(Early Modern History - Society and Culture) Melinda S. Zook (Auth.) - Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2013) PDF

Early Modern History: Society and Culture
General Editors: Rab Houston, Professor of Early Modern History, University

of St Andrews, Scotland and Edward Muir, Professor of History, Northwestern
University, Illinois
This series encompasses all aspects of early modern international history from
1400 to c.1800. The editors seek fresh and adventurous monographs, espe-
cially those with a comparative and theoretical approach, from both new and
established scholars.
Titles include:
Robert C. Davis
CHRISTIAN SLAVES, MUSLIM MASTERS
White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800
Rudolf Dekker
CHILDHOOD, MEMORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN HOLLAND
From the Golden Age to Romanticism
Caroline Dodds Pennock
BONDS OF BLOOD
Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture
Steve Hindle
THE STATE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, 1550–1640
Katharine Hodgkin
MADNESS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Craig M. Koslofsky
THE REFORMATION OF THE DEAD
Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700
Beat Kümin
DRINKING MATTERS
Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe
John Jeffries Martin
MYTHS OF RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM
A. Lynn Martin
ALCOHOL, SEX AND GENDER IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Laura J. McGough
GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SYPHILIS IN EARLY MODERN VENICE
The Disease that Came to Stay
Samantha A. Meigs
THE REFORMATIONS IN IRELAND
Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690
Craig Muldrew
THE ECONOMY OF OBLIGATION
The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England
Niall Ó Ciosáin
PRINT AND POPULAR CULTURE IN IRELAND, 1750–1850
H. Eric R. Olsen
THE CALABRIAN CHARLATAN, 1598–1603
Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe
Thomas Max Safley
MATHEUS MILLER’S MEMOIR
A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century
Clodagh Tait
DEATH, BURIAL AND COMMEMORATION IN IRELAND, 1550–1650
B. Ann Tlusty
THE MARTIAL ETHIC IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY
Civic Duty and the Right of Arms
Richard W. Unger
SHIPS ON MAPS
Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe
Johan Verberckmoes
LAUGHTER, JESTBOOKS AND SOCIETY IN THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS
Claire Walker
GENDER AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
English Convents in France and the Low Countries
Johannes. C. Wolfart
RELIGION, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN EARLY
MODERN GERMANY
Lindau, 1520–1628
Melinda S. Zook
PROTESTANTISM, POLITICS, AND WOMEN IN BRITAIN, 1660–1714
Forthcoming titles:
Caroline Dodds
LIVING WITH SACRIFICE
Also by Melinda S. Zook
RADICAL WHIGS AND CONSPIRATORIAL POLITICS IN LATE

STUART ENGLAND
REVOLUTIONARY CURRENTS: Nation-Building in the Transatlantic
World (co-edited with M.A. Morrison)
CHALLENGING ORTHODOXIES: Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern
Women (forthcoming)
Protestantism, Politics,
and Women in Britain,
1660–1714
Melinda S. Zook
Associate Professor, Purdue University, USA
© Melinda S. Zook 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-30319-6
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First published 2013 by
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For Mike and Lucy
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Note on the Text xiii
Introduction: Nursing Mothers and Sanctified Sisters:

Women’s Political Behavior after the Restoration 1
1 Nursing Mothers: Dissenting Women and Opposition

Politics 16
2 A Dangerous Woman: Mary Speke, her Family, and the

Puritan Gentry 58
3 Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and the Culture of

Nonconformity 92
4 An Incomparable Queen: Mary II, the Protestant

International, and the Church of England 125
5 Devoted Daughters of the Church: Elizabeth Burnet and

Mary Astell 160
Conclusion: Stuart Women and Political Culture 197
Appendix A: Poems on the Death of Mary II 203
Appendix B: Sermons on the Death of Mary II 206
Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s Recommended Reading List 209
Bibliography 212
Index 232
vii
List of Illustrations
1.1 Elizabeth Gaunt – permission to publish from the

National Portrait Gallery, London 15
2.1 Whitelackington House – George Roberts, The Life,
Progresses, and Rebellion of James, Duke of Monmouth
(London, 1844) 57
3.1 Aphra Behn – permission to publish from the National
Portrait Gallery, London 91
4.1 Mary II – permission to publish from the National
Portrait Gallery, London 124
5.1 Image of Elizabeth Burnet – permission to publish from
the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC 159
viii
Acknowledgements
This work is the outgrowth of several impulses. The first was my

desire to examine patterns of women’s behavior within the context of
oppositional politics between 1660 and 1688 that I had noticed while
researching my book on Whig politics. The sources were thin but inti-
mated that women were clearly enmeshed in the thick of seditious
plotting and publication. They also suggested that one could not with
confidence connect the actions of these women to political ideologies
but that which motivated their behavior was their religiosity. I felt very
strongly then that this was a story that deserved to be told. The impor-
tance of religious fervor in seventeenth-century women’s lives and the
degree to which I felt that I had not given religion the full weight of its
significance in my first book, was also a driving force behind this book.
Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England was writ-
ten initially as a dissertation in the context of life in Washington, DC,
and particularly, the influence of the Centre for Political Thought at the
Folger Shakespeare Library, which was then under the direction John
Pocock, Lois Schwoerer, and Gordon Schochet. Given that atmosphere,
it is little wonder that my focus was driven by interest, first and fore-
most, in political culture and discourse. This present work derives from
another context entirely, one both personal and political. The impact
of religious fanaticism on ordinary lives since September 2001 has cer-
tainly been cause for thought. On a more intimate level, this project
is the work of a more mature woman, living a more settled life, and
one who is far more appreciative of the role of spirituality in day-to-day
existence.
It took me long time to write this book so I have many people to
thank. I am grateful to the Center for Humanistic Studies at Purdue Uni-
versity for their support as well as my colleagues in the Department of
History. Several of my graduate students helped me over the years with
the research end of this project; they include Suzanne Calkins, Christian
Griggs, and Karen Sonnelitter. My wonderful gang of female friends –
Lois G. Schwoerer, Hilda L. Smith, Janelle Greenberg, and Linda Peck –
all of whom I have known me since my graduate school days, have long
been a tremendous source of strength and encouragement for me. Janet
Todd and Derek Hughes have been dear friends for many years, and
ix
x Acknowledgements
anyone who works on Aphra Behn and Restoration drama owes them
a debt of gratitude. Warren Johnson has also been a close confidant,
and I am grateful to him for his help with locating seventeenth-century
funeral sermons, and his insights on such topics as latitudinarianism
and Anglican orthodoxy. I have benefitted from my many conversa-
tions with Gary De Krey, Robert Bucholz, and Newton Key. Maureen Bell
helped me to better understand the activities of seditious booksellers.
Julie Farguson helped me identify several of Mary II’s charities. Stephen
Taylor, Mark Goldie, Molly McClain, and Tim Harris have been kind and
encouraging friends. Closer to home, Larry Mykytuik, Purdue’s history
biographer, has been especially wonderful at assisting with biblical texts.
The Inter-Library Loan office in our Humanities Library has been unfail-
ing in their efforts to support my research. But above all, I am grateful
to the support and understanding of my dear daughter, Lucy, and my
true and loyal friend, Michael G. Smith.
West Lafayette, Indiana, 2013

List of Abbreviations
Add Additional Manuscripts, British Library,

London
AHR American Historical Journal
BDBR Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in
the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Eds. Richard
L. Greaves and Robert Zaller. Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982–84
BIHR Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research
Behn, Works Aphra Behn, The Works of Aphra Behn. 5 vols.
Ed. Janet Todd. London: Pickering & Chatto,
1995
Birch, Life Thomas Birch, The Life of the Most Reverend
Dr. John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of
Canterbury London, 1753
BL British Library
Burnet, HOHOT Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time. 6
vols. Oxford, 1833
Burnet, A Supplement A Supplement to Burnet’s History of His Own
Times. Ed. H.C. Foxcroft. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1902
Calamy Revised A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised: Being a
Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the
Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced,
1660–2. Oxford, 1934
CHJ Cambridge Historical Journal
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series
Dalrymple, Memoirs John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and
Ireland. 2 vols. London and Edinburgh,
1771–73
Doebner, Memoirs Memoirs of Mary, Queen of England. Ed.
R. Doebner. Leipzig, 1886
DHC Dorset History Centre
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
EHR English Historical Review
xi
xii List of Abbreviations
Evelyn, Diary The Diary of John Evelyn. Ed. E.S. de Beer, 6

vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986
HJ Historical Journal
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
House of Commons The History of Parliament: The House of
Commons, 1660–1690. 3 vols. Ed. B. D.
Henning. London: The History of Parliament
Trust, 1983
JBS Journal of British Studies
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Locke Correspondence The Correspondence of John Locke. 8 vols. Ed.
E.S. de Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978–82
Luttrell Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of
State of Affairs from September 1678 to April
1714. 6 vols. Oxford, 1857
Morrice, EB The Entering Book of Roger Morrice. 6 vols.
Gen. Ed. Mark Goldie. Woodbridge: The
Boydell Press, 2007
NA National Archives, London
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004
P&P Past and Present
Rawl. Rawlinson Manuscripts, Bodleian Library,
Oxford
Strickland Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of
Scotland and England and English Princesses
Connected with the Regal Succession of Great
Britain, 12 vols. New York, 1851–59
SEL Studies in English Literature
State Trials A Complete Collection of State Trials. 22 vols.
Ed. T. B. Howell. London, 1816
TCHS Transactions of the Congregational Historical
Society
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Note on the Text
For the most part, I have modernized the spelling and grammar
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, including manuscript
sources. However, for Aphra Behn’s plays, novels, and poems cited in
Chapter 3, I have followed Janet Todd’s edition of The Works of Aphra
Behn. Similarly, in Chapter 5, I have followed the spelling in Patricia
Springborg’s edition of Mary Astell’s Political Writings.
I am certainly aware that the terms “Anglicanism” and “Anglican”
are basically anachronistic to the seventeenth century in the way that
we use them today, but I have chosen nonetheless to retain them for
reasons of clarity and simplicity.
xiii
“Brothers and Sisters: Greet Prisca and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus,
who risked their necks for my life . . . Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was
the first fruits in Asia for Christ. Greet Mary who has worked hard for you.
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and my fellow prisoners; they are
prominent among the Apostles and they were in Christ before me. Greet
Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord. Greet Urbanus, our co-worker in Christ,
and my beloved Stachys. Greet one another with a holy kiss.”
Saint Paul to the Romans, 16:3–9

Introduction
Nursing Mothers and Sanctified
Sisters: Women’s Political Behavior
after the Restoration
After many weeks of listening to the “strong opinions” of Tabitha Smith,

an Oxford glover named Richard Crutch decided to go to the authori-
ties. In February 1686, he traveled to London and out of his “duty to
his majesty” accused Smith of treasonable activity. She had come from
the West Country to live with Richard and his wife, Katherine, about a
month ago. Loquacious and opinionated, Smith had told them a fraught
tale of daring and escape. Her husband, James, had joined the rebel
leader, the Duke of Monmouth, at Lyme and had sent word to her in
Taunton that she and their servants should prepare to provide horses
and provisions for the rebellion. Tabitha Smith joined Monmouth’s
army and saw action at Phillips-Norton where she herself commanded a
company of horse. After the rebels’ defeat at Sedgemoor, Smith escaped
back to Taunton “wearing men’s clothes” to secure what goods she had
left. Colonel Kirke’s regiment came “speedily after.” Smith hid what
she could, borrowed money from a shopkeeper in Bristol and made
it to Oxford. Since Smith practiced the same trade as the Crutches,
they had taken her into their home. But her bold talk soon made
Richard apprehensive, and he regretted it. Smith swore that the Duke
of Monmouth was still alive and would come again with 40,000 men.
She boasted of having been entertained by a kinsman of the Earl of
Derby’s in Lancashire, where they were raising money in preparation for
Monmouth’s return.1 She refused to call James II, “king,” and declared
that the Queen was “as arrogant a whore as any in England” and kept
1
BL, Add. 41,804, ff. 257–257v. Tabitha Smith was probably referring to William
Stanley, ninth Earl of Derby (c. 1655–1702) who was lord lieutenant for Cheshire
and Lancashire.
1
2 Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714
“five or six gallants” to please herself. Smith hoped to one day “drink a
draft of the Queen’s blood.”2
Is Tabitha Smith’s story true? Possibly. The authorities in London cer-
tainly took Richard Clutch seriously. Smith was arrested and questioned.
Naturally, she denied Clutch’s allegations. She was promptly impris-
oned anyway. Interestingly, rather than support her husband, Katherine
Crutch softened the story, reporting that although Tabitha spoke “very
kindly of the Duke of Monmouth, wishing God to bless him where
ever he was,” she never said anything “treasonable.”3 Oxford authori-
ties were not convinced and were more inclined to believe her husband.
What happened to Smith, how long she was confined, or whether she
was ever reunited with her husband, James, remains a mystery. She
never resurfaces among the sources. Her story is but a sliver, a small
chard of evidence, among the numerous informants’ reports on, and
interrogations of, suspected Monmouth supporters following the failed
Rebellion.4 We may find parts of the story that Tabitha Smith told the
Clutches suspicious, particularly her boast of having led a troop of horse.
But parts of it also mirror the activities of many women throughout his-
tory in times of war and rebellion: supplying horses, arms, food, and
money or cross-dressing and even joining men in battle.5 Even if Smith
exaggerated, she certainly had “strong opinions,” as Richard Clutch
put it, it is reasonable to assume that she took some action to assist
Monmouth, especially since she was on the run.
However slender the evidence, the tale of Tabitha Smith is revealing,
and it supports the conclusion that women in former times, including
common women, were both politically alert and active. This is nothing
new. Historians of women’s history and gender history have reiterated
this time and again, yet somehow it fails to breach the bulwarks around
2
BL, Add. 41,804, ff. 258–9.
3
Ibid., ff. 260, 262, 263.
4
The story of Tabitha Smith was reported to Secretary of State, Charles Middleton
(BL, Add. 41, 804, ff. 257–63). There were at least two “James Smiths” in the Rebel-
lion. One, a cloth worker, was tried in Taunton and sent to Jamaica. The other,
a yeoman, was still at large. While neither of them fit Richard’s information, it
is possible that one of them was Tabitha’s husband. W. MacDonald Wigfield, The
Monmouth Rebels, 1685 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 157; CSPD, James
II, 1: 428, 430.
5
Chapter 2 describes women who helped supply Monmouth’s army. On the tradi-
tion of women cross-dressing and joining armies, see Rudolf M. Dekker and Lotte
C. van de Pol, eds., The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe
(New York: Palgrave, 1997).
Introduction: Nursing Mothers and Sanctified Sisters 3
political history. Tabitha Smith was also very likely a Protestant Dis-
senter. She certainly had all the hallmarks of one: a tradesperson from
Taunton who had supported Monmouth. Motivated, it would seem, by
“the Protestant Cause,” the desire on the part of Whig exclusionists and
Protestant Dissenters to deny the crown to the Catholic James, Duke of
York, by law or by force, Smith went into action. It is also likely that
the shopkeeper in Bristol and the Crutches of Oxford were Smith’s con-
fessional brethren, which explains their willingness to help her. They
belonged to the same Dissenting network, possibility Quakers, who felt a
particularly strong sense of group identity. Only Tabitha’s big talk began
to frighten her host.6
This book begins with this little story to make a point about a much
larger story and one that remains untold: the contributions of women,
at all social levels, to the political culture of Restoration and Revolution
England. Certainly, over the last fifty years, women’s and gender his-
tory has transformed our understanding of family, kinship, household
order, honor codes, constructions of femininity and masculinity, work
and the craft industry, scientific traditions, magic and witchcraft, gos-
sip, lay religiosity and more. But there is a gap. Explorations into the
social, economic, and cultural lives of women dominate. Political his-
tory lags behind. This is not to say that studies of women and politics
in the early modern era do not exist. The final chapter, “Politics,” in
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford’s Women in Early Modern England;
Bernard Capp’s chapter, “Women as Citizens: Public and Political Life”
in When Gossips Meet; and Hilda Smith’s discussion of “Commercialism,
Politics and Gender in the Eighteenth Century” in All Men and Both
Sexes – certainly advance our understanding of the political roles and
personas played by early modern English women.7 But they are also
tucked away, bound in books on women’s and gender history, not polit-
ical history, and thereby unlikely to be sought out by the student of
early modern politics. Literary critics, Susan Wiseman and Katharine
6
Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to
the Revolution of 1688/89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 335.
7
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–
1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women,
Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003); Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics and the False
Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2002). Also
see, James Daybell, ed., Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Gillespie, have written important books on women writers and poli-

tics in the seventeenth century.8 But both are far more concerned with
political ideology, theory, and representation than the actual political
activities of women. Thus it is that specialized studies, many of them
seminal, on women writers and political thought, queenship and aristo-
cratic women, exist but tend to garner audiences of feminist and literary
scholars or court historians.9
The problem is worse still for the second half of the seventeenth
century. In part, this is due to the traditionally lopsided nature of
English historiography which has found the early Stuart politics, the
run up to the Civil War, and the political radicalism of the Interregnum
more worthy of attention than the anti-climatic Restoration with
its bloodless revolution. True, in recent times, the Restoration has
attracted more scholarly attention.10 Still the religio-political responses
of women to sectarianism, party politics, rebellion, revolution, and the
post-revolution Church lag behind the great outpouring of studies on
women’s political behavior during the first half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. This is certainly the case insofar as England’s mid-century crisis
is concerned. Numerous studies on women as petitioners, prophets,
preachers, visionaries and Levellers have significantly influenced our
vision of plebian politics during the Interregnum.11 The accumulative
impact of this scholarship has been profound. It has slowly penetrated
8
Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) examines Dissenting women
writers during the mid-century crisis; Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue:
Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) discusses women writers from 1620 to 1688.
9
See, for example, Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman, eds., Feminist
Interpretations and Political Theory (Oxford: Polity Press, 1977); C. Levin, D. Barrett-
Graves, J. Elderidge Carney, eds., High and Mighty Queens in Early Modern England:
Realities and Representations (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Clarissa Campbell Orr,
ed., Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic
Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, reprint, 2010).
10
Gary De Krey speaks to this in “Between Revolutions: Re-Appraising the
Restoration in Britain,” History Compass 6/3 (2008): 738–73. http://history-
compass.com/. Accessed 9/6/12.
11
See, for example, Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” P&P 13
(1958): 42–62; Claire Cross, “ ‘He-Goats before the Flocks:’ A Note on the Part
Played by Women in the Founding of Some Civil War Churches,” Studies in
Church History 8 (1972): 195–202; Patricia Higgins, “The Reactions of Women,
with Special Reference to Women Petitioners,” in Politics, Religion, and the English
Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 179–222; Anne
the grand political narratives of the Civil Wars and Revolution and made
its way down the avenues of knowledge to those great distributors of
historical learning: college textbooks.12
The subject of women and politics in the eighteenth century, partic-
ularly in the second half, has also received some significant attention
by feminist historians. The work of Elaine Chalus, Hannah Barker,
and others has uncovered the highly politicized society that women
among the elite and upper middle class inhabited and participated.13
This scholarship has pointed to a far larger, diverse, and vibrant polit-
ical domain than was ever imagined in the work of those formidable
political historians like J.H. Plumb and Jonathan Clark.14 Feminist
scholars have explored the wide range of political activities in which
Laurence, “A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-

Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women in the Church, eds. W.J. Shields and
Diana Woods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women:
Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992); Sharon Achinstein, “Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of
the English Revolution,” Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 131–63; Ann Hughes, “Gen-
der and Politics in Leveller Literature,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics
in England, eds. Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995), pp. 162–88; Stevie Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the
English Revolution, 1640–1660 (London: The Women’s Press, 1998); Hilary Hinds,
God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Crit-
icism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Elaine Hobby, “ ‘Come
Live a Preaching Life:’ Female Community in the Seventeenth- Century Radical
Sects,” in Female Communities, 1600–1800, eds. Rebecca D’Monte and Nicole Pohl
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 76–91; Marcus Nevitt, Women and the
Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006);
Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2012) and
for popular consumption, Alison Plowden, Women All on Fire: The Women of the
English Civil War (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998).
12
For example, Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714, 3rd Ed.
(New York: Longman, 2003), p. 241.
13
In addition to those works cited below, see Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus,
eds. Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representation and Responsibili-
ties (London: Longman, 1997); Amanda Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege, and Power
in British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001);
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writings in England, 1780–
1830 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000); Elizabeth Egar, Charlotte
Grant, Cliona O’Gallchoir and Penny Warburton, eds., Women, Writing and the
Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001).
14
J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1714–1815) (London: Penguin,
1959); J.D.C. Clark, English Society, Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien
Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Of more recent vintage
eighteenth-century women engaged: from writing, publishing, and

debating; to membership in joint stock companies and reform societies;
to patronage and electoral politics. Much of this work has concentrated
on the politicking of elite women, particularly within the context of
powerful families. Nonetheless, this scholarship has reached conclu-
sions similar to those of this current work on women of a wider array
of social groups, namely that historians need to apply a broader and
more inclusive understanding of what constituted politics in the early
modern era and that theoretical assumptions about separate spheres
of gendered activity do not fit the realities of the social and political
worlds of early modern women. “The boundaries between public and
private worlds overlapped,” as Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson
so aptly put it.15 The scholarship of Elaine Chalus on the political lives
of women in the eighteenth century supports both of these points.
She has sought to incorporate politics into social history and has sit-
uated her work at the point where gender history, political history, and
social history intersect.16 The present work is similar insofar as it seeks
to combine political history, gender history, and the history of reli-
gion in the second half of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth
century.
Sandwiched between the well served mid-century crisis and the rein-
vigorated latter eighteenth century, the late Stuart era hosts no such
similarly groundbreaking concentration of studies on women and pol-
itics. While there is certainly fine work on women and the Popish Plot
and the Glorious Revolution, any accumulative impact and power to
is Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1992) which speaks to both eighteenth-century politics and national
identity and includes an important chapter on women and nationalism.
15
Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds., Women in British Politics,
1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), Intro-
duction, p. 9.
16
Elaine Chalus, Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2005), pp. 6, 12. Also see her: “Elite Women, Social Politics, and the
Political World of Late Eighteenth-Century England,” HJ 43/3 (2000): 669–707;
“My Minerva at my Elbow:” The Political Roles of Women in Eighteenth-Century
England” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, eds.
Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell
Press, 1998). Chalus has also spoken to the importance of understanding the
political roles of women in Augustan England; see “ ‘Ladies Are often Very Good
Scaffoldings:’ Women and Politics in the Age of Anne,” Parliamentary History 28/1
(2009): 150–65.
inform the political narratives of the late Stuart era is still wanting.17
Work on aristocratic women and queens, in particular, Queen Anne and
Sarah Churchill, has been more successful at capturing the attention of
political historians.18 Yet, in great part, the political narratives of the
Restoration and Revolution read as if women – other than a handful at
court, the queens and mistresses – did not exist, never mind play any
political roles.19
How then do scholars successfully integrate the contributions of
women to Restoration and Revolution politics in such a fashion as
to catch the attention and imagination of students of political cul-
ture? How do historians, in the words of Mendelson and Crawford,
“restore women to politics, and politics to women”? “What happens,”
writes Susan Wiseman, “when we begin to consider seventeenth-century
women’s relationship to the political sphere from which they were the-
oretically excluded?”20 Most political historians would concede that
politics cannot simply be reduced to the institutions of law and gov-
ernment or the public world of men. Or that as often as men advised
women that “silence becomes your sex,” especially in matters “so much
above your reach,” their admonitions were generally unheeded.21 Not
only is it clear that women had a public voice and participated in various
forms of political behavior, it is equally plain that most men expected
as much and even depended on women’s support and participation in
public arenas. Thus, James Smith sent word to Tabitha to make ready the
provisions for the Duke of Monmouth’s army. So the wives and daugh-
ters of booksellers helped print and distribute political newssheets and
pamphlets; often doing so, as in the case of Elizabeth Calvert in 1661,
17
Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument
in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Lois
G. Schwoerer, “Women and the Glorious Revolution,” Albion 18 (1986): 195–218.
18
Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984); Frances Harris,
A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991); Robert Bucholz, The Augustan Court of Queen Anne and the
Decline of Court Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
19
In older accounts of the period, such as J.R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in
England (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972) the absence of women other than queens
and mistresses is predictable enough. But newer surveys of the era are little better.
For example, in Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts (New York: Longman,
1993) “women” are mentioned twice.
20
Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 345; Wiseman, Conspiracy, p. 2.
21
Letter to a Gentlewomen Concerning Government (London, 1697), p. 27.
while their husbands languished in prison for seditious publishing.22

At the other end of the social scale, women of influence and reputa-
tion, like the zealous Whigs, Lady Rachel Russell and Elizabeth Burnet,
lent political advice and support to men.23 Regardless of what contem-
porary men said or wrote about how women should behave, the political
realities of the later Stuart era with its expanding political culture, saw
women petitioning, oath-taking, joining mass gatherings, printing and
distributing political ideas, news and slogans, dispensing patronage and
philanthropy, and influencing law-makers.24 Still more, women were
fined, imprisoned, and even executed for seditious behavior.
Not only is it important that scholars expand their vision of all that
accounts for political culture, it is equally vital for them to recognize
that religion, a domain in which female agency has always been more
readily acceptable, was also a highly politicized space in early modern
England. Religious authority and practice were contested sites through-
out the seventeenth century. During the Restoration, disputes over the
royal succession, popery, religious toleration, the influence of the clergy
over the laity; and the practice of occasional conformity by Protestant
nonconformists, were all issues of both a civil and religious magnitude.
Even after the Act of Toleration (1689) these issues continued to be hotly
debated in the press and in parliament. Religious controversy was rarely
about private devotion and almost always about public policy and prac-
tice. This is what Mark Knights aptly terms “politicized religion.”25 The
debates, crises, and controversies of the Restoration and Revolution were
neither simply political nor simply religious but intrinsically both.
Thus the actions of women who sheltered Dissenting preachers, held
conventicles in their homes and on their estates, cared for their brethren
in prison, hawked anti-Catholic broadsides, or shuttled outlaws and
rebels from London to Amsterdam, cannot be simply bracketed off as
22
NA SP29/44, 93.
23
On Lady Russell’s influence after the Revolution, see Lois G. Schwoerer,
Lady Rachel Russell: “One of the Best of Women” (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988), p. 190; Elizabeth Burnet’s activities are explored in
Chapter 5.
24
On late Stuart political culture, see Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepre-
sentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); on women
and political culture, see Lois G. Schwoerer, “Women’s Public Political Voice
in England, 1640–1740,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Politi-
cal Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 56–74; and Capp, When Gossips, pp. 288–319.
25
Knights, Representation, p. 18.
“religious behavior.” Similarly, women who supported the civil and

ecclesiastical structures entered the political arena, lampooning the
opposition, participating in backdoor parliamentary politics, defending
the established Church. Female activism may well have been moti-
vated by spiritual concerns, but it translated into public action. Women
(and men) understood this reality. They knew the consequences of their
actions. The Baptist and Whig courier, Elizabeth Gaunt, had successfully
avoided authorities on numerous occasions, but in October of 1685 her
luck ran out. Sentenced to death for harboring a rebel, Gaunt wrote a vir-
ulent dying speech which admitted her crime, but asserted that it was
“but a little one and might become a prince to forgive . . . I did but taste
a little honey, and lo I must dye for it.” She was burnt at the stake.26
In 1681, the Quaker poet, Mary Mollineux stood before the Bishop of
Chester and boldly explained why, “for conscience sake,” she and her
husband, Henry, refused to pay the tithe. Their defiance had landed
them in prison on numerous occasions, and Mary knew first-hand the
debilitating effects of prison sitting. Nonetheless, she decried a Church
that “God ne’ver set up, and makes its merchants rich.” She would far
rather sacrifice herself for “the precious truth (plac’d in her heart).”27
The goal, then, of this study is to illustrate the religio-political actions
and utterances of women of various social groups and confessions,
between the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the death of
Queen Anne in 1714. Time and again, religious devotion thrust women
into political action, regardless of whether these women were daugh-
ters of the Church of England or sister sectarians. This study does not
pretend to give the sweeping coverage of a synthetic narrative. Rather
the case studies offered here of a diverse range of women should help
to convince political historians of the vital roles women played at vari-
ous points of crisis and contention throughout the late Stuart era; and
that the words and actions of women enrich our narratives, broaden
our scope and add complexity and nuance to our understanding of the
period. How might “the experience of defeat,” following the collapse of
26
Elizabeth Gaunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaunt’s Last Speech who Was Burnt at London
October 23, 1685, as Was Written by her own Hand (London, 1685), broadside.
After admitting her crime, she cleverly quotes 1 Samuel 14:43 wherein Jonathan
explains to King Saul that he ate a bit of honey not knowing that it was forbidden.
Her story is fully explored in Chapter 1.
27
Mary Mollineux, The Fruits of Retirement: or, Miscellaneous Poems, Moral and
Divine (London, 1702), see Henry Mollineux, “A few Words more, in Remem-
brance of my dear Wife, M.M,” pages unnumbered.
the Republic and restoration of the monarchy, be reconceived if viewed

from the perspective of the wives and female supporters of the regicides
and republicans on the run in the 1660s? How might such traditional
paradigms of Restoration historiography, such as the Exclusion Crisis,
the Revolution of 1688/89, and the crisis of “the Church in Danger”
during the late 1690s and early 1700s, be newly illuminated if our focus
shifts from the thoroughly picked over deeds and writings of some men
to those of women? This monograph not only demonstrates just how
immersed many women were in the political controversies of the first
age of party, it also illuminates just how dangerous some women were
perceived to be by the government as well as by other women. It also
sheds light on what might seem a rather mundane but oft-forgotten
fact – that the activities of men were often heavily dependent upon the
assistance of women. Women were hardly holed up in little domestic
spheres of influence. Like Tabitha Smith, they were expected to assist
the political machinations of men, and this was especially true when
the activities of their men folk and brethren went sour.
This study also strives to bring balance to the way political and fem-
inist historians understand the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. Too often specialized studies focus simply on one political
party or the other, Whigs or Tories, or one side of the religious divide
or the other, Protestant Dissenters or Anglicans. This tendency leaves
readers with an understanding and hence sympathy for merely one side
of these political and religious loyalties.28 Thus we find that scholar-
ship on the politics of Aphra Behn’s writing is often superb at describing
her Toryism, but does little to enhance our knowledge of exactly what
Behn found so disturbing about political Whiggism and particularly
Protestant Dissent, especially among women. Studies of Mary Astell’s
political ideas and religiosity often suffer from similar one-sidedness,
resulting in the unintended effect of narrowing our vision and biasing
our understanding.29 By studying both Dissenting women committed to
28
One of the few exceptions is Susan Wiseman’s Conspiracy and Virtue which
examines both royalist and sectarian cultures.
29
On Behn, see, for example, Arlen Feldwick, “Wits, Whigs, and Women: Domes-
tic Politics as Anti-Whig Rhetoric in Aphra Behn’s Town Comedies,” in Political
Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women, eds. Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1955) and Anita Pacheco, “Reading
Toryism in Aphra Behn’s Cit-Cuckolding Comedies,” The Review of English Stud-
ies, 55/22 (2004): 690–708. On Astell, see for example, Van C. Hartman, “Tory
Feminism in Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair,” 28 (Fall 1998) The Journal of Narrative
Technique 28 (1998): 243–65.
oppositional/Whig politics and Anglican women devoted to the Church

of England and the Stuart monarchy, we gain a more balanced and
inclusive understanding of the tempestuous issues that divided these
women as well as any common ground between them. After all, both the
devoted daughters of the Church of England and the holy sisters of the
conventicles were passionate about the preservation of Protestantism in
England, Scotland, and Ireland as well as throughout Europe and the
New World.
Catholics and, after 1688, Jacobites, offer an important third dimen-
sion to the political and religious controversies of the era and are
addressed in this study when appropriate, but the focus of this mono-
graph is on the much larger groups of conforming, partially conforming,
and nonconforming Protestants. Furthermore, since they have been
adequately treated in the historiography, this study is not concerned
with Dissenting women writers, but rather with those women for
whom there are far fewer sources, Dissenting women activists.30 Unlike
nonconformists, women loyal to the Church of England are particu-
larly ill served in the historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In part, this is a result of the fact that Church history has
been traditionally written by churchmen who have had little or noth-
ing to say about women and, in part, because feminist historians have
been more attracted to Dissenting and free-thinking women than to
Anglican women.31 Conforming women not only illuminate the ways
these women imagined their sectarian sisters, but also the widening
variety of Anglican belief and practice in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century.
Chapter 1 focuses on the ways in which Protestant nonconformity
compelled women in London to political action, particularly during
the turbulent 1660s and 1680s. These women, the “nursing mothers”
of the “Protestant Cause,” often from the lower and middling rungs
30
In addition to those works cited in note 10, see Diane Willen, “Religion and the
Construction of the Feminine,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writ-
ing, ed., Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 22–39; Judith
Scheffler, “Prison Writings of Early Quaker Women,” Quaker History 73 (1984):
25–37; Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Liter-
ary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Curtis W.
Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses (Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2011).
31
There are, of course, exceptions, Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in
England, 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993) addresses Anglican women; also
see W.J. Sheils and D. Wood, eds., Women in the Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
of society, participated in radical and often risky political behavior.

While the men engaged in oppositional politics are often described
by historians as participating in “out-of-doors” politics, the Dissent-
ing women in this chapter played a very stealthy game of what we
might term, “back door” politics, aiding and abetting their men-folk,
while seeking to escape notice.32 This was not synonymous with what
historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have sometimes
called “boudoir” or “behind the scenes” politics, which is often associ-
ated with aristocratic women and political meddling, corruption, and
unaccountability.33 Rather, due to the high degree of danger involved,
these Dissenting women sought to promote radical politics while avoid-
ing official surveillance and punishment. This is why the sources for
their activities are often fragmentary. Nonetheless, it is clear that women
acted as agents of news and information, sheltered and patronized reli-
gious and political radicals as well as helped to supply the needs of
preachers, rebels, and conspirators on the run and sometimes followed
them to the gaol and scaffold.
Moving out from the metropolis to the West Country, Chapter 2 is
also concerned with those who were alienated by the Restoration set-
tlement and increasingly hostile to the Stuart court. Among the many
Puritan gentry families of Somerset, the Spekes of Whitelackington in
Illminster were the most notorious for their daring and often reck-
less opposition politics. This chapter focuses around the matriarch of
the Speke family and her influence over her husband, children, and
neighbors. The formidable Mary Speke was a “nursing mother” in both
the figurative and literal sense, as a fomenter of Whig radicalism and
nonconformity and as a mother of a brood of seditious sons and daugh-
ters. Like the “nursing mothers” in Chapter 1, Mary Speke also presents
the historian with something of a source problem; she did not author
tracts, her correspondence is missing. But enough evidence exists to
suggest a fairly fascinating, if tragic story and one that confirms the argu-
ment that nonconformists women like Mary Speke, inspired by their
religiosity, actively promoted seditious politics and nurtured it in their
children.
Thus it is not surprising that Puritan women like Mary Speke were
often the target of Aphra Behn’s devastating satire. Behn’s hostility
32
Tim Harris is fond of talking about “out-of-doors” politics, see, for example,
his Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 6,
13–14.
33
Chalus, Women in English Political Life, pp. 1–3.
toward the culture of Protestant nonconformity is the subject of

Chapter 3. While Behn was profoundly antagonistic to the Whig and
Dissenting brethren, her harshest images were often reserved for the
“sanctified sisters” of the conventicles. Behn’s poetry and political come-
dies provide scholars with a wholly alternative vantage point from
which to view Dissenting culture: to see it as it was seen by its oppo-
nents. Chapter 3 links Behn’s travels abroad, to Europe and the New
World, where she made contact with remnants of the Good Old Cause,
godly soldiers and politicians, with her abiding distaste for the Protes-
tant Cause as it was later portrayed in her imaginative writings. Behn’s
adventures in Antwerp also showed her another world (one of opulence,
triumph, and beauty) that of the Catholic baroque. Nothing, perhaps,
could have been more directly opposite to the grimy world of fanatics
and republicans on the run. These two disparate images later informed
Behn’s political loyalties and writings.
In the spring of 1689, as her health and prospects faded, Behn
addressed the new Queen, Mary II, reminding her how much she resem-
bled her father, James II, in her “gracious sweetness, affability . . . and true
piety.”34 Queen Mary was indeed a pious woman, as historians of the
Williamite court often repeat. But beyond this, and Mary’s penchant for
the domestic arts, the Queen is often dismissed as a political nonentity
in the narratives of the late Stuart era. Yet Mary II had a profound influ-
ence over the Established Church, informed by her experiences with
international Protestantism. Chapter 4 explores the shaping of Mary’s
religiosity during her time in the Netherlands as Princess of Orange,
arguing that Mary sought to experience a wide range of Protestantism(s)
while in Europe, bringing her into contact with many of the lead-
ers of the Dutch Enlightenment. Mary’s appreciation for Protestantism
abroad, both its sufferings and vagaries, imbued her churchmanship as
Queen. As both a regnant and as a consort queen, Mary II reached out
to Dissenters in England and was a generous patron of Protestants in
Ireland, Europe, and America. She also sought to reshape the Church of
England, and with Archbishop John Tillotson, set the Church on a new
course, one that emphasized a practical, rational Christianity, concerned
more with daily morality and less with theological hair-splitting.
Queen Mary’s broad, irenic vision of the Church was certainly appeal-
ing to those with Low Churchmen sympathies, including the devotional
34
“A Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, upon Her Arrival
in England” (1689), in Behn, Works, 1:306.
writer, Elizabeth Burnet.35 Elizabeth was the third wife of the historian
and Williamite bishop, Gilbert Burnet. Like Mary Speke, she is one of the
lesser known women in this study. Yet in her own time, she was quite the
political operator and well immersed in the political and cultural land-
scape of London in the early eighteenth century. Chapter 5 explores
Elizabeth Burnet’s Low Church Anglicanism, her correspondence with
John Locke over issues of Anglican orthodoxy, and her Whig politicking
in association with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Both well-
educated and well-traveled, Elizabeth Burnet was a diehard Whig and a
latitudinarian Christian; she exemplifies the life of a devout Anglican
women living in an enlightened, Lockean world. Burnet was a contem-
porary to Mary Astell, a far more familiar figure among scholars. Astell
was also a sophisticated Christian philosopher and Tory propagandist.
She despised the moderate churchmanship of so many of the clergy
raised to the episcopate by Mary II and William III in the 1690s, believ-
ing that they imperiled the Established Church by their attempts to
comprehend and appease nonconforming Protestants, whom she con-
sidered responsible for the rebellion and regicide of the 1640s.36 Like
Elizabeth Burnet, Astell was a participant in the political tussles in the
years known as the “Age of the Church in Danger,” publishing ardent
Tory political tracts as well as a work of feminist High Church theology,
The Christian Religion as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England
(1705). Thus, despite the fact that both Burnet and Astell were staunch
supporters of the Church of England, the very kind of Anglican devo-
tion that each advocated represented the opposite ends of the Anglican
spectrum in the early eighteenth century. Thus readers of this book will
find that its focus moves from women on the margins to women in the
center; from the sanctified sisters of the conventicles and the nursing
mothers of sedition, to the ultimate nursing mother of the Protestant
world after the Revolution, Mary II; and finally to the daughters of the
contested Church at the outset of the High Enlightenment.
35
Irenicism in Christian theology is rooted in Renaissance humanist ideals and
aimed at unifying Christian systems though reason.
36
Patricia Springborg has done a great service to Astell scholarship with her edi-
tion of three of Astell’s Tory tracts; see Mary Astell, Political Writings, ed. Patricia
Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); also see Springborg,
Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005) and the edited collection, Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds.
William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Figure 1.1 Elizabeth Gaunt – permission to publish from the National Portrait
Gallery, London
1
Nursing Mothers: Dissenting
Women and Opposition Politics
It was the hopes of a Reformation that we fought and suffered . . .

Richard Baxter1
Between 1663 and 1665, informants to Secretary of State, Sir Joseph

Williamson, reported on one Mrs. Holmes, living at St. Lawrence Lane,
London. Jane Holmes was reputed to be a “great patroness of the worst
sort of people.” She consorted with regicides and Rump MPs. She fre-
quented prisons and encouraged those that were in “greatest opposition
to the government.” A widow of “great estate,” she spent her money
liberally among “those that lie in wait to disturb the peace of the king-
dom . . . and gains with her money from the Church daily and under the
pretense of charity corrupts many and wanting people.”2 She was hardly
alone. Spy reports in the 1660s are filled with stories about women of
various social groups who were thought to be aiding and abetting polit-
ical opposition to the government. How so? What exactly were these
women doing and what made them so dangerous that the government
paid informants to spy on their travels, haunts, friends, and neighbors?
Not surprisingly, they were doing what women in persecutory societies
have often done throughout Western history. They were nurturing the
faith and fortifying the faithful by acting as missionaries and orga-
nizers, working for the reprieve and release of political and religious
prisoners, publishing and distributing sectarian literature, patronizing
preachers, supporting nonconformist families in trouble, and more.
1
Richard Baxter, Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor (London, 1656), p. 380.
2
G. Lyon Turner, ed., “Williamson’s Spy Book,” TCHS 5 (1911–12): 250.
Mrs. Holmes (also spelled “Homes”) was a friend of the Rumper republican and
regicide, Cornelius Holland, and one of her servants was reportedly a former MP
in the Rump Parliament.
16
Nursing Mothers: Dissenting Women and Opposition Politics 17
Their activities were almost always tied to the care of their confes-
sional brethren and the furtherance of nonconforming churches and
sects. In the 1660s especially, this brought them into the Cromwellian
orbit of former politicians, officers, and soldiers. Many of these women
were themselves married to or were the widows of Republicans and
regicides. Their acts of charity and daring, and their sheer tenacity in the
face of persecution were politically charged. Like Shaftesbury’s famous
image of popery and slavery as two sisters going hand in hand, so
Protestant Dissent and opposition politics became joined, even if most
nonconformists desired nothing more than to live in peace and wor-
ship freely.3 The linkage between religious and political opposition that
came out of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate endured during the
Restoration as did concerns over disorderly women venturing beyond
the domain of hearth and distaff. Little wonder that Mrs. Holmes was
thought to be encouraging the underground of political desperadoes
and radicals in London; that was a world that shared her zeal for god-
liness and the gospel ministry. The experience of defeat, following the
demise of the Commonwealth and the return of the monarchy, had left
many men – politicians, soldiers, and preachers – forlorn and desper-
ate, lost in a political wilderness. Where was Christ’s kingdom now? For
women the experience was similar; only they outnumbered men among
the nonconformist varieties of Protestantism under attack during the
Restoration, and they were fundamental to the preservation of these
sects. True enough, women were not likely to carry guns or boldly plot
risings in taverns over pots and pipes, but they were conduits of com-
munication, money, and inflammatory literature. They were also there
to pick up the pieces in the end, tending to their brethren in the gaol
and at the gallows.
Nonconformity and Persecution
The people of God are sad, not knowing what to do or where to go

William Hooke4
3
“Popery and slavery like two sisters go hand in hand and sometimes one goes
first, sometimes the other . . .” B. Martyn, A. Kippis, and G. Wingrove Cooke, The
Life of the First Earl of Shaftesbury from Original Documents in the Possession of the
Family, 2 vols. (London, 1836), 2: 202.
4
“Letters and Papers Relating to the Regicides,” Collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, vol. 38: The Mather Papers, 4th ser., vol. 8 (Boston,
1868), 8:125.
For three days in January 1661, a small armed group of between

thirty-five and fifty men terrorized London. Led by a wine-cooper,
Thomas Venner, these Fifth Monarchists sought to overthrow the
recently restored monarchy and initiate the reign of “King Jesus” on
earth.5 Their sudden, if abortive, riot brought a swift end to any illu-
sion about the nation’s universal joy at the return of the Stuarts. At first
glance, the Venner rising would seem insignificant enough; it was char-
acteristic of so much of the zealous plotting of the early Restoration that
did not have the slightest chance of success. But the specter of a resur-
gent republicanism coupled with fanatical sectarianism that Venner’s
men represented, panicked the restored regime and trigged a cycle
of royalist repression and opposition plotting. Within days, a royal
proclamation banned all gatherings of Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and
Baptists, and shortly thereafter, over 4,000 Quakers were rounded up
and imprisoned.6 What followed was the establishment of a secret ser-
vice through the Secretary of State’s office that constructed an elaborate
network of informants to spy on former Cromwellians and Protestant
Dissenters. These spies went into the streets, the prisons, the churches,
the taverns, and the bookshops. The government’s informants were
paid to seek out evidence of conspiracy and that is what they did,
whether baseless or not. They read the mail, followed suspicious per-
sons, and flooded the Secretary of State’s office with reports of secret
meetings, conspiracies, night ridings, rumors of risings and plots, and
hundreds of intercepted letters, warnings, and informations – all of
which contributed to a climate of fear and suspicion and conspiracy.7
The plots and risings of Restoration England, Ireland, and Scotland,
some real, some fabricated, most fantastical and utterly incapable
of success, had an extraordinarily negative impact on Protestant
nonconformists.8 For whatever accommodations that Charles II might
5
Champlin Burrage, “The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections,” EHR 25 (1910): 722–47;
Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–
1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 49–57.
6
By the King, A Proclamation Prohibiting all Seditious Meetings and Conventicles under
the Pretence of Religious Worship (10 January 1661); Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 223.
7
W.C. Abbott, “English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660–1674,” AHR 14 (1909):
503–28; J. Walker, “The Secret Service under Charles II and James II,” TRHS 4th
ser., 15 (1932): 211–35; Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of
Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 28–37.
8
For a narrative account of the plots and risings between 1660 and 1688 see
Richard Greaves’ trilogy, Deliver Us from Evil; Enemies under his Feet: Radicals and
have wished to allow the “tender consciences” of his sectarian sub-

jects, the practice of religious liberty was muted by the forces of royalist
and Anglican reaction.9 The government’s insecurity led to a host
of persecutory legislation, targeting all believers outside the Church
Established and making curious bedfellows of once mutually hostile
groups. Presbyterians and Muggletonians, Independents and Quakers,
Fifth Monarchy Men and Baptists were “counted all alike and declared
enemies to the state,” so the Independent minister, William Hooke,
put it. “The people of God and the late ministry of the Gospel are (gen-
erally) in a low estate and, under their severe exercises, suffering under
the name of fanatics from the Presbyterian downward.”10 The result of
this coercive legislation was that by 1662 these groups forged a common
identity. Writes Neil Keeble, “they faced a common foe and endured a
common plight . . . It was the shared experience of persecution which
created Dissent out of the various nonconformities of 1660.”11 “The
Independents and Presbyterians, who could scarcely give each other a
good word,” as one London informant reports, “on the publishing of
the Act of Uniformity, held a great meeting at Great St. Bartholomew’s,
Thames Street, received the sacrament together, and have appointed a
fast.”12 Their newfound unity would only increase as the government
continued to treat all Dissenters alike and as the culture of the Court
appeared increasingly alien to a godly worldview.
Charles II’s administration had numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean
statutes at their disposal with which to harass nonconformists, includ-
ing laws against conventicles and vagrancy, the latter of which could
be deployed against iterant preachers.13 But the royalist and episcopal
party within the Cavalier Parliament sought a deeper level of security
Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990);

Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Glorious Revolution
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
9
Charles II’s Declaration of Breda (4 April 1660) declares “a liberty for tender
consciences.” Reprinted in The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary,
ed. J.P. Kenyon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 358.
10
“Letters and Papers Relating to the Regicides,” Collections, 8: 172, 177.
11
N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century
England (Athens, GA: University of George Press, 1987), p. 44. Also see, Gary S. De
Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), pp. 87–90.
12
CSPD, Charles II, 2:396.
13
Neil Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), pp. 140–1.
for the government and a more painful price for Dissent. The Act of
Uniformity of April 1662, which was designed to keep all positions in
the church, schools, and universities firmly in the hands of Anglicans,
ultimately created a narrow, exclusive Established Church.14 This act fell
most heavily on Presbyterian ministers still hoping for accommodation
within the Church. They were required to undergo a re-ordination by
an Anglican bishop, invalidating their first ordination by a presbyter,
and to consent to everything in the revised Book of Common Prayer
of 1662, which many of those living outside of London had never
had a chance to review. Those who did not take the necessary oaths
by St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August 1662) were deprived of their liv-
ings. Roughly 1,909 men, predominantly Presbyterians, were ejected.15
Still more penal laws followed. The Conventicle Act (1664) banned any
meeting of five persons or more where the Prayer Book was not used.
The Five Mile Act (1665) forbade all preachers outside the Established
Church from coming within five miles of any town or place where they
had once ministered.16 Known together as the Clarendon Code, the
penal laws were utterly unable to compel conformity to the Church of
England or eradicate nonconformity. In fact, they endowed these groups
with a history of persecution that emboldened many and strengthened
their unity and determination. It also forced the most audacious among
them to join that soup that made up oppositional politics.
The opposition to the restored regime in the 1660s was indeed a
strange cocktail of Protestant Dissenters (including the militant Fifth
Monarchy Men and millenarians of various shades), republicans and
former Levellers, and Cromwellian officers and soldiers. According to
Alan Marshall, who has done invaluable work on the secret service, this
amalgamation of various hostile groups posed the gravest threat to the
government between 1660 and 1665. The problem all nonconformist
14
“Charles II, 1662: An Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Admin-
istration of the Sacraments” in John Raithby, ed., Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols.
(London, 1819), 5: 364–70.
15
A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. xi–xiii.
Also see David Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restora-
tion Nonconformity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
16
John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1649–1689 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), pp. 49–52; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political
and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), pp. 157–80; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruc-
tion of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
pp. 162–95.
Protestants faced was the government’s inability to distinguish between

those who were loyal (only desirous for freedom of worship) and those
zealots who were willing to bear arms for their beliefs. Even before the
most severe penal legislation went into effect, the government received
report after report of “preachers [who] go about from county to county
and blow the flames of rebellion.” “The wild [or Weald] of Kent is a
receptacle for distressed running parsons,” reads a typical report to Sec-
retary Nicholas in October 1661, “who vent abundance of sedition on
their new-created lecture days.”17 The hunger for liberty of conscience
and the vicissitudes of suffering often compelled Dissenters into the
murky underground of disgruntled soldiers and fanatical plotters. A sec-
ond period in which Charles II’s administration felt acutely imperiled
by plots, both real and fantastic, occurred between 1679 and 1685. This
time the opposition was more organized by Whig politicians and their
operatives in the streets and conventicles. Once again the opponents
of the government were composed of various groups, including old
Cromwellians and commonwealthmen, with a wide array of agendas.
But the majority of those active in the Whig cause, or more accurately,
“the Protestant Cause,” as they themselves called it, were simply Dis-
senting Protestants. They joined the opposition in parliament and in
Whig clubs, processions, petition-drives, and plots in the early 1680s in
an effort to stem the tide of encroaching popery and, above all, in search
of a liberty of conscience.18
While Restoration Britain was undoubtedly a persecutory society,
the impact of the penal laws differed from region to region and their
enforcement, according to John Spurr, “waxed and waned according
to the political fears of the day.”19 Official harassment usually targeted
Baptists and Quakers more than Presbyterians and Independents; but
in times of real insecurity within the government, such as in the early
1660s and again in the early 1680s, even moderate Presbyterians could
be subject to the ferocity of zealous authorities.20 The enforcement of
17
CSPD, Charles II, 2: 161, 107. “The Weald of Kent” was once a vast forest in
South East England and is still a place of great natural beauty.
18
Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage, pp. 7–17; also see, Tim Harris, London
Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until
the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
19
John Spurr, “From Puritanism to Dissent, 1660–1700,” in The Culture of English
Puritanism, 1560–1700, eds. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 248.
20
Baptists and Quakers were more readily associated with radicals and republi-
cans. Spurr, The Restoration Church, p. 31.
this legislation at the local level was usually in the hands of the coun-
try gentry, which meant that it was dependent upon their pleasure.
Local sheriffs and JPs might be zealous enforcers of the penal code or
they might be sympathetic to their Dissenting neighbors and partial
conformists themselves.21 Or they might simply be indifferent and lack-
adaisical in their duties. Quite naturally, Dissenters learned how to evade
the authorities. They met in hidden rooms, caves or forests; they dis-
guised their meetings as banquets and their preachers as peddlers. They
wrote their letters in ciphers. They used look-outs and escape routes.22
All this they did and more, given the very simple reality that the cost of
being caught could be ruinous or even deadly.
Sectarians ran the risk of suffering both financially and physically for
their faith. They might be fined, roughed up, whipped, transported, or
imprisoned. Their meeting houses might be ransacked or burnt to the
ground. Their personal wealth might be confiscated down to their cattle,
tools, books and blankets. Worse still, they might languish in prison for
years on end. The most famous example is John Bunyan, imprisoned
in Bedford for twelve years for his continual refusal to stop preaching.
But others suffered worse. The Quaker, William Dewsbury, was impris-
oned in the Warwick gaol for nineteen years.23 While Bunyan enjoyed
a fairly liberal imprisonment many, especially Friends, died in prison
or had their health impaired. Prison sitting was often a horrid experi-
ence; cells were filthy, crowded, dark, wet, and dens of disease, including
the plague, small pox, and typhus (known as “gaol fever”). The radical
bookseller, Elizabeth Calvert, lost her son to gaol fever.24 William Hooke
described the situation shortly after the passage of the Act of Unifor-
mity: “Multitudes have been surprised and forthwith carried to prisons,
the gaols filled, as the Gatehouse, Newgate, Tower, White-Lion, and
some in the Fleet and in the King’s Bench. Many have died in impris-
onment and have been stifled through thronging together and want of
air.”25 Long periods of incarceration could also leave families destitute,
21
Anthony Fletcher, “The Enforcement of the Conventicle Act, 1664–1679,”
Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 235–45.
22
Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660–1688
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 41–3; Watts, The Dissenters,
pp. 230–1.
23
Cragg, Puritanism, p. 90.
24
NA, SP 29/95/98; SP 29/96/64.
25
Hooke’s letter is printed in A.G. Matthews, “A Censored Letter: William Hooke
in England to John Davenport in New England, 1663,” TCHS 9 (1924–26): 266.
depriving them of their means of support. In all this, the anger and
frustration, the suffering and subterfuge, Dissenting women were full
participants.
Women were the mainstay of Dissent in Restoration England, out-
numbering men among the more conservative Presbyterians as well as
within the gathered churches and the Quakers. Clive Field estimates that
62 percent of all Baptists between 1651 and 1700 were women, and that
women were 61 percent of all Independents. Women made up 68 per-
cent of both churches in London.26 The composition of the Reverend
John Owen’s Independent congregation at Bury Street in London was
typical: throughout the 1660s and 1670s, there were usually twice as
many women as men.27 Officials reported that women were prominent
in all the sects, whether Quakers or Presbyterians. Women outnum-
bered men at conventicles by as much as two or three to one male
listener. Many women of various social groups held conventicles in
their homes. Time and again, the sources speak of conventicles dom-
inated by “women and children” – widows and mothers, surrounded
by their offspring. Typical was a report of June 1661, where an infor-
mant came across a meeting in London of thirty women and ten men.28
Roger Morrice, the Puritan diarist, reports a service being disturbed at
Queen Street with forty women and ten men in 1684.29 During the Civil
Wars and Interregnum, women had played highly visible roles within
the sects, evangelizing their faith, preaching and prophesying.30 But the
prominence of popular female preachers had declined after the Restora-
tion as Dissenting ministries became more wary of ecstatic women and
less conducive to having them preach and teach. By 1662, the penal
26
Clive D. Field, “ ‘Adam and Eve:’ Gender in the English Free Church Con-
stituency,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44/1 (1993): 63–79; Patricia Crawford,
Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 189.
27
T.G. Crippen, “Dr.Watts’s Church-Book,” TCHS 1 (April 1901): 26–38.
28
G. Lyon Turner, Original Records of Early Nonconformity under Persecution and
Indulgence, 2 vols. (London, 1911), 2: 5–11, 77–83, 90; Dorothy Ludlow, “Shaking
Patriarchy’s Foundations: Sectarian Women in England, 1641–1700,” in Tri-
umphant Over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. Richard L. Greaves (London:
Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 108–9.
29
CSPD, Charles II, 2: 70: Morrice, EB, 2: 482.
30
Phyllis Mack, “Women as Prophets during the Civil Wars,” Feminist Studies 8/1
(Spring 1982): 19–45; Diane Purkiss, “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body:
Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century,” in Women, Writing, History 1640–
1740, eds. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1992).
laws had forced all male and female evangelists to adopt “low visibil-
ity strategies.”31 Pressures from within these churches and outside from
local authorities were still not enough to prevent some women, espe-
cially Quakers, from preaching and missionary work. Nor did they stop
women from partaking in other defiant activities from refusing to pay
the tithe to hiding itinerant preachers and political outlaws. Women
broke the law and were imprisoned, and they assisted their imprisoned
brethren and political prisoners. Women partook in the print culture
that disseminated sectarian and oppositional books, broadsides, and
tracts. And, Dissenting women were involved in covert and dangerous
political activities during the Restoration. If these sectarian women of
the Restoration differ in one dramatic way from their sisters of the mid-
century crisis, it is that in the topsy turvy world of the wars and the
Republic, women often cultivated publicity through open air preach-
ing or spectacular stunts.32 After 1660, their work became far more
treacherous, requiring them to operate as much as possible beneath the
official radar. Thus, as we shall see, women provided the kind of “back
door” political support that often helped to make the much vaunted
“out-of-doors” politics possible.
Women and the Opposition in the 1660s
And there followed him a great company of people, and of women,

which also bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning unto them
said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for your-
selves, and for your children.
Luke 23: 27–8
That the years of the early Restoration were a time of despair for the
godly is hardly surprising. What historians perhaps underestimate is the
sense of confusion that accompanied the experience of defeat. What
would the restored regime bring to God’s people? Would the bishops
31
Ludlow, “Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations,” p. 94.
32
Such as the Quaker practice, among both women and men, of “going naked as
a sign,” or as in the case of the attention Quaker women paid to James Nayler,
spreading their garments before him and singing “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of
Israel,” as he rode into London in 1656 in imitation of Christ entering Jerusalem.
Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and ‘Going Naked as a Sign,’ ” Quaker History
62/2 (1978): 69–87; Watts, The Dissenters, p. 210; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women:
Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), p. 266.
return, and with them, slowly but surely, popery? And who would suf-
fer for their participation in the Good Old Cause? Women, like men,
watched for signs of times to come, not simply from Whitehall and
Westminster, but from the heavens as well. Little wonder that in 1662,
the bookseller, Elizabeth Calvert, knew she would find a ready and
eager audience for the highly inflammatory tract, Mirabilis Annus, a
“collection of many strange signs of apparitions.”33 The government
immediately understood its significance and arrested Calvert for “instill-
ing into the hearts of subjects a superstitious belief . . . and dislike and
hatred of His Majesty’s person and government and preparing them to
effect a damnable design for his destruction and a change of govern-
ment.”34 When the preacher, William Hooke, described a frightening
scene in London to the regicide and millenarian, William Goffe, hid-
ing in New England, he knew that Goffe would appreciate its meaning.
Out of a black cloud “appeared two perfect arms and hands, in the right
hand was grasped a great broad sword and in the left a cup . . . full of
blood.” These “prodigious apparitions” astonished those present. Next
a loud voice was heard to say, “Woe, woe to the land and to the inhabi-
tants thereof, for he cometh that is to come and you shall all see him.”35
The millenarian message of such signs (armies seen fighting in the heav-
ens, talking infants, heads appearing out of the sky, blood-red suns
or twin suns) were interpreted by the godly as proof of God’s wrath
and willingness to intervene in human affairs. The appearance of the
plague in London in 1665 was further evidence of God’s displeasure and
confirmed that the City “hath rebell’d and sinned grievously,” having
“spilled the blood o’ the just.”36
For many Dissenters the “blood of the just” was spilled in the first
years of the Restoration. In August of 1660, a mere three months after
the return of the King, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion passed the
Convention Parliament and pardoned most of the crimes committed
against the monarchy during the Civil Wars. But it exempted thirty-
three men, most of whom were the “regicides” or judges at the trial
33
Mirabilis Annus: Or, the Year of Prodigies and Wonders was originally published in
1661; a second installment was issued in 1662.
34
CSPD, Charles II, 2: 106. Mirabilis Annus was spread throughout the British Isles;
its frightening images supposedly scared the people of Ulster “out of their wits,”
and it was quickly deemed treasonous. Greaves, Deliver Us, p. 139.
35
“Letters and Papers Relating to the Regicides,” Collections, p. 176.
36
The Plague Checkt; or Piety will either prevent or Alter the Property of the Plague
(London, 1665), within which see “London’s Lamentation,” pages unnumbered.
of Charles I and signers of his death warrant in 1649.37 Thirteen of

those men were executed between 1660 and 1662; another nineteen
were imprisoned for life. Many others went into hiding and escaped to
the continent or America. Certainly, many nonconformists, especially
Presbyterians whose representatives were excluded from the proceedings
of the Long Parliament after Pride’s Purge in 1648, saw the actions of
the regicides as abhorrent. But for many others, including Independents
with their strong ties to Cromwell’s army, the actions of the King’s
judges and those of the rousing preacher of regicide, Hugh Peters, were
absolutely justified in eschatological terms. Thus Venner’s men had used
the slogan, “The King Jesus and their heads upon the gates” in 1661,
referring to their outrage over the recently executed regicides whose
heads were on display.38 Fifth Monarchists might have been the only
sectarian group that believed the reign of “King Jesus” could be brought
in through the force of arms, but they were certainly not the only ones
willing to participate in political violence for spiritual ends.
In the early years of the Restoration, uncertain as they were, Dis-
senting women aided and abetted radicals, outlaws, ejected preachers,
seditious propagandists, and the regicides in hiding. Time and again,
the sources record women at the side of men in trouble, beginning with
those at the scaffold. The first ten regicides drawn on sledges to the gal-
lows at Charing Cross or Tyburn were executed between October 13 and
19, 1660. Their scaffold speeches, filled with godly justifications for their
actions and faith in their cause, were published soon after. The speeches
were certainly meant to fortify the saints in their time of suffering and
fashion the regicides into martyrs. They seem to have been successful at
both, and the government sought to extract and punish their publishers.
The preface to the first edition speaks of the speeches of the regicides as
a “great treasury,” published to “satisfy those many in city and country
who have desired it” and so all might “see the riches of grace magnified
in those servants of Christ.”39 In part, these speeches were fairly authen-
tic renderings of some of what the condemned men said. Justice John
37
An Act of a Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) in The Stuart
Constitution, pp. 365–74. The radical preacher, Hugh Peters, was also exempted
from the general pardon. While he did not participate in Charles I’s trial, his
inflammatory preaching was seen as an incitement to regicide.
38
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 2: 11.
39
The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harrison, October, 13; Mr. John Carew,
October 15; Mr. Justice Cooke, Mr. Hugh Peters, October 16, Mr. Tho. Scott . . . (London,
1660), “To the Reader,” pages unnumbered. The speeches of the regicides were a
Cooke’s obsessive worrying about the loss of his estate and his “poor,
tender, loving wife and child,” does little to add to his aura as a saintly
martyr and hero of the Republic, but it is included nonetheless. On the
other hand, the compiler of the speeches certainly presented them in
ways that evoked sympathy and vindicated the Good Old Cause. None
of the regicides repented. “I have not one temptation to desert the Good
Old Cause,” so Cromwell’s intelligencer, Thomas Scott, asserts shortly
before his particularly grisly death. So too Justice Cook makes several
powerful political statements: “we are not traitors, nor murderers, nor
phanaticks, but true Christians and commonwealthmen, fixed and con-
stant to the principles of sanctity, truth, justice, and mercy which the
Parliament and the Army declared and engaged . . .”40
The most notorious speech was certainly that of Major General
Thomas Harrison. A religious zealot and millenarian with ties to the
Fifth Monarchists, Harrison had a fearsome reputation as both a soldier
and a saint. Charles Firth believed that no man was “personally more
responsible for the trial and execution of the King” than Harrison.41 But
what made him truly frightening to the restored regime was that he
shared the Fifth Monarchist belief that the Second Coming was at hand
and could be ushered in through violence. Stalwart and stoic, Harrison
made no effort to flee or hide following the return of Charles II, and at
his trial he was unrepentant. He was the first regicide to be executed
and his “occasional speeches and memorable passages” are the most
powerful and poignant. Women play significant roles in the narrative
of Harrison’s final hours, testifying to his saintliness, and following him
on the way to the cross.
The first woman witness in Harrison’s “memorable passages” is the
one who prepared his cell at Newgate prison and is asked by many how
hot commodity in November 1660, sold “up and down the streets” shortly after
the executions. In 1663, Giles and Elizabeth Calvert, Simon Dover, and Thomas
Brewster sought to bring out another edition but were caught and imprisoned.
“The Trial of John Twyn, Printer, for high treason; also of Thomas Brewster, book-
seller, Simon Dover, printer, and Nathan Brooks, bookbinder, for misdemeanors,
at the Old Bailey, 15 Charles II, 1663,” State Trials, 6: 544.
40
The Speeches and Prayers, pp. 47, 57, 49. Justice Cooke also baldly states that he
“cannot confess any guilt, it is such a [good old] cause that the martyrs would
gladly come again from heaven to suffer for.” This line really rankled authorities
and is cited in the case against the booksellers that tried to republish the Speeches
and Prayers in 1663. “The Trial of John Twyn, Printer . . .,” State Trials, 7: 544.
41
C.H. Firth, “A Memoir of Major-General Thomas Harrison,” Proceedings of the
American Antiquarian Society, new ser., 8 (1893), p. 398.
the General behaves himself and what he says. She “knew not what he
has done to deserve to be there, but sure she was that he was a good
man, and that never such a man was there before for he was full of
God, there was nothing but God in his mouth.” On the day of his exe-
cution, Harrison bid his wife farewell, telling her that he has nothing
to leave her but his Bible and “assuring her that God would make up
her losses in due time.” This line, coupled with Harrison’s later asser-
tion that he would rise again, sounded very much like a threat against
the government. As Harrison is being led from his cell to his sledge,
a woman grabs his hand, saying, “blessed be the great God of Hosts,
that hath enabled you and called you forth to bear your testimony, the
God of all grace, and peace be with you, and keep you faithful to the
death that you may receive a crown of life.” A soldier pulls her away,
but Harrison gently chides him, “be not offended with her, she speaks
Scripture-language.” A third woman, a friend, approaches Harrison, now
bound with a rope around his neck. She is weeping, but Harrison is stoic.
“Hinder me not,” he tells her, “for I am going about the work for my
master.” At the scaffold, Harrison is jeered and mocked by some in the
crowd. One bystander asks him where his Good Old Cause is now. But
Harrison is impassive and simply smiles, claps his hand on his breast
and replies, “Here it is, and I am going to seal it with my blood.” But
most amazingly, in his speech from the ladder, Harrison tells the crowd
that he will rise from the dead on the third day, sit at the right hand of
God, and sentence those who judged against him.42
How much of the Harrison narrative in The Speeches and Prayers is
authentic and how much of it is tailored to evoke Christ’s Passion is
unanswerable. It is, undoubtedly, a mixture of both.43 Sectarian women
were drawn to the plight of the regicides not because they had condoned
the execution of Charles I, although some certainly did, but because
many of these men had robust reputations for godliness. Women could
also serve as powerful witnesses to male saintliness. Nor was it uncom-
mon to find women at the side of dangerous men in dire circumstances:
on the run, in prison, and at the scaffold. The prevalence of female
sympathizers and fellow travelers to the enemies of the restored regime
42
Speeches and Prayers, pp. 1, 4, 5, 6–7.
43
The speeches of the regicides also contain some echoes of John Foxe’s depic-
tions of the Marian martyrs, particularly in their presentations of wives and
children and of the crowds, sometimes jeering and sometimes weeping. John
Foxe, Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable (London, 1610
edition).
was certainly something of which royalists were well aware. Thus they
sought information about them, sending out informants to observe and
gather news about them, intercepting correspondence, tracking their
movements. Royalists outside the government were certainly aware of
such women and sufficiently anxious enough to ridicule them. The
licentious “holy sisters” in one anonymous 1661 tract are inspired by
“brother Venner” to kill their husbands who they liken to “kinglings.”44
Abraham Cowley’s character, Tabitha, who is of the “Fifth Monarchist
faith,” in his play, Cutter of Coleman Street (1663), is seduced by the
royalist Cutter’s mock Puritan prophecies. Cutter’s visions tell him that
he will
return upon a purple dromedary which signifies magistracy with an

axe in my hand that is called Reformation and I am to strike with
that axe upon the gate of Westminster-Hall and cry down Babylon,
and the building called Westminster-Hall is to run away and cast itself
into the river and then Major General Harrison is to come in green
sleeves from the North upon a sky-colored mule.45
While Cowley’s imitation of godly cant, millenarianism, and its power

over women was certainly meant to be humorous, the conspicuous
nature of some saintly women’s actions was a lot less amusing, espe-
cially to the Secretaries of State trying to secure the safety of the restored
monarchy.
Keeping tabs on the wives of the regicides as well as those of
other notorious parliamentary soldiers and politicians, men who had
absconded, or were imprisoned, executed, or assassinated kept the gov-
ernment’s network of informants busy in the 1660s. Naturally, these
women were of interest, first and foremost, because their movements
and communications might lead authorities to their husbands or his
friends who were in hiding. Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, was
only found and later executed after royalist agents tracked the move-
ments of Lady Wariston when she traveled abroad to meet him.46 But the
44
The Holy Sisters Conspiracy against their Husbands (London, 1661), p. 8. Anti-
Puritan satire is discussed in Chapter 3.
45
Abraham Cowley, Essays, Plays and Sundry Verses, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1906), pp. 302, 308. “Green sleeves” were associated
with Roundheads in Royalist ballads and satire.
46
Robert Wodrow, The Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to
the Revolution, 4 vols. (Glasgow, 1838), 1: 356.
activities of these women could also be worrisome in and of themselves.

