In May 1689 the English Crown declared war on an aggressive France, thus commencing an exhaustive and, at times, desperate conflict that was to last for over two decades. The impact of the Nine Years' War (1689–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) was enormous. The fight against France dramatically augmented the fiscal scope of the English state, which struggled to meet the costs of warfare and war-related debt; it increased the clout of the legislature, with Parliament meeting to vote supply; and its economic and social costs pinched every level of society. As a result of the wars, the army grew to an unprecedented size. At the start of James II's reign in 1685, the English army had consisted of 8,865 men, with its numbers strengthened by the Irish army of 7,500 men and the Scottish army of 2,199. By the time of the Nine Years' War, the British army stood at an estimated average annual strength of 76,404 men; by the War of the Spanish Succession it had risen to an estimated average annual strength of 92,708 men.Footnote 1 Possibly one in seven men who were capable of military employment served in the British army between 1689 and 1697.Footnote 2
How voters, taxpayers, and communities financed and manned this major war effort has been a key theme of research into this formative period of British history.Footnote 3 The conduct of the war was a significant electoral issue and a matter of controversial public debate. Successive governments and their supporters portrayed the conflict as a just war, fought in defense of Protestantism, liberty, and the national interest, and one that Britain had to win.Footnote 4 But although there was relative political consensus over the legitimacy of the war—at least until toward the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century—there existed strenuous disagreement about how and where the war should be fought. In its rawest form, this disagreement centered on the merits of a “bluewater” policy (as represented by the navy) over a continental land strategy (requiring a large army). The debate was driven by prevailing diplomatic circumstances as well as the sheer expense of maintaining men in the field. However, contemporary attitudes toward the existence of a large professional army were also important, both during wartime and the periods of peace between 1697 and 1702 and after 1713.
By 1689 “standing armies” had been a long-standing political concern. The experience of military rule in the 1650s had made them synonymous with tyranny and illegitimate might. Even the Cavalier Parliament met with some trepidation the establishment of the first peacetime professional army in 1660–61. Parliament's concern only increased over the next two decades. Parliamentary debates in the 1670s and during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis were punctuated by alarm over the army, especially when Charles II proved slow in disbanding the forces he had raised to fight Louis XIV. These fears intensified after 1685 when James II rapidly expanded the army and began staffing it with Catholics, an act that contributed to his deposition in the Revolution of 1688–89. Fears about the tyrannous nature of standing armies continued to haunt the post-Revolutionary period. These came to a head between 1697 and 1699, after the Peace of Ryswick, when William III fought to maintain the army's strength of numbers against considerable parliamentary opposition. He proved unsuccessful, with Parliament voting to reduce the army to 7,000 in England and a total of 24,600 in England, Scotland, Ireland, and the colonies.Footnote 5
The anti-army position was vigorously voiced. Inspired by Roman and modern historical examples, anti-army writers attacked the standing army at length as a harbinger of royal or republican tyranny and presented the navy and a trained militia as a constitutionally preferable and cheaper form of national security.Footnote 6 However, the army did have its defenders. Pro-army pamphlets refuted anti-army arguments by questioning the utility of citing classical examples of military tyranny given the differences between republican Rome and contemporary England. They liked to emphasize how the army had acted as “Guardians of the Constitution” particularly in its support of the Revolution of 1688–89 and the Hanoverian Succession.Footnote 7 They attacked the notion that professional soldiers were mere mercenaries by dwelling on the inadequacy of financial recompense in relation to the sacrifices that were required of them.Footnote 8 The political verse of the period backed up these claims with its ardent celebration of military valor and graphic, gory depictions of the bloody nature of modern warfare, depicting John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough and his senior officers as patriots, “who firm in Battel, for their Country stood.”Footnote 9 The efforts of pro-army pamphleteers and poets were supported by the newly emerging periodical press. The Tatler and The Spectator, for instance, ridiculed the military pretensions of militia soldiering, while providing encomiums upon the bravery and suffering of the British army, and attacked “Battle-Criticks” who carped at its victories.Footnote 10
Importantly, pamphlets, the periodical press, and verse were not the only significant media for articulating pro-army sentiments in this period. So too was drama—as John Loftis highlighted back in 1963, and Kevin J. Gardner has argued more recently.Footnote 11 The most famous of these “pro-army” plays was George Farquhar's extraordinarily popular The Recruiting Officer (1706). However, around forty other plays published, staged, and restaged between circa 1680 and 1730 featured army officers and soldiers or, if they did not include military personnel among the protagonists, instead made explicitly pro-army points. These plays will form the basis of what follows, which, developing the work of Loftis and Gardner, explores in particular how the stage's projection of a positive image of the army officer crucially had a gendered dimension.
