfill all the roles usually answered by men. Just as with The Female Academy, The Convent of Pleasure’s orientation toward marriage changes drastically with a disclosure late in the play. In this case, the secret concerns a foreign princess who comes to join the convent. From her first appearance, the tenor of the convent alters, as Lady Happy and the princess develop a particular intimacy that sets them apart.51 This attachment results in language that moves from friendship to eroticism: when the princess implores Lady Happy’s friendship, Lady Happy replies, “I should be ungrateful, should I not be not only your Friend, but humble Servant,” and the princess returns “I desire you would be my Mistress, and I your Servant; and upon this agreement of Friendship I desire you will grant me one Request,” of dressing in masculine clothing and playing the part of Lady Happy’s lover.52 The hierarchical relation (albeit an alternating one) of servant and mistress, rather than the equality of friends, throws into relief the social inequality already existing in the convent.53 As the relationship progresses, Lady Happy laments that she loves the princess too much for it to be natural; nevertheless, the princess soothes her with embraces and kisses, and they participate in a pastoral play. The Convent of Pleasure’s revelation is that a man, disguised as a woman, has infiltrated the convent. Although Madam Mediator brings the news and threatens to “search” to “find it,” the appearance of an ambassador reveals that the princess is in fact a prince.54 Indeed, the audience learns of the princess’s true identity just a few moments before his exposure, when the prince muses on the conflict between his duties to his kingdom and those to his “Beautiful Mistress,” Lady Happy.55 The play thus follows its contemplation of same-sex eroticism and the nature of love with a firmly traditional opposition between masculine public life and effeminate private desire. Love becomes something public in the play, however, because the ambassador brings news that your Subjects are so discontented at your Absence, that if your Highness do not return into your Kingdom soon, they’l enter this Kingdom by reason they hear you are here; and some report as if your Highness were restrained as a Prisoner.56

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The prince corrects him – he is captured “not by the State, but by this Fair Lady” – reclaiming the language of war as a metaphor for love.57 Nevertheless, this metaphorical restraint might well have resulted in a real invasion by the prince’s country. More significantly still, the prince goes on to “ask their [the people’s] leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms.”58 On one level, the lines pun on the dual meaning of “arms,” which can offer embraces or describe weaponry. And yet the people’s requested consent quickly turns into violent coercion, since the threat of the “force of Arms” could equally apply to Lady Happy and to the people of her country. Presumably, Lady Happy happily consents, her desire for the princess rendered natural by the revelation that she is a he. If so, the play makes her consent a silent one, for aside from momentary banter with the comic Mimick, she does not speak again in the play. Like the Female Academy, the alternative women’s space of the Convent of Pleasure allows for circumscribed play with gender roles, but it does not alter the terms of the marriage contracts into which the women enter upon leaving retirement. In The Female Academy, the reintegration of separated women into society is a punchline, a concealed truth that shows the men’s worries about the commonwealth falling apart without women are groundless. In The Convent of Pleasure, reincorporation is poised on the nearly indistinguishable border between love and war: the cross-dressed prince threatens to go to war unless the lady who vowed never to marry marries him. Out of friendship, eroticism; out of eroticism, violent compulsion, softened and made acceptable by love, her desire bending to his, Adam’s handgrasp. In that regime of desire, women’s friendship can exist as a prior state, even as the state in which love grows out of friendship, but it has no answer for war, or for the coercions of reproductive desire. In this, it differs sharply from the civically efficacious women’s friendship present in Philips’s and Hutchinson’s writings. While stressing heterosexual closure, The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure both allow more room than that: room to imagine eloquent female orators who pay no attention to male suitors; room to depict a self-sustaining, all-female community; room to delight in the kisses and embraces of two female figures without realizing that one of them is a man.59 These communities provide alternatives to marriage within their walls; they indicate ways of reorganizing affect and intellect that take account, at moments, of conflicts of conscience (as Cavendish’s depictions of women’s friendships in the world do not). Importantly, too, each retired community of women, for its brief existence, becomes “curiously central,” as Hero Chalmers notes.60 In each

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case, however, Cavendish’s retired women return to a society unchanged by their absence. They temporarily disrupt the marital economy but do not reform it.61 For both Philips and Hutchinson, in different ways, the integration of marriage and friendship serves as sign and effect of friendship’s resilience, its ability to incorporate multiple obligations. The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure, in contrast, show friendship superseded by marriage, just as in the triangular jealousy plots in The Blazing World and Sociable Letters.

“Unknit the Knot of Friendship” Productive retirement, in which retreat from the world provides a means of engaging with it, is for Cavendish marital retirement.62 In Letter 29 of Sociable Letters, Cavendish corrects the misapprehension that she stays at home because she is “Constraind, in not having the Liberty, that usually other Wives have, to go Abroad.”63 On the contrary, she actively chooses to live a retired life so that she can think without disruption; retreat allows Cavendish’s thoughts to “live Friendly and Sociably together.”64 This emphasis on friendly and sociable thoughts, rather than people, reinforces Cavendish’s commitment to self-created worlds. Nevertheless, in this lengthy letter, Cavendish balances the discomforts of a social life conducted with people with delight in the company of her “Noble and Kind Husband.”65 Not all marriages achieve this ideal, and Cavendish provides a litany of the dangers of marriage and reproduction in many of her writings, not least The Convent of Pleasure.66 When marriage succeeds, however, as Cavendish argues it does in her own case, it models the textual productivity and civic engagement that Philips and Hutchinson locate in friendship.67 Cavendish writes in the same circumstances of civil war and its aftermath as Philips and Hutchinson. Like them, she articulates possibilities for wifely maneuvering within coverture, though her strategies hew more closely to the traditional tactics of seduction. Unlike them, however, Cavendish does not turn to the language of friendship in order to address issues of conflicting allegiances, and she cordons off marriage from separatist women’s communities.68 Insofar as she acknowledges conflict within friendship, she treats it as irrelevant to women (as in Sociable Letters), as arising from sexual jealousy (as in The Blazing World), or as hypothetical (as in The Female Academy). The reason and the impetus for these differences become clear in her treatment of friends and enemies. Unlike the double-edged potential for betrayal within friendship, in which the friend can always either betray

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the state by standing with the friend or betray the friend by choosing the state, Cavendish asserts both the collapse of friendship and the importance of constancy. Bringing historical specificity to standard laments, she attributes friendship’s demise to civil war: “a Civil War doth not only Abolish Laws, Dissolve Government, and Destroy the Plenty of a Kingdom, but it doth Unknit the Knot of Friendship, and Dissolve Natural Affections.”69 Cavendish shows the destruction of friendship to be contiguous with other forms of political, social, and natural disorder. She returns to the theme of friendship undone by changes in circumstances and the pressures of faction repeatedly throughout her works.70 When Cavendish comes to specifics, however, she praises a particular type of person for fidelity in friendship: the soldier, especially the military commander. Her husband, her brother, and Caesar all earn this accolade.71 More importantly and more consistently, though, Cavendish links constancy with mercy toward enemies.72 By stressing the breakdown of friendship and foregrounding obligations to be merciful to enemies, Cavendish articulates a martial code of virtue, like what Lucy Hutchinson describes in her husband John.73 Whereas John Hutchinson’s clemency to his enemies during the interregnum blackens his name amongst republicans, William Cavendish’s generosity toward enemies contrasts with King Charles II’s neglect of him upon the restoration, a situation much lamented by Margaret Cavendish.74 Unlike Lucy Hutchinson, whose amicitia articulates obligations to friends with divergent political opinions, Margaret Cavendish’s treatment of friendship accords with her husband’s. Cavendish’s insistence on the value of constancy, which she links to virtuous treatment of enemies in war, marks her rejection of the more fragile bonds between friends. Throughout her works, the only steadfast friendships occur in imagined spaces, like her mind, or in communities set off from the conflicts of the world. This emphasis aligns with Cavendish’s own insistence on her unlikeness to other people. Of both Cavendish and Astell’s singularity, Catherine Gallagher writes that “the ideology of absolute monarchy provides, in particular historical situations, a transition to an ideology of the absolute self.”75 Subsequent modifications of Gallagher’s argument challenge both Cavendish’s absolutism and the separatism it entails.76 Most recently, Jonathan Goldberg links Cavendish’s Lucretian materialism to her female separatist communities to argue for queerness in her writings, especially the mixture of marriage and female intimacies in The Blazing World.77 Reading Cavendish’s female separatism in relation to Philips’s and Hutchinson’s amicitia offers a different answer to these questions. It matters to Cavendish’s writing and to her politics that she casts dilemmas of conscience only in terms of marriage, not

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friendship, for instead of opening outward into public debate the fissures within coverture turn inward. This internal rupturing transforms, that is, into the multiplication of mental worlds that Cavendish portrays in The Blazing World. She intentionally unhinges this multifarious world from the pressures of irreconcilable obligations. Cavendish has other languages for public commitments that allow for the resilience Philips and Hutchinson locate in friendship: Cavendish transforms Hobbes’s irrevocable contract into something much more flexible, as Victoria Kahn shows.78 But Cavendish’s choices – the choice to separate marriage and friendship, the choice to proliferate mental worlds – mean that unlike friendship, which is “both made and found,” Cavendish’s worlds, and her friendships, are only made, never found.79 Her extravagant imagination opens up into other articulations of politics, but it contains women’s friendship within a diminished sphere.