Many of them consorted with men considered highly dangerous: Fifth
Monarchists, former Cromwellian soldiers, and newly ejected ministers.
In the minds of the Secretaries of State, the potential of these wives,
widows, and friends of the government’s enemies to foment sedition
necessitated their surveillance.
Because these women were trying to keep their exploits and infor-
mation from prying eyes, our sources are necessarily limited. We do not
know the depth of their involvement in seditious activity. We only know
that they were watched, reported on, and, when possible, their letters
were intercepted. What is clear, however, is that these women formed
networks, sharing information, news and consolation. Their sociability
seems to have had political, spiritual and psychological ends; they were
bonded by the experience of defeat and by their desire to maintain their
political and religious identity and goals.
Frances, Lady Vane, wife of parliamentarian, writer, and millenarian,
Sir Henry Vane, the younger, kept in touch with Lady Wariston, among
others.47 Lady Vane had long had a reputation for godliness, winning
the praise of the Puritan minister, Roger Williams of Providence, New
England, in 1652.48 After the Restoration, she began employing Inde-
pendent ministers in her home. Letters to her and by her were often
intercepted. In July 1663, she received one from an unknown correspon-
dent filled with oblique political references: “All is in safety, though not
without alarms and warnings . . . all things grow darker, but at evening
time it will be light.”49 If such ambiguous talk was designed to give the
government pause, it certainly worked. Authorities were also concerned
by the fact that Lady Vane employed men whom they saw as highly
suspect. Her steward at Raby Castle in Durham was one John Cock, “a
very dangerous person,” who had been corrupted by Sir Henry Vane’s
“leaven” and was beloved by all fanatics. But Lady Vane entrusted Cock
with the management of several estates and even traveled with him.50
47
After two years of imprisonment, Sir Henry Vane was charged with high trea-
son for his services to the Commonwealth, tried and beheaded at Tower Hill
on June 14, 1662. He was the only parliamentarian executed who had not par-
ticipated in the trial of Charles I. His prison writings were published by radical
publisher, Hannah Chapman, discussed below.
48
Roger Williams, Experiments of Spiritual Life & Health (London, 1652), see his
dedication to Lady Vane.
49
CSPD, Charles II, 3: 199.
50
CSPD, Charles II, 5: 377; 6: 243, 495. Vane’s political principles and abstruse
theology are described as a “leaven,” meaning they are a toxic mixture which
changed people’s minds.
Lady Vane’s friend, Helen Hay, Lady Johnston of Wariston, had a harder
time finding loyal staff. One of her household servants kept the govern-
ment abreast of her travels and activities. The government learned from
this servant that Lady Johnston was sending her husband news and
books from Scotland including a book by Independent minister, John
Owen. The informant also thought that “the five boxes alluded to in one
of her letters meant the five speeches of the men [the regicides] who suf-
fered.” The role of provider of news and information to her husband was
nothing new for Lady Wariston. As Lord Wariston’s diary clearly demon-
strates, she had been an active partner throughout his long and troubled
political career. Her letters, as well as those of their daughters, supplied
him with political news from Scotland when the family was separated.
When she was in London, Lady Wariston would appeal in person to
Commonwealth and Protectorate politicians on her husband’s behalf.51
With the Restoration, Wariston went into hiding and eventually escaped
abroad. Lady Wariston’s letters to her husband were written in a cipher,
but they were nonetheless intercepted and translated by the govern-
ment. They contained news of the Kirk in Scotland, the Covenant, and
the ongoing dispute between Lords Lauderdale and Middleton.52 After
Lady Wariston’s fatal visit to Germany, authorities located and eventu-
ally arrested Wariston in Rouen. In May 1663 Lady Wariston and her
fourth daughter, Margaret, attended to Lord Wariston in the Tower and
Margaret, though only a child, remained as her father’s companion.
Wariston was later transferred to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh. He was
hanged and beheaded at the Mercat Cross in July 1663.53
Lord and Lady Wariston produced twelve children together and,
not surprisingly, the religious and political leanings of the parents
infected their offspring, especially their daughters. In 1674, Margaret
Johnston was imprisoned along with other Covenanting women for
presenting a petition for the liberty of their ministers. She was later ban-
ished from Edinburgh. More remarkable was another daughter, Helen
Johnston, who married Sir George Hume of Graden in 1659. Both she
and her husband were staunch Covenanters. Sir George was impris-
oned, at least briefly, for nonconformity in 1678. In June 1679, he
fought with Covenanter rebels at Bothwell Bridge. A year later, following
her husband’s death, Lady Graden was fined an exorbitant £26,000
51
Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, ed. James D. Ogilvie, 3 vols.
(Edinburgh, 1940), 3: 88, 174–5.
52
CSPD, Charles II, 2: 593; 3: 12, 27.
53
Wodrow, The Sufferings, 1: 355–62; John Nicoll, A Diary of Public Transactions
and Occurrences, Chiefly in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1836), pp. 394–6.
for frequenting field conventicles and harboring rebels. The excessive

fine was almost certainly in part because she was Wariston’s daughter,
Hume’s widow, and Robert Baillie of Jerviswood’s sister-in-law. Robert
Baillie was Lord Wariston’s nephew and married to another one of his
daughters, Rachel. In London in 1683, Baillie became mixed up in Whig
plans to launch an insurrection. A year later, he was charged with high
treason, tried, and sentenced to be hanged, quartered, and beheaded for
his complicity in the Rye House Plot to assassinate the royal brothers,
Charles II and the Duke of York. Baillie was in poor health and Lady
Graden attended to him throughout his trial. During his imprisonment
in the Tolbooth, she remained his companion, reading to him from the
Bible, comforting him, and tending to his needs. She followed him to
the scaffold and stayed by him throughout the entire ordeal, retrieved
his limbs, and like Christ’s body, she wrapped them in “linen cloth” and
buried them.54
In addition to Lady Wariston, Lady Vane also corresponded with
Anne Danvers, wife of Henry Danvers, who served Cromwell’s regime
and became imbued with Fifth Monarchist militancy. Anne and Henry,
both Baptists, were married in 1662. Anne Danvers was part of a net-
work of correspondents among dissidents. One informant asserted that,
“Women are employed about letters which are sent for Lady Danvers
to be communicated to Lady Vane.”55 Among Anne Danvers’ circle of
friends and fellow travelers, with whom she communicated, were the
Hartopps and the Fleetwoods. Anne’s sister, Mary, was married firstly to
Sir Edward Hartopp and secondly, to Charles Fleetwood, an army officer
under Cromwell and part of the triumvirate (along with Generals John
Lambert and Samuel Desborough) during the last days of the Common-
wealth. Although Fleetwood was spared by the restored regime, both the
Fleetwood and Hartopp families, who resided together at the Fleetwood
manor, Stoke Newington in Middlesex, were closely watched. Charles
Fleetwood’s daughter, Elizabeth, was married to Sir John Hartopp,
Edward Hartopp’s son. Both generations attended Dr. John Owen’s
Independent congregation on Bury Street in the parish of St. Mary
Axe, London.56 Spy reports indicated that Elizabeth, Lady Hartopp,
54
Mark 15: 46; Wodrow, The Sufferings, 3: 52, 106; 4: 112; William Morison,
Johnston of Warriston (New York: C. Scribner, 1901), p. 151. Baillie’s limbs and
head were dug up and displayed.
55
BDBR, s. v., “Danvers, Henry (c. 1622–1687);” CSPD, Charles II, 5:24.
56
A.J. Shirren, The Chronicles of Fleetwood House (London: Barnes & Printers,
1951), pp. 78–109.
had connections with Fifth Monarchists, attended conventicles at

Moorfields, and retained the services of Independent ministers in her
home.57 Elizabeth Hartopp was a close friend and correspondent of
Mary Berry, the wife of Colonel James Berry, a former parliamentarian
army officer and Major General who was imprisoned in Scarborough
Castle until 1672. Mary was also member of Dr. Owen’s Bury Street
congregation and was reported to be living near Stoke Newington.58
John Owen’s Bury Street congregation also attracted Bridget Bendish,
who was the daughter of General Henry Ireton and Cromwell’s eldest
daughter, Bridget. In 1652, Bridget Ireton, then a widow, married
Charles Fleetwood (she was his second wife). When she died, her
daughter, also named Bridget, went to live with her stepfather at Stoke
Newington. In 1669, she married Thomas Bendish of Gray’s Inn but
nonetheless remained extraordinarily independent and was described
as strong-willed, feisty, and intemperate. Several character sketches of
Bridget Bendish were written after her death, the authors of which all
agreed that she was a woman of great contradictions who was generous
to a fault as well as suspicious, dishonest, and jealous with both friends
and servants alike. There was “something in her countenance, how-
ever, that both attracts and commands respect.” She resembled Oliver
Cromwell more than any of his descendants both in her appearance
and temperament. According to the Dissenting minister, Samuel Say,
she was “a person of great presence and majesty, heroic courage, and
unflagging industry.” She was notorious for visiting friends late at night
and was a hardy drinker. Her piety was strongly tinged with enthusiasm.
She was known to retire to her closet and through fasting, meditation,
and prayer “the vapors were raised” and she fell into a kind of rapture.59
She adhered to the political views of her grandfather and spoke of him
as a great saint. She was also a staunch defender of his reputation. “Once
when travelling by coach she heard a gentleman abuse Oliver’s charac-
ter in the grossest terms. At the first stop she drew another passenger’s
sword, called the other a poltroon and a coward and challenged him
to show himself a man, and pay no attention to her sex.”60 Bridget
57
“Williamson’s Spy Book,” pp. 248, 250, 251, 254, 257.
58
There is little information on Mary but her attendance at Owen’s congregation
and association with the Hartopps and Fleetwoods placed her under suspicion.
Christopher Durston, “Berry, James (d. 1691),” ODNB; CSPD, Charles II, 3: 110.
59
BL, Add. 19,118, ff. 60–1.
60
BL, Add. 19,118, ff. 60–2. This story is also told in Mark Noble, Memoirs of
the Protectoral House of Cromwell, 2 vols. (London, 1784), 2:336–7. According
Bendish’s activities were monitored by the restored regime. She raised

alarms in 1683 when aided her brother, Henry Ireton the younger’s
escape from prison after he was accused of complicity in the Rye House
Plot. Later when Ireton was recaptured, she attended him in the Tower.61
In the late 1680s, she distributed literature in support of the Prince of
Orange, going into shops and dropping “bundles of papers to prepare
the minds of the people.” In 1694, she was presented to Mary II by
Archbishop Tillotson in order that a pension might be settled on her.62
Another circle of Independents, also wives of regicides, included Mary
Cawley, Frances Goffe, and Mary Whalley. Informants reported that
these women met often and corresponded. Their activities were tracked
not only in hope of locating their husbands, but also because informants
asserted that these women knew the whereabouts of Edmund Ludlow,
one of the most sought after regicides. Mary Cawley’s husband, William,
had fled to Switzerland after the Restoration. William Cawley, Edmund
Ludlow, John Lisle, and Nicholas Love – all of whom were sought for
their roles in the trial and execution of Charles I – resided in Lausanne
and Vevey in the1660s. Mary Cawley moved into her brother’s house
in London. Spy reports speak of her as being intimately acquainted
with Ludlow’s wife, Elizabeth, who later left London to join her hus-
band in 1663.63 Mary Cawley was also intimate with Frances Goffe and
Mary Whalley, whose husbands had fled to New England (although
informants were never sure where they were and thought they might
still be in England or with Ludlow).64 Frances Goffe was the daugh-
ter of Edward Whalley and the wife of William Goffe. Both Whalley
and Goffe were regicides and Major Generals under Cromwell. They
were also “both godly men,” as John Davenport put it, imbued with
to Gilbert Burnet, it was said of Cromwell’s children that “those who wore
the breeches deserved petticoats better, but if those in petticoats had been in
breeches they would have held faster.” Apparently, strong women ran in the
family. Burnet, HOHOT, 1: 152.
61
Young Ireton was storing muskets at the time of the Oxford Parliament in 1681.
In 1682–83, he became entangled in the Rye House conspiracy. BL Add. 28,875,
f. 257; CSPD, James II, 1: 394, 417. After the Revolution, his services in defense
of Protestantism were awarded by William III.
62
Noble, Memoirs, 2: 335–7.
63
“Williamson’s Spy Book,” 307; CSPD, Charles II, 3: 13.
64
CSPD, Charles II, 3: 144, 380. Whalley and Goffe’s activities in New England see
Lemuel Welles, The History of the Regicides in New England (New York: Benjamin
Blom, Inc., 1971). Their adventures inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story,
“The Grey Champion” (1835) and were incorporated in Sir Walter Scott’s novel,
Peveril of the Peak (London, 1823).
a Puritan sensibility and millenarian fervor. They lived in a cave out-

side New Haven, Connecticut, for a time in an effort to elude royalist
agents. Ultimately, they moved to Hadley, Massachusetts, where they
“preached and prayed and were looked upon as men dropped down
from heaven.”65 Frances Goffe went to live with her aunt Jane and
her husband, the Independent minister, William Hooke in London.
The Hookes had immigrated to New England in 1637, where William
ministered alongside John Davenport in New Haven. They returned to
England in the 1650s, and Hooke became one of Cromwell’s chaplains
and the master of the Savoy Hospital, London.66
But the 1660s were difficult times. William Hooke lost his living and
was caring for his niece, Frances Goffe and her daughters, in addition to
his own large family. Still William and Jane’s connections with America
remained healthy and the Hooke household was a hub of trans-Atlantic
communication among the godly. Both William and Jane Hooke stayed
in contact with John Davenport, Increase Mather, and the regicides,
Whalley and Goffe. Frances Goffe, using aliases, wrote to her husband,
William; and he tried to keep in touch with her as he and his father-
in-law, Whalley, moved about New England. William Goffe addressed
his wife, Frances, as his “Dear and Honored Mother” and referred to
their daughters as his “sisters.” In her letters, Frances referred to William
as her “Dear Child.” It seems unlikely that this little subterfuge of theirs
would actually fool the authorities. Their choice of such terms may have
had more to do with their status as a godly family, physically separated,
but attached through strong bonds of faith and affection. Frances was
no longer William’s “wife” so much as she was his “mother,” mothering
him through his time of travail. Their letters exchanged private news,
advice, and encouragement. Frances also sent her husband information
about England as she tried to fathom God’s will: “oh, the many ways
God hath taken with poor England . . . sore judgments hath followed one
upon the other . . . and yet the heart of the people are not awakened.” She
concluded this 1671 letter to William with “many friends desire to be
remembered to you and pray for you daily. The churches enjoy much
peace in London, but are sorely persecuted in the country; [may] the
Lord appear for [their] deliverance.”67
65
Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine, ed. I.M. Calder (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973), p. 174; CSP, Colonial, 5: 54.
66
Calamy Revised, p. 274; Susan Hardman Moore, “Hooke [Hook], William
(1600/01–1678),” ODNB.
67
“Letters and Papers Relating to the Regicides,” Collections, 8: 133, 134.
William Hooke’s letters to Goffe, Davenport, and Mather were far

more incendiary, containing news about the penal laws, the trials and
executions of the regicides, the strange misfortunes that befell conform-
ing ministers, and signs from the heavens foretelling God’s displeasure
with the restored regime. In 1663, he reported news about a plot “begun
by Anabaptists, hatched by Fifth Monarchy men, fostered in Congre-
gated Churches . . . supported by soldiers of Oliver’s old army and, in
fine, carried on by the concurrence of all Dissenting sects against the
royal interests.”68 Hooke’s wife, Jane, shared his religious and political
commitments. Sending news to Goffe and Whalley in 1672, she wrote,
“as for O.[ld] E.[ngland], we are in expectation daily when the Lord will
visit us for our sins and horrid blasphemy . . . for the contempt of the
Gospel by parliament and higher powers.”69 Jane Hooke continued to
write to key members of the godly community in New England after
her husband’s death in 1678. Throughout the 1670s, she took up collec-
tions of money and old clothing for the poor and “distressed ministers”
of New England and sent them to Davenport and Increase Mather. She
sent Mather pairs of gloves and thanked him for the books he had sent
her. She was a willing benefactor to those in real need, but if they were
“of a loose frame, not a penny.”70
Other women, for whom there are far fewer sources, were reported
on by the spies of the Secretaries of State in the 1660s, including
many who supported the most violent sect, the Fifth Monarchy Men.
The Widow Harding, residing at Little Wood Street in London, was
reputed a “Fifth Monarchist” and a “very violent woman.” She had
been entrusted with the letters and papers of Thomas Venner, who
had led the Fifth Monarchy rising in 1661. The Widow Brome held
Fifth Monarchy conventicles at her house at Tuttle Street, Westminster.
Mary Winch, also a widow, hosted Fifth Monarchists meetings at her
house in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, from 1662 to 1665.71 The widow Jane
68
Ibid., 213–14. Hooke’s seditious newsletters to Goffe and Davenport were often
intercepted; see CSPD, Charles II, 3: 63–5, 98, 117; A.G. Matthews, “A Censored
Letter,” pp. 262–83.
69
“Letters of Jane Hooke,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 8: 260.
Jane Hooke was the youngest daughter of Richard Whalley (father of the
regicide). As a young woman she had refused the hand of Roger Williams, the
theologian and founder of the first Baptist church in America. A.G. Matthews,
“A Censored Letter,” p. 263.
70
Letters of John Davenport, 257; “Letters of Jane Hooke,” Collections, 8: 261–5.
71
NA SP 29/44/39. f. 1; Middlesex County Records (Old Series), ed. John Cordy
Jeaffreson, 4 vols. (London, 1972, reproduced from the original 1886 edition),
3: 343; NA SP 29/67, f. 7.
Holmes, mentioned at the outset of this chapter, not only sheltered

dissidents hostile to the restored regime, she acted as an intermedi-
ary through whom the Presbyterian ministers, Edmund Calamy and
William Jenkins, could exchange communications with Colonel Joseph
Bampfield, the former Cromwellian intelligencer turned Dutch spy in
the early 1660s.72 But much of the information collected by agents
working for the government was even more cryptic. One report from
January 1663 speaks of “dangerous” ejected ministers who are “the peo-
ple’s idols” and ends with “some ladies encourage the meetings and
ministers.”73 This could be a pointed reference to the network of Ladies
Vane and Danvers or simply an acknowledgment of the numerous
wealthy women both in London and the countryside who “encouraged”
religious and political nonconformity.
Elite women, for whom the sources are richer, also frequented
conventicles, patronized ejected clergy, and associated with old soldiers.
Succeeding generations have often remembered these women as
respectable paragons of Puritan virtue, but in their own time the gov-
ernment cast a wary and watchful eye on their activities. Elizabeth,
Countess of Anglesey and her husband, Arthur Annesley, were Dis-
senters who retained the services of a nonconformist chaplain in their
home from 1661 to 1684. But the Countess went further than her more
prudent and politic husband, she was known to visit the residence of
the Independent and Fifth Monarchist, George Cockayne. In 1684, she
was arrested at a conventicle conducted by the Independent leader,
John Owen.74 Most of the titled women who were under surveillance
favored the Presbyterians. Anne Carr, Countess of Bedford, was known
to frequent both of Richard Baxter’s conventicles at Covent Garden and
Holborn. In March of 1675, she was arrested at a meeting in which John
Manton was preaching. Like so many men in his position, her husband,
William Russell, first Duke of Bedford, attended his parish church, but
72
NA SP 29/172, f. 18; CSPD, Charles II, 6: 146. Col. Bampfield, Jenkins, and
Calamy were involved in the Presbyterian conspiracy in 1651. See Leland
H. Carlson, “A History of the Presbyterian Party from Pride’s Purge to the Disso-
lution of the Long Parliament,” Church History 11 (1942), pp. 116–17. Bampfield
is discussed in Chapter 3.
73
74
George Cockayne was the minister of an Independent/Fifth Monarchist con-
gregation at St. Pancras, Soper Lane, between 1648 and 1660. He applied for
a license to preach after the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence and established a
church between White Cross and Red Cross Streets. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy
Men, p. 205; Watts, The Dissenters, p. 251.
he also maintained a Presbyterian minister.75 Elizabeth Vere, Countess

Dowager of Clare, also attended the conventicles at Covent Garden
and Westminster in the 1660s and allowed the Presbyterian preacher,
Thomas Manton, to conduct meetings at her home. Her daughter, Anne
Holles, Lady Clinton, also met with Covent Garden conventicle and was
a friend and patron of Baxter’s.76 During the Interregnum, the London
home of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, in Pall Mall had been
a gathering place for parliamentarians and Puritan intellectuals, includ-
ing Lady Ranelagh’s brother, Robert Boyle, as well as John Milton and
Sir Henry Vane.77 Quite naturally, after the Restoration, Lady Ranelagh’s
associations came under the scrutiny of the government. In 1661, infor-
mants reported that she conducted meetings with Presbyterian leaders
and former “dangerous” soldiers who “highly extolled” her.78 Lady
Ranelagh was separated from her husband, and many of the women
under surveillance were widows, allowing them a certain amount of
freedom that they may not have had otherwise.
While in no way immune from persecution, elite women, whether
married or widowed, might have also felt a certain amount of boldness
due to their social status. Thus in 1673, even after Charles II’s grant of
some religious liberty was revoked, Lady Mary Stanley continued to hold
Presbyterian services at her residence, Bickerstaffe Hall in Lancashire.
In one instance, soldiers burst into her chapel when Nathaniel Heywood
was about to preach. Lady Stanley “came out of her gallery and placed
herself near the pulpit-door hoping to over-awe their spirits and obstruct
their designs.”79 The husbands of gentle and aristocratic women often
shared their confessional zeal but were much less willing to acknowl-
edge publicly their nonconformity, particularly after the passage of the
Test Act in 1672 which confined public offices to conforming Anglicans.
Thus while the arrest of elite women at Dissenting meetings after the
1660s was still common, elite men were rarely caught. They would not
risk their political personas by going as far as their wives. Far from
75
HMC: 11th Report, Leeds Manuscripts (1888), p. 15; Watts, The Dissenters,
pp. 250–1; Victor Slater, “Russell, William, First Duke of Bedford (1616–1700),”
ODNB.
76
HMC: Leeds, p. 15.
77
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660
(New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975), pp. 62–3.
78
79
Henry Ashurst, Some Remarks upon the Life of that Painful Servant of God Mr
Nathaniel Heywood (London, 1695), p. 30.
simply being paragons of Puritanism, godly women could be audacious

patronesses and protectors of men whom the government considered
troublesome, if not menacing.
Women, Sedition, and the Press
Dispersing seditious books is very near akin to raising of tumults;

they are as like as brother and sister: raising tumults is the more
masculine; and printing and dispersing seditious books is the femi-
nine part of every rebellion.
“The Trial of John Twyn,” State Trials, 7: 549.
But perhaps the women who engaged in the most dangerous and signif-
icant work in support of religious fanaticism and political radicalism
were the publishers and booksellers, active throughout the era of
Restoration and Revolution.80 These women have attracted the atten-
tion of scholars. Among them, Maureen Bell, in particular, has written
a series of important articles on women booksellers.81 While there is
no need to reprise her findings here, no study on women, religion,
and politics would be complete without mentioning the importance
of the press and the notoriety that several female booksellers achieved.
These women certainly differ in at least one important aspect from those
explored so far in this chapter. Unlike the women who colluded with the
Fifth Monarchists and the wives and widows of the regicides, booksellers
were motivated by profit as well as by any religious zeal and politi-
cal convictions they might have felt. This then begs the question: did
Elizabeth Calvert publish and sell Mirabilis Annus because she sought
80
Maureen Bell identifies 300 women connected to the book trade between
1540 and 1730. The majority of these women were active after 1640. “A Dic-
tionary of Women in the London Book Trade, 1540–1730” (Master’s Dissertation,
Loughborough University of Technology, 1983).
81
Maureen Bell, “Hannah Allen and the Development of a Puritan Publishing
Business, 1646–51,” Publishing History 26 (1989): 5–66; “Elizabeth Calvert and
the ‘Confederates,” Publishing History 32 (1992): 5–49; “ ‘Her Usual Practices:’
The Later Career of Elizabeth Calvert, 1664–75,” Publishing History 35 (1994):
5–64; “Women and the Opposition Press after the Restoration,” in Writing and
Radicalism, ed. John Lucas (London and New York: Longman,1996), pp. 39–60;
also see Margaret Hunt, “Hawkers, Bawlers, and Mercuries: Women and the
London Press in the Early Enlightenment,” in Women and the Enlightenment, eds.
Margaret Hunt, Ruth Perry, Phyllis Mack (New York: Haworth, 1984), pp. 48–68;
Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London
Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
to fortify the godly in their time of despair or because she knew it was
sure to sell prodigiously? Did these women subscribe to the religious
enthusiasm and political sedition that saturated the texts which they
sold? While a complete answer is impossible since the sources are sim-
ply inadequate, what is certainly clear is that publishing such literature
was dangerous and yet women like Calvert continued to take risk after
risk to do so. As Margaret Hunt has pointed out, “opposition publishing
could be quite lucrative,” but it was also “extremely risky,” and this was
especially true since the government found it easier to punish print-
ers, publishers, and sellers than the anonymous authors of the texts
themselves.82
In August 1663, Roger L’Estrange became “surveyor of the imprimery”
or printing presses; a post he retained until the Revolution in 1688/89.
As a monarchist and virulent opponent of Republicanism and Dis-
sent, L’Estrange was eager to sniff out and extirpate radical booksellers.
In 1663 he identified a group of seditious publishers and booksellers
he labeled the “Confederate Stationers.” “The most dangerous people
of all are the Confederate Stationers, and the breaking of that knot
would do the work [of suppressing radical literature] alone.”83 That
group included the printer, Simon Dover, the publishers and booksellers,
Thomas Brewster, Thomas Creake, Livewell Chapman, and Giles and
Elizabeth Calvert, and the book-binder, Nathan Brookes. This cohort
was responsible for compiling, printing, binding, and distributing much
of the most seditious tracts published between 1660 and 1663, among
them were the various editions of the Speeches and Prayers of the regicides
and the series of tracts known as Mirabilis Annus: Or, the Year of Prodi-
gies and Wonders. There was also A Phoenix: Or, The Solemn League
and Covenant (1661) which reprinted the Presbyterian Covenant and
included documents such as Charles II’s promise in 1650 to abide by
the Covenant. The “Confederate Stationers” were also responsible for
publishing The Panther-Prophesy (1662), written by a Fifth Monarchist,
Owen Lloyd. It sketches a frightening scene of God’s judgment raining
down on a clergyman with “a surplice and the Book of Common Prayer”
under his arm; a lawyer with the “great charter in his hand;” and a
“citizen with a bag of gold.” Unwilling to heed Christ’s call, these three
are shot with arrows by Christ appearing among the clouds; then the
poor people come out, the prison doors are opened, and London is set
82
Margaret Hunt, “Hawkers, Bawlers, and Mercuries,” p. 44.
83
Roger L’Estrange, Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the
Press (London,1663), p. 6.
ablaze.84 But perhaps most keenly political of all the seditious literature
that this group published was Mene Tekel: Or, The Downfall of Tyranny
(1663). This “scriptural description of magistracy” asserts that kings are
the people’s servants, set up by the people, and to be removed by the
people at will. Mene Tekel is an angry, aggressive tract which continually
harkens back to the injustice of the penal laws against Dissent:
What cursed laws are now in force, to persecute the faithful minis-
ters of Christ . . . [and] murder the Lord’s people by stifling them in
prisons and dungeons where hundreds have within these three years
perished for no other cause but praying, preaching, and bearing the
Word of God and all this and much more because wicked men are
put in authority.85
Of the radical nature of these tracts, there can be no doubt. There was
certainly some truth to the royalist accusation that the press was fueling
the same spirit of “hypocrisy, scandal, malice, error, and illusion that
actuated the late Rebellion.”86
Members of the cohort of radical publishers suffered from frequent
arrests, fines, and imprisonments following the return of Charles II. But
even after Giles Calvert’s incarceration in 1661 for his role in publish-
ing The Phoenix and Mirabilis Annus, Or, the Year of Prodigies, his wife,
Elizabeth Calvert, “went on with the Prodigies” and she too was jailed
for a time. Giles was released in November 1662 only to be taken up
again in December for “dangerous and seditious designs.”87 Then in
1663, L’Estrange struck a near fatal blow to this group with the arrests
and trials of John Twyn, Thomas Brewster, Simon Dover, and Nathan
Brookes. Livewell Chapman, the most prominent publisher of the Fifth
Monarchists, was also sought by L’Estrange, but had already fled abroad.
The printer, Twyn, was caught red-handed by L’Estrange printing a tract
entitled, The Execution of Justice, early one morning. The tract, among
other things, advocated a people’s rebellion against the monarchy. He
was charged with high treason, found guilty, and executed in April
84
[Owen Lloyd], The Panther-Prophesy, A Premonition to all People (London, 1662),
pp. 3, 6.
85
Mene Tekel; or, the Downfall of Tyranny (London, 1663), p. 26.
86
L’Estrange, Considerations and Proposals, “The Epistle Dedicatory,” pages
unnumbered.
87
Roger L’Estrange, Truth and Loyalty Vindicated from the Reproaches and Clamours
of Mr. Edward Bagshaw (London, 1662), 57; CSPD, Charles II, 2: 592.
1664. Tried the same day as Twyn were Brewster, Dover, and Brookes
for printing and selling The Speeches and Prayers of the regicides and
The Phoenix. They were found guilty of a lesser charge, fined, and sen-
tenced to the pillory.88 Simon Dover and Thomas Brewster both died in
prison in April 1664. Giles and Elizabeth Calvert, who were both named
throughout the trials, had gone into hiding, but Giles was caught and
arrested shortly thereafter and died in August 1663, debilitated by his
frequent imprisonments. After her capture, Elizabeth obtained her free-
dom by paying a fine of £600 and promising not to print, publish, or
sell seditious books.89 Her word was worthless.
True enough, L’Estrange had decimated the leading male members of
the “confederate knot,” but he had apparently not foreseen their wid-
ows’ willingness to carry on the business of seditious publishing. Not
only did the daring and intrepid Elizabeth Calvert continue her “usual
practices,” but Joan Dover and Anna Brewster also resumed their late
husbands’ work. In part, they probably did so out of sheer necessity;
they were left with children, servants, apprentices, shops, the tools of
the trade, and old stock. Yet given the risks and pitfalls of seditious pub-
lishing, it is also fair to surmise that these women were committed to
the preservation of nonconformity and the Good Old Cause. Women
were, as Maureen Bell has pointed out, “instrumental” in the “difficult
business of opposition printing and publishing” after 1664.90
Hannah Chapman, Livewell’s wife, had been intimately involved
in radical publishing along with her first husband, Benjamin Allen,
since the years of the Civil Wars and Protectorate. Between 1646,
when Benjamin died, and 1651, she ran the shop herself, publishing
Fifth Monarchists and other critics of Cromwell’s regime.91 In 1651,
Hannah married Livewell, Benjamin’s former apprentice, and the two
continued to publish Dissenting and millenarian titles. Livewell had
absconded during the Twyn trial but was apprehended in March 1663
and briefly imprisoned, though in failing health. He died the following
year. Hannah continued in the trade, publishing (among other titles)
the prison writings of the regicide, Sir Henry Vane. Eventually her busi-
ness was ruined by official harassment, and she seems to have ceased
88
A Treatise of the Execution of Justice (London, 1660); “The Trials of John Twyn,
Printer, for high treason; also of Thomas Brewster, bookseller, Simon Dover,
printer, and Nathan Brooks, bookbinder, for misdemeanors, at the Old Bailey,
15 Charles II, 1663,” State Trials, 7: 513–64.
89
CSPD, Charles II, 3:216.
90
CSPD, Charles II, 3: 456; Bell, “ ‘Her Usual Practices,” p. 5.
91
Bell, “Hannah Allen,” pp. 47–51.
publishing by 1665. Joan Dover, the widow of Simon, was more success-
ful. L’Estrange called her “one of the most craftiest and most obstinate
of the trade.”92 In 1666 she married John Darby who had worked
in her husband’s shop. Together they printed numerous millenarian
and Quaker texts. Consequently, their shop was often searched, John
arrested, and their presses confiscated. But they remained indomitable
and continued printing nonconformist and oppositional titles into
the 1680s. Joan and John Darby often worked in tandem with Anna
Brewster and Elizabeth Calvert. These four were probably responsible
for the highly incendiary, A Trumpet Blown in Sion (1666) and libelous
broadside, The Poor Whore’s Petition (1668).93
Anna Brewster’s career is more difficult to follow. She may have been
primarily responsible for simply dispersing seditious literature. In 1677,
she was reported to be selling The Long Parliament Dissolved to book-
sellers, a piece that argued that the current government was trampling
on England’s ancient liberties. “Widow Brewster” went into hiding but
was said to be “of Cocking’s [George Cockyne, the Fifth Monarchist]
conventicle.”94 She seems to have been working with the bookseller,
writer, and Baptist preacher, Francis Smith in 1679. That year he wrote
and printed an anti-paptist satire that became known as Tom Ticklefoot
with Anna Brewster’s name in it, intending to “save her harmless.”
Smith probably used Anna as a distributor and she was called in as a wit-
ness at his trial.95 She was also arrested in October 1679 in connection
with dispersing the notorious Whig tract, An Appeal from the Country to
the City, which advocated the succession of Charles II’s illegitimate son,
the Duke of Monmouth.96 Her career seems to have come to an end
around 1680.
92
Quoted in Beth Lynch, “Darby, John (d. 1704), printer,” ODNB.
93
[Benjamin Keach] A Trumpet Blown in Sion, Sounding an Alarm in God’s Holy
Mountain (London, 1666); The Poor Whore’s Petition (London, 1668).
94
HMC: Ninth Report, part II, p. 70; Lords Journal, 13: 60.
95
Clod-pate’s Ghost: Or, a Dialogue between Justice Clodpate and his [quondam] Clerk,
Honest Tom Ticklefoot (London, 1679), p. 12; An Impartial Account of the Tryal of
Francis Smith (London, 1680), p. 4. The practice of “saving harmless” meant that
if Brewster were fined or imprisoned, Francis Smith would come to her aid so
long as she refused to name anyone to the authorities. By “saving harmless,”
publishers protected hawkers and others who distributed their wares.
96
Timothy Crist, “Government Control of the Press after the Extirpation of
the Printing Act in 1679,” Publishing History 5 (1979), p. 55; [Charles Blount]
An Appeal from the Country to the City (London, 1679); the 1679 edition of Appeal
was probably published by Langley and Jane Curtis.
Immediately following Giles Calvert’s death, Elizabeth relied heav-

ily on their old stock and on disseminating books to sellers in Bristol.
But by 1666 she was firmly back in business, specializing in books by
sectarians and tracts on popular astrology. The return of the plague to
London in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666 led to a host of apocalyp-
tic books, published and distributed by Elizabeth Calvert, along with
the Darbys. Many of these works were similar to Mirabilis Annus and
blamed Catholics, the ungodly, and backsliders for God’s wrath. Calvert
“ignored licensing regulations with impunity” was arrested and ques-
tioned in 1667, 1668, 1670.97 Finally, in 1671 she was arrested and
tried for publishing Nehushtan, Or, A Sober and Peaceable Discourse (1668)
which argued that the liturgy and ceremonies of the Church of England
were “prejudicial” to the “true religion” and should be abandoned.98
While she was only fined and released, her publishing output declined
steadily in the early 1670s. She probably died around 1674. Nonethe-
less, the tradition of high profile women booksellers like herself as well
as Anna Brewster, Joan Dover/Darby and Hannah Chapman contin-
ued into the eighteenth century. Jane Curtis, Elinore Smith, Abigail
Baldwin – whether side by side with their husbands, sons, daughters,
or alone – continued to print and sell a steady stream of nonconformist
and oppositional works in the 1680s and 1690s.
Nursing Mothers and the Protestant Cause in the 1680s
I do not find in my heart the least regret for anything that I have
done in the service of my Lord and Master Jesus Christ
The Dying Speech of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaunt
By the early 1680s, oppositional politics, that strange amalgamation of

religious dissent and millenarianism, country Puritanism and political
radicalism, had become blended together into Whig politics. Dissenting
women remained active supporters of their ministers, husbands, sons,
and brothers engaged in the opposition during the turbulent years lead-
ing up to the Glorious Revolution. Sometimes too these women acted
on their own accord; often they were wealthy widows with an income
at their disposal. All of them sought to oppose the persecutory policies
97
Bell, “Her Usual Practices,” p. 21.
98
[Joseph Wilson] Nehushtan: Or, A Sober and Peaceable Discourse Concerning the
Abolishing of Things Abused to Superstition and Idolatry (London, 1668), see “To the
Sober and Ingenuous Reader,” pages unnumbered.
of the restored regime and reverse the inroads of popery at Court and
within English culture as a whole. The Whig women of the early 1680s
were active in the effort to bar the “popish successor,” James, Duke of
York, and aid the would-be Protestant heir, the Duke of Monmouth.
They were often referred to by the men they aided, as “nurses” or “nurs-
ing mothers.” The term “nursing mothers” is found most frequently in
the reports of English informants on the activities of the Whig and Dis-
senter refugee communities in Amsterdam and Utrecht. These “nursing
mothers” were also called “titular mothers” or “nominal mothers” by
those they served. But “nursing mother” and “nurse” were the most
commonly used terms. One of the most frequently discussed “nursing
mothers” in these spy reports was Elizabeth Gaunt, who was burnt at
the stake in 1685 for allegedly harboring a Monmouth rebel. While the
information on her Holland activities, connections, and haunts is often
sketchy, it is still possible to surmise this much: that Elizabeth Gaunt was
part of a ring of women, known to the men they assisted as their “moth-
ers.” These women were Dissenters, usually from London’s merchant
and trading caste. The men whom they “nursed” were political radicals
and nonconformists, often preachers, but also barristers, soldiers, and
gentlemen running for their lives in the 1680s.99
The term “nursing mother” resonated with numerous political and
religious implications in the seventeenth century. The biblical passage
from Isaiah 49:23, “And Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their
Queens, nursing mothers,” was often employed to remind monarchs
of their duty to the Established Church or Protestantism as a whole.
Charles and James might be lauded as “nursing fathers” when they
sought to relieve their nonconforming subjects through their Declara-
tions of Indulgence.100 But only after the Revolution of 1688/89 and
the ascension of a King and Queen without popish sympathies, could
nonconformist Protestants comfortably apply it to the Stuart monar-
chy. Mary II was commonly seen as a nursing mother to the Church of
England as well as other Protestant churches in Scotland, Ireland, Europe
99
This section draws from my chapter, “Nursing Sedition: Women, Dissent, and
the Whig Struggle,” in Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in
the 1680s,” ed. Jason McElligot (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 189–204.
100
Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence: His Majesty’s Declaration to all his Loving
Subjects (15 March 1672); James II’s Declaration of Indulgence: James the Second,
his Gracious Declaration to all his Loving Subjects for Liberty of Conscience (4 April
1687). Both are reprinted in Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, pp. 407–8,
410–13.
and the New World.101 With Queen Anne, and subsequently Queen
Caroline, the image of the queen as a nursing mother became so com-
mon place that Handel used it in his coronation anthem, “My Heart is
Inditing,” and poets parodied it, most famously in the Dunciad, wherein
Alexander Pope refers to “A nursing mother, born to rock the throne.”102
But the image of the nursing mother, protecting, suckling, and bond-
ing with the faithful, was not one that necessarily had to be connected
to queens. During the Restoration, the term “nursing mother” was
democratized and frequently applied to nonconformist women actively
serving, shielding, and spreading the faith. Missionaries were often
styled “nursing mothers” whose maternal care went beyond their imme-
diate family. The notion of the family itself was expanded in sectarian
literature wherein all brethren became the “brothers and sisters” and
“sons and daughters” of these mothers. Nursing mothers nourish the
hungry congregation of the new, enlarged family. Thus the Quaker mis-
sionary, Joan Vokins, “tender care of the Church of Christ” made her
“a nursing mother over the young convinced.” The anonymous author,
celebrating Vokins in this 1691 tract, goes on to cry out, “oh Lord do
thou thy power, rise up more such faithful laborers and such nursing
mothers in thy Israel.”103 Not surprisingly, given the highly visible role
of many female Friends, Quakers often adopted maternal metaphors.
Margaret Fell Fox was regarded by many contemporaries as a “mother
in Israel” (Judges 5:7) who, like the prophet Deborah, sang to celebrate
her people. Fox was not only the mother of her children in faith, she was
also a bountiful biological mother of eight children and often appeared
in public surrounded by her offspring.104 This maternal discourse framed
101
The image of Mary II as a “nursing mother” is discussed in Chapter 4. Abraham
Kick, A Brief Relation of the State of New England (London, 1689); Joan Whitrow,
To King William and Queen Mary, Grace and Peace (London, 1692), pp. 8–9.
102
The Dunciad (London, 1728), 1: 256. Many scholars believe that Pope is allud-
ing to Queen Anne in the first edition of the Dunciad, quoted above. In the 1742
edition, he seems to be referring to Magna Mater, Dullness herself. See Catherine
Ingrassia, “Women Writing/Writing Women: Pope, Dullness, and ‘Feminization’
in the Dunciad,” Eighteenth-Century Life 14 (November 1990): 40–58. Toni Bowers
discusses Queen Anne and the trope of the “nursing mother” in The Politics
of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 50–65.
103
God’s Mighty Power Magnified: As Manifested and Revealed in His Faithful
Handmaid Joan Vokins (London, 1691), pp. 8, 6.
104
Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Margaret Fell Fox and Feminist Literary History:
A ‘Mother of Israel’ Calls to the Jews,” in The Emergence of Quaker Writing,
active women whose exploits went far beyond the hearth within accept-
able, non-threatening familial roles and made what was unfamiliar and
potentially unsettling, familiar and harmless.
Yet the activities of those Dissenting women styled “nursing moth-
ers” of the Protestant Cause in the 1680s were not harmless and were
certainly thought to be threatening by the government which nervously
watched them. Calling these women “nurses” or “nursing mothers” may
well have made them acceptable to the men they assisted, but their
activities went well beyond what authorities saw as acceptable behavior
for anyone. For the Secretaries of State tracking these women, they were
nothing more than nurturers of sedition. The “nursery” as the breed-
ing house of sedition, irreligion, popery, or sectarianism was a common
trope in Restoration literature. Playhouses were “nurseries of license
and atheism.” “Drunken clubs” in London were “the very nurseries
of atheism, popery, and rebellion.” In The Second Part of Absalom and
Achitophel, John Dryden accuses the Independent preacher and Whig
propagandist, Robert Ferguson, of establishing a “nursery of sects” in
London.105 In July 1686, James II complained to the Dutch ambassador
that the Netherlands still harbored English rebels (including some “nurs-
ing mothers”) and was thus “the source and nursery of all the obstacles
which counter him in the point of religion.”106 Thus the term was not
without multi-valence. But for the Whigs and Dissenters who claimed
to have a “nurse,” the context in which they used the term was that of
female participant in the nurturing of the Protestant Cause. But unlike
so many sectarian women, preachers and missionaries who have gar-
nered scholarly attention, the tasks of these Whig “mothers” was, with
great caution and stealth, to assist, support, and relieve the men whose
goal was to bar the succession of the Duke of York to the throne – by
force if necessary – and after 1685, to overthrow the government of
James II. The men they aided were themselves Dissenters, or partial con-
formists to the Church of England, of all social castes. What bound them
together was the Protestant Cause, or what we may simply term by the
1680s, Whig politics. Thus the men these women nursed were Whig rad-
icals. The “nursing mothers” of the 1680s were made to sound harmless,
but they were far from it.
eds. Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (New York: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 42–55; Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 245–6.
105
Mr. Colliers Dissuasive from the Play-House (London, 1703), p. 3; BL, Add.
29,910, f. 100; The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel (London, 1682), II: 325.
106
BL, Add. 34,512, ff. 41v-43.
Anne Smith and Constance Ward, both described as “nursing moth-

ers,” provided safe houses and money to Whig fugitives. Anna Smith
and her husband lived just outside London. In 1681 she provided safe
harbor for Archibald Campbell, the ninth Earl of Argyle. The Highland
Earl was under a death sentence in Scotland for refusing to take the so-
called Test, an oath intended to bind powerful elites to the succession of
the Duke of York. Argyle had been rescued from an Edinburgh prison
cell by his stepdaughter, Lady Sophia Lindsay, and conveyed to the
Smith residence by one of Cromwell’s former officers, Captain Nicholas
Lockyer.107 In 1682, Anne Smith helped Argyle escape to Holland, and
she and her husband joined him there soon after.108 By 1683, Smith
had become a wealthy widow, well established in Utrecht and at lib-
erty to use her fortune to assist Dissenting preachers and fund both
Monmouth’s and Argyle’s rebellions in June of 1685. In addition to
Argyle, whom Smith “long entertained” and to whom she gave 8,000
sterling, numerous other refugees stayed at the Smith residence, includ-
ing another “mother,” Elizabeth Gaunt.109 Richard Ashcraft believes that
“the most important colony of Scottish radicals” was gathered around
Argyle and “the widow Smith.”110 She also had enough clout within the
refugee community to order the text (Psalm 34) of the sermon to be
said upon the landing of Monmouth and his tiny army at Lyme Regis in
June 1685. The disastrous results of Argyle’s and Monmouth’s invasions
led to another exodus of radicals to the continent. Numerous Whig dis-
sidents and rebels met in Cleves to discuss their precarious situation.
Among them were the one time Leveller, John Wildman, the former
Whig Mayor of London, Patience Ward, and the Independent preach-
ers, John Howe and Walter Cross. They sent for Anne Smith to join in
their consultations, but this is the last notice of her in the sources. She
probably died before the Revolution.111
107
Alexander Lindsay Crawford, A Memoir of Lady Mackenzie, Countess of Balcarres
and afterward of Argyll (Edinburgh, 1868), p. 116.
108
William Veitch maintains the Mr. Smith did not know about his wife’s
intrigues and that Argyle was passed off to him as simply a “Scots gentleman.”
But informants in Holland asserted that Smith was as “ill a man” as those he
and his wife served. Memoirs of Mr. William Veitch and George Brysson Written by
Themselves (London, 1825), p. 139; BL, Add. 41,810, f. 64.
109
The Journal of the Hon. John Erskine of Carnock, 1683–1687 (Edinburgh, 1893),
p. 180; BL, Add. 41,810, f. 64; BL, Add 41,818, f. 77.
110
Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Govern-
ment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 429.
111
BL, Add. 41,817, f. 219; BL, Add. 41,812, f. 224.
Much of the information about the nursing mothers gathered by

English informants in the Netherlands in the 1680s was obtained
from the loose tongue of the preacher, Walter Cross. Cross was edu-
cated in Scotland. He moved to London and in the early 1680s had
became the pastor of an Independent congregation in Rope-maker’s
Alley, Moorfields. A perpetual busybody, he involved himself in the Rye
House Plot machinations in 1682–83 and soon after found it prudent to
make his way to Utrecht, where he preached at the English Church.112
He continued to associate with various Scots and English Whig refugees,
including John Locke. He knew Elizabeth Gaunt, Anne Smith, and
Constance Ward, all of whom he referred to as his “mothers.” Cross was
particularly close to Constance Ward of East Smithfield, and he eulo-
gized her following her death in 1697. Ward was a Baptist and a courier
of messages, who, along with her husband, was particularly active in the
Scottish dimension of Whig plotting between 1682 and 1685.113 In his
funeral sermon for Ward, Cross praised the “many good deeds of this
woman, her pains and travel at night and day for many years together,
sheltering the exil’d, relieving the distressed, hiding them in danger,
supplying them in want . . . She was a true Phoebe, a succourer of many
and myself also.” He concluded with an elegy bemoaning her death as
a great loss to “poor surviving Saints,/ Who when distress did unto her
complain,/ And were hid by her, and reliev’d in Wants . . . Scots Exiles
were/ Equal to English, Objects of her Care.”114 Numerous other women
were active in the Netherlands, but the information about them gath-
ered by English spies was often little more than a name. Suzanne Burger
and Jane Hall were both referred to as “nursing mothers” who assisted
the Protestant Cause as messenger-carriers. Susannah Nelthorp (wife of
Richard Nelthop, a Rye House conspirator who was captured and exe-
cuted following Monmouth’s defeat) lodged with Anne Smith for a time
and carried messengers to and from England.115 The “Widow Browning”
of Amsterdam was mentioned several times as a “phanatick bookseller”
who printed seditious papers and sold Francis Smith’s Whig Domestick
112
Walter Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting
Houses, 4 vols. (London, 1808), 2: 535–6; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 436;
A Copy of a Letter Sent by a Person that Was Present at the Apprehension of Mr. Meade
and Five More (London, 1683); BL, Add. 41,812, f. 222; BL, Add. 41,818, f. 108v.
113
Howell, State Trials, 9: 451, 454; CSPD, Charles II, 1683, 25: 56–7.
114
Walter Cross, Caleb’s Spirit Parallel’d, in a Sermon Preach’d at the Funeral of the
late Mrs. Constancy Ward of East-Smithfield, London (London, 1697), pp. 6–7, 47–8.
115
BL, Add. 41,818, f.77v; BL, Add. 14,817, f. 225.
Intelligencer. Her shop was a haven for “English phanaticks and Dutch
merchants.” Even the Prince of Orange knew about her business, assur-
ing the English envoy that he would have her shop searched for a libel
called the Duke of Monmouth’s last speech in 1685.116
The most notorious “nursing mother” was Elizabeth Gaunt, exe-
cuted by James II’s government in 1685. Historians think they know
her story. According to Bishop Burnet, Gaunt spent “her life in acts
of charity, visiting the gaols, and looking after the poor of what per-
suasion soever they were.” In 1685, she ran afoul of the authorities
when her compassionate disposition led her to aid a desperate rene-
gade, James Burton, who had fled Monmouth’s army. Burton “delivered
himself” to the government and turned king’s evidence against Gaunt.
She was arrested, tried, and burnt alive at Tyburn.117 Burnet’s vision
of Gaunt as a charity worker was repeated in the histories of David
Hume and Thomas Macaulay, and it is also found in modern studies on
Monmouth’s rebellion and the aftermath.118 Despite the fact that Burnet
and Gaunt may well have crossed paths, his account is not first-hand.
Rather, he relied upon William Penn’s description of her execution as
well as the idealized portrait of her found in the Whig hagiography
that rapidly formed around the victims of the Tory Reaction and the
Bloody Assizes. The Whigs republished Gaunt’s dying speech numerous
times, and she was pictured along with greatest Whig martyrs, William,
Lord Russell, Colonel Algernon Sidney and others on the covers of the
Whig martyrologies published in 1689, 1693, and 1705. The principal
author of the martyrologies, John Tutchin, described Gaunt as a “good,
honest, charitable woman;” a victim of the “implacable fury of bloody
papists and those blind tools who co-operated to promote their accursed
designs.”119
But was Gaunt simply a victim? Her burning has always seemed espe-
cially heinous. Thomas Macaulay thought it wondrous. “Even after all
the horrors of that year,” he wrote, “many thought it impossible that
these judgments [against Gaunt and John Fernley, also convicted of
116
BL, Add. 37,981, f 2v, f. 58. Whether the Prince actually had Browning’s shop
searched is another matter. BL, Add. 41,812, f. 232.
117
HOHOT, 3: 61–2.
118
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, ed. Charles Harding Firth,
6 vols. (New York: Ams Press,1968), 2: 656–8; David Hume, The History of England,
6 vols. (Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 1983), 6: 464. Also see, Edward Parry, The
Bloody Assize (New York: Dobb, Mead & Co., 1929), pp. 273–9.
119
[John Tutchin], The Western Martyrology (London, 1705), pp. 136–7.
helping Burton] should be carried into execution.”120 Unlike the case

against Alice Lisle, wherein two Monmouth rebels were found in her
residence, Gaunt had never actually concealed Burton in 1685.121 More-
over, in the course of her trial, the evidence pointed to the culpability of
Gaunt’s husband far more than herself. Why then was she burnt alive?
Perhaps her beneficence extended to more than charity work. Restoring
Gaunt’s role as a “nursing mother” provides new meaning to her story.
No longer simply the passive recipient of James II’s awful fury, Gaunt
now becomes a player in the events that shaped politics in the early
1680s.
Gaunt and her husband, William, were Baptists and “Wappingers,”
well known around the Dissenting, Whig-infested, wharfs, docks, and
public houses of Wapping in east London.122 They were deeply involved
in London Whig politics. William Gaunt signed both the May 1679 and
January 1680 Whig-sponsored petitions, affirming belief in the Popish
Plot and calling for a Parliament to redress the nation’s grievances.123
He was part of the lower circle of Whig conspirators who were plotting
to overthrow the government of Charles II in 1682 and 1683. In early
1683, he went with Captain Thomas Walcot to inspect the strength of
the guards at the Tower of London in preparation to seize it following
the assassination of the royal brothers.124 William and Elizabeth knew
many former soldiers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchists, including Henry
Danvers, John Wildman, and the owner of the infamous Rye House
Mill, Richard Rumbold.125 They were also associated with Independent
preacher, Whig scribbler and plotter, Robert Ferguson. It was probably
Ferguson who connected the Earl of Shaftesbury, with the Gaunts in
November 1682 when he needed to flee the country. London authori-
ties were certain that the Gaunts had acted as Shaftesbury’s “brokers,”
enabling him to abscond to Holland.126
In fact, arranging passage for fleeing outlaws, conspirators, and rebels
seems to have been the Gaunts’ primary contribution to the Protestant
120
Macaulay, The History of England, 2: 657.
121
The Treason Trial of Lady Alice Lisle, State Trials, 11: 298–382.
122
The Western Martyrology, p. 136.
123
Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge
124
Walcot was a Baptist and former captain-lieutenant in Ludlow’s troop. State
Trials, 11: 415–16.
125
Trials of John Fernley, William Ring, Eliz. Gaunt and Henry Cornish, esq. at
the Old Bailey for High Treason, 1685, State Trials, 11: 403, 414–16, 418.
126
State Trials, 11: 414.
Cause in the early 1680s. In June 1683, Elizabeth Gaunt came to the
aid of James Burton who had been outlawed for his role in the Rye
House conspiracy. She gave him money and arranged for his safe pas-
sage to Amsterdam. In June 1685 Burton was again on the run after
the Battle of Sedgemoor and was hiding in Wapping. On August 2,
while waiting for the Gaunts to arrange his passage to Holland, Burton
was arrested.127 Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth Gaunt was incarcerated and
charged with conspiring with others to rebel against the government
and kill the King, although the heart of her offence was harboring a
traitor. Either her husband William had escaped or the authorities were
simply uninterested in him. He was sighted in Amsterdam in November
1685 and was exempted from James II’s General Pardon of March 1686
but later pardoned on March 31, 1686.128 The government’s chief wit-
ness against Elizabeth Gaunt was Burton, who turned king’s evidence
and won himself a pardon.
Gaunt’s trial took place on October 19, 1685, in the Old Bailey. James
Burton, his wife and his daughter, testified against her. The prosecution
claimed that Gaunt had given aid and comfort to Burton knowing full
well that he was an outlaw. Burton recalled his first encounters with
Gaunt, when, in 1683, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot,
she had arranged for his escape to Holland. Burton claimed that she
was anxious to assist his flight overseas because he knew about her hus-
band’s role in the Rye House conspiracy.129 In his discussion of more
recent events, Burton, as well as other witnesses, implicated the absent
William Gaunt far more than Elizabeth. The best the prosecution could
do was to establish that Burton had been in Elizabeth Gaunt’s company.
Burton’s daughter, witnessed Elizabeth with her father: “we . . . met them
in Houndsditch, and my father had Mrs. Gaunt under the arm.” Gaunt
did not deny knowing Burton, but she swore that she did not “contrive
to send him away.”130 Regardless of the fact that two witnesses were
needed to convict Gaunt of treason and that no one could substantiate
whether Gaunt knew Burton was a traitor or not, the judge charged the
jury to bring in a guilty verdict. She was convicted of high treason.
On October 23, Gaunt was taken to Tyburn where she was burnt to
death, the penalty for treason inflicted upon common women. John
127
State Trials, 11: 399–402.
128
BL, Add. 41,812, f. 248; Wigfield, Monmouth Rebellion, Appendix I; CSPD, James
II, 2: 440.
129
State Trials vol. 11: 415.
130
State Trials, vol. 11: 403, 417, 419.
Beattie points out that it was “generally believed in the eighteenth cen-
tury that as an act of mercy executioners strangled women ordered to
be burnt,” but Gaunt was not so fortunate and was literally burned alive
as ordered.131 Many witnessed her death. Roger Morrice wrote that she
died without “terror or dread” and that she took up one of the faggots
and kissed it, saying that she “had a great while longed and desired
to go hence, and now God by his providence had called her, though
in an unexpected way.” The ordinary told her that she should confess
and bewail her sins. She replied that it was her duty to relieve Burton’s
wife and children: “I did it in obedience to the words of our Lord, ‘ye
have clothed the naked, fed the hungry.’ ” Gaunt held up the Bible and
claimed that she had aided Burton’s wife and children “in obedience to
the contents of this book.” William Penn told Burnet that she “died with
a constancy, even to a cheerfulness, that struck all that saw it,” calmly
arranging the straw around her to hasten her burning. The spectators
were “melted to tears.”132
While the details of Gaunt’s trial and death are provocative, they lend
few clues as to why the authorities were so interested in Gaunt and
why they gave her the harshest of sentences. The injustice perpetrated
against Gaunt at her trial was hardly unique among the treason trials
of the 1680s. Perjuring witnesses, impaneled juries, browbeaten juries,
questionable evidence, judicial rule-bending and tyrannical judges were
far from unusual. The Alderman Henry Cornish, who was truly inno-
cent, also lost his life on the testimony of former Whig friends who
perjured themselves for pardons. The treason trial of the elderly Alice
Lisle for harboring Monmouth rebels in Winchester a month earlier was
a complete judicial farce, wherein the notorious Judge George Jeffreys
harangued and bullied the principal witness and finally ordered a reluc-
tant jury to bring the defendant in guilty.133 But what is truly startling
in the case of Elizabeth Gaunt is not her guilt or innocence, for she was
most certainly guilty of treason although not necessarily for harboring
Burton, but rather why James II’s administration pursued her so. Why
was it more interested in her than her husband? William Gaunt was a
Rye House plotter and Monmouth rebel. Why did they not pursue James
131
J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986), p. 79n.
132
Roger Morrice, EB, 3: 47; Burnet, HOHOT, 3: 62.
133
Lisle’s sentence was reversed by an Act of Parliament in 1689. State Trials, 11:
298–380.
Burton himself? He had been outlawed for his part in the Rye House Plot
and had fought at Sedgemoor.
The answer probably has to do with Gaunt’s role as a “nursing
mother.” In the early 1680s, the Secretaries of State were receiving infor-
mation about Gaunt’s activities in the Netherlands. These spy reports
indicate that while both Elizabeth and William were immersed in radical
politics, she probably knew more than he. That spring, as the prepara-
tions for the Duke of Monmouth’s invasion began, Elizabeth Gaunt was
in Amsterdam and active among the Whigs and Dissenters preparing
for Argyle and Monmouth’s invasions. At one point, Monmouth sent
her back to England to instruct the Earl of Macclesfield to be ready to
act in Cheshire. A few weeks later, Gaunt returned to Amsterdam to
find out why Monmouth was so delayed. English agents in Utrecht and
Amsterdam reported her movements and repeatedly pressed for her cap-
ture. They stated time and again that “if she be brought to confession,”
“Mother Gaunt” could reveal much about several “eminent persons”
both in exile and in England.134 Yet these agents also believed that she
might prove obstinate and be less than forthcoming in her testimony.
Perhaps she needed to be threatened.
Burton’s arrest brought Gaunt’s whereabouts to the attention of
the government and provided a reason to arrest and to interrogate
her. James II’s officials may well have promised her leniency if she
would name some grandees. His administration had pardoned far more
incendiary characters, many with longer track records of sedition than
Elizabeth Gaunt. If her initial interrogation and trial failed to frighten
her into compliance, authorities surely thought a death sentence might
bring her around. Facing torture following his capture in Scotland,
the Earl of Arygle named his “nursing mother,” Anne Smith.135 Lord
Grey of Werk, Monmouth’s boon companion, nabbed after Sedgemoor,
wrote a long melodramatic confession, naming everyone involved.136 He
was fully pardoned and went hunting with the King soon after. Gaunt
was given pen, ink, and paper in her cell while awaiting her execu-
tion. Surely, she could have still won a reprieve or have her sentence
commuted. But she revealed nothing. She failed to write a confession
and was thus treated without mercy. Instead she wrote a stirring dying
134
BL Add. 41,818, f.77v.
135
John Willock, A Scot’s Earl in Covenanting Times: Being the Life and Times of
Archibald, the Ninth Earl of Argyle (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1907), p. 406.
136
Grey’s confession was later published as The Secret History Rye of the House Plot
and Monmouth’s Rebellion (London, 1754).
speech which was published immediately in both English and Dutch

