Early in Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England, Samuel Fullerton quotes an anonymous critic of the republican satirist Henry Neville, who remarked that Neville’s sexual content “made my eyes to water, my hands to shake, my heart to tremble, my senses astonished with a just amazement, and finally, it almost stroake an universall Palsey through my hole microcosme” (1). Fullerton’s book may not have quite the same impact on modern readers, but it is nevertheless an engaging, readable study of the often strikingly explicit discourse that characterized English public culture during the religio-political crises of the 1640s and 1650s. The “sex-talk” Fullerton examines ranges from scurrilous rhetorical jabs to more sophisticated “porno-political” theories that used graphic imagery to report and analyze political change.

Readers familiar with the abundant printed material of these decades will likely have come across such sexual references. Indeed, scholars including Christopher Hill, Nigel Smith, Ann Hughes, Jason McElligott, and Frances Dolan have noted specific aspects of this ubiquity. Fullerton’s distinctive contribution is to provide an overarching analysis that traces the emergence of porno-political theorizing across the mid-seventeenth century. He draws on extensive archival and printed material and guides readers clearly through the theoretical literature. In so doing, he pushes the dating of “the West’s ‘first sexual revolution’” back from the Restoration to the mid-seventeenth-century revolution (13).

Using a largely narrative form, Fullerton traces these developments across seven chronological chapters. Although sexual politics had circulated in oral and scribal networks during the Tudor and early Stuart periods, he argues that the political breakdown of 1637–1642—especially the collapse of print licensing—facilitated sex-talk’s introduction into anonymous, unlicensed cheap print. In this context, King Charles I’s supporters and opponents used this rhetoric in ways consistent with anti-popish and anti-puritan traditions rooted in the Reformation. Scottish Covenanters and their English puritan allies portrayed bishops as lecherous hypocrites and court Catholics as agents of the “Whore of Babylon” (36). By 1642, partisans had developed highly sexualized stereotypes about their rivals. Parliamentarians accused rapacious cavaliers (royalists) of an “effeminate” libidinousness—an example of the gendered dimensions of this discourse that Fullerton astutely highlights (77). Royalists, by contrast, cast puritan roundheads (parliamentarians) as either sexless cuckolds or randy hypocrites. Initially, Charles’s sense of decorum and puritan unease with bawdry restricted these tropes to unofficial networks. But as both sides sought to mobilize the population during the first Civil War, their “para-propagandists” escalated such rhetoric (69). Fullerton notes that parliamentarians used sex-talk more frequently, though Charles’s sanitizing influence on royalist discourse faded during the war. During the post-war settlement crisis, commentators increasingly linked political upheaval, religious heterodoxy, and sexual corruption, as shifting alignments produced new intersections of constitutional and religious issues.

At points during these early chapters, the sheer ubiquity and flexibility of sex-talk can be somewhat overwhelming. As Fullerton acknowledges, though, greater coherence emerged in the late 1640s and 1650s, when proliferating sex-talk matured into a theoretically richer porno-politics. Correspondingly, some of Fullerton’s strongest material appears in his analysis of the regicide and of the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes. Defenders of the regicide deployed sexualized language about kingship and fatherhood to justify Charles’s execution and the establishment of a republican Commonwealth, even scrutinizing Charles’s personal sexual behavior. This broke a taboo of the 1640s and enabled republican writers to repurpose the concept of the king’s two bodies to exemplify rapacious tyranny and Stuart depravity. Royalists responded by framing Charles’s downfall as the English people’s seduction away from their royal spouse. Variations on these themes persisted throughout the 1650s.

Radical opponents such as the Levellers also targeted the Commonwealth with sex-talk to voice their dissatisfaction. The much-debated Ranters likewise proposed a radical reformulation of the Christian tradition, foregrounding explicit sexuality and transgressing early modern patriarchal assumptions underlying social discipline. Through both rhetoric and practice, they elevated the holiness of sexual liberty above the godly, repressive pieties of the orthodox ministry and the Commonwealth. By the mid-1650s, royalists, too, embraced debauchery and obscenity as a way to subvert, rather than openly oppose, the Protectorate’s moralistic policies. In turn, this reinforced the Protectorate’s focus on moral reformation, by which it sought not only individual reform but also a means to counter royalist agitation and to curb religious radicals such as the Quakers, often portrayed as the ideological heirs to the Ranters.

By the Restoration, sexualized tropes were commonplace: in 1658, critics implied that the new Protector, Richard Cromwell, was an effeminate homosexual and, in 1659, they lambasted the restored Rump Parliament as a den of “Pimp[s]” and “whoremongers” (268). Such material supports Fullerton’s broadly persuasive argument that the famous bawdiness of Restoration culture drew on the porno-politics of the mid-century revolution. In other respects, this brief chapter raises unanswered questions. If, as Fullerton accepts, Charles II projected his sexual prowess to “render every facet of his sexuality into a public message about his ability to provide for his subjects” (270), then how did contemporaries understand the royal couple’s inability to provide a legitimate heir? Throughout his reign, did Charles’s overt sexuality become an exculpatory exercise to shift blame to his wife, Catherine of Braganza? Space may well have been a consideration in Fullerton’s omission of Catherine from this chapter, but given the sophistication of his broader analysis of kingship, sexuality, and legitimacy, her absence here remains somewhat puzzling.

Even so, such questions may indicate Fullerton’s larger success, since one of his aims is to offer an overarching account that might inform future research. These caveats should not detract from the overall strength of his argument. He treats his material with seriousness, sensitivity, and élan, correcting the nineteenth-century moralism that once obscured the significance of such texts. And while—unlike Neville’s critic—my eyes remain undampened, my hands steady, my heart firm, and, indeed, my senses and whole microcosm largely unaffected, Fullerton has nonetheless produced a useful, informative, and thought-provoking analysis of the English Revolution’s sexual politics.