Drama's importance to the study of late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century British political culture has become increasingly established over the last two decades. Historians and literary scholars have analyzed how dramatic texts were employed to publicize and popularize matters of political and social concern and probed how they functioned within a wider textual and visual print culture. The theater has been revealed as a complex site and space in itself; a sociable experience, where groups within the audience actively participated in the “creation of meaning.”Footnote 12 As part of this “theatrical turn” to political-cultural history, research focusing predominantly on the mid- to late eighteenth century has considered how the stage was used by various groupings within British society to formulate, refine, and further think about patriotism and gender, particularly in times of military and political crisis. Likewise it has elucidated how theater was represented as fulfilling a patriotic function by promoting patriotic forms of behavior to its audiences.Footnote 13 Less attention, however, has been devoted to considering how the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century stage dealt with these particular issues or to excavating how audiences responded to the politicized content addressed to them from the stage.Footnote 14
This relative lacuna in scholarly interest is unmerited. It is true that the theater of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not so far-reaching a medium of politicized communication as it would later become. The number of theatergoers in London in this period might only amount to between five and six hundred a day, with a lesser number of provincial counterparts attending performances by touring theatrical companies in provincial cities and towns, such as Bath, Norwich, and York. By contrast, the late eighteenth-century Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters could each hold around three thousand or more people, and permanent theater provision was expanding in the provinces.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the later Stuart and early Georgian theater was, even in this earlier period, a significant locus, especially for the metropolitan elites—as a number of recent studies of its preoccupations have made clear.Footnote 16
It is also true that it is far harder for scholars of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century stage to make full use of the often very subtle approaches that studies of the mid- to late eighteenth-century theater have developed to reconstruct how dramatic performances were understood and analyzed by contemporary audiences. Such studies have drawn on the rich variety of visual and textual material relating to celebrity actors and actresses to explore how images created of particular stars influenced the audience's understanding of both play and performance and provided meaning and association beyond the script.Footnote 17 While the era circa 1700 saw the gradual growth of dramatic criticism in pamphlet and periodical form, detailed accounts in the press of specific performances and productions remained sporadic in comparison to the mid- to late eighteenth century, and the genre as a whole had difficulty escaping the controversy over whether or not the stage was “immoral.” Similarly, the period furnishes little in terms of prints and paintings of leading actors in popular theatrical roles or scenes—unlike the latter half of the eighteenth century, which saw artists such as Zoffany, Reynolds, and Lawrence producing theatrical portraits.Footnote 18
Harder though it is for those working on the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century stage to draw on these approaches, the material that exists, such as the cast lists found in published editions of plays, allows us some insight into performances. The career of Robert Wilks, who frequently portrayed army officer protagonists, provides us with a hint of how a particular actor might mediate understandings of “pro-army” plays. Thomas Betterton, George Powell, and Colley Cibber had all created several of the early army officer roles—the legendary Betterton was the first Captain Beaugard in Thomas Otway's The Soldiers' Fortune (1680), Powell the first Colonel Hackwell in Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers (1692), and Cibber the first Lord Hardy in Steele's The Funeral (1701).Footnote 19 However, it was Wilks, a star of the early eighteenth-century stage, who did much in the 1700s and 1710s to develop the persona of the heroic army officer protagonist so central to the pro-army play. His most celebrated role was Sir Harry Wildair, the vivacious gentleman who has served in Flanders, a character in Farquhar's The Constant Couple (1699). Wilks went on to create a series of army officer heroes: Captain Freeman in William Burnaby's The Reform'd Wife (1700); Captain Clerimont in Steele's The Tender Husband (1705); Captain Plume in Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer; Faithful in Susanna Centlivre's The Man's Bewitch'd (1709); Colonel Bastion in Centlivre's The Perplex'd Lovers (1712); and Sir George Truman in Addison's The Drummer; or, The Haunted House (1716).Footnote 20 Frustratingly little is known about his performances in these plays, but the repeated casting of the dashing Wilks in such roles may well have consolidated the character type as an attractive ideal in the imaginations of his audiences.