and republished numerous times after the Revolution. The speech was
clearly addressed to fellow travelers, Dissenters and Whig radicals. “I do
not find it in my heart the least regret of anything I have done in the ser-
vice of my Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in favoring and succoring any
of his poor sufferers, that have shewn favor to his righteous cause; which
cause, though it be now fallen and trampled on . . . yet it shall revive.”
She quoted Scripture throughout and stated that her sole offence was to
“relieve a poor, unworthy, and distressed family, and lo, I must die for
it.” She ended her speech by laying her blood at the door of the “furi-
ous judge and unrighteous jury . . . together with the great[est] one of all
(James II) by whose power all these, and multitudes of more cruelties are
done.”137
Religious activism and seditious politics readily converged during the
Restoration, particularly amid the most turbulent decades, the 1660s
and 1680s. Women who nursed their spiritual brethren and women
who nursed political radials found a space for female agency and per-
sonal power. Their activities allowed them to venture far from home
and hearth; to form relationships beyond the immediate family; to pro-
tect, patronize, and to “mother” men, who were sometimes their own
husbands, sons or brothers and sometimes not. These women were not
feminists; they were not seeking to transgress gender norms or threaten
domestic patriarchy. But they were clearly activists engaged in oppo-
sition politics. Men depended upon these women and expected them
to help them, hide them, relieve their wants, send them news, stand by
them at the cross and bury their broken bodies. The “back door” political
support that these women provided helped to make the conspiratorial
politics of the 1660s and 1680s possible. Scholars have explored the writ-
ings of Dissenting women, Quakers foremost among them, as well as the
attraction between women writers and royalist politics.138 But they have
137
Mrs. Elizabeth Gaunt’s Last Speech Who Was Burnt at London, October 23, 1685
(London, 1685).
138
The historiography on Dissent and women writers is noted in the Introduc-
tion (notes 10 and 30). On the connection between royalism and women, see
Gwendolyn B. Needham, “Mary de la Riviere Manley, Tory Defender,” Huntington
Library Quarterly 12 (1949): 253–88; Joan K. Kinnaird, “Mary Astell and the
Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” Journal of British Studies 19
(1975): 53–75; Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of
the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1 (1988): 24–39;
Van C. Hartman, “Tory Feminism in Mary Astell’s Bart’lemy Fair,” The Journal of
Narrative Technique 28 (1998): 243–65.
had very little say about politically active women who were not pub-
lished writers and who were attracted to republicanism and Whiggism.
Yet there was a very real affinity between Dissenting women and oppo-
sition/Whig politics from the outset of the Restoration to the Glorious
Revolution. For the godly women explored in this chapter, the appeal
of oppositional politics was obvious. It alone offered hope for liberty
of conscience; opposed the formalism and exclusivity of the Church of
England; decried the immorality of the Stuart Court; and clearly saw the
encroaching papist threat. This is why these women helped desperate
men and why they stood on or by the scaffold. And this is why so many
of them agreed with the regicide, General Thomas Harrison, when he
declared in his dying speech that, “God is a law-maker; he is our King
and he will save us, [and] judge the cause of this people.”139
139
Speeches and Prayers, p. 7.
Figure 2.1 Whitelackington House – George Roberts, The Life, Progresses, and
Rebellion of James, Duke of Monmouth (London, 1844)
2
A Dangerous Woman: Mary
Speke, her Family, and the
Puritan Gentry
And bless thy Saints in the West, oh bless thy sons and daughters
Dying Prayer of Regicide, John Carew1
The Bishop of Bath and Wells, Peter Mews, kept a careful watch over
the Speke family of Whitelackington in Somerset. A thorough-going
royalist, Mews was no friend to the many Puritan gentry families in
the West Country about whose activities he made regular reports to
the authorities in London. But of all the wealthy nonconformist fam-
ilies within his diocese, the Spekes rankled him the most. In early July
1683, Mews informed Secretary Leoline Jenkins that “Mrs. Speak, the
wife of Mr. Speak of Whitelackington in this county is now in London
and hath been there for some time. There is not a more dangerous
woman in the West, and what her sons are I need not tell you.” A cou-
ple weeks later, the Bishop wrote to Jenkins again, imploring him to
have Whitelackington house searched for arms and papers. “I need give
no character of their family. I suppose it is sufficiently known how
actively of late years they have all appeared against his Majesty’s interest,
especially the mother and her son, Hugh . . ..”2
1
The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harrison, October 13; Mr. John Carew,
October 15; Mr. Justice Cooke, Mr. Hugh Peters, October 16 . . . (London, 1660), p. 22.
2
The original letter is in the National Archives, SP 29/427, part 1, f. 20; it is
transcribed in CSPD, Charles II, 25: 8, 178. The transcriptions of the intercepted
Speke letters in the Calendar of State Papers follow the original letters word for
word. Henceforth, I have chosen to cite those in the Calendar and follow their
modernization of the spelling.
58
A Dangerous Woman: Mary Speke and her Family 59
That the matriarch of the large and politically active Speke brood,
Mary Speke, should be so targeted by Mews as particularly dangerous is
curious. Why was she such a threat? As a woman, Mary could not join
the Green Ribbon Club or sign either the 1679 or 1680 Whig petitions
calling for a parliament.3 Unlike her menfolk, there is no evidence that
she was friendly with the perpetrator of the Popish Plot, Titus Oates, or
the leading Whig Lords, such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl
of Shaftesbury, or with William, Lord Russell.4 Mary did not author or
sponsor treasonous writings as did her son, Hugh. And she seems to have
been far better at holding her tongue than her boisterous and pugna-
cious husband, George, who was well known about Somerset for calling
the King an ass and the Queen a whore. The Bishop was well aware of
all this, as were the many Speke enemies and government informants
in Somerset monitoring the goings-on at Whitelackington. Still, Mews
thought that she was the most dangerous, the worst of the lot.
Certainly, Mary Speke was not innocent, particularly by contempo-
rary standards. She had an arrest record and had engaged, insofar as
both authorities in London and royalists in Somerset were concerned, in
a worrisome pattern of behavior. Her frequent trips to London and her
wide circle of correspondents seem to be part of what made Mary Speke
the object of their suspicions. She may have been a “nursing mother”
to Whig radicals in the 1680s, and was perhaps no less active or dan-
gerous than Elizabeth Gaunt. Only Mary Speke, unlike Gaunt, was born
in a manor house and married to a one time defender of the King’s
cause. Above all, she was a stalwart godly gentlewoman, bravely practic-
ing her faith, undaunted by the Restoration Settlement of the Church
and the penal laws against nonconformity. Mary Speke had grown up in
3
The Green Ribbon Club was a Whig club that met at the King’s Head Tavern,
London. It orchestrated anti-papist propaganda, pope-burning processions, and
petition drives. The 1679 and 1680 Whig petitions called for a parliament to
redress the nation’s grievances. J.R. Jones, “The Green Ribbon Club,” Durham
University Journal, 49 (1956): 17–20; Mark Knights, “London Petitions and Par-
liamentary Politics in 1679,” Parliamentary History 12 (1993): 29–46; “London’s
‘Monster’ Petition of 1680,” HJ 36 (1993): 39–67.
4
Titus Oates (1649–1705) supposedly uncovered a Catholic plot to murder
Charles II in 1678, the so-called Popish Plot, resulting in waves of anti-papist
hysteria. Nonetheless, Oates was hero to “true Protestants” like the Spekes,
who never doubted the veracity of his wild tales. On the Popish Plot, see
J.P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1974); Jonathan
Scott, “England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot,” in The Politics of Religion
in Restoration England, eds. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford:
Basil Blackwood, 1990), pp. 108–31.
a Puritan household, and she remained steadfast in her faith in the true
reformed religion, come what may. Although she was indicted for keep-
ing conventicles in 1663, she continued to hold nonconformist meet-
ings at the Speke family residences of Whitelackington and Dillington
as well as support iterant preachers, travel to conventicles throughout
the West and, most consequential of all, raise her children as ardent
believers and defenders of godliness. Her once royalist husband, George,
was now a suspected fanatic and fomenter of sedition. Her daughters
were married to other nonconformists. Her sons, with the exception of
one, were notorious propagators of the Protestant Cause and consorters
with the enemies of the Court. As far as loyalists in the West Country
and London were concerned, Mary Speke had infected her entire family.
A breeder of sedition and a nurturer of Dissent, she was at the heart of
this turbulent and factious family.
The story of Mary Speke and the Speke family of Ilminster, Somerset,
offers the Restoration historian numerous vantage points. The Spekes
were like one of Tolstoy’s “happy families,” insofar as they were very
similar to numerous other Puritan gentry, while at the same time like
“each unhappy family,” peculiar in their own way. Like many of their
gentry neighbors, the Spekes were large landowners who held numer-
ous estates. Their menfolk served in local offices and were members
of Parliament. Like many of their Puritan neighbors, they patronized
nonconformist preachers, employed them in their homes, and carefully
selected the beneficed clergy at their family parish. They socialized with
their Puritan neighbors; their sons and daughters married into these
same families; and they suffered at the hands of the same enemies as
did these families. But the Spekes were unique as well. Other landed
nonconformist families suffered during the Restoration on account of
their religion. But none achieved the notoriety like the Speke fam-
ily of Whitelackington. It was no doubt the consistency and depth
of Speke involvement in all the major crises that began in the late
1670s and continued to the Revolution of 1688/89 that finds them
so frequently in the sources. The Spekes were connected with the
Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Rye House Plot and treason
trials, Monmouth’s Rebellion and aftermath, and the Glorious Revo-
lution. Speke houses were frequently searched for arms; George was
summoned before the royal Court and Privy Council on several occa-
sions to answer for his behavior and that of his wife; he was severely
fined; his daughters went into hiding; his wife was arrested; his eldest
son took refuge abroad; one son was imprisoned; and another was
hanged.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells blamed Mary. Mews may have known
more than we do. In 1683, he reported that Mary kept “a great corre-
spondence.” But these papers are lost to us now.5 What sources that are
available, however, sketch the portrait of a woman, a wife, and mother,
who both significantly influenced her husband, sons, and daughters
and, above all, practiced her faith openly and defiantly. Her audacity
in the face of mounting scrutiny as well as her influence over oth-
ers seems to be what authorities found most disturbing. They looked
to Mary as to the eye of the storm that was the Speke family. The
story of Mary and her family demonstrates just how unsettling the defi-
ant practice of nonconformity was to guardians of the monarchy and
the Church established, and, from the perspective of the Spekes them-
selves, just how intertwined nonconformity was with Whig politics.
What did the Spekes want? Why were they so actively agitating against
the Stuart monarchy? What did Mary’s sons and daughters imbibe
at her feet and at the conventicles? Royalist propaganda envisioned
nightmare scenarios: chaos and regicide, republicanism and fanaticism.
But in the traditional world of the country gentry such wild imagin-
ings would have had little resonance. What Whig politics meant for
the Spekes had everything to do with fear of popery and a desperate
desire for liberty of conscience. Their piety lay at the heart of their
activism.
The Puritan Gentry
Ilmestre . . . withyn a mile of Whitelackington where Master Spek

dwellith
John Leland6
The Spekes were part of a large, amorphous social group known as

the gentry. Their men were “not borne but made,” unlike their supe-
riors, the peerage. In his chapter, “Of Gentlemen,” Sir Thomas Smith
spoke of “whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who studieth in
the universities, who professeth liberall sciences . . . [and] who can live
idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and
5
CSPD, Charles II, 25: 178. I have searched for Mary Speke’s correspondence in
local and national archives to no avail and suspect that she destroyed it.
6
Quoted in James Street, The Mynster of the Ile or, The Story of the Ancient Parish of
Ilminster (Taunton: Chapple & Son, 1904), dedication.
countenance of gentleman . . . shall be taken for a gentleman.”7 Certainly

the Spekes, who could trace their ancestors to the twelfth-century knight
and founder of three Cistercian abbeys, Sir Walter Espec, did not till their
own lands.8 Further, George and his sons were educated and his wife and
daughters, literate. The Spekes and their gentry neighbors described in
this chapter were fairly wealthy and powerful within their own commu-
nities. Most of these Puritan families held landed estates worth £1,000
a year or more.9 While it has been difficult to gage exactly how much
the Spekes were worth, when George Speke filed his will in 1692, he
listed seven manors that valued over £1,000 per year.10 Secondly, the
Spekes and their West Country gentry neighbors exercised authority
within their local community and held public offices in the counties
where they were seated. As captains of the militias, justices of the peace,
deputy lieutenants, sheriffs, and representatives in the House of Com-
mons, they performed the duties that traditionally belonged to the
gentry.
We know very little about the material and mental worlds of the
Spekes. They were wealthy; and their children married into families
of similar, sometimes superior, circumstances. The Spekes could enter-
tain lavishly and employ numerous servants. They frequently traveled
to London and Mary went to Richmond to drink the mineral waters.11
7
Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum: The Manner of Government or Policy of the
Realm of England (1583), ed. L. Aston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1906), pp. 33, 39–40.
8
John Collinson, The History and Antiquities of Somerset, 3 vols. (Taunton, 1791),
1: 67; DNB, s.v. “Espec, Walter.”
9
In the Appendix of J.T. Cliffe’s Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry During
and after the Civil Wars (New York: Routledge, 1988), he lists gentry families
with estate revenues of a £1,000 or more at the time of the mid-century crisis.
Among those discussed in this chapter are: the Hampdens of Great Hampden,
Buckinghamshire; the Pyes of Faringdon, Berkshire; the Pynes of Curry Mallet,
Somerset; the Strodes of Barrington Court, Somerset; the Trenchards of Wolfeton
House, Dorset. The Spekes are not listed in Cliffe’s book on Puritans because
George Speke supported the royalists during the Civil Wars. Mary’s family, the
Pyes of Faringdon, is listed.
10
George Speke’s estate was valued at £ 1,410 p.a. in 1641; it seems to have been
kept intake for the most part by the time of his death. J.A. Hawkins, ed., Sales of
Wards in Somerset, 1603–1641 (Frome: Butler & Tanner, 1965), pp. 57–8; Speke’s
will is in the NA, PROB 28/1249. The hearth tax for 1664–65 lists George Speke
as having 22 chimneys which is far more than most of his Somerset neighbors.
R. Holworthy, Hearth Tax for Somerset, 1664–5 (Taunton: E. Dwelly, 1916), p. 205.
11
George and his sons frequented coffee houses and taverns both in
London and the West. Sociability, visits to and from cousins, friends,
neighbors, and in-laws, played a large and important role in their lives.
But access to their mental world remains particularly difficult. Their let-
ters make references to farming, horses, gaming, and legal disputes, but
only very rarely to books and never to plays.12 They probably had a
library similar to that of their neighbor, William Strode of Barrington
Court that contained popular works like Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of
the World and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.13 The letters of John and Hugh, the
two eldest sons, do speak of London politics, newsletters, and propa-
ganda sheets, but make no references to political ideologies or to the
great thinkers of the early modern era. Searches of the Speke family
homes would uncover pistols, a blunderbuss, and “a keeper’s gun to kill
deer,” but never mention finding any seditious pamphlets or books like
those burnt at Oxford in 1683.14
We can imagine, however, that Mary’s day-to-day existence, like that
of other gentlewomen, was a hectic one. Married in 1641, the first
twenty-five years of her married life were consumed with pregnancies,
infants, and small children in addition to her duties as the female head
of household. Starting in 1642, Mary had ten live births, at intervals
varying between two and five years.15 By 1681, she had already buried
four of her children and would bury one more before she died in 1697.
12
CSPD, Charles II, 23: 121; 21:185–6: The eldest son, John, who was educated at
Wadham College, does mention two books, an enchiridion (possibly Erasmus’s
Enchiridion militis Christiani or Francis Quarles’s popular Enchiridion, containing
institutions divine, contemplative, practical, moral, ethical ,etc., which went into thir-
teen editions in the seventeenth century) and Moses Pitt’s English Atlas (London,
1680).
13
See Strode’s will, NA, PROB 11/323/2.
14
CSPD, Charles II, 21: 175–6; CSPD, Charles II, 25: 316, 399; The Judgment and
Decree of the University of Oxford, Pass’d in their Convocation, July 21, 1683, against
certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines (London, 1683).
15
Since most couples married late in the seventeenth century, married women
would normally only bear four or five children of whom only two or three
reached adulthood. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Repro-
duction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 62. Even Lawrence Stone’s
class-based analysis of marriage has elite women marrying around age 26. The
Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979),
abridged edition, p. 42. Mary’s fecundity speaks to both her youth when first
married (age sixteen) and general good health. Nor were large numbers of chil-
dren entirely unusual among similarly wealthy seventeenth-century families.
Alexander Popham of Wellington, Somerset, had eight children; six of whom
The first child, Joan, baptized at St. Margaret’s Westminster, died in

infancy. Their eldest son, George, born in 1644, died at age twenty-four.
Another son, Thomas, died at age twenty and a daughter, Elizabeth,
died unmarried in 1681 at age twenty-four.16 What circumstances lay
behind the deaths of these young adults is unknown. Dying young was
far from uncommon. George’s mother, Joan Portman, lost three of her
brothers, all in their early twenties and one sister in her thirties.17 Yet,
regardless of the frequency with which death haunted large families,
the grief over losing so many adult children, in particular, was surely
devastating. “The death of young Miss Speke,” wrote John Trenchard,
referring to Elizabeth, “has much afflicted” that family.18 Mary undoubt-
edly found consolation in her deep devotion, and perhaps the demise
of so many of her children deepened her religious zeal. When Mary
was not birthing or burying her children, or later in the 1680s, run-
ning up to London to scold her second son, Hugh, for his dissolute
behavior, she managed the household economy. Manors, as Mark Goldie
has aptly put it, were like “small rural factories.”19 Great households
were porous places with servants, neighbors, sons, daughters and their
spouses, cousins and clergy, constantly coming and going. Food and
drink needed to be processed and provided. Cider and ale were brewed;
cheese and butter, churned. Vegetable and herb gardens needed tend-
ing. Animals were everywhere: large dogs lounging on the carpets and
under the tables, looking for handouts; cocks and hens strutting about
the yard; horses in the stables needing to be groomed, shod, and exer-
cised. All of this and more would have fallen under the purview of the
female head of household. She directed the servants, oversaw the pro-
duction and consumption of food, ordered the linen and needlework,
and paid the bills.
survived to adulthood. Sir Wadham Wyndlam of Orchard Wyndlam, Somerset,

had twelve children, of whom ten survived.
16
Bernard Burke, A Genealogy and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great
Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1939), 3: 2103.
17
A.W. Vivian-Neal, “Materials for the History of Orchard Portman,” Somersetshire
Archeological and Natural History Society, 89 (1943): 35–53. On child mortality,
see E.A. Wrighley and R.S. Shofield, “English Population History from Fam-
ily Reconstitution: Summary Results, 1600–1799,” Population Studies 37 (1983):
177–83.
18
DHC, BLX/D60, f. 56. Letter to Henry Trenchard by John Trenchard (October
1681).
19
Mark Goldie, John Locke and the Masham at Oates (Cambridge: Churchill
College, University of Cambridge, 2004), p. 16.
Women like Mary were also responsible for maintaining a godly

household, one that was well ordered, wherein parents, children, and
servants participated in communal worship usually twice a day. Godly
families met together for prayers, often accompanied by scriptural
readings and the singing of the psalms. Household worship might
include fasting and special days of prayer. Although the practice of
strict Sabbatarianism was waning in the late Stuart era, many Puri-
tan families still honored it.20 Mary probably led her family in prayer
and catechized the children and servants. She maintained at least
eight different nonconformist ministers at various times, and both
Whitelackington and Dillington (the two main Speke residents) were
places of meeting for Presbyterian services. One report by an infor-
mant speaks of a conventicle at Dillington of 1,000 people; another
speaks of 200 people gathered at Whitelackington to hear James Strong,
an ejected Presbyterian minister and long time Speke friend.21 When
Strong dedicated a book of sermons to Mary, he noted her “constant
and diligent attendance in worship.”22 Mary would have also practiced
private devotions. Numerous funeral sermons speak of Puritan gentry
women who were assiduous in their daily devotions. Dorothy, Lady
Drake of Buckland Abbey, Devon, “spent much time, day by day, in
her closet devotions. Praying, reading of the Scriptures and other good
books took up some hours of her time every day . . . She knew closet
prayer is as much a duty as Church prayer.”23 Anne, Lady Burgoyne of
Sutton, Bedfordshire, read the Old Testament once and the New Testa-
ment three times every year. These women often copied out passages
from the Bible and other edifying books. Mary Speke would have prac-
ticed similar devotions. The activities of Puritan gentlewomen often
20
J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged, 1650–1700 (New York: Routledge, 1993),
Chapter 11: “The Godly Household,” pp. 136–46.
21
CSPD, Charles II, 3: 116; G. Lyon Turner, Original Records of Early Nonconformity
under Persecution and Indulgence, 2 vols. (London, 1911), 2: 1111–12, 1: 7.
On Strong, see John D. Ramsbotton, “Presbyterians and ‘Partial Conformity’ in
the Restoration Church of England,” JEH 43 (1992): 260.
22
James Strong, Lydia’s Heart Opened: or, Divine Mercy Magnified in the Conversion
of a Sinner by the Gospel (London, 1675), dedicated “To the Religious Mrs. Mary
Speke of Whitelackington,” pages unnumbered.
23
This sermon was delivered by Joseph Rowe, an Anglican cleric of Puritan sym-
pathies. Thomas Hervey, ed., Some Unpublished Papers Relating to the Family of Sir
Francis Drake (Colmber, 1887), p. 50. Many women (and men) practiced “closet
devotions.” A closet was like a small, private office which could be used for
solitary prayer and meditation as well as a place to hold private audiences.
extended beyond the household as well to charity work among their

neighbors and confessional community.
What was certainly true of Mary, as it was of numerous godly women,
was that she took care to raise her children in her faith. Mary probably
did this alone. While she undoubtedly influenced her husband, it is far
from clear whether George, a royalist during the Civil Wars, was ever
fully converted to Presbyterianism.24 Religion in the Speke family was
clearly the mother’s domain. Thus we can imagine that she, like Puritan
gentlewomen for whom there are better sources, strove to instruct her
children, and probably the household servants as well, in the founda-
tions of their religion. Mary, Lady Langham charged her children with
“reading and committing to memory both Scripture and catechism.”
Edward Harley describes his mother, Abigail, as taking every occasion to
instruct her children in the “principles of religion, virtue and honour.”25
That Mary Speke successfully immersed her children in the culture of
nonconformity there can be no doubt. Perhaps the only surprise was
the depth of their commitment as demonstrated by their defiance in the
face of persecution and their aggressive Whig activism. R.C. Richardson
has argued that the godly household with its daily family devotions
fostered family solidarity and led to considerable intermarriage among
Puritan families.26 The Speke children, under their mother’s guidance,
bear this out. Speke daughters, Mary and Philipa, and Speke sons, John,
Hugh, and Charles, all connected themselves to other nonconformists.27
24
The evidence suggests that George tolerated and tried to protect his wife and
his children’s nonconformity, but did not partake in it. For example, a description
of a conventicle in Otterton speaks of John, the eldest surviving son, participat-
ing while his father waits “in the hall.” Emanuel Green, The March of William
of Orange through Somerset (London, 1892), p. 53. In 1682, amid a heated polit-
ical argument, a neighbor asked George whether he had “turned Presbyterian.”
George replied merely, “The Presbyterians are the honestest [sic] men and the
preservers of the country’s rights.” CSPD, Charles II, 26: 1.
25
These and other Puritan mothers are described in Cliff, The Puritan Gentry, pp.
143–6.
26
R.C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-west England (Manchester: Manchester
27
There is very little information on William Speke, the youngest son, probably
because he was only around 14 at the time of Monmouth’s Rebellion, the apogee
of the Speke family activism. The second youngest brother, Charles, executed in
1685, left William the bulk of his inheritance and Mary, his mother, left all of
her estate to William when she died in 1697. Charles’s will is recorded in Matilda
Pine-Coffin, The Speke Family History (Exeter, 1914), p. 21. Mary’s will is in the
National Archives, PROB11/491, f. 133r.
These were their spouses and in-laws, their friends, their political allies,
and their business partners. When they sought or gave advice, borrowed
money, or sold a horse, it was with another nonconformist. Like their
mother, they attended conventicles, and sometimes they were arrested
for doing so.28 As much as they could, they surrounded themselves with
people like themselves, stridently anti-papist and distressed over their
inability to worship according to their beliefs.
The Speke Family Network
My Mother and my Brethren are these which hear the Word of God,
and do it
Luke 8:21
That the Speke children were nourished on nonconformity by their

mother’s instruction and example is clear. But from whom did Mary
learn her Puritanism? Mary was the eldest daughter of Sir Robert Pye
of Faringdon, Berkshire.29 Her father was an auditor of the exchequer
and a client of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.30 Pye was in the
rather awkward position of defending his master, Buckingham, at the
turbulent Parliament of 1628. Despite this and his diligent work as an
executor for the Villiers family following Buckingham’s assassination,
Pye sided with Parliament in the 1640s, though his support was at best
lukewarm, and he was often suspected of royalist sympathies. He rep-
resented Woodstock at the Long Parliament and was secluded at Pride’s
Purge in December 1648. Although Pye seems to have been a merely
moderate Presbyterian and parliamentarian (he sat on the committee
that oversaw the destruction of Catholic images in the captured royal
regalia), he did link his family through marriage to the so-called Great
Patriot, John Hampden. His eldest son and heir, Robert Pye, married
Hampden’s daughter, Anne. Of young Robert’s support for Parliament
there could be no doubt, at least during the war. Robert Pye, the younger,
28
Philipa was apprehended at a conventicle at Taunton in 1683; John was spotted
at one in Otterton in 1685; CSPD, Charles II, 26: 229; Green, The March of William
of Orange, p. 53.
29
She was probably the Mary Pye who was baptized at Richmond, Surrey in 1625.
M. Zook, “Speke, Mary (fl. 1641–1697),” ODNB.
30
He was knighted in 1621 and purchased the estate at Faringdon sometime in
the 1620s. He married Mary Croker of Battisford, Gloucestershire, and they raised
six children. G.E. Aylmer, “Pye, Sir Robert (bap. 1585, d. 1662),” ODNB.
Mary’s brother, raised a troop of horse for the Earl of Essex at the out-
set of the war; he was wounded at Cirencester in 1643; he commanded
a cavalry regiment in 1644; and in 1645 he was appointed colonel of
a regiment of horse in the New Model Army. Colonel Pye heroically
defended Leicester against the King’s forces and published an account
of the siege.31 Yet despite his military bravery, Colonel Pye was no zealot
and that became clear during peacetime, climaxing in January 1660
when he presented a petition from Berkshire requesting the return of the
secluded members of the Long Parliament, many of whom were believed
to be royalists. His actions landed him in prison, only to be released
a month later by General Monck. This incident won Colonel Pye the
gratitude of Charles II following the Restoration, and Pye was issued a
baronetcy in December 1662.32 The Pye family seems to have lived out
the tumultuous 1680s in relative quiet, unlike their cousins, the Spekes.
Still the Bishop of Bath and Wells was suspicious and reported in 1683
that the Pyes of Faringdon were in league with all “the fanatic families
in that part of Berkshire.”33
The rather tepid stance of Mary’s father during the hostilities between
King and Parliament was further displayed in his choice of a husband
for his eldest daughter. In May 1641, Mary Pye married George Speke of
Whitelackington, Ilminster. George was only thirteen when his father
died and his wardship was sold to Sir Robert Pye for £1,800.34 Although
it was a marriage arranged for primarily financial reasons, the elder Pye
might still have been dismayed by his young son-in-law’s eager exertion
for the King’s cause. Youthful though he was, George raised regiments of
foot and horse for the King’s army and lent Prince Rupert 1,000 crowns
during the siege of Bridgwater. After the fall of Bridgwater in 1645,
George was one of six hostages selected by General Fairfax and impris-
oned. Only after the intervention of his brother-in-law, Colonel Pye, was
George liberated, though he paid a heavy fine.35 Speke remained under
31
Aylmer, Ibid; C.H. Firth, “Pye, Sir Robert (c. 1622–1701);” ODNB; Robert Pye,
A More Exact Relation of the Siege Laid to the Town of Leicester . . . Delivered to the
House of Commons by Sir Robert Pye (London, 1645).
32
Mary Frear Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640–41 (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1954), p. 317; HMC: Report on the Manuscripts of F. W.
Leyborne-Popham, Esq. (Norwich, 1899), p. 144.
33
34
F.N. MacNamara and A. Story-Maskelyne, eds., The Parish Register of Kensington,
1559–1675 (London, 1890), p. 71; Hawkins, ed., Sales of Wards, pp. 57–9.
35
Speke paid £2,390. The six hostages were all prominent West Country gen-
tlemen, many of whom would later become the Speke’s royalist enemies.
suspicion during the 1650s. He was imprisoned again in 1655 for com-
plicity in a royalist conspiracy, and in 1657 he was ordered to rebuild
a hospital demolished during the war out of his own funds. In April of
1660, George was among the eager Somerset gentry that sent Charles II a
declaration of their happiness at his return. In the years that followed,
George claimed, more than once, that he had been a “great sufferer”
for the royal cause and this appeal to his past record would, more than
once, save him and his wife from the full wrath of the Court.36
If Mary followed her father and brother in their political and reli-
gious persuasions, moderate though they may have been, were she and
George at odds during the Interregnum? Or was there far more common
ground among affluent gentry families like the Pyes and the Spekes than
our vision of a divided society allows? Certainly, Colonel Pye used his
influence with Parliament to rescue his young and perhaps impetuous
Cavalier brother-in-law in 1645. Still further, there is no indication that
George and Mary’s marriage was ever extraordinarily unhappy or that
the couple disagreed about Mary’s deepening religiosity or their chil-
dren’s political activities. They began having babies almost immediately,
and Mary’s long series of pregnancies only ceased when she was in her
mid-forties. George and Mary were young by contemporary standards
when they married.37 He was seventeen; she was sixteen. It seems highly
probable that they grew together in love and respect and that certainly
by the 1660s, George, in his prime, had come to admire his wife’s devo-
tion. He certainly tried to protect her. By the 1680s, “old Mr. Speke,”
now in his fifties, had become a thorough-going political radical, willing
to see the Stuarts displaced by force if necessary.
George Speke may well have been jubilant in1660 with the return of
the monarchy as was most of the nation. The Pyes were pleased, as were
George’s other cousins, the Portmans of Orchard Portman, Somerset.
P.F. Campbell, “Two Generations of Walronds,” The Journal of Barbados Museum

and Historical Society 38 (1989): 268, 271; On George Speke’s Cavalier days, see
Hugh Speke, Some Memoirs of Most Remarkable Passages and Transactions on the
Late Happy Revolution in 1688 (Dublin, 1709), p. 34.
36
M. Zook, “George Speke (1623–1689),” ODNB; The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg,
1659–1661, ed. W.L. Sashse (London: Royal Historical Society, 1961), pp. 70–1;
Letter from George Speke to Middleton (August 1685), BL, Add. 41, 804, f. 31.
37
See above, note 15. The mean age of first marriage for English women in the
seventeenth century was around 26 and around 27 for men. While there was a
low legal threshold, a minimum age for valid marriage of 12 for girls and 14 for
boys, early marriage was clearly frowned upon in the prescriptive literature of the
time. Macfarlane, Marriage, pp. 24–6, 211–15.
Joan Speke (née Portman) was George’s mother. Her father, Sir William
Portman, a strident royalist, was taken prisoner at Naseby and died
in the Tower in 1645. His son, Joan’s brother, also named Sir William
Portman, was a political maverick, who never quite fit in either the Cav-
alier or Roundhead, Tory, or Whig camps. He was an early member of
the Royal Society; he sat for Taunton in the Cavalier Parliament; and
he was famous for his “boundless charity.” Portman was one of the
most affluent and influential men in the West of England.38 Orchard
Portman, like Whitelackington, lay just a few miles outside Taunton and
the Spekes and Portmans often visited one another. In the late 1670s
and early 1680s, their politics seemed to match. They both believed in
the Popish Plot and supported the bill in Parliament to bar the Duke
of York from the royal succession. They both entertained the so-called
Protestant successor, James, Duke of Monmouth, on his western progress
in 1680. But thereafter their political stances began to diverge as the
Spekes became ever more radicalized, and Sir William began to regret
his former opposition to the Duke of York. In 1680, Portman along
with Speke enemies, Bishop Mews and Sir William Wyndham, tried to
organize royalists during the parliamentary elections, mainly to prevent
John Speke from becoming elected. A year later, much to the Spekes’
dismay, it was reported that Portman had begun to drink to the Duke of
York’s health.39
But prior to Portman’s open defection from the Protestant Cause,
so dear to Speke hearts, the two families had been close and George
and Mary’s grown children often stayed at Orchard Portman, and they
wrote to their uncle. They also spent time at the great houses of other
like-minded gentry families in the West Country with whom they had
much in common. Most of these landed families had supported Parlia-
ment during the Civil War, and most had welcomed the restoration of
the monarchy, but had become disillusioned by the 1670s and increas-
ingly worried about the growth of popery at Court. They were usually
Presbyterians and occasional conformists in order that they might con-
tinue to provide the kind of local authority and national leadership to
which gentry families were traditionally entrusted and entitled. Typi-
cal were families like the Pynes of Curry Mallet, Somerset. John Pyne
had actively supported Parliament in the 1640s and had become part of
a radical faction within the Somerset country committee. In the early
38
Robin Clifton, “Sir William Portman, sixth baronet (1643–1690),” ODNB; House
of Commons, 3:265–7.
39
Bodleian Library, Wood MS. F. 40, f. 293; CSPD, Charles II, 22: 515.
1660s he was often arrested on suspicion of plotting. He kept a private

conventicle in his house for his family and a few neighbors, openly
declaring that he “cannot conform to the discipline of the Church of
England.” After John Pyne’s death in 1678, his wife and sons were often
spotted at the same conventicles as were the Speke children.40
The lives of the Spekes were particularly intertwined with the
Prideauxs of Forde Abbey, at Thorncombe on the Devon-Dorset bor-
der, and the Strodes of Barrington Court, Ilchester, Somerset. Edmund
Prideaux married his daughter, Katherine, to George Speke’s eldest son
and heir, John, and when John was not in residence at Dillington, he
was often at Forde Abbey. The Presbyterian Prideauxs and the Spekes had
much in common and were close friends and allies. Edmund Prideaux’s
wife, Margaret, who died in 1683, named John the executor of her will;
and she generously remembered not only “my friend Mrs. Mary Speke,”
but all of Mary’s children, except for the black sheep, Hugh.41 Edmund
Prideaux patronized nonconforming preachers and made his house a
great “receptacle of all fanatics.”42 A supporter of the Exclusion Bill
and marked “honest” by Shaftesbury, he famously declared that it was
“better to live in slavery under the Turk” than to live under popery in
England. Prideaux, along with his son-in-law, John Speke, was reported
to have had some involvement in the Whig conspiracy, known as the
Rye House Plot.43 But what was more apparent was that Prideaux, like
the Spekes, placed his hope with the Protestant Duke, Monmouth, and
like the Spekes again, he suffered for it.
So did the Strodes of Barrington Court, whose house lay just three
miles north of Whitelackington. When William Strode’s father, a colonel
in the parliamentarian army, was arrested by his royalist enemies in
Somerset in 1661, he proudly expressed what most Puritan families felt
at the Restoration, “that indeed he was a presbyter and ever was so since
he knew what religion was but . . . [nonetheless] . . . was as good a sub-
ject and much rejoicing in His Majesty’s Government as any man.”44
Yet like so many of their neighbors, the Strodes became increasingly
40
House of Commons, 1660–1700, 3: 643–4; Keeler, Long Parliament, p. 319; Cliffe,
Gentry Besieged, p. 85; Green, March, p. 53.
41
Frederick Brown, Abstracts of Somersetshire Wills, 4 vols. (London, 1889), 4: 10.
42
There were numerous reports of conventicles held at Forde Abbey. Turner,
Original Records, 1: 44.
43
House of Commons, 1660–1700, 3: 288; CSPD, Charles II, 23: 26.
44
Quoted in H.A. Helyar, “The Arrest of Col. William Strode of Barrington, in
1661,” Somerset Archeological & Natural History Society 37 (1891): 33.
alienated by the direction of the Court. William Strode, the younger, was
considered by royalists to be a leader of the fanatics and disaffected in
Somerset. In 1679, he and John Speke sat for Ilchester and supported the
first Exclusion Bill.45 In preparation for the Oxford Parliament of 1681,
Strode entertained lavishly, with “great treats in town and large invita-
tions of his party to his house in Barrington.”46 And he too, along with
his brother, Edmund Strode of Shepton Mallet, supported Monmouth’s
unfortunate rebellion.
However, no man had more influence over the Spekes, for good or
for ill, than Sir John Trenchard of Bloxworth. He “managed” their son,
John, and married their youngest daughter, Philipa, and he was show-
ered with praise and affection by George and Mary. Trenchard hailed
from an old Dorset family that had intermarried with the Speke fam-
ily throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nursed on
Roundhead politics and religious nonconformity as a child, John was
knee-deep in the most extreme Whig conspiracies of the 1680s. Wealthy,
popular, and outspoken, he was known as the “movement man of the
West” for his supposed, though never tried, ability to raise hundreds
of men at a moment’s notice. An Exclusionist MP, Trenchard was the
chairman of the Green Ribbon Club that George Speke and three of his
sons joined.47 Even before his marriage to Philipa in 1681, Trenchard
was a regular at Whitelackington. In 1683, Bishop Mews referred to him
as Mary Speke’s “darling.” George was no less enamored with him and
when queried by a neighbor as to why he would marry his daughter to
Trenchard, George replied, “My son Trenchard is so brave and forward
a man that I do not question but see him Lord Chancellor in a little
time.”48 Trenchard, like his father-in-law, was not one to mince words
and reports of his declaring that, “a Trenchard had as much right to
the crown as any Stuart,” were used against him during the Rye House
Plot trials in the heady summer of 1683.49 Trenchard may have had
the Spekes in his thrall, but he was also a loyal friend and did all that
45
The election was contested by Tory candidates, but Speke and Strode prevailed.
The Case of the Petitioners, William Strode and John Speke, Esquires (London, 1681).
46
CSPD, Charles II, 22: 514. Also see, Thomas Serel, “On the Strodes of
Somersetshire,” Somerset Journal 13 (1856–66): 6–20.
47
CSPD, Charles II, 25: 356; John Burke, ed., Royal Families of England, Scotland
and Wales, 2 vols. (London, 1851), 2: pedigree CIX; Alan J. Miller, “Sir John
Trenchard – The Movement Man of the West,” The Dorset Year Book (1996),
pp. 17–20; Robin Clifton, “Trenchard, Sir John (1649–1995),” ODNB.
48
CSPD, Charles II, 25: 178, 430.
49
he could to aid his in-laws following their disastrous participation in

Monmouth’s Rebellion.
Whig Politics in the 1680s
the greatest fanatick of a fool this day in England, one Speke,

esquire50
How and why did the Spekes become involved in Whig politics? Why
did they feel it was necessary to join the forces of opposition to the
Court? Was there a turning point in which they felt they must join the
fray in London rather than live a sedate country existence? The sources
do not always tell us a simple or straightforward story. There are gaps
and silences. The government intercepted some of the Speke correspon-
dence, but by no means all. Mary’s letters are lost though we know she
kept up a “great correspondence.” There are no Speke family diaries.
Hugh’s partisan memoir of his family’s suffering was written long after
the events and motivated by his penury.51 The story of Speke’s growing
entanglement with radical Whig politics in the 1680s that follows, then,
is based necessarily on some guess work, verified as closely as possible
by the sources.
George Speke welcomed the restored monarchy in 1660. But dis-
appointment must have set in rather quickly. Charles II’s Declaration
from Breda (April 1660) in which he promised “a liberty to tender con-
sciences” proved meaningless.52 Instead, the Cavalier Parliament’s series
of penal laws against any kind of religious nonconformity from the
episcopal Church of England crushed Puritan hopes for any kind of com-
prehension. The Speke family’s first real taste of the new regime came
in 1663 when Mary was indicted for keeping a conventicle. George,
as High Sheriff of Somerset, sought to protect his wife and was highly
incensed when he was unable. Nonetheless, Mary continued to host
and attend Presbyterian services. In April 1663, Sir John Warre reported
to Secretary Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, that the “chief person at
this conventicle [in Ilminster] being George Speke’s wife who, though
indicted for it at last assizes, still keeps up the conventicles, and her
husband, a deputy lieutenant and justice of the peace, permits it and
50
Letter to Anthony Wood in 1680 referring to George Speke. Bodleian Library,
Wood MS. F. 40, f. 293.
51
Hugh Speke, Some Memoirs of the Late Happy Revolution (London, 1715).
52
See below, Chapter 1, n9.
threatened the constables and church wardens who indicted her.” Speke
not only permitted his wife’s highly visible nonconformity, he refused
to do anything in his official capacity to disturb Presbyterian meetings
in Taunton and Bridgewater “though much importuned to do some-
thing by those who live near and fear to be destroyed.”53 One wonders
if this was George Speke’s turning point: his inability to shield Mary
followed by his own dismissal from the commission of the peace soon
after. By May 1663, George began speaking of the “malice of his ene-
mies,” wondering “under what colour they work, [he] having always
deserved well from the King.”54 Was this, he wondered, the monarchy
that he suffered for in his youth?
We know very little about Speke affairs in the early 1670s. No sources
record how they reacted to Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of
March 1672 or the passing of the Test Act by Parliament in 1673, which
made it difficult for nonconformists to hold office without at least
occasionally attending services in the Established Church. Nor do we
know how they felt about the Duke of York’s subsequent acknowledge-
ment of his Catholicism. After 1673, George Speke and his sons must
have become, like most Puritan gentlemen, “occasional conformists.”
This would hardly have been a terrible burden, although it was prob-
ably resented nonetheless. The Speke family controlled the rectory at
Whitelackington church, and it would certainly have been easy for them
to install puritanical clerics fairly agreeable to their own principles.
The Spekes resurface in the sources in the late 1670s just as the crises
over popery and the royal succession began to capture the nation’s
attention. By 1680, the five eldest Speke children, ranging from around
age fifteen to thirty, were all keenly politically conscious. Unfortunately,
we know the least about the Speke daughters, Mary and Philipa. The
evidence that exists does suggest that they shared the religious and
political sentiments of their parents and brothers. Even after Mary and
Philipa married, they stayed at Whitelackington regularly and moved
within their parents’ orbit of friends and family. The eldest daughter,
Mary, married fellow Presbyterian, Thomas Jennings of Burton Pynsent
in Curry Rivel, Somerset sometime in the 1670s.55 They had a son and
53
CSPD, Charles II, 3: 116. The royalist, Sir John Warre of Kingston, Somerset, was
a member of the commission of peace and profoundly hostile to nonconformists.
54
55
There is little information on Thomas Jennings. The Hearth tax list for 1664–65
lists him as an “esquire” with thirteen chimneys. He seems to have been fairly
wealthy. Holworthy, Hearth Tax, 1: 13.
two daughters before Thomas died in 1680. In the 1680s, the “Widow
Jennings” maintained a strong presence at Whitelackington where her
opinion was valued. The government considered her an outspoken critic
and an admirer of the Duke of Monmouth. Mary Jennings was also
a friend of Thomas Dare, the radical goldsmith who was Monmouth’s
paymaster during the Rebellion, and the Quaker writer, John Whiting.56
Philipa, the youngest daughter, sealed her parent’s love and admiration
for John Trenchard by marrying him in 1682. She was only eighteen
whereas he was thirty-three and already a man of some standing, com-
plete with a history of political opposition. Trenchard was also a regular
fixture at Whitelackington where he kept a study. Philipa shared John’s
hazards throughout the 1680s: staying close prisoner with him in the
Tower following the Rye House Plot revelations and following him into
exile in Europe at the outset of Monmouth’s invasion.57
Of the Speke brothers, the sources are richer, especially for the eldest
brothers, John and Hugh, who frequently corresponded. Their lives
intersected with the affairs of state at all the crucial points in the 1680s.
The eldest son and heir, John, had studied at Wadham College, Oxford,
and Lincoln’s Inn, toured Europe, and married.58 The second son, Hugh,
who also studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, had a growing reputation for
political meddling, gaming, and extravagant living. By the late 1670s,
John was immersed in local and national politics. Like his father before
him he held various local offices, and both he and his father sat at the
1679 Exclusion Parliament where, not surprisingly, they voted to bar
the so-called “popish successor,” the Duke of York, from the throne. As
his letters to his brother, Hugh, and others reveal, John was also deeply
involved in the propagation of Whig plots. “I was with Mr. [Titus] Oates
this morning,” John wrote to Hugh from London in June 1680. There he
gathered more information about the trials of the popish priests, named
by Oates as conspiring to burn London and murder the King, which
John then passed on to Hugh and which Hugh, a great rumor-monger,
56
Somersetshire Wills, 2: 10; CSPD, Charles II, 23: 121; 25: 247; John Whiting,
Persecution Exposed in Some Memoirs Relating to the Suffering of John Whiting, and
Many Others Called Quakers (London, 1715), p. 141.
57
To avoid gender confusion, I have added an “a” to Philip Trenchard’s first name.
However, her name was really “Philip.” This is how she herself spelled it and how
the sources of the era spell it. Nineteenth-century historians and genealogists
could not accept the fact that her name was “Philip” and always added an “a,”
but this is actually incorrect. CSPD, Charles II, 25: 16, 25. BL, Add. 41,817, f. 274v.
58
Wadham had a strong West Country connection. Joseph Wells, Wadham College
(London, 1898), p. 30.
passed on to others. John sent Hugh more news a week later con-
cerning narratives of the Popish Plot and recommending anti-Catholic
literature.59
Both John and Hugh kept a wide circle of correspondents, and both
were in the business of spreading anti-Court and anti-papist news, gos-
sip, and rumor. But they were being watched, as were their father and
mother back in Somerset. The Spekes’ very public show of affection for
the opposition leader, John Trenchard, and their conventicle-going as
well as George Speke’s own outrageous remarks to friend and foe alike
were observed and recorded. The Spekes garnered numerous enemies,
the most diligent of whom were their own neighbors. Among those who
spied on Speke activity and reported to London were: the Walronds of
Sea, Ilminster, the Wyndhams of Orchard Wyndham, St. Decuman’s,
and above all, Peter Mews, Bishop of Bath of Wells. Henry Walrond
was a die-hard royalist. His family’s estate was within a few miles of
Whitelackington, making the Walronds especially troublesome to the
Spekes. Sir William Wyndham was somewhat more circumspect. Con-
sidered a tepid royalist during the 1670s, he later threw his support
behind the Duke of York and voted against tampering with the royal
succession. But what made Wyndham and Walrond most threatening
to the Spekes was their readiness to disrupt conventicles in and around
Taunton.60
The Spekes were certainly warned by friends that they were being
watched. In August 1679, Hugh wrote a highly flammable anti-Court
letter to his uncle, Sir William Portman. Portman was incensed and wor-
ried about how such a letter, if intercepted, could damage both his and
young Speke’s reputation. “Take care,” wrote one of Hugh’s friends, and
do not take “false measure of Sir William for though he is against Popery
and the Duke of York, yet he is firm to King and Church.”61 But the
Spekes did not take care and were impervious to repeated warnings. The
Bishop of Bath and Wells made sure that the King and the Duke of York
were kept abreast of their behavior. Mews caught the Court’s attention
in the spring of 1680 when he reported that George Speke declared that
the King was a papist and Monmouth was the true heir of the throne.
Secretary Jenkins wrote back to Mews, telling him that both Charles
II and his brother, James, had read his letter and were “very sensible of
your watchfulness and zeal.”62
59
CSPD, Charles II, 21: 176, 185–6.
60
On Walrond’s violence against conventicles, see Street, Mynster of Ile, pp. 205–7.
61
62
The Court signaled its readiness to move against the Spekes in

the spring of 1680 when a warrant for George Speke’s arrest, osten-
sibly for pledging his support for the Duke of Monmouth, arrived
at Whitelackington while the family was entertaining numerous gen-
tlemen, including John Trenchard.63 George rallied his friends and
appeared before the Court with a train of no less than forty promi-
nent West Country men. He was in luck. Prince Rupert was with the
King and remembered Speke’s contributions to the royalist cause dur-
ing the Civil Wars. Naturally, Speke himself reminded Charles II as
well. Charles was generous, and Speke was released. He dined with
the Prince that evening and came home emboldened rather than chas-
tened.64 But George’s friends and his eldest son, John, himself fresh
from a run-in with the law, were worried. John wrote to Hugh, “since
his [George’s] return he has been encouraged to be silent and not con-
cern himself with public affairs, instead he gives himself more liberty
and talks more at random and dangerous than formerly, which is a
great affliction to all his friends.”65 George ranted and raved against
Henry Walrond, Bishop Mews, William Portman, the King, the Queen,
the Duke of York and all the bishops.66 His language was colorful; his
meaning, indisputable.
Three months later, in August 1680, James, Duke of Monmouth, and
his handlers decided to display just how truly popular he was among the
Puritan gentry and the common folk of the West, many of whom were
Dissenters. Thus Monmouth, the so-called Protestant Duke, went on an
extended progress through the West Country. From Wiltshire, the Duke
passed into Ilchester, his destination, Whitelackington. His progress was
celebrated in a Whig broadside. Ten miles off from Whitelackington,
“he was met by 2,000 on horse,” and the numbers increased as he drew
closer. The roads were strewn with flowers; people shouting, “God Bless
King Charles and the Protestant Duke.” At Whitelackington, the crowd
was supposedly 20,000 strong. The park’s palings were thrown down to
admit them. The Duke and his attendants took refreshments under an
old chestnut tree that stood before the house. George Speke “set out sev-
eral hog heads and vessels of beer, ale and cider to entertain the people.”
The Spekes’ excitement is easy to imagine. Monmouth knew George, the
63
George Roberts, The Life, Progresses and Rebellion of James, Duke of Monmouth Life
of Monmouth, 2 vols. (London, 1844; reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing,
LCC 2007), 2: 318; Street, Mynster of Ile, p. 217.
64
CSPD, Charles II, 22: 690–1.
65
66
CSPD, Charles II, 21: 471, 505; 25: 430–1; 26: 1–2.
three eldest Speke sons (John, Hugh, and Charles), and John Trenchard.
Perhaps this was the first time the Duke met the Speke women, Mary and
her daughters and the youngest son, William. The tract goes on in true
Whig style to assert that George Speke is “an example to all gentry for
his loyalty to the King, and his love of his country, for being an ortho-
dox Protestant and a true hospitable lover of our dear true Protestant
Englishman,” meaning Monmouth.67
The stops on Monmouth’s tour were like a roll call of the Puri-
tan gentry in Somerset: Brympton, the seat of the stridently anti-
papist, Sir John Sydenham; Barrington Court, seat of the Speke’s friend,
Sir William Strode; Ford Abbey, home of John Speke’s father-in-law,
Edmund Prideaux; Colyton House, the “fanatic,” Sir Walter Yonge’s
residence, and others. George Speke and his sons probably accompa-
nied Monmouth. On the third day of his progress, Monmouth came
back to Whitelackington to spend the night. The next day, Sunday,
Monmouth attended divine service at Ilminster Church. The Speke fam-
ily was undoubtedly there as well, and the Duke might have sat with
them at “Mr. Speke’s Ile.”68 Monmouth returned to Whitelackington
once more before passing into Dorset and returning to London. The
Spekes alone, among the gentry families on Monmouth’s junket, had
received him three times. It was a jubilant time for the Speke family,
enamored as they were of the Protestant Duke.69
Their happiness was short-lived. Sometime in 1680, the eldest daugh-
ter, Mary, was widowed. The following year, the youngest daughter,
Elizabeth died. George and Mary were also troubled by the increas-
ing outlandish behavior of their second eldest son, Hugh, a barrister at
Lincoln’s Inn. Hugh was not only in the thick of Whig politics, plotting,
and pamphleteering in Exclusion-era London, he was also addicted to
gambling and women. At one point, a “coffee-woman” was pretending
67
A Narrative of the Duke of Monmouth’s Late Journey into the West (London, 1680),
pp. 2–3.
68
The Speke’s pew was probably near the chancel. Although Mary and her
children were committed Presbyterians, it is hardly surprising that they would
attend Sunday services. The Spekes had a controlling interest in the churches at
Ilminster, Whitelackington, and Dowlish Wake (where one can still see mon-
uments to the Speke family) and they would have needed to maintain their
authority, in part, through public appearances like Sunday services. Street,
Mynster of Ile, p. 218.
69
Monmouth’s progress is described in Roberts, Life of Monmouth, 1: 89–105;
also see, H. St. George Gray, “Whitelackington and the Duke of Monmouth,”
Somersetshire Archeological & Natural History Society 73 (1927): 35–9.
to be his wife and tried to blackmail George and Mary. Hugh was con-
stantly in debt as well. At first, it was for small sums that the family
could cover. But in May 1680, John informed Hugh that his letter, beg-
ging for money, had “enraged father. He as good as cursed you and
called you names . . . now he must sell his land . . . You know his tem-
per.”70 Two years later the situation was much worse. Hugh had incurred
extraordinary debts and entangled himself with one Lady Dorrell, “half-
mad, extravagant, expensive, and drunken.” John, as always, pleaded
with Hugh to “avoid dangerous courses and bad company.” “I pity your
condition and would do you any kindness you can reasonably expect
of me.” But the rest of the family did not pity Hugh. John Trenchard
found Hugh’s predicaments amusing, so John reported to his brother,
but “my sister [Mary] Jennings and my Lady [John’s wife] Prideaux”
are “no friends of yours.” Yet their dismay at Hugh’s behavior was
nothing compared to his mother’s shame and distress. In 1680, Mary
traveled to London to take control of her wayward son. She was furi-
ous, and Hugh declared that she scolded him into a “swoon.” John
condemned his “mother’s violent reproving” of Hugh, but the rest of
the family supported her. “Keep out of debauched company,” John
warned Hugh, “though Whigs and great men.”71 Mary Speke was such
a formidable figure that when Hugh tried to “please” her, family and
friends commended him.72
Then in June of 1683, authorities learned of a Whig plot to assassinate
Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, at Rye House mill as the
royal brothers returned from the races at Newmarket. The discovery of
the so-called Rye House Plot led to numerous arrests, imprisonments,
and trials.73 The threat that the Plot represented to the security of the
government heightened the already politically charged atmosphere of
London. The Court and its Tory allies were quick to react against any
perceived challenge. The “Tory Reaction” against Whigs and Dissenters
soon engulfed several of the Spekes. In the spring of 1683, one of Hugh
70
CSPD, Charles II, 23: 605–6; 21: 471.
71
72
CSPD, Charles II, 23: 122; CSPD, Charles II, 24: 294.
73
Among the leaders arrested in connection with the plot were William, Lord
Russell, Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, Algernon Sidney and John Trenchard.
On the Rye House Plot, see Richard Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British
Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), pp. 206–50; Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics: Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),
pp. 332–98.
Speke’s fellow gamblers reported to authorities that Hugh had supported

Thomas Pilkington’s assertion that the Duke of York had set fire to
London in 1666 and had further declared that the King was as “great
a papist as the Duke.”74 John was dismayed, telling Hugh that he was
the talk of the West Country with folks wondering whether he would be
fined or sent to the gallows,
the latter mostly suspected. It has not been surprising news to me

considering the persons you have to buckle with and [having] no
friends to assist you, and if willing, not able, for you often mar your
own and others’ concerns . . . It’s thought you will not be long out of
prison . . . not only your relations but all your friends wish that you
were gone out of London and come into the West.75
But Hugh was hardly the only family member in trouble. John
Trenchard was apprehended on June 28 for his alleged role in the Rye
House Plot. Soon after “old Mr. Speke” along with William Strode were
sent for in connection with the plot. In early July, Mary traveled to
London. Bishop Mews warned London authorities that the most “dan-
gerous woman in the West” was on her way. Later that month, Mews
asserted that “the father, the mother and the two brothers are much
suspected,” though they managed to avoid prosecution for the plot,
and only Trenchard languished in the Tower.76 That summer Hugh
busied himself with the defense of several of the Rye House Plotters,
including William, Lord Russell. He gave Sir Richard Atkyns (Russell’s
defense attorney) legal advice and visited the Whig conspirator, Francis
Charlton, in the Tower.77 By the end of July, Hugh himself was arrested
for helping to spread tall tales about the death of Arthur Capel, Earl
of Essex. Essex was supposedly one of the “council of six,” along with
Lord Russell, John Trenchard, and others who were charged with con-
spiring to assassinate the royal brothers at Rye House Mill. On July 13,
amid Lord Russell’s trial, Essex was found dead in the Tower with his
neck slashed in an apparent suicide. Royalists saw Essex’s suicide, sup-
posedly out of guilt, as proof of the plot’s reality. But Whig gossips
74
In 1682, Thomas Pilkington was sued by the Duke of York for supposedly
exclaiming two years earlier that the Duke “hath burnt the city and is come to
cut our throats.” Morrice, EB, 2: 318.
75
76
CSPD, Charles II, 24: 362; CSPD, Charles II, 25: 8; CSPD, Charles II, 25: 228.
77
CSPD, Charles II, 24: 108–9, 127, 304.
and propagandists were determined to cast suspicions on the Court for

Essex’s death.78 Hugh was in the thick of it. Following Hugh’s arrest,
John wrote, “My mother is much concerned for you and is much
ashamed to hear of your wickedness.” Yet Mary seemed to be more
troubled by his gambling, for being “a cheat at play,” than his polit-
ical entanglements. Hugh’s bail was set at £8,000, an exorbitant sum
which he could not pay nor was anyone willing to help. Mary appeared
before the Privy Council on Hugh’s behalf. She tried to cover his political
connections with Whig partisans by explaining that her son had simply
lost “great sums at play and borrowed money of Sir Atkyns and Mr.
Charlton.”79 Considering the suspicions authorities had against Mary
herself, her appearance before them was audacious to say the least. Nor
were they impressed by her attempts to minimize her son’s activities,
and Hugh was tried for sedition in February 1684 before the soon-to-be
notorious Judge George Jeffreys. Fined £1,000, he could not pay and was
moved to King’s Bench prison. His imprisonment during Monmouth’s
Rebellion probably saved his life.
In the course of the heady summer of 1683, Mary Speke travelled to
and from London and Ilminster on several occasions. Authorities kept
a watchful eye on her movements. But why? John’s letters only indi-
cate that she was trying to control Hugh’s bad behavior. Was she of
interest merely as the mother and mother-in-law of seditious sons? Or
was she herself a “nursing mother” of the radical politics for men like
Trenchard, Monmouth, and Lord Russell? Did she carry messages and
money between the metropolis and the West Country? It is a possi-
ble scenario. Like the nursing mothers, Elizabeth Gaunt and Constance
Ward, Mary Speke’s name does surface in the course of the Rye House
Plot interrogations. But whereas Gaunt and Ward are mentioned in con-
nection with the Plot on several occasions, Mary is only mentioned
once. Yet on this slender evidence she is mentioned as a “nurse.”
Zachariah Bourne, a London brewer, who turned King’s evidence against
his fellow Whig plotters, drops Mary’s name while informing his inter-
rogators of several “correspondents” with leading conspirators. “Lady
Row told me,” Bourne states, “of one that would part with many pounds
for the nurse, who was, I think Lady Speke.” The “one” with the money
78
Hugh was trying to help Laurence Braddon investigate Essex’s “murder” and
the Court’s supposed cover-up. Some historians have attributed An Enquiry into
and Detection of the Barbarous Murther of the Late Earl of Essex (London, 1689) to
Hugh Speke, but it was written by Robert Ferguson.
79
is an unnamed leading conspirator, someone like the Earl of Argyle, who