Mary Astell’s Female Alliances Born a generation after Cavendish, Mary Astell (1666–1731) writes in the aftermath of the Civil Wars’ legacy in the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the battles over religious toleration that shape party politics of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Astell never marries, unlike Philips, Hutchinson, and Cavendish; from early in her life she supports herself by writing, supplemented by patronage. Of all the women writers in this study, Astell produces texts most readily identifiable as political philosophy and theory. Supportive of the established church and monarchy, Astell’s pamphlets address questions of moderation, toleration, and dissent.80 Especially in An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom (1704), Astell explicitly engages the legacy of the Civil Wars, paralleling debates about the people’s right to resist a tyrannical king to the causes of rebellion in 1641 and regicide in 1649.81 Astell also challenges John Locke repeatedly, asserting that social contract insufficiently accounts for the natural vulnerability of humans and their preexisting social formations.82 Astell contends with political theorists such as Locke by rigorously applying the logic of political philosophy to gender. In her best-known works, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some Reflections upon Marriage, Astell extends the tenets of educational reform and contract theory, respectively, to argue that women should receive educations equal to men’s and be able to opt out of the marriage market. Frustratingly for later feminists, Astell’s conservative Tory politics mean

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that she does not condone resistance to either the political state or its parallel case of marriage.83 A scrupulous political thinker attuned to issues of gender discrimination, Astell nevertheless refuses the option of direct civic participation embraced by Philips and Hutchinson, and she closes down the room for negotiation within coverture.84 Like the other writers of this study, Astell wields the discourse of friendship to forge alliances. When she moves to London at the age of twenty-two without the support of relations, Astell modifies a language of friendship in order to solicit the patronage of powerful male clergymen. In time, she develops a network of female friends, whose intellectual companionship and material help sustain her.85 With some of these women, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Astell’s friendship takes a writerly form; she encourages Montagu to publish her Turkish Embassy Letters and writes a preface for it.86 In practice, Astell thus seems to offer a compelling account of textualized female friendship at work in the world. In two early texts, Astell uses the rhetoric of friendship to solicit patronage from a powerful male figure; in both cases, she performs her own lack of friends in order to establish connections. In the first of these, a set of manuscript poems presented in 1689 (but not published in full until Ruth Perry’s 1986 biography), Astell addresses William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury.87 The poems recompense Sancroft’s financial aid to her, invoking Christian charity and the literary patronage of earlier generations. In the letter accompanying the manuscript, Astell praises Sancroft for his kindness “when even my Kinsfolk had failed, and my familiar Friends had forgotten me.”88 With her poems, Astell claims both to thank Sancroft for his generosity and to trespass upon it again, recalling the self-abnegating gestures of Philips’s poems and letters. The construction of Astell’s isolation from “familiar Friends” continues in the poems themselves. Although Astell first laments that friendship ought to be “more practis’d & more understood,” implying that friendship’s condition on earth does not match that in heaven, she concludes the stanza by contracting the claim: “Why shou’d it be, / Friendship shou’d only be forbid to me?”89 The failure of friendship is the world’s, not Astell’s, but she suffers its effects disproportionately. Astell depicts God as the only reliable friend: “I fear not to obtain my ends, / While God and a good Conscience are my Friends; / Nor need a Patron, if with Heav’n / I can preserve my reck’nings ev’n.”90 The language stresses use rather than virtue with “obtain my ends” and the economic valence of “reck’nings ev’n,” evoking friendship writings on the value of friends’ practical assistance.91 In the context of the manuscript’s dedication to

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Sancroft, the poem has the effect of calling into being the very things it disavows. Astell does not need Sancroft’s patronage because she has God’s friendship, but God’s friendship makes her a worthy object of Sancroft’s patronage. By marking herself as friendless, Astell renders herself a worthy friend to one who would otherwise be too much above her. Her abjection traverses the inequality not by leveling difference, but by insisting upon it while subtly suggesting the equality of souls before God. In the final poem of the manuscript, Astell argues most explicitly for the importance of lacking friends, starting with renunciations familiar from other poems of retirement. Astell’s poem has a gendered edge, dismissing “Company” and “Courtship” as well as the more political “Flatterers” and “Sycophants.”92 In the third stanza, she thanks God that she is “Friendless too.”93 She finds this gratitude “hard” because friendship, unlike public renown or romantic admiration, can potentially be “the noblest end, / [God’s] glory in a Friend.”94 Friendship offers the possibility of self-improvement into a love directed toward God. Astell’s conception of friendship, like Philips’s, appears in its denial: its description becomes clear as Astell laments that she lacks it. In a twist, though, Astell’s friendship ideal emerges through God’s “Jealousie,” which prevents her from having human friends so that “Jesus” alone can be her friend.95 With him, Astell shares “Joys” and “sorrows,” and he surpasses human friends because she need not weep for her friend or “leave her here.”96 The perfection of a God who fulfills all the classical requirements of friendship while never succumbing to any of its failures seems to overtake, once and for all, the need for human companionship. The pronoun “her,” almost unnoticeable in the final line of that stanza, tells a different story. Its gendered specificity suggests not that Astell never had any friends, as she earlier claims, but rather that she had a friend who failed her. The fourth stanza hints at this backstory: No want so sharply doth affect the heart, No loss nor sickness causeth such a smart, No racks nor tortures so severely rend, As the unkindness of a darling Friend.97

Astell’s gratitude for having no friends but God develops only in response to the greatest pains she can imagine, the “unkindness of a darling Friend.” “Unkindness” suggests that the friend errs by becoming not only unpleasant but unlike the speaker; “darling” connotes a particular favorite, one selected amongst many. Astell does find some value in the betrayal of a friend, though not in the continuing network of relationships that Philips and Hutchinson develop. Instead, Astell discovers

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virtue by substituting God for earthly companion: the friend’s betrayal teaches her that to sin is to betray God’s friendship.98 By understanding herself as a potential betrayer, Astell takes the example of the unkind friend as a pattern to lead her away from sin.

“I am loath to abandon all Thoughts of Friendship” The culmination of a correspondence between Astell and John Norris, a High Church clergyman and Tory, Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) poses the problem of balancing earthly and heavenly loves. Over the course of the letters, Astell repeatedly asks Norris how the injunction to love God only, “intire and exclusive of all other Loves” (as the full title of the Letters puts it), affects the commandment to love one’s neighbor.99 Norris’ version of desire between people carries negative and often sexualized connotations: he connects excessive love of one’s neighbor to the Vice of Self-love, by which we mean a craving and seeking after more than comes to a Man’s Share without having Regard to the Community, or a greedy Pursuance of ones own private Interest in Opposition to that of the Publick.100

Here, Norris suggests that unbounded neighborly love harms rather than strengthens community; it takes a public interest and falsely makes it private. Astell responds by pushing against the logic of Norris’ claims. She depicts herself as especially susceptible to friendship: “For having by Nature a strong Propensity to friendly Love, which I have all along encouraged as a good Disposition to Vertue, and do still think it so if it may be kept within the due Bounds of Goodwill.”101 Holding out the possibility that it can operate within appropriate boundaries, Astell connects friendship to desire rather than the benevolence Norris advocates: it is a very difficult thing for me to love at all, without something of Desire. Now I am loath to abandon all Thoughts of Friendship, both because it is one of the brightest Vertues, and because I have the noblest Designs in it. Fain wou’d I rescue my Sex, or at least as many of them as come within my little Sphere, from that Meanness of Spirit into which the Generality of them are sunk . . .102

The passage links together Astell’s most consistent attitudes toward friendship: her emotional propensity for it, her conviction of its virtue, and her desire to use it to educate other women to virtue. In her challenge to the “Generality” of women, Astell looks forward to the educational

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reform of A Serious Proposal. Neighborly friendship will help to redirect women’s attention, making them more benevolent to each other. This hopeful vision makes it all the more startling that a few lines later Astell returns to the laments over friendship’s betrayals from her manuscript poems. From the “Generality” of her sex, her focus contracts to her own experiences: But though I can say without boasting, that none ever loved more generously than I have done, yet perhaps never any met with more ungrateful Returns, which I can attribute to nothing so much as the Kindness of my best Friend, who saw how apt my Desires were to stray from him, and therefore by these frequent Disappointments would have me learn more Wisdom than to let loose my Heart to that which cannot satisfie. And though I have in some measure rectified this Fault, yet still I find an agreeable Movement in my Soul towards her I Love, and a Displeasure and Pain when I meet with Unkindness, which is a strong Indication of somewhat more than pure Benevolence;* for there’s no Reason that we should be uneasie because others won’t let us do them all the Good we would.103

Astell utilizes superlatives to evoke the extremity of her suffering, which she characterizes as a gift from her “best Friend,” God. Like the disappointed friend of the poems, Astell takes the “ungrateful Returns” of her friendship as a sign that she ought to stop mistakenly loving the creature and not the creator. This is precisely Norris’ point. But just as in the poems, an unruly pronoun – the “her” of “her I Love” – disrupts the move toward God. Astell’s soul still makes “an agreeable Movement” toward friendship; it still suffers rejection. Perhaps more surprisingly, this inclination to preserve both the pleasures and pains of friendship does not succumb to reason, but instead strengthens over time. The asterisk in the passage above marks a footnote that appears in the 1705 (but not the 1695) edition of the letters, in which Astell retracts the idea that she should learn to accept others’ refusal to receive good: “next to Sorrow for our own Sins, our Neighbours refusing to receive the Spiritual Good we wish them, is the justest, greatest, and most lasting Cause of Grief.”104 The textual trace of publication history shows Astell becoming more rather than less inclined to insist upon friendship as a good in itself and as a possible avenue for reform. In the explicit argumentation of Letters Concerning the Love of God, however, Astell moves towards Norris’ way of thinking: insofar as human friendships participate in the love of desire, they will inevitably lead to disappointment, for only God can return love without jealousy. Instead, people should love each other with benevolence only. Unlike particular friendships in the classical and humanist tradition, benevolent love for the neighbor does not rely upon likeness but instead flourishes

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in the absence of a return: “Our Kindness when he no longer returns it is the more excellent and generous, because more free: And though it can’t be called Friendship when the Bond is broke on one side, yet there may be a most refined and exalted Benevolence on the other.”105 Freedom and friendship are antithetical; asymmetry marks a virtuous, benevolent relation.106 Unlike the copious humanist friendship of Philips and Hutchinson, which produces textual generativity, Astell’s particular friendships appear as constraining forces, “contracting and limiting” the benevolence that would otherwise benefit many.107 Friendship’s abundance exists negatively, as “a Bank to all that Mischief, Malice, and Uncharitableness that is in the World.”108 What in Philips and Hutchinson is a problem of conflicting allegiances to equally legitimate sources of obligation is for Astell the universal condition of desire, an ever-present problem of insufficient resources. Like Norris’ criticism of the person who falsely chooses private over public interest, friendship appears not to sustain sociability but instead to undermine it. A contemporaneous response to Letters Concerning the Love of God illuminates the extremity of Norris and Astell’s eventual position. In 1696, the anonymously published A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, written by Damaris Masham, vigorously rebuts the claims of the Letters. It seems likely Astell thinks the author to be John Locke, a friend of Masham’s; Masham herself is, until an angry disagreement only a few years prior, a close friend of Norris’, who has in turn been helped to his living by Locke’s intervention.109 Masham’s advocacy of friendship thus emerges out of a history of ruptured and newly formed friendships. Masham bases her critique in the larger social consequences of not loving one’s neighbor: “It is certain, that if we had no Desires but after God, the several Societies of Mankind could not long hold together, nor the very Species be continued: For few would give themselves Care, and Sorrow, in the pursuit of Possessions not desireable.”110 Masham argues that desire, far from fracturing communities into jealous, self-interested parties, instead motivates people to care for one another. Her next point recalls the tenets of amicitia: as long as neither God nor friends require contradictory things, humans have the ability to love both.111 Masham thus solves Norris’ problem of conflicting obligations – the public interest of loving God only that is necessarily opposed to the private desire for other humans – both by expanding human capacity and by deferring the possible conflict to a contextual rather than constitutional status. Humans’ sociability defines them: There is nothing more evident than that Mankind is design’d for a Sociable Life. To say that Religion unfits us for it, is to reproach the Wisdom of God

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as highly as it is possible; And to represent Religion as the most mischievous thing in the World, dissolving Societies.112

Masham’s disagreement with Letters Concerning the Love of God evinces a concept of human nature wherein the greatest good lies in interactions with others. She rejects the theoretical for the practical, worrying about the lived consequences of spurning human ties for God alone. In this, Masham has an unlikely ally: Astell, who even after ostensibly agreeing with Norris cannot quite give up her idea of friendship. Rather, she cannot relinquish her “Experience” of it: But though all other Arguments should fail, my own Experience would assure me that there is such a thing as unmixed Benevolence; for there are some Persons in the World to whom I could perform the highest Services, without any the least Intuition of Reward, or Prospect of bettering my own Being.113

Unusually, the rigorously philosophical Astell advocates “Experience” over “Arguments.” In keeping with her repeated disappointments in friendship, she does not record the good others have done for her – indeed, she suggests that her actions have little “Prospect of bettering my own Being” – but instead the good she wishes to do for others. The potentiality of the verb is important: she does not adduce the evidence of “the highest Services” she has performed, but those “I could perform.” Astell continues, in these concluding remarks, to reiterate that love of another creature cannot fulfill humans; only love of God can.114 But the unfulfilled possibility of the statement pushes against the impossibility of friendship. She preserves a space for a productive, benevolent friendship, though not for a classically equal one. Importantly, though, Astell always shows the betrayals of friendship turning her away from her human friend and toward God. Unlike for Philips and Hutchinson, friendship’s failures unmake rather than remake. This lack of flexibility has consequences for the forms of successful friendship she offers.

