Gender and the English Revolution

191 Pages·2012·1.57 MB·English

by  Ann Hughes

GENDER
AND THE ENGLISH
REVOLUTION
ANN HUGHES
Gender and the English Revolution
In this fascinating and unique study, Ann Hughes examines how the experience of
civil war in seventeenth-century England affected the roles of women and men in
politics and society; and how conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity
werecalledintoquestionbythewarandthetrialandexecutionofananointedking.
Ann Hughes combines discussion of the activities of women in the religious and
political upheavals of the revolution, with a pioneering analysis of how male political
identities were fractured by civil war. Traditional parallels and analogies between
marriage, the family and the state were shaken, and rival understandings of sexuality,
manliness, effeminacy and womanliness were deployed in political debate.
In a historiography dominated by military or political approaches, Gender and the
English Revolution reveals the importance of gender in understanding the events in
England during the 1640s and 1650s. It will be an essential resource for anyone
interested in women’s history, feminism, gender or British history.
Ann Hughes is Professor of Early Modern History at Keele University; she has
published widely on mid-seventeenth-century English history and is particularly
interested in gender, print culture and religion. Her publications include Gangraena
and the Struggle for the English Revolution (2004) and The Causes of the English Civil
War (1998).

Gender and the English
Revolution
Ann Hughes
Firstpublished2012
byRoutledge
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SimultaneouslypublishedintheUSAandCanada
byRoutledge
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p.cm.
Includesindex.
1.Women--GreatBritain--Socialconditions.2.Sexrole--GreatBritain--
History--17thcentury.3.GreatBritain--History--CivilWar,1642-1649.
I.Title.
HQ1593.H842012
305.420941--dc22
2011008783
ISBN:978-0-415-21490-2(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-415-21491-9(pbk)
ISBN:978-0-203-80470-4(ebk)
TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
Gender, power and politics in early modern England 10
2 Women and war 30
Some contexts 30
Women at war 35
A ‘soliciting temper’: women and survival strategies 42
‘Brave feminine spirits’: women and politics 49
‘Christ hath purchased us at as dear a rate as he hath done
men’: parliamentarian petitioners 54
Royalist women 61
Religion 71
3 Manhood and civil war 90
Roundheads and Cavaliers 93
Thinking with women 96
Inadequate men 102
Radical masculinities 106
An uxorious king 118
England without a king 122
4 Bodies, families, sex: using gender, imagining politics 125
Women, politics, sex 126
Bodies and the body politic 130
vi Contents
Women, family and political change 134
The state and the household: the public and private 138
5 Conclusion 144
Notes 150
Index 175
Acknowledgements
This book was planned long ago, but many distractions delayed its completion. My
most heartfelt thanks are to successive editors at Routledge, and especially to Eve
Setch and Laura Mothersole, for patience and support over many years. I have
learned a great deal from friends and colleagues working on gender in the early
modern period. Anne Laurence was most generous with references and I would also
like to thank Sue Wiseman, Rachel Weil, Mary Fissell and Mandy Capern. I could
not have finished this book without successive periods of study leave granted by
KeeleUniversityandIhavebenefitedgreatlyfrom teachingaspecialsubjectonearly
modern women to Keele students since 1995. As always I would achieve nothing
without Richard, Alice and David.
Ann Hughes
Lichfield
February 2011

1
INTRODUCTION
On 30 January 1649, Charles I, the anointed king of England, having been
condemned‘inthebehalfofthepeopleofEngland’fortreasonand‘otherhighcrimes’,
was publicly executed. The actions of women, and troubling disruptions of conven-
tional assumptions about gender were alike prominent in this most traumatic drama
of the English revolution. This was a political culture where all relationships of
authority were seen as connected and mutually reinforcing. The ‘Homily’ on Dis-
obedience, read often in parish churches, taught the conventional position: ‘Take
away kings, princes, rulers … no man shall keep his wife, children or possessions in
quietness’. Armed resistance of a monarch, followed by regicide, was thus bound to
raise questions about family structures and the proper relationships between men and
women. Charles’s father, James VI of Scotland and I of England, had often stressed
that kings were like gods, or fathers, or husbands, ‘a King is truly Parens patriae, the
politique father of his people’, while Charles himself, in the Eikon Basilike, a revised
version of his own meditations and justifications, issued in a startlingly effective
propagandamoveinthewakeoftheregicide,waspresentedbothasa‘politicparent’
to his people, and as a good husband and father to his queen and children. The
republican poet John Milton retorted with an extensive exploration of the political
damage done by ‘effeminate and uxorious magistrates’.
Many women were political actors during the crisis. As the General Council of
Officers of the Army debated what to do with the king in late December and early
January1648–49,oneElizabethPoole,anAbingdonwomanclosetoradicalreligious
groups, wasadmittedto theirdebates.She urged themtodrawbackfrom regicidein
conventional, gendered language: ‘You never heard that a wife might put away her
husband as he is the head of her body’. A wife might defend herself against a violent
husbandbutshecouldnot takehislife;byanalogytheparliamentmightdefenditself
against an aggressive monarch, and perhaps put him on trial, but neither regicide nor
murder of a husband could be legitimate. Although Poole’s message was ultimately