Bourne was speaking of in the preceding sentence. The “nurse” was,
he thinks, “Lady Speke.”80 This would confirm the Bishop of Bath and
Wells’ assertion that Mary Speke kept a “great correspondence.” It also
helps explain why later, in November of 1685, when George Speke was
arrested and appeared before the bar, “many foul imputations were laid
upon Mrs. Speke,” according to Roger Morrice.81 Yet our sources are
extremely limited and what those “foul imputations” were remain hid-
den. Like so many of the nursing mothers, Mary Speke was an extremely
stealth operator. Yet when the defense of the Protestant cause in concert
with radical Whig politics erupted into open rebellion in 1685, Mary
(along with her husband and sons) abandoned all caution. This proved
their undoing.
Monmouth’s Rebellion and the Aftermath
He [Charles Speke] came from a pious family, which always have

been opposers to popery and suffered deeply for their courage
John Tutchin, The Western Martyrology
After being held a close prisoner in the Tower for six months, John
Trenchard, the so-called “movement man” of the West, was released.
According to the confessions of several Rye House plotters, it was
Trenchard’s task to lead a rising in Taunton, but he failed to translate
his bold talk into action and was later dubbed a coward by his fellow
conspirators.82 Trenchard’s case never came to trial, and he was released
for want of a second witness. In December of 1683, Trenchard returned
to a hero’s welcome in the West Country, attended in his progress to
Whitelackington by crowds of Dissenters, congratulating him on his
liberty. Trenchard, however, was something of a new man. He had been
cowed by his imprisonment and wanted to stay out of trouble. In Febru-
ary 1685, James II ascended the throne. The new King had old scores to
settle, and three months later Trenchard was accused of new plots and
stirrings. Officers were sent to Whitelackington to arrest him, but George
80
Howell, State Trials, 9: 419; also transcribed in the CSPD, 25: 57.
81
Morrice, EB, 2:16.
82
Information of John Rumsey, CSPD, Charles II, 25: 188. Also see Robert
Ferguson’s reproof of Trenchard’s failure to act in his, A Letter to Mr. Secretary
Trenchard (London, 1694), p. 3.
Speke, in a daring and reckless move, led a riot that allowed Trenchard to
escape.83 Shortly thereafter, news of the Duke of Monmouth’s invasion
sent Trenchard scurrying abroad to avoid any suspicion of complicity
with the rebellion. He took his wife, Philipa, with him and warned his
in-laws. But the Spekes were determined to support their great Protestant
hope and so the tragedy of their participation in Monmouth’s Rebellion
played itself out.
James, Duke of Monmouth, and eighty-two men made landfall
on June 11 at Lyme Regis. Thomas Dare, the Taunton goldsmith
and Monmouth’s paymaster, was dispatched to Whitelackington.
Monmouth hoped that the Spekes would rally the great families of
the West Country in whose adoration he had basked five years ago
to his standard and bring men, horses, arms, and money.84 But 1685
was hardly 1680. The Rye House Plot trials and the Tory backlash
against Whigs and religious nonconformity had decimated radical Whig
leadership and weakened the resolve of many others. Furthermore,
King James had been warned of Monmouth’s impending invasion and
his messengers had had time enough to swoop down and incarcer-
ate many of Monmouth’s potential supporters, particularly disaffected
gentlemen and Dissenting preachers in the West. Sir Walter Yonge of
Colyton House had been arrested briefly in May and was unwilling to
join the rebellion.85 William Strode and his brother, Edward Strode of
Shepton Mallet, had hurriedly sent Monmouth money shortly before
their arrests. Edmund Prideaux was arrested and sent to the Tower.86
Intimidated or incarcerated, none of these great men were willing or
able to join Monmouth’s army.
Not so the Spekes. The mood at Whitelackington at the news
of Monmouth’s landing must have been one of alarm, mixed with
83
Roberts, Life of Monmouth, 1: 211; on the riot, HMC: Downshire, vol. 2, part 1,
p. 64.
84
Robin Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 158–9; Street, Mynster of Ile, p. 223.
85
Yonge was arrested on May 19. House of Commons, 1660–1690, 3: 789–90.
Monmouth’s envoy to the West found him “very cool in the matter.” Quoted
in Mark Goldie, “John Locke’s Circle and James II,” HJ 35/3 (1992): 563.
86
On the Strodes, see Serel, “On the Strodes,” p. 15. In some accounts, Prideaux
was able to send money and horses to Monmouth before his arrest, while others
report that he was arrested two days before Monmouth landed. Roberts, Life of
Monmouth, 2: 293; Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion, p. 245; House of Commons,
1660–90, 3: 287–8.
exhilaration. Was this what they had hoped and prayed for? Did they see
Monmouth as their Protestant savior? Probably, yes. Mary Jennings, the
Speke’s eldest daughter, was “all afloat about the Duke, thinking the day
was their own,” and she promptly sent him money and horses.87 But
for George and Mary the situation was more complex. George, along
with William Strode, had just been presented at the 1684 Wells Assize as
a person “dangerous and disaffected,” and he was still wanted for rais-
ing a riot to rescue John Trenchard. Evidence against Mary’s activities
was also mounting.88 It would be difficult to believe that George and
Mary were not aware of the dangers this rebellion posed for their family.
Nonetheless, Mary sent “cart loads of bread and cheese and other great
quantities of provisions,” along with a mare, to the Duke’s army.89 Worst
still, George and Mary allowed their son and heir, John, with a motley
crew of forty “raged horse,” to join Monmouth. No member of the Speke
family was more unfit for such a task than John. Gentle, perhaps even
bookish, John was not the bold, rash man his father was, nor did he have
the kind of “heat” of which he accused his brother Hugh. Monmouth’s
disappointment at the sight of merely one Speke brother with a few
“ordinary fellows” must have been profound. Still “young Speke” was
the only gentlemen who appeared, and Monmouth made him a colonel
with his own regiment.90 John soon proved himself worthless. He had
no stomach for battle and became an object of ridicule among the other
rebels. During one skirmish, John, described as “a silly insignificant
man,” gave orders to his men “from the top of a steeple with his hand-
kerchief.” Still worse, when battle broke out at Frome, John “rode into a
church porch as supposed for mediation . . . when they were fighting in
the long lane.” His peculiar behavior was observed. Monmouth sent for
young Speke and “seeing his courage failed” allowed him to depart the
army. John fled and eventually made his way to the Netherlands to join
Trenchard and his sister.91 In doing so, he had saved his own life, but his
younger brother, Charles, was far less fortunate.
87
Whiting, Persecution Exposed, p. 297; BL, Lansdowne 1152A, f. 240v.
88
Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion, p. 71; George was eventually fined 2,000
marks for his riot. John Ellis, The Ellis Correspondence, 1686–1688, ed. G.A. Ellis, 2
vols. (London, 1831), 1: 194; Morrice, EB, 3: 635.
89
John Tremaine, Pleas of the Crown in Matters Criminal and Civil: Containing a
Large Collection of Modern Precedents (Dublin, 1793), p. 4.
90
BL, Lansdowne, 1152A, f. 238, 240; BL, Add. 41,818, ff. 206–7; BL, Add.
41,819, f. 51.
91
BL. Add. 14,819, f. 58; Morrice, EB, 1: 635. Roberts states that John Speke was
the most “influential gentleman” to join Monmouth and does not believe he
Some scholars have maintained that Charles Speke was not inter-
ested or active in politics thereby making him into an innocent and
poignant victim of Judge Jeffreys’ “Bloody Assizes.”92 But Charles was
every inch a Speke. He was a Green Ribbon brother and Popish Plot
rumor-monger just like his older brothers. In 1681, he gave the Anglican
minister at Whitelackington parish a tract supposedly proving that the
Duke of Monmouth was Charles II’s legitimate son. That same year,
Hugh warned Charles that he might be called to the next Assize as
Henry Walrond and other Somerset royalists were rounding up all those
“active against popery.”93 Like John and Hugh, Charles was admitted to
Lincoln’s Inn where he kept an office and chambers. He had also pur-
chased the office of filazer (filing writs at the Court of Common Pleas)
for several western counties for £3,000. He seems to have some head
for business. John reported to Hugh that Trenchard had a “kindness for
my brother, Charles, but none for you. Perhaps Charles can help him to
business.”94 It is unclear whether Charles actually joined Monmouth’s
army or not. George Roberts, the great nineteenth-century historian of
the rebellion, following the story told in the Whig martyrologies that
were published shortly after the Revolution, maintained that Charles
did not join Monmouth, but simply rode into Ilminster to pay obei-
sance to Monmouth as his army passed. There is probably some truth
to this because Charles was not at the Battle of Sedgemoor nor did he
flee to Holland like John. Perhaps George and Mary forbid their younger
sons, Charles and William, from joining the rebel army, although they
were rarely so prudent. After Monmouth’s defeat on July 6, the merciless
rounding up of rebels, as well as all those who had assisted Monmouth
or hid his fleeing soldiers, began. Charles was arrested on the road to
London. He was tried at Wells Assize (September 23) for “aiding and
assisting the rebels” by Judge Jeffreys. Jeffreys was apparently told at
least twice that there were “two Spekes” (John and Charles) and that this
was not the one who had joined the rebel army. But Jeffreys is supposed
deserted the Duke. But John himself admitted to leaving Monmouth when he
petitioned the King for a pardon. Roberts, Life of Monmouth, 2: 32.
92
Gray, “Whitelackington,” p. 38; J.G. Muddiman, The Bloody Assizes (London:
William Hodge & Co., 1929), p. 100. Both of these historians seem to be following
John Dunton, The Merciful Assizes: or, a Panegyric on the Late Lord Jeffreys Hanging
so Many in the West (London, 1701), p. 235.
93
The tract about Monmouth’s legitimacy was probably Robert Ferguson’s A Letter
to a Person of Honour Concerning the Black Box (London, 1680); CSPD, Charles II,
26: 2; 22: 260.
94
to have replied merely that, “his family owes a life; he shall die for his
namesake.”95
Charles Speke was hanged from a large tree in the market-square at
Ilminster. The Whig martyrologies described Charles’s death. He prayed
for nearly an hour and sang a psalm. The huge crowd that gathered
around him were weeping and wailing, and some supposedly volun-
teered to take the young man’s place. Did Charles receive the full penalty
for treason? Was he really hanged until nearly dead, cut down, and
disemboweled? Or, as the son of a gentleman, was he spared such indig-
nities? The sources are silent on the question. Charles did have time to
write his will, and a dying speech in which he styled himself a Protes-
tant martyr who, though innocent, was “contended to drink this bitter
cup.”96 A reprieve was issued, but it arrived too late.
The Speke fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. George, Mary,
and their eldest daughter, Mary Jennings, went into hiding after
Monmouth’s defeat. Trenchard, Philipa, and John Speke were refugees
in Amsterdam. Hugh was in prison; Charles was dead; and only young
William remained at Whitelackington. In August, George surrendered
himself and pleaded with Secretary of State, Charles Middleton, to inter-
cede with the King on his behalf and that of his wife’s. “I hope his
majesty will be so gracious to me who all the first part of my life, was
a great sufferer for him however misrepresented . . . I am his unfortu-
nate loyal subject.”97 George was not fooling anyone. James II knew
the full extent to which George and his family had agitated against
him. In November, George appeared before the bar where “many foul
imputations were laid upon Mrs. Speke.”98 He was fined 2,000 marks for
his ill-considered riot that rescued Trenchard. Mary Speke was eventu-
ally arrested as well and indicted for aiding Monmouth. In March 1686,
James II issued a General Pardon to all those who sought refuge abroad
or were still in hiding. Among those excluded were George and Mary
Speke, Mary Jennings, John Speke, and John Trenchard.99
95
Wiltshire Quarter Session Rolls assert that Charles Speke was indicted “for
marching in the late Duke of Monmouth’s army,” probably because he was con-
fused with John Speke. Roberts, Life of Monmouth, 2: 223; Street, Mynster of Ile,
p. 234.
96
Muddiman, The Bloody Assizes, p. 101; Roberts, Life of Monmouth, 2: 222–3.
97
BL, Add. 41,804, f. 31.
98
Morrice, EB, 2: 16.
99
Mary Jennings was found and placed under house arrest; she eventually secured
her release by paying a fine supposedly over £200. Charles Chenevix Trench, The
Western Rising (New York: Longmans, 1969), p. 241.
In Amsterdam, John Trenchard’s life was a series of contradictions.

At first, he boldly kept company with a group of Whigs, rowdy
rebels and radicals, and even inherited Monmouth’s former bodyguard,
Captain Edward Mathews, who became his “bully and pensioner.”100
Trenchard was reported to have toasted James II’s destruction. A month
later he was singing the praises of the Prince of Orange and thinking
of buying an estate in Switzerland.101 But shortly thereafter, he began
distancing himself from his hard drinking rebel friends and confessing
his hopes and fears to the Court informant, Edmond Everard. Trenchard
wanted to return home; he wanted to be a good man and live in peace.
He worried about his in-laws and hoped the Court would take pity on
them. “I told him,” wrote Everard, “he was very inconsistent.”102 In the
spring of 1686, Trenchard approached another English spy: “he seemed
extremely sorrowful and wept,” saying that, “he could not hope for his
Majesty’s pardon.” “He was very sensible of his past miscarriages . . . [and]
hoped the King would have pity on his wife’s brother Mr. [John] Speke,
who had not been so great a sinner and was only drawn in.” Upon learn-
ing that George and Mary had been convicted of treason, Trenchard
blamed himself: “He is all out of hope of being able to do anything that
might merit his pardon; knowing that this trouble comes upon his wife’s
relations for his sake.”103 But Trenchard did, after a time, prove useful to
the Court, persuading fellow refugees to “submit and sue for pardon”
by telling them that James II had promised to protect Protestantism.
He also reminded them that James’s eldest daughter, the very Protes-
tant, Mary, Princess of Orange, would succeed the Catholic King. That
was good enough for John Speke, who applied for a pardon in August
1686.104
Both John Trenchard and John Speke won pardons through the aus-
pices of William Penn. In 1687, as part of James II’s new liberal policies
towards Protestant nonconformists, George, Mary, and Mary Jennings,
were able to obtain pardons for the hefty sum of £5,000. Hugh, as well,
was released from prison. Still, it seems unlikely that the Spekes would
have been seduced by James II’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1687 and
100
BL, Add. 41,818, ff. 206–7; 79, 98–9. Captain Matthews was Sir Thomas
Armstrong’s son-in-law. Armstrong had been executed for his role in Rye House
Plot. The “fraternity” of rebels included, Major John Manley and his son, as well
as John Starkey, and the printer, Awnsham Churchill.
101
BL, Add. 41,818, f. 98v, ff. 136–7, ff. 206–7.
102
BL, Add. 41,804, f. 158.
103
BL, Add. 41,813, ff. 113–14; BL, Add. 41,804, f. 158v.
104
BL, Add. 41,819, f. 58, 219.
become Whig collaborators. John Speke, master of Dillington house, did

remain active in local affairs, and John Trenchard tried to advise James
II, with little success. But all was quiet at Whitelackington. It is easy to
imagine that George and Mary were numbed by their experiences. They
were both in their fifties and George was ailing. They had been pub-
licly humiliated, severely fined, and seen their son hanged from a tree.
In August of 1686, John Trenchard informed his brother that he should
allow Mary Jennings “£300 upon her mortgage,” if she could make use
of it. However, he was not to press the matter, “I think it best not to say
much to them till they have an opportunity to get thinking clear and
time has lessened the impositions of their sorrow.”105 Then in the fall
of 1688, the Prince of Orange marched through Somerset. In the West,
John Trenchard began raising money for him, and old George Speke
saddled up and rode out to greet the Prince.106
In the spring of 1689, George Speke petitioned Parliament hoping to
recover some of the fines levied against himself and his wife for high
treason during the reign of James II.107 He died three years later.108 Mary’s
“darling,” John Trenchard, had a brief stint as William III’s Secretary
of State of the Northern Department, but his health was impaired by
tuberculosis, and he died in 1695.109 Mary’s will was made in 1697,
leaving her estate to young William, and it was proved in 1706.110
John’s son, George, inherited Whitelackington and carried on the Speke
tradition of Whig partisanship in Parliament in the early eighteenth
century. Neither Mary nor George left Hugh anything in their wills,
and the black sheep seems to have had little contact with his family
after the Revolution. Hugh was briefly employed by John Trenchard as
105
DHC, BLX/D60, f 57. Letter from John Trenchard to Henry Trenchard
(August 26, 1686).
106
H.C. Foxcroft, The Life and Letters of Sir George Savile, 2 vols. (London, 1898),
2: 13.
107
Journals of the House of Commons, 10: 128.
108
George’s will made Mary the executor and transferred several manors to his
youngest son, William, for the security of William over debts amounting to
£10,000 for which George and William stood jointly engaged. Once the debts
were paid, the manors were to be returned to the rightful heir, John. John
contested the will, but the court found it valid. NA PROB 28/1249.
109
Trenchard was honored as a great defender of the nation in the Nahum Tate’s
poem celebrating Williamite appointees, “A Poem on the Promotion of Several
Eminent Persons in Church and State,” collected in An Essay on Poetry (London,
1697), pp. 5–6.
110
Mary’s will is NA, PROB 11/491, f. 133r.
a “witness-monger” against suspected Jacobites in the early 1690s and

for a short time, lived lavishly and, as usual, beyond his means.111 But
by the early 1700s, he had married a “wicked woman” and lived in
poverty, eking out a living by petitioning the government and nota-
bles for money in compensation for his family’s suffering in the 1680s
and his own great service to the Revolution.112
The story of Mary Speke and her family during the Restoration is
certainly not a happy one, but it is instructive. First and foremost,
it demonstrates the intricate connection between nonconformity and
Whig activism. What propelled the Speke children to act out, first and
foremost, was their Puritanism imbibed from their mother. Their Whig
politicking was an offshoot of their commitment to Presbyterianism. For
the Spekes, the struggles of the 1680s were not so much about Whig and
Tory, as they were about the “true” and “false” religion. George Speke’s
troubles started when he tried to defend his wife’s desire to worship with
her brethren. The old Cavalier was shocked when he found he could
not protect her. His rash statements – that the King is an ass, the Queen
a whore, all bishops are popish – speak to a man who was angry and
resentful. Their father’s wrath and their mother’s devotion inspired the
children. The sons did all they could to propagate the Popish Plot tales
of Catholic blood lust and Protestant suffering. Their goal was to dis-
credit the Duke of York and to ensure a Protestant succession through
the Duke of Monmouth. And when Monmouth came in 1685, the eldest
Speke daughter was “all afloat,” thinking that this was “their day,” a
day of liberation for all true Protestants. While the sources are lim-
ited, it seems fairly clear that the Spekes of Whitelackington were not
republicans. They might have been Whig constitutionalists; but they
certainly never spoke of limiting the monarchy, never mentioned the
111
According to Robert Ferguson, “Mr [Hugh] Speak . . . hath been looked upon
by reason of his folly, accompanied by his vanity, as the sport of society and the
buffoon of the town . . . God hath denied him of understanding and good sense.”
Letter to John Holt (London, 1694), p. 14.
112
Hugh claimed to be the author of the spurious “Third Declaration” of William
of Orange which supposedly ignited Irish Night (the backlash against Catholics
in London) during the Revolution. In 1703, Hugh petitioned Parliament for mon-
etary compensation in consideration of all that his family had paid in fines under
James II. He also had an account of his mighty deeds during the Revolution (Some
Memoirs of Most Remarkable Passages and Transactions on the Late Happy Revolution
in 1688) translated into French for George I. He also sent copies of his book to
Archbishop Thomas Tenison and the Countess of Shaftesbury. See his letters in
NA, PRO 30/24/28, ff. 4–5.
ancient constitution or used terms like “contract” or “rights.”113 What

we know for sure is that their mother’s commitment to Presbyterianism
left them outside the exclusive Restoration Church and that, like their
Puritan neighbors, they felt threatened by what they saw as a corrupt
and popish Court. What they fought for was the freedom to worship as
they wished.
Clearly, Mary Speke was at the center of this factious family. She was
in the thick of radical politicking of the early 1680s, perhaps no less than
Elizabeth Gaunt, although the extent of her activities remains unknown.
Perhaps too her social status as a gentlewoman and as the wife of the
one-time royalist saved her from the full wrath of the Court. Yet Bishop
Mews thought she was the “the most dangerous woman in the West,”
not simply, it would seem, because she herself was a political incendiary,
but because she had converted her family into fanatics. Such was the
power of mothers.
113
Their support for the Duke of Monmouth suggests their willingness to alter
the royal succession; yet they also spread the claim that Monmouth was Charles
II’s legitimate heir and they might have believed him to be so.
Figure 3.1 Aphra Behn – permission to publish from the National Portrait
Gallery, London
3
Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and
the Culture of Nonconformity
Behold the race, whence England’s woes proceed,

The Viper’s nest, where all our Mischiefs breed,
There, guided, by Inspiration, Treason speaks,
And through the Holy Bag-pipe Legion squeaks.
The Nation’s Curse, Religion’s ridicule,
The Rabble’s God, the Politician’s tool,
Scorn of the Wise, and Scandal of the Just,
The Villain’s Refuge, and the Women’s Lust.
Aphra Behn, “On a Conventicle”1
Unlike the “religious Mrs. Mary Speke,”2 who sought out conventicles in
her native Somerset, the cosmopolitan poet and playwright in London,
Aphra Behn was unlikely to have ever attended or observed a Dissenting
meeting. Her poem, “On a Conventicle,” derives, it seems, from her own
fertile imagination as well as from the rich stock of satiric images of Puri-
tans that harkened back to the time of Elizabeth I. Behn’s poetic pairing
of Dissent with treason and civil strife was, of course, very much an
outgrowth of the Civil Wars when religious dissidents in large numbers
sided with Parliament against the King. Sour memories of the violence
and chaos of those years were still fresh during the Restoration and, as
we have seen, oppositional politics and religious nonconformity were
still intertwined in the years following Charles II’s return. While this
1
Published for the first time as “Verses by Madam Behn” in Miscellany Poems upon
Several Occasions (London, 1692); also in Behn, Works, 1: 355–6.
2
James Strong, Lydia’s Heart Opened: or, Divine Mercy Magnified in the Conversion of
a Sinner by the Gospel (London, 1675), dedication.
92
Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and Nonconformity 93
linkage was exaggerated in royalist propaganda, it existed nonetheless,

and in the very heady years of the 1680s, the visibility of Dissenting
politicians and preachers involved in Whig politics, often in its most
radical forms, was right before all eyes. Parliamentary politics, street
demonstrations, coffee house and tavern talk as well as the press, the
pulpit, the court room, and the stage were all filled with the noise of
partisan politics.
Women were consumers and producers of the rancorous political cul-
ture in the first age of party. Opportunities made possible through street
politics and the press allowed women, just as they did men of the mid-
dling and plebian ranks, the possibility to engage in the political dramas
unfolding in the era of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. While
those women who were knee-deep in seditious politics did their best
to stay beneath the radar, they were not always successful, as we have
seen. The fact that these women were Dissenters certainly did not escape
notice either. The image of Baptist, Elizabeth Gaunt, clutching her Bible
as she was slowly burnt to death at Tyburn in October of 1685 was
part of the public consciousness. It was a chilling spectacle attended
by hundreds and, even if Aphra Behn was not among the crowd that
day (although who is to say that she was not) she certainly would have
known the grisly details of Gaunt’s death, seen her dying speech sold
on the streets and in bookshops, and heard about the Baptist woman’s
last words. Elizabeth Gaunt’s story would undoubtedly have confirmed
for Behn what she already believed: that Protestant Dissent seduced
and corrupted women, making them the pawns of self-interested and
conniving men whose ambitions were purely worldly.
Certainly, much has been written about Aphra Behn in the last thirty
odd years. Much has been written about the political images and allu-
sions in her writings, particularly for the stage, and much has been
written about Behn’s portrayal of women and about her own supposed
feminist consciousness.3 So too scholars have also tried to understand
3
On the political context and contents of Behn’s writings, see Janet Todd, ed.,
Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Susan Owen,
Restoration Theater in Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Melinda
Zook, “Contextualizing Aphra Behn: Plays, Politics, and Party, 1679–1689,”
in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L.
Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Anita Pacheco, “Read-
ing Toryism in Aphra Behn’s Cit-Cuckolding Comedies,” The Review of English
Studies 55/22 (2004): 690–708; Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women,
Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), pp. 349–63. On Behn’s portrayal of women and her feminism,
Behn’s religious faith, if she had any.4 What needs attending, for our
purposes, is simply this: Behn’s record on Dissent and particularly her
portrayal of Dissenting women. Behn had much to say about the cor-
rosive nature of Protestant nonconformity. On the one hand, her own
brand of ardent royalism certainly came shining through her work. She
was unrelenting and unforgiving to those that she saw as the enemies
of the Stuart state and, more particularly, to a culture that the Stuart
monarchy represented to her, one that was artistically, intellectually,
and sexually liberal. On the other hand, Behn wrote for profit. She knew
what her audience desired and she delivered. She both exploited popu-
lar fears and anxieties about Dissenting Protestants and she advanced
those same fears and anxieties. This makes her a valuable gauge of
royalist opinion. Behn’s poetry and plays offer a lens through which
we can see Dissenting women as they were seen by many English in the
era of Restoration and Revolution. This chapter examines the shaping
of Behn’s political outlook during her time abroad as well as how her
own imaginative writing shaped Dissent, Dissenting women, and their
relationship to politics.
For Aphra Behn, women like the radical bookseller Elizabeth Calvert,
the Baptist Elizabeth Gaunt, and the Presbyterian Mary Speke were a
direct threat to the social and sexual order as well as to the monar-
chy and the Established Church. First and foremost, Behn was repelled
by what she saw as the hypocrisy and dissimulation of Protestant
nonconformity. The sectarians’ dissembling, both in public and in pri-
vate, corrupted the nation, pushing the traditional order to the brink
of collapse. Their religious cant was corrosive. It might seem harmless
enough to some lax gentry in the countryside, half-heartedly execut-
ing the penal laws, or those accommodating churchmen, who spoke
of “moderation,” but if sectarianism were allowed to grow unfettered
it could infiltrate and sicken the entire polity. Whig slogans and godly
see the first two chapters in Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanish-
ing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994); Ros Ballaster, “ ‘Pretences of State:’ Aphra Behn and the
Female Plot,” in Reading Aphra Behn: History, Theory and Criticism, ed. H. Hunter
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,1993); Donald Wehrs, “Eros, Ethics,
Identity: Royalist Feminism and the Politics of Desire in Aphra Behn’s Love Let-
ters,” SEL 32 (1992): 461–78; Dolors Altaba-Artal, Aphra Behn’s English Feminism:
Wit and Satire (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999).
4
On Behn’s religion, Sara Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), passim; Alison Shell, “Popish Plots: The
Feign’d Curtizans in context,” in Aphra Behn Studies, pp. 30–49.
drivel might seem liberating to some silly women and ignorant artisans
and tradesmen. But ultimately, it was merely a tool used by deceitful
men, grasping for power and wealth and bent on the destruction of the
old order. Tory politics and culture, on the other hand, were transparent.
The rules of political, social, and sexual behavior were not hidden in a
coded language but plainly visible in the common currency of English
traditions.
Behn Abroad: Adventures in the New World and Europe
To the great part of the Main, I myself was an Eye-witness . . .

Behn5
In the 1660s, Aphra Behn was in her twenties, a handsome woman,

lively, witty, and flirtatious, of indeterminate origins and social class.
She spent approximately eighteen months abroad: first, in the New
World, and secondly, in the medieval city of Antwerp. Her adventures in
Surinam and Antwerp may not have been her first experiences beyond
English shores. Behn’s superior knowledge of the continent, the French
language, and particularly of the institutions of Roman Catholicism,
suggest some extended stay in Europe, perhaps in the Low Countries or
France. Perhaps she even spent time in a convent.6 But as with much of
Behn’s biography, all this remains conjecture. Her trips to Surinam and
Antwerp, on the other hand, can be traced through the sources, how-
ever limited. In both cases, she came into contact with that sometimes
stealthy, sometimes downright desperate and forlorn world of English
republicans on the run. In Europe, she also crossed paths with what
was, in many ways, its polar opposite: the lush and ornate world of the
Catholic baroque. It would be hard to imagine that these two worlds
did not influence Behn’s later writings and particularly her sentiments
on the topic of religion.
Behn, her mother and siblings, lived in the English colony of Surinam
in South America, located between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, for
approximately six months, from August 1663 to February 1664. Surinam
was a tumultuous place in the early 1660s, divided by factions and
competing interests. The royalist governor, Major William Bynam, was
5
Behn, The Fair Jilt, in Behn, Works, 2: 381.
6
In her short story, The History of the Nun or the Fair Vow-Breaker, Behn claimed
that she was “design’d an humble Votary in the House of Devotion.” Behn, Works,
3: 212.
trying to gain the upper hand, and his tactics were seen as ruthless,
especially by a nest of political dissidents.7 Traditionally, scholars fol-
lowing Behn’s own story in her novella, Oroonoko, have asserted that
Behn’s father was sent to Surinam to assume an administrative post.
His death on the passage over would account for the brevity of their
stay.8 More recently, Behn’s biographer, Janet Todd, supposes that Behn
herself was sent to the colony as an agent working for Charles II’s
government on a mission to ferret out information on republicans in
Surinam, including William Scott and George Marten.9 Either way, it is
clear that Behn became acquainted with these men and received her first
taste of the hapless world of defeated soldiers and former Cromwellian
office-holders.
Among the men that Behn came into contact with in Surinam was
George Marten. George and his brother, Henry, were the sons of a Puri-
tan father and, perhaps as a consequence, they were both hedonistic
playboys, who lavished what money they had on wine and women.
John Aubrey says that Henry was “as far from a Puritan as light from
darkness.”10 Nonetheless, he was one of the most popular and fanat-
ical anti-monarchists in the years leading up to the King’s execution
in 1649. A witty man of many contradictions (he both despoiled the
Westminster Abbey of popish “toys and trifles” and argued for reli-
gious toleration, Catholics included), Marten had served as one the
King’s judges and signed the death warrant.11 He was instrumental in
the formation of the new Republic but grew increasingly suspicious
of Cromwell’s ambitions. Behn describes Henry Marten in Oroonoko
as “the Great Oliverian.” But Marten was at odds with Cromwell,
and he held no positions during the Protectorate. In 1658, when the
Long Parliament was recalled, he had to be retrieved from prison,
where he was languishing for debt. With the return of the monarchy,
7
Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, ed. V.T. Harlow
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), letters on Surinam, pp. 184–7; Henry Adis,
A Letter Sent from Syrranam (London, 1664), pp. 4–5.
8
Oroonoko in Behn, Works, 3: 95; also see “The History of the Life and Memoirs of
Mrs. Behn,” in All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn,
Entire in One Volume (London, 1698), pp. 2–3.
9
Janet Todd, Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996),
pp. 40–2.
10
John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 354.
11
Commons Journals, 3: 24; “Henry Marten,” DNB, s. v; Sarah Barber, A Revo-
lutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Gloucestershire: Sutton
Publishing, 2000), passim.
Marten, a regicide, submitted himself according to royal order and was

imprisoned. Ultimately, through a combination of wit and luck, he
saved his neck from the halter, although he remained in prison until
his death in 1680.12
While scholars know quite a bit about Henry, thanks in part to the
colorful portrait drawn of him by Aubrey, they know far less about
his younger brother, George. According to Sarah Barber’s biography
of Henry Marten, George captained his brother’s ship, Marten, and
saw some action during the first Civil War.13 Although he had mar-
ried well, he was constantly in debt and in search of an easy fortune.
He sailed to Barbados in 1646. Once there, he seems to have aban-
doned his interests in England and established himself as a plantation
and slave owner, living openly with a woman he called “butter-box.”14
While royalists maintained control of the island, there was a significant
group of republicans and nonconformists vying for power. Political life
was turbulent and trade uncertain. Marten was part of the faction of
men described collectively as “old, overgrown, desperate malignants.”15
By 1658, Martin was bankrupt. He fled Barbados, escaping his creditors
and setting his sights on sugar in Surinam, where he once again became
a plantation owner.16 Enter the young, flirtatious, and inquisitive Aphra
Behn: she seems to have been duly impressed by George Marten. She
describes him as a man of “great gallantry, wit, and goodness . . . he was
wise and eloquent and from the fineness of his parts bore a great sway
over the hearts of the colony.” In Oroonoko, he nobly refuses to display
the quarters of the slaughtered hero, an African prince, saying he could
“govern his negroes without terrifying and grieving them with frightful
spectacles of a mangled King.”17 There must have been some intimacy
or at least a meeting of the minds between Behn and Marten. She later
wrote about both George and Henry and their parsimonious father in
12
Oroonoko, 3: 97; Aubrey, Brief Lives, p. 193; Mark Noble, The Lives of the
English Regicides, 2 vols. (Birmingham, 1798), 2: 39; Sarah Barber, “Marten, Henry
(1601/1–1680),” ODNB.
13
Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue, see Chapter VI, “Trade and the Sea.”
14
Marten’s plantation consisted of 259 acres; he owned 60 slaves. Richard
S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,
1624–1713 (New York: Norton & Co., 1973), p. 68; Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue,
pp. 122–33.
15
[E.M. Shilstone], “Some Records of the House of Assembly of Barbados,” Journal
of Barbados Museum and History Society X (1943), p. 175.
16
Colonising Expeditions, pp. 194, 195.
17
Oroonoko, 3: 111, 118.
her play, The Younger Brother (1696).18 Behn seems to have been attracted
to bold, adventurous men with healthy appetites for sex and alcohol.
But George Marten was hardly the only middle-aged republican swag-
gering about Surinam. Behn was also intrigued, at least at first, by
Colonel William Scott.
He was the son of Thomas Scott, one of the regicides executed in
October 1660. Thomas Scott had sat in the Long Parliament and was a
commissioner at the trial of Charles I and signed his death warrant. For
a time, he served as an intelligence gatherer for Cromwell, employing
spies both at home and abroad.19 An ardent republican, Scott opposed
the increasingly dictatorial powers of Cromwell and any limitations of
the freedoms of the people. “Shall I,” he declared in Parliament in 1658,
“that sat in a parliament that brought a king to the bar, and to the
block, not speak my mind freely here?” Even as the Republic began to
collapse, following the intervention of General George Monck, Scott
remained steadfast in his principles, asserting that he could have no
better epitaph than, “here lieth one who had a hand and a heart in
the execution of Charles Stuart.”20 His bold statements, coupled with
his role in Charles’s execution, compounded his doom. Following the
restoration of the monarchy, Scott fled to Flanders. But in Brussels he
was recognized by royalist agents, arrested, and returned to England in
June 1660. He tried but failed to obtain a pardon and was executed. He
was stoic and unapologetic on the scaffold.21 Thomas Scott had two sons
who also wore the “green sleeves” of the Good Old Cause, but lacked
both their father’s administrative talents and his bravery. His namesake,
Colonel Thomas Scott, became entangled with republican activity in
Ireland after the Restoration. He was arrested in 1663 but saved him-
self by turning King’s evidence against his restless friends.22 Thomas
Scott’s other son, his impecunious and “improvident son,” as he called
William, was probably a lawyer, who seems only to have been successful
18
The Younger Brother, or, the Amorous Jilt (London, 1696). Marten was later carried
off by a pestilence that swept through Surinam sometime before 1668. HMC:
Fourteenth Report, Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland (London, 1894), 3: 310.
19
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds., Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 1:14.
20
“Thomas Scott,” DNB, s. v; North, Regicides, 2: 172.
21
CSPD, Charles II, 10: 649; The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harrison,
October 13; Mr. John Carew, October 15; Mr. Justice Cooke, Mr. Hugh Peters, October 16,
Mr. Tho. Scott (London, 1660).
22
Pepys, Diary, 4: 168; Richard Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Under-
ground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 145, 148.
in life so long as his father could hoist him to lucrative places within the
Commonwealth.23 In the early 1660s, William could see by his father’s
sad experience in Brussels that Europe was simply not far enough away
from the prying eyes of the royalist government and so he dispatched
himself to Surinam.
The relationship between Scott and Behn in Surinam is far from clear.
In addition to being quite a bit older than Behn, he was also married,
and while that might not have been an impediment to Scott, it prob-
ably made Behn think twice. Behn might have been his mistress; they
might have been simply friends. Behn might have been sent to Surinam
to make contact with Scott and his ilk in the first place, as Janet Todd
supposes. But the evidence is thin. All that is known for sure is that she
was sufficiently enough acquainted with him to warrant the govern-
ment’s interest in using her to further worm information from him in
1665. While perhaps over-rating her services, Behn declared to Secretary
Arlington that, “No person in the world but herself could have drawn
him [Scott] to service.”24
Not long after Behn and her entourage left Surinam, Scott made
his way to Rotterdam. There he made contact with English dissidents,
including an old operative of his father’s, Colonel Joseph Bampfield.
Bampfield had organized a troop of horse in the service of the
Dutch. This cavalry unit was composed of numerous English radicals,
desperate for employment abroad and more than willing to work for for-
eign hire. Bampfield befriended Scott, but the two men remained wary
of each other and not without good reason. Bampfield was the more
experienced of the two. He had already had a long and colorful career
in espionage by 1665. He had served as a royalist colonel during the
Civil War and famously helped the Duke of York escape from St. James’s
Palace in 1648, accompanying him to the Netherlands. Once in Europe,
however, Bampfield was unable to gain the trust of the King in exile,
Charles II. In need of employment, he switched allegiances in the
1650s and worked for Cromwell’s regime as an agent in Europe, keeping
watch over royalists and gathering information on foreign governments.
He also made frequent trips to England and maintained a network of
Presbyterian contacts. With the Restoration, he assumed that he would
be included in Charles II’s general pardon. Instead he was imprisoned
in the Tower. Seen as untrustworthy, which was probably not an unfair
23
Thomas Scott quoted in Todd, Secret Life, p. 43.
24
assessment, Bampfield left England as soon as he was able and worked

as an intelligencer for the Dutch from 1665 to 1672. He also maintained
contact with ejected preachers and radicals in England like Jane Holmes,
discussed in Chapter 1. But not unlike many English abroad in those
years, he was still continually trying to obtain a pardon from London.25
A royal pardon was certainly what William Scott sought. Proclama-
tions from London on the eve of the first Anglo-Dutch war ordered
disgruntled English abroad to return home and face trial. Should they
remain in foreign lands, they risked losing everything if they were cap-
tured.26 Scott may well have seen his choices in terms of the fate of his
executed father and his turncoat, but very much alive, brother. In 1666,
Scott contacted the Secretary of State, Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington,
looking to be rehabilitated. He promised information on Dutch defenses
in return for a pardon. He was probably desperately frightened of
being seized by the royalist agents in search of His Majesties’ rebel-
lious subjects. But the restored regime was suspicious of Scott’s claims
to knowledge; desperate men often promised more than they could
deliver. Thus they sent Behn (code name: Astrea) to have Scott (code
name: Celadon) answer a series of questions and judge his sincerity.
In the meantime, Scott did not sit on his hands awaiting rescue. Not
unlike Bampfield, he was also playing a double game. Making overtures
to London while at the same time helping the Dutch Republic of John
de Witt capture English spies.27
It was into this bleak and uncertain world of espionage and counter-
espionage, code names and ciphers, invisible ink and secrets for sale to
which Behn sought access in the summer of 1666. With her brother
and several servants, Behn sailed to Flanders.28 Antwerp was her des-
tination. It was still part of the Spanish Netherlands, and far safer for
royalist agents like herself than Holland. Ship board on the voyage
25
Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s Apology, eds. John Clyde Loftis and Paul H. Hardacre
(London: Associated University Presses,1993), passim; CSPD, Charles II, 1: 171,
2:391; James Walker, “The Secret Service under Charles II and James II,” TRHS 15
(1932): 225–6.
26
See By the King, A Proclamation Requiring some of His Majesties Subjects in the Parts
beyond the Seas to Return to England (London, 1666), naming Scott and Bampfield.
27
CSPD, Charles II, 4: 500; Herbert H. Rowan, John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of
Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 160–1.
28
Aphra was briefly married to one “Mr. Behn,” a merchant after she returned
from Surinam. Janet Todd believes that Behn’s husband was one “Jonas Behn,” a
merchant sailor and probably a slaver. Todd, Secret Life, pp. 67–70. He was dead
by 1666, perhaps having succumbed to the plague that ravaged London in 1665.
was the Catholic Lord Stafford, going to visit relatives in a convent in

Lorrain. Behn made his acquaintance and through him began a jour-
ney into another world completely opposed to that of Marten, Scott,
and Bampfield. William Howard, Viscount Stafford, was a polished and
widely traveled man in his early fifties when Behn met him. On the
one hand, he was reputed to be haughty and was generally unpopular
in fashionable London society and even among his own family. On the
other, as a cosmopolitan man and member of the Royal Society, along
with his status as a peer of the realm, Strafford attracted the curious and
social climbing Behn. Their party visited a convent in Bruges and from
there made their way to Antwerp where Stafford’s daughter was a nun.29
In the sixteenth century, the port town of Antwerp was the second
largest city in Europe and the richest. While the city’s golden age was
a thing of the past by the second half of the seventeenth century,
it was still a marvelous place to behold. It had become a centre of
the Catholic Counter Reformation (Jesuits, along with Dominican and
Augustinian friars, had all settled there) and was still “an artistic and
cultural metropolis where famous personalities such as Rubens and Van
Dijk were active.”30 Visitors described the streets as “clean and beauti-
ful;” and the townhouses, “sumptuous.” But most impressive were its
many Catholic churches and cloisters. The fourteenth-century Gothic
Cathedral, “Onze Lieve Vrouwkathedral” (Church of our Blessed Lady),
dominated Antwerp’s skyline then as it does now. Built between 1351
and 1521, it was the largest structure in the Netherlands. Although seri-
ously damaged by fire and iconoclastic furies in 1566 and again in 1581,
the cathedral could not have failed to make an impression on Behn. It
was, according to one seventeenth-century travel account, “a magnif-
icent pile of building and of a prodigious extent.” “The steeple is the
fairest in the world, five hundred foot high.” The cathedral contained
“sixty-six chapels, with a great number of marble pillars, paintings,
and other rich ornaments.” “The vestry is wonderfully stored with rich
church-stuff, shining with gold, silver, diamonds, pearls, rubies, and
29
“My Lord Stafford was not a man beloved, especially by his own family.”
Evelyn, Diary, 4: 234; DNB, s. v., “William Howard, Viscount Stafford;” Todd,
Secret Life, pp. 90–1.
30
Michael Limberger, “ ‘No Town in the World Provides More Advantages:’ Eco-
nomics of Agglomeration and Golden Age of Antwerp,” in Urban Achievement in
Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, eds. Patrick
O’Brien, Derek Keene, Marjolein t’Hart and Herman van der Wee (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 49.
other precious stones.”31 In addition to the cathedral, convents, and

monasteries was the Jesuit Church built between 1615 and 1621. The
baroque church of St. Ignatius (now the St. Charles Borromeo church)
was also an imposing structure. John Evelyn visited it in 1641. “I exceed-
ingly admired that sumptuous and most magnificent church of the
Jesuits,” he wrote, “being a very glorious fabric without and within
wholly encrusted with marble and polished into divers representations
of histories, landscapes, and flowers.”32 Rubens played an important part
in the decoration of the Church’s façade, the pinnacle of the tower,
and especially the interior. Visitors were greeted in the front of the
Church by a statue of Ignatius Loyola and the powerful religious images
and sumptuous decoration on the baroque façade. The Jesuit Church
was an inspiring monument, representative of a fusion of humanist
and Roman Catholic principles. This rich and splendiferous world of
Catholic beauty impressed the imaginative Behn.
Regardless of whether or not this was Behn’s first acquaintance with
European Catholicism, it is easy to understand how the churches and
convents of Antwerp may have been the inspiration behind her descrip-
tions of Catholic ceremonies in her epistolary novel, Love Letters between
a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–87) and her short story, set entirely in
Antwerp, The Fair Jilt (1688). Both works suggest a thorough acquain-
tance and appreciation of the various monastic orders. It is possible
that Behn herself had been born into the Catholic Church or converted
to Catholicism at some point in her life. She seemed to find Catholic
ritual dazzling, sensual, and even erotic: “sure there is nothing gives
an Idea of real Heaven, like a Church all adorned with rare Pictures,
and the other Ornaments of it, which what even Charm the Eyes; and
Musick, and voices to Ravish the Ear.”33 Janet Todd surmises that Behn
was drawn to the elegant, the extravagant, “the sensuous drench,” and
that she might have found the Catholic baroque a religious experience
akin to the kind of aristocratic excess that she found so attractive in
men like Stafford and later the Earl of Rochester.34 It is equally possible
31
Edward Brown, A Brief Account of Some Travels in Divers Parts of Europe (London,
1685), pp. 108–9; E. Veryard, An Account of Diver Choice Remarks . . . Taken in a
Journey through the Low Countries, France, Italy (London, 1701), pp. 38–9.
32
Evelyn, Diary, 2: 63–4; Piet Lombarde, “Antwerp in its Golden Age: ‘One of the
Largest Cities in the Low Countries’ and ‘One of the Best Fortified,’ ” in Urban
Achievement, p. 115.
33
Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, Behn, Works, 2: 381.
34
Todd, Secret Life, p. 109; Sara Mendelson makes the case that Behn was most
Catholic at the end of her life, see The Mental World, pp. 117–20, 148–50.
that Behn, always interested in turning a profit with her writing, was
playing on English fears of popery as superstitious religion that seduces
the worshipper with its music, candles, artwork, and incense. Nonethe-
less, even if she remained a member of the Church of England, she
certainly retained strong sympathies for the sheer beauty of Counter
Reformation Catholicism.
But Behn’s business in Antwerp was not to wander among the chapels
and gardens of its Catholic institutions. She opened communication
with Scott shortly after her arrival.35 He was nervous about leaving
the safety of the Netherlands. He had good reason. Scott had recently
betrayed two agents, working for the English, to the Dutch, one of
which they had promptly executed. The other, Thomas Corney, had
managed to escape after being held prisoner for six months. Corney was
in Flanders and vowing to kill Scott. Bampfield also made Scott nervous,
watching his every move.36 Naturally, under such conditions, Scott was
eager to find an avenue back to England, and in a rather cloak and dag-
ger scenario, he met Behn in a closed carriage for their first conversation.
Behn paid his expenses and soon found herself in financial difficulty.
She dutifully wrote to her contacts in London; she needed money and
a pardon for Scott. While her missives went unanswered, she continued
to communicate with Scott. Behn’s arrival in Antwerp had also raised
the suspicions of Thomas Corney. He was a most unwanted guest at her
abode, where he visited frequently. Behn found him arrogant and full of
bluster.37 She sent on what information Scott gave her but received lit-
tle encouragement from the English government. Over time, Behn must
have felt abused by all sides. Scott continued to milk her for money;
London rarely answered her pleas for funds and direction; and Corney
darkened her door daily. Secretary Arlington’s office did finally send
Behn fifty pounds, but it was not nearly enough to cover her expenses.
In November, Scott’s double game finally landed him in prison when
Bampfield betrayed his activities to the Dutch. No longer able to pro-
vide Behn with information, he was useless. Money from London only
35
The story of Behn’s spying mission in Antwerp has been told by her biogra-
phers, although some details differ. The fullest account is in Todd, Secret Life,
pp. 86–106; but also see, Maureen Duffy, Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn
1640–89 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 69–77. I have stayed close to the pri-
mary sources on Behn’s mission in the State Papers and Colonel Joseph Bampfield’s
Apology.
36
37
Behn calls Corney an “insufferable, scandalous, lying, prating fellow.” CSPD,
Charles II, 6: 145.
came with results and with Scott out of commission, Behn too became
obsolete. She sold what valuables she had left and returned to London
in December 1666. She found herself threatened with debtors’ prison
soon thereafter.38
Behn’s short career in espionage was far from glamorous. The life of
the spy, writes Alan Marshall, was “often dangerous, dirty, and humili-
ating.” Nor were Behn’s experiences terribly unique. English spies were
always underpaid. In fact, Behn was given more money at the outset
of her journey than were most. She was probably not very savvy about
her expenses and was certainly “ruthlessly pillaged by Scott.”39 Corney
found Behn “indiscreet;” and true enough, she seems to have been
unable to keep her mission a secret. Both Lord Strafford and Sir Anthony
Desmarces, with whom Behn had sailed, saw Behn in Scott’s company.
Behn openly discussed her assignment with Desmarces.40 In contrast
to Marshall’s rather dim view of Behn’s spying career, Behn’s defenders
have envisioned her as a victim of a careless and misogynist govern-
ment that “laughed at” her information about Dutch forces to their own
peril. Andrew Barnaby, Lisa Schnell, and Ros Ballaster, unfortunately,
base this reading on a secondary account and one which is highly prob-
lematic.41 There is no reason to suppose that Behn’s information was
treated any differently than that of any other spy. There is also no rea-
son to assert that from this experience, Behn had learned to distrust the
restored regime, as Schnell and Barnaby suppose, when they write that
from her spying mission Behn “discovers in the community of truth-
gatherers by which she is commissioned in the 1660s, a reverse ethic
of distrust, deceit, and betrayal, a situation that was made particularly,
and painfully, clear to her when she found herself in debtor’s prison
upon her return from Antwerp, the government having reneged on its
38
CSPD, Charles II, 9: 127; Bampfield’s Apology, p. 204.
39
Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 139–41.
40
NA SP 77/35, ff. 91–2; CSPD, Charles II, 6: 44.
41
Barnaby, Schnell, and Ballaster base this assertion on the anonymous biography
written shortly after Behn’s death in All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late
Ingenious Mrs. Behn (London, 1689), p. 8. It is unfortunate that these scholars treat
this highly improbably statement (that Behn’s dispatches were “laughed at”) as
though it were fact. Ballaster,“’Pretences of State:’ Aphra Behn and the Female
Plot,” in Rereading Aphra Behn, p. 191; Andrew Barnaby and Lisa J. Schnell, Literate
Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century English Writing (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), pp. 161–2.
contract by refusing to pay her for her services.”42 This is a speculation

that the sources simply do not support.
A far more likely scenario for which there is evidence is that what
the thoroughly royalist Behn learned from her travels abroad was that
the world of English republicans and Dissenters in exile was shallow,
grimy, unstable, and deceptive. This milieu of back-stabbing, bribery,
and poverty stood in sharp contrast to the steady, sumptuous, and
lavish world of the Catholic baroque. Certainly, Behn in her days in
Surinam might have found the drunken swaggering of men like George
Marten attractive. But, older and wiser in Antwerp, she soon found the
coterie of ever plotting and bold-talking Cromwellian exiles nauseat-
ing. “All the rogues from Holland [English and Scottish dissidents] flock
thither,” she reported, “and talk such treason about the King as would
make one mad.” Nor was she fooled by Scott. She knew that he was
playing a double game with both the English and the Dutch and she
referred to him in her missives home as a “rogue.”43 Certainly, con-
sidering the ardent royalism of Behn’s plays and poems in the 1670s
and 1680s and her antipathy towards Whigs and Dissenters, it is hard
to imagine that she held Charles II’s government in contempt for her
unprofitable spying mission. Rather, the Stuart Court’s growing sympa-
thy for Catholicism and fashionable obsession with all things French
as well as the calm beauty of Catholic ritual and the lush and sump-
tuous lifestyle of aristocratic men like Stafford, were the things that
attracted Behn’s bright spirit. Against such a background, the world
of conspiratorial street politics and back stairs conventicles must have
looked tawdry and cheap.
A Tradition of Anti-Puritan Satire
Frippery: Can you carry yourself cunningly and seem most holy?
Novice: O, fear not that, sir! My friends were all Puritans44
Thomas Middleton
It is with little wonder that the themes of deceit, dissimulation, and

equivocation should so often appear in Behn’s writing. She had certainly
seen all three in action during her time in Antwerp. But the connection
42
Schnell and Barnaby, Literate Experience, p. 162.
43
44
Thomas Middleton, Your Five Gallants (London, 1627), Act 1, sc. 1.
between deception and religious and political dissidents within English

literature was hardly a new one, and Behn’s writings resonated, rein-
forced, and built on a long and rich tradition of anti-Puritan satire. Behn
made it clear, time and again, that she acquainted Protestant Dissenters
with Whigs in the 1680s and both with the republicans, Puritans, and
sectarians whom loyalists like herself held responsible for the bloodshed
and chaos of the Civil Wars and the execution of Charles I. Whether
their treason lay in their political machinations or in their subversive
religious gatherings, or both, Behn depicted them as the enemies of all
that was transparent, ordered, stable, honest, and magnanimous.
Puritans, from the age of Queen Elizabeth onwards, were certainly
vulnerable to the charges of being revolutionary. They did, after all,
seek change. They were advocates of reformation, the transforming
of the church and society into something more pure, godly, and
based on gospel truths. Calvinist churches in France, Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and Scotland were their models. They attacked the eccle-
siastical structure of the Church of England, asserting, among other
things, that the office of the bishop had no forerunner in the gospel,
whereas presbytery was a truly biblical form of order. The mitre also
smacked of Rome. So too the elaborate liturgy in the Book of Com-
mon Prayer, the collects, and traditional merrymaking such as church
ales and maypoles were seen by Puritans as corruptions, sordid leftovers
from the country’s Catholic past. That Puritans were not simply spoilers,
that they honestly sought to elevate the people through good preach-
ing, reading of Scripture, and a personal prayer life rather than one
dictated by rote, did not matter. To their detractors, they were schem-
ing, self-serving disturbers of the traditional order.45 In A Satyre: The
Puritan and the Papist (1643), Abraham Cowley compares Puritans to
Catholics, pointing out that whereas papists “blind obedience and blind
duty teach,” Puritans “blind rebellion and blind faction preach.”46
Thus many Anglicans mistrusted the Puritan desire for reform. Sir
Francis Bacon voiced the opinion of many conformists when he asserted
that making religious changes based on minor qualms was unwise and
dangerous. What reason was there to believe that presbyters would gov-
ern any better than bishops? And what reason, as James I reflected in his
45
William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572–1641 (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1954), pp. 32–6; Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character: Polemics and
Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1989), pp. 1–6.
46
Abraham Cowley, A Satyre: The Puritan and the Papist (London, 1643), p. 4.
“no bishop, no king” remark, was there to believe that Puritans would
cease with their demands once the bishops were eradicated? Might they
aim higher? For many, the ecclesiastical establishment was not only
that which preserved the accustomed order of society, it was also a
bulwark against new fangled and untested ideas. Queen Elizabeth had
fought the Puritans to a draw; James I had tried to engage them, only to
find their leaders, to his mind, both insufferable and uncompromising.
The Caroline Church, however, posed a new threat to Puritan sensi-
bilities. Since the Elizabethan settlement, both Puritans and Anglicans
had preached the core doctrines of John Calvin, including predesti-
nation, election, and the inherent vileness of mankind. But the early
Stuart Church began to soften and even ignore the grimmer aspects of
Calvinism. The growth of Arminianism, with its emphasis on free will
over predestination, within the Church pushed Puritans into further
opposition. Whereas they had once merely disputed ritual and forms,
Puritans now found themselves disagreeing with traditional clergy and
even fellow parishioners over fundamental doctrine.47 By the 1630s
Puritans openly opposed Charles I’s religious policies, and by the 1640s
they were not merely reformers trying to work within the Church,
they were revolutionaries demanding a completely new order. They also
fragmented among themselves as sectarian groups, each one seemingly
more radical than the last, gained increasing prominence.
Both the Puritans within the Church, and the sectarians outside it,
were easy to mock. In Jacobean literature, Puritans are portrayed as bib-
lical literalists, able to find a justification for any minutia by thumbing
through the good book. Because they were often seen as scrupling over
minor details of the Church service (such as the bowing at the name
of Jesus), they were often called “precisarians;” malcontents who busied
themselves splitting hairs over insignificant rites, words, and services.
But Puritans and sectarians were also accused of more secular short-
comings. They were killjoys. After Ben Jonson’s archetype Puritan, Busy
Zeal-for-the-Land, is placed in stocks for tipping a basket of gingerbread-
men that he declared were popish images, he modestly describes himself
as “one that rejoiceth in his affliction, and sit here to prophesy the
destruction of fairs and maypoles, wakes and Whitsun ales, and doth
47
John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1998),
pp. 54–61; Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, pp. 36–8; Nicholas Tyacke, “The ‘Rise
of Puritanism’ and the Legalization of Dissent, 1571–1719,” in From Persecu-
tion to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, eds. J. Walsh,
C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 27.
sigh and groan for reformation of abuses.”48 But, above all, Puritans
were hypocrites who acted the part of saints, but were secretly sinners,
extraordinarily well versed in disguising and dissembling their all-too-
human foibles. Since many of them were merchants and tradesmen,
they were open to charges of greed and miserliness. Puritan shopkeepers
were swindlers, who talked a great deal about heaven while they cheated
their customers’ blind. Since so many Puritans were from the lower ech-
elons of society, they were mocked as ignorant fools who pretended to
be learned as they preached long-winded nonsense.49
The “foreignness” of Puritans and sectarians, deriving from the influ-
ence of Geneva as well as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where a profusion
of sects flourished, was also ripe for satire. Dutch cities were seen as
spreading outlandish modes of worship as well as confusion and false-
hoods. Anti-Puritan satire consistently portrayed Holland as a place
where strange cults multiplied like rabbits; a place where cunning men
could set up their own religion, profiting from the ignorance of the
common folk. Typical is the exchange between Pedant and Forobosco
in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Fair Maid of the Inn (1626). Pedant states,
“I am a schoolmaster sir, and would fain confer with you about erect-
ing a new sect of religion at Amsterdam.” “What the Devil should new
sects of religion do there,” Forobosco asks. “I assure you,” Pedant replies,
“I would get a great deal of money by it.”50 In James Shirley’s The Gen-
tlemen of Venice (1639), Malipiero declares, “I will live to Amsterdam,/
And add another schism to the two hundred/ Fourscore and odd;/
I am resolved/ . . . To cry down all things/ That hang on wit, truth, or
religion.”51
If the Puritans were easy targets of ridicule, so much more so were the
sectarians. Amid the turmoil of the mid-century crisis, they had gained
significant followings among ordinary tradesmen and soldiers, dock
workers and journeymen, and women of all stations: domestics, mar-
ket women, shopkeepers, as well as the wives of merchants and country
48
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1619) in The Alchemist and Other Plays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 408. See also Patrick Collinson, “Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair: The Theater constructs Puritanism,” in The Theatrical City:
Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, eds. D. Smith, R. Strier, and
D. Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
49
On Puritanism and the “middling sort,” see Christopher Hill, Society and
Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), ch. 4.
50
The Dramatic Works in Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bower, 10
vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10: 617.
51
James Shirley, The Gentlemen of Venice: A Tragi-Comedie (London, 1655), p. 31.
gentlemen. Schismatic preachers, who seemed so obsessed with all man-

ner of vice and sin, were easily satirized by their detractors as pious
frauds and hypocritical lechers who used their pulpit-tubs to seduce
unlearned simpletons and hysterical women. They were drunks and
fornicators who lie, cheat, and dissemble. “They’ll have no Common
Prayer, but do abhor,” so they declare, “All that is common but a com-
mon whore.”52 Female preachers were a particularly rich topic for satire,
accused of ignorance, derangement, hysteria, and, above all, sexual
license. Among John Taylor’s 1642 list of all the “distempers of the Com-
monwealth” is the “dangerous disease of feminine divinity:” “These
[who] would reform the Church, and under that pretence, deform it.”
Female preachers and “zealous ladies” were typically portrayed as highly
amorous, only they seek their satisfaction under cover. The holy sis-
ters preach and pray, “but I must not now say/ What they do when
the candles are out.”53 The sectarian woman’s pursuit of godliness,
her traipsing off to meetings and seeking time alone for prayer and
meditation, were seen by royalists as mere ruses, used to cover oppor-
tunities for intrigue and seduction. The frenzy of a rapturous religious
meeting was acquainted with sexual arousal and ecstasy as well as
leveling politics. The satiric poem, “The Character of a Roundhead,”
(1641) speaks to the likely outcome of when two pious brethren meet:
What’s he that met a holy-sister,

And in the haycock gently kist her,
Oh! Then his zeal abounded,
Close beneath a shady willow,
Her Bible served her for her pillow,
And there they got a Roundhead.54
The Puritan fop and the lusty, sanctified sister, then, were stock char-
acters in Restoration literature. The association of opposition politics
with Dissent was also a commonplace; certainly, there was no effort
52
“A Vindication of a Cheapside Cross against the Roundheads,” in Rump: Or an
Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relations to the Late Times (London,
1662), p. 141. On the sexualized image of the Puritan see Kristen Poole, Radical
Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
53
John Taylor, The Diseases of the Times (London, 1642), pp. 3–4; “A Song in
Defense of Christmas,” in Rump: Or an Exact Collection, p. 143.
54
“The Character of a Roundhead,” in Rump: Or an Exact Collection, p. 43.
to distinguish between republicans and sectarians, Whigs and Dis-

senters in either literary or political discourse. But the sanctified sis-
ters and “she-divines” were potentially even more troubling than the
tradesmen-turned-preacher sermonizing from a tipped over tub. By step-
ping into a role traditionally reserved for men, female preachers “wear
the breeches,” which, in turn, puts “petticoats” on men.55 But perhaps
even more alarming was the procreative power of women. They breed
and, so their critics claimed, women were responsible for a kind of
“spiritual whoredom,” wherein new sects multiplied and darkened the
air like locust. Writes the royalist, Henry Ferne, it is the “she-divines
that hath procreated these monsters in religion that hath engendered this
vaporous brood of schismatical tenets.”56 It was abundantly clear that
holy sisters beget, not merely figuratively but literally, Roundheads,
as in the poem cited above. This was a seventeenth-century reality of
which contemporaries were well aware; Puritan and Dissenting mothers
raised broods of Puritan and Dissenting offspring. The Presbyterian Mary
Speke, though married to a sometime royalist, had certainly done a mag-
nificent job of educating her children in the ways of nonconformity and
Whig politics. Godly women could inspire whole communities. So the
rector of Somerford Magna in Wiltshire reported that the matriarch,
Rebecca Mayo, was “the main fomenter of fanaticism in the parish and
if reclaimed [to the Church of England] would have many followers.”57
True enough the trope of the over-sexed sectarian woman was, in part,
a byproduct of the usual misogynist arsenal of stratagems used against
women throughout the medieval and early modern eras. But it is also
fairly clear that it was bred out of a frightening realization about poten-
tial of maternal power: the power of mothers to breed, nurture, shape,
and inform future generations.
Behn at Home: Staging Dissent
The Poetess Afra though she’s damned today