Last, although it is noticeable that contemporaries were more preoccupied with registering how they experienced the theater in terms of social status and sociability (such as where and with whom they sat and whom they met) than with recording individual or collective responses to what they saw on stage, what survives suggests that audiences were very conscious of the politics of what was acted before them.Footnote 21 Indeed, as work on the theater in this period has emphasized, audiences used the theater building as an arena where members of the audience might publicly “perform” their own politicized responses to the play's script or material extraneous to it.Footnote 22 A German visitor, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, left a rare but telling description of this dynamic in action when relating how a performance of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in July 1710 was used to launch an attack on the duke of Marlborough's conduct of the army, which met with a raucous reception within the theater.
The actors represented a prodigiously satirical Interscenium, which was not to be found in the printed copy of the play. … In this interlude a troop of soldiers came on, singing at the top of their voices an English song which had been made by the army in Flanders about the Duke of Marlborough. In it Prince Eugène is praised for his openhandedness, while Marlborough, on the other hand, is blamed for his avarice. … The people, who are very bitter against the whole family, even the Duke himself, laughed prodigiously and bandied about monstrous insults, although Marlborough's daughter, the Dutchess of Montaigu, was herself at the play and was so greatly shamed that she was covered with blushes. … When the song was at an end, there was such a clapping and yelling that the actors were unable to proceed for nearly a quarter of an hour.Footnote 23
Leading ministerial politicians such as John, Lord Somers, Charles Montagu, and Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset, and political groups like the Kit-Cat Club do not appear to have been directly involved in commissioning pro-army drama in the way that they commissioned pro-army or pro-war journalism and verse (most famously Joseph Addison's poem in celebration of the victory at Blenheim, The Campaign).Footnote 24 Nonetheless such writing functioned as a way for playwrights to initiate claims to royal, ministerial, and military patronage, and after 1689 it often formed part of Whiggish writers's portfolios of politically focused literature. Moreover, since the government monitored and licensed what was performed in theaters, “pro-army” plays had command of the stage. No play appears to have been performed that attacked the army, and the total number of plays featuring the navy or putting forward a pro-navy case amounted to no more than a quarter of those featuring the army. Only one became a staple of the repertory.Footnote 25
This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the varieties of political thinking in post-Revolutionary England, and the literary genres by which they were expressed through a study of pro-army plays and will examine how this particular branch of political writing engaged with broader constitutional, confessional, and politically partisan debates in its vindication of the army officer. The article argues that pro-army plays set about rehabilitating the image of the army officer by representing him as committed to the safety of his country and the Revolution of 1688–89. They did more than just rework the arguments made by pro-army pamphleteers in dramatic form. The romantic plotlines that were both conventional and indispensable to these dramas allowed playwrights to provide the standing army controversy with a notably gendered aspect which is less apparent in the corresponding pamphlet literature. A further aim of this article, then, is to explore the ways in which pro-army plays provide cultural perspectives on patriotism and gender roles in a period that has been identified as seeing a significant reinterpretation of gendered ideologies and sexualities.Footnote 26
Pro-army playwrights championed the army officer as one who possessed many of the ideal masculine virtues. Situating their arguments within wider contemporary debates about masculinity, they additionally used a range of stock male characters long familiar with theater audiences to emphasize their point. Philip Carter has argued with regard to one stock male type, the fop, that “the power of the fop stereotype in eighteenth-century literature derived from its ability to combine a series of traditionally undesirable features … with new characteristics relevant to an eighteenth-century audience.”Footnote 27 As the first part of this article shows, playwrights similarly combined the traditional and the contemporary when tapping into associations attached to particular stock character types; positive in the case of the bold Cavalier, negative in the case of the grasping citizen, the braggart soldier, and the fop. Through such characterization, playwrights were able to present the army officer as the quintessence of political virtue and manliness, a gentleman who made substantial physical, material, and emotional sacrifices for his country. They thus brought out the standing army controversy from its more academically classical and historical confines and defended the army's cause to audiences in a more personalized and accessible register.