Astell’s Serious Proposal Astell articulates the potential of productive friendship in her most famous work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694; 1697). Written in two parts, A Serious Proposal offers a plan to improve women’s lives and characters by teaching them in a retired community of women only. Astell argues that the defects generally attributed to women – frivolity, inconstancy,

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and lack of intelligence – result from the deficiencies in their education rather than from nature.115 She proposes to solve these through a rigorous course of study that will both prepare young women to leave the community for marriage and provide an alternative for women who do not wish to marry at all.116 Astell names the community “a Monastery” or “Religious Retirement,” although it will not require “Vows or irrevocable Obligations,” leaving women’s participation entirely “voluntary and free.”117 With this qualification, Astell hopes to distinguish her retired community from both marriage and the Catholic convents to which her detractors inevitably compare it.118 In its retreat from the world and its foundation on intellectual principles, Astell’s “Religious Retirement” models a female separatist community. It incorporates elements of earlier friendship traditions, including some language of amicitia, while strongly diverging in other respects, such as its treatment of humanist practices. As such, A Serious Proposal provides the ideal test case for exploring the implications of female separatism on the tradition of female friendship. The popularity of A Serious Proposal, which prompts varied reactions from impulses to fund such a community to satirical plays on the topic, also means that Astell’s retired society of women has a lasting effect on people’s imaginings of women’s associations.119 Friendship operates within Astell’s women’s community in two senses: a generalized bond among all the women and particular affinities between individuals. In the general sense, Astell envisions the society participating in frank conversation without the flatteries of courtship.120 By eliminating the influence of men and the competition for husbands, the all-female community also prevents the most insidious expression of female jealousy, where other women conspire in “betraying and seducing unwary Innocence.”121 To eliminate seductions, the retired community firstly removes women from the manipulations of men, and secondly reorients women’s loyalties, inculcating virtue and offering an alternative to marriage.122 By decoupling marriage and financial maintenance, Astell’s community helps to alleviate the “economy of scarcity” in marriage.123 Within the idealized community, Astell also allows for more exclusive intimacies between individuals. Astell describes these friendships with all the extravagant rhetoric of earlier generations: But I intend by [friendship] the greatest usefulness, the most refin’d and disinteress’d Benevolence, a love that thinks nothing within the bounds of Power and Duty, too much to do or suffer for its Beloved; And makes no distinction betwixt its Friend and its self, except that in Temporals it prefers her interest.124

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The lines mix the exalted – “refin’d and disinteress’d Benevolence,” the willingness to suffer for another – with the practical inclination to be “useful” and to exercise the friend’s “interest” “in Temporals.” At the same time, the passage carefully draws the bounds of what friends can require of one another, not only by insisting on “Temporals” and thus implying that in matters of conscience the friend ought to prefer her own interest, but also through “Power and Duty.” “The bounds of Power and Duty” are exactly what amicitia, in its civically engaged form, demonstrates the impossibility of drawing, with “Duty” always multiple duties. The female separatist community allows Astell to envision a contraction of forces that frees women from other duties (to obey their parents, to marry, to support themselves) and gives them a limited scope for exercising their power. By removing women from other obligations, the society of women obviates conflicts. They arise only in the caveat that “particular Friendships must be no prejudice to the general Amity,” recalling the letters to Norris.125 Astell’s retired community shrinks larger questions about competing sources of allegiance into a tension between particularity and generality. In so doing, it emphasizes the society’s separation from the larger world. This enclosure continues in Astell’s treatment of the classical and humanist tradition. In the proposal, Astell rejects the scholarly techniques prized by and often denied to women of earlier generations: language study, translation, and extensive secular as well as religious reading.126 She does not omit humanist education from her school because she believes women cannot learn, but she argues that debate and contention impede the end of discerning religious truth.127 Her stress on divine rather than secular knowledge also curtails the applications for women’s knowledge: “Women have no business with the Pulpit, the Bar or St. Stephens Chapel,” the last a reference to the House of Commons.128 Astell thus excludes women from ministry, law, and politics – that is, from formal public speaking in its most pervasive forms. The practical applications of women’s knowledge, which she advocates throughout, do not take these recognizably public and influential forms. In her treatment of questions of conflicting allegiances, in her rejection of humanist learning, and in her refusal to include women in official public life, Astell thus distinguishes her female separatist community from civically engaged women’s amicitia. The public consequences of Astell’s rejection of humanist education appear still more strongly in her use of a loaded political term: prudence. Connoting a judicious weighing of circumstances and precedents in order to determine appropriate action, prudence emphasizes efficacy over abstract good, especially once associated with reason of state from

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the late sixteenth century onward.129 In Astell’s text, particularly the second installment, prudence no longer carries these pragmatic associations; in fact, Astell specifically contrasts the prudence inculcated in her community to that of dissembling orators. Early in A Serious Proposal, prudence simply seems to mean good judgment, as when she argues against men’s ideas that “Women are naturally incapable of acting Prudently, or that they are necessarily determined to folly” or stresses that the teachers in the society should be women “of a consummate Prudence.”130 Neither use has particularly public connotations, but neither prevents that possibility. Later, Astell both elevates the status of prudence and defines it more precisely: For the main thing we are to drive at in all our Studies, and that which is the greatest Improvement of our Understandings is the Art of Prudence, the being all of a Piece, managing all our Words and Actions as it becomes Wise Persons and Good Christians.131

Here, prudence equates to self-management, rather than assessment of external circumstances. Notably, being prudent also means being consistent, “all of a Piece.” In this way, prudence connects to Astell’s insistence on a singular truth discoverable by anyone and capable of being expressed in plain language. In her most explicit rejection of rhetoric, Astell shows her commitment to these principles: Besides, by being True Christians we have Really that Love for others which all who desire to perswade must pretend to; we’ve that Probity and Prudence, that Civility and Modesty which the Masters of this Art say a good Orator must be endow’d with; and have pluck’d up those Vicious Inclinations from whence the most distastful faults of Writing proceed.132

Astell distinguishes between the truthful women of her community and deceptive orators. Whereas for Lucy Hutchinson the biblical Rebecca’s prudential counsel is a “pious fraud” that helps fulfill God’s plan, for Astell piety is one thing and fraud, associated with public speech and persuasion, quite another. Astell claims that “really” possessing the traits of “a good Orator” – “probity,” “prudence,” “civility,” and “modesty” – makes the women of her community better writers: “duly warm’d with a Zeal for his Glory and concern for our Neighbours Soul, no Figures of Rhetoric, no Art of Perswasion wou’d be wanting to us.”133 Astell puts “Zeal” and charity in the place of humanist education; the members of her community appear to be naturally effective rhetoricians. To what end is the prudence of Astell’s retired women? Whom do they persuade, and of what do they persuade them? Implicit in the recasting of prudence as self-management rather than statecraft is the question

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of the purposes of Astell’s retreat and its effects on larger society. In a response to the Norris–Astell letters that accords with anti-Catholic readings of Astell’s proposal, Masham preemptively criticizes any religion which requires people to retire to “desarts” and “to renounce the World and live in Woods.”134 Astell’s rejoinder echoes the humanism she dismisses elsewhere in her tract: your Retreat shall be so manag’d as not to exclude the good Works of an Active, from the pleasure and serenity of a contemplative Life, but by a due mixture of both retain all the advantages and avoid the inconveniences that attend either. It shall not so cut you off from the world as to hinder you from bettering and improving it, but rather qualify you to do it the greatest Good, and be a Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies; whose good Example it is to be hop’d, will so influence the rest of their Sex, that Women may no longer pass for those little useless and impertinent Animals.135

The invocation of the vita activa and vita contemplativa and the reference to “good Example” suggest a humanist philosophical tradition. An odd sense of breeding and animality, “stock[ing] the Kingdom” and “useless and impertinent Animals,” mingles with the philosophical references, however. The language negatively evokes women’s reproductive roles, raising the issues of marriage and motherhood. The roles of wife and mother prove inescapable in A Serious Proposal, for Astell’s community stipulates both a home for women who do not wish to marry and an education for young women who do. The women going out into the world, then, seem most likely to be prospective wives and mothers. Astell has an easier case to argue for the usefulness of her didactic plan for mothers: better religious and academic education will help them to teach their children and run their households more effectively.136 On the issue of marriage, she has more difficulty, because she needs simultaneously to present educated women as attractive to good men and to show that this education will allow them to be better wives. She “suppos[es] that prudent Men will reckon the endowments they here acquire a sufficient Dowry” and thus will desire to marry educated women, but her clear-eyed account of most suitors’ mercenary motives makes it hard to imagine who these “prudent Men” might be.137 Similarly, Astell’s account of the wife’s effect on her husband tends toward the ideal rather than the actual: a good and prudent Wife wou’d wonderfully work on an ill man; he must be a Brute indeed, who cou’d hold out against all those innocent Arts, those gentle persuasives and obliging methods she wou’d use to reclaim him . . . The only danger is, that the Wife be more knowing than the Husband; but if she be ’tis his own fault, since he wants no opportunities of improvement; unless he be a

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natural Blockhead, and then such an one will need a wise Woman to govern him, whose prudence will conceal it from publick Observation, and at once both cover and supply his defects.138