Tomorrow will put up another play
The Tory Poets: A Satyr (London, 1682)
Upon her return to London, Behn was once again responsible for
her own livelihood. She had already established connections with the
55
Taylor, The Diseases of the Time, p. 5.
56
[Henry Ferne], The Sovereignty of Kings (London, 1642), A1, italics mine.
57
Nathaniel Aske quoted in Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in Danger: Parsons and
Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 160.
theater and so she turned her hand to drama, transforming “the spy
Astrea into the playwright Astrea,” as Janet Todd puts it.58 Whereas
many other women writers of her era circulated their manuscripts
among friends or wrote apologetic prefaces to their published works,
Behn not only owned the fruits of her labor, she proudly announced
to the world that she made her living by her pen.59 Traditional fem-
inine virtues such as modesty and silent subservience to the public
world of men were alien to her. Behn may not have always been per-
fectly forthright about her own origins or activities, but she was not a
mealy-mouthed charlatan or hypocrite. She valued transparency, frank
liberality, and bold-faced openness, and what she despised, above all,
was sneaky, small-minded dissembling, that which could be so easily
acquainted with Dissent.
Most of Behn’s plays in the 1670s were tragicomedies which garnered
moderate success. Her first play, The Forced Marriage, debuted in Septem-
ber 1670, lasting six days, only to be replaced by a reproduction of
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This was a decent beginning.60 A mere five
months later, Behn’s The Amorous Prince (1671) was staged. The follow-
ing year, Behn contributed four poems to the Covent Garden Drollery.61
She was becoming a known quantity in the fashionable world of poets
and playwrights. She had a sometime lover in the sexually ambiguous
lawyer, John Hoyle, and a circle of witty friends whom she later cel-
ebrated in her poem “Our Cabal.”62 She also became acquainted with
the racy, John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who she found fascinat-
ing. Like the Viscount Stafford, Rochester was nobly born and exuded
continental breeding and style. But unlike the upright Catholic Stafford,
Rochester was also a profane drunkard, the author of lewd squibs and
lampoons.63 Still he was charming, gifted, and rich. That Behn was
attracted to him and to the world of aristocratic liberality and license
is easy to imagine.
58
Todd, Secret Life, p. 130.
59
Sir Patient Fancy, “To the Reader,” in Behn, Works, 6: 5.
60
Playwrights received the ticket fares beginning on the third day of a play’s run.
A full house might amount to around £70, although, after expenses, the play-
wright might only clear a third of that. Judith Milhous, “The Duke’s Company
Profits, 1675–1677,” Theatre Notebooks 32 (1978): 76–88.
61
Behn may have also edited the Covent Garden Drollery. Paul Salzman, Reading
Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 200.
62
“Our Cabal,” originally published in Poems on Several Occasions (London,
1684).
63
On the relationship between Behn and Rochester, see Todd, Secret Life,
pp. 262–5; Salzman, Reading, pp. 204–6.
With Behn’s third play, she suffered a setback and something of

a personal humiliation. The Dutch Lover, a comedy, flopped, and she
was bitter, particularly because she had overheard a “wretched fop” in
the audience exclaim that he “expect[ed] a woeful play . . . for it was a
woman’s.” She wrote a highly defensive prologue to her “Good, Sweet,
Honey, Sugar-candied” readers when she published The Dutch Lover in
1673.64 It was one of the few times that Behn betrayed a feminist con-
sciousness. Why shouldn’t women write for the stage? After all, “plays
have no great room for that which is men’s great advantage over women,
that is, learning,” so Behn declared. Clearly, Behn was rattled; her lack
of a formal education was a sore point. A few years later a similar inci-
dent occurred when she overheard “a Coxcomb Cry/ Ah, Rott it – ‘tis a
Woman’s Comedy” from the audience. Again Behn defended a woman’s
right to write “Sense and Sacred Poetrie.”65 In 1682, she celebrated the
publication of Thomas Creech’s translation of Lucretius that allowed
“the Female sex to tread/ The Mighty Paths of Learned Heroes Dead,”
whereas she had formerly “curst my sex and education/ And more the
scanted Customs of the Nation.”66 But Behn never went on to make any
great defense of women writers. She never advocated female access to
any kind of formal education. Behn certainly saw the ways in which
women were limited in her society, and she took attacks on her own
work personally. Yet Behn was no feminist theorist or advocate; she was
no Mary Astell. Behn had a certain sense of her own deprivation as a
woman in London’s masculine literary world, but her growing political
partisanship as well as her interest in the marketability of her product
limited what feminist impulses she may have had.
Behn rebounded and the plays that followed were, for the most part,
moderately profitable. Her greatest success came in 1677 with her adap-
tation of the Thomas Killigrew’s play, Thomaso (c. 1654). The Rover
not only marks the apogee of Behn’s success as a playwright, it also
registers the beginning of Behn’s coming out as a staunch royalist.
By the late 1670s, the atmosphere of London had become so politi-
cally charged, that Behn felt compelled to make her biases known. The
hero of Behn’s play, Willmore, epitomizes the destitute Cavalier wan-
dering abroad following the defeat of the royalists and execution of the
64
The Dutch Lover: A Comedy (1673), “Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-candied
Reader,” in Behn, Works, 5: 162.
65
Sir Patient Fancy (1678) in Behn, Works, 6: 79.
66
To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius (1682) in Behn,
Works, 1: 26.
King. He is an adventurous rake, poor but proud, a hard drinker and

womanizer. In many ways, he resembles George Marten in all but his
politics. In Behn’s political comedies that followed, she produced a series
of robust rake royalist heroes: loyal to the monarchy, their cups, and the
never-ending quest for sexual conquest.
Behn may have found it wondrous that every plebian had their nose
in the politics of the day, mocking their busybody chattering with her
exclamation, “What has the House of Commons done today,” in The
Rover epilogue.67 But the political jockeying of 1677 was a mere fore-
taste of the deluge to come. A series of political and religious crises
that began with the Popish Plot in 1678 and continued through the
controversy over the royal succession, commonly known as the Exclu-
sion Crisis, produced an increasingly divisive political culture. “The
devil take this cursed plotting Age,” as Behn quipped in 1679, “ ’T
has ruin’d all our Plots upon the Stage.”68 Audiences craved topical
plays, filled with allusions to contemporary politics and personali-
ties, spouting Whig and Tory slogans. London’s playhouses, as much
as the bookshops and coffee houses, became sites of partisan poli-
tics. Behn, always eager to fulfill the needs of a ready market, was
more than willing to comply with this new “Disease o’th’ Age,” as
she called it.69 Not unlike other dramatists during the Exclusion Cri-
sis, including John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, Behn’s plays became
markedly political from 1678 to 1682. The most keenly partisan were
Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign’d Curtizans (1679), The Roundheads
(1681), and The City Heiress (1682), all Tory plays that mocked the
opposition in the form of the old, canting, rabble-rousing Dissenter,
and celebrated royalism in the form of the young and handsome
Cavalier. Naturally, the women in these comedies came in several
varieties. There is the Cavalier’s love object, to be sure, young, rich,
beautiful, sometimes haughty, often witty, and always utterly desir-
able. But there are also various Dissenting women, all of whom, in
one way or another, are merely feigning their loyalty to nonconformist
Protestantism.
Much of what Aphra Behn had to say about Dissent, as seen in
her Exclusion era comedies, was not terribly unique. Her portrayal of
nonconformity resembled satiric images of Dissent in the vast pamphlet
67
The Rover, 5: 520.
68
The Feign’d Curtizans, Prologue in Behn , Works, 6: 89.
69
The Second Part of the Rover (1681), Prologue in Behn, Works, 6: 231.
literature of the time as well as in other Tory plays.70 Certainly, Behn

was influenced by the rich tradition of anti-Puritan literature as well.
More problematic is the question of whether Behn’s time in Surinam
and the continent impinged on her vision of the world of conventick-
ling, republican politics, and anti-Catholicism. While, it would be naive
to read Behn’s plays as simply ideological texts, mere reflections of her
own ardent Toryism, it is equally difficult to imagine that her formative
experiences abroad did not color her view of Dissent and republicanism
as well as Catholicism. Certainly, her visit to Surinam was still vivid in
her mind when she wrote Oroonoko at the end of her career. So too her
time in Antwerp inspired The Fair Jilt, The Younger Brother, The Dumb
Virgin, and sections of her long epistolary novel, Love Letters between
a Nobleman and his Sister. Thus, while proceeding with some caution,
we can imagine that Behn’s time abroad, and particularly her nega-
tive experiences within the shadowy world of republicans, impacted
her depiction of nonconformity in her plays. Above all, however, what
makes Behn’s work particularly valuable is not as a mere reflection of
her own beliefs, but as they resonate shared cultural images and val-
ues. As one who wrote for her bread, Behn aimed to sell a marketable
product, not something unique or idiosyncratic, but rather something
that many others would appreciate and find entertaining. Behn’s come-
dies fed into the need many royalists felt to disparage and discredit
Dissent. They also reflect contemporary fears over the growing influ-
ence of nonconformity and oppositional politics among rabble rousing
plebeians and women.
Like so much of the satire directed against Puritans and sectarians
prior to and during the mid-century crisis, Behn’s plays indicate that
which was most troubling about Dissent and its political form, the so-
called Protestant Cause or Whiggism, was the threat that it posed to
order, peace, and stability. Thus the chaotic times of the Popish Plot and
Exclusion Crisis, when the monarchy and the Church seemed besieged
by the Whig politicians and their artisan and tradesmen allies in the
streets, revived bleak memories of Civil Wars, with all of its blood-
shed and social disorder. If Behn, along with other royalist playwrights
and Tory hacks, harped on the theme of “forty-one over again,” time
again, it was not without reason. Events in the early 1680s may well
have seemed to mirror the sequence of events leading to the outbreak
70
On partisan print culture see, Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation
in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
of the Civil War, as Jonathan Scott has argued.71 Roger L’Estrange saw
the circumstances surrounding the Popish Plot as replaying “the his-
tory of forty-one over again . . . [it is] the style of One and Forty to a
hair.” Church of England clergy drew the same parallel, “The same pre-
tenses which are so rife in this age,” sermonized Edward Pelling, “were
so fatal in that.”72 Behn and others sought to remind their audience just
what the political maneuvering of Dissenters and Whigs really meant.
We won a commonwealth through “cozenage and pious frauds,” Behn
has the Dissenting elder, Goggle, declare in The Roundheads.73 And by so
doing, they executed the King and overthrew the monarchy, disestab-
lished the Church, confiscated the bishops’ lands, sent poor Cavaliers
packing abroad, and unleashed social chaos across the land. And if that
spectacle was not troubling enough, with every little Londoner inject-
ing their own ill-educated opinion into political domain, there was also
the specter of the she-politician: women, infused by religious zealotry,
making a mockery of themselves and their entire sex.
First and foremost, Behn portrayed Dissent as pure pretense. There
was no heartfelt religiosity about it: no real faith, piety, or true zeal.
It was a mask merely, a veil behind which the so-called godly hid their
authentic selves as well as their true goals and intentions. It was an
affectation; it was all show. The theme of ‘Dissent as deceit’ was one
of which Behn never tired. The old game that the Dissenters’ “fore-
Fathers [Roundheads] played with such good success” was engineered
by “dissimulation and hypocrisy.”74 Behn repeatedly maintained in her
comedies that there was absolutely nothing spiritual about Protestant
nonconformity. Dissenters only professed piety for the sake of appear-
ance. Like the Pharisees before them, through their haughty displays of
zealotry, they sought to flaunt their sanctified status. Thus Lady Fancy
in the city comedy, Sir Patient Fancy, declares that “a Psalm is not sung
so much out of devotion as ‘tis to give notice of our Zeal and Pious
intentions, ‘tis a kind of Proclamation to the Neighbourhood, and can-
not be omitted.” Although the pieties of Dissent were hollow, yet its
practice did signify something. As Lady Fancy flatly states, Sir Patient
71
Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 6–7.
72
Roger L’Estrange, Observator, 3 December 1681; Edward Pelling, A Sermon
Preached on the Anniversary of that Most Execrable Murder of K. Charles the First,
Royal Martyr (London, 1682), p. 11.
73
The Roundheads, Act 4, sc.1, in Behn, Works, 6: 400.
74
The Roundheads, dedication, 6: 362.
is “vainly proud” of his “Rebellious opinion, for his Religion means

nothing but that . . .”75 Sir Patient’s nonconformity means nothing but
seditious politics, and sectarian meeting houses were nothing more
than nurseries of treason where Dissenters rail against the government,
“quoting Scripture for Sedition, Mutiny and Rebellion.”76
Dissent also provides the godly with a discourse with which to manip-
ulate the masses. In the Roundheads, Behn’s remake of Nathan Tatham’s
The Rump which satirizes the last days of the Commonwealth, Lady
Lambert abruptly tells Lord Fleetwood to stop speaking with the godly
twang. Lord Whitlock replies that “this is the Cant we use to delude
the Rabble with.” “Then let him use it there,” quips Lady Lambert,
“not amongst us, who so well understand one another.”77 Truth, on
the other hand, was bare-faced, plain, without disguise. Behn’s Tories
and Cavaliers despise dissimulation, hypocrisy, and falseness. “Secresie,”
declares the roving Cavalier, Willmore in The Second Part of the Rover, “is
a damn’d ungrateful sin, Child, known only where Religion and Small-
beer are current.”78 Behn’s aristocratic heroes love mirth, wit, generosity,
and maintain the old ethos of chivalry and unwavering loyalty to the
monarchy. The Dissenters, on the other hand, practice “Dissimulation,
Equivocation, and mental Reservation,” outdoing the Jesuits in their
capacity to manipulate language.79
Dissenters also use religion as camouflage for the practice of all
manner of vice, particularly opportunities for sexual encounters. Long
hours of prayer and mediation in one’s closet and frequent trips to
conventicles are all ruses by which the godly disguise their rendezvous
with lovers. The pursuit of sexual satisfaction was certainly no sin, as far
as Behn was concerned. It was deceit coupled with religious hypocrisy
that Behn disdained. What the saints do, they do in secret. When Sir
Timothy Treatall hears his Tory nephew, Wilding, speak of his conquests,
Sir Timothy recalls the good old days of Cromwell and the Puritan
regime: “Oh, that crying sin of Boasting!” Sir Timothy exclaims, “Well
75
Sir Patient Fancy, Act 4, sc. 2, 6: 54; Act 2, sc. 1, 6: 19.
76
The City Heiress, Act 1, sc. 1 in Behn, Works, 7: 15.
77
The Roundheads, Act 1, sc. 1, 6: 375.
78
The Second Part of the Rover, Act 2, sc. 1 in Behn, Works, 6: 245. Small beer
was less alcoholic and associated with Puritans who were concerned about
drunkenness.
79
Behn has Lord Lambert say, “tis most certain, he that will live in the World,
must be indu’d with the three rare Qualities of Dissimulation, Equivocation, and
mental Reservation.” This line originates from Tatham’s The Rump, only slightly
modified. The Roundheads, Act 1, sc. 2, 6: 374.
fare, I say, [in] the days of old Oliver; he by a wholesome Act, made it
death of boast; so that then a man might whore his heart out, and no
body the wiser.”
“Right, Sir,” injects Sir Charles Merriwell with a note of irony, “and
then the men pass’d for sober religious persons, and the women for
as demure Saints.” The young Wilding certainly expresses Tory suspi-
cions about Dissent when he berates his old Whig uncle, Sir Timothy.
“A Plague upon your damn’d Dissimulation, that never-failing Badge of
your Party, there’s always mischief at the bottom on’t.”80
Naturally, among the most easily lampooned of the mischief-makers
were the nonconformist preachers, whom Behn likens to clowns when
she has Isabella ask her suitor, Lodwick, if he has “turn’d Buffoon,
Tumbler, or Presbyterian Preacher?”81 Behn has a good deal of fun at
the expense of “the teaching saints” in her comedies, particularly in
The Feign’d Curtizans and The Roundheads, each of which portray the
duplicity, stupidity, avarice, and licentiousness of Dissenting preach-
ers through the characters of Timothy Tickletext in the former, and
Ananias Goggle in the latter. Tickletext styles himself the “principle
holder forth of the Covent Garden Conventicle, Chaplain of Buffoon-
Hall in the County of Kent.”82 The conventicle at Covent Garden in
London was particularly famous. It was associated with Richard Baxter’s
ministry and attracted many leading Presbyterian families including sev-
eral aristocratic women. In the Feign’d Curitzans, Behn has Tickletext
accompany young Sir Signall to Rome as his tutor and guardian, a com-
mon employment for many Presbyterian and Independent preachers.
Tickletext is a numbskull and country bumpkin, completely oblivious to
the beauties of Rome. “Your buildings are pretty buildings,” so Tickletext
declares with disdain, “but not comparable to our University-buildings;
your Fountains, I confess, our pretty Springs, – and your statues rea-
sonably well-carved – but Sir, they are so ancient they are of no value!
then your Churches are the worst I ever saw – that I ever saw!” Behn
is not only ridiculing Tickletext’s ignorance, but English provincialism
and ignorance of the wider world in general, what she calls, “English
ill-bred opinion.” Worse still, Tickletext’s petty godliness blinds him to
the splendor of Catholic art at its most magnificent. Asked if he liked
St. Peter’s, Tickletext replies that he did not because it did not have a
80
The City Heiress, Act 1, sc. 1, 7: 12; Act 3, sc. 1, 7: 37.
81
Sir Patient Fancy, Act 1, sc. 1, 6: 12.
82
The Feign’d Curtizans, Act 3, sc. 1, 6: 121–2.
pew, desk, pulpit or steeple. But what about “the rich alter, and excel-
lent pictures of the greatest Masters of the World,” he is asked. “Your
Rich Alters,” cries Tickletext, “your guegaws and trinkets, and Popish
Fopperies! with a deal of sing-song . . . and for Pictures Sir, they are super-
stition, Idolatrous and flat Popery.”83 The only thing about Rome that
excites Tickletext is the opportunity to sneak off to a brothel.
Whereas Tickletext is merely a lascivious buffoon, Ananias Goggle
in The Roundheads is both a lecher and a political operator. Although
Tatham’s The Rump, upon which The Roundheads is based, did not
include a “teaching saint” among its dramatis personae, Behn did not
lose an opportunity to mock godly preachers. She probably modeled
Goggle after the rabble-rousing Hugh Peters, executed as a fomenter of
regicide in 1660. In the opening act, Behn’s Cavalier heroes, Loveless
and Freeman, are standing near a sectarian meeting. The preacher is
offstage but is probably Goggle, sermonizing from a “sanctified tub.”
Loveless is indignant: “To hear a Rascal hold forth for Bodkins and Thim-
bles . . . [and] carry on the Good Cause, that is, Roguery, Rebellion and
Treason.”84 Behn’s audience knew that Hugh Peters had famously asked
London women to give up their “bodkins and thimbles” in support of
the parliamentarian army. But Ananias Goggle is not only wedded to the
Good Old Cause, he also services his sanctified sisters in the bedroom as
well. While petting Lady Desborough’s breasts, he tries to seduce her by
explaining how he serves the ladies of the Commonwealth both from
the pulpit and in their chambers. But Lady Desborough, who is a Cava-
lier at heart, is not so easily fooled; she knows exactly what his kind is
all about:
your imprudent and Bloody Principles, your cheats, your Rogueries

on honest men through their kind, deluded Wives, whom you cant
and goggle into a Belief . . . Ye Locusts of the Land, preach Nonsense,
Blasphemy, and Treason, till you sweat again, that the Sanctifi’d
Sisters may rub you down . . . 85
The image of women rubbing down sweaty parsons fresh from working
an audience and paying their keep, while being deluded and seduced
by godly gibberish seems to have particularly vexed Behn. She may well
have satirized the pretended saints as silly ignorant fops, but one detects
83
The Feign’d Curtizans, Act 1, sc. 2, 6: 100–1.
84
The Roundheads, Act 1, sc, 1, 6: 369.
85
The Roundheads, Act 3, sc. 1, 6: 395–6.
a more serious side to her comedy. Dissenting preachers were a threat.

Hugh Peters had cajoled men and women out of their allegiance to
their sovereign lord and master, the King. What was to prevent these
preachers from turning the social order topsy turvy once again, so long
as conniving Whig politicians continued to “Pay all the Pulpit knaves
that Treason brew/ And let the zealous Sisters pay ‘em too.”86
The Sanctified Sisters
Nay, even the Women, now, pretend to reign

Behn87
It is far from clear whether Behn had the slightest inclination as

to why Protestant nonconformity could appeal to women. She may
have had no interest in seeking an answer or she may have felt that
it had something to do with nonconformity’s emphasis on individ-
ual conscience and the spiritual equality of all believers, along with
Whig slogans about individual rights and privileges. She often had
her nonconformist characters spout off the tropes of Whiggism about
liberty and property. But she made it clear that these words were
just that, words, with no substance or integrity behind them. Some
women, like Lady Lambert, know that they are mere cant and some
were deluded by their promises. Behn was certainly aware that many
women supported the handsome “Protestant Duke,” Monmouth, and
she herself felt something of an obsession for him.88 By the summer
of 1685, she would also have known that the Dissenting women who
had assisted Monmouth and the Protestant Cause paid a heavy price for
their treason. Lady Alice Lisle, the wife of the regicide, was beheaded
for supposedly harboring two Monmouth rebels on her estate.89 The
Baptist, Elizabeth Gaunt, was burnt alive at Tyburn. And mothers,
wives, and daughters – like the Speke women – found themselves
forced to flee abroad. Clearly, these women had chosen the wrong
portion.
86
The Roundheads, Prologue, 6: 365.
87
Sir Patient Fancy, Prologue, 6: 7.
88
I have discussed this in “The Political Poetry,” in Cambridge Companion to Aphra
Behn, eds. Janet Todd and Derek Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), pp. 49–55.
89
The Treason Trial of Lady Alice Lisle, State Trials, 11: 298–382.
The seduction of women by what Behn imagined as the hollow

promises of Protestant nonconformity was obviously not a trivial mat-
ter. It was Behn’s genius, following in the tradition of anti-Puritan
satire, to turn it into a comedic one. Dissent becomes a mere ruse
to achieve, not spiritual ecstasy, but sexual pleasure. Behn’s come-
dies portray nonconformist women as alluring and sexually ravenous.
In The Roundheads, the Cavalier Loveless sneers at his friend, Freeman,
who has a nonconforming mistress. “They are all sanctify’d Jilts,”
he declares, “Make Love to ‘em, they answer you in Scripture.” But
Freeman responds, “Ay, and lye with you in Scripture too. Of all Whores,
give me your zealous Whore; I never heard a Woman talk much of
Heaven, but she was much for the Creature too.” Loveless, though, is
unconvinced, “Damn ‘em for signing, groaning Hypocrites.”90 Behn’s
Dissenting women are not signing and groaning for the gospel ministry,
but for sexual satisfaction.
Behn’s portrayal of Lady Lambert in The Roundheads is particularly
illuminating. In Tatham’s The Rump she is an important character, and
he makes much of the rumor that she was Oliver Cromwell’s mistress.
But Tatham was not nearly as interested as was Behn in slandering
sectarianism. Behn expands Lady Lambert’s part, often alluding to her
godly reputation with which Lady Lambert camouflages her political
ambitions and sexual adventures. After all, “ ’tis impossible a Lady that
goes to a Conventicle twice a day, besides long Prayers and lowd Psalm-
singing, shou’d do anything with an Heroick [a Cavalier] against her
Honour,” declares a deluded Lord Desbro. “Your [Lady Lambert’s] known
Sanctity preserved you from Scandal.” Behn’s Lady Lambert is also a
political operator, “an absolute States-Woman,” boasts Lord Lambert.
It was “Old Noll” (Cromwell), declares Lady Lambert, “who first infus’d
Politiques,” like semen, “into me.”91 In addition, Behn transformed Lady
Lambert’s maid from the childish and comical Pris in The Rump, to
an older, wiser woman, Gilliflower, who can teach her mistress about
the differences between the ungainly godly and the beautiful Cavaliers.
A true saint wears “the Vizor of Sanctity, which is the gadly Sneere,
the drawing of the Face to a prodigious length, the formal language,
with a certain Twang through the Nose, and the pious Gogle, they are
fitter to scare Children than beget love in Ladies.” Conversely, a Cav-
alier is all “Wit, Softness, and Gallantry.” At first, Lady Loveless warns
90
The Roundheads, Act 1, sc. 1, 6: 369–70. “Creature” was an alcoholic drink,
usually whiskey.
91
The Roundheads, Act 2, sc. 1, 6: 384, 374, 380.
Gilliflower against such talk, “Have a Care what you say.”92 But she soon
finds herself seduced by the Cavalier Loveless even though he is one of
the “Heathenish Heroicks.” After all, a rendezvous with him might save
his soul, she declares, and “I’m much inclin’d to Acts of Piety.”93 Little
wonder, then, that when their love-making is interrupted, she quickly
demands her prayer-books.
The disguising of promiscuous sexuality with religious zealotry by Dis-
senting women was a ploy that Behn returned to time and again. In The
City Heiress, Behn portrays two lower-class women, both reputed Dis-
senters. Mrs. Clackett is a “true Protestant” and killjoy, or as Wilding
contemptuously puts it, “You hate any good thing should go by your
own nose.” She is also a prostitute, “a most devout Baud, a precise pro-
curer; A Saint in the Spirit, and a Whore in the Flesh; A Doer of the
Devil’s Work in God’s Name.”94 The old Whig, Sir Timothy Treatall, also
has as a nonconformist maid, Mrs. Sensure. Dreswell catches her coming
from Sir Timothy’s bed with a book of Richard Baxter’s sermons. “Gad
a mercy, Sweetheart,” says Dreswell with sarcasm, “thou art a hopeful
Member of the True Protestant Cause.”
Senure: “Alack, how the Saints may be scandaliz’d! I went but to tuck
his Worship [Sir Timothy Treatwell] up.”
Dreswell: “And comment upon the Text a little, which I suppose may
be, increase and multiply.”95
Religion and sex become confused. The culture of nonconformity is

like the love making between a “sanctified jilt” and an old impotent
Whig: shabby and perverse. Thus it is hardly surprising that Behn envi-
sions Dissenting meetings as sites of lewdness and promiscuity. In her
poem, “On a Conventicle,” quoted at the beginning of this chapter,
nonconformist services are described as merely places where villains find
refuge and women vent their “lust.”96 In The Roundheads, Lady Lambert
asserts that the first lesson women learn in the conventicles is the impor-
tance of “jilting” that they might cuckold their husbands.97 While it is
certainly true that Behn’s depiction of Dissenting women was meant to
92
93
94
The City Heiress, Act 4, sc. 1, 7: 47.
95
96
Behn, Works, 1: 355.
97
titillate as much as condemn, she is also unrelentingly severe in her han-

dling of these women. She chastises and humiliates them, drawing from
both in the tradition of anti-Puritan satire as well as traditional repre-
sentations of women as fickle, seductive, and sexually insatiable. Behn’s
agenda was to maximize the audience’s pleasure in hopes of maximiz-
ing her own profit, while at the same time, disparaging a culture she
detested.
Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Behn shows little interest in
attacking Catholicism or the See of Rome. This was not simply a matter
of her Tory politics. Most Tories, like their opponents, feared the spread
of Counter Reformation Catholicism, especially as it was so linked to
French absolutism. They often accused Whigs and Dissenters of being
closet papists. But Behn had a real sympathy for splendor of Catholic
art and ritual and perhaps even Catholic piety. She was contemptuous
of those who could not open their minds to the sheer magnificence
of Catholic churches, that which Tickletext dismisses as “guegaws and
trinkets, and popish fopperies.”98 She also ridicules the absurd and self-
ish destruction of the beauty of the Laudian Church in The Roundheads.
At the women’s conventicle, the Dissenting women brag about their
husband’s iconoclastic furies against the Caroline Church: “ ’twas my
Husband that headed the Rabble . . . [that] broke the Idols in the Win-
dows, and turn’d the Churches into Stables and dens of Thieves; rob’d
the Alter of the Cathedral of the twelve pieces of Plate call’d the twelve
Apostles, turn’d eleven of ‘em into Money, and kept Judas for his own
use at home.” Another reports that her husband, “pull’d down sumptu-
ous Shrines in Churches and with the golden and Popish Spoils adorn’d
his own Houses and Chimney Pieces.”99 Janet Todd believes that Behn
was an Anglican to the end. She was, after all, buried at Westminster
Abbey.100 But if she loved the Church of England, it was with little zest.
Rarely does she betray any enthusiasm for the Established Church or any
form of Protestantism. If she remained true to Anglicanism, it may well
have been only because she saw it as bulwark against the worse excesses
of Protestant enthusiasm and as a pillar of the established order. In The
City Heiress, the Tory knight, Sir Anthony, is faithful to the Church of
England. He goes to his parish church to hear “good wholesome Doc-
trine that teaches Obedience to my King and Superiors, without railing
at the Government, and quoting Scripture for Sedition, Mutiny, and
Rebellion.”101
98
The Feign’d Curtizans, Act 1, sc. 2, 6: 100.
99
100
Todd, Secret Life, p. 435.
101
By 1683, the craving for political comedies had utterly died. Always
the survivor, Behn turned her hand to writing novels, translations, and
poems on the affairs of state, particularly in honor of the Catholic
James II, to whom she was thoroughly devoted. The last months of
her life must have been particularly poignant and sad as she watched
James’s administration unravel and his son-in-law and daughter, the
Prince and Princess of Orange, usurp his throne, albeit with legal dress-
ings. Behn clearly detested Dutch William.102 Perhaps she equated him
with her unsuccessful mission to wrest William Scott from the Dutch
secret service while in Antwerp. She may have also associated him with a
dogmatic and narrow-minded Calvinist outlook, as well as with the rep-
utation of the United Provinces for allowing a multiplicity of Protestant
sects to breed at will. The only saving grace of the Revolution for Behn
was the presence of James’s elder daughter, Mary, already renowned
for her beauty and piety. Mary was a true daughter of the Church of
England. But if Behn was hoping for a Queen who would zealously
defend the Church against Dissent, she was sadly mistaken, as we shall
see in the next chapter.
The suffering of Protestant nonconformists in the age of the “great
persecution,” as it has been called, easily garners the modern scholars’
sympathetic gaze.103 Intolerance is never pretty. Yet it is illuminating to
see the persecuted as they were seen by so many of their contemporaries
and to understand why sectarians garnered so much hostility. Indeed,
there are always two faces to fanaticism. It may be “august and touch-
ing” as well as “hideous,” in the words of Victor Hugo, who certainly
saw his share of fanaticism over a hundred years later.104 Religious fervor
may well be a matter of the purest conscience as well as an impetus to
destruction. For Behn, and many of her like-minded contemporaries, the
“phanatick,” whether man or woman, was a self-serving destroyer. Behn
had seen the remnants of the Good Old Cause in America and Europe.
In their new guise, as Whigs and Dissenters in Exclusion-era London,
they appeared to her as no less tawdry, grotesque, and frightening.
102
This is most clearly evident in her Congratulatory Poem to Her Most Sacred
Majesty . . . the Prince of Wales (London, 1688), Behn, Works, 1: 294–8.
103
Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1957).
104
Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), p. 47.
Figure 4.1 Mary II – permission to publish from the National Portrait Gallery,
London
4
An Incomparable Queen: Mary II,
the Protestant International, and
the Church of England
The murmuring world till now divided lay,

Vainly debating whom they shou’d Obey
Till you great Caesar’s offspring blest our Isle
The differing Multitudes to reconcile
Aphra Behn1
On the day that Prince William launched his expedition to England,

Mary, Princess of Orange, rose early and spent several hours in prayer
and meditation. She then attended services at an English church, a
French church, and those at several Dutch congregations. At one of
the services, a Presbyterian minister addressed the Princess directly from
the pulpit, speaking to the opportunities she should have in England to
“serve Lord Jesus Christ and his people” throughout the world. At the
hearing of this address, Mary “stood up and let fall a flood of tears.”2
1
“A Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, upon Her Arrival
in England” (London, 1689) in Behn, Works, 1: 307.
2
J.G. Grevius, A Funeral Oration of J. G. Grevius upon the Death of Mary II (London,
1695), translated from the Latin, p. 8; quotation from Cotton Mather, Observanda:
The Life and Death of the Late Q. Mary (Boston, 1695), p. 36. This chapter often
employs evidence from the large number of funeral sermons in honor of Queen
Mary following her death in the winter of 1694/5. The great plethora of these
funeral sermons (thirty-seven in all, listed in Appendix B: Sermons on the Death
of Mary II) by Dissenters and Anglicans, as well as clergy on the continent,
make them attractive sources. However, I am certainly aware of their limita-
tions. Funeral sermons conform to a certain genre and any bibliographical data
they may contain needs to be measured, when possible, against other sources.
Nonetheless, I have chosen to use these sources, especially as expressions of how
125
The Princess rose and accepted her task: to ensure the survival of the
reformed religion in Europe and beyond. In short, it was the future
Queen’s mission to save the Protestant International.
Historians of English history rarely think of Mary II as a woman with
a mission. In fact, they rarely think of Mary at all. Traditionally, she
has received little attention in the great annals of late Stuart history,
and when she has garnered a few sentences, they are usually nega-
tive. Lacey Baldwin Smith reproduces the typical description of Mary
in his textbook, writing, “Mary was ignorant of history, politics, sci-
ence, and mathematics. Her spelling was quaint, her grammar faulty.
Her mind, her critics maintained, was ‘as sluggish as an inland river,’
and she always deferred to her husband’s judgment.”3 There is noth-
ing in this description that bears any resemblance to the Mary II who
contemporaries knew. Smith quotes a critic, almost assuredly a Jacobite,
about the “sluggishness” of the Queen’s mind; such an obviously hostile
source might be balanced by a few more partial sources on the subject
of the “most accomplished Princess in Europe,” whose “apprehension
was quick and lively, her judgment more penetrating and solid, her
elocution more ready, more fluent, graceful, and every way more per-
suading than is usually found in her sex.”4 Or, later in the eighteenth
century, John Wesley, whose father knew and loved the Queen, wrote
that “Her apprehension was clear, her memory tenacious, and her judg-
ment solid; she was a zealous Protestant, scrupulously exact in all the
duties of devotion.”5
contemporaries envisioned Mary, her relationship to Dissenters, and her influ-

ence on the Church of England. Diane Willen uses funeral sermons extensively
in “Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and Gender,” JEH 43
(1992): 561–80; as does Retha M. Warnicke in “Eulogies for Women: Public Tes-
timony of Their Godly Example and Leadership,” in Attending to Women in Early
Modern England, eds. Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Cranbury, NJ: Associ-
ated University Presses, 1994), pp. 168–86. Also see Eric Josef Carlson, “English
Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons,”
Albion 32/4 (Winter 2000): 567–97.
3
Smith’s textbook was first published in 1966; although he revised the text
numerous times, he never altered his description of Mary. Lacy Baldwin Smith,
This Realm of England, 1399–1688 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), 8th
ed., p. 339.
4
Anonymous, A Funeral Oration on the Most High, Most Excellent, and Most Potent
Princess, Marie Stuart (London, 1695), p. 6; John Finglas, A Sermon Preached at the
Chappel Royal in the Tower, upon Sunday the Sixth day of January, 1694/95 (London,
1695), p. 28.
5
Quoted in L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley (London,
1866), p. 187.
An Incomparable Queen: Mary II and the Church of England 127
Mary II’s image in modern scholarship did undergo something of a

historiographical makeover in the 1980s. Articles by Lois Schwoerer and
William Speck did much to enhance the political importance of Mary
during the Revolution and the early 1690s.6 Yet neither Schwoerer nor
Speck imbued her with any significance that transcended her death,
and Mary remained little more than a cipher in textbook descriptions.
In 1996, Mark Kishlansky described her as “a figurehead regnant, con-
trolled by a Council of Nine and managed by William’s detailed direc-
tives,” and portrayed her religious devotion as a “psychological shelter
from the traumas of having rejected her father and fallen out with her
sister, Anne.”7 Kishlansky seems unable to conceive of religious zeal as
anything other than a mental crutch. John Spurr, on the other hand, cer-
tainly takes religiosity seriously but imagines Mary as a weakling, ruled
by the clergy, writing that, “Among other influences upon the King was
that of Queen Mary, who took the warnings of divine providence and
the advice of Bishops Burnet and Lloyd to her timorous heart.”8
But a new perspective on Mary’s significance following the Rev-
olution has begun to emerge in the scholarship on the Church of
England and the moral reformation in the 1690s. Historians, Craig
Rose and Tony Claydon, led the way. In 1993, Rose spoke of the “dis-
tinctly latitudinarian tone” of Mary’s churchmanship. A few years later,
he wrote admiringly of Mary’s “broad Protestant sympathies” as both
“deep” and “unaffected.” Rose also gave Mary the primary credit for
filling the bishoprics left vacant by the non-jurors.9 In his 1996 book
6
Lois G. Schwoerer, “The Queen as Regent and Patron,” in The Age of William
III and Mary II: Power, Politics, and Patronage, 1688–1702, eds. Robert P. MacCubbin
and Martha Hamilton-Phillips (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary,
1990); Lois G. Schwoerer, “Images of Queen Mary II, 1689–95,” Renaissance Quar-
terly 42 (1989): 717–84; W.A. Speck, “William – and Mary?” in The Revolution of
the 1688–89: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); W.A. Speck, “Mary II (1662–1694),” ODNB. Speck’s arti-
cle in the ODNB, however, relies on several problematic sources, including
the Duchess of Marlborough’s highly negative account of Mary, discussed in
Chapter 5.
7
Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (London: Penguin
Books, 1996), pp. 301–2.
8
John Spurr, “The Church, the Societies and the Moral Revolution of 1688,”
in The Church of England, c. 1689–c.1833, From Toleration to Tractarianism, eds.
J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), p. 128.
9
Craig Rose, “Providence, Protestant Union and Godly Reformation in the
1690s,” TRHS 6th ser. 3 (1993), p. 163; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution,
Religion and War (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), pp. 41, 157.
on the moral reformation that followed the Glorious Revolution, Tony

Claydon posits that Mary’s support of Bishop Burnet and the entire
“Burnetine clergy,” as he calls them, was indispensible. For Claydon,
all ecclesiastical policies in the early 1690s were delegated to Mary. The
Queen also played a “pivotal role” in the development of Court pro-
paganda. “It was she who adopted, organized, and promoted many of
the courtly reformation initiatives described below.”10 Finally, in 2002,
perhaps the strongest affirmation of Mary’s importance to the history
of religion in era following the Revolution was made by Mark Goldie.
“Calvinist William left the church matters to his Anglican wife,” who,
in Goldie’s estimation, was hardly timorous or traumatized. “She was
a woman with decided views, a Latitudinarian queen.”11 What follows
in this chapter, while not in complete agreement with every position
of Craig, Claydon, and Goldie, does certainly build on their concep-
tion of Mary II as a strong woman, deeply pious, politically astute,
and more than willing to initiate Court and church policies. To this,
I add another dimension to Mary that shaped the kind of Protestant
queen that she would become: her very formative experience in the
Netherlands amid the early Dutch Enlightenment with its relatively
liberal academic atmosphere as well as toleration for a wide variety
of sectarian groups. Mary’s broad irenic vision of Protestantism was
shaped by the very international climate of the Netherlands, by its rich
confessional diversity and teeming refugee populations in the 1680s.
Mary brought to the throne in 1689 an understanding and deep con-
cern for the survival of the Protestant International in Europe and
in the New World. Her European experiences shaped her desire to
reform and reinforce the Church of England, accommodate Protestant
nonconformity in the three kingdoms, and ensure the perpetuity of
the reformed religion in the world beyond. Through Queen Mary’s
guidance, patronage, and leadership, the Church of England follow-
ing the Revolution was set on something of a new trajectory. She
helped transform it from the church of Archbishop William Sancroft:
sacerdotal, coercive, and tightly bound to the Stuart monarchy, to the
Church of Archbishops Tillotson and Tenison: conciliatory, pragmatic,
and latitudinarian.
10
Tony Clayton, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 71.
11
Mark Goldie, “John Locke, Jonas Proast and religious toleration,” in The Church
of England, c. 1689–c.1833, pp. 143–71.
Latitudinarianism has become something of a contested site for

scholars.12 While not a full-fledged ideology, latitudinarianism did
characterize an increasingly strong tone or temper within the post-
Revolution Church. Queen Mary’s churchmanship was often in line
with the latitudinarian mood of men like John Tillotson, Simon Patrick,
Gilbert Burnet, Edward Fowler, and others, especially if we character-
ize latitudinarianism as an alternative to both the rigid Calvinism of
some Dissenters and the coercive dogmatism and exclusivity of the
Church of England following the Restoration. To say that the Queen
and the circle of clergy around her were latitudinarian in their approach
to religion and the Church is to say simply that they believed in a
practical Christianity that demonstrated itself not through ceremonies
or sacerdotalism, but rather through everyday Christian living, includ-
ing charity to other Protestants. “Moderation” was the watchword of
the movement: moderation towards Dissent; moderation towards ritual;
and moderation of any kind of rapturous religious behavior.13 Indeed,
Latitudinarians looked askance upon religious “enthusiasm,” emphasiz-
ing instead an enlightened, sober devotional practice and deportment
over ecstatic expression.
With these basic sentiments, Mary aligned herself. But she was hardly
a slave to a movement that was Cambridge based and carved out
of English experience. As we shall see, she was neither consistently
latitudinarian nor even Low Church throughout her reign.14 Mary’s
religiosity was molded out of her positive experiences with the great
variety of reformed practice that she encountered in the Netherlands.
It was also shaped by the close proximity and constant threat of French
12
John Spurr, “ ‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church,” HJ 31/1 (1988):
61–82. Also see Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin, eds.,
Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992). The ideas of the Latitudinarians were first
articulated in S. P., A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-men (London, 1662)
which speaks to their repugnance to the rigidities of systematic theology, their
rejection of Calvinist theology, and Laudian ecclesiastic policies. A Brief Account
is usually attributed to Simon Patrick, but John Spurr disputes this point. Spurr,
“ ‘Latitudinarianism,’ ” p. 70.
13
It should be noted, however, that their moderation did not extend to Catholics
nor were they all consistent advocates of accommodation for nonconformists.
14
The terms, “High” and “Low” Church, became more prominent after the
Revolution and are fully discussed in Chapter 5. In short, High Churchmen
emphasized the ritualistic and sacerdotal aspects of Anglicanism while Low
Churchmen sought to make the Church more appealing to nonconformists.
Catholicism to the United Provinces. Mary had witnessed the after-

math of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. She had
seen the streams of Huguenot refugees entering the Low Countries, and
she had heard of the horrors, some real and some fabricated, inflicted
on those Protestants who remained in France. The besieged nature of
Protestantism in Europe made a profound impression on her, and she
came to believe that she and her husband were God’s instruments and
that their mission was quite simply to ensure the survival of the Refor-
mation. “I abandon myself entirely to His providence,” Mary wrote in
1689 about her support of the Glorious Revolution, “and sacrifice my
will to his Divine pleasure.”15
The Lady Mary at the Court of Charles II
Two glorious nymphs of your own godlike line,

Whose morning rays, like moontide, strike and shine;
Whom you to suppliant monarchs shall dispose,
To bind you friends, and to disarm your foes.
John Dryden, Epilogue to Calisto16
There was nothing enchanting, admirable, or even very interesting

about the childhood of Mary, eldest daughter of James, Duke of York,
the brother to Charles II. It was all rather mundane and typical in the
sense that Mary was raised like many elite girls of her era: by a governess
and tutors with only limited access to her parents. It might be thought
that as the eldest child of the heir apparent, a child in line to the royal
succession to the thrones of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, Mary
might have been prepared to assume, if need be, the duties of a queen.
It might be thought that her education would be robust and exacting
and her time well spent learning foreign languages, world history, and
geography. But this was far from the case and if there are two words
that aptly suit the treatment of Lady Mary and her younger sister, Anne,
during their years at the Court of Charles II, they are benign neglect.
Charles, belatedly, might have come to the conclusion that Mary might
15
Doebner, Memoirs, p. 4.
16
John Crown’s play, Calisto, was performed before the Court of Charles II in
1675. Both Princesses, Mary and Anne, took part. Dryden’s epilogue was
addressed to the Duke of York. The Dramatic Works of John Crown (New York,
1874), p. 326.
very well succeed her father, but James held out hope for a son that
would survive to adulthood; his daughters were mere spares.
At Richmond Palace in Surrey, Mary and Anne were placed under the
supervision of a governess, Lady Frances Villiers. They grew up with
eight other little girls, spending their days in idleness: dressing, play-
ing cards, reading and watching plays, and writing extravagant letters
to one another. Mary’s mother, Anne Hyde, the Duchess of York, who
kept a lush and sparkling household at St. James’s, had fully converted
to Catholicism by 1670. It is said that Anne spoiled her little daugh-
ters with treats, but her actual contact with them seems to have been
meager.17 As an adult, Mary rarely referred to her mother. The Duke of
York converted to Rome as well, not long after his wife, although this
was not public knowledge until the passing of the Test Act in 1673.
Some historians have pictured James as a loving father based on merely
one shard of evidence: Samuel Pepys’ observation of James playing with
Mary in 1664.18 What affection Mary may have felt for her father is dif-
ficult to assess. As an adult, she seemed to have had a certain amount of
respect for him as the King of England, but little real love. She was, after
all, deeply anti-Catholic and could only wonder how anyone could be
“induced to leave the bulwark of purest truth,” the Church of England.19
Additionally, James was stingy and never paid the allowance promised
to his daughter in Holland and, subsequently, Mary was always short
of funds. As Princess of Orange, she wrote that “the only thing I ever
asked the King, my father, to do, was to use his influence with the King
of France to prevent the seizure of the Principality of Orange. But my
father preferred to join with the King of France against my husband.”
And Mary never took kindly, indeed she was absolutely unforgiving, to
those who opposed William.20
17
Molly McClain, “Love, Friendship, and Power: Queen Mary II’s Letters to
Frances Apsley,” JBS 47 (July 2008), p. 508; Frances Harris, Transformations of Love:
The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), p. 93.
18
“And I saw him with great pleasure play with his little girl – like an ordinary
private father of a child.” The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds. Robert Latham and
William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1971), 5: 268.
19
Grevius, A Funeral Oration, p. 12.
20
On Mary’s poverty, see “Manuscript Account of Dr. Hooper,” in Arthur Trevor,
The Life and Times of William III (London, 1836), Appendix, pp. 467–8; Mary
quoted in F.A.J. Mazure, Histoire de La Revolution de 1688 in Angleterre, 3 vols.
(Paris, 1825), 3: 44; translated from the French.
After the death of her mother in March 1671, Mary, at age nine
became increasingly part of Court life. In 1675, Charles II entrusted her
education and that of her sister to Henry Compton, Bishop of London.
Compton’s ardent anti-Catholicism was well known and by placing him
in charge of his brother’s children, Charles reassured the Protestant
world that despite the Duke of York’s religion, Mary and Anne would
be brought up as stalwart Anglicans.21 To varying degrees, Compton
achieved the intended result. The girls were imbued with the belief that
the Church of England was the one true apostolic Church of Christ. The
problem with the Church of Rome was that centuries of impurities had
crept in and were maintained by a sinister and corrupt priesthood. Rome
had become the anti-Christ personified. The wayward and schismatic
Protestant Dissenters were responsible for the chaos and bloodshed of
Civil Wars, and worst of all, the execution of the girls’ grandfather,
Charles I of Blessed Memory. All Dissenters were, potentially at least,
rebels and regicides, although this blackened image of Dissent made less
of an impression on Mary than upon Anne and, as we shall see, the
elder daughter remained open-minded and interested in various forms
of reformed practice. Although still quite young, Mary showed a real
aptitude for learning and this, coupled with a generous spirit, made
her a favorite among her tutors and the clergy.22 She eagerly debated
theological questions and was always ready to “express [herself] against
popery,” so much so that Charles II called her “Queen Bess.”23
But other areas of Mary’s education were neglected. Compton had the
mentality of a soldier rather than a scholar, and Mary and Anne received
the education of gentlewomen who might grace drawing rooms rather
than Whitehall itself.24 They were taught French, drawing, music, and
dancing, but received nothing of the humanist curriculum of the daugh-
ters of Henry VIII. Whereas, Elizabeth I was fluent in six languages by
age eleven; Mary knew but two before her marriage and new life in the
21
Edward Carpenter, The Protestant Bishop: Being the Life of Henry Compton, 1632–
1713, Bishop of London (London: Longman, 1956), pp. 33–5.
22
Strickland, 5: 397; David Gregg, Queen Anne (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1970), p. 15.
23
Edward Fowler, A Discourse of the . . . Death of Our Gracious Sovereign, Queen Mary
(London, 1695), p. 16.
24
Because of her childhood experiences with Compton, Mary knew the Bishop
of London well. When the opportunity arose to promote him to the See of
Canterbury in 1690, Queen Mary was against it, and Compton was passed over
in favor of John Tillotson. Clearly, Mary perceived that something was wanting
in Compton’s character. Carpenter, The Protestant Bishop, p. 174.
Netherlands. The daughters of the Duke of York were, in short, pawns

of statecraft, used to make European alliances through marriage. Thus
in November 1677 Charles II was willing to give Mary, at age fifteen,
away to William, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces.
Very likely the King still held out hope that his brother, James, would
produce a living son with his new young wife, Mary of Modena. Charles
also wished to have a greater influence over his difficult and taciturn
nephew, William, the son of his sister, Mary Stuart, Princess of Orange.
And there was the added bonus that such a Protestant match was highly
popular with the people of England who were increasingly nervous by
the Catholic direction of the Court.25 Thus Mary left for her new life.
Childish and ill educated though she may have been, she also pos-
sessed an open mind and a generous heart. In fact, as her subsequent
behavior demonstrated, she eagerly welcomed the opportunity to read,
study, observe, and absorb new vistas and experiences and, in short, to
be inspired in ways the Stuart Court had failed her.
The Princess of Orange and Protestantism Abroad
The lamentable formality and contention which overspread Protes-

tant Churches abroad most sensibly afflicted her; she would with a
certain anguish of heart, say upon it, Can such dry bones live?
Cotton Mather26
In Holland, Mary of Orange blossomed. Over time, she rid herself of

her former childhood attachments and became a sophisticated and an
accomplished young woman.27 She learned to speak Dutch. In fact, she
understood and spoke Dutch so well that when meeting with foreign
dignitaries, she could easily move from one language, be it English,
French, or Dutch, to another, making all her guests feel welcome. She
25
John Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), pp. 83–5.
26
Mather, Observanda, p. 44.
27
For a time, as Princess of Orange, Mary wrote gushing letters to her childhood
friend, Frances Aspley. The letters are indicative of an impressionable adoles-
cent mimicking the language of the sex-infused Court life she had witnessed in
London. They became progressively formal as Mary matured. Mary’s letters are
found at the British Library, Loan 57/69 and are printed in Benjamin Bathurst,
Letters of Two Queens (London, 1924). Molly McClain discusses them in “Love,
Friendship, and Power: Queen Mary II’s Letters to Frances Apsley,” JBS 47 (July
2008): 505–27.
also became “very beautiful withal.”28 She resembled her father: tall,
dark eyes, bountiful thick black curls. Contemporaries describe her as
buoyant, cheerful, and talkative and as such she was a terrific asset to
her sober, uncommunicative husband. The Court at The Hague was
“young, sociable, cosmopolitan, and full of familiar company.”29 This
was unimaginable without Mary, and although William was perhaps
slow to realize it, he was fortunate to have such a vibrant and discerning
partner.
They were an odd couple, William and Mary. Twelve years older, four
inches shorter, and in imperfect health, William was anything but a
dashing lover. A bout with small pox as a child had left its mark; he
suffered from asthma and had a nagging deep cough. English observers
were sometimes dismayed by William’s gruff and unsentimental treat-
ment of his wife and sent reports back to the Stuart Court of a tyrannical
and cruel husband. But as anti-Orange propaganda such information is
not always credible and was spread, not out of concern for Mary, but to
discredit the Prince, who James II detested.30 Very likely, William was a
difficult man, hardened by years of political strife and war. But this did
not prevent Mary from loving him, and so much so that she feared that
her zeal for the Prince might interfere with her love of God. As Queen,
she frequently ended her letters to him with lines like, “ ’tis impossi-
ble for me to love you more than I do, don’t love me less.”31 William,
for his part, might have been something of a reluctant husband. For
many years, he sought comfort in the arms of Elizabeth Villiers, one of
Mary’s maids of honor, who was both a politically savvy operator and
closer to the Prince in age. Yet, over time, William and Mary’s marriage
grew into a reliable partnership. His affection for her was certainly less
transparent than her abiding adulation for him. William was not a man
to show his humor, but he was nonetheless paralyzed by grief, fainting
and weeping, when Mary died suddenly in 1694. He refused to consider
remarriage.32
28
Anon., A Funeral Oration, p. 13; The Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, Archdeacon and
Prebendary of Exeter (London, 1846), p. 26.
29
Harris, Transformations of Love, p. 265; The Royal Diary; or King William’s Interior
Portraiture (London, 1702), p. 32.
30
See, in particular, John Covell’s letter about William. BL, Add, 15,892, ff. 264–5.
31
NA SP 8/7, f. 135v.
32
“Elizabeth Villiers,” s.v., DNB; Melinda S. Zook, “The Shocking Death of Mary
II: Political and Gender Crisis in Late Stuart England,” The British Scholar 1/1
(September 2008): 21–36.
While Prince William was certainly cool and unaccommodating of

Mary’s Anglicanism, he did not thrust his own religious beliefs on
her. As a child, the Prince had been tutored by Cornelius Trigland,
a standard-bearer of Calvinist orthodoxy. The clergy of the Dutch
Reformed Church had long envisioned the House of Orange as the
defenders of the true reformed religion, and William was certainly aware
of his patrimony. But as an adult, William, who championed religious
toleration even for Catholics and Jews, was by no means a doctrinaire
Calvinist. Historians disagree as to the degree and nature of his personal
piety. Jonathan Israel asserts that William’s religiosity was “decidedly
tepid,” while Hans Bots speaks of William as “a religious, pious man with
a rock-solid confidence in God’s province.”33 On the other hand, histo-
rians are in agreement on William’s priorities: that which was politically
expedient was more important to him than the upholding of any reli-
gious orthodoxy. He was unimpressed by religious disputes over external
forms; he despised interfaith wrangling, especially when it interfered
with statecraft. He had one mission, one mammoth task, upon which
his vision was narrowly focused: the maintenance of the balance of
power in Europe in the face of Louis XIV’s quest for hegemony.34
While William had little inclination to impose his beliefs on the
Princess, there were others in Mary’s life who certainly did try to
shape her devotional practices. Whitehall dutifully sent the Princess
a new Anglican chaplain every few years. This was seen as a post of
some importance, and Mary’s chaplain and tutor in England, Edward
Lake, was indignant when in 1677 he was bypassed in favor of the
vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, William Lloyd, whose career was on
a fast track. An ardent anti-papist with some puritanical tendencies,
Lloyd was charged with ensuring that Mary was given an Anglican
chapel as was stipulated in her marriage settlement. But Lloyd’s time
in Holland was short, and instead he accompanied Mary to the ser-
vices of the English Church at The Hague, which was dominated by
Dissenters. While this news troubled some clergy at home, the Princess
33
Jonathan I. Israel, “William III and Toleration,” in From Persecution to Toleration:
The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, eds. O.P. Grell, J.I. Israel, N. Tyacke
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 131; Hans Bots, “William III and His Fellow
Calvinists in the Low Countries,” in Church, Change and Revolution, eds. J. Van
Den Berg and P.G. Hoftijzer (Leiden: Brill, 1991), p. 122.
34
J. Van Den Berg, “Religion and Politics in the Life of William and Mary,” in
Fabrics and Fabrications: The Myth and Making of William and Mary, eds. P. Hoftijzer
and C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 18–22; Israel, “William III and
Toleration,” pp. 130–5; Bots, “William III and His Fellow Calvinists,” pp. 123–5.
herself was quite comfortable with the basically Presbyterian services of

the English Church. Lloyd was gone within a year, but Mary contin-
ued to attend with services of the English Church, with an entourage
that sometimes included the Prince.35 This made the tasks of Lloyd’s
immediate successors, the more traditional George Hooper and Thomas
Ken, more difficult. Hooper, who had achieved fame as a scholar at
home, had some success. When he found the Princess reading the
works of Dissenters, he placed Hooker and Eusebius in her hands.36
He also managed to convert her dining room at Huis ten Bosch into a
chapel. But he did all this in the face of some hostility from William,
who found the rituals of the Church of England both extraneous
and irrelevant. When Hooper voiced his opposition to liberty of con-
science for English Dissenters, William, on the presumption that he
might one day be King of England, supposedly remarked, “Well, Dr.
Hooper you will never be a bishop.” The Prince might have foreseen
his own regal destiny, but not that of his wife’s. Mary enjoyed a cor-
dial and loving relationship with Hooper and, as Queen, she saw to
his promotion. Hooper later remarked that during his eighteen months
with the Princess, who was but sixteen at the time, he “never saw
her do, nor heard her say a thing that he could have wished she
had not.”37
Hooper’s close friend, Thomas Ken accepted the post of Mary’s new
chaplain late in 1679. He hoped to induce the Princess towards stricter
adherence to the principles of the Church of England and was dismayed
to find that the Princess was still attending Dissenting worship. He
was even more aghast by William’s gruff treatment of her, telling the
English ambassador, Henry Sidney, that the Prince was “not kind” to
his wife. Still the ascetic “little Ken,” renown for his monastic lifestyle,
organ music, hymns, and beautifully crafted sermons, actually had lit-
tle impact on Mary. She seems to have loved and respected him, but
she was undeterred from enjoying her freedom to worship where and
35
The Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, Archdeacon and Prebendary of Exeter (London,
1846), p. 8, 26; A. Tindal Hart, William Lloyd, 1627–1717 (London, SPCK, 1952),
p. 26; Rosemary Van Wengen-Shute, “The English Church in The Hague during
William and Mary’s Time,” in Fabrics and Fabrications, p. 51.
36
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Eight Books (London, 1593)
and Eusebius of Caesarea, The History of the Church (London, 1663). Both of
these classic works went into multi-editions throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury; they appealed to traditionalists since both spoke of the dangers of religious
innovation, heresy, and schism.
37
“Manuscript Account of Dr. Hooper,” in Trevor, Life and Times, Appendix,
p. 467.
with whom she pleased.38 And as Mary matured, her faith deepened. She
established her own rigorous routine of religious devotion and practice.
She rose early every morning and spent two hours in her closet in prayer,
readings, and meditation. She attended divine service at 9:00 in the
morning and again at 5:00 in the evening. She studied books on theol-
ogy and read the Bible, start to finish, twice a year.39 The Anglican chap-
lains that followed Lloyd, Hooper, and Ken failed to influence her. They
were far less distinguished than their predecessors and seem to have
been selected based on their ability to spy and sow dissension among
the courtiers at The Hague and especially between William and Mary.40
Mary’s religious freedom was thus greater than ever and what influ-
enced her far more deeply than either her husband or her chap-
lains was the diverse religious atmosphere of the Netherlands in
the 1680s. Mary continued worship at the English Church at The
Hague, where she was considered a benefactor and where she had
a special suite built for herself and her entourage so that they
could attend without disturbing the congregation.41 She also went
to hear popular preachers throughout the Netherlands. She visited
churches in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brielle, Utrecht, Delft, and Leiden.
She encountered a wide variety of reformed practice in these cities.
A seventeenth-century English travel guide to Amsterdam describes
the city as having, in addition to many Dutch Reformed churches, a
Lutheran church, a French church, an Arminian church, an English
church, along with one Family of Love and three Anabaptist meet-
ing houses which were also used by Socinians and Arians. The
city hosted three synagogues and numerous Catholics who wor-
shipped in private residences.42 Another contemporary, writing in 1680,
38
Charles II famously referred to Thomas Ken as “little Ken;” though little in
stature, he was known to bravely confront princes with their shortcomings.
Strickland, 5: 437; Diary of the Times of Charles II by the Honourable Henry Sidney
(afterwards Earl of Romney), ed. R.W. Blencowe, 2 vols. (London, 1843), 2: 19–20;
Gareth Bennett, To the Church of England (Worthing: Churchmen Publishing,
1988), pp. 63–6.
39
Grevius, A Funeral Oration, pp. 7–9.
40
This was particularly true of the elderly John Covell who exposed William’s
affair with Elizabeth Villiers to Mary. BL, Add. 41,812, f. 231; Add. 15,891, ff.
264–5.
41
After the Revolution, Mary procured from the Exchequer an annuity of thirty
pounds for this church. Fred Oudschans Dentz, History of the English Church at
The Hague (Delft, 1929), p. 22.
42
William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland, and
Ireland, ed. Edward Hawkins (London: Chetham Society, 1844), pp. 67–8.
describes the Netherlands as attracting “Roman-Catholics, Lutherans,