Pro-army dramatists not only celebrated the masculine virtues of the army officer by comparing him with what they represented as other, lesser men. As the second part of the article demonstrates, they also explored his relations with women of his own social rank, characterizing him positively by circa 1700 as an honorable lover or devoted husband. And because of this focus on gender relations and sexual behavior, the female protagonists of pro-army plays were subject to sustained attention from dramatists as well. The article contends that dramatists worked to create an ideal of elite womanhood that could be worthily matched with the gentlemanly soldier hero and explored how women could promote their country's welfare.
I
The dashing Cavalier was a regular character type on the Restoration stage, and he took various forms. The heroic plays of the 1660s were peopled by honorable warriors, loyal to their king despite misfortune. Comedies by Robert Howard and Abraham Cowley also focused on royalist officers, but those closer to home; dispossessed Cavaliers still struggling with their usurping puritan adversaries during the Interregnum.Footnote 28 To these manifestations can be added Captain Beaugard, hero of Lieutenant Thomas Otway's very popular The Soldiers' Fortune, first performed in the spring of 1680 and often restaged in the following decades. The first major work to cast the English army officer as its central protagonist, The Soldiers' Fortune portrayed him as a patriotic loyalist unappreciated by his king and fellow countrymen.Footnote 29
In 1677–78 Charles II had raised an army to fight against the French and called on all his subjects in foreign military service to return home. But a peace was shortly concluded, and so this new army was disbanded, leaving its members (among whom was Otway) unpaid and unemployed. These events, together with the Popish Plot, form the backdrop to The Soldiers' Fortune.Footnote 30 Captain Beaugard has obediently resigned his post in foreign military service to join the English army. Consequently, disbandment leaves Beaugard jobless and “loyally starv[ing].” Of royalist stock, Beaugard meets this blow with cynicism, remarking, “loyalty and starving are all one. The old Cavaliers got such a trick of it in the king's exile, that their posterity could never thrive since.” This sentiment is reiterated a couple of scenes later when Beaugard and his soldier friend, Courtine, encounter a former Cromwellian who is now flourishing while “honest men are forgotten.”Footnote 31 Courtine roundly condemns the anti–standing army position, caricaturing its advocates as low-born schismatics: “When the business is over, then every parish bawd that goes but to a conventicle twice a week, and pays but scot and lot to the parish, shall roar out, ‘Faugh, ye lousy redcoat rakehells! Hout, ye caterpillars, ye locusts of the nation! You are the dogs that would enslave us all, plunder our shops, and ravish our daughters.”Footnote 32 Such sentiments find full expression in the character of Sir Davy Dunce, the army-hating, homosexual Whig villain, whom Beaugard's mistress, Clarinda, has been forced to marry.Footnote 33 Dunce is termed a “monster” in contrast to Beaugard, who is described as of “the true English breed—well-knit, able, and fit for service.”Footnote 34
The Soldiers’ Fortune placed great emphasis on the army officer as a loyal servant of the Crown and underscored his political ancestry as the heir of the civil war Cavalier (an argument that was given weight by the fact that the Restoration army was prominently staffed by former royalists and their sons).Footnote 35 Such a stance is in keeping with Otway's Tory politics and his attempts to gain the patronage of James, duke of York (later James II and well known, even at this point, for his military interests). The enthusiasm for the Cavalier character type in Restoration England was unsurprising given the Restoration court's interest in—and supervision of—the stage. But the Cavalier had a more general appeal that went beyond the political contingencies of Charles II's and James II's reigns. He was presented as brave, tough, intelligent, ingenious, sexually attractive, and with a residual loyalty to the Crown. He thus embodied a gamut of the conventional masculine qualities and political virtues of the Restoration era.