The passage struggles between an idealized vision of the “good and prudent Wife” who can persuade and oblige her husband by virtue of her own goodness and the “danger” of a husband who will not recognize her worth. Astell’s acerbic wit shows when she can scarcely bring herself to imagine the “Blockhead” husband who neither makes the effort to improve himself nor realizes his wife’s wisdom. In A Serious Proposal, Astell’s imagined community of women operates in an ideal, even utopian world, for all the realistic assessment of women’s social disadvantages and the problems of the marriage market that lead her to propose it. The “Religious Retirement” may prepare women “to furnish our Understandings with useful Principles, to set our Inclinations right, and to manage our Passions, and when this is well done, but not till then, [to] safely venture out,” but it has no answer for the “Brute[s]” and “Blockhead[s]” of that world.139

“To struggle with her Yoke will only make it gall the more” Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700) provides those answers. This anonymously published tract, written in response to the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Mazarin, critiques the logic of the institution of marriage itself, in complement but also in contrast to Astell’s earlier strategy of providing an alternative. Some Reflections upon Marriage pushes the arguments of contract theory to their logical conclusions, exposing the hypocrisy of theorists who advocate resistance against tyrannical kings while ignoring or even supporting the domestic tyranny of husbands. In the 1706 edition, Astell adds a strenuously argued preface that turns all her resources of irony to this comparison: Far be it from her to stir up Sedition of any sort, none can abhor it more; and she heartily wishes that our Masters wou’d pay their Civil and Ecclesiastical Governors the same Submission, which they themselves exact from their Domestic Subjects.140

Ostentatiously using the language of political rebellion, Astell makes her point: if subjects can rebel against rulers, why not wives against husbands? Unfortunately, Astell herself is more consistent than her political opponents. She advocates liberty and rebellion neither for citizens nor for wives.141

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In Some Reflections upon Marriage, the brutes and blockheads rule, and women have an obligation to submit. In contrast to A Serious Proposal’s more hopeful account of a good wife’s effect on her husband, the later tract vividly describes an unequal marriage: To be yok’d for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied ones most innocent desires, for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose Follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them; is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it.142

The passage evokes political parallels with “tyrannize” and “absolute Lord and Master,” while recalling the language of A Serious Proposal. Where in the proposal the prudent wife can help fix and conceal her husband’s failings, here “a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide” her husband’s “Follies.” Nevertheless, the wife has no redress: she can only hope that “her Prudence and Vertue” reproach her husband silently, while she looks to heaven.143 Unlike her husband, a dissatisfied wife accomplishes her proper business at home, so she cannot amuse herself elsewhere; similarly, she cannot appeal to the legal system if he reneges on the financial arrangements made at the time of their marriage.144 Some Reflections on Marriage thus does not offer women the scope for change that A Serious Proposal does when it at least imagines that the wife’s good example will reform the husband; nor does it give her external recourse, in which the wife can rely on familial or societal support to align the marriage with its original promises. Astell advocates an absolute submission, or passive obedience, of wife to husband.145 Given Astell’s commitment to education for women, she unsurprisingly finds it insupportable to be “bore down not by Reason but Authority.”146 She states firmly that wives do not owe their husbands “a blind Obedience [which] is an Obeying without Reason, for ought we know against it. God himself does not require our Obedience at this rate.”147 Through education, women will come to understand masculine rule to be reasonable; a husband should govern his wife “not as an absolute Lord and Master, with an Arbitrary and Tyrannical sway, but as Reason Governs and Conducts a Man, by proposing what is Just and Fit.”148 This positive version of matrimonial governance comes closer than any other to the prudence of husband and wife in A Serious Proposal: both spouses act reasonably, according to God’s law, and thus the wife can happily obey her husband. This dynamic echoes the process by which self-management becomes the example for others to follow in

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the proposal. Astell, however, never adduces solid evidence for why the husband’s superiority is inherently reasonable. Still more problematically, Astell seems to take away the wife’s ability to judge accurately the reason of her husband’s commands. She offers the following account of the wife’s duties: She then who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey. She must not attempt to divide his Authority, or so much as dispute it, to struggle with her Yoke will only make it gall the more, but must believe him Wise and Good and in all respects the best, at least he must be so to her. She who can’t do this is no way fit to be a Wife.149

On one level, this passage is ironic; Astell goes on to invoke “some refractory Woman” who will object that becoming a husband hardly makes a man infallible.150 On another level, Astell means precisely what she says: a woman willing to marry must be willing to subscribe to the fiction of her husband’s superiority, and to lose any consciousness of it as a fiction. Any woman who cannot or will not do this ought not marry. The requirement that a wife “not attempt to divide his Authority,” or even to “dispute it,” severely circumscribes the wife’s sphere of action, including limiting her autonomy in areas, like the household, traditionally considered under her primary authority. In part, Astell is willing to cede this degree of authority to husbands because she thinks that their sway only obtains in nonessential matters. As in A Serious Proposal, she states in Some Reflections upon Marriage that every woman is made to serve God: “The Service she at any time becomes oblig’d to pay to a Man, is only a Business by the Bye.”151 But she does have to pay that service. She also repeatedly argues that God does not ordain woman’s subjection to man, either through natural inferiority or as a consequence of the fall.152 Given that it does not mirror heavenly priorities, a wife’s subjection to her husband becomes almost incidental, a matter of this world only. Consequently, Astell does not offer much scope – or reason – for changing the social fact of women’s subjection on earth. She also dodges the question that plagues Renaissance marriage theorists when they write of “the yoke mis-yokt” of incompatible marriage partners: what is a spouse to do when her or his (but usually her) spouse asks her to do something against her conscience?153 In other writers, this question of conscience opens up a space for wifely resistance and dissent within the legal fiction of coverture; it allows the wife to act independently on the basis of a competing obligation. Oddly, given her focus on devotion to God, Astell does not discuss this problem, instead advocat-

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ing a passive resistance that accords with her political beliefs. Rather than fighting for conscience, Astell depicts marriage as a zone in which the wife fulfills her godly duty by suffering. A Serious Proposal offers the possibility that the wife’s virtue and intelligence will change the husband through example, but the husbands of Some Reflections on Marriage, mostly brutes and blockheads, trample that hope. In A Serious Proposal, Astell describes friendships in which each friend prefers the other’s interest “in Temporals” but not, she implies, in matters of conscience.154 Astell most nearly discusses resistance legitimated by conscience, that is, in writing of women’s friendship. Importantly, though, Astell stresses that her community of female friends does not require “Vows or irrevocable Obligations;” its lack of force renders resistance unnecessary.155 Astell needs friends not to be irrevocably obliged to each other, because the limitations she places on resistance deny any room to maneuver within contracted obligations. This makes her a powerful critic of the analogy between the marital contract and the social contract, but it also means that the only possible choice in marriage is to accept or refuse. Single women can circulate in the world, but they lack the support of friends when they do so. Astell’s retreats for women afford precisely the kind of private space, separate from the cares of the world, that Astell criticizes Locke for positing. These retired communities construct a space for philosophical thought in which friendship can flourish. They do not quite do the work of neo-Stoic retirement or Epicurean gardens, however, because societal reform only occurs through the hopeful persuasion of the prudent wives who might create new kinds of marriages with their husbands. Retreat does not change either the conditions of society or the forms of the marriages themselves; it does not facilitate the textual circulation of alternative models. The idealized all-women’s community serves as a rebuke to society, but it does not contribute directly to transformation by changing the terms of the debate.

Conclusion: Friendship’s Entanglements Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are each, in some way, singular: Cavendish in her extravagant dress, her abundant literary production, her insistent self-performance in print; Astell in her firm advocacy that women should be able – indeed, that they ought – to opt out of marriage, to support themselves in a single life. This singularity makes each of them models for the women writers and feminists who follow them. It provides instances of boldness, of self-determination, and of

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independence. Likewise, the trenchant critiques each woman offers of the marriage relation and its imbrication in pernicious structures of hierarchy, economy, and patriarchy point the way to future discussions of the utility and limitations of liberal contract theory. Each of these political theorists writes both to expose and to reimagine relations between men and women and between subjects and their government. Each does so, in part though not in whole, through imagining worlds where women can live amongst other women, in an idealized community that simply refuses the obligations and traumas of patriarchy, matrimony, and reproduction. This singularity, for all its energy and force, also limits their imaginings. The separatist communities stand outside the wrenching choices of civil war and its consequences: the choice between a husband and a friend, between the family of birth and the family of marriage, between God and king. They are safer, cleaner, tidier – but also less able to produce the resilient strength of a relationship made, undone, and remade anew. In the writings of Philips and Hutchinson, betrayaloriented friendship makes sense of these conflicting allegiances, without assuming a simple resolution. The paradoxical idea that betrayal can empower draws its force from poetry, in a dual sense: its meaning comes from participation in a literary history and from literary strategies such as metaphor, like the entangled cord stronger than the many small strings that comprise it. Most famously, John Milton uses this metaphor for Jesus’ words to the Pharisees on divorce: they are “not so much a teaching, as an intangling.”156 In their original context in Tetrachordon, the words describe the necessity to fit speech to a particular audience, and the liberty that an assessment of that original audience (and its defects) can confer upon a later interpreter. Since Jesus does not really want to teach the Pharisees, Milton claims, later readers must not expect those words of his to teach them. Jesus’ entanglement of the Pharisees enables Milton to argue for his desired dissolution: “to loosen or to set free” an unfit partner.157 Milton notably stresses that the husband should not be able to divorce his wife unilaterally, without her consent, but Milton’s words here tend toward severance, toward the inviolability of a self preserved by ending harmful entanglements – in some cases, the cords of marriage. Milton’s reader is entangled in order to learn to set her- or himself free. In this, he joins Cavendish and Astell, who establish selfhood through the refusal of obligations: the distinction between friend and enemy; the choice not to marry, lest one’s husband be a brute. These forms, and choices, are recognizably modern, as Milton’s argument for divorce suggests. Cavendish, Astell, and Milton seem familiar, in part, because Philips’s

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and Hutchinson’s very different ideas of friendship’s entanglements disappear into the history of inconsequential or separatist female friendship, into the story of Anna and Clarissa, among many others.158 In perhaps her most emotional poem on the dissolution of a friendship, Philips writes: I’m so entangl’d and so lost a thing By all the shocks my daily sorrows bring, That would’st thou for thy old Orinda call, Thou hardly could’st unravel her at all.159