Brownists, Independents, Arminians, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arians,
Enthusiasts, Quakers, Borrelists, Armenians, Muscovites, Libertines,
and . . . Seekers, because they are still seeking out for a religion, . . . Jews,
Turks, Persians, and Mennonites.”43 This plurality of faiths, living
in relative harmony, could not have failed to impress the young
Princess.
Mary’s wide-ranging sermon-going, as well as her position at the
Orange Court, brought her into contact with many of the Low Coun-
tries’ leading intellectuals and theologians. She knew many of the
academics, ministers, and journalists at the forefront of the early Dutch
Enlightenment, men who historians today consider to be the very archi-
tects of the High Enlightenment traditions in both eighteenth-century
France and England.44 Among this intellectual milieu was a French-
speaking coterie of Protestant ministers that included Pierre Jurieu.
In 1683, Mary took her cousin, James, Duke of Monmouth to hear
Jurieu in Rotterdam; he had become one of her favorite preachers. Jurieu
had received Anglican ordination but spent most of his career at the
Walloon (French Calvinist) Church in Rotterdam. He was an extraor-
dinarily prolific theologian, moral philosopher, and historian who was
perhaps most famous in England for his History of the Council of Trent,
first translated into English in 1684. He was also an ardent supporter
of the house of Orange and a millenarian who predicted the overthrow
of the anti-Christ, meaning the papacy, in 1689.45 Jurieu enjoyed the
Princess’s presence at his fiery sermons. He considered her a “mother
and protectoress” of his church. Later, upon the news of her death in
1694, he told his congregation that it was “impossible not to love her.”
43
The Religion of the Dutch: Represented in Several Letters from a Protestant Officer in
the French Army. Trans. from French. (London, 1680), pp. 14, 23. Socinianism was
an anti-Trinitarian movement. The Borrelists were a sect named after their leader
Adam Borrel of Zealand.
44
Jonathan Israel, “The Early Dutch Enlightenment as a Factor in the Wider
European Enlightenment,” in The Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic,
1560–1750, ed. Wiep Van Bunge (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 215.
45
Pierre Jurieu, L’Accomplissement des prophesies (The Hague, 1686). On Jurieu’s
life, see F.R.J. Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu: Theoloog en Politikus der Refuge (Kampen, 1967);
on Jurieu’s prophesies, see Ernestine van der Wall, “ ‘AntiChrist Stormed:’ The
Glorious Revolution and the Dutch Prophetic Tradition,” in The World of William
and Mary, eds. D. Hoak and M. Feingold (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996).
“None ever went from her presence without being charmed by her.”46
Mary, in turn, defended Jurieu. In the winter of 1686, she coyly baited
Gilbert Burnet while he kept her company as she sat knotting a fringe.
“What had sharpened the King [James II] so much against Monsieur
Jurieu,” she asked. Never at a loss for words, Burnet plunged in, but
instead of critiquing James, as Mary had hoped, he launched into an
attack on Jurieu. “I told her, he mixed all his books with a most viru-
lent acrimony of style, and among other things, he had writ with great
indecency of Mary, Queen of Scots, which caste reflections on them that
were descended from her; and was not very decent in one that desired
to be considered as zealous for the Prince and herself.” But Mary was
unmoved and found any reference to her great-great-grandmother, both
Catholic and scandalous, particularly vexing. Rising to Jurieu’s defense,
she replied that it was natural that he would “support the cause that
he defended, and to expose those that persecuted it in the best way he
could.” She added, in reference to the Queen of Scots, that “if princes
would do ill things, they must expect that the world will take revenges
on their memory, since they cannot reach their persons.”47
But Jurieu was hardly the only leading light with whom Mary was
familiar in the 1680s. She was also well acquainted with Friedrich
Spanheim, the younger, an orthodox Calvinist professor of divinity at
Leiden and “one of the most considerable men of the reformed church,”
according to Pierre Bayle.48 She visited his church and admitted him to
her private chapel, where she confided in him about her fears for her
father’s soul. Spanheim, in turn, plainly adored the young Princess and
especially appreciated her desire to unite all Protestants.
How earnestly she wished in my hearing . . . [that] there might be a

moderate way found to consolidate the common safety of England
46
Pierre Jurieu, A Pastoral Letter Written on the Occasion of the Death of the Late
Queen of England (London, 1695), pp. 6, 9, 10.
47
Burnet, HOHOT, 3: 134–5. While Jurieu had the admiration of both William
and Mary, he was a fanatical polemicist who made many enemies. His attacks
on Pierre Bayle were violent and unrelenting. He was also no friend to Burnet.
Leo Pierre Courtines, Bayle’s Relations with England and the English (New York:
Colombia University Press, 1938), pp. 104–9; Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlight-
enment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), pp. 332–8.
48
Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Pierre Bayle, 5 vols.
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 5: 194.
and the universal church by the union of all parties, all offences
being removed, all animosity being laid aside, all passion being mod-
erated, and whatsoever on either wise favored too much of human
invention, being utterly rejected.
Later as Queen, Mary gave Archbishop John Tillotson one of Spanheim’s

books concerning a union between the Dissenters and Church of
England, a project that remained dear to her heart.49 The Princess also
knew Johannes Georg Graevius, the great classicist and chair of his-
tory at the University of Utrecht, someone intimately acquainted with
Benedictus de Spinoza. So too, Jacob Perizonius, professor of ancient his-
tory at Franeker and Leiden and thought to be the greatest scholar of his
generation, was on friendly terms with Princess Mary.50
When Mary died in 1694, these men, the preachers and professors of
the Dutch Enlightenment, published deeply moving funeral sermons
in her honor. Many of them remembered her as one among their
flock, praising her with lines like “no person was more attentive to
the preacher.” Isaac Claude, minister of the Walloon Church at The
Hague, reminded his congregation how they had “seen her often at
Church . . . You have seen her often attentive to the servants of God.”51
These men found her sudden death a severe blow to the cause of
Protestantism in Europe and they themselves were overcome by grief.
Joannes Ortwinius, a rector in Delft, warned his congregation during
his funeral sermon for the Queen that his “sobs would interrupt my
words.” Spanheim told his listeners at The Hague to bear with him as
“no man can believe that a flood of eloquence should flow from his
mouth whose eyes were blubbered [and] checks overflowed with tor-
rents of water continually streaming.”52 These men also described Mary’s
piety as “enlightened devotion,” without superstition or ostentation,
49
Francis Spanheim, A Funeral Oration to the Sacred Memory of the Most Serene and
Potent Mary II (London, 1695), pp. 10, 30; Birch, Life, pp. 232–3.
50
Both men honored the Princess when she died. See Grevius, A Funeral Oration;
and Jacob Perizonius, A Funeral Encomium upon the Queen. Most Serene and Potent
Princess, Mary II (London, 1695). On Perizonius’ reputation, see Joseph M. Levine,
Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustus England (Berkeley:
University of California, 1977), passim.
51
Peter Francius, An Oration of Peter Francius upon the Funeral of the Most August
Princess, Mary II, Queen of England, etc (London, 1695), p. 13; Isaac Claude, Sermon
upon the Death of the Queen of England (London, 1695), p. 14.
52
Ortwinius, A Funeral Oration . . . (Delph, 1694/5), p. 3; Spanheimus, A Funeral
Oration, pp. 1–2.
nursed by “frequent discourses with learned and able divines.” She

was, in their words, “generous, charitable, good, liberal, and beneficent
beyond expression.”53 They were impressed by her knowledge of divin-
ity and found her articulate and wise. For whatever education the Court
of Charles II had failed to provide her, she made up for in Holland.
Mary erected her own library at Het Loo Palace, filled with books on his-
tory, architecture, geometry, geography, and theology. She read Jurieu’s
books and works by English Dissenters. She read Gilbert Burnet’s History
of the Reformation, William Cambden’s Annals of Queen Elizabeth, and
Father Paul’s History of the Council of Trent, which was a favorite among
Protestants. She had no interest in “empty romances or frothy plays”
and when she found reading difficult because of her poor eyesight, she
had her women read aloud to her.54
Mary had a highly visible presence in the Netherlands. She was young
and elegant, the center of a vibrant Court, and she was often seen by the
public: in her carriage, at worship, and taking long promenades or barge
trips with her ladies. After 1685, William and Mary made the plight of
the Huguenot refugees streaming into Dutch cities one of their partic-
ular concerns, and Mary was soon renowned for her charitable giving.
Her largesse, along with her frequently observed devotional practices,
made her exceedingly popular in the Netherlands and quickly dispelled
any lingering memories of her highly unpopular aunt, Mary Stuart, the
previous Princess of Orange. In fact, Mary’s fame among the Dutch was
such that the English envoy, Henry Savile, described the common peo-
ple as “stark mad, stopping her coach that they might kiss the wheels”
even trying to “snatch a piece of the clothes off her back that they might
have a piece of something she wore.” “People crowded in throngs from
distant cities,” as another contemporary declared, “they brought their
little children to catch a glimpse of her.”55 Thus when the tumultuous
political events in England in the 1680s began to intrude on the culture
of the Orange Court, Mary was not unprepared. Sophisticated, popular,
53
Anon., A Funeral Oration, pp. 14–15.
54
A Funeral Oration, Pronounc’d upon the Death of the Most Serene and Potent Princess,
Mary Stuart (London, 1695), p. 8; William Payne, A Sermon upon the Death of the
Queen, Preached in the Parish-Church of St. Mary White-Chappel (London, 1695),
p. 24; Gilbert Burnet, An Essay on the Memory of the Late Queen (London, 1695),
p. 38. Paulo Sarpi’s bitter account of the Council of Trent was translated into
English in 1620 and influenced generations of Protestants.
55
NA SP/ 84/ 216, f. 134; also described in Savile Correspondence: Letters to and from
Henry Savile, ed. W.D. Cooper (London: Camden Society, 1858), p. 182; Anon.,
A Funeral Oration, p. 15.
in love with her husband and all that he stood for, and, above all,
trusting in God’s providence, the Princess was neither timorous about
defying her father, the King of England, nor defending the true religion.
Repercussions from political crises in England were felt at The Hague
as droves of English and Scottish political and religious refugees began
to pour into Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, and The Hague after each
successive Whig debacle, such as the discovery of the Rye House Plot
in the spring of 1683, and again following the catastrophes of Argyle’s
and Monmouth’s invasions in the summer of 1685. William and Mary
hosted many of the Dissenters and Whigs who sought to evade author-
ities in London.56 Among them were two of the leading Presbyterians
in England, William Bates and John Howe. William Bates was one of
Mary’s favorite Dissenting writers, and they began a hardy friendship
that continued after the Revolution. John Howe, who had settled in
Utrecht and preached at the English Church there, met with both the
Prince and Princess of Orange on several occasions. Mary’s repeatedly
stated desire to bring about a union of all Protestants in England partic-
ularly impressed him. The Church of Scotland minister, Thomas Hog,
who preached at The Hague, also knew Mary.57 Then in May of 1686,
Gilbert Burnet came to the Court of William and Mary. Like those before
him, he became enchanted by the Princess and was soon her close con-
fidant and advisor. James II believed Burnet was seditious and repeatedly
warned Mary not to entertain him. But Mary defied her father; she was
charmed by the highly learned and loquacious Scot. Her latest chaplain
and spy, William Stanley, reported that Burnet was “perpetually desir-
ing to talk with the Princess in private and too often gets the liberty.”58
Although James’s envoy, Marques d’Albeville, did succeed in having the
Prince banish Burnet from his Court in 1687, Burnet remained in close
contact with William and Mary. The Princess had an altogether different
reaction to the Quaker, William Penn, sent to The Hague by the King to
56
William and Mary also began to strengthen their ties with leading opposition
figures within England. Mary wrote to Lady Rachel Russell, wife of the Whig
martyr, William, Lord Russell, and a woman of no small standing, promising to
do her “any kindness” should it be in her power. Letters of Lady Rachel Russell:
From the Manuscript in the Library at Woburn Abbey (London, 1773), p. 81.
57
On Bates, see Calamy Revised, p. 36. On Howe, see Henry Rogers, The Life and
Character of John Howe (London, 1836), p. 149. On Hog, see Keith L. Sprunger,
Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands
(Leiden: Brill, 1982), pp. 132–3.
58
Stanley to Compton, August 1686; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS,
983 C.
sound out and, if possible, convince William and Mary of the benefits of
lifting the penal laws and the Test Act.59 Penn made some progress with
William, who certainly was not averse to the principle of religious toler-
ation, although he baulked at any attempt to abolish the Test Act. Mary
was a harder case, far more adamantly against the removal of any of the
Church of England’s safeguards. She also took something of a dislike to
Penn, who she suspected of being a spy for her father. Burnet, on hand
during Penn’s visit, described the Quaker as “a talking, vain man,” and
this seems to have been Mary’s reaction as well. At one point, Penn, who
was aware of Mary’s penchant for good preaching, asked if she would
care to hear him preach. She readily declined the offer, saying that she
had plenty of “very good preachers.” She also told Penn, “If ever she
was queen of England, she would do more for the Protestants than even
Queen Elizabeth.”60
Mary’s growing opposition to her father’s policies, in conjunction
with her ardent anti-Catholicism, was now increasingly on display.
D’Albeville told James that the Princess spoke with great firmness in all
their conferences concerning the lifting of the Test Act; “she was more
intractable on those matters than the Prince himself.” When it became
apparent in 1687 that James would abolish the penal laws, the Princess
wrote to Archbishop William Sancroft, stating that she certainly hoped
that the English clergy were “as firm to their religion as they have always
been to their king.” In the winter of 1687, James’s made his one and only
attempt to convert his eldest child to his religion, sending her a two-
page handwritten letter and some books on Catholic apologetics. Mary
responded quickly, “without consulting any one person, and in so solid
and learned a letter, that she cut short all further treaty.”61 In a politically
charged move, she also sent a copy of her reply to Archbishop Sancroft
so that he might know of her father’s attempt to convert her and of her
ardent defense of Protestantism. “The Reformers did not leave the true
Catholic Church,” she wrote to her father, “but only the errors which
59
The Test Act of 1673 (25 Car. II. c. 2) enforced an oath of supremacy and alle-
giance on all persons in civil or military offices; one also had to subscribe to
a declaration against the Catholic notion of transubstantiation and receive the
sacrament in the Church of England within three months after admittance to
office.
60
Burnet, HOHOT, 3: 139; William Hull, Eight First Biographies of William Penn
(Swarthmore College Monographs on Quaker History, 1936), pp. 55–6; Mary
quoted in Strickland, 5:460.
61
John Breval, The History of the House of Nassau (London, 1734), p. 248; Mary’s
letter is reprinted in Strickland, 5: 470.
have crept into it.”62 Nor was Mary shy about exhibiting the depth of
her disdain for the religious policies of the French government. She let
the French ambassador know her feelings on several occasions, includ-
ing one in which she regaled the ambassador with a story of how two
French Protestant girls were boiled alive in a pot. Affronted, the ambas-
sador complained to the Prince to restrain his wife, but William blandly
replied, “that he could not.”63
Then the unthinkable happened. In June of 1688, Mary of Modena
gave birth to a healthy baby boy, James Francis Edward. William saw his
wife’s place in the English royal succession displaced and the prospect
of a Catholic alliance between France and England a very real pos-
sibility. Nothing less than the independence of the United Provinces
and survival of the reformed religion were at risk. Yet all was not lost.
William and Mary were receiving overtures from unhappy elements
within England itself, and not just from Whigs and Dissenters anymore.
Anglicans and Tories despaired at the grim future they saw stretched
before them; one in which the Established Church was truly imperiled,
and not by nonconformity, but by the very monarchy to which the
Church had so tightly bound itself. Mary was also the recipient of innu-
endo and gossip about the child’s legitimacy coming from inside the
Stuart Court itself.64 Was this baby boy really her father’s son? If James
Edward was a fraud, then Mary was still the next legitimate heir and the
Protestant succession was saved. Such a proposition was too rich with
possibility to be dismissed out of hand. It offered an avenue of real hope.
The Queen of England and the Established Church
The Church, which William sav’d, was Mary’s Care,

Taught by Her Life, and guarded by Her Prayer.
George Stepney65
62
Mary also informed her sister, Princess Anne, and Henry Compton, Bishop of
London. Countess Bentick, ed., Lettres et Memoires de Marie, reine d’Angleterre (La
Haye, 1880), p. 65.
63
Recounted in numerous sources including Sanders, Princess and Queen of
England, p. 163.
64
See the exchange of letters between Anne and Mary reprinted in Dalrymple,
Memoirs, 2, appendix, part 1, p. 305.
65
A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of Her Late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary
(London, 1695), p. 2.
Once Mary was convinced that the Prince of Wales was supposititious,
a fraud perpetuated by her father that could only lead to the destruc-
tion of the Church of England and endanger Protestantism throughout
Europe and the New World, she fully supported William’s plans to
invade England. She ordered that there should be no prayers for the
Prince of Wales and retreated to Het Loo, spending her time in medita-
tion. In the days immediately leading up to the invasion, she returned
to The Hague so that she could be with William. She ordered prayers
for his success to be said four times a day in every church, including
the Catholic chapels of the Spanish and Imperial ambassadors. She also
forbade the collects for her father.66 Mary was convinced of the righ-
teousness and necessity of her husband’s cause. But it was not simply
his cause. It was their cause. It was what God called them to do: to save
the sinking state of Britain. She had not chosen her husband over her
father; rather she felt that God had made the choice for her. “I bless my
God decided between the daughter and the wife, and showed me, when
religion was at a stake, I should know no man after the flesh, but wait
the Lord’s leisure and trust his goodness for the event.” Burnet saw Mary
right before William’s expedition and reported that “she seemed to have
a great load on her spirits, but to have no scruple as to the lawfulness of
the design.”67
William and Mary were crowned King and Queen of England on
February 13, 1689. Although Mary was considered a regnant queen,
all true sovereignty rested in William alone when he was in England.
But when the King was abroad, making war on France or tending to
his responsibilities in the United Provinces, Mary was invested with
executive authority. This occurred on six occasions of varying lengths
between 1689 and 1694, for a total of thirty-two months.68 When
William returned, Mary resumed her role as a consort queen. As both
a regnant and as a consort queen, Mary II was able to exercise consid-
erable influence, particularly over the Church of England. Mary’s ability
to guide the Church was made all the more vital after William made sev-
eral early blunders in his dealings with Anglican churchmen. The prickly
sensibilities of the clergy needed to be handled with more acuteness
66
Strickland, 5: 498; Speck, “Mary II,” ODNB.
67
Doebner, Memoirs, 3; Burnet, HOHOT, 3: 311.
68
Mary’s regencies were 11 June to 10 September 1690; 6 January to 10 April and
1 May to 19 October 1691; 5 March to 18 October 1692; 24 March to 29 October
1693; and 6 May to 9 November 1694.
than the indelicate Dutchman was capable.69 Mary, a true daughter of

the Church of England, easily filled the breach.
What Mary found in England upon her arrival in February shocked
her. “The first thing that surprised me at my coming,” wrote Mary II,
“was to see so little devotion in a people so lately in such eminent
danger.”70 She continued to be dismayed by the Established Church,
its ceremonialism, its treatment of Protestant Dissenters, and the gen-
eral laxity of the clergy. She immediately set out to change things.
Inspired by her experiences in the Netherlands, Mary sought to reform
the Church from within and seek to accommodate, if not compre-
hend, nonconformists. Her goal was simply to establish a stronger, purer
reformed Church that could lead the Protestant world. Although her
time was short, her accomplishments were enough that by the time of
her death, Protestants in Europe, America, and the British Isles would
come to know her as their “nursing mother” and “protectrix;” “the
light of our eyes, and the breath in our nostrils;” “She of whom we said,
nations shall rest under her shadow.”71
As was her practice in Holland, Mary surrounded herself with clergy.
Burnet, of course, was in constant attendance and was elevated to the
bishopric of Salisbury in March 1689.72 But the most significant cleric
in Mary’s life became John Tillotson, Dean of Canterbury, who had
already made a highly favorable impression on William. Tillotson was
appointed clerk of the King’s Closet in April 1689. He was a calm, dis-
creet, urbane man, firm in his beliefs, mild and even-tempered in his
deportment. His liberal theology with its emphasis on practical spir-
ituality and ethical behavior appealed to Mary’s desire for a moral
reformation. Like William and Mary, Tillotson had no interest in the
retrenchment of inessential dogmas, of fighting old battles over ritu-
als, signs or formulaic prayer. In this new age, such ‘things indifferent’
were not worth squabbling over. Tillotson believed in a rational, ethical
69
William’s mistakes are recounted in G.V. Bennett, “King William and
Episcopate,” in Essays in Modern English Church History, eds. G.V. Bennett and
J.D. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 113–55; also see Craig,
England in the 1690s, pp. 162–5; and Birch, Life, p. 156.
70
71
Anon., A Funeral Oration, p. 22; Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Mourning,
And the Great Concern of Preparing Our Selves for Death (London, 1695), preface;
John Finglas, A Sermon Preach’d at the Chappel Royal, p. 3.
72
Burnet waited on the Queen once a week at Whitehall. H.C. Foxcroft and
T.E.S. Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1907), p. 286.
Christianity, one that promoted virtue, prudence, charity, and enlight-

ened self-interest in everyday living. The persecution of Dissent was an
abomination to him. Rather, he wished to broaden the Church and,
like the Queen, was earnest in his desire for comprehension. In short,
Tillotson sought to Christianize the Enlightenment. Thus with Tillotson
and Burnet at her side, the Queen sought to lead the Church, promoting
moral reform, pastoral care, and moderate clergymen, who, to varying
degrees, accepted and supported the Revolution. Although reluctant,
Tillotson himself was elevated to the See of Canterbury in October
of 1690, replacing the nonjuring Archbishop William Sancroft. “The
Queen’s extraordinary favour to me, much beyond my expectation, is
no small support to me,” Tillotson declared to Lady Rachel Russell.73
That first spring, speaking on behalf of all nonconformists, the
Presbyterian leader, William Bates, with whom Mary was well
acquainted, addressed the Queen: “We humbly desire, that your Majesty
would be pleased, by your wisdom and goodness, to compose the dif-
ferences between your Protestant subjects in things of less moment
concerning religion.” Mary, of course, willingly consented, answering
that she would do everything in her power for “obtaining a union that
is necessary for the edifying of the church.”74 But the more conservative
and jealous elements within the Established Church thwarted all designs
to comprehend moderate Dissenters, and the failure of comprehension
led to the more radical Act of Toleration passed by Parliament in May
1689.75 Similarly derailed was an ecclesiastical commission charged by
the crown with the task of reviewing the Church’s liturgy and canons
and with the goal of broadening the Church. High Churchmen, feel-
ing that the passage of the Act of Toleration had already given far too
much to nonconformity, would not consent to any reforms and either
refused to attend or walked out of the process. Increasingly, the Church
bifurcated between the moderates around the Court and Archbishop
Tillotson and those High Churchmen bent on preserving the Restora-
tion Church, exclusive and dogmatic. Mary watched these events with
73
Walsh and Taylor, “Introduction,” The Church of England, pp. 35–47; Letters of
Lady Rachel Russell: From the Manuscript at the Library at Woburn Abbey (London,
1801), p. 282.
74
Bates’ address and Mary’s response are reprinted in Daniel Neal, The History of
the Puritans, 3 vols. (London, 1837), 3: 315–16.
75
The Act of Toleration (1689): “An act for exempting Their Majesties’ Protestant
subjects dissenting from the Church of England from penalties of certain laws.”
John Raithby, ed., Statutes of the Realm. 11 vols. (London, 1810–20), 4: 74–6.
growing consternation. “We were like to have a great division in the

Church,” she wrote in 1691, “for not only some would stick to their
old bishops, but all our High Churchmen and the Bishop of London
[Compton] were ready to join with them and form a party.”76
Still the Court had tremendous control over the direction of the
Church, especially through the power of ecclesiastical appointment.
The opportunities given to the new regime to shape the character of the
church hierarchy were vast due to the number of deaths and depriva-
tions following the Revolution. Four bishops died in 1689 alone and six
more, who refused to takes the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary,
were deprived in 1691. Between 1689 and 1692, the dual monarchy pre-
ferred seventeen new bishops and translated another three in England,
and appointed two more in Wales. Thus out of the twenty-seven English
and Welsh Sees, twenty-five were filled by bishops who owed their posi-
tions to the dual monarchy by 1692. In Ireland the situation was similar.
William and Mary had appointed nineteen of the twenty-three bishops
in Ireland by 1694.77 They made several of their most crucial appoint-
ments in England in 1689. In addition to promoting Gilbert Burnet, they
oversaw Edward Stillingfleet’s election to Worcester and Simon Patrick’s
translation to Chichester. Patrick and Stillingfleet were among the most
gifted men in orders. They were closely associated with Tillotson and
shared his irenicism.78
Among the ecclesiastical matters that fell into the hands of the
Queen in the early 1690s was the knotty problem presented by those
clergy who refused to accept the Revolution. Mary was extremely eager
to prevent a schism within the Church between the swearing and
nonswearing clergy. She was also unwilling to allow the nonjurors
the slightest chance to the play the part of martyrs. For two years,
the nonjuring clergy were left unmolested and in possession of their
dioceses, giving them plenty of time to rethink their decision, one
that meant losing their incomes. But by the summer of 1691, the gov-
ernment’s patience had run out. The nonjurors had to be removed
76
77
F.M. Powicke, Handbook of British Chronology (London: Royal Historical Soci-
ety, 1939) lists the succession of the bishops in England, Wales, and Ireland,
pp. 132–272.
78
Bennett, “King William and the Episcopate,” p. 109; Bennett, To the Church of
England, p. 89; J. Van Den Berg, “Between Platonism and Enlightenment: Simon
Patrick (1625–1707) and his Place in the Latitudinarian Movement,” Nederlands
Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 68 (1988): 164–79.
and the new bishops appointed. With the King abroad, the Queen
oversaw the removal of the nonjuring clergy and began “filling the
Bishopricks.”79 It was Mary who ordered Archbishop Sancroft to vacate
Lambeth Palace and had apartments outfitted for Tillotson and his
wife. The Queen certainly understood the opportunity that had been
given her, and she strove to “produce a great change in the church
and in the temper of the clergy” through promotion and translation.80
For the most part, Mary’s appointees were “Low Church,” insofar as
they were men interested in enlightened, practical solutions to the
Church’s problems rather than theological dogmatism. Among them
was Edward Fowler, a long time promoter of accommodation with
nonconformists, who Mary preferred to the See of Gloucester in July
1690. In December 1691, she nominated Thomas Tenison to the bish-
opric of Lincoln. He too had long been known for his moderation
towards Dissenters.81
But Mary did not always tow a strictly latitudinarian or even Low
Church line. On the one hand, the Queen selected men whose learn-
ing and piety she admired, such as Edward Stillingfleet. On the other,
she made appointments based on political convenience, particularly in
her effort to reconcile those clergy having twinges of conscience over
the Revolution. As Burnet put it, “The Queen hoped to overcome the
peevishness of the leaders of the [High Church] party by preferring
them.”82 She tried this tactic with the important bishopric of Bath and
Wells. In 1691, she nominated William Beveridge to replace her for-
mer chaplain, the nonjuring, Thomas Ken. Mary knew that Ken had
“a great desire to be a martyr” and determined that he should not
be gratified.83 Beveridge’s monastic lifestyle and acetic piety resembled
that of Ken’s. The Queen hoped to gain both Beveridge’s support and
use him to make for an easy transition at Bath and Wells. Beveridge
dithered for three weeks, but ultimately refused the appointment on
the advice of Sancroft and under pressure from Jacobites. Mary then
79
80
Burnet, HOHOT, 4:212.
81
On Fowler and Dissent, see Mark Goldie and John Spurr, “Politics and the
Restoration Parish: Edward Fowler and the Struggle for St. Giles Cripplegate,”
EHR 109 (June 1994): 572–96. Thomas Tenison’s moderate views are made clear
in his Argument for Union, Taken from the True Interest of the Dissenters in England
(London, 1683).
82
Burnet, A Supplement, p. 504.
83
Burnet, HOHOT, 4: 11, n.1.
turned to Richard Kidder, another moderate and member of Tillotson’s

circle. Beveridge would wait another thirteen years before he wore the
mitre.84 Mary and Tillotson were more successful with the promotion of
the High Churchman, John Sharp, to the Archbishopric of York in 1691.
Although “a warm and zealous man for the church,” who had attacked
Dissenters in his sermons, Sharp was not a dogmatic militant or even
keenly political. He had ultimately supported the new regime, earned
Mary’s admiration at the pulpit, and proved that he was more interested
in pastoral care than politics.85
But Mary’s bipartisan choices did not always meet with William’s
approval. Upon Sharp’s elevation, the deanery of Canterbury became
vacant, and Mary hastily appointed her old friend, George Hooper.
Hooper was thoroughly High Church, and William, who had linger-
ing memories of Hooper as Mary’s meddling chaplain in Holland, was
not amused.86 William and Mary clashed again following Tillotson’s
death in November 1694. Mary strongly favored the candidacy of highly
intellectual Edward Stillingfleet to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. But
the King was more concerned with appeasing his political allies. The
Whigs in William’s government considered Stillingfleet’s “notions and
his temper too high,” and William chose the more moderate, Thomas
Tenison.87 Tenison was certainly not disagreeable to Mary, and in her
last months, she defended the new Archbishop against his detractors.88
Indeed, Tenison was a good choice. He continued the work of Tillotson
and the Queen: patronizing her charities and moral reformation soci-
eties and fully supporting the propagation of the faith abroad until his
own death in 1715.
84
Beveridge was in “all the great questions of Church doctrine and ritual” sim-
ilar to Ken. E.H. Plumptre, Life of Thomas Ken, D.D., 2 vols. (London, 1890), 2:
51. Also see White Kennett, Compleat History of England, 3 vols. (London, 1706),
3: 634.
85
Burnet had recommended Sharp to William in the winter of 1689. But as Sharp
became aligned with Tory and High Church politics, Burnet asserted that Sharp’s
elevation had been a mistake. Burnet, A Supplement, p. 504. Mary, however, clearly
admired Sharp, proving that she was more concerned with a clergyman’s piety
and learning than his political leanings. DNB s.v. “Sharp, John.”
86
Appendix in Trevor, Life and Times, p. 468.
87
Burnet, HOHOT, 4:244. Stillingfleet was becoming increasingly conservative in
the 1690s which seems to be the reason for Whig concern. Stillingfleet is further
discussed in Chapter 5.
88
Thomas Tenison, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Most Reverend Father in
God, Dr. Thomas Tenison (London, 1716), p. 20.
Mary’s years in Holland had attuned her to a far more stark approach
to worship than she found in the Church of England upon her return.
Whereas she had formerly gone to “public prayers four times a day,”
she complained that, “now I hardly have the leisure to go twice and
that in such a crowd with so much formality and little devotion.” Mary
was particularly offended by the excessive ritualism that she considered
“popish.” Even before her coronation, Mary had dismissed the violinists
at St. James’s Chapel and had the singing of the prayers halted.89 Mary
saw to it that the services at the royal chapels were far more frequent and
public, and as a great believer in sermons, she had those given before
her published by her order as well as many others. More sermons were
published by the Queen’s command during Mary’s short five-year reign
than during the entire twenty-five years of Charles II’s regime.90 The
Queen could also be critical of what her clergy said and did. She flatly
told Burnet to shorten one of his long-winded sermons and reprimanded
George Hooper for traveling on Sundays. She pressured clergymen guilty
of pluralism and non-residence to abandon those livings where they
did not reside and she considered using bishops’ revenues for charitable
purposes.91
The Queen’s puritanical sensibilities were especially offended by the
Sabbath-breaking she witnessed in and around London. In 1691 she
informed her council that she was framing regulations for better obser-
vance of the Sabbath, going so far as to forbid all hackney-carriages
and horses from working Sundays. That summer she issued a procla-
mation to the JPs of Middlesex for the suppressing of drunkenness,
blasphemy, and debauchery. In 1692, during the King’s absence, the
Queen sent directives to the magistrates throughout England “to exe-
cute the laws against drunkenness, swearing, and profanation of the
Lord’s Day.”92 Certainly, Mary was well aware that there were those
that snickered at her afternoon sermons and ridiculed her moral legis-
lation. Enemies of the Revolution and High Churchmen, such as the
disgruntled Henry Compton, Bishop of London, who had expected
89
Doebner, Memoirs, pp. 11–12, 13.
90
According to Tony Claydon’s figures, 45 sermons were published by the King’s
command during Charles II’s 25-year reign as compared to 101 by command
during Mary’s 5 year reign. See his, William III and the Godly Revolution, pp. 96–7.
By my count, those 101 sermons were given by at least 40 different clergymen of
varying ranks.
91
Strickland, 6: 46; Appendix in Trevor, Life and Times, p. 473.
92
CSPD, William & Mary, 1: 437–8.
the Archbishopric of Canterbury and was passed over, were forming a

party around her alienated sister, Princess Anne.93 But the Queen was
undeterred. She employed Christopher Wren to design a hospital in
Greenwich for the care of old and injured seamen. She was planning a
college in Virginia for the propagation of the faith. She was particularly
concerned with the deplorable state of the Church of Ireland, a topic
on which she wrote to William after his success at the Battle of Boyne,
telling the King that he was obligated to advance the true religion and
promote the gospel among the Irish. To this end, she advised him to
keep some of the confiscated estates with which to establish schools
to instruct the poor Irish, and she herself established a charity for the
maintenance and training of orphans.94 Mary, with William, continued
to support the emigration of French Protestants to Britain and America.
The Queen also supported Huguenot and Dutch reformed chapels in the
Channel Islands which William maintained after her death.95 Frederick
Spanheim believed that the Queen sent £40,000 abroad annually for the
care of orphans, widows, ministers, and distressed families in Germany,
Switzerland, and Piedmont.96 No Stuart monarchy had a more favor-
able reputation in Protestant Europe than the dual monarchy of William
and Mary.
At home, Mary sought to lead by example, setting a model of piety
and devotion at Court. Her morning routine of prayer and meditation
continued and was widely known and admired. Her closet was a “little
oratory [that] was always filled with the sweet incense of fervent and
well directed prayer.”97 Mary had the royal chapel at Hampton Court
remodeled so that her participation in worship could be viewed. After
the service, courtiers could wander through a maze she had had con-
structed in the gardens so that they might ponder the sermon.98 She
urged her bishops to be exemplars at the local level. To that end, the
93
Doebner, Memoirs, 24; Burnet, HOHOT, 4:128.
94
Letter (July 1690) from Mary to William, Dalrymple, Memoirs, 2, part 3,
pp. 140–1.
95
By the King and Queen, A Declaration for the Encouraging of French Protestants
to Transport Themselves to this Kingdom (London, 1689); The Case of the French
Protestant Refuges, Settled in and about London, and in the English Plantations in
America (London, 1696); on the Channel Islands, see Bodleian Library, Rawlinson
C392, f. 317.
96
Spanheim, A Funeral Oration, p. 27.
97
William Perse, A Sermon Preach’d upon the Occasion of the Queen’s Death on the
4th Sunday in Lent, Being the 3d of March, 1694/5 (London, 1695), p. 16.
98
Discussed in Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, p. 95.
Queen and Archbishop Tillotson requested Burnet compose a guide-

book on pastoral care. Bishop Burnet’s A Discourse of the Pastoral Care
(1692) details the benefits of vigorous pastoral care, catechetical instruc-
tion, and the enforcement of moral discipline. At the heart of it was
the notion that by setting an exemplary model, the clergy of the Estab-
lished Church would win back the Dissenters, “for the manners and
the labors of the clergy, are real arguments which all people do both
understand and feel.” Pious actions were better than dogmatic rules and
ritualism.99
English Dissenters were well aware that they had a friend in the
new Queen. She met with various prominent nonconformists on sev-
eral occasions.100 But her days of being carried off in her carriage to
hear preachers of various hues were over. She was now, along with
William, head of the Church of England. Yet her affection and concern
for reformed piety in all its vagaries remained. She ordered a catalog of
the most “thoughtful books of the Dissenting ministers,” to be sent to
her, saying that since, “I am tied up from hearing them preach, I am
resolved to make up this loss so far as I can by a careful perusal of their
best writings.”101 Mary was never shy about asserting her ultimate goal.
She certainly made it clear to the Dissenting as well as the conform-
ing clergy in England; she had pronounced it on numerous occasions
to Protestant clergy in Europe, and it was known as well to those in
America that she sought to heal “our unhappy differences in religious
things,” as William Bates put it. Writing after her death, the Presbyterian
John Howe asserted that, “She knew some modes of worship differed
from hers but said that God stands not on lesser things . . . [all] those
that serve Christ are acceptable to God.” “She loved and valued the
image of God, wherever she found it,” wrote John Spademan, another
Presbyterian, “this is why our loss is so bitter, because she had the
capacity to take away our unhappy differences.”102
99
Burnet, A Supplement, p. 507; Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (London,
1692), p. x.
100
John Tutchin, A Poem upon Their Majesties Speeches to the Nonconformist
Ministers (London, 1690); The Address of Condolence to His Majesty by the Dissenting
Ministers (Edinburgh, 1695).
101
Robert Fleming, A Practical Discourse Occasioned by the Death of King William
(London, 1703), p. 142.
102
Bates, A Sermon Preached, pp. 19–20; John Howe, A Discourse Relating to the
Much-lamented Death and Solemn Funeral, of Our Incomparable and Most Gra-
cious Queen Mary (London, 1695), p. 36; John Spademan, A Sermon Preach’d at
Rotterdam . . . the Day of Her Majesty’s Funeral (London, 1695), pp. 26–7.
So, too, Protestants in Europe and America felt the loss of their cham-
pion upon her sudden death in December 1694. In Amsterdam, Peter
Francis described how the mourning for the Queen could not be con-
tained within the “the limits of one kingdom; it crosses the sea and
ranges through the cities of confederate Belgium; all places are filled
with the sounds of mournful knells, with weeping, lamentations and
mourning, and every one displays the convictions of grief. In Franeker,
Utrecht, Leiden and this city . . . Witness the universal sorrow.” Mary’s
friend, Francis Spanheim, agreed.
Whatever the English most adored in her, what the Batavian [the
Dutch] loved, the German honoured, the Switzer reverenced and
the girning [snarling] and reluctant French admired, Fame has also
so loudly proclaimed to the utmost limits of the hyperborean, the
eastern and western worlds, that she can never have said to have
celebrated the same of any other woman.103
In New England, the Puritan Cotton Mather described how the Queen
“was very concerned and took it upon herself to be well informed
about the state of our plantations that we have among the infidels
[Indians]. But it was no small grief to her to hear that they were but
too generally a reproach to the religion.” She had, he asserted, “a spe-
cial regard” for New England and that her death was a calamity to
“our brethren in Scotland,” “the navies and armies, and all the plan-
tations of both the Indias, [and] the Courts of Europe, except for one
[France].”104
Anglican churchmen, especially among the moderates and Latitud-
inarians that had welcomed the Revolution, agreed with their Dissent-
ing brethren. The Queen was “a true tender nursing mother to the best
of Churches,” Thomas Bowber told his parishioners at St. Swithin in
London, but “her chief care was to support the Protestant interest and
religion throughout all Europe.” Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester,
who had waited on the Queen for several years as her chaplain and
whose political and religious beliefs were in complete accord with the
new regime, declared that Mary was a “second Elizabeth,” whose zeal
for the Church had not corrupted her with “any sour prejudices against
103
An Oration of Peter Francius upon the Funeral of the Most August Princess, Mary II,
Queen of England, etc (London, 1695), p. 2; Spanheim, A Funeral Oration, p. 10.
104
Mather, Observanda, pp. 48–9.
other Protestant churches.”105 Her time in Holland had broadened her

scope and endowed her with empathy, understanding, and charity
towards all “sober Dissenters.” William Payne, a zealous supporter of
the Revolution, who had preached before Mary, declared in his funeral
sermon for the Queen that “her religion lay not in affected singularities,
in pharisaical shows and pretences . . . or in any bigotry and immoderate
zeal for little indifferent things of no value or importance in religion;
but in wise and regular and decent piety and devotion.” Payne’s sermon
was not merely eulogistic; he sought to defend the latitudinarian princi-
ples of Mary’s Church. Her task had been “building up and repairing the
whole church of England and making it like Mount Sion . . . improving
its worship, ordering its discipline, amending its defects, in making
up its breaches, and bringing all sober Protestants to worship to one
communion, which would have been the greatest blow to popery.”106
The Death and Legacy of Mary II
Lay aside the vehemence of thy grief . . . and if thou hast any love for
my people, for the church, for Holland, for all Europe, be more careful
than hitherto of thy own preservation.
Mary to William107
Mary’s sickness was first observed on December 19, 1694. William

returned to Kensington Palace on the second day of her illness and “was
struck with this beyond expression,” according to Burnet. The King
called me into his closet and gave a free vent to a most tender passion;
he burst out into tears and cried out that there was no hope of the
Queen, and that, from being the most happy, he was now going to
be the most miserable creature upon earth. He said during the whole
105
Thomas Bowber, A Sermon Preached in the Parish-Church of St. Swithin, London,
March 10th, 1694/5, Upon the Much Lamented Death of our Most Gracious
Queen (London, 1695), p. 19; Fowler, A Discourse of the Great Disingenuity and
Unreasonableness of Repining at Afflicting Providences (London, 1695), p. 17.
106
William Payne, A Sermon upon the Death of the Queen, Preached in the Parish-
Church of St. Mary White-Chappel (London, 1695), pp. 24, 16.
107
These were supposedly among Mary’s last words, Spanheim, A Funeral
Oration, p. 38.
course of their marriage he had never known one single fault in her;
there was a worth in her that nobody knew besides himself.108
The service at Whitehall Chapel that Christmas Day was gloomy; when
prayers were said for the Queen, the King broke into sobs. “The Court is
all in tears and the King is drowned in sorrow,” wrote one observer.109
On December 26, Thomas Tenison, the newly installed Archbishop of
Canterbury, informed the Queen of the dire nature of her condition,
which she took gracefully.110 She had contracted small pox and died
shortly after midnight on December 28, 1694. Londoners awaiting the
news learned of her death by the tolling of the bells.
The astounding number of printed and iconic materials on the
Queen’s death, both in the British Isles and on the European conti-
nent, attests to the Protestant world’s attraction to Mary II. At least
seventy pindarics, elegies, and poems in English, Latin, and Dutch
were printed on the death of Mary, as compared to the more normal
amount of approximately twenty-five each at the deaths of Charles II,
William III, and Queen Anne. Mary was celebrated by Dissenters like
John Tutchin and Daniel Defoe, but she was also honored by High
Churchmen like Samuel Wesley, whose career she had forwarded.111 In
Rotterdam, the poet and translator of Erasmus, Pieter Rabus lavished
praise on the Queen Mary.112 In addition to the poetry, thirty-six funeral
sermons for Mary were published in English, seven of which were orig-
inally published in Latin or French on the continent. By comparison,
when William died in 1702, nine funeral sermons were published,
and in 1714, Queen Anne’s death garnered a mere twelve. Nor did
108
Burnet, HOHOT, 4: 247; on Mary’s death, see Zook, “The Shocking Death,”
pp. 21–36.
109
CSPD, William & Mary, 6: 301.
110
Mary had read Charles Drelincourt, The Christian’s Defense against the Fears of
Death (London, 1675) and made every effort to die well.
111
Daniel Defoe, Threnodium Britannicum, To the Sacred Memory of that Most Excel-
lent Majesty Princess, Mary the Second (London, 1695); John Tutchin, An Epistle to
Mr. Benjamin Bridgewater Occasioned by the Death of the Late Queen Mary (London,
1694); Samuel Wesley, “On the Death of her Late Sacred Majesty, Mary, Queen
of England,” in Elegies on the Queen and Archbishop (London, 1695). Wesley, an
enthusiastic admirer of the Queen, dedicated his Life of Christ: An Heroic Poem
(London, 1694) to Mary, comparing her to the Virgin Mary.
112
Pieter Rabus, Uitvaart, Van Haar Grootmagtigte, Majesteit Maria, Koninginne van
Groot Britanje, Vrankrijk en Yerland (Rotterdam, 1695); and Britanje en Neerland in
den rouw, over’t affterven van Haar Grootmagtigste, Majesteit Maria, Koningine van
Groot Britanje, Vrankrijk en Yerland (Rotterdam, 1695).
any of the sermons honoring William or Anne originate in Europe.

Thirty-six medals were also cast to memorialize the Queen.113 Of the ser-
mons, one-third were by nonconformists, usually either Presbyterians
or Independents in England; and another third were originally pub-
lished on the continent by French Protestants or Dutch reformed clergy.
Of the nearly twenty sermons published by Church of England clergy,
most were by Latitudinarians and Low Church supporters of the Rev-
olution, as would be expected. Others, like Thomas Dawes, had been
outspoken opponents of James II even before the Revolution. Some had
formerly supported James and preached the Tory doctrine of passive obe-
dience, like Nicholas Brady and William Payne, but were now outspoken
Williamites. And some of the clergy who honored Mary after her death
had only accepted the Revolution reluctantly but had nonetheless found
themselves attracted to her churchmanship.
One of the most moving funeral sermons for the Queen was by a
Church of Ireland priest, John Finglas, whose career Mary was sup-
porting at the time of her death. Finglas was deeply distraught by
the Queen’s demise and felt that he had lost a mother. She was, he
wrote, “the most careful, prudent, and most tender and indulgent
Queen, and in all respects my parent.”114 The sermons and elegies
written in honor of the Queen compared Mary to Tabitha, Deborah,
Queen Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary, but the most typical reference
found in nearly every sermon and poem was to Mary as a “nursing
mother.” In 1689, shortly after the coronation of William and Mary,
the Dissenter Abraham Kick, writing from New England, addressed the
new Queen, pleading with her as “God’s instrument” to be a nursing
mother to “the Church of God” in the English colonies and plantations
in America, the West India Islands, and among the newly converted
Indians. “How many thousands of refugees,” exclaimed Cotton Mather
also in America, “found her a liberal mother unto them all; and this,
without any regard unto their different persuasions . . .”115 And so the
Queen who had had no children became the mother of the Protestant
world.
113
See Appendix A: Poems on the Death of Queen Mary, and Appendix B:
Sermons on the Death of Queen Mary. On the medals, see Edward Hawkins,
Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the Death of
George II (London, 1885), 2 vols., 2: 108–10.
114
Finglas, A Sermon Preached at the Chappel Royal, p. 21.
115
Abraham Kick, A Brief Relation of the State of New England (London, 1689);
Mather, Observanda, pp. 40–1.
Mary’s effort to shape and guide the Church of England was not for-
gotten. In 1715, twenty years after her death, she was still being praised
for her charity, her efforts to reach out to “Protestants abroad,” her
“pushing on a further Reformation,” as the vicar of Blewbury put it.116
The Church that the Queen left behind had been invigorated by her
brand of what might be called “puritanical liberalism,” a temperament
that encompassed both the high-minded morality and Sabbatarianism
of Puritanism accompanied by a latitudinarian spirit of irenicism and
moderation toward various forms of Protestantism. Mary’s Church was,
to be sure, rocked by division and controversy in the 1690s and early
1700s, as we shall see in the next chapter. Still she had given liked-
minded liberal clergy the upper hand and, when all was said and done,
the Church that came out of the so-called “Age of Danger” by the time
of the Hanoverian succession was the Latitudinarian Church of the eigh-
teenth century. On the one hand, this was the church of the “Vicar of
Bray,” Erastian, complacent, detached.117 On the other, it was the church
that withstood both the rationalizing tendencies of the age of the High
Enlightenment and enthusiastic frenzies of Methodism and Evangelical
Revival.
116
Joseph Acres, Great Britain’s Jubilee: Or, The Joyful Day. A Sermon Preach’d at
Blewbury (Reading, 1715), pp. 21–2.
117
See the anonymous satire on the clergy, The Vicar of Bray (London, 1714).
Figure 5.1 Image of Elizabeth Burnet – permission to publish from the Folger
Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
5
Devoted Daughters of the Church:
Elizabeth Burnet and Mary Astell
For each Religion, did its Faith enjoy,

She one defended, but none did destroy1
Colley Cibber
Mary II had attracted many admirers. Her gentle ways and cheerful
demeanor; her extraordinary generosity; her devotion to her faith and
moderation towards nonconforming Protestants; and her ardent belief
in her husband and the Protestant Cause certainly recommended her
to those of like-minded sensibility. Among her biggest fans was the
Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, who was utterly heartbroken by her
sudden death. Years later, in 1700, he married a woman whose values
were remarkably similar to his own and whose virtues resembled those
of the Queen. Yet Burnet’s third wife, Elizabeth (formerly, Berkeley)
Burnet (1661–1709) was hardly a tabula rasa on which the bishop might
inscribe his convictions. Gilbert was Elizabeth’s second husband. She
had been a widow for seven years and was already something of a known
entity among the political and cultural elite of London. Prior to the
Revolution, she had met Gilbert Burnet, along with other English and
Scottish refugees, in the United Provinces. She was acquainted with the
Prince and Princess of Orange whose invasion of England she warmly
supported. On her return to England after the Revolution, she became a
frequent guest at the palace of Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester,
a place where she was renowned for her piety and charity. She was
also friendly with Stillingfleet’s philosophical combatant, John Locke;
1
Colley Cibber, A Poem on the Death of Our Late Sovereign Lady, Queen Mary
(London, 1695), p. 2.
160
Daughters of the Church: Elizabeth Burnet and Mary Astell 161
and by 1701, she was an intimate of Sarah Churchill, later Duchess of

Marlborough, with whom she shared a zeal for the success of the Whig
agenda in Parliament. Elizabeth Burnet was also the author of a manual
on Anglican devotion and practical spirituality, designed primarily for
women. In sum, her Whig politics and Low Church Anglicanism were
already essential features of her character before she had ever agreed to
become Gilbert Burnet’s wife.
Elizabeth Burnet’s brand of Anglicanism felt perfectly at home in
Mary II’s Church. But there were many other Anglicans, women and
men, who found its latitudinarian leanings an anathema to all that they
held dear, including the pamphleteer, Mary Astell (1660–1731). Unlike
Elizabeth Burnet, Astell is well known among scholars, particularly for
her feminist tracts. But in addition to her Christian feminism, Astell was
also an outspoken supporter of High Church principles and Tory poli-
tics. She despised the moderation of so many of William and Mary’s
bishops. She found their tolerant gaze toward Dissenters, their empha-
sis on a broad, practical Christianity, and their adoration of the very
Revolution that had placed them in power, nauseating. The deeply felt
and wonderfully articulated High Anglicanism of Mary Astell, with its
relish for the rituals and traditions of the Church, represents a strain of
Protestantism not yet discussed in this study. Like Aphra Behn, Astell
looked upon Dissenting women such as the Baptist, Elizabeth Gaunt,
with suspicion and disgust. But the similarities between Astell’s and
Behn’s Anglicanism probably end there. Behn never expounded a truly
ardent attachment for the Church of England and, as we have seen, if
she had any attraction to religion at all, it would seem to have been in
the direction of Rome.
But Mary Astell was, as she called herself, a “daughter” of the Estab-
lished Church.2 This she shared with Elizabeth Burnet, who was equally
devoted to Anglicanism. Mary Astell and Elizabeth Burnet were also
contemporaries. They witnessed many of the same events: the frantic
politicking of Exclusion Crisis; the collapse of James II’s regime and the
Revolutionary Settlement that placed William and Mary on the throne;
the passage of the Act of Toleration in 1689; and the death of Mary
II in 1694. Both participated in the struggles of the so-called “Age of the
Church in Danger” at the outset of the eighteenth century. Both Astell
and Burnet warmly welcomed the ascension of Mary II’s sister, Queen
2
Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of
England (London, 1705).
Anne, in 1702. Certainly, Elizabeth Burnet had advantages that came

with her superior social class that Mary Astell did not. Burnet was profi-
cient in French and well traveled throughout northwestern Europe. But
what Astell lost in social status, she made up for in determination and
intellect. Both Astell and Burnet were at home conversing with divines
and scholars (something they shared with Mary II). Yet despite their
staunch support of the Church of England, their vision of the Church as
well as the kind of Anglican devotion that they advocated was, in many
respects, worlds apart and consequently, so too were their political posi-
tions. Thus, Burnet and Astell represent opposite ends of the Anglican
divide between the Low and High Church positions at the beginning of
the age of Enlightenment.
A Church Divided: Anglicanism after the Revolution
Here lies the widowed Anglican Church,

Half buried, half dead, and left in a lurch
Anonymous3
The political divisions between Whig and Tory that arose to screech and
roar amid the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s continued unabated
after the Revolution of 1688/89. If anything, they were exacerbated
by the presence of the followers of James II, the Jacobites. Groupings
among the clergy of the Church of England mirrored the nation’s polit-
ical divisions. The nonjurors, who maintained their belief in a divinely
ordained royal succession, stubbornly refused to take the oaths of alle-
giance to the new regime. In the end, some 400 inferior clergy and
seven bishops were deprived of their benefices and followed Archbishop
William Sancroft into something of an ecclesiastical wilderness.4 Yet like
their political counterparts, the Jacobites, they were not silent, voicing
in turns both their discontent and alarm over the direction of the
Church and the nation, and lending “massive scholarly and polemi-
cal support,” in the words of Mark Goldie, to Tory and High Anglican
3
Anonymous Jacobite epigram attacking Archbishop Tillotson, quoted in
Strickland, 6:97.
4
There is nothing yet written on the nonjuring clergy that is not problematic,
but one might consult, Robert D. Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution
of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-Juror Thought (Newark: Univer-
sity of Delaware, 1993); Gordon Rupp, Religion in England , 1688–1791 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 1.
causes.5 But the Revolution had also fueled a growing and more signifi-
cant division, particularly in terms of the history of the Church, among
the swearing clergy. Common usage of the terms, “High Church” and
“Low Church” materialized after the Revolution. They reflected divi-
sions among the clergy that had begun to appear during the reign of
Charles II, particularly over the issue of how best to handle the prob-
lem of sectarianism. They fully emerged as pejorative “party-names” in
the 1690s and early 1700s.6 Low Churchmen were often associated with
the Whig party and often, though not always, supported Whig policies.
High Churchmen were coupled with the Tory Party, and often, though
not always, supported Tory policies. Historian William Gibson cautions
scholars against viewing these groupings within the Church as “exclu-
sion or homogenous.” Clergymen often cut across parties and belied
such labels as “Whig,” and “Tory,” “High Church” and “Low Church.”
Moreover, in terms of basic theology, both High and Low clergy were,
by and large, committed to “core Anglican beliefs:” “Trinitarianism, a
strong pastoral ministry, the importance of the Eucharist, moral reform
and renewal and even episcopacy.”7 Yet it is also true that Anglican
orthodoxy in the early eighteenth century was becoming something
increasingly difficult to pinpoint. What Anglicanism was, to any one
individual beyond the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine
Articles, was often more about cultural and ideological predispositions
than theological tenets.8 “High” and “Low” Church principles were usu-
ally bound up with an individual’s politics rather than their theology.
Thus while Low Church and High Church groupings were certainly
not monolithic parties, neither were Whigs and Tories. Only like the
Whigs and Tories, Low and High Churchmen were identifiable divisions,
representing competing interests.
For the most part, William and Mary had favored Low Churchmen
of a latitudinarian strain. The willingness of these men to open the
Church to some sort of accommodation with nonconformists made
them attractive to the new regime. Once comprehension had failed and
5
Mark Goldie, “The Non-jurors, Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convoca-
tion Controversy,” in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759,
ed. E. Cruickshanks (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1982), p. 15.
6
Richard West, The True Character of a Churchman (London, 1702), p. 1.
7
William Gibson, “William Talbot and Church Parties, 1688–1730,” JEH 58/1
(January 2007): 26, 46.
8
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were devised in 1563 to clarify the Church’s
doctrinal positions in relation to Catholicism and continental Protestantism.
the Act of Toleration passed in Parliament in 1689, Low Churchmen

accepted the new reality of a legally sanctioned religious pluralism.
Most of them had never believed that Dissenters could be persecuted
out of existence anyway. As a result of the Revolution, many of these
moderate or Low clergymen were placed in positions of power, and
they sought to make the national Church more appealing, especially
to those occasional conformists that might be satisfied with Sunday
services at their parish church rather than wandering off to their Dis-
senting meeting house. Low Churchmen emphasized the doctrine of
adiaphora which argued that “things indifferent,” such as bowing at the
name of Jesus in the liturgy, were simply not necessary for salvation.
It was Archbishop John Tillotson’s wish to make such indifferent ritu-
als (including making the sign of the cross at baptism and taking the
Lord’s supper kneeling) optional within the Church, although his plans
never materialized due to the obstruction of High Church clergy.9 Men
like Tillotson and Bishops Gilbert Burnet, Edward Fowler, Simon Patrick,
and Thomas Tenison were also wary of any undue emphasis on sacer-
dotalism. Tenison, for example, defended the practice of lay baptism.10
But, above all, what truly separated High and Low Churchmen were the
debates carried on within the political arena in print and Parliament.
Low Churchmen promoted and defended a Whig vision of the Revo-
lution as both providential and constitutional. They supported the Act
of Succession (1701) which ensured the future of the Protestant monar-
chy. They fought the Bill against Occasional Conformity which sought
to end the practice among Whig Dissenters of “occasionally” taking
communion in the Church in order to qualify for public office. They
defended the Act of Union with Presbyterian Scotland in 1707, and
they abhorred the anti-Revolution, anti-Williamite hysterics of Henry
Sacheverell in 1710.11
High Churchmen, on the other hand, were opposed to religious toler-
ation and, above all, to changing Church ceremonies, rites, and rituals
to suit the yearnings of nonconformists. They blocked any attempts by
the Latitudinarian bishops installed by William and Mary to transform
9
Birch, Life, pp. 175–6.
10
Tenison’s declaration of the validity of lay baptism is published in Edward
Carpenter, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Times (London:
SPCK, 1948), p. 317.
11
Henry Sacheverell (1674–1724) was a High Church clergyman whose 1709 ser-
mon, The Perils of False Brethren, in Church, and State, was a furious attack on the
Revolution, Whigs and Dissenters.
or dilute the liturgy and the rituals of the Church.12 They also favored
an elevated perception of the sacraments and the priesthood and looked
back fondly on the exclusive and coercive Church of the Restoration
Settlement. They were further concerned that the Act of Toleration
had undermined the Church’s status. “The days of the authority of the
church are over,” wrote the nonjuror and pamphleteer, Charles Leslie,
“we now seem to be in the height of the Laodicean state.”13 The Estab-
lished Church no longer stood as the “symbol and guarantor of a unitary
state,” and High Church polemicists like Mary Astell predicted growing
societal divisions and degeneration. If the people were allowed to wor-
ship freely, sects would multiply, breeding ever more outlandish modes
of worship; and so too irreligion, atheism, licentiousness, and sheer
ignorance would flourish as others simply chose not to attend any reli-
gious service whatsoever.14 But, ultimately, the divisions between High
and Low Anglicans were most keenly visible amid the debates over the
political topics of the day and none more so than that over occasional
conformity – an issue that roused the ire of both Elizabeth Burnet and
Mary Astell.
The Life of Elizabeth Burnet
. . . one of the most extraordinary persons that has lived in this age . . .
Gilbert Burnet15
The life story of the woman, born Elizabeth Blake, was recorded in 1713
by Timothy Goodwyn, the Archdeacon of Oxford and later Bishop of
Cashel. The font of his information was Elizabeth’s second husband,
Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. Mildly hagiographical, Goodwyn’s
“Account of the Life of the Author” prefaced the second edition of
Elizabeth’s only published work, A Method of Devotion. It is the strongest
12
Birch, Life, pp. 180–2; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and
War (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), p. 166.
13
Charles Leslie, Querela Temporum; or, the Danger of the Church of England
(London, 1694), in the Somers Tracts, 9: 520. “Laodicean” meaning lukewarm
or indifferent in religion; an allusion to the early Christians of Laodicea in
Revelation 3:14–16.
14
John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, “The Church and Anglicanism in the ‘Long’
Eighteenth Century,” in The Church of England, c. 1689–c.1833, From Toleration
to Tractarianism, eds. J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 47; Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, pp. 59–63.
15
Burnet, A Supplement, p. 509.
biographical source available on her. “I dictated the greatest part,” so