After the Revolution of 1688–89, pro-army dramatists continued to use the Cavalier as a recognizable identity for their army officer protagonists. This is readily understandable given that the Cavalier worked as a form of literary shorthand for an appealing masculine ideal with whom audiences could relate. He also acted as a useful template for constructing the concept of the soldier who was committed to promoting the public good, useful not only because of the Cavalier's army background but because he was an inherently traditional figure, who had been—either literally or figuratively—an opponent of the military tyranny of the 1650s. Indeed, by adopting this approach, dramatists were working within a strand of Revolutionary political thought that justified 1688–89 in conservative terms as a new version of the very popular Restoration of 1660 whose achievements had been undermined by Charles II and James II.Footnote 36
Politically, of course, there were significant differences between the Cavalier and the post-1689 army officer as represented on the stage. The Cavalier's patriotic impulses were indicated by his resolute support of absolute Stuart monarchy and his dislike of Protestant Dissent. Playwrights thus had to modify this template to make it work in a Whiggish context after 1689. Like the Cavalier, the post-1689 army officer was shown as having a strong allegiance to the Crown but, as might be expected, he was characterized as a servant of the parliamentary Protestant monarchy and Church of England.Footnote 37 Such a depiction aimed to defuse fears that a “standing army” was hell-bent on either republican or royal tyranny by presenting army officers as men of political principle but, at the same time, political (and religious) moderates of neither one extreme nor the other. In this sense the army officer corresponded to the definition offered by Samuel Blackwell in 1705 of “a Loyal Subject” and “Good Patriot” as “a true lover of that which every one ought to account his Israel; the Church and Kingdom to which he belongs; his Native Country.”Footnote 38 After 1689, both army officers and the soldiery openly identify themselves as committed to parliamentary monarchy and the Revolution of 1688–89 in a number of plays.Footnote 39 However, two plays written almost a quarter of a century apart by authors with close ties to the government particularly illustrate this preoccupation.
Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers; or, The Stock-Jobbers was first performed posthumously in the autumn of 1692. At the time of its composition, Shadwell was at the height of his career, having been appointed poet laureate to William III and Mary II. Indeed, the play's enthusiastic endorsement of William III and his military campaigns suggests it should be read alongside Shadwell's laureate verse, praising William for his conquest of Ireland; the play itself was dedicated to Mary II by Shadwell's widow. In The Volunteers, the leading protagonist, Colonel Hackwell, is the figurative heir of the Cavalier despite being the son of a Cromwellian Anabaptist. So evident is his loyalty that Major-General Blunt, a former royalist officer, welcomes Hackwell's courtship of his daughter, Eugenia, although Hackwell stands to be disinherited by his father owing to the machinations of his wicked stepmother. As Blunt remarks, if the young officer “had no Fortune, hee'd hew himself out one with his Sword, under so brave, and magnanimous a King.”Footnote 40 Blunt's emphasis on royal valor and generosity presents William III as endowed with the traditional virtues of good kingship, virtues that an adherent of Charles I could admire. Consequently, Hackwell's service in the Williamite cause can be situated within an established royalist discourse of service to the Crown. Like the royalist dramas of the 1660s, The Volunteers even ends with a type of restoration scenario, with the hero being restored to his lawful inheritance and the usurper—Hackwell's stepmother—banished. Shadwell is also careful to underline that Hackwell's religious beliefs are orthodox: the colonel ran away from home at the precocious age of nine so that he could receive the infant baptism that his Anabaptist father had denied him.Footnote 41
Depicting the army officer as loyal to the post-1689 Crown and Church was a crucial aspect of Colley Cibber's The Non-Juror as well, which premiered in December 1717. Like Shadwell, Cibber had a particularly close connection with the Revolutionary monarchy. He had been part of the regiment that William Cavendish, fourth earl of Devonshire, had raised for William of Orange in 1688 and, after the Hanoverian succession, Cibber had promoted close connections between the Drury Lane theater (of which he was a manager) and the new royal family. Indeed, he composed The Non-Juror to boost support for George I in the aftermath of the Jacobite “Swedish Plot” and at the time of the Whig Schism. Dedicating the play to the king, Cibber argued that The Non-Juror's popularity with theater audiences publicly proved that the number of George I's enemies was fewer than had been supposed, “there being no Assembly where People are so free, and apt to speak their Minds, as in a Crowded Theatre.”Footnote 42 The play was a political and theatrical sensation when it was first staged, with an opening run of twenty nights, and it contributed to Cibber's appointment to the poet laureateship in 1730.Footnote 43
