FOCUSING ON MARGARET Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656), this chapter explores how that work serves as a reminder of warfare by acting, as Marina Leslie has noted, as “an emblem of disordered times.” The “emblem” of war most recognized in Cavendish’s body of work is the heroic fighter; in particular, the soldier, being a character that crosses generic boundaries, has been the subject of detailed critical assessment. Because some of the most impressive protagonists in the field are female characters who take inspiration from the most positive images that literature and society could offer, Cavendish is believed to celebrate the female warrior. Such an explanation of the way that battlefield ethics operate has never wholly coincided with the critical response to the text that I will be examining, which is also the story from Natures Pictures that Leslie identifies as emblematizing disorder: “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” despite its superficial resemblance to the femme forte tradition, has always prompted more dystopian, Hobbesian focus on the brutality of war and reflections on the abuse of women. The real-life historical circumstances that war inflicted, as I will show, left Cavendish probing the negative impact of war and the unrest of the times.

Military history, at least that which was too overtly fascinated with the tactics of battle, did not interest Cavendish, but she was greatly concerned with the ethics of war and also its effects. While “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” cannot be said to fully establish the heroism of war, her biography, The Life of the Thrice Noble ... William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1667), comes much closer to identifying the best in human nature as represented by the figure of the loyal soldier fighting for a noble cause. However, as Deborah Boyle has noted in her analysis of seventeenth-century ethics and politics, “humans vary widely in their natural moral qualities” and “Cavendish evidently does not think that the naturally good and the naturally bad are evenly distributed; the naturally good are in the minority.