Bishop Burnet modestly asserts. Dr. Goodwyn only wrote “so much
of it as to give him a right to set his name to it at my desire.”16 But
the “Account” is not merely composed of Burnet’s recollections of his
wife. Rather, it is clearly a retelling of stories that Elizabeth herself told
Burnet, particularly about her childhood and first marriage, some of
which are echoed in Elizabeth’s spiritual journal and travel diary housed
at the Bodleian Library.17 This, in addition to A Method of Devotion and
her correspondence with John Locke and Sarah Churchill, compose
the bulk of the sources that tell the tale of this “most extraordinary”
woman.
She was the daughter of Sir Richard and Elizabeth Blake of Easterton,
Wiltshire.18 Young Elizabeth was a voracious reader, who developed
“philosophical habit of mind.” Her godfather was none other than the
scholar and staunch royalist, Bishop John Fell of Oxford, who helped
to guide her education. It was he who arranged her marriage at age
seventeen to Robert Berkeley of Spetchley in Worcestershire.19 Robert
is described as “a good man,” but “weak in body and mind,” keenly
16
Timothy Goodwyn, “Some Account of the Life of the Author,” in Elizabeth
Burnet, A Method of Devotion (London, 1713); Burnet, A Supplement, p. 509.
17
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 1092, ff. 111–203. George Ballard
also wrote a short biographical piece on Burnet in Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great Britain which was originally published in 1752 (Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 345–52. There are three modern studies of Elizabeth
Burnet and her book; they are: C. Kirchberger, “Elizabeth Burnet, 1661–1709,”
The Church Quarterly Review 148 (1949): 17–51; Anne Kelly, “ ‘Her Zeal for the
Publick Good:’ The Political Agenda in Elizabeth Burnet’s A Method of Devotion
(1708),” Women’s Writing 13/3 (October 2006): 448–74; and Charles Wallace, Jr.,
“The Prayer Closet as a “ ‘Room of One’s Own:’ Two Anglican Women Devo-
tional Writers at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Women’s History
9/2 (Summer 1997): 108–21.
18
Her mother’s father may have been the physician, John Bathurst, (d. 1659)
but this is not clear. See Frances Harris, “Burnet [née Blake; other married name
Berkeley], Elizabeth (1661–1709),” ODNB.
19
Robert’s grandfather, Sir Robert Berkeley, was an eminent lawyer and one of the
judges on the Court of King’s Bench. He had sided with the royalists during the
Civil Wars. He left his estate to his grandson, Robert, rather than his son, Thomas,
because Thomas had converted to Catholicism while in exile in Belgium. Thomas
also married a Catholic, Anne Darell, Robert’s mother. Bernard Burke, A Geneal-
ogy and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols.
(London, 1939), 1: 145. Shelia Doyle, “Berkeley, Sir Robert (1584–1656),” ODNB.
Bishop Fell was connected to the Berkeley family through his mother who was
the niece of Sir Robert Berkeley, senior.
susceptible to the influence of his mother, Anne, “a woman of good

life,” to be sure, but also “a zealous papist.” In order to protect her youth-
ful husband from his mother’s religion and defend her own, Elizabeth
fortified herself by studying the controversies between the churches of
England and Rome. Apparently, though, this was not enough. In 1685
Bishop Fell died, thus removing his good affects on the family, and
with the ascension of the Catholic King, James II, Elizabeth felt that she
and Robert would have to leave England entirely in order to thwart the
sway of Catholicism in her home. They traveled to the United Provinces
and lived for a time at The Hague, “where she was soon known and
great into the esteem and friendship of persons of the highest rank,”
including the Prince and Princess of Orange and Gilbert Burnet and
his wife, Mary.20 Elizabeth and Robert also traveled widely through the
Low Countries, visiting his family’s Catholic friends in Brussels, Ghent,
and Liege.
Following the Revolution of 1688/89, the young couple returned to
Worcestershire where Robert died a few years later. Elizabeth was left a
widow with a fairly sizable income and plenty of freedom.21 She divided
her time between Spetchley and the London house of his sister, Mary,
who was married to Justice Robert Dormer. Their neighbor was John
Locke and he and Elizabeth became friends and correspondents. Back
in Worcester, Elizabeth paid regular visits to the newly installed bishop,
Edward Stillingfleet and his wife, Elizabeth. Stillingfleet is reported to
have said that “he knew not a more considerable woman in England”
than Elizabeth Berkeley. Coming from one of the most intellectual
churchmen of his age, this was no small complement. She was also
admired by William Talbot, who was then Dean at Worcester and later
the Bishop of Oxford. That Elizabeth should attract admirers is certainly
understandable. She devoted much of her time to charity, founding a
hospital and schools for the poor and helping the country clergy and her
less fortunate neighbors. Left childless herself, she became a “mother”
to all her husband’s Protestant relatives.22 It was also during this time
that she wrote the first draft of her manual on devotion, revised and
published in 1708.
20
“Account of the Life of the Author,” pp. vi–vii, viii–ix; H.C. Foxcroft and
T.E.S. Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1907), p. 353; C. Kirchberger, “Elizabeth Burnet,” p. 20.
21
Luttrell reports that Elizabeth had an income of around £800; four-fifths of
which she devoted to charity. Luttrell, Diary, 4: 649.
22
“Account,” pp. ix–x.
The political scene in London was one which Elizabeth readily

engaged. She received regular reports of parliamentary news from her
brother-in-law, Dormer. She was friendly with the moderate Tory and
devout Anglican, Sir William Trumbull. Her acquaintance with one who
was very close to the Williamite court was also rekindled. In 1700, after
some internal debate, the thirty-nine year old Elizabeth Berkeley mar-
ried the fifty-seven year old Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet. His
second wife, Mary, had died of small pox in June 1698, leaving him
with five children, the eldest of which was only ten. The match between
Elizabeth and Gilbert proved beneficial to both partners. Elizabeth
hoped to “have more power to do good in a more public post,” and she
soon became even more immersed in the affairs of church and state.23
According to Bishop Burnet, Elizabeth was quick to enter into “friend-
ship with some persons of the greatest quality,” including the Duchess of
Marlborough. Elizabeth was ambitious, no doubt, for her new husband,
but more precisely for the Whig agenda: the continuation of the war
in Europe, the Protestant succession, and the defeat of High Church,
Tory, and Jacobite schemes. Her politicking did not go unnoticed by
her political foes, who sneered at her for having the Bishop maintain
six coach horses.24 Even Bishop Burnet himself admitted that “her zeal
for the public good, and that eagerness of spirit which kept her intent
upon it, was the single thing he had ever observed in her that looked
like excess.” Yet the Bishop also benefited from the marriage, writing
that “both I and the children were happy in her beyond expression; for
she was one of the strictest Christians, and . . . one of the most heavenly
minded persons I have ever known.”25
In the spring of 1707, Elizabeth took three of Burnet’s children on
an extended excursion in Europe.26 This journey was said to be in the
interest of the children and Elizabeth’s health, which was never strong
and suffered in the moist climes of England. Their goal was to reach
Spa, Belgium, where Elizabeth would take the waters. Elizabeth Burnet
23
Elizabeth Burnet wrote that she was generally disinclined to the idea of a
second marriage, but she felt that it could help Bishop Burnet navigate Court
politics since his free and generous nature made him susceptible to the snares of
“designing men.” Rawl. D. 1092, f. 136.
24
HMC: Downshire Manuscripts, vol. 1, part 2, p. 908.
25
Quoted in Foxcroft and Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, p. 380.
26
She took her stepdaughter, Elizabeth, and two stepsons, William, the eldest
son, and Thomas, the youngest. The boys were to spend a year at the University
of Leyden. Kirchberger, “Elizabeth Burnet,” pp. 222–3.
and the children visited Leyden, The Hague, Amsterdam, and Brussels.27
Elizabeth often toured Catholic churches and religious houses, con-
versing with priests and nuns. She is also said to have listened to
“preachers everywhere.” Burnet’s biographer asserts that she was chari-
table to “those that differed from her in matters of religion,” including
“papists.”28 But Europe amid the war of the Spanish Succession also con-
firmed Burnet’s Whig prejudices about the continent, particularly the
Catholic domains. In her travel journal she blesses God for the “mod-
eration of our government” and pities the oppressed, superstitious, and
impoverished in northern Europe.29
This was a trip that had political aspirations as well. Conveniently,
Spa was just a short sojourn from Hanover, where Burnet was intent
on meeting the Dowager Electress Sophia, the British heir presump-
tive, in hopes of doing “some good,” according to Burnet herself.30
Indeed, but what kind of good might she do? Back home, it was widely
believed that Burnet was sent to Hanover as an agent for the Duchess of
Marlborough, most likely in an effort to cultivate the good will of the
Electress. When the Duke of Marlborough, then at The Hague, received
word of Elizabeth’s intended journey in April of 1707, he tried to put
a stop to it. Marlborough knew that if word of it reached Queen Anne,
anxious and jealous as she was of her German successors, it would fur-
ther sour the already deteriorating relationship between the Queen and
the Marlboroughs.31 Nonetheless, off to Hanover Elizabeth Burnet went
and if the Duchess could have prevented Burnet’s visit, she chose not
to. Elizabeth visited the Sophia’s residence, Herrenhausen, in Septem-
ber. She found the Electress to be a politically astute observer of English
and European affairs and a pragmatist. They discussed politics, religion,
and the possible ascension of Sophia’s son, George. Burnet also met
the philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, who discussed the work of Henry
Dodwell and John Toland with her. Back home, the garrulous Bishop was
bragging about how his wife was “mightily caressed by the Electress.”32
27
Foxcroft and Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, p. 429; Kirchberger, “Elizabeth
Burnet,” p. 26.
28
“Account,” p. xxix.
29
Rawl. D. 1092, f. 118.
30
Rawl. D. 1092, f. 126.
31
Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 2 vols. (London, 1838),
1: 68–9.
32
Rawl. D. 1092, f. 130; HMC: Downshire, vol. 1, part 2, p. 854. Henry Dodwell
(1641–1711) was a scholar, theologian, and nonjuror. John Toland (1670–1722) a
radical free-thinker, is discussed below.
With her tour of Europe complete, Elizabeth traveled back to the United
Provinces and met the Duke of Marlborough in Rotterdam, where he
sent her home on his yacht, no doubt with a sigh of relief.33
Whatever benefits Elizabeth had derived from the waters of Europe
proved to be ephemeral and she died of a “chill” in February of 1709.
Luttrell reports she was “very much lamented for her charity and piety.”
Others were not so kind. “Mrs. Burnet with the politics in one end and
the Bishop etc had so exhausted her spirits that she is dead,” wrote
another observer.34 Elizabeth had borne the Bishop two daughters but
they had perished in infancy. She had done her best to nurture and guide
Mary Burnet’s five children which was not always an easy task, partic-
ularly in regard to Gilbert’s wayward eldest son, William. Elizabeth also
left an important legacy, her manual of Anglican devotional exercises.
The Religiosity of Elizabeth Burnet
When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut
thy door, pray to thy Father . . . in secret
Matthew 6:635
Something happened to Elizabeth Blake when was she was eleven. She
had a religious experience, an epiphany of sorts, at which point “she
began to have a true sense of religion and read with great application
the books that were put into her hand.” So she later told her second
husband, Gilbert Burnet.36 She also noted in her religious journal:
I remember when very young, so soon as I began to think of religious

matters, some of these thoughts did as [it] were spring up in my mind,
I knew not how; for I found them not then in books; but my mind
found rest and quick in them . . . and when I first met with them from
men of piety and learning, my heart was glad . . . and I feel as it were
their certainty.37
33
Foxcroft and Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, p. 428.
34
Luttrell, Diary, 6:403; HMC: Downshire, vol. 1, part 2, p. 870.
35
Quoted in The Method of Devotion, p. 16. Burnet was strongly opposed to any
sort of pharisaical show of one’s piety and felt that one’s relationship with God
should be intimate and private.
36
“Account,” p. v.
37
Quoted in Foxcroft and Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, p. 381.
Perhaps then, considering her own youthful experience, it is not too

surprising that Burnet was attracted, at least for a time, to the writings
of Christian mystics as recorded in her spiritual journal.38 Yet, in the
end, she rejected all enthusiasm. The mature, deeply pious woman that
composed A Method of Devotion was far more influenced by the blos-
soming culture of latitudinarianism within the Church of England and
the Enlightenment within British and Northern European society as a
whole. She embraced the “ratio” and yet she was, to twist the words
of William Blake, still able to see the “infinite in all things.”39 Burnet’s
Method, as well as the lengthy list of books she recommends to her read-
ers, thoroughly illustrates her brand of Low Church Anglicanism which
was one in spirit with the rationalism of men like John Tillotson and his
circle.40
Burnet’s Method of Devotion is aimed at women of the “richer sort”
with plenty of leisure time, but it also has sections designed for chil-
dren, the young, and servants.41 Time again, she stresses a devotional
practice which is rational and pragmatic. “The great end of religion and
devotion,” so she begins her preface, “consists chiefly in being good
and doing good, consequently the devotion that is rational and will rec-
ommend us to God.” We are “all rational beings” and “must behave
in accordance to “God’s Word and right reason.”42 The liberty which
we are given by our reason allows us to pray and to mediate without
the need of set forms. The “impartial reasoning of a sincere heart” finds
more favor with God than “the bare repeating of well composed forms,”
which may be eloquent but are, in the end, a “fruitless devotion.” “Who
can think, that has any rational thought of God, that he does not prefer
the sincerity of the heart to the eloquence of the tongue?”43
38
According to her spiritual journal, Burnet read the Flemish mystic, Antoinette
Bourignon, (1616–80) as well as Teresa of Ávila (1515–82). Rawl. D. 1092, f. 139–
139v.
39
“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only
sees himself only.” William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion (London, 1788),
broadside. Ratio is Latin for reason plus calculation.
40
See Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s Recommended Reading List in A Method of
Devotion. This list is discussed at the end of this section.
41
A Method of Devotion (London, 1713), p. xxxvii. I have no evidence, however,
of who actually read Burnet’s work. It did go into several editions (1708, 1709,
1713 and 1738) which would suggest some popularity.
42
Ibid., pp. vxxii, 34, 88.
43
Ibid., pp. xxxiv, xxxix.
Burnet values moderation and told her readers to be wary of those

who engaged in extravagant forms of religiosity. She does not deny that
some few were given the “gifts of prophesy or preaching, a capacity
to understand and unfold obscure mysteries.” But she was also suspi-
cious. No extraordinary talent is truly a gift from God if it is without an
“inward grace of charity” for otherwise it is of “no profit.” Only those
powers which give unto others are from God. Fasting should be part of
one’s devotional practices but within limits and never to gain notice or
impair one’s health. One should only practice “useful acts of self-denial
and mortification and not those heathenish and superstitious whim-
sies.” For example, abstaining from “public meals where the company
is apt to dissipate the thoughts is of good use.” But Burnet was clearly
against any practice that sought to raise “fumes and vapours,” methods
that many sectarian women like Bridget Bendish, discussed in Chapter 1,
were known to use. Clouding the reason “rather defeats than answers”
the goal of devotion. So she asserts, “ ’tis a superstition to think that God
is pleased with such unreasonable pieces of will-worship” when none is
commanded.44 Although the targets of Burnet’s ire remain unnamed,
she clearly has the ascetic exercises of Catholic mystics as well as the
practices of some Protestant Dissenters. Always the advocate of reason,
utility, and moderation, Burnet tells her readers to “endeavour to sup-
press all extravagant imagination.” Nor should one “indulge a skeptical
and perpetually doubting humour; but be modest and content with
such a proof as the matter will bear.” Make every moment of your life
useful; pray when you pass a church, a funeral, hear of a crime, or wit-
ness the plight of the poor. Burnet warns against overwrought anxiety,
melancholy, introspection, or unreasonable dwelling upon things past
remedying. One’s goal is to maintain a “cheerful gravity” and “nour-
ish God’s Holy Spirit” within. “Abstruse speculation is not necessary to
faith and practice.” Even those studies that have no obviously useful
aim should be rejected.45
It would be wrong, however, to surmise that Burnet was either an
ardent anti-Catholic or an enemy of Dissent. She is nothing if not
moderate in all things. Insofar as the Roman Church is concerned,
her strongest words are anti-papal when in a prayer she asks God to
deliver “the Western Churches from the miserable yoke of papal usurpa-
tion.” Indeed she does, like most Protestants, equate Catholicism with
44
Ibid., pp. 61, 63, 172, 194.
45
Ibid, pp. 90, 82, 91–6.
“idolatry, superstition, and cruelty,” the artifice of a corrupt priesthood.

But she also believes that many Catholics are “devout persons” and need
only the “light and liberty” to find their way to “thy Word and Spirit.”46
When she critiques her fellow Protestants, it is not always clear whether
she is chiding those outside the Anglican communion or within. For
example, at one point, she petitions God to rescue his people from the
“pernicious evils in the Church,” listed as “private interpretations, inno-
vations in holy things; from the strange doctrines of the unlearned and
unstable; from the pride of novices and from doubting about questions,
and making endless strifes; from heresies, schisms, scandals public and
private.”47 This litany would seem to be an attack on sectarians who
splinter and divide the reformed church throughout Europe, but parts
of it could just as easily be aimed at the nonjurors and High Church
clergy within the Established Church. Quite possibly it is a critique of
both because she immediately links them again. She begins by castigat-
ing Dissenters: “To make doubtful speculations the cause of division in
the Church, proceeds generally from a proud, contentious spirit, and all
such as divide from and stubbornly disobey the laws and institutions
of society, civil and ecclesiastical on account of things purely ceremo-
nial, which though liable to objections, they confess are not sinful.”
Their separation obstructs the “progress of true piety, and improve-
ment of useful truths, taking up and clouding men’s minds by the dust
of needless contentions.” Then she admonishes High Church clergy,
“though all dividers in these cases are condemned, yet the rigid and tyran-
nical imposers of things justly exceptional, though not unlawful, are by no
means excusable, and must answer to God for such offences, as laying a
stumbling block in their brother’s way to offend by.”48
Burnet was clearly agitated by the current state of religion in Britain
and abroad. She continually advocates a union of all Christians based
on charity, mutual love, and toleration. She condemns schismatics, the
superstitious, and the “enthusiastical” because they deny the “govern-
ment of reason.” Burnet’s call for a Christian union among reformed
churches is a pervasive theme of her work.49 She certainly had some-
thing of a European sensibility; and like Queen Mary, she under-
stood the perils Protestants encountered on the continent. She also
conceived of England as special, a place apart from the corruptions and
46
Ibid., p. 42.
47
Ibid., p. 146, italics mine.
48
Ibid., pp. 155–6, italics mine.
49
Ibid., pp. 165, 170, 43, 184–5.
contentions of Europe. The British Isles were particularly fortunate, sep-

arated “from the pollutions of the world” and divinely favored. That
Burnet was a keen follower and something of a participant in the politi-
cal tumults of the Court and Westminster is in evidence throughout the
Method. She continually displays a strong sense of public-mindedness,
remembering throughout her treatise to pray for Queen Anne, her coun-
selors, magistrates, clergy, and “our allies.” With the recent Revolution
in mind, she reminds her readers to thank God for preserving their
“native country, and the liberty of the gospel, and a just and legal gov-
ernment, and rescuing us from the miseries of tyranny and arbitrary
power.” And, in what is clearly aimed at Jacobites and conniving Tories,
she petitions God to “defeat all the designs of wicked and unreason-
able men,” who seek to undermine the Queen and her government.
She uses the Whig device of referring always to the government as “free
and legal” or “just and legal,” a none too subtle defense of the Glorious
Revolution in opposition to Tory doubts and Jacobite threats.50
Burnet concludes her 444-page treatise with a lengthy list of books
and sermons that she recommends to her readers. Since her days as a
young wife at Spechley, books were Elizabeth’s chief “delight.”51 Her
list of recommended reading, with its forty-eight different authors and
seventy-four different books, is certainly testimony to the fact that she
was a voracious reader.52 Burnet’s list is tailored to the needs of her
audience and echoes and reinforces her own practical Christianity. She
was most significantly influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, and
their theological offspring, the Latitudinarians.53 Many of the authors
are exactly those expected of someone with Low Church sympathies.
Thus it is no surprise that Burnet recommends works by Bishops John
Tillotson, John Moore, Gilbert Burnet, John Williams, Thomas Tenison,
and Simon Patrick. All of these men were nominated to the episcopal
bench by William and Mary or, after 1695, by William alone. Many
of them were among Mary II’s friends and admirers and many were
leading Latitudinarians. They were the same men who often preached
50
Ibid., pp. 43, 21, 186, 73, 140.
51
“. . . books are her delight.” Letter to Mary Evelyn (21 December 1689). BL, Add.
78, 435, f. 49.
52
She was a wide-ranging reader as well since she not only read mystics like
Antoinette Bourignon, but according to her spiritual diary, she also read the
nonjurors, Henry Dodwell and George Hickes.
53
Among the Cambridge Platonists, Burnet lists Henry More, Benjamin
Whichcote, John Norris, and John Worthington.
before Queen Mary and eulogized her upon her sudden death. Writers
that Elizabeth Burnet recommended who subsequently became bishops
under Anne or George I, include Richard Willis, William Wake, and
Benjamin Hoadly, all of whom were also proponents of the kind of
comprehensive Protestantism that was a key feature of Mary II’s Church.
Not surprisingly, Burnet’s list includes many classic Anglican works,
such as The Whole Duty of Man (1657). There are also numerous guides
to the gospels, creeds, and catechisms, such as William Burkitt’s Expos-
itory Notes, with Practical Observations, on the New Testament (1700)
and John Lewis’s Church Catechism Explain’d by way of Questions and
Answers (1700).54 Burnet listed books about morality and those meant
to serve as examples of lives well spent, such as William Hamilton’s
The Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell, Esq (1703).55 She also
included a handful of works by High Churchmen. There is one sermon
by the moderate Tory, John Sharp, Archbishop of York, and another
by the high-flying firebrand Francis Atterbury. A couple of books by
nonjurors also make an appearance, such as Charles Leslie’s A Short and
Easy Method with a Deist (1697) and Jeremy Collier’s polemics against
the stage.56 But Elizabeth Burnet chose carefully. The sermons by High
Churchmen are eloquent and apolitical; Atterbury’s sermon on private
prayer girds Burnet’s own emphasis on an active and personal prayer
life. Collier’s famous attacks on the theater, including the plays of Aphra
Behn, reflected widespread anxieties about the moral order of society,
concerns shared by both High and Low clergy.
If Burnet’s list of recommended books is indicative of anything it is
that of a thoroughly orthodox Anglican. True enough, she leaned in
54
Both Burkitt and Lewis were Low Churchmen. Burkitt held puritanical sym-
pathies and had numerous ties to Dissenters while the Whiggish Lewis publicly
attacked High Church principles. N. Pankhurst, The Life of the Rev. W. Burkitt
(London, 1704); J. Shirley, “John Lewis of Margate,” Archaeologia cantiana 64
(1951): 39–56.
55
James Bonnell (1653–99) was a deeply pious government official working in
Ireland during the Revolution and the 1690s. He supported the comprehension of
nonconformists and promoted religious societies in Dublin. Bonnell’s life, written
by Archdeacon William Armagh, was extremely popular, going through seven
editions by 1741. D.W. Hayton, “Bonnell, James (1653–1699),” ODNB.
56
John Sharp, Government of Thoughts: A Sermon Preached before the King and Queen
at Whitehall (London, 1694); Francis Atterbury, On the Excellency and Advantage of
Private Prayer (London, 1704); Charles Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with a Deist
(London, 1697); Jeremy Collier, Short View of the Immortality and Profaneness of the
England Stage (London, 1698); A Defense of A Short View (London, 1699); A Second
Defense of a Short View (London, 1700).
the direction of Latitudinarians like Tillotson and Patrick, and her list
contained the works of maverick rationalists like Samuel Clarke and
Edward Synge.57 But she was no Socianian and was clearly exercised
by the debate over the nature of the Holy Trinity and the implausi-
bility of the miraculous in religion. She included a number of works
defending orthodox Trinitarianism and attacking John Toland’s infa-
mous Christianity not Mysterious (1696) which argued that Christianity
possessed no mysteries. Thus Burnet’s inclusion of Charles Leslie’s clas-
sic defense of Trinitarian orthodoxy and the centrality of the doctrine
of satisfaction, as well as the nonjuror, John Richardson’s The Canon of
the New Testament Vindicated: In an Answer to the Objections of J. [ohn]
T. [oland] (1701) and Edward Synge’s defense of mystery in religion,
A Gentleman’s Religion with Grounds and Reasons for it (1698). What
Burnet did not list were any works by English Dissenters. No Richard
Baxter, no John Bunyan, nor even William Bates, Mary II’s favorite
Presbyterian writer. In keeping with her solidly Anglican position, there
are merely two continental writers listed, which, considering Burnet’s
time abroad and appreciation of northern European culture, might seem
a tad surprising. But Burnet’s list was for the orthodox Anglican reader
and not meant to embrace the Protestant International. Hugo Grotius’s
work of Protestant apologetics, The Truth of the Christian Religion, newly
translated by Simon Patrick, was recommended, as well as two works
by the Swiss Protestant pastor, Jean Frederic Ostervald. Like Grotius’s
treatise, Ostervald’s work was often used by Anglican missionaries.58
Highly learned and pragmatic, Ostervald’s thinking was in line with
the Latitudinarians, advocating a more ethical, less rigid Protestantism.
In the end, Elizabeth Burnet’s Method as well as her list of recommended
reading illuminates the mind of an Anglican thinker at the outset of
the Enlightenment, trying to reconcile reason with religion, daily prac-
ticality with something of a yearning for the otherworldly. That Burnet
denied her readers of that which she at one time (or perhaps still)
was fascinated by – mysticism, enthusiasm, speculative imagining, and
57
The Whiggish Edward Synge, who was appointed Archbishop of Tuam in 1716,
trended toward a Deist position. Edward Clarke, a theologian and philosopher,
would come to doubt the divinity of Christ, but Burnet only includes his earliest
and uncontroversial work, Three Practical Essays, viz. On Baptism, Confirmation,
and Repentance (London, 1699).
58
Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion: In Six Books. Trans. Simon
Patrick (London, 1683); Jean Frederic Ostervald, A Treatise Concerning the Causes
of the Present Corruptions of Christians (London, 1702); The Grounds and Principles
of the Christian Religion (London, 1704).
even doubt – accords well with what we know about the Latitudinarian
Church of Queen Mary and Archbishops Tillotson and Tenison. It was
nothing if not rational, utilitarian, practical and dull.
Conversations with John Locke
I don’t indeed conclude Mr. Locke can’t err, but am not at all disposed
to believe he does.
Elizabeth Burnet59
Between 1696 and 1702, Elizabeth Burnet and the philosopher, John
Locke, exchanged letters. They had met in London through Elizabeth’s
sister, Mary, who lived next door to the author of the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding.60 That John Locke and Elizabeth, who in 1696 was
a young widow, well traveled and well read, became friends is not sur-
prising. Locke enjoyed the company of intelligent women, and he and
Elizabeth had mutual acquaintances and shared political sympathies.
While only one of Locke’s letters to Elizabeth Burnet has survived, eigh-
teen of Elizabeth’s missives have remained and are printed in Locke’s
collected correspondence. The first two years of their correspondence
focused on the polemical skirmish between Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop
of Worcester, and Locke over epistemological questions and the cer-
tainty of basic Christian tenets. This was a dispute about which Burnet
cared deeply. To be sure, it concerned two of her friends, men whom
she greatly admired. Additionally, Elizabeth liked still waters and, as
she would make clear in her Method, abhorred wrangling and divisions
among Protestants over doctrinal details and airy speculations. On a
deeper level, Burnet was perhaps troubled. Troubled by the implica-
tions of the debate for Anglican orthodoxy, and troubled too because,
while she sympathized with Stillingfleet’s defense of Church doctrine,
she wondered if Locke’s minimalist Christianity was not closer to the
direction of her own thinking.
Elizabeth Burnet first wrote to Locke in July 1696. Perhaps it was
a bit brazen of her. Her style oscillates between deference and a wily
playfulness. She is a woman aware of both his intellectual author-
ity and her own social status and intelligence. They had met in
59
Locke Correspondence, 5: 665.
60
Between 1696 and 1701, Elizabeth’s surname was still “Berkeley,” but to
avoid confusion she is referred to throughout this section as “Burnet,” her last
husband’s surname.
person, and Burnet had yearned to speak to Locke in a “less observ-

able way” that turned out to be impossible at the time. So she wrote.
Burnet was familiar with Locke’s work, having read many of his “excel-
lent books.” It is her opinion, so she tells him, that the duties of
a Christian are “very few and simple,” suggesting that her concep-
tion of Christianity is not far from Locke’s position as articulated in
his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). Still, she found herself
“little disquieted by hearing it as your judgment that there was no
positive obligation from Scripture or primitive practice for the use
of the sacraments.”61 Burnet asks Locke if he would either like to
deny such a reading of his work or bring his thinking in line with
Anglican orthodoxy. She wonders if he is simply misunderstood and
cautions him to take more care in speaking his thoughts as he has
“observers,” by which she seems to mean both enemies and disci-
ples, who would use his philosophy to forward their own agendas.
Undoubtedly, Burnet was referring to John Toland’s use of Locke’s epis-
temology in his radical Christianity not Mysterious. She was concerned
by those that would employ Locke’s epistemology to undermine the
Church.62
Between July 1696 and February 1697, Burnet and Locke were both in
London and exchanged visits. Their discussions had centered on Bishop
Stillingfleet’s A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1696)
which argued that Locke’s views were antithetical to Christianity as
interpreted by the Church of England. When Burnet wrote to Locke
in February, she tried to sooth Locke’s irritation with the Bishop of
Worcester. “I have often heard him [Stillingfleet] speak of you with great
esteem and respect.”63 But Locke was far from pacified, and his first
response to Stillingfleet was witty, caustic, and highly defensive. The
great philosopher did not take critiques of his work kindly, and he was
clearly unnerved by Stillingfleet’s assertion that his ideas were dangerous
to orthodox belief. Locke included Elizabeth Burnet on the distribution
list of his reply to Stillingfleet entitled, A Letter to the Bishop of Worcester
(1697) and enquired after her thoughts on the matter. Elizabeth obliged
him, though with characteristic deference, she wondered if he would
61
Locke Correspondence, 5: 664. Burnet is almost certainly referring to Locke’s The
Reasonableness of Christianity which appeared in August 1695.
62
Ibid., 5: 664–5. Although it is dated 1696, Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious
first appeared in December of 1695.
63
Ibid., 5: 785. Stillingfleet’s A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity
appeared in November 1696.
not “lose those favorable thoughts you have too hastily entertained of
me” once he read her responses.64
Then she lets him have it.
In several places in the book I thought you were a little too critical in
observing small faults in the exactness of writing that did not imme-
diately relate to yourself or matter of your complaint, to correct such
errors in a friend is kind and allowable, or to expose a vain pretender
to knowledge, but my Lord [Stillingfleet’s] reputation for learning
is so justly established and of so public a benefit, that all needless
reflection ought to be avoided.
To enumerate Stillingfleet’s mistakes or to accuse him of mistaking

the truth could do nothing but harm. It would have been far bet-
ter, she boldly asserts, for Locke to have simply clarified what “was
obscure in my Lord’s books” and looked for agreement between them
“in interest of Truth.” Burnet sought to explain Stillingfleet’s position
to Locke. The Bishop views your thinking as “the original and foun-
dation of what is called the new way of reasoning,” which he believes
will be and has been used for ill purposes, contrary to Locke’s intention.
Stillingfleet posits that Locke’s epistemology has the power to “weaken
faith.” While, she explains, the Bishop has no ill will against Locke
or his book, “he thought [his Vindication] necessary for the safeguard
of the truth he defended, and if a little sharpness sometimes mix’d
his ink, he then forgot Mr. Locke and meant only the abusers of his
notions.”65
Burnet proceeds to comb through Locke’s reply page by page, often
defending Stillingfleet and critiquing Locke for language she feels is “a
little harsh” or “too resenting.” In the end, she believes that only the test
of time will prove Locke’s theories of human understanding. “For if your
way of proving and knowing is found [to be] a clear and easy method, it
will be approved and used when time has smoothed the prejudices and
stilled the fears of its opposers.” Burnet is attracted to Locke’s ideas, only
she worries that he makes “the ways of speculation so plain and easy”
as to tempt “all unarmed and weak persons” into the realms of theol-
ogy and philosophy. Naturally, she has John Toland in mind and warns
Locke that it would be very harmful if he were thought to favor the
64
Ibid., 6:198. Locke’s A Letter to the Bishop of Worcester was published in January
1697.
65
Ibid., 6: 199, 200, 201.
“heretical side,” meaning heterodox thinkers such as the Socianians and

Deists.66 What Burnet found most troubling about this dispute between
her friends was that it might be used by those seeking to weaken Church
principles. Burnet made it clear that she was unhappy that Locke felt
it necessary to reply to Stillingfleet at all. All things considered, she
writes, Locke might have been “content to dispense with your own
right” to respond. “I think it would be most charitable and best to be
silent . . . I hear the Lord has some thoughts of writing [a response to
Locke’s Letter] but I hope he will not.”67 Clearly, Burnet was aware of
the power of Locke’s line of thinking and of his reputation. She knew
he had the upper hand and that Stillingfleet was the weaker disputant.
But she admired Stillingfleet and saw him as a defender of orthodox
Anglicanism.
Burnet received a short note from Locke within a month’s time. He
thanked her for her comments and expected to wait upon her in London
shortly, hoping to discuss her objections to his reply to Stillingfleet then.
Clearly agitated, however, Locke curtly asserts that if he is thought to
favor the “heretical side” that “misfortune” is owing to nobody more
than Stillingfleet.68 Feeling Locke’s wrath, Burnet quickly responded,
once again trying to smooth over all differences. She had spoken with
Bishop Stillingfleet and assures Locke that the Bishop does not think
that he is heretical. She too is “fully persuaded as to the integrity of your
intentions.” But she does not back down and remains concerned about
how others will mistake and misuse Locke’s ideas. “I conclude your aim
is to make people better and wiser, and hope you will remember the
world is mostly made up of children in the worst sense.”69 It seems likely
that Burnet and Locke met shortly after this exchange. Henceforth their
correspondence made fewer references to the debate with Stillingfleet,
although Elizabeth notes in November 1698 that she has received and
read Locke’s second reply to the Bishop. She assures Locke that it did
not make her “melancholy,” as he thought it might, only she remains
unhappy that two of her friends, who are capable of thinking alike, are
so opposed.70
66
Ibid., 6: 201, 202.
67
Ibid., 6: 198.
68
69
Ibid., 6: 226.
70
Ibid., 6: 509. Locke’s second letter to Stillingfleet was entitled, Mr. Locke’s Reply
to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Letter, and appeared
in June 1697.
The joust between Locke and Stillingfleet was not over before one
more tilt: the Bishop’s answer to Locke’s second letter and Locke’s
reply.71 Perhaps there might have been a fourth round as well save for
Stillingfleet’s death in March 1699. Although Locke repeatedly denied
that his philosophy had any implications for orthodox theology, it
clearly did, as John Toland had bravely shown. Locke never budged
from his sola scriptura position, and Stillingfleet never lured him into
admitting or denying the Resurrection, the immateriality of the soul,
or the Holy Trinity. Elizabeth Burnet had pleaded for a cessation of the
whole dispute. She was wary of its effects on the already suffering Estab-
lished Church. “ ’Tis safer believing with humility, than disputing with
niceness,” she wrote in her Method, “which is often the effect of pride,
the cause of divisions, and is an enemy to charity.”72 “Thank God,” she
wrote to Locke in the spring of 1700, “I am not uneasily curious about
what is obscurely revealed either with respect to what is the future or in
other matters above our clear and full comprehension; I look on Scrip-
ture more as a rule of life . . . and [if I] honestly perform my part, I shall
I hope commit my future being to God . . .”73 Her emphasis on Scripture
echoes, whether consciously or not, Locke’s rebuttal to Stillingfleet in
both his first reply when he asserts that, “The Holy Scripture is to me,
and always will be, the constant guide of my assent,” as well as his sec-
ond reply: “I read revelation of the Holy Scriptures with a full assurance
that all it delivers is true.”74 She had chided Locke for skirmishing with
a true defender of the Church, but she agreed with him just the same.
Burnet and Locke continued to correspond in the early 1700s. They
may not have been able to see each other as much as before. Elizabeth
was now remarried and was living with Bishop Burnet and his children.
The couple probably divided their time between the bishop’s residences
in Salisbury, Windsor, and London.75 Elizabeth wanted to visit Locke at
71
Stillingfleet’s last reply to Locke was entitled, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer
to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter and dated September 1697. Locke’s responded with,
Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his
Second Letter (London, 1699).
72
A Method of Devotion, p. 86.
73
74
John Locke, A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward, p. 96; Mr. Locke’s Reply, p. 341.
75
Elizabeth Burnet had an estate at St. John’s Court, Clerkenwell, on the edge
of London. This was probably their “London residence” after the Bishop lost his
apartments at St. James’s upon the ascension of Queen Anne. Elizabeth willed the
Clerkenwell house to Gilbert and it became his permanent residence toward the
end of his life. NA, PROB 11/50/26.
the Masham estate in Essex where he was residing, writing in the sum-
mer of 1701 that, “if I knew Lady [Damaris] Masham, I would come and
see both her ladyship and yourself.” She also offers to send Locke Bishop
Burnet’s coach to retrieve him. The following winter, Elizabeth was ill,
blaming the political tumults of that season for her bad health. In March
of 1702, William III died and the pro-Tory, Queen Anne, ascended to
the throne. That winter, High Church Anglicans and their Tory allies in
the House of Commons began a campaign against Dissenters and par-
ticularly those who practiced “occasional conformity.” In typical Whig
fashion, Burnet found the demands of the High Church unreasonable
and divisive. She tried to persuade Locke to write on the side of “justice,
charity” and “truth.” “Surely, we have enemies enough abroad, and ’tis
madness to quarrel at home, when truth and liberty will fall by it, but
I know you’ll say, ’tis to no purpose, but you can’t be sure of it, I never
knew you write without success and conviction and why not now?”76
Burnet’s last letters to Locke often addressed the plight of Catharine
Trotter, who had written a defense of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding as a reply to Thomas Burnet’s attack.77 Apparently seeking
patronage, Trotter had sent Elizabeth and the Bishop a copy of her book.
Elizabeth liked what she read and told Locke that both Bishop Burnet
and the philosopher, John Norris, approved of Trotter’s work.78 Elizabeth
knew quite a bit about Catharine Trotter. “Your champion,” she wrote to
Locke, “is unmarried” and has “more than the common genius.” Unfor-
tunately, Trotter was “left in mean circumstances,” supporting herself
by writing plays, which brought her into ill company, and worse, had
“turned papist.”79 Several letters over the fall and summer of 1702 make
76
Locke Correspondence, 7: 359, 360.
77
Catharine Trotter, A Defense of the Essay of Human Understanding (London,
1702). Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715) was a theologian and master of the
Chatterhouse; his tract, Remarks upon an Essay Concerning Humane Understand-
ing (London, 1697) accused Locke of Deism and Socinianism. On Trotter, see
Anne Kelley, Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988).
78
It seems likely that Burnet was acquainted with John Norris. He had a circle
of female admirers including Lady Damaris Masham and Mary Astell. Burnet rec-
ommended two of his books to her readers. She also asked Locke in November of
1702 if he had read Norris’s An Essay towards the Theory of an Ideal and Intelligible
World (which appeared in two parts, the first one in 1701) and to send her his
thoughts on it.
79
Locke Correspondence, 7: 638. Two of Elizabeth Burnet’s letters to Catharine
Trotter have been printed and are found in The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn,
ed. Thomas Birch, 3 vols., (London, 1751), 1: xvii–xviii, xxxi–xxxii.
it clear that Burnet assisted Trotter. In her new position as wife to the
Bishop of Salisbury, Elizabeth was increasingly able to play the role of
Whig patron. She was not only a patron, but also a client, and not
just any client, but one to the greatest of Whig grandees of the early
eighteenth century, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
Whig Politics and Memory
Queen Mary of ever precious memory . . .

Elizabeth Burnet
That Elizabeth Burnet was a Whig, an ardent and an active one is evident
in all the sources. That she should become a trusted friend of the great
patroness of Whig causes, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough,
makes perfect sense. Yet they were by no means twins. The Duchess’s
friendship with Queen Anne had made her rich and powerful. She could
also be haughty and vindictive.80 Nor was Sarah Churchill particularly
pious, although in common with Elizabeth Burnet, she disdained the
High Church party.81 Elizabeth, on the other hand, was by all accounts,
modest, discreet, and motivated, first and foremost, by her religiosity.
But she did share with the Duchess of Marlborough a passion for what
they both believed to be the good of the nation, and that, above all,
meant Whig causes such as the vigorous pursuit of the war with France.
It also meant a concerted effort to thwart the divisive politics that Tories
and High Church Anglicans brought to bear in Parliament.
Just as Elizabeth had hoped, her marriage to Gilbert Burnet gave her
further access to the arenas of power in London in the early eigh-
teenth century. In 1698, William III had appointed Bishop Burnet to
tutor the eight-year-old William, Duke of Gloucester, who was Princess
Anne’s sole surviving child and the heir apparent. The Bishop married
Elizabeth in May or June of 1700. Though the young duke died that
80
The most authoritative study of Sarah Churchill is Frances Harris, A Passion for
Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991); see also, Ophelia Field, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough: The
Queen’s Favorite (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).
81
In her memoirs, the Duchess of Marlborough wrote: “The word CHURCH had
never any charm for me in the mouths of those who make the most noise with
it.” She castigates those who have a “persecuting zeal against Dissenters, and
against those real friends of the Church, who would not admit that persecution
was agreeable to its doctrine.” Sarah Churchill and Nathaniel Hooke, An Account
of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (London, 1742), p. 134.
July, it was not before Elizabeth Burnet and Sarah Churchill had become
acquainted.82 Given their mutual interests, they quickly perceived in
one another a kindred spirit. They corresponded for the next five years.
For the most part, only Burnet’s letters to the Duchess have survived.
They revolve around two issues, both political and religious and dear to
Burnet: Tory politicking in Parliament and the memory and legacy of
Mary II. Clearly, both Gilbert and Elizabeth Burnet saw her friendship
with Sarah, made Duchess of Marlborough in 1702, as an important one.
The Duchess’s influence over Queen Anne was still formidable in the
first years of the new century.83 John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough,
commanded Anne’s armies abroad and the Marlboroughs’ close ally,
Sidney Godolphin, was the Queen’s Lord Treasurer. Bishop Burnet, as
effusive as ever, openly boasted of his new wife’s connection to the
Duchess, while Elizabeth, for her part, did all she could to cultivate her
role as friend and client to the Queen’s favorite. Elizabeth Burnet’s let-
ters to the Duchess are deferential and loving, assuring the Duchess of
Elizabeth’s desire to do her any service and reminding her that Bishop
Burnet “is at all times your Ladyships faithful servant.” In her role
as confidant, Elizabeth Burnet lends an empathic ear to Sarah’s irrita-
tion over perceived jealousies and malice toward herself and the Duke.
Indeed, Burnet writes to the Duchess, “I see the envy of some peo-
ple at your prosperity.” And when the Duchess talks of retirement,
Burnet assures her that such a decision would be disastrous for the
country. “I am sensible that you would gain quiet and be more happy,
but surely now you do more good, and how would the Duke strug-
gle with so many difficulties without your help?” This, no doubt, was
exactly the reply that the Duchess anticipated, although she probably
had little desire to “assist the distressed” and “defend the innocent,”
as the ever virtuous Burnet urges her. Burnet is such a good friend to
the Marlboroughs that when she learns of the Duke’s great victory at
Blenheim, she writes to Sarah that it has eased her grief over the loss of
her infant daughter.84
82
Foxcroft and Clark, A Life of Gilbert Burnet, pp. 381–2.
83
Although, as Frances Harris points out, it was also true that relations between
the Queen and her favorite had become strained by 1704 which was something
the Duchess hid from her friends. Frances Harris, “Accounts of the Conduct
of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 1704–1742,” The British Library Journal 8/1
(1982), p. 9.
84
BL, Add 61,458, ff. 3, 4v, 8, 10. The Burnets’ daughter, tellingly named Anna
Sophia, was baptized on July 5 and buried on July 31. Foxcroft, A Supplement,
p. 409.
But she was not just a friendly ear. Elizabeth Burnet strove to pro-
vide the Duchess of Marlborough with useful information, particularly
about Tory maneuvering in the House of Commons. In November of
1702, and again in 1703 and 1704, Tories in the Commons introduced
a bill entitled, An Act for Preventing Occasional Conformity. The act was
aimed at nonconforming Whigs who occasionally took the sacrament
in the Church of England in order to qualify for office. For the Duke of
Marlborough and Sidney Godolphin, both moderate Tories, the pursuit
of the war on the continent was priority number one. They saw the bill
against Occasional Conformity as not only disruptive, displacing more
urgent business, but likely to alienate Whigs and Dissenters whose con-
tinued support for the war was vital. On the other hand, Marlborough
and Godolphin did not dare oppose the bill openly lest they lose their
Tory allies. Thus all their maneuvering against the bill had to be done
behind closed doors. Each time the bill was introduced, it passed the
Commons but was defeated in the Lords, where the moderate bishops
of William and Mary’s making blocked the measure.85
Throughout, Elizabeth Burnet provided the Duchess with information
from inside Parliament which she gathered from her brother-in-law,
Justice Dormer, and Sir Joseph Jekyll, a Whig MP and ally to John,
Lord Somers. She also informed the Duchess that Dormer, Jekyll, and
her friend, the moderate Tory Bishop, William Talbot, were all eager
to serve her.86 In November of 1704, Burnet passed information about
Tory efforts to reintroduce the bill to the Duchess. “I was told the
Tories had a meeting of 61. Sir G[eorge] R[ooke] was one. The debate
was about the Occasional Bill.”87 A few days later she described for the
Duchess the vote in the Commons,
85
On the issue of Occasional Conformity, see John Flaningam, “The Occasional
Conformity Controversy: Ideology and Party Politics, 1697–1711,” JBS 17 (1977):
38–62; George Every, The High Church Party, 1688–1718 (London, SPCK, 1956),
108–12; Henry L. Snyder, “The Defeat of the Occasional Conformity Bill and the
Tack: A Study in the Techniques of Parliamentary Management in the Reign of
Queen Anne,” BIHR 41 (1968): 172–86; Martin Greig, “Bishop Gilbert Burnet and
Latitudinarian Episcopal Opposition to the Occasional Conformity Bills, 1702–
1704,” Canadian Journal of History 41/2 (2006): 247–62.
86
BL, Add. 61,458, ff. 6, 19.
87
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 30; also quoted in Snyder, “The Defeat,” p. 178. The Tory,
Admiral Sir George Rooke was a naval commander whose battle with the French
at Malaga in August 1704 was compared in the Tory press to Blenheim. Naturally,
this was something the Marlboroughs highly resented. W.A. Speck, The Birth of
Britain: A New Nation, 1700–1710 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 73–4.
It was debated long and, as you say, all the strength of argument
ran against it ten to one. Speakers for it were [William] Bromley,
Sir Humphrey Mackworth, [John] Hungerford, Ceaser, etc; against it
Lord Hartenton, [Henry] Boyle, Smith, [William] Stanhope, Holles,
Dormer etc. The decision was 152 for it, amongst whom was How,
and [Henry] St. John; . . . against it 126 nos, amongst these was the
secretary and controller [Thomas Mansel].88
Burnet also sent the Duchess weeklies such as the Gazette and Observator,
marking that which she wished to bring to Sarah’s attention.89 Whether
any of Burnet’s information was actually useful to the Marlboroughs
and Godolphin is difficult to say. But it certainly attests to Burnet’s own
willingness to engage in the political wrangling of the time.
Burnet had sought to temper her animosity toward High Church
partisans in her Method. But in her letters to the Duchess, she did not
mince words. She told the Duchess, who was certainly receptive to
such opinions, that High Church rhetoric was designed as if to “pro-
voke the Dissenters never to come within a church again, a way that
no church in the world but ours ever thought on.” Castigating the
bill against Occasional Conformity, Burnet writes, “if we think we are
in the right and the best church, as doubtless we are, why should
we fear being liked the worse by being better known; it is much eas-
ier to make silly people think our service is half popery if they never
came to our churches.” No one is “the worse” for going to Church
services, if only occasionally, and probably many thousands, “espe-
cially children and servants,” have gained intimate knowledge of the
Church because of this practice among Dissenters.90 Never, Burnet tells
the Duchess, has she heard of anyone leaving the Church to become a
Presbyterian, but “many Jacobites have turned to popery and others are
very near it.”91
These things Burnet and Churchill agreed on. But their like-
mindedness did not extend to recent royal history. Elizabeth Burnet, like
Bishop Burnet, was a great admirer of the late Queen, Mary II. Elizabeth
was initially enchanted by Mary when she met her at Het Loo Palace
prior to the Revolution. When Burnet visited Loo again in 1708, she
recalled her first encounter with Mary and reflected on her death,
88
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 30; also quoted in Snyder, “The Defeat,” p. 179.
89
BL, Add. 61,458, ff. 16, 22.
90
BL, Add. 61,458, ff. 9–11.
91
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 11.
“We [the English] were not worthy of such a blessing.”92 But the Duchess
of Marlborough’s memories of the Queen were not so precious. Back in
1692, William and Mary learned that John Churchill was correspond-
ing with James II. William stripped Churchill of his offices. Later, during
an invasion scare that spring, the Queen had Churchill arrested and
briefly imprisoned. Mary also requested Princess Anne to dismiss Sarah
Churchill from her service. Anne refused. The quarrel between the royal
sisters became increasingly ugly as William and Mary sought to isolate
Princess Anne for her defiance. Anne, in turn, was hardly a passive vic-
tim of royal displeasure and, as Mary was well aware, cultivated a party
of disaffected Tories and churchmen around her.93 In the midst of it,
Sarah’s pride had been wounded, both for herself and her husband.
Little wonder, then, that the Duchess found Burnet’s “wonderful partial-
ity” for William and Mary challenging and strove to disabuse Elizabeth
of such a fallacy by telling her own tale of Queen Mary’s behavior.
In November of 1704, the Duchess sent Burnet “A True Account of the
ill and undeserved treatment of the Princess Anne of Denmark by King
William and Queen Mary, her sister, contrived and carried on by the
Earl of Rochester.”94 Sarah’s “Account” sought to persuade Burnet that
Mary was certainly no saint, and that the actions of William and Mary
between 1692 and 1694 had been unjust and arbitrary. Naturally, the
Duchess also wished to justify her own behavior during the quarrel.
But Elizabeth Burnet was not so easily convinced of any wrong doing
on the late Queen’s part. Similar to her response to Locke’s reply to
Stillingfleet, Burnet felt that the Duchess was too harsh and offered to
make a list of passages “where I think a little more charity may with
reason be admitted.”95 Nor did Burnet retreat from her favorable view
of Mary II. She was willing to praise the Duchess for her lively style,
but to her mind, if Queen Mary “had lived, there would have been a
92
Rawl. D. 1029, f. 132v.
93
Harris, A Passion, pp. 63–5; John Hattendorf, “John Churchill, First Duke
of Marlborough (1650–1722),” ODNB. On Queen Mary’s awareness of sister’s
actions, see Doebner, Memoirs, p. 24.
94
The Duchess of Marlborough’s “A True Account” is found in BL, Add. 61,421.
She calls Burnet’s affection for William and Mary “wonderful partiality” on f. 1.
As Frances Harris has pointed out, the Duchess’s “A True Account” was written
to set Elizabeth Burnet straight and was later transformed into the Duchess’s
famous, An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (London,
1742). Harris, “Accounts of the Conduct of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,
1704–1742,” The British Library Journal 8/1 (1982): 7–35.
95
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 27. Also quoted in Harris, “Accounts,” p. 10.
reconciliation” between the sisters only “the nation were not worthy of
such a joy.” “The uprightness of her [Mary’s] wit and freedom of her
humor could not but have endeared her to that Princess.” True enough,
Mary was “young and inexperienced in such politics” at the time of
the Revolution. Perhaps she was misled and the “unhappy breach was
made by designing people who widened it on both sides.” Still Burnet
was adamant that the Queen “had no ill will toward the princess or
you,” only Mary thought it was “the Princess’s duty to oblige” her.96
Burnet was equally unhappy with the Duchess’s treatment of the King in
her “account.” Armed with her own sources, Burnet defended William
III, who was certainly someone the Duchess detested. Burnet reported
the following story to the Duchess. On the night of the Queen’s death,
Lord Somers went to Kensington Palace. The King was in his closet and
in “the most dismal way possible.” Somers spoke to him about some
kind of reconciliation between himself and Princess Anne as “some-
thing absolutely necessary.” The King told Somers, “do what you will,
I can think of no business.” Burnet admits that William had something
of an “unpleasing sourness of temper,” but since both he and Princess
Anne were “reserved and silent,” they could never please each other.
Furthermore, the King had “long felt himself dying.”97
Elizabeth Burnet’s defense of Mary “of ever precious memory” is
certainly interesting. In addition to her own first-hand knowledge of
Mary II, she had probably read Bishop Burnet’s hagiographical essay
on the late Queen. It would have reinforced for her what she already
believed about the late Queen: that they had much in common, par-
ticularly insofar as the Protestant religion was concerned. This went
beyond the fact that they were both deeply pious; that each maintained
a robust spiritual life; that they both composed prayers and medita-
tions and saw God’s providence in the good and ill that befell the
nation. This much they would have shared with any number of devout
women and men of the era. What would have attracted Burnet to Mary
II was the Queen’s broad view of the Church; her moderation toward
other Protestants; and her rationalism. “She was no enthusiast,” wrote
Bishop Burnet of the Queen in his essay. Nor was her affection for the
Church of England “blind or partial. She saw what finishings we still
wanted.”98 So too Elizabeth Burnet, who castigated High Churchmen
96
BL, Add. 61,458, ff. 98v, 29.
97
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 29.
98
Gilbert Burnet, An Essay on the Memory of the Late Queen (London, 1705),
pp. 94, 74.
for their treatment of Dissenters and who recommended to her readers

the writings of the very men preferred by Mary II. Most importantly,
both women advocated a religion that promoted domestic peace and
stability.
Mary Astell and High Church Anglicanism in the

Age of Danger
That moderation that the Dissenter desires of the Church is the slack-
ing the reins of discipline, the violation of order and breach of laws so
that his moderate church-man must . . . be a good natur’d easy fool,
who suffer the foundations to be sapped under his nose . . .
Mary Astell99
If Mary Astell had an opinion of Mary II, it was almost certainly not
favorable. Astell never mentions the Queen. But since she had noth-
ing but contempt for William III and the Revolutionary Settlement, she
almost certainly was not one of Mary’s adoring fans. Additionally, the
very kind of Church that Mary II had helped to shape was repugnant to
Astell. The famed feminist writer was no less devout than the Queen or
Elizabeth Burnet, but her piety stood at the opposite end of the Anglican
spectrum. Astell believed that the moderate Anglicanism indicative of
the churchmanship of Mary II and Archbishops Tillotson and Tenison
represented everything that imperiled the Established Church at the
dawn of the new century. The Church was threatened from within by
Low Church moderates, whose tepid piety left the Church undefended,
and from without by Dissenters, who by their cant and cunning stole
the weak and ignorant away from the true religion. Atheists, libertines,
Deists, Socinians, freethinkers and “wits” of every sort further under-
mined the national Church. So, too, “busy” women. Feminist though
she was, Mary Astell abhorred women like Elizabeth Burnet and the
Duchess of Marlborough, who occupied themselves with Whig politics.
Worst still were Dissenting women like the Presbyterian, Mary Speke.
Astell described these women as merely the “tools of crafty and design-
ing demagogues.”100 Yet, like all of these women, Astell’s religiosity
propelled her to political action. Articulate, eloquent, and wise, Mary
Astell’s political tracts illuminate the mind of a High Church Anglican
99
Mary Astell, Moderation Truly Stated (London, 1704), p. 13.
100
Astell, The Christian Religion, p. 120.
in the early eighteenth century. Thus, in the same way that Aphra Behn’s
comedies dissected the cant and hypocrisy of Puritanism and oppo-
sitional politics from the perspective of a royalist, Astell deconstructs
Queen Mary’s moderate Church, Whig politicking, and Dissent in the
so-called “age of the Church in danger.”
Mary Astell was born into a prosperous North Country mercan-
tile family from whom she seems to have inherited both her ardent
attachment to the Stuart monarchy and her devotion for the Church.
She received some education from her father’s brother, Ralph Astell,
the curate of St. Nicholas Cathedral, who had been influenced by the
neo-platonists during his time at Cambridge. The death of Mary Astell’s
father in 1678 left the family in rather dire straits.101 For a time, Mary
Astell lived with her mother and aunt, but sometime in the late 1680s,
she did something very brave. With little money and few connections,
she moved to London, eventually settling in the fashionable neighbor-
hood of Chelsea. Her first patron was none other than the Archbishop
of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who had refused to take the new oaths
of allegiance after the Revolution and was ordered to vacate Lambeth
Palace by Mary II in 1691. Astell’s publications in the 1690s include her
most famous, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (part 1 in 1694 and part II in
1697) and her exchange of philosophical letters with the Cambridge
Platonist, John Norris, titled, Letters Concerning the Love of God
in 1695.102
By the early 1700s, Astell was fairly well established in the intellec-
tual and literary milieu of London. She had a circle of female friends
and patrons and also acquainted with several prominent nonjurors
including George Hickes, an antiquarian and Tory polemicist, and Henry
Dodwell, a theologian and professor of history deprived of his position
at Oxford in 1691. She was also a neighbor and friend to Dean Francis
Atterbury, a High Churchman and politician who would later turn
Jacobite conspirator. As Astell’s biographer, Ruth Perry, has observed,
101
The contours of Astell’s life are sufficiently well known. Ruth Perry’s biogra-
phy (and ODNB entry) as well as those secondary sources cited below should be
consulted by those readers desiring more than is provided here. Ruth Perry, The
Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), pp. 29–51, 66–7.
102
There are modern editions of both of these early works by Astell. A Serious
Proposal to the Ladies, parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg (London: Broadview
Press, 1985); Mary Astell and John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, eds.
E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Astell’s “friends and contacts in the capitol were from the ranks of disaf-
fected Stuart sympathizers.”103 Thus it is not surprising that when Astell
entered the political tussles of the early 1700s, she supported Tory, or to
be more exact, High Church principles. In 1704, Astell published three
major political tracts: Moderation Truly Stated and A Fair Way with Dis-
senters, both of which deal with the controversy over the bill against
Occasional Conformity; and her Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of the
Civil War, which was a hard-line Tory interpretation of the Civil Wars
and execution of Charles I. In all of these tracts, Astell sought to defend
what she truly saw as a Church in danger on all sides.
And what was it that so threatened the Church Established? The so-
called “Age of the Church in Danger” is a curious one. In the years
between the Glorious Revolution and the failure of the first Jacobite
Rebellion in 1715, High Church and Tory propagandists increasingly
spoke of the Church of England as an endangered institution. At the
heart of their anxiety was the new reality of religious pluralism, legally
sanctioned, as created by the Act of Toleration of 1689. No longer able
to depend on the state to flush out and prosecute its competitors, the
Church was forced to compete with Dissenting chapels and academies.
This was a contest which High Churchmen among the ecclesiastical
hierarchy as well as many lower clergy in the countryside believed
the Church was increasingly losing.104 Quite naturally, they saw this
as a consequence of the Revolution Settlement and the supposedly
Laodicean churchmanship of so many of Mary and William’s bishops,
as well as the deprivation of the nonjuring clergy, which had “shorn
the Church of some of her finest ornaments.”105 But if Dissenters out-
side the Church and Latitudinarians within were not enough, there
was also the problem of irreligion among the people, as many simply
chose not to attend any church; an outbreak of new fangled religions
such as the followers of enthusiastic mystic, Jane Leade; and, above all,
the spreading cancer of new philosophies, epistemologies, and here-
sies among the elite. Intellectual questioning of Christ’s divinity, the
103
Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 42. Also on Astell’s circle of friends, see
Florence M. Smith, Mary Astell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916),
pp. 9–11; Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist Reflections upon Marriage and other
Writings by Mary Astell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 7–12.
104
Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger, Parsons and Parishners, 1660–
1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 14–22.
105
Rose, England in the 1690s, p. 160. Many of the nonjurors were among the
ablest scholars, antiquarians, and liturgists of the era.
Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and everything miraculous within

Scripture did indeed imperil the authority of the clergy and orthodox
doctrine. This is what Edward Stillingfleet saw so clearly and which
Locke denied. But whereas Locke’s friend, John Tillotson, and even the
increasingly conservative Stillingfleet, had tried to engage in a dialogue
with proponents of the new philosophies, High Churchmen simply
denounced these enemies of orthodoxy. Christ was not a matter of mere
conversation, even for the sake of peace among all parties. This is why
“No Moderation” became a High Church slogan.106
If the age of the Church in danger is a curious one it is because
the anxiety among High Churchmen was both real and manufactured.
Tory propaganda stirred and seasoned the “Church in Danger” mantra
and brought it to a boil during Anne’s reign, leading many histori-
ans to dismiss the idea of any real threat to the Church. What was
in danger, according to Keith Fielding, was “the Church as they had
known it – supreme, authoritarian, exclusive.”107 True enough, the
Restoration Church had been vanquished and the once privileged clergy
found themselves in completely new circumstances. This was no easy
adjustment. It was also certainly true that Tory polemicists heightened
anxieties for political reasons. But there was also something genuine
about High Church trepidations, something sincere about the assertions
of people like Mary Astell. Nor was Astell alone. If her anonymous polit-
ical tracts could be mistaken for someone like the non-juror, Charles
Leslie, or the High Churchman turned Jacobite, Francis Atterbury, it is
because her portrayal of all the ills that afflicted the Church, along with
the depth of her fear and anger, were felt by others as well.
The High Church positions taken in Astell’s political tracts also had
much in common with those enunciated in Aphra Behn’s plays and
poetry. This, of course, resulted from the fact that both were Stuart
sympathizers and both found Protestant sectarianism repulsive. They
both delighted in mocking Puritan cant and both conflated Dissent and
Whig politics, at the bottom of which they saw nothing but deceit and
hypocrisy. Astell, no doubt, would have found any comparison between
herself and the notorious “Madam Behn,” a writer of licentious stage
106
J.G.A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” in Enthusiasm
and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, eds. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La
Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1998), p. 15; Walsh and Taylor,
“The Church and Anglicanism,” p. 53.
107
Keith Fielding, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965), p. 303.
plays, distasteful.108 Astell belittled the very kind of literature, “poetry,

plays, and romances,” of which Behn was a master.109 But Astell also
realized that her Age of the Church in Danger had much in common
with Behn’s era of the Exclusion Crisis; and like the Tories of the 1680s
who cried up “41 again,” Astell also saw that the conflict between
the Church and Dissent had its roots in the Civil Wars. For “’tho’
Names of Contempt have been often changed on either side; as Cav-
alier and Roundhead, Royalist and Rebels, Malignants and Phanaticks,
Torys and Whigs, yet the Division has always been barely the Church
and the Dissenter, and there it continues to this Day.”110 For Astell, “the
pretended saints” who executed Charles I of Blessed Memory were also
responsible for the late Revolution in which an anointed King was force-
fully removed. Behind every pretended plot and conspiracy, petition,
and tumult over the last half century were the self-serving schismatic
demagogues. They were not to be accommodated because their demands
never ended; besides, they aimed at nothing less than the absolute ruin
of the Church and state.111 “They Bribe, they Threaten, they Solicit, they
Fawn, they Dissemble, they Lye, they break through all the Duties of
Society, violate all the Laws of God and of Man . . .”112
But Astell not only sounded like the “incomparable Astraea,” a com-
parison which scholars today might find pleasant enough.113 She also
108
Behn died in the spring of 1689 but she was not forgotten. A collection of
poems which included the notorious libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
together with Behn and others was published in 1694, entitled Chorus Poetarum:
Or Poems on Several Occasions by the Duke of Buckingham, the Late Lord Rochester . . .
Madam Behn . . . (London, 1694). In addition, Behn’s prose works were collected
and published in All the Histories and Novels by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn
(London, 1698). This collection went into multi-editions throughout the 1690s
and early 1700s.
109
Astell, Christian Religion, p. 206.
110
A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons (London, 1704), in Political
Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p. 109.
111
Moderation Truly Stated, pp. 63, xxxi.
112
An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War (London, 1704)
in Political Writings, p. 139.
113
An Elegy upon the Death of Mrs. A. Behn, the Incomparable Astraea (London,
1689). Astell and Behn are often bundled together as Tories or early feminists or
both; see, for example, Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeen-Century English
Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 3; Joan K. Kinnaird,
“Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” JBS 19/1
(Fall 1979), p. 59, 19n; Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist, p. 53.
sounded very much like contemporary male voices that scholars often
find a lot less attractive, including the “furious” Jacobite, Charles Leslie,
and High churchmen like Francis Atterbury and Henry Sacheverell.114
It is certainly understandable that modern scholars might find the intol-
erance of these men distasteful. But as William Kolbrener points out,
scholars “too readily endorse the characterization of Jacobite political
and theological positions as somehow fanatic, rabid, or simply irra-
tional, and thus place them beyond the pale of scholarly inquiry.”115
Mary Astell’s politics and theology had much in common with those
of Charles Leslie, though he is often styled as one of the most “rabid”
polemicists of the era.116 Over the course of his prolific career as a
controversialist, Leslie, a nonjuring Irish priest, was unsparing in his
attacks on Catholicism, Deism, Judaism, latitudinarianism, Socinianism,
all Protestant Dissenters, but above all, Quakers. For Leslie as well as
Astell (and even those on the other side of the political fence like Daniel
Defoe) personal theology determined one’s politics. Religious hetero-
doxy bred political disaffection and radicalism; Socinians and Deists
had their political counterparts in Whigs and republicans. On the other
hand, the divinely ordered political state was sustained and supported
by the divinely ordered episcopal Church. “So closely is religion and
government link’d together,” Leslie wrote in his weekly, The Rehearsal,
“that the one supports the other, and corruption in a Christian
government cannot come in but by the corruption of religion and over-
throwing those principles which it teaches.”117 Leslie blamed the Civil
Wars, the Rye House Plot in 1683, and Monmouth’s Rebellion on Dis-
senters. So too the Glorious Revolution which further undermined the
patriarchal order of society by sanctioning the violent removal of a
divinely appointed monarch.118 Ruth Perry writes that “Mary Astell was
sympathetic to these attitudes.”119 Indeed, contemporaries could not tell
114
Astell’s first political tract, Moderation Truly Stated, was mistaken for the work
of Charles Leslie. In the addendum to A Fair Way, Astell wrote that her tract was
“Not writ by Mr. L-y or any other furious Jacobite.”
115
William Kolbrener, “The Charge of Socinianism: Charles Leslie’s High Church
Defense of ‘True Religion,’ ” The Journal of the Historical Society 3/1 (Winter
2003): 5.
116
Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 186.
117
[Charles Leslie], The Rehearsal 147 (12 October 1706).
118
None of these charges were uncommon among Tories and High Churchmen.
Charles Leslie makes them in several of his publications; see, for example, The
Wolf Stript of his Shepherd’s Clothing (London, 1704), pp. 7–9.
119
Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 187.
the polemics of Leslie and Astell apart. Astell not only sympathized with
such views, she espoused them.
Thus it was that the new latitudinarian culture of the Church – that
which Elizabeth Burnet found comforting – was deeply troubling to
other equally devout Anglicans. Elizabeth’s second husband, Gilbert
Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was often targeted by High Church pam-
phleteers as representing the worse kind of churchmen: a supporter of
the Revolution, Maryite church and Williamite state; a propagandist of
Tillotsonian religiosity; an accommodator of Dissent. Mocking Daniel
Defoe, who had asserted that modern Dissenters no longer called for
the abolition of the bishops, Astell asked whether they were reconciled
to the office of the Bishop or merely to the person of “my Lord of
Salisbury.”120 Astell accused Low Church bishops like Burnet of “Supine
indifferency . . . under the specious name of moderation.” “To be moder-
ate in religion is the same thing as to be lukewarm, which God so much
abhors, that he has threatened to spew such out of his mouth.” The
Church “knows too well that False Friends who wear her Livery that they
may more effectually betray her, and are abundantly more dangerous
than open and declared enemies . . .”121 Or, as Leslie asserted in very sim-
ilar terms, “that Laodicean latitude and indifferency in religion, which
God abhors, and declares that He will spew such a lukewarm Church
out of His mouth recommends itself to us at this day, under the specious
name of moderation!” They are called “Low Churchmen” because they
have “low regard for the preservation of that society of which they are
members” and seek to undermine it from within.122
In her concern for the Church, Astell’s political positions had much
more in common with nonjurors like Leslie than accommodating
Anglicans like Elizabeth Burnet. Burnet and Astell’s politics followed
suit. Burnet blessed the great and glorious revolution, adored Mary II,
defended William III against his detractors, and most importantly, went
so far as to assert the Whig doctrine of the right to resistance.123 Astell
detested William, maintained that kings were instituted by God, and
asserted the Tory doctrine of passive obedience, seeing its origins in
Christ’s resignation in the face of crucifixion. “Love is all the retaliation
our religion allows us.” “The pacifism of the Gospel,” as Mark Goldie
points out in his discussion of Astell, “was incompatible with Locke’s
120
Astell, A Fair Way, p. 108.
121
Astell, Moderation Truly Stated, pp. 5, 37.
122
Leslie, Wolf Stript, 1; [Leslie], The Rehearsal 82 (19 January 1705/6).
123
BL, Add. 61,458, f. 30v.
advocacy of political violence.”124 The piety and politics of Elizabeth