The play, based on Molière's Tartuffe, features Colonel Woodvil, a keen supporter of George I and the Protestant cause. Woodvil and his sister Maria have been disinherited by their father, Sir John Woodvil, owing to the machinations of Sir John's devious non-juring chaplain, Dr. Wolf. However, at a pivotal moment when Wolf appears to have tricked and blackmailed Sir John into handing over his estate, the Colonel arrives with damning information about Wolf's Jacobite treason and his past—he is a Catholic priest in disguise—and arrests him. The Colonel's profession is vital to Cibber's political message since it helps the audience to identify the Colonel as a defender of the established order against whom Wolf's political and religious disaffection can be measured. The tyrant here is not the soldier but the popish priest who plots to betray his country. Cibber crafts the Colonel's character in such a way as to make him a recognizably traditional figure.Footnote 44 Like the Cavalier heroes of Restoration drama and Shadwell's Colonel Hackwell, he is the lawful heir driven from his inheritance by the usurper who has ousted his father. The Colonel is also depicted, like Colonel Hackwell, as having a professed allegiance to the Church of England, and Cibber introduces a short discussion between the Colonel and his father right at the start of the play, which makes clear that the Colonel is a member of—and goes to—“the establish'd Church.”Footnote 45
Playwrights presented the army officer as a servant of Crown and country by adapting the character type of the Cavalier to fit their purpose. However, pro-army plays emphasized the army officer's manly patriotism in other ways too. In particular, they stressed the sacrifices that he made for his country in contrast to his anti-army opponents at home. Again they drew upon long-standing theatrical character types to add weight to their argument. In particular, they caricatured the anti–standing army viewpoint as one held by the plebeian, hypocritical citizen, or “cit” in contemporary parlance, a familiar object of satire to theater audiences.Footnote 46 And while a gendered argument is not made explicit here, implicit is the comparison between the army officer who has displayed the requisite masculine virtues of bravery and hardiness and the anti-army cit who has made money by staying at home in safety and comfort.
William Burnaby used the character type of the anti-army cit as a way to attack the anti-army position in his play The Reform'd Wife.Footnote 47 Somewhat of a shadowy figure, Burnaby seems to have moved in Whig circles as a friend of Richard Steele's—both were at Merton College, Oxford—and he held and lost a post in the Admiralty prior to his early death in 1706.Footnote 48 Burnaby probably wrote The Reform'd Wife circa 1699 at a time of military disbandment when many of the officer corps were still waiting for their arrears of pay. Indeed, on 27 February 1700, only a few days prior to the play's opening night, a group of soldiers had marched on Parliament demanding their wages.Footnote 49 These years also saw a wave of anger across the political spectrum directed toward those who were believed to have profited from the war at the expense of the nation. The Tory Charles Davenant, for instance, condemned the profiteer who laughed from his coach and six at “gallant Fellows, Colonels and Admirals, trudging a-foot in the Dirt. … Their Honour forsooth led 'em to fight for England abroad, but I play'd a much wiser Game, by joining with those who … were plundering their Country at home.”Footnote 50
The Reform'd Wife brought together both stances to provide a particularly focused attack on the army's opponents.Footnote 51 This was enhanced by Burnaby's dedication of the play to the youthful Lord Lorne (heir to the earldom of Argyll), whose own regiment was disbanded after Ryswick. The play concerns Captain Freeman's affair with the wife of Sir Solomon Empty. Empty's lack of sympathy with the postwar soldier's plight inspires Freeman's angry outburst against the anti-army stance he considers unjust and ungrateful: “This old Rascal thinks a Soldier fit for any thing that's mean, and values himself upon his Riches that we have secur'd to him with our Blood. … To bear all hardships, and stand intrepid midst a thousand horrours … to be despised when we return, and among the very People he has sav'd … the tatter'd Hero starves.”Footnote 52