“Entangl’d” by the obligations of her “daily sorrows,” Orinda becomes a different person. But that person remains “entangl’d” in her friendship with Lucasia: “thou hardly could’st unravel her at all.” Despite the fact that the poem reads as a final leave-taking of Lucasia, the impossibility of unravelling friendship’s obligations indicates that they endure, nevertheless. The lines also recall Hutchinson’s commonplace version of Caussin’s text, with its source in Cicero quoting Cato’s words: when friendships fail, “ ‘They should be unravelled rather than rent apart’.”160 The persistence and gentleness of that statement aptly describe the importance and continuance of friendship, its venerability, even as the violence of Philips’s lyric evokes the pressures of conflicting obligations that friendship exemplifies. The alternative models of women’s friendship articulated by Cavendish and Astell help to illuminate the degree to which friendship, marriage, and historical circumstances entangle in Philips’s and Hutchinson’s political thought. When Cavendish and Astell write of women’s friendship and marriage as the separate traditions they become, they sever the connection between resistance in marriage, legitimated by conscience, and civically engaged friendship’s possibility of rebellion, drawn from classical and humanist amicitia. If friendship’s entanglements unravel in the autonomy of the modern political subject, what difference does it make to retell the story of women’s friendship now? The answer lies in the shaping effects of stories of human origins on the lived consequences of political structures. Boldly appropriating a masculine discourse that proclaimed itself as not for them, the women writers of this study exploit their historical circumstances – the ideological incoherence of coverture and the historical crisis of conflicting obligations – to make something new. Imagining an intellectual generativity linked to texts rather than to bodies, Philips and Hutchinson refigure women’s relation to the state. The paradox of friendship’s political form, its paired vulnerability and resilience, forges a political model that does not refuse difference or dissension, but instead incorporates them in a process of rupture and remaking. Telling

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a different story about human bonds – like that of women’s friendship in which betrayals do not obliterate but lead to rebuilding – exposes the contingency of the usual stories. The theories of patriarchalism, of contract, of natural sociability, and of the separation of public and private spheres have the force not of necessity, but of repetition: certain explanations circulate, over and over, until they acquire the veneer of inevitability. The model of betrayal-oriented friendship not only offers alternatives to the theories, but also to the logic of solidifying certainties. This mode of reading takes up the materials of the near or distant past and uses them in new ways – as do these writers, when they appropriate classical discourses, miscellaneous poetry, and contemporary pamphlets. The interpretive practice limns but also manifests feminist imaginings of a generativity of texts rather than of bodies. The stories of friendship’s betrayals reveal an alternative way of conceptualizing human relationships, in all their danger, fragility, and persistence.

Notes 1. A brief list of titles on friendship illustrates this distinction: Bray’s The Friend (2003), Hutson’s Usurer’s Daughter (1994), Olmsted’s Imperfect Friend (2008), and Shannon’s Sovereign Amity (2002) all focus on the Renaissance period, and all predominantly discuss masculine friendship. In contrast, Donoghue’s Passions between Women (1993), Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), S. Marcus’ Between Women (2007), J. Todd’s Women’s Friendship in Literature (1980), and Vicinus’ Intimate Friends (2004) discuss women’s relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2. Alger, “Introduction,” Friendships of Women, n.p. 3. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, p. xviii. 4. See S. Marcus, Between Women, pp. 23–108 for a reconsideration of female friendship as central to Victorian England and its novels. 5. I take the terminology “second-best” from Vicinus, Intimate Friends, p. xvi. 6. Richardson, Clarissa, p. 40. 7. Faderman, Surpassing, p. 413. 8. In contrast, D’Monté, “Mirroring Female Power,” p. 93, sees Cavendish’s friendship as influenced by Philips’s poems. 9. Hutchinson, MLCH, p. 84, praises the character (though not the politics) of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. On their philosophical interests, see Goldberg, Seeds, pp. 122–78. On the biographies, see Cottegnies, “The Garden and the Tower,” pp. 125–44; Norbrook, “Identity, Ideology, and Politics,” pp. 179–203; and Rees, Margaret Cavendish, pp. 39–41. 10. On the traditional view of Cavendish as a royalist, see Raber, “Our wits joined,” pp. 464–93; Rees, Margaret Cavendish, p. 5; and Chalmers,

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

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Royalist Women Writers, pp. 128–48. For complications of Cavendish’s royalism, see Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, pp. 182–202. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 192–5 argues that Cavendish’s use of contract moves her close to Parliamentary arguments. Battigelli, “Political thought/ political action,” pp. 40–55 explores interconnections with Hobbes. Rogers, Matter of Revolution, pp. 197–8 considers republican elements in Cavendish’s thinking. See Donagan, “Varieties of Royalism,” pp. 66–88; and Roy, “Royalist Reputations,” pp. 89–111 on the contingent nature of political identity. See also de Groot, Royalist Identities, pp. 1–19. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 61. On Cavendish’s biography, see Fitzmaurice, “Cavendish,” ODNB. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 61. Whitaker, Mad Madge, p. 159. Wright, “Reading the Private,” p. 232, reads this passage as an example of Cavendish’s separatism. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 61. Ibid., pp. 42 and 287. Ibid., pp. 142–3. For a rich account of the conversational dynamics in this text, see Larson, Early Modern, pp. 138–65. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 44. Cavendish, Blazing World, p. 181. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., pp. 194–5. See Chapter 2. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 69. See Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, pp. 52–85. S. Marcus, Between Women, pp. 85–108, argues that female friendship helps to bring about marriage in nineteenth-century novels. Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (better known as Fanny Hill) offers one of the best-known versions of this form of sexual initiation. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 70. Ibid., p. 70. Cavendish, World’s Olio, p. 32. Cavendish, Female Academy, III.xx, pp. 668–9. Ibid., p. 668. Ibid., p. 668. Ibid., p. 668. Ibid., p. 668. Cicero, De officiis, III.x, p. 313. Cavendish, Female Academy, IV.xxi, p. 669. In both Female Academy and World’s Olio, the observations that women must accommodate their behavior more closely to those with whom they interact and the circumstances in which they find themselves sound very much like classical descriptions of rhetorical decorum. See Female Academy, II.viii, p. 660, and World’s Olio, p. 32. Cavendish, Female Academy, III.xiv, p. 664.

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43. Waller, “On the Friendship betwixt Two Ladies,” Poems (1904) lines 1 and 13–14. See Chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of this trope. 44. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 182. 45. Cavendish, Female Academy, V.xxix, p. 679. 46. Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure, I.ii, p. 220. 47. Ibid., p. 220. 48. Ibid., II.i, pp. 222 and 223. 49. Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure, III.ii–x, pp. 229–33. Wright, “Reading the Private,” p. 213, reads Cavendish as strongly condemning marriage: “While The Convent of Pleasure invites many readings, and goes some measure to re-establish the validity of heterosexual marriage at its conclusion, the premise of the play rests on the contention that domesticity brings such misery to women that they must construct an alternative to free themselves from its most pernicious aspects.” Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 145, notes the miseries of childbirth and raising children. 50. Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure, II.i–ii, pp. 223–5, and Female Academy, III.xiv, pp. 664–5. 51. As Lang Bonin notes in “Dramatic Utopias,” p. 350, the princess also interrupts the critiques of marriage, which shift to staging cross-dressed heterosexual romance on her impetus. 52. Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure, III.i, p. 228. 53. Thanks to Katie Larson for this observation. 54. Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure, V.i, p. 243. 55. Ibid., IV.i, p. 239. 56. Ibid., V.i, p. 243. 57. Ibid., p. 243. 58. Ibid., p. 244. 59. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 177, notes this pattern of dramatic closure: “In The Convent of Pleasure (1668), Cavendish explicitly explores the attractions of homoeroticism among women, only to reaffirm the necessity of marital alliance as the price of a harmonious dramatic conclusion.” 60. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, p. 140, reads Cavendish’s retirement as more efficacious than I do, although she also sees Philips engaging more explicitly with public life than Cavendish does (p. 108). 61. Cavendish does offer significant revisions to marriage through contract. See Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 171–95. 62. For a fuller discussion of neo-Stoic retirement, see Chapter 4. 63. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 76. 64. Ibid., p. 77. 65. Ibid., p. 79. 66. See Wright, “Reading the Private,” pp. 213–14: “Yet Cavendish’s powerful analysis of the darker side of the private is counter-balanced by her frequent assertions of the virtue of a carefully constructed, closeted, intellectual life for women. Through her defence of a retired life, Cavendish actively and publicly constructs an alternative meaning of the private and its potential benefits for women.” 67. Suzuki, “Female Satirist,” pp. 483–500; and Raber, “Our wits joined,”

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68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

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pp. 464–93 see conflict between the political views and literary ends, respectively, of Margaret and William Cavendish. My argument therefore diverges from Masten, “Material Cavendish,” pp. 49–68, especially pp. 54 and 61–2, who powerfully argues that Cavendish uses same-sex egalitarian friendship to help reimagine the Cavendishes’ companionate marriage. Cavendish, Sociable Letters, p. 174. In Poems and Fancies, p. 91, Cavendish writes a dialogue between Peace and War, in which Peace says that War “Factions . . . mak’st in every Publick-weale, / From Bonds of Friendship tak’st off Wax, and Seale.” Similar language occurs in World’s Olio, p. 154, where war “makes Friendships like Bonds that are unsealed.” On her husband, see the prefatory letter to the World’s Olio, fol. A2v; on Caesar, see World’s Olio, p. 130. See World’s Olio, pp. 45, 111, 112, and 130. Wright, in “Questioning gender,” an unpublished talk given at Indiana University, argued, however, that a critique of war, manifested in a focus on dying soldiers and their grieving families, threads throughout Cavendish’s writings. See Chapter 5. Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute,” p. 25. See Goldberg, Seeds, pp. 126–32 for a review of the debates. Goldberg, Seeds, pp. 130–2. Kahn, Wayward Contracts, pp. 171–95. Thanks to Maura J. Smyth for illuminating Cavendish’s “finding” and “making” models of creativity in several conversations. Less well-known than her more explicitly feminist tracts, Astell’s pamphlets include Moderation Truly Stated, A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom. Her most sustained argument on religious and political issues is The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, though she publishes it anonymously. Her last pamphlet, Bart’lemy Fair or an Enquiry after Wit first appears in 1709, with a revised and expanded edition responding to the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1722. On the relation between her religion and her feminism, see Achinstein, “Astell, Religion, and Feminism,” pp. 17–29. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, pp. 165, 188, and 192. On Astell’s biography and writings in brief, see Perry, “Astell,” ODNB. Springborg offers the most sustained argument for Astell’s engagement with Locke in Theorist of Freedom, especially pp. 1–7, 96–102, 113–30, 143–69, and 187–204. See also Perry, Celebrated, pp. 150–231; and Goldie, “Astell and Locke,” pp. 65–85. Apetrei identifies John Toland as another important interlocutor for Astell in Women, Feminism, and Religion, pp. 122–6. See H. Smith, “Cry up Liberty,” pp. 193–204, and Reason’s Disciples, pp. 3–17; Weil, Political Passions, pp. 142–60; and Miller, Engendering the Fall, pp. 217–30. See Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 7 on her view of Philips. On Astell’s early life, see Perry, Celebrated, pp. 28–54. On her female

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86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119. 120. 121.