Burnet were shared by many of her contemporaries, among them men
like Gilbert Burnet and John Locke, who are far better known to scholars
today. In many respects, she represents the mind of a woman who
sought to engage rather than resist the new realities of her world fol-
lowing the Revolution. Astell’s political writings, on the other hand,
speak to a woman who, not unlike many of her contemporaries as well,
such as Charles Leslie and Francis Atterbury, found those same realities
deeply troubling and destabilizing. So too, both women, daughters of
the Church of England, found their religiosity a comfort as well as an
impetus to action.
124
Astell, Christian Religion, p. 167; Mark Goldie, “Mary Astell and John Locke” in
Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, eds. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 80.
Conclusion
Stuart Women and Political Culture
Let us consider the following event. Sometime in 1694, Archbishop

Tillotson presented Bridget Bendish to Queen Mary II. Bendish was
granted a pension, presumably for circulating pro-Williamite propa-
ganda prior to the Prince’s invasion in 1688, thereby supporting the
Revolution.1 Bendish seems to have had contacts in the Netherlands
among the large Whig and Dissenting refugee communities there.
Perhaps she was another “nursing mother.” But Bendish was also special
for another reason; one that might have prevented her meeting with
the Stuart queen, but did not. Bridget Bendish was the granddaughter of
Oliver Cromwell and from all accounts, his spitting image. Still further,
her father was Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s close associate as well as a lead-
ing parliamentary officer and regicide. Her exchange of pleasantries with
the Queen, whose grandfather, Charles I, Bendish’s father and grandfa-
ther had brought to the scaffold, provides us with an intriguing, even
poignant, image. It certainly has much to say about Mary II, much that
John Tillotson already knew. First, that the presence of this living image
of Cromwell, she whose ancestors were rebels and regicides, would not
unsettle the Queen; and secondly, that the presence of this Dissenting
woman, who worshipped with Independents and practiced the kind of
enthusiastic religiosity that moderates like Mary and Tillotson found
troubling, would not faze her.
Perhaps these two women, so seemingly different, had more in
common than we might initially assume. Their meeting reminds us of
Mary II’s broad sympathies for a wide variety of Protestant worship,
1
BL, Add. 19,118, ff. 60–2; Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral House of
Cromwell, 2 vols. (London, 1784), 2: 335–7. The pension, however, was never
paid due to both Tillotson’s and the Queen’s death shortly after this interview.
197
and how the Queen had sought to expand the Church of England,
to open its doors and windows, to welcome the estranged, waver-
ing, and disenchanted. Nor was she weighed down by the Stuart past;
even the French Protestant, Pierre Jurieu’s, critiques of her great-great-
grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots, did not disturb her. Cromwell’s
granddaughter was welcomed in her presence and granted a pension.
In an age of factionalism and division, Mary sought to unify. For her
part, Bendish had supported the Williamite Revolution; and not unlike
Elizabeth Burnet, she probably saw William and Mary as the saviors
of their sinking nation. “I thank God for the Revolution,” wrote an
emphatic Burnet to her friend, the Duchess of Marlborough, in 1704.2
What was at stake in 1688 in the eyes of women like Bendish the Dis-
senter, and Burnet the Anglican, was nothing less than the survival of
the Protestant world. So it was that in 1694, despite their vastly different
backgrounds, the granddaughter of Cromwell and the granddaughter of
Charles I shared the same devotion to the Protestant Cause and will-
ingness to defend it. It was for that cause that the London Baptist,
Elizabeth Gaunt, had died in 1685 and the Presbyterian gentlewoman,
Mary Speke, had lost her son that same year. All of these women, nursing
mothers in one way or another, Dissenters and Anglicans, had played
parts, sometimes covert and sometimes overt, in the public world of
power and authority, law and government. They deserve inclusion in
our political narratives.
Even as we have ignored or depreciated these women, their contem-
poraries were certainly well aware of their political and religious pursuits
and their ideological opponents sought to deflate their importance by
mocking them. The royalist, Aphra Behn, was hardly alone among those
who satirized godly women. Behn’s desire for royal patronage and profit
helps to explain her derogatory portrayal of Dissent, but her royalism
was certainly heartfelt as well. Her little squib, “The Conventicle,” was
not written solely for reasons of profitability; it was a mean-spirited
attack on all that she detested: “The Viper’s nest, where all our Mischiefs
breed,” where villains vent their treason and women their “lust.”3 And
so too Mary Astell, in the early eighteenth century, wrote in defense
of her political and religious beliefs and condemned women who bus-
ied themselves with politicking and women in the thrall of schismatic
preachers and opportunistic politicians. Behn, the probable Catholic
2
BL, Add 61,458, f. 30v.
3
“On a Conventicle” in Behn, Works, 1: 355–6.
sympathizer, and Astell, the High Church Anglican, may have been
ideologically miles apart from the nursing mothers and sanctified sis-
ters and even moderates like Mary II and Elizabeth Burnet, but all these
women shared the same desire to enter the political domain through
actions or words and make a difference.
An obvious point? Perhaps. And yet it is one that has failed to inform
our political narratives of the era of the Restoration and Revolution
which have so often written as though women, if they existed at all,
were merely retiring queen consorts and royal whores. In part, this
a product of the simple fact that when, in the Anglophone world,
women began entering the historical profession in the twentieth cen-
tury, they so often turned their attention to the socio-economic and
cultural history of women, leaving political history in the hands of their
male colleagues who, for the most part, perpetuated a traditional male-
dominated narrative of the past. In part, the blame lies with women’s
history itself, which in its early stages was obsessed with finding “first
feminists,” seeking our sisters in earlier times yearning to be free, obses-
sively looking for female speech acts which might be construed as
feminist, and above all, overestimating women’s captivity and under-
estimating their agency. Additionally, women’s and gender history have
placed far too much stress on images of women in literature authored by
men. Prescriptive literature, in particular, has very little to tell us about
the real world of women. In fact, it only accurately reflects male wishes
and patterns of conformity that most women were obviously flout-
ing.4 When the playwright, Delarivier Manley, has Sir Charles Lovemore
declare that “Politics is not the business of a woman” in The Adventures
of Rivella (1714) it is exactly because she knows that women have made
politics their business, despite the nonsensical bluster of some men (and
women) about the proper behavior of women.5 But perhaps the great-
est historiographical fallacy of all has been the imposition of the theory
of separate spheres on the early modern era.6 This has led scholars to
presume something about gender relations that did not exist in the first
4
This point is also made by Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus in the Introduction
to Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities,
eds. Hannah Baker and Elaine Chalus (New York: Palgrave, 1997), p. 2; Anne
Hughes also discusses the problematic nature of prescriptive writings in Gender
and the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 10–17.
5
Delarivier Manley, The Adventures of Rivella, ed. Katherine Zelinsky
(Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), p. 112.
6
In British historiography, the “separate spheres” paradigm was first applied to
the socio-economic situation of elite Victorian women, but its use has seeped
place and to act surprised when they find evidence of women acting
beyond some artificial boundary. In its most absurd extension, it has
meant that every woman found to be active in any public domain is
labeled a feminist or proto-feminist; a woman who writes is a feminist;
a woman who speaks her mind in a court of law is a feminist; a woman
who electioneers is a feminist. Forgotten in all this is the simple fact that
quite often these same women had absolutely nothing to say about the
plight of women and may well have been completely uninterested or
even confused by the question of the treatment of women.
Sarah Heller Mendelson argues that early modern women “culti-
vated the mental or spiritual realm, leaving to men their monopoly
of worldly power. Alternatively, they made use of speech to compen-
sate for their lack of physical prowess. From these perspectives, diverse
types of Stuart womanhood can be seen as embodiments of a common
urge to transcend feminine impotence and win control over a menac-
ing environment.”7 But if the world of the fearless printer, Elizabeth
Calvert, or the pugnacious Bridget Bendish, or the wives and widows of
the regicides in 1660s, or the nursing mothers in the 1680s was “men-
acing,” it was not because they were women, but because they were
Dissenters or seditious or both, as well as active in the world beyond
the hearth. As far as we know, Mary Speke never wrote a word about
her ardent spirituality; but she was arrested for it. Neither was she help-
less or impotent. In fact, as far as loyalists were concerned, she was the
most “dangerous woman” in the West and had raised a nest of vipers.
My point simply is that women were not powerless nor, as a whole, did
they see their environment as inherently hostile simply because they
were women. And I suspect that those who did feel depreciated by a
“menacing environment” were in the minority.
Finally, we need to place a greater emphasis on the necessary coop-
eration that took place between women and men in the early modern
era. Beyond what we traditionally assume to be “women’s work,” schol-
ars need to recognize that most men depended on women and expected
the women in their lives to be their partners in all things. We have
long known that women worked beside their husbands in guilds,
shops, and farms, but their cooperation extended to the political world
down into the earlier eras and lower social classes. See Amanda Vickery, “Golden
Age to Separate Sphere? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of England
Women’s History,” HJ 36/2 (1993): 383–414.
7
Sarah Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 189.
as well.8 Men who participated in “out-of-doors” or cloak-and-dagger

conspiratorial politics counted on the support of their womenfolk. Men
who participated in parliamentary or ministerial politics counted on
women. John Churchill was hardly alone in having an eager helpmate
in his Duchess. So also did Elizabeth Burnet seek to guide her hus-
band, the guileless Bishop Burnet, through the political nettles of early
eighteenth-century London. So also did Mary, as princess and queen,
support William of Orange with a steely resolve, betray her Catholic
father and alienate her younger (and, to Mary’s mind bull-headed) sister,
all in support of her husband and the Protestant Cause. Nor did she
forgive anyone who crossed or defamed the King. When in 1693 the
Jacobite printer, William Anderton, was seized along with a tract accus-
ing William III of war atrocities, including ordering wounded English
soldiers to be buried alive, Mary showed no mercy. Anderton was found
guilty of treason and sentenced to death and though many pleaded to
the Queen for his life, Mary saw to his execution.9
There is a plethora of sources for elite women like Mary II and Sarah
Churchill. Much less in the way of written evidence exists for the
women who, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Republic, sought
to aid and abet the causes for which so many of their men-folk suf-
fered. These women – the wives, widows, and daughters of the regicides,
parliamentary politicians and officers, Dissenting preachers and sedi-
tious printers – often played a stealthy game of cat and mouse with the
informants, spies, and royal authorities who tried to track their activi-
ties. They left few traces of themselves. They published nothing of their
own or very little and most of their correspondence was destroyed (most
likely by themselves). Yet from the fragments that remain we see women
operating in back door, often seditious, politics. For the most part, these
women do not seem to have been motivated by purely political ide-
ologies or simply socio-economic conditions, but rather by a far more
powerful force: faith (and love). Writes Anne Hughes, “Political choices
are not made simply through rational adherence to particular manifesto
8
This problem has also been pointed out by Susan Wiseman who, writing about
the case of Elizabeth Poole and the Levellers in the 1640s, observes that by “iso-
lating women from the men around them” scholars have perpetually underesti-
mated their political impact. Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics
in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 168.
9
This event is discussed in my article, “The Shocking Death of Mary II: Political
and Gender Crisis in Late Stuart England,” The British Scholar 1/1 (September
2008), p. 29.
or lists of policies; they involve less easily defined personal and affective
questions of passion, affection and identity.”10 For women in the late
Stuart world, religion proved to be a prime motivator for political action,
affiliation, and allegiance. In this sense, the inclusion of women in the
political narratives of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies manifests what revisionist historians have been asserting for some
time: that human behavior in the early modern world is incompre-
hensible unless we understand the power of confessional commitment
and identity. Additionally, scholars of early modern women and politics
would do well to have a firmer grasp of theology that they might better
understand what the women they study understood.11
Instead of envisioning Stuart women as helpless or hindered by cul-
tural stereotypes or set apart in some domestic box, let us see them as
they really were and let us then recall Elizabeth Calvert, who though
she had lost both her son and husband to the disease and deprivation
inherent in prison sitting, boldly carried on the trade in seditious books
and pamphlets into the 1670s, come what may. Let us remember the
cross-dressing Tabitha Smith, who supposedly rode into battle during
Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685. And let us not forget Lord Wariston’s
daughter, the stalwart Lady Helen Graden, standing beside her brother-
in-law, Robert Baillie, on the scaffold as he was dismembered piece by
piece for his role in the Rye House Plot. Little wonder Aphra Behn and
Mary Astell found such women so menacing.
10
Hughes is thinking more about gender identity whereas this study is more
concerned with confessional identity, but the point here is similar insofar as
it concerns “personal and affective” choices. Gender and the English Revolution,
p. 149.
11
Writes John Pocock, “The great discovery which we constantly make and
remake as historians is that English political debate is recurrently subordinate
to English political theology; and few of us know one-tenth of the theology
available to competently trained divines and laymen among our predecessors.”
And I will add that this is equally true of many women. Quoted in “A Discourse
on Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress,” in Political Discourse in
Early Modern Britain, eds. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 381.
Appendix A: Poems on the Death
of Mary II
[The place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated]
Albion’s Tears on the Death of Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary: A Pindaric Poem
(1695).
Britain’s Sorrowful Lamentation, for the Loss of their Gracious Queen Mary (London
and Edinburgh, 1695).
The Court and the Kingdom in Tears: Or, the Sorrowful Subjects Lamentation for the
Death of Her Majesty Queen Mary (1694). Broadside.
On the Death of the Queen, An Ode (1695).
On the Death of the Queen. A Poem (1694/5).
An Elegy upon the Most Pious and Incomparable Princess, Mary, Queen of England
(1694). Broadside.
A Funeral Eclogue Sacred to the Memory of Her Most Serene Majesty, our Late Gracious
Queen Mary (1694).
Great Britain’s Lamentation (1695). Broadside.
A Kind Congratulation between Queen Elizabeth and the Late Queen Mary II (1695).
Broadside.
In luctuosissimum, Mariae, D.G. magnae Britanniae, Franciae, & Hiberniae, &c.
Reginae, mulierum praestantissimae, obitum (Edinburgh, 1695). Broadside.
To the Memory of the Queen: A Pindarique Ode (1695).
The Mourning Court Or, The Solemn Representation of the Royal Funeral of that Most
Illustrious Princess Mary, Queen of England, Scotland, France and Ireland (1695).
Broadside.
In Obitum Mariae (1694).
An Ode Occasion’d by the Death of Her Sacred Majesty. By a Young Lady. (1694/5).
An Ode in Memory of Her Late Majesty, Queen Mary. By a Person of Quality. (1700).
Pietas Universitatis Oxoniensis in obitum augustissimae & desideratissimae Reginae
Mariae (1695).
A Pindarick Poem published in Poems on the Death of the Late Majesty Queen Mary
of Blessed Memory (1710).
A Pindarick Ode published in Poems on the Death of the Late Majesty Queen Mary of
Blessed Memory (1710).
A Pindarick Ode, on the Death of the Queen. By a Young Gentleman. (1694/5).
To the Pious and Sacred Memory of our Late Dread Sovereign, Mary, Queen of England.
Written by a Person of Quality. (1694). Broadside.
A Poem Occasioned by the Death of Her Majesty. By a Person of Honour. (1695).
A Poem upon the Death of the Queen (1695). Broadside.
A Poem on the Death of the Queen by a Gentlewoman of Quality (1694/5).
A Poem, Occasion’d by the Death of Her Late Majesty of Ever Happy and Sacred
Memory. By a Private Hand. (1695).
A Poetical Essay Devoted to the Glorious Memory of our Late Queen Occasion’d by a
Number of Poems and Sermons on her Death (1695).
203
204 Appendix A: Poems on the Death of Mary II
The Royal Funeral: Or, the Mourning State and Solemnity of the Funeral of Mary, Queen
of England (1695). Broadside ballad.
Urania. A Funeral Elegy on the Death of our Gracious Queen of Ever Blessed Memory
(1695).
Urania’s Temple; or, A Satyr upon the Silent Poets (1695).
A. B., An Ode Occasion’d by the Death of the Queen, with a Letter from the Author to
Mr. Dryden. By a Gentleman, A True Lover of his Country. (1695).
Arwaker, Edward. A Pindaric Ode upon our Late Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory,
Queen Mary (1695).
Blow, John and Henry Purcell, Three Elegies upon the Much Lamented Loss of our Late
Most Gracious Queen Mary [Blow and Purcell wrote the music and Mr. Herbert
wrote the words] (1695).
Bridgwater, Benjamin. A Poem upon the Death of Her Late Majesty, Queen Mary, of
Blessed Memory Occasioned by the Epistle to the Author from J. Tutchin (1695).
Cibber, Colley. A Poem on the Death of our Late Sovereign Lady, Queen Mary (1695).
Cobb, Samuel. A Pindarique Ode: Humbly Offer’d to the Ever-Blessed Memory of our
Late Gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Mary (1694).
Congreve, William. The Mourning Muse of Alexis. A Pastoral Lamenting the Death
of our Late Gracious Queen Mary, of Ever Blessed Memory. Dedicated to the
Honourable Charles Montaque. (1695).
Coward, William. Uraniae Metamorphosis in Sydus: Or, the Transfiguration of our
Late Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary (1694/5).
Cutts, John. On the Death of the Queen by a Person of Honour (1695).
C. D., An Elegy on the Death of the Queen by C.D., Rector of K. of S. (1695).
Defoe, Daniel. Threnodium Britannicum, To the Sacred Memory of that Most Excellent
Memory Princess, Mary the Second (1695).
Dennis, John. The Court of Death, A Pindarique Poem, Dedicated to the Memory of
Her Most Sacred Majesty, Queen Mary (1695).
Dove, Henry. Albiana. A Poem Humbly Offered to the Memory of our Late Sovereign
Lady, Mary, Queen of England. Addressed to Her Royal Highness. (1695).
D’Urfey, Thomas. Gloriana. A Funeral Pindarique Poem: Sacred to the Blessed Memory
of that Ever-admir’d and most Excellent Princess, Our Late Gracious Sovereign Lady
Queen Mary. Dedication to the Duke of Gloucester. (1695).
Glanvill, Francis. A Poem Dedicated to the Memory, and Lamenting the Death of her
Late Sacred Majesty of the Small-Pox (1695).
Gleane, Peter. An Elegy on the Death of the Queen (1695).
Gleane, Peter. A Poem, Occasioned by the Magnificent Proceeding to the Funeral of Her
Late Majesty Queen Mary II of Blessed Memory (1694/5).
Gould, Robert. A Poem Most Humbly Offered to the Memory of Her Late Sacred
Majesty, Queen Mary (1694/5).
Hog, William. In Memoriam Illustrissimae Mariae (1695).
Hume, Patrick. A Poem Dedicated to the Immortal Memory of Her Late Majesty, The
Most Incomparable Q. Mary (1695).
King, Richard. A Second Book of Songs Together with a Pastoral Elegy on the Blessed
Memory of Her Late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary (1695).
Laughton, Richard. Lacrymae Cantabrigienses in obitum serenissimae Reginae Mariae,
Cantabrigiae (1695).
Manning, Francis. A Pastoral Essay, Lamenting the Death of the Most Gracious Queen
Mary of Blessed Memory. Dedicated to Lord Somers. (1695). [second edition
Appendix A: Poems on the Death of Mary II 205
published as Sylvana: A Pastoral Essay, Lamenting the Death of the Most Gracious
Queen Mary of Blessed Memory (1695)]
Motteux, Peter Anthony. Maria. A Poem Occasioned by the Death of Her Majesty,
Addrest to Three Persons of Honour (1695).
T. N., A Poem on the Queen (1695).
S. O., Epicedium, or a Funeral Elegy on the Death of our Late Gracious Sovereign (1695).
Park, Henry. Lachrymae Sacerdotis. A Pindarick Poem Occasion’d by the Death of
that Most Excellent Princess, our Late Gracious Sovereign Lady, Mary the Second of
Glorious Memory (1695).
Partridge, W. A Consolatory Poem: Addressed to His Most Sacred Majesty (1695).
Phillips, John. In Memory of our Late Most Gracious Lady, Mary Queen of Great-
Britain, France, and Ireland. A Poem (1695).
J. L. R. of S. An Elegy: On the Death of Her Late Sacred Majesty, Mary the Second,
Queen of England (York, 1695).
Rabus, Pieter. Uitvaart, Van Haar Grootmagtigte, Majesteit Maria, Koninginne van
Groot Britanje, Vrankrijk en Yerland (Rotterdam, 1695).
Rabus, Pieter. Britanje en Neerland in den rouw, over’t affterven van Haar
Grootmagtigste, Majesteit Maria, Koningine van Groot Britanje, Vrankrijk en Yerland
(Rotterdam, 1695).
Rawson, Joseph. On the Lamented Death of Her Most Excellent Majesty, Queen Mary
(1695).
Segar, Simon. Threno-Maria. A Rapsodicall Essay on the Death of our Late Gracious
Sovereign Queen Mary of Ever-blessed Memory (1695).
Stepney, George. A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of Her Late Gracious
Majesty, Queen Mary (1695).
Steele, Richard. The Procession. A Poem on Her Majesties Funeral. By a Gentleman
of the Army. (1695).
Strode, S. A Poem on the Death of Her Most Sacred Majesty, Queen Mary (1695).
Talbot, J. Instructions to a Painter upon the Death and Funeral of Her Late Majesty
Q. Mary of Blessed Memory (1695).
Tate, Nahum. Mausolaeum: A Funeral Poem on our Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary of
Blessed Memory (1695).
Tutchin, John. An Epistle to Mr. Benjamin Bridgwater, Occasion’d by the Death of the
Late Queen Mary (1694).
Wesley, Samuel. Elegies on the Queen and Archbishop (1695).
Walsh, William. A Funeral Elegy upon the Death of the Queen Addrest to the Marquess
of Normanby (1695).
Appendix B: Sermons on the
Death of Mary II
[The place of publication is London unless other indicated; if I was able to

determine the author’s confessional affiliation, I have noted it]
A Funeral Oration on the Most High, Most Excellent, and Most Potent Princess, Marie
Stuart, Queen of England, etc (1695). Translated from the French. Originally
printed at The Hague. Recited by the learned author of The Collection of Canons
and New Pieces.
Allestree, Charles. The Desire of all Men: A Sermon Preach’d at Daventry in
Northamptonshire, March 5, 1694/5 (1695). Dedicated to the Bailiff and
Burgesses of Daventry.
Bates, William. A Sermon Preached upon the Much Lamented Death of our Late
Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary (1695). Presbyterian.
Barnett, Andrew. A Just Lamentation for the Irrecoverable Loss of the Nation by the
Doleful Death of the Late Queen Mary (1695). By “a minister of the gospel.”
Beverley, Thomas. A Solemn Perswasion to Most Earnest Prayer for the Revival of the
Work of God Bringing Forth the Kingdom of Christ . . . Upon Occasion of the Late
Stroke of Divine Displeasure in the Death of the Queen (1695). Independent.
Bowber, Thomas. A Sermon Preached in the Parish-Church of St. Swithin, London,
March 10th, 1694/5, Upon the Much Lamented Death of Our Most Gracious Queen
(1696). Dedicated to Lord Somers. Church of England.
Boyse, Joseph. Two Sermons Preach’t on a Day of Fasting & Humiliation Kept by the
Protestant Dissenters in Dublin, on the Sad Death Occasion of the Death of our Late
Gracious Queen (1695). Sermon I. Presbyterian.
Brady, Nicholas. A Sermon Preach’d at Whitehall, March 3, 1694/5 Upon the Occasion
of Her Late Majesties Death (1695). Church of England.
Claude, Isaac. Sermon upon the Death of the Queen of England, Preach’d in the Wallon
Church at The Hague (1695).Translated from the French. French Protestant.
Cumming, John. A Sermon Preached on Occasion of the Death of our Late Gracious &
Memorable Sovereign, Queen Mary (1695). Dissenter.
Dawes, Thomas. A Sermon Preach’d at the Parish-Church of St. Chad’s in Shrewsbury,
March 5, 1695, Being the Funeral Day of our Most Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary
(1695). Dedicated to the Mayor of Shrewsbury. Church of England.
Evans, John. Some Thoughts on the Character of Solomon’s Vertuous Woman, Preach’d
in a Sermon at the Parish Church of Croydon, on the Occasion of Q. Mary’s Death
(1695). Dedicated to Lady Coningsby, wife of Thomas, Lord Coningsby. Church
of England.
Finglas, John. A Sermon Preached at the Chappel Royal in the Tower, upon Sunday the
Sixth Day of January, 1694/5 . . . whereon the greatest part of that audience appeared
in deep mourning, upon the death of Her Sacred Majesty (1695). Church of Ireland.
Dedicated to Lord Lucas. [this sermon was also published anonymously as
206
Appendix B: Sermons on the Death of Mary II 207
A Sermon Preach’d at the Chappel Royal in the Tower upon the Death of Her Sacred
Majesty, our Late Gracious Queen Mary (1695)]
Fleetwood, William. A Sermon Preach’d on the Death of Q. Mary, at St. Austins in
1694. Published in Four Sermons (1712). Bishop of Ely.
Fowler, Edward. A Discourse of the Great Disingenuity and Unreasonableness of
Repining at Afflicting Providences . . . Published upon the Occasion of the Death of
our Gracious Sovereign Queen Mary (1695). Bishop of Gloucester.
Francius, Peter. An Oration of Peter Francius upon the Funeral of the Most August
Princess, Mary II, Queen of England (1695). Preached in Amsterdam on the day
of her funeral. Translated from the Latin. French Protestant.
Goodwin, Thomas. Of the Happiness of Princes led by Divine Counsel: A Sermon
Occasioned by the Death of that Most Excellent Princess, our late Sovereign, Queen
Mary (1695). Independent.
Graevius, J. G. A Funeral Oration of J. G. Grevius, Upon the Death of Mary II (1695).
Translated from the Latin. Preached in Utrecht. Dutch Calvinist. Found in a
collection of sermons, title page is the first sermon listed here, the anonymous,
A Funeral Oration on the Most High, Most Excellent, and Most Potent Princess, Mary
Stuart, Queen of England.
Howe, John. A Discourse Relating to the Much-lamented Death and Solemn Funeral, of
Our Incomparable and Most Gracious Queen Mary (1695). Presbyterian. Dedicated
to Lady Rachel Russell.
Johnson, Christopher. On the Death of our Late Most Gracious Sovereign Lady, the
Queen of Blessed Memory. Found in Three Sermons Preached (1696). Church of
England.
Jurieu, Pierre. A Pastoral Letter Written on the Occasion of the Death of the Late Queen
of England (1695). French Protestant.
Kennett, White. The Righteous Taken Away from the Evil to Come. Applied to the
Death of the Excellent Queen in a Sermon (1695). Church of England.
Mannyngham, Thomas. A Sermon Preached at the Parish-Church of St. Andrew’s
Holborn (1695). Church of England.
Ortwinius, John. A Funeral Oration, Pronounc’d upon the Death of the Most Serene
and Potent Princess, Mary Stuart (1695). Translated from Latin. Originally
published in Delph. Dutch Calvinist.
Payne, William. A Sermon upon the Death of the Queen, Preached in the Parish-Church
of St. Mary White-Chappel (1695). Church of England.
Pead, Deuel. A Practical Discourse upon the Death of our Late Gracious Queen (1695).
Church of England.
Perse, William. A Sermon Preach’d upon the Occasion of the Queen’s Death on the 4th
Sunday in Lent (1695). Church of England. Dedicated to Lady Palmes.
Perizonius, Jacob. A Funeral Encomium upon the Queen. (in A Collection of the
Funeral Oratoins Pronounced by Publick Authority in Holland upon the Death of
the Most Serene and Potent Princess, Mary II (1695). Translated from Latin. Dutch
Calvinist.
Powell, Joseph. The Death of Good Josiah Lamented. A Sermon Occasioned by the
Death of our Late Most Gracious Soveraign Queen Mary . . . Preach’d at Balsham in
Cambridgshire (1695). Church of England.
Sherlock, William. A Sermon Preach’d at the Temple-Church, December 30, 1694,
Upon the Sad Occasion of the Death of our Gracious Queen (1694). Church of
England.
208 Appendix B: Sermons on the Death of Mary II
Spademan, John. Of Remembrance and Initiation of Deceas’d Holy Rulers. A Sermon

Preach’d at Rotterdam, March the 15th 1695, New Style, the Day of Her Majesty’s
Funeral (1695). Minister of the English Church in Rotterdam. Presbyterian.
Spanheimius, Francis. A Funeral Oration to the Sacred Memory of the Most Serene and
Potent Mary II (1695). Originally given in Holland on the day of her funeral.
Dutch Calvinist.
Stanhope, George. Of Preparation for Death and Judgment a Sermon Preached at
Whitehall January 27, 1694/5, Before . . . The Lord Chamberlain, the Ladies of the
Bedchamber, and Others of the Household to our Late Gracious Queen Mary of Blessed
Memory (1695). Church of England.
Tenison, Thomas. A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Her Late Majesty Queen Mary
of Ever Blessed Memory in the Abbey-Church in Westminster (1695). Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Tenison, Thomas. Sermon Prononce Aux Funerailles De La Reine Marie II (1695).
Archbishop Tenison’s sermon translated into French.
Weld, Nathaniel. Two Sermons Preach’t on a Day of Fasting & Humiliation Kept by
the Protestant Dissenters in Dublin, on the Sad Death of our Late Gracious Queen
(1695). Sermon II. Presbyterian.
Wake, William. Of our Obligation to Put our Trust in God, Rather than in Men, and of
the Advantages of it. In a Sermon Preached before the Honourable Society of Grayes-
Inn, upon the Occasion of the Death of our Late Royal Sovereign Queen Mary (1695).
Church of England.
Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s
Recommended Reading List
Burnet’s list is found at the end of A Method of Devotion (1713), pp. 391–5.
She often abbreviated titles, mistitled some books, and omitted authors.
My re-creation of her list is based on some guesswork.
[The place of publication is London unless otherwise noted. Burnet also recom-
mends the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.]
Anonymous, A New Manual of Devotions. In Three Parts. (2nd ed., 1713).

Anonymous, The Whole Duty of Man (1657).
Atterbury, Francis. On the Excellency and Advantage of Private Prayer (1704).
Barrow, Isaac. Of the Duty and Reward of Bounty to the Poor: In a Sermon (1671).
Barrow, Isaac. A Sermon upon the Passion of the Blessed Savoir (1677).
Beveridge, William. A Sermon Concerning the Excellency and Usefulness of Common
Prayer (1681).
Brown, Peter. Letter in Answer to a Book entitled Christianity not Mysterious (London
and Dublin, 1697).
Burkitt, William. Expository Notes, with Practical Observations on the New Testament
(1700).
Burnet, Gilbert. The Life of God in the Soul (1702).
Burnet, Gilbert. Discourse on Pastoral Care (1692).
Burnet, Gilbert. Four Discourses Delivered to the Clergy of Dioceses of Sarum
Concerning the Truth of the Christian Religion (1694).
Burnet, Gilbert. The Abridgement of the History of Reformation of the Church of
England (1682).
Burton, Hezekiah. Several Discourses (1684).
Clarke, Samuel. Three Practical Essays, viz. On Baptism, Confirmation, and Repen-
tance (1699).
Clarke, Samuel. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705).
Clarke, Samuel. A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural
Religion (1706).
Cockman, Thomas. Tully’s Offices in England (1699).
Collier, Jeremy. Essays on Several Moral Subjects (1697).
Collier,Jeremy. Short View of the Immortality and Profaneness of the English Stage
(1698).
Collier, Jeremy. A Defense of A Short View (1699).
Collier, Jeremy. A Second Defense of A Short View (1700).
Comber, Thomas. Short Discourses upon the Whole of Common Prayer, Designed to
Inform the Judgment and Excite the Devotion (1684).
Echard, Laurence. A General Ecclesiastical History (1702).
Fleetwood, William. A Discourse Concerning the Education of Children (1702).
Goodman, John. The Penitent Pardoned: Or, A Discourse on the Nature of Sin
(1689).
209
210 Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s Recommended Reading List
Grotius, Hugo. The Truth of the Christian Religion: In Six Books. Trans. Simon
Patrick (1683).
Hale, Matthew. Contemplations Moral and Divine, to which Is Added the Life of the
Author by Gilbert Burnet (1696).
Hamilton, William. The Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell, Esq. (1703).
Harrison, Joseph. Exposition on the Church-Catechism after a New Method (1708).
Hoadly, Benjamin. The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England
(1703).
Kennett, Basil. Brief Exposition of the Creed, according to Bishop Pearson: In a New
Method by Way of Paraphrase and Annotation (1705).
Leslie, Charles. A Short and Easy Method with a Deist (1697).
Lewis, John. Church Catechism Explain’d by Way of Questions and Answers (1700).
Lucas, Richard. Practical Christianity, or an Account of the Holiness which the Gospel
Enjoins (1677).
Lucas, Richard. An Enquiry after Happiness in Several Parts (1685).
Lucas, Richard. Influence of Conversation, with Regulation Thereof (1706).
Moore, John. Of Religious Melancholy. A Sermon Preached before the Queen [Mary II,
1691] (1708).
More, Henry. Enchiridion ethicum (1667).
Nelson, Richard. The Great Duty of Frequenting Christian Sacrifice and the Nation of
Preparation Required (1706).
Nelson, Richard. A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England
with Prayers Suitable to Each Solemnity (1704).
Norris, John. Of Religious Discourse in Common Conversation (1706).
Norris, John. A Practical Treatise Concerning Humility (1707).
Ostervald, Jean Frederic. The Grounds and Principles of the Christian Religion (1704).
Ostervald, Jean Frederic. A Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Present Corruptions
of Christians (1702).
Patrick, Simon. The Christian Sacrifice (1671).
Patrick, Simon. Advice to a Friend (1677).
Patrick, Simon. Commentaries (on the Old Testament in numerous volumes
published between 1695 and 1704).
Patrick, Simon. Search of the Scriptures: A Treatise Showing that all Christians Ought
to Read the Holy Books (1685).
Patrick, Simon. Parable of the Pilgrim, Written to a Friend (1687).
Patrick, Simon. Heart’s Ease, Or A Remedy against all Trouble (1699).
Patrick, Simon. Treatise of Repentance and Fasting, Especially in the Lent Fast (1700).
Pearson, John. An Exposition of the Creed (1659).
Richardson, John. The Canon of the New Testament Vindicated: In an Answer to the
Objections of J. [ohn] T. [oland] (1701).
Sherlock, William. A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689).
Sherlock, William. Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment (1692).
Sharp, John. Government of Thoughts: A Sermon Preached before the King and Queen
at Whitehall (1694).
Sharp, John. A Perswasive to Prayer. A Sermon Preach’d before the King, at St. James’s.
March 13, 1697/8. (1700).
Somers, John. A Discourse Concerning Generosity (1693).
Stanhope, George. A Paraphrase and Comment on the Epistles and Gospels (1705).
Stillingfleet, Edward. Twelve Sermons Preached on Several Occasions (1696).
Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s Recommended Reading List 211
Synge, Edward. A Gentleman’s Religion with Grounds and Reasons for it (1698).
Tenison, Thomas. A Sermon against Self Love (1689).
Tillotson, John. Fifteen Sermons on Several Subjects (1704).
Tillotson, John. Of Evil-speaking: A Sermon Preach’d before the King and Queen, at
White-Hall. By . . . John, Late Lord Arch-bishop of Canterbury, 1694 (1709).
Tillotson, John. Two Sermons of the Nature and Necessity of Restitution (1707).
Wake, William. The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained: In a Brief
Commentary upon the Church Catechism (1699).
Whichcote, Benjamin. Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot. In Two Parts (1698).
Whitby, Daniel. A Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament. In Two
Volumes (1703).
Wilkins, John. A Discourse Concerning the Beauty of Providence (1649).
Wilkins, John. Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675).
Williams, John. A Brief Exposition of the Church-Catechism (1689).
Willis, Richard. An Address to those of the Roman Communion in England (1700).
Woodward, Josiah. Fair Warnings to the Careless World, together with Tillotson’s
Advice to Sick Persons (1707).
Worthington, John. A Scripture Catechism (1672).
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Additional
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19,118 On Bridget Bendish
28,875 Ellis Papers
29,497 Political Poems
29,910 Swinfen Papers
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Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series

Vol. 1, Charles II, 1660–1661
Vol. 7, Charles II, 1667
Vol. 8, Charles II, November 1667 to September 1668
Vol. 9, Charles II, October 1668 to December 1669
Vol. 10, Charles II, 1670, with Addenda, 1660 to 1670
Vol. 11, Charles II, January to November 1671
Vol. 12, Charles II, December 1671 to May 17, 1672
Vol. 13, Charles II, May 18 to September 30, 1672
Vol. 14, Charles II, October 1672 to February, 1673
Vol. 15, Charles II, March 1 to October 31, 1673
Vol. 19, Charles II, March 1, 1677 to February 28, 1678
Vol. 20, Charles II, March 1, 1678 to December 31, 1678 with Addenda, 1674–79
Vol. 21, Charles II, January 1, 1679 to August 31, 1680
Vol. 22, Charles II, September 1, 1680 to December 31, 1681
Vol. 23, Charles II, January 1 to December 31, 1682
Vol. 24, Charles II, January 1 to June 30, 1683
Vol. 25, Charles II, July 1 to September 30, 1683
Vol. 26, Charles II, October 1, 1683 to April 30, 1684
Vol. 27, Charles II, May 1, 1684 to February 5, 1685
Vol. 28, Charles II, Addenda
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Vol. 1, James II, February–December 1685

Vol. 2, James II, January 1686–May 1687
Vol. 3, James II, June 1687–February 1689
Vol. 1, William & Mary, 13 February 1689–April 1690
Vol. 2, William & Mary, May 1690–October 1691
Vol. 3, William & Mary, November 1691–End of 1692
Vol. 4, William & Mary, 1693
Vol. 5, William & Mary, 1694–1695
Vol. 6, William III, July 1–December 31, 1695, Addenda, 1689–1695
Vol. 5, Colonial: America and the West Indies, 1661–1669
Vol. 6, Colonial: America and the West Indies, 1669–1674
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Index
Allen, Benjamin 42 Bates, William 142, 147, 153, 176

America 13, 26, 35, 123, 146, 152, battle of Sedgemoor, see under James
153, 154, 157 Scott, Duke of Monmouth
Amsterdam 8, 45, 49, 52, 54, 86, 87, Baxter, Richard 16, 33, 38, 176
108, 137, 142, 154, 169 Bayle, Pierre 139
anabaptists 36, 137–38 Beattie, John (historian) 52–3,
Anderton, William 201 Beaumont, Francis 108
Anglicanism, see Church of England Behn, Aphra 10, 12–3, 92–123, 125,
Anne (Queen of England) 7, 9, 46, 161, 175, 190, 192, 198, 202
156, 169, 174, 182, 183, 184 abroad (and her spying mission)
as Princess 152, 183, 187, 188, 200 95–105
Annesley, Arthur 37 her plays:
Annesley, Elizabeth 37 The Amorous Prince 111
anti-Catholicism 8, 43, 44, 67, 76, The City Heiress 113, 116–17, 121,
114, 131, 132, 143, 172–73, 122, 122
143–44, 194 The Dutch Lover 112
Antwerp 13, 95, 100, 101–05, 114, The Feigned Curtizans 117–18
123 The Forced Marriage 111
Argyle’s Invasion, see under Campbell, The Younger Brother 98, 114
Archibald The Roundheads 113, 115, 116,
Arminian/Arminianism 107, 137–38 117, 118, 120–22
Ashcraft, Richard (historian) 48 The Rover 112–13
Astell, Mary 10, 14, 112, 161, 162, The Second Part of the Rover 116
165, 189–96, 198, 202 Sir Patient Fancy 113, 115–16
Astell, Ralph 190 her prose works:
Atkyns, Richard 80, 81 The Dumb Virgin 114
Atterbury, Francis 175, 190, 192, 196 The Fair Jilt 102, 114
Aubrey, John 96, 97 Love Letters Between a Nobleman and
His Sister 102, 114
Baillie, Robert 32, 202 Oroonoko 96, 97, 114
Baillie, Rachel (née Johnston) 32 Belgium 154, 168
Baldwin, Abigail 44 Bell, Maureen (historian) 39
Ballaster, Ros (literary scholar) 104 Bendish, Bridget 33–4, 197–98, 200
Bampfield, Joseph 37, 99–100, 101, Bendish, Thomas 33
103 Bennet, Henry, Lord Arlington 73,
baptists 18, 19, 21, 23, 32, 43, 49, 51, 99, 100
93, 94 Berkeley, Elizabeth, see under
Barbadoes 97 Elizabeth Burnet
Barber, Sarah (historian) 97 Berkeley, Robert 166–67
Barker, Hannah (historian) 5, Berry, James 33
Barnaby, Andrew (literary scholar) Berry, Mary 33
104 Beveridge, William 149–50
232
Index 233
Blake, Elizabeth (mother of Elizabeth Cambridge Platonists 174, 190

Burnet) 166 Capel, Arthur, Earl of Essex 80–1
Blake, Richard 166 Capp, Bernard (historian) 3
Blake, William 171 Caroline of Ansbach (Queen
bloody assizes, see under James Scott, Consort) 46
Duke of Monmouth Carr, Anne, Countess of Bedford 37
Book of Common Prayer, see under Catholics/Catholicism 11, 44, 95, 96,
Church of England 101–03, 106, 114, 122, 131, 133,
Bots, Hans (historian) 135 135, 137–38, 143, 144, 145, 167,
Bourne, Zachariah 81 169, 172, 169, 172, 198
Bowber, Thomas 154 Catholic baroque 13, 95, 101–03,
Boyle, Robert 38 105, 122
Brady, Nicholas 157 Cawley, Mary 34
Brewster, Anna 42–4 Cawley, William 34
Brewster, Thomas 40–2 Channel Islands 152
Brome, the Widow 36 Chalus, Elaine (historian) 5, 6
Browning, the Widow 49 Charlton, Francis 80, 81
Brookes, Nathan 40, 41, 42 Chapman, Hannah 42–4
Brussels 98, 99, 167, 169 Chapman, Livewell 40–2
Bunyan, John 22, 176 Charles I (King of England) 26, 28,
Burger, Suzanne 49 34, 98, 106, 107, 132, 191, 193,
Burgoyne, Anne 65 197, 198
Burnet, Gilbert 50, 129, 141, 164, Charles II (King of England) 18, 19,
174, 195, 196 21, 27, 32, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 51,
and Mary II 128, 129, 142–43, 148, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 85,
153, 160 92, 96, 99, 105, 130–33, 141, 151,
and Elizabeth (his third wife) 14, 156, 163
160, 161, 165–66, 167, 168, Church of England/Anglicanism 4,
170, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 45, 47, 73, 90,
186, 188, 201 94, 106–07, 127–29, 131–32,
Burnet, Elizabeth 8, 14, 160–89, 196, 135–37, 145–58, 162–65, 170–81,
196, 198, 199, 201 189–96, 197–98
A Method of Devotion 165, 170–77, Book of Common Prayer 20, 40,
181 106, 163
and John Locke 177–82 High Church 14, 147–51, 156,
and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of 161–65, 168, 173, 175, 182–83,
Marlborough 183–89 186, 189–95
Burton, James 50–1, 53, 54 Low Church 13, 14, 129, 149, 157,
Bynam, William 95–96 161, 163–64, 171, 174, 189, 195
Restoration Settlement 19–22, 59
Calamy, Edmund 37 Thirty-Nine Articles 163
Calvert, Elizabeth 7, 22, 25, 39–44, Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough
94, 200, 202 169, 170, 184, 187, 201
Calvert, Giles 40–2, 44 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of
Calvin, John 107 Marlborough 7, 14, 161, 166,
Cambden, William 141 169, 183–88, 201
Campbell, Archibald, ninth Earl of civil wars 4, 5, 17, 23, 25, 42, 66, 70,
Argyle 48, 54, 82 77, 92, 96–7, 99, 106, 114, 115,
Argyle’s Invasion 48, 54, 142 132, 191, 193, 194
234 Index
Claude, Isaac 140 Dodwell, Henry 169, 190

Clark, Jonathan (historian) 5 Dormer, Mary 167
Claydon, Tony (historian) 127–28 Dormer, Robert 167, 168, 185, 186
Clarendon Code 20 Dover, Joan, see Joan Darby
Clarke, Samuel 176 Dover, Simon 40–2
Cock, John 30 Drake, Dorothy 65
Collier, Jeremy 175 Dryden, John 47, 113, 130
Cockayne, George 37, 43 Dutch Reformed Church 135, 137,
Commonwealth 17, 31, 32, 99, 109, 152, 157
115, 116, 118
Compton, Henry 132, 144, 148, 151 Enlightenment 13, 14, 128, 138,
Conventicle Act 20 140, 147, 148, 158, 162, 171, 176
Cooke, John 26–7 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 92,
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, First Earl of 132, 143, 154
Shaftesbury 17, 51, 59, 171 Espec, Walter 62
Corney, Thomas 103, 104 Evelyn, John 102
Cornish, Henry 53 Everand, Edmond 87
Cowley, Abraham 29, 106 exclusion crisis 10, 60, 93, 113, 114,
Crawford, Patricia (historian) 3, 7 161, 162, 193
Creake, Thomas 40
Cromwell, Oliver 26, 27, 32, 33, 34,
Family of Love 137
35, 36, 42, 48, 96, 116, 120, 197,
Fell, John 166, 167
198
Fell Fox, Margaret 46
Cromwellians (officers and politicians
Ferguson, Robert 47, 51
during the Protectorate) 17, 18,
Ferne, Henry 110
20, 21, 30, 37, 96, 105
Fernley, John 50
Cross, Walter 48–9
Crutch, Katherine 1–3 Field, Clive (scholar) 23
Crutch, Richard 1–3 Fifth Monarchy men/Fifth
Curtis, Jane 44 Monarchists 18, 19, 20, 26, 27,
29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41,
Danvers, Anne 32, 37 42, 43, 51
Danvers, Henry 32, 51 Firth, Charles (historian) 27
Darby, Joan 42–4 Finglas, John 157
Darby, John 43 five mile act 20
Dare, Thomas 75, 83 Fleetwood, Charles 32, 33
Davenport, John 34, 35, 36 Fleetwood, Mary 32
Dawes, Thomas 157 Fletcher, John 108
Declaration of Breda 19, 73 Fowler, Edward 129, 149, 154, 164
Declaration of Indulgence (1673) France 95, 106, 130, 131, 138, 144,
45, 74 145, 154, 183
Declaration of Indulgence (1687) Francis, Peter 154
45, 87
Defoe, Daniel 156, 194, 195 Gaunt, Elizabeth 9, 44, 45, 48, 49,
Deists/Deism 180, 189, 190 50–5, 59, 81, 90, 93, 94, 119, 198
Desborough, Samuel 32 Gaunt, William 51–4
Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 68 George I (King of England) 175
De Witt, John 100 Geneva 108
Dewsbury, William 22 Germany 31, 152, 169
Index 235
Gillespie, Katharine (literary Hungerford, John

scholar) 4 Hunt, Margaret (historian) 40
Gleadle, Kathryn (historian) 6 Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York 131
Glorious Revolution, see under
Revolution of 1688/89 Independents/Congregationalists 19,
Godolphin, Sidney 184, 185, 186 21, 23, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49, 138,
Goffe, Frances 34–5 157, 197
Goffe, William 25, 34–6 Indemnity and Oblivion, Act of 25
Goldie, Mark (historian) 64, 195 Interregnum 4, 23, 38, 69
Goodwyn, Timothy 165–66 Ireland 11, 13, 18, 98, 130, 148
Graevius, Johannes Georg 140 church of Ireland 45, 148, 152, 157
Green Ribbon Club 59, 72 Ireton, Bridget (née Cromwell) 33
Grotius, Hugo 176 Ireton, Henry 33
Ireton, Henry, the younger 34
Hall, Jane 49 Israel, Jonathan (historian) 135
Hamilton, William 175
Hampden, John 67 Jacobites 11, 89, 126, 149, 162, 168,
Handel, Georg Fredrik 46 174, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 201
Harding, the Widow 36 James I (King of England) 106, 107
Harley, Abigail 66 James II (King of England) 1, 13, 45,
Harley, Edward 66 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 82–3, 86,
Harrison, Thomas 27–9, 56 87, 88, 123, 134, 139, 142, 143,
Hartopp, Edward 32 157, 161, 162, 167, 187
Hartopp, Elizabeth 32–3 as Duke of York 3, 32, 45, 47, 48,
Hartopp, John 32 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 89,
Hanoverian succession 158 99, 130, 131, 133
Henry VIII (King of England) 132 James Francis Edward (“the
Hickes, George 190 Pretender”) 144, 145
High Church, see under Church of Jeffreys, George 53, 81, 85–6
England Jekyll, Joseph 185
Hoadly, Benjamin 175 Jenkins, Leoline 58, 76
Hog, Thomas 142 Jenkins, William 37
Holland, see under United Provinces Jennings, Mary (née Speke) 66, 74,
Holles, Anne 38 75, 79, 84, 86, 87, 88
Holmes, Jane 16, 17, 36–7 Jennings, Thomas 74
Hooke, Jane 35–6 Jews 135, 138
Hooke, William 17, 19, 22, 25, 35–6 Johnston, Archibald, Lord Wariston
Hooper, George 136–37, 150, 151 29, 31–2, 202
Howard, William, Viscount Stafford Johnston, Helen Hay, Lady Wariston
101, 102, 105, 111 29, 30–2
Howe, John 48, 142, 153 Johnston, Margaret 31
Hoyle, John 111 Jones, Katherine 38
Hugo, Victor 123 Jonson, Ben 107
Huguenots (French Protestants) 130, Jurieu, Pierre 138–39, 141, 198
141, 152, 157
Hume, David 50 Ken, Thomas 136–37, 149
Hume, George of Graden 31–2 Keeble, Neil (historian) 19
Hume, Helen (née Johnston) of Kick, Abraham 157
Graden 31–2, 202 Killigrew, Thomas 112
236 Index
Kishlansky, Mark (historian) 127 Mary of Modena (Queen Consort)

Knights, Mark (historian) 8 133, 144
Kolbrener, William (literary Mary, Queen of Scots 139, 198
critic) 194 Masham, Darmaris 182
Mather, Cotton 133, 154, 157
Lake, Edward 135 Mather, Increase 35, 36
Lambert, John 32 Matthews, Edward 87
latitudinarian/latitudinarianism 127, Mayo, Rebecca 110
128, 129, 149, 154, 155, 157, 158, Mendelson, Sara (historian) 3,
161, 163, 164, 171, 174, 176, 177, 7, 200
191, 194, 195 Methodism 158
Lauderdale, John 31 Mews, Peter 58–61, 68, 70, 72, 76,
Leade, Jane 191 77, 80, 90
Leibniz, Gottfried 169 Middleton, Charles 31, 86
Lewis, John 175 Milton, John 38
levellers 4, 20, 48, 51 Mollineux, Mary 9
L’Estrange, Roger 40–3, 115 Mollineux, Henry 9
Monck, George 68, 98
Leslie, Charles 175, 176, 192,
Monmouth/Monmouth’s rebellion,
194–95, 196
see Scott, James, Duke of
Lindsay, Sophia 48
Monmouth
Lisle, Alice 51, 53, 119
Moore, John 174
Lisle, John 34
Morrice, Roger 23, 53, 82
Lloyd, Owen 40
muggletonians 19
Lloyd, William 127, 135
Locke, John 49
Nelthorp, Richard 49
and Elizabeth Burnet 14, 160, 166,
Nelthorp, Susannah 49
167, 177–83, 196
Netherlands, see under United
Lockyer, Nicholas 48
Provinces
Louis XIV (King of France) 130, 135
New England 25, 34, 30, 35–6,
Low Church, see under Church of
154, 157
England
New Model Army 68
Love, Nicholas 34 New World 11, 13, 46, 95,
Ludlow, Edmund 34 128, 145
Ludlow, Elizabeth 34 non-jurors (and nonjuring clergy)
148–50, 162, 165, 173, 175–76,
Macaulay, Thomas (historian) 50–1 190, 195
Marten, George 96–8, 101, 105, 113
Marten, Henry 96–8 Oates, Titus 59, 75
Manley, Delarivier 199 occasional conformity 8, 164, 165,
Manton, John 37, 38 182, 185–86, 191
Marshall, Alan (historian) 20 Ortwinius, Joannes 140
Mary II (Queen of England) 13–4, Ostervald, Jean Frederic 176
34, 45, 125–158, 160–62, 174–76, Owen, John 23, 31, 32, 33, 37
184, 186–89, 190, 195, 199, 200,
201 Parliament
at the court of Charles II 130–33 Cavalier Parliament 19, 70, 73
as Princess of Orange 87, 123, Convention Parliament 25
133–44 Exclusion Parliament (1679) 75
Index 237
Long Parliament 26, 27, 67, 68, Republicans/Republicanism

96, 98 (Commonwealthmen) 10, 13,
Oxford Parliament (1681) 72 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 40, 56, 61, 95,
Patrick, Simon 129, 148, 164, 174, 96–8, 105, 106, 110, 114, 194
176 Revolution of 1688/89 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
Payne, William 155, 157 10, 14, 40, 44, 45, 55–6, 60, 85,
Pelling, Edward 115 89, 123, 127, 128, 130, 162, 167,
Penn, William 50, 53, 87, 174, 191, 194, 195, 198
142–43 Richardson, John 176
Pepys, Samuel 131 Richardson, Sarah (historian) 6
Perizonius, Jacob 140 Richardson, R.C. (historian) 66
Perry, Ruth (historian) 190–91, Roberts, George (historian) 85
194 Rose, Craig (historian) 127
Peters, Hugh 26, 118, 119 Rotterdam 99, 108, 137, 138, 142
Pilkington, Thomas 80 royal society 70, 101
Plumb, J. H. (historian) 5 Rumbold, Richard 51
Pope, Alexander 46 Russell, Rachel 8, 147
Popish Plot 6, 51, 59, 60, 70, 75–6, Russell, William (d. 1683) 50, 59,
85, 89, 93, 113, 114, 115 80, 81
Portman, Joan 64, 70 Russell, William, first Duke of
Portman, William 70, 76, 77 Bedford 37
Presbyterians/Presbyterianism 19, Rye house plot 32, 34, 49, 51–4, 60,
20, 21, 23, 26, 37, 38, 40, 65–7, 71, 72, 75, 79–81, 82, 83, 142,
70, 71, 73, 74, 89, 90, 99, 110, 194, 202
117, 125, 136, 142, 147, 153, 157,
164, 176, 186, 189 Sacheverell, Henry 164, 194
Pride’s purge 26, 67 Sancroft, William 128, 143, 147, 149,
Prideaux, Edmund 71, 78, 83 162, 190
printers (publishers, booksellers) 7, Sarpi, Paulo 141
39–44 Savile, Henry 141
Say, Samuel 33
Protectorate 17, 31, 42, 96
Schnell, Lisa (literary scholar) 104
Puritans/Puritanism 12, 29, 30, 35,
Schwoerer, Lois (historian) 127, 175
37, 38, 39, 44, 58–90, 154, 190,
Scotland 11, 31–2
192
Church of Scotland 31, 45
anti-Puritan satire 28–9, 105–110,
Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth
113–23
1–3, 7, 43, 45, 54, 70, 71, 75, 81
Pye, Anne (née Hampden) 67
his Western progress 77–8
Pye, Robert 67–8
his rebellion 48, 50, 60, 75, 82–6
Pye, Robert, the younger 67–8
Battle of Sedgemoor 1, 52, 54, 85
Pyne, John 70–1
bloody assizes 50, 85–6
Scott, Jonathan (historian) 115
Quakers (Society of Friends) 3, 9, 18, Scott, Thomas 27, 98–9
19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 43, 46, 55, 75, Scott, William 96
138, 142, 143, 194 Shakespeare, William 111
Sharp, John 150
Raleigh, Walter 63 Shirley, James 108
regicides 16, 17, 25–9, 34–5, 39, 97 Sidney, Algernon 50
Republic 10, 23, 24, 27, 96, 201 Sidney, Henry 136
238 Index
Smith, Anne 48–9, 54 Talbot, William 167

Smith, Lacey Baldwin (historian) 126 Tatham, Nathan 116, 118, 120
Smith, Elinore 44 Taylor, John 109
Smith, Francis 43, 49 Tenison, Thomas 128, 149, 150
Smith, Hilda L. (historian) 3 Test Act (1673) 38, 74 131, 143
Smith, James 1, 2, 7 Tillotson, John 13, 34, 128, 129, 240,
Smith, Tabitha 1–3, 7, 10, 202 146–49, 150, 153, 154, 164, 171,
Smith, Thomas 61–2 174, 176, 177, 189, 192, 195, 197
Socinians/Socinianism 137, 194 Todd, Janet (literary scholar) 96, 99,
Somers, John 185, 188 102, 111, 122
Sophia, Electress of Hanover 169 Toland, John 169, 176, 178, 179, 181
Spademan, John 153 Toleration, Act of 8, 147, 161, 164,
Spanheim, Fredrick 139–40, 152, 154 165, 191
Speck, William (historian) 127 Tory reaction 50, 79, 83
Speke, Charles 66, 78, 84–6 Tories (Tory party) 10, 95, 113–14,
Speke, Elizabeth 64, 78 116, 122, 144, 157, 161–63, 166,
168, 174, 182–85, 187, 190–93
Speke, George 59, 62–3, 64, 66,
Trenchard, John 64, 72–3, 75–88
68–70, 71, 72, 73–4, 76–9, 80, 82,
Trenchard, Philipa 66, 72, 74, 75,
84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89
83, 86
Speke, George (grandson) 88
Trotter, Catharine 182–83
Speke, Hugh 58, 59, 63, 64, 66, 73,
Trumball, William 168
75–6, 77, 78–81, 84, 86, 87, 88–9
Tutchin, John 50, 82, 156
Speke, Joan (née Portman) 64, 70
Twyn, John 39, 41–2
Speke, John 66, 71, 72, 75–6, 77, 78,
79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88
Uniformity, Act of 19, 20, 22
Speke, Margaret (née Prideaux)
United Provinces (Netherlands) 13,
71, 79
45, 47, 48–50, 51, 54, 84, 95, 99,
Speke, Mary 12, 14, 58–90, 92, 94,
100, 101, 103, 106, 108, 125, 128,
110, 189, 200
129, 133, 137–38, 141, 146, 197
Speke, Thomas 64
Speke, William 78, 85, 86, 88 Vane, Frances 30–1, 32, 37, 38
Spekes/Speke family 12, 58–90, 119 Vane, Henry 30, 38, 42
Spinoza, Benedictus de 140 Venner, Thomas 18, 26, 29, 36
Spurr, John (historian) 21, 127 Vere, Elizabeth, countess dowager of
Stanley, Mary 38 Clare 38
Stanley, William 142 Villers, Elizabeth 134
Stillingfleet, Edward 142, 148, 149, Villiers, Frances 131
150, 160, 167, 187, 192 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham
debate with Locke 177–81 67
Strode, Edward 72, 83 Vokins, Joan 46
Strode, William 63, 71–2, 78, 80,
83, 84 Wake, William 175
Strode family 71 Wales 130, 148
Strong, James 65 Walcot, Thomas 51
Surinam 95–99, 105, 114 Walrond, Henry 76, 77, 85
Switzerland 34, 87, 106 Ward, Constance 48–9, 81
Sydeham, John 78 Ward, Patience 48
Synge, Edward 176 Warre, John 73
Index 239
Wesley, John 126 as Prince of Orange 34, 49, 50, 87,

Wesley, Samuel 156 88, 123, 133–44
Whalley, Edward 34–6 William, Duke of Gloucester 183
Whalley, Mary 34 Williams, John 174
Whigs (Whig party) 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, Williams, Roger 30
12, 13, 14, 21, 32, 43, 44–5, Williamson, Joseph 16
47–56, 59, 61, 66, 70–90, 93, 94, Willis, Richard 175
105–06, 110, 113–15, 119, Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester 102,
122–23, 142, 144, 150, 161–64, 111, 187
168, 169, 174, 182, 183–89, Winch, Mary 36
192–95, 197 Wiseman, Susan (historian) 3–4, 7
Whiting, John 75
Wren, Christopher 152
Wildman, John 48, 51
Wyndham, William 70, 76
William III (King of England) 14, 88,
123, 145–57, 182, 183, 187, 188,
189, 195, 201 Yonge, Walter 78, 83

(Early Modern History - Society and Culture) Melinda S. Zook (Auth.) - Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2013) PDF

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(Early Modern History - Society and Culture) Melinda S. Zook (Auth.) - Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2013) PDF

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Early Modern History: Society and Culture

General Editors: Rab Houston, Professor of Early Modern History, University

Also by Melinda S. Zook

RADICAL WHIGS AND CONSPIRATORIAL POLITICS IN LATE

List of Illustrations viii

Note on the Text xiii

Introduction: Nursing Mothers and Sanctified Sisters:

1 Nursing Mothers: Dissenting Women and Opposition

2 A Dangerous Woman: Mary Speke, her Family, and the

3 Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and the Culture of

4 An Incomparable Queen: Mary II, the Protestant

5 Devoted Daughters of the Church: Elizabeth Burnet and

Conclusion: Stuart Women and Political Culture 197

Appendix A: Poems on the Death of Mary II 203

Appendix B: Sermons on the Death of Mary II 206

Appendix C: Elizabeth Burnet’s Recommended Reading List 209

1.1 Elizabeth Gaunt – permission to publish from the

This work is the outgrowth of several impulses. The first was my

West Lafayette, Indiana, 2013

Add Additional Manuscripts, British Library,

Evelyn, Diary The Diary of John Evelyn. Ed. E.S. de Beer, 6

Saint Paul to the Romans, 16:3–9

After many weeks of listening to the “strong opinions” of Tabitha Smith,

Gillespie, have written important books on women writers and poli-

Laurence, “A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-

eighteenth-century women engaged: from writing, publishing, and

while their husbands languished in prison for seditious publishing.22

“religious behavior.” Similarly, women who supported the civil and

the Republic and restoration of the monarchy, be reconceived if viewed

oppositional/Whig politics and Anglican women devoted to the Church

of society, participated in radical and often risky political behavior.

toward the culture of Protestant nonconformity is the subject of

It was the hopes of a Reformation that we fought and suffered . . .

Between 1663 and 1665, informants to Secretary of State, Sir Joseph

Nonconformity and Persecution

The people of God are sad, not knowing what to do or where to go

For three days in January 1661, a small armed group of between

have wished to allow the “tender consciences” of his sectarian sub-

Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990);

Protestants faced was the government’s inability to distinguish between

Women and the Opposition in the 1660s

And there followed him a great company of people, and of women,

of Charles I and signers of his death warrant in 1649.37 Thirteen of

return upon a purple dromedary which signifies magistracy with an

While Cowley’s imitation of godly cant, millenarianism, and its power

activities of these women could also be worrisome in and of themselves.

for frequenting field conventicles and harboring rebels. The excessive

had connections with Fifth Monarchists, attended conventicles at

Bendish’s activities were monitored by the restored regime. She raised

a Puritan sensibility and millenarian fervor. They lived in a cave out-

William Hooke’s letters to Goffe, Davenport, and Mather were far

Holmes, mentioned at the outset of this chapter, not only sheltered

he also maintained a Presbyterian minister.75 Elizabeth Vere, Countess

simply being paragons of Puritanism, godly women could be audacious

Women, Sedition, and the Press

Dispersing seditious books is very near akin to raising of tumults;

Immediately following Giles Calvert’s death, Elizabeth relied heav-

Nursing Mothers and the Protestant Cause in the 1680s

By the early 1680s, oppositional politics, that strange amalgamation of

Anne Smith and Constance Ward, both described as “nursing moth-

Much of the information about the nursing mothers gathered by

helping Burton] should be carried into execution.”120 Unlike the case

speech which was published immediately in both English and Dutch