Friendship’s Shadows friends, see Perry, Celebrated, pp. 232–81; and H. Smith, Reason’s Disciples, pp. 121–2. In the event, Montagu arranges only for a posthumous publication of the letters; see Perry, Celebrated, pp. 275–7. Astell, “Poems,” Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 154, fols. 50–97v. See Pickard, “ ‘Great in Humilitie’,” pp. 115–26. Astell, “Poems,” cited from Perry, Celebrated, Appendix D, “Rawlinson Manuscript of Mary Astell’s Poetry, 1689,” p. 401. All further references will be to this edition. Astell, “Poems,” p. 434. Ibid., p. 446. See Chapter 2. Astell, “Poems,” p. 451. Ibid., p. 451. Ibid., p. 451. Ibid., p. 452. Ibid., pp. 452 and 451. Ibid., p. 452. Ibid., p. 451. Astell and Norris, Letters (1705), pp. 103–116. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 33–4. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 97–8. Kolbrener, “ ‘Design of Friendship’,” pp. 52–4, also stresses the importance of asymmetry and failure in Astell’s friendships, reading them as akin to “martyrdom.” Astell and Norris, Letters (1705), p. 96. Ibid., p. 92. See Perry, Celebrated, pp. 87–91; and Springborg, Theorist of Freedom, p. 31. Masham, Discourse, p. 83. Ibid., pp. 84–8. Ibid., p. 123. Astell and Norris, Letters (1705), p. 118. Ibid., pp. 118–24. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 8, 11, and 13–14. The two options distinguish her communities from Cavendish’s. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 18 and 29. A powerful female patron, variously identified as Lady Elizabeth Hastings or Princess (later Queen) Anne, likely withdrew her planned financial support for the project due to worries about its appearing too Catholic, according to Perry, Celebrated, p. 134. See Perry, Celebrated, pp. 100–3 on the reception of A Serious Proposal. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 19–20. Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 76. Cavendish makes a similar point in

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122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

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Sociable Letters, p. 221, when she says that women cannot be friends because they are too competitive. Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 39. Kolbrener, “ ‘Design of Friendship’,” pp. 58–60 stresses the threat of courtship. The term “economy of scarcity” is from Dolan, Marriage and Violence, pp. 3–4. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 36–7. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 22, 23, 97, and 119. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 24, 109, and 133. She decries humanist argument in utramque partem, p. 137. Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 143. See Chapter 3. Astell, Serious Proposal, pp. 9 and 27. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid., p. 142. Masham, Discourse, pp. 124–5. Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 149–50. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 178. Astell, Reflections, p. 8. For an extended discussion of this parallel, see Astell, Reflections, pp. 17–19. Springborg points out that Astell recommends obedience for all in her introduction to Reflections, p. 4. Astell, Reflections, pp. 33–4. Ibid., pp. 39–40; see also 78. Ibid., pp. 48, 52. See Springborg, Theorist of Freedom, pp. 135–42 on passive obedience. Astell, Reflections, p. 33. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 11. Astell, Reflections, p. 11. See Turner, One Flesh, pp. 106–23. Milton, Tetrachordon, II.591–2. Astell, Serious Proposal, p. 37. Ibid., p. 29. Milton, Tetrachordon, II.643. Fish made these words famous in Surprised by Sin, pp. 21–2, where he uses them to describe Paradise Lost’s relation to its reader. Milton, Tetrachordon, II.645. Perry, Celebrated, p. 100, notes that Samuel Richardson may have modeled Clarissa on Astell. Emphases added. Philips, Poem 93, lines 13–16. Cicero, De amicitia, xxi, p. 185.

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Index

Act of Free and Generall Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion, 27, 154, 190; see also clemency Adam and Eve, 128–31, 133 Alger, William Rounseville, The Friendships of Women, 222–3 allegiances conflicting, 3, 14–15, 27–8, 57, 71–2, 73, 212 in coverture, 85 oaths of, 14, 29–32 political, 95, 196–7 alliances betrayal in forging, 17 in coverture, 13–14 discourse of friendship in, 238–40 female, 237–40 formed and dissolved, 93, 103, 164, 166–7 same-sex, 3, 57, 179, 181 vulnerability and, 17–18 amicitia benefits of, 82–3 betrayal in, 2–3, 175 charity and, 211 coverture and, 73 defined, 2, 5–6 in Eve’s creation, 132–3 humanist, 1–3, 5–6, 85 political aspects of, 74–7, 117 politics and passion in, 178 rhetoric of, 2–3, 8, 73, 79, 90–1, 191, 192 treason and, 116 tropes of, 226–7 usefulness of, 78, 79–80, 177 virtues of, 78

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women and, 77, 78, 117 see also classical friendship amicitia perfecta, 2, 5, 19n10, 117–18, 121, 166 Andreadis, Harriette, Sappho in Early Modern England, 171 Annesley, Arthur, first Earl of Anglesey, 125 Aristotle, 5–6, 10, 117 Astell, Mary on betrayal, 241 on education, 237–8, 240–1, 243–8 female alliances of, 237–40 on freedom, 241–2 on friendship and God, 240–3 on isolation, 238–40 on Locke, 237–8 on marriage, 244, 247–51, 253 Norris and, 240–2 patronage for, 238–9 on political separatism, 3, 224 on prudence, 245–7 refusal of obligations by, 252 on retirement, 239, 244, 246–7, 248 singularity of, 251–2 works Impartial Inquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom, An, 237 Letters Concerning the Love of God, 241–3 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A, 237, 241, 243–51 Some Reflections upon Marriage, 237, 248–51 Bacon, Francis, “Of Counsel,” 201–2 Barash, Carol, 71

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Index Baynes, J., “On Friendship,” 160–1 Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes, 175 benefits, 31–2, 79–82, 90–1, 94–5, 127, 130–1, 141, 204–6 betrayal in amicitia, 2–3, 175 causes and consequences, 88–9 in the Civil War years, 27–8, 236 clemency and, 60–1, 90, 154, 205 constancy through, 191 by Cromwell, 193–4 in Epicurean friendship, 121 in forging alliances, 17 friendship and, 7–8, 86–95, 101–2, 103, 240–1 memory of, 60 rebuilding and, 253–4 in republican friendship, 90, 197 secrecy and, 124 vulnerability and, 139 birth imagery, 126–7 Boétie, Etienne de la, 7 Boyle, Elizabeth, 93–5 Brathwaite, Richard English Gentleman, The, 118, 201 English Gentlewoman, The, 118 on Epicurean friendship, 118 on gentlemanly conduct, 60–1 Nature’s Embassie, 118 on wives’ counsel, 201 Bray, Alan, Friend, The, 12, 80, 208, 210 Broad, Jacqueline, 212 “Brutus” (Cowley), 38–9 Caesar, Julius, Cromwell compared to, 50 Calvin, John, 129–30 Carey, Lucius, Viscount Falkland, 43–4 Catholics, 15, 59, 208 Cato the Younger, 196–7, 206–7 Caussin, Nicolas, The Holy Court, 197–8, 207–8 Cavaliers, 34–5, 55–6, 60 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle on conflict, 226–7 on constancy, 236–7 coverture and, 199–200 critique of war in writings of, 257n73 female separatist communities in drama by, 229–35

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on marriage, 227–8, 232–3, 235, 253 on military virtue, 236 on obligations, 203–5, 252 on political separatism, 3, 224 on royalist friendship, 193 self-created worlds of, 227, 229–35, 236–7 singularity of, 251–2 on women as subjects, not citizens, 225–6 works Blazing World, The, 227–37 Convent of Pleasure, The, 229–30, 232–5 Female Academy, The, 229–32, 234–5 Sociable Letters, 225, 226–7, 228–9, 235 World’s Olio, The, 193, 205 Cavendish, William, 236 charity, 207–12, 211 Charles I, King as Achilles, 47 as David, 47–8 in Davideis, 43–4 and the death of Buckingham, 47–8 execution of, 50, 159 Nedham on, 20n29, 29–30, 33–4 in “On the double murther of K. Charles,” 89–90 panegyrics to, 45–6, 49 Charles II, King clemency of, 1, 53, 60, 190, 205 in Davideis, 41, 43–4 panegyrics to, 45–6, 49 restoration of, 34–5, 113n165; see also Restoration Charleton, Walter on Epicurus, 118–19, 140 Epicurus’s Morals, 119 on human society’s origins, 123–4 Immortality of the Human Soul, The, 119–20, 123 on mutual aid, 131 Physiologia Epicuro-GassendoCharletoniana, 114–15, 119 on public service, 120 on vulnerability and security, 123 Chidley, Katherine, 212 Cholmley, Sir Hugh, 70–1 Churchyard, William, A Sparke of Friendship and Warme Goodwill, 1–2, 75

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Cicero, Marcus Tullius De amicitia, 5–6 De officiis, 6 on friendship, 5–6, 87, 117, 177, 230–1 on tyrants, 7 on women’s education, 117–18 civic life, 15–16, 235 civil rights and worship, 211–12 civil unrest see rebellion Civil Wars betrayal in the, 27–8, 236 contract in the, 16–17 dissolution of friendships in, 235–7 loyalties shifting in, 14 memory and reinterpretation of, 161–2 in monarchic friendship, 192–3 philosophy affected by, 164 classical friendship, 39, 41, 86–7, 212; see also amicitia clemency betrayal and, 60–1, 90, 154, 205 in “Brutus,” 38–40 of Charles II, 1, 53, 60, 190, 205 of Cromwell, 51–3 between friends, 167 as kingly virtue, 51, 52–3, 204–5 memory and, 34–5 obligation and, 40, 204–5, 206–7 by Parliament, 47 in the Restoration, 35–6, 206–7 and submission, 38–9 see also Act of Free and Generall Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion Clifford, Anne, 163 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 213 Commonwealth Engagement Oath in, 30 women’s relations foundational to, 224 communion, 208–10 community, 72–3, 93, 103, 240, 242–3 companionate marriage see marriage conflicting obligations, 70, 102, 115–16, 176, 235 conscience charity and, 211 civic order and, 211–12 in coverture, 12–13, 199–200, 212, 236–7, 250–1 rebellion and, 210–12 in “Upon Appleton House,” 58–60

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consent in friendship, 75–6 to marriage, 132–43, 167 and monarchic power, 167–8 and subordination, 133 conspiracy nonconformity and, 209–10 perfect friends in, 15 virtue preventing, 87–8 see also treason constancy Cavendish, Margaret, on, 236–7 in “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” 57–8 Lipsius on, 162–3 to multiple authorities, 58–60 Nedham on, 31 in Stoicism, 162 through betrayal, 191 see also inconstancy contracts in Davideis, 42 in the English Civil War, 16–17 marriage and, 131–6, 164–8, 248–9 royalists on, 167 social, 15–16, 103, 164–8 vulnerability and, 16 convents, 58, 244 corruption, 195 coterie friendship, 69, 95–103 Cotterell, Sir Charles (Poliarchus), 69, 97–8, 104n2, 156, 182n16 counsel, 200–3 countenance, 11–12, 80, 83–4 courtship plots, 228–9 coverture alliances in, 13–14 amicitia and, 73 in companionate marriage, 191 conflicting allegiances in, 12–13, 85, 180 conscience in, 199–200, 212, 236–7, 250–1 criminal culpability in, 12–13, 71–2, 105n15 described, 12–15 disobedient wives in, 202 divergent opinions within, 71 ideological incoherence of, 253–4 language of friendship in, 72–4 patriarchal authority in, 13 in “Upon Appleton House” (Marvell), 58–60 see also marriage

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Index Cowley, Abraham “Brutus,” 38–9 Civil War, The, 43 on conflicting allegiances, 3 Davideis, 39–45 on the female body, 171–3 inconstancy of, 36–45 on Philips, Katherine, 171–3 Poems, 36–7 on Stoics and Sappho, 154 Cowper, Ashley, 174 Creech, Thomas, 116 Cromwell, Oliver betrayal by, 193–4 clemency and, 51–3 in Davideis, 41, 43–4 friendship and, 194–5 Hutchinson, Lucy, on, 49–52 Hyde on, 193–4 Nedham on, 20n29, 194 in “Panegyrike to My Lord Protector,” 45–6, 48–51 poems to, 27–8, 53–4 as tyrant, 7 as virtuous republican, 38 Damon and Pithias (also Phintias), 9–10, 197, 202 Dering, Sir Edward correspondence of, 97, 98–101 manuscripts of, 97 Philips and, 69, 100–1 public service of, 104n2 Derrida, Jacques, 4 Diogenes Laertius, 118 Dissenters, 208 dissolution of friendship benefits from, 82–3, 90–1 in the Civil Wars, 235–7 generativity of, 102, 173 Hutchinson, Lucy, on, 252 obligations in, 198 Philips, Katherine, on, 88–95, 179, 253 Dolan, Frances, 15, 59 Donne, John, “Sappho to Philaensis,” 172–3 Dorke, Walter, Tipe or Figure of Friendship, A, 6–7 Edelman, Lee, No Future, 84–5 education, 117–18, 146n69, 237–8, 240–1, 243–50

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Edwards, Richard, Damon and Pithias, 9–10 Edwards, Thomas, 212 Elyot, Sir Thomas Boke Named the Governour, The, 8–9, 11 on friendship, 5–6, 16–17, 193 emotion, 2–3, 175 enemies false friends as, 87 in the language of friendship, 205–6 military virtue and, 195 obligation to, 203–5 in the state of nature, 121 virtuous treatment of, 51, 235–7 see also clemency Engagement Oath, 30, 225 Epicurean friendship, 3, 10–11, 116–21, 125–8, 140–2, 144n36 Epicurus, 116–19, 120, 127, 148n124 equality in marriage, 124–5, 170 between princes and men, 192–3 of souls before God, 238–9 subordination and, 44 unity and, 5 of virtue, 23n79, 230–1 see also inequality Erasmus, Desiderius Adages, 140–1 “Amicus alter ipse,” 5 eroticism, 83–4, 102–3, 233, 234; see also lesbian eroticism and sexuality ethics, 80, 209–10 Evelyn, John, 116 Exclusion Crisis, 27–8, 35, 208, 237 Faderman, Lillian, 223–4 Fairfax, Thomas, 57–60 female friendship cultural representations of, 223–4 depoliticization of, 222–4 economic interest in, 173–4 marriage and, 154, 179–80 modern democratic theory and, 17 politics and, 15–17, 154, 178–80 in the private sphere, 223–4 reproduction and, 174, 231–3 same-sex desire and, 172–4, 178–9 self-interest and, 154–5 textualized, 238 usefulness of, 92 vulnerability of, 17

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female separatism and separatist communities, 58–9, 229–35, 236–7, 243–8 female writers see women writers feminization of friendship, 3–4, 222–4 fidelity see loyalty Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha, 167 Finch, Francis (Palemon) Friendship, 83, 96, 164 in Philips’s coterie, 69 royalist friendship, 193 Florio, John, 74 free will, 134–5 friendship, discourse of as alternative to absolutism, 193 betrayal in, 2–3, 7–8, 17–18, 101–2 and charity, 207 classical, 10 in coverture, 72–4 enemies in, 205–6 Epicureanism and, 114–15 false counsel in, 201–2 in forging alliances, 238–40 gender and, 12 by Hutchinson, Lucy, 3, 192, 207–8, 215 by Philips, Katherine, 3, 78, 164 in politics, 14–16, 78 in public life, 73 in romantic fiction, 223–4 subversive potential of, 85 “Friendship. An Elegy, by Lucasia,” 179–80 Gallagher, Catherine, 236 garden of Epicurus, 117–18 Gassendi, Pierre, 114–15, 118–19 gender in amicitia, 12–13, 74, 117–18 conscience and, 13 counsel and, 200–3 hierarchy of, 118 inconstancy and, 12–13, 162–4, 176 kindness and, 48 Neo-Stoicism and, 162–4 political obligation and, 176 in political philosophy, 237–8 political radicalism and, 191 in public life, 14–15 reputation and, 191 treason and, 12–14 Glorious Revolution, 28, 237 Goldberg, Jonathan, 214–15, 236 Green, Karen, 212

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Grotius, Hugo, 16 Guy-Bray, Stephen, 84–5 Harley, Lady Brilliana, 13–14 Hastings, Lady Elizabeth, 258n118 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 40, 77–9, 200–1 heterosexuality, 222–3, 227–8 Hilder, Thomas, Conjugall Counsell, 13 Hill, Christopher, 199 “The History of the Times,” 60 Hobbes, Thomas on contracts, 131–2, 237 Leviathan, 131–2 state of nature, 121–2, 131–2, 166 Tyrrell and, 166–7 homosexuality, 21n56; see also lesbian eroticism and sexuality human society, 115–16, 121, 123–5, 130–1, 197–8 humanism, 5–6, 85–7, 103, 119–20, 245, 247 Hutchinson, John, 190, 198–207, 203–5, 209–10, 214–15 Hutchinson, Julius, 190, 213 Hutchinson, Lucy amicitia used by, 196–7 Calvinism of, 129–30 Christian charity of, 207–12 companionate marriage of, 214–15 on conformity in religion, 209–10 on contract, 132 on Cromwell, 49–52 disobedient wife, 202 emphasis on obligation of, 116–17 on Eve’s creation, 130, 132–3 on Fairfax, 57–8 friendship of, 3, 16, 192, 207–8, 215, 252 gender politics of, 127–8, 201, 253–4 on grief, 127–8 on loyalty and betrayal, 4 on marriage as friendship, 124–6, 189 on propagation, 125–30 on prudence, 134–40 on public life, 120–1 recantation letter by, 190–1, 198–207 republicanism of, 115, 190, 192, 214 reputation of, 191, 206–7, 212–14 on sexual reproduction, 126–7, 203 on vulnerability and society, 121–2 works

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Index De rerum natura (translation by), 115–16, 120–1, 131–2, 141–2 epitaph for John, 213–14 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 191, 198, 214–15 “Musings in my evening Walkes at O,” 127–8 Order and Disorder, 115–16, 125–8, 132, 134–40, 141–2, 189–90 “To Mr. Waller,” 49–52 Hutson, Lorna, 2, 11, 72, 83–4, 93–4 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon Essays, 192–4 History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 192–4 rebuff of Cowley, 38–9 on royalist friendship, 192–4 inconstancy of Cowley, 36–45 gender and, 12–13, 162–4, 176 of Marvell, 53–60 of May, 55–7 of Nedham, 29–35 in poetry, 27–8 in reputation, 27–8 of Waller, 45–53 see also constancy inequality, 41–2, 74–5, 96, 141; see also equality interregnum, 59, 61n7, 85, 93, 216n12 Jagose, Annamarie, Inconsequence, 178–9 James VI and I, King, 156, 162 Jermyn, Henry, 43 Johnson, Samuel, 37, 45 Jonathan (in Davideis), 39–45 Jones, Jenkin, 71 Jonson, Ben, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” 56–7 justice, 8–9, 130 Kahn, Victoria, 16, 237 Lawes, Henry, 69, 104n2 lesbian eroticism and sexuality female friendship and, 172–4 in female separatist communities, 231–4 in feminist analyses, 222–4 in patriarchy, 178–9 in Philips’s poetry, 170–4, 178

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and textual generativity, 58, 83–4, 103, 181 unproductivity of, 178–81 L’Estrange, Roger, A Rope for Pol, 32–4, 35 Leveller women, 71–2, 212 likeness of friends in amicitia, 5–6, 165–6 Astell on, 241–2 Cavendish on, 230, 236 in Epicurean philosophy, 114–15 in judgment, 200–2 in marriage, 136, 139 in Philips’s poems, 74, 89–90, 94, 103, 171 in politics, 16–17 in sacrifice, 8 Lilburne, John, 71 Lilley, Kate, 86 Lipsius, Justus, 156, 162–3 Locke, John, 168–70 loyalty and civic virtue, 2 during the Civil Wars, 14 conflicted, 6–7, 30, 86–7 filial, 39–45 gender and, 12–13, 14–15 in hierarchy, 197–8 marriage and, 199–200 vulnerability and, 206 Lucasia see Owen, Anne (Lucasia) Lucretius, De rerum natura, 115–16, 120–1, 132, 141–2 Ludlow, Edmund, 192, 195–6, 199 male writers, 3, 28 marriage alternatives to, 234–5 as amicitia, 124–6 companionate, 22n58, 154, 175, 180, 191, 214–15 conflict in, 102 conscience and, 236–7 consent to, 132–43, 135–6, 167 contracts in, 133–6, 167 economy of, 174, 231–4, 244 education and, 247–8, 249–50 in Epicurean philosophy, 118 female friendship and, 154, 179–80 inconstancy in, 163 jealousy and, 227–8 loyalty and, 199–200 obligations in, 70–1, 136–7, 180, 235 redefined, 128–31

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marriage (cont.) and religion, 13 resistance in, 13, 250, 253 self-management in, 249–50 separated from friendship, 237 in state and society, 15–16, 124–5 submissiveness in, 249–50 textual productivity and, 235 Tyrrell on, 167 see also coverture Martyr, Peter, 39 Marvell, Andrew Account of the Growth of Popery, 28 “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” 53–5 on conflicting allegiances, 3 “First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector,” 53–4 inconstancy of, 53–60 “Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector,” 53–4 “Tom May’s Death,” 54–7 “Upon Appleton House,” 54, 57–60 masculine friendship tradition, 1–2, 5–12, 73, 253–4 Masham, Damaris, Discourse Concerning the Love of God, 242–3, 247 May, Thomas on friendship, 192, 195 History of the Parliament of England, 194–5 inconstancy of, 55–7 The King’s Cabinet Opened, 55 on military virtue, 195 on obligation, 205 “Tom May’s Death” (Marvell), 54–7 McDowell, Nicholas, 54–6 military virtue, 195, 236 Miller, Shannon, 126–7 Milton, John Paradise Lost, 128–9, 133–4 Tetrachordon, 252 monarchic traditions of friendship, 9–10, 192–4, 195 monarchs and subjects, 131 monarchy, 42–3, 167–8, 204–5 Monmouth see Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth Montagu, Mary Aubrey (Rosania), 88–91, 99–100, 111–12n141

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Montaigne, Michel de, “Of Friendship,” 6–7, 74 mutual aid, 128–31, 140–1 mutual obligations, 31–2, 82, 131, 204–5 natural sociability, 16–17, 76, 165–8 Nedham, Marchamont Case of the Commonwealth of England, The, 14, 30–2 Case of the Kingdom, The, 14, 31 on conflicting allegiances, 3 on Cromwell, 194 Excellencie of a Free State, The, 35 inconstancy of, 29–35 Mercurius Pragmaticus, 29, 32–3, 192–4 Newes from Brussels, 34–5, 60 Short History of the English Rebellion, A, 33–4 “The Negative Oath,” 30–2 “The Solemn League and Covenant,” 30–2 neighbors, 208–12, 240–3 neo-Platonism, 77–85 Neo-Stoicism inconstancy in, 162–4 Neo-Stoic retirement, 1, 10, 58, 105n25, 144n36, 158–9, 163–4 in Philips’s writing, 154, 155, 160–1, 164–8 and political rewritings, 155–62 Nethercot, Arthur, 37, 39 non-conformity, 208–10 Norbrook, David, 48–9, 124–5, 135–6 Norris, John, 240–2 numbers of friends, 117, 121, 166 Nussbaum, Martha, 122, 124 oaths of allegiance, 14, 29–32, 225 obligations clemency and, 40, 204–5, 206–7 conflicting, 70, 115–16, 176, 235 in dissolution of friendship, 198 to enemies, 203–5 ethics and, 81–2 injury and, 103 in marriage, 70–1, 136–7, 180, 235 mutual, 31–2, 82, 131, 204–5 political, 70, 102, 154–5, 176 refusal of, 252 of rulers, 32, 38, 131 of subjects, 32, 38 vulnerability and, 198

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Index Olmsted, Wendy, 2 Orestes and Pylades, 8–9, 197, 202 Orinda see Philips, Katherine Overton, Richard, 71 Owen, Anne (Lucasia), 72, 76–7, 81, 82, 84, 96, 99–100 Owen, John, 211–12 Parliamentary friendship, 194–5 Pateman, Carole, 15–16, 168 patriarchalism and anti-patriarchalism, 126, 155, 164–8, 181 patriarchy authority and, 13, 166–7, 168 family and, 15, 74, 116, 170, 223 patronage, 238–9 persuasion, 83–4, 200, 251 Philips, James (Antenor), 69–71, 100–3 Philips, Katherine (Orinda) amicitia perfecta of, 166 conflicting allegiances of, 70, 102, 166 coterie of, 69, 95–103 on dissolution of friendship, 88–95, 179, 253 eroticism of, 102, 157, 170–4, 178 friendship of, 3, 16, 72–4, 78, 154–5, 164 hostility to marriage of, 185n85 Irish land claim of, 100–1 marriage of, 102 on mixture in friendship, 169–70 Neo-Stoicism and, 154, 155–64 as Orinda, 81, 88–95, 99–100 Philo-Philippa on, 176–7 politics of, 69–70, 72–3, 87–8, 102, 178–9, 253–4 rhetoric of, 94–5, 97, 103, 181 sexual infidelity alleged of, 175–6 textual generativity of friendship, 84–5, 94–5, 102–3, 170–4, 228 works “A dialogue of friendship multiplyed” (Poem 97), 166 “A Friend” (Poem 64), 74–7 “A retir’d friendship, to Ardelia” (Poem 22), 157–9 “Injuria amici” (Poem 38), 88–93 “Rosania to Lucasia on her letters” (Poem 98), 166 “To Lucasia, upon a scandalous libell made by J. Jones” (Poem 32), 72, 132

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“To Mrs. M.A. upon absence” (Poem 49), 80 “To My Lucasia” (Poem 43), 81–4 “To Rosania (now Mrs. Montague)” (Poem 42), 163–4 “To the Lady E. Boyl” (Poem 102), 93–5 Philo-Philippa, 176–7 Platonic friendship, 78–9 politics in amicitia, 74–7, 117, 178 authority in, 42–3 community and, 103 discourse of friendship in, 15–16 emotion and, 175 Epicureanism and, 120–1 female friendship and, 15–17, 154, 178–80 female separatist communities and, 230, 231 friendship and, 1–3, 86–95, 117 obligation in, 70, 102, 154–5, 176 organizations of, 16, 42 retirement in, 10, 156–7 separatism in, 3–4 vulnerability and, 253–4 préciosité, 77–8 Prince, Thomas, 71 propagation, 125–9; see also sexual reproduction prudence, 130, 134–40, 245–7 public life friendship in, 73, 80 gender in, 14–15 prudence in, 136–7 women’s inclusion in, 77 publicity, 77, 81–2, 89, 178 Pufendorf, Samuel, 16, 76 Pym, John, 46 Raymond, Joad, 28 reason of state, 130, 156, 162, 245 Rebecca, story of, 134–40 rebellion conscience and, 210–12 friendship and, 7, 195 Irish, 195 language of, 248–9 reciprocity, 82, 90–1 religious persecution and resistance, 211–12 republican traditions of friendship, 9–10, 192, 196–7 republicanism, 192, 196, 211

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republicans, 159–60, 216n12 reputation gender and, 191, 199 politics and, 27–8, 196 sacrifice of, 203–4, 206–7, 214–15 Restoration changing allegiances in, 61 charity in, 208 clemency in, 35–6, 205 and Epicurean philosophy, 144n36 Nedham in, 29, 32–5 in Neo-Stoicism, 144n36 political climate of, 206 retirement Astell, Mary, on, 239, 246–7 in Cavalier poetry, 1 in Epicurean friendship, 10–11, 120–1, 144n36 into female societies, 232–4 in Marvell’s poems, 57–8 see also under Neo-Stoicism rhetoric of amicitia, 73, 90–1 education and, 246–7 on female communities, 245 friendship and, 2–3, 94–5, 97 humanist, 231 matrimony and, 232 of Neo-Stoic retirement, 156–7 in patronage, 238 political, 46–7 in public life, 176–7 of war, 176–7, 234 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 223 romantic plots in fiction, 228–9 Rosania see Montagu, Mary Aubrey (Rosania) royalists community of, 72–3 on contract theory, 167 friendship and, 90, 192–4 in the interregnum, 22n66 neo-Platonic ideals of, 77–9 Neo-stoic associations of, 159–60 in Philips’s coterie, 95–9 rulers, obligations of to subjects, 32, 38, 131 safety, 120–1, 122–3, 131 same-sex alliances, 3, 57, 179, 181 same-sex eroticism see lesbian eroticism and sexuality Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 238–9

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Saul, King of Israel (in literature), 41, 43, 60–1 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 170 Schwarzenbach, Sibyl, On Civic Friendship, 17, 168–9 Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius, 5, 41, 177, 196–8 Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth, 157–62 Scott, Jonathan, 28 Second Conventicle Act (1670), 208 secrecy betrayal and, 124 Caussin on, 197 in human society, 123–4 in royalist friendship, 192–3 as a virtue, 77 Seneca De beneficiis, 31, 127 De otio, 120 in English Neo-Stoicism, 156 on intentions, 139 Morales, 31–2 on public affairs, 120 sexual infidelity, 8–9 sexual initiation plots, 228–9 sexual reproduction cheated by female friendship, 174, 231–3 and female communities, 58–9, 252 in Genesis, 129 Hutchinson, Lucy, on, 126–7, 203 and lesbians, 178–81 and state power, 84–5, 170 sexuality, 130, 154, 171–4; see also lesbian eroticism and sexuality Shannon, Laurie, 2 Shifflett, Andrew, 156 Sidney, Algernon, 199 Sidney, Sir Philip, Arcadia, 10, 166 similitude see likeness of friends Smith, Nigel, 54, 56 souls, 95, 117, 119–20 sovereignty and counsel, 201–2 Sprat, Thomas, 37–8 Stanley, Thomas, History of Philosophy, 117–18 subjects, obligations of to rulers, 32, 38 subordination, 44, 118, 133 Tacitism, 156, 162–4 Taylor, Jeremy on charity, 207–8 Discourse, 78–9, 91–2

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Index in Philips’s coterie, 69 on Platonic friendship, 78–80, 96 Taylor, John, “The Water Poet,” 175–6 textual exchange conflicting allegiances in, 17 in countenance, 11–12 friendship and, 2–3, 6, 56–7, 85 generativity of, 3, 11–12, 84–5, 94–5, 102–3, 170–4, 228, 235 persuasion in, 158–9 in public life, 58, 178 Thwaites, Isabel, 58–60 Tiberius Gracchus and Caius Blosius, 7, 177 Tindal, Matthew, 38–9 Traub, Valerie on domestic heterosexuality, 154 Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, The, 178–9, 231–2 treason and coverture, 71–2 Epicurean friendship and, 116 and friendship, 2, 9, 40–2, 86–7, 116 and gender, 12–14 see also conspiracy tropes of amicitia, 226–7 of Inconsequence, 178 of rebellion against tyrants, 189 of renaming, 164 tyrants friendship and, 7–10, 41, 60–1 reformed, 197 resisting, 38, 42, 191, 195 Saul as, 41 unfaithful friends as, 88–9 Tyrrell, James and Hobbes, 166–7 Patriarcha non monarcha, 167 on Philips, 164–5 Vicinus, Martha, 222–3 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 47, 48 virtue conspiracy and, 87–8 equality of, 23n79, 230–1 in friendship, 6–7, 60–1, 74–5, 78

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volitional associations, 4, 15–17, 48, 85 vulnerability alliances and, 17–18 betrayal and, 139 contract theory and, 16 in Epicurean friendship, 3, 121–5 of female friendship, 17 human, 17–18 loyalty and, 206 mutual aid and, 130–1 obligations and, 198 in politics, 253–4 Waller, Edmund on clemency, 51 on conflicting allegiances, 3 Marvell and, 54 “Of his Majesty’s Receiving the News of the Duke of Buckingham’s Death,” 47–8 “On the Friendship betwixt Two Ladies,” 173–4 “Panegyrike to My Lord Protector,” 45–6, 48–53 Poems (1645), 46–8 political inconstancy of, 45–53 “Upon the Late Storm,” 45–6 “Waller’s Plot,” 46 Walwyn, William, 71 Watson, Richard, “Anti-Panegyrike,” 49–52 wives, 200–3, 249–50; see also coverture; marriage women education of, 117–18, 237–8, 240–1, 243–8 in Epicurean friendship, 117–18 as meet companions, 129–30 as negative citizens, 105n15 petitioning Parliament, 71–2 power of prudence of, 138–9 in public life, 77 roles of, 84–5, 178 women writers, 3, 11–12, 15–16 women’s friendship see female friendship Wood, Anthony à, 35 Worden, Blair, 53

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