The hypocritical cit was not the only generic character type that pro-army dramatists used to defend the army officer and attack the anti-army position. They also employed an even older character type, the miles gloriosus or the cowardly, braggart soldier, as a way of highlighting the failings of the militia's personnel.Footnote 53 Again, this was a characterization with which audiences were familiar; the miles gloriosus had been delineated by Plautus and Terence. Jacobean and Elizabethan playwrights had likewise found humor in militia officers.Footnote 54
William Burnaby drew upon the miles gloriosus characterization in his next play, The Ladies Visiting Day, performed in early 1701, and dedicated to another military patron, James Butler, second duke of Ormond. The play features “Capt. Strut,” “a Militia Capt. that by aiming to pass for an Army Officer, over does it, and looks ridiculous.” Strut fails in his pursuit of a gentlewoman, is exposed by one of the play's protagonists as his former footman, and is beaten off the stage.Footnote 55 Thomas Baker similarly employed the miles gloriosus characterization in his very popular Tunbridge-Walks; or, The Yeoman of Kent (first performed in January 1703) to push a pro-army message, and he explicitly set up the contrast between the professional and amateur soldier in his lavish dedication of the play to John Howe, Queen Anne's Joint-Paymaster of the Forces.Footnote 56 Reflecting on the success of the last campaign, Baker presented Howe as having had the foresight to argue for support for disbanded officers who were now “not only Defending England, but Saving Europe.”Footnote 57 The play features the militia captain, Squib, a braggart, bully, and coward who refuses to fight either a duel or, more importantly, the French. When asked whether it would not gain him “more Reputation … to make a Campaigne … serve your Country, and justly merit the Title of an Officer,” Squib answers: “'tis only for your swarthy ill look'd Rogues to go to War; we Spruce Officers stay at home to guard the Ladies, Fight Mock-Sieges upon Bunhill, and Storm the Outworks of a Ven'son Pasty.”Footnote 58 Like Burnaby's Captain Strut, Squib's plebeian origins are exposed at the end of the play when Squib is revealed to be not the man of substance that he claims but a tailor. As one of the play's heroes concludes, “Taylors, Shomakers, and Barbers may serve for Militia Officers, since you only fight Mock-battles, and represent what a Captain shou'd be.”Footnote 59
While pro-army playwrights were keen to demarcate between the brave, gentlemanly serving officer and the lowborn cowardly militia man, their analysis of the relationship between social status and manliness was more complicated than this simple division might suggest. Contemporaries were well aware that cowardice, effeminacy, and foppery was not confined to the likes of the lowly Squib; they considered it rife among his social superiors.Footnote 60 And while foppery was an ongoing source of concern and satire over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anxiety about the supposedly “effeminated,” “softened” state of Englishmen was especially pronounced during times of warfare since it made the nation “an easie Prey to Foreign Enemies,” as one clergyman remarked in 1697.Footnote 61
Dramatists used the character of the gentlemanly fop—a long established character type on the stage—to drive home their point that the army officer represented the epitome of patriotic masculinity because he was physically tough and brave, and so had a natural superiority over other men, even within his own social grouping.Footnote 62 In The Volunteers, Shadwell contrasts Colonel Hackwell and his friend Welford, who has served as a volunteer in William III's army, with two fop characters, Sir Nicholas Dainty and Sir Timothy Kastril. Dainty is a most unlikely and effeminate volunteer soldier, who balks at a swift departure for Flanders since his campaign wardrobe is incomplete.Footnote 63 While Dainty is depicted as well meaning, such foppery is shown as a grave concern for the success of the war effort as represented by Colonel Hackwell, who complains to Major-General Blunt that “instead of hardship, toil, abstinence, we have Introduced in Camps, Softness, Effeminacy and Luxury, and such Extravagance in Cloaths and Equipage.” Blunt is similarly alarmed and views the phenomenon as “a Damn'd French Invention to undo men, and make them absolutely depend like Slaves.”Footnote 64 Sir Timothy Kastril is an even greater cause for patriotic alarm. Shadwell depicts him as a cowardly “sub-Beau” who believes that he has no reason to join the army to gain honor since he already has a title. Why should he go, he asks, if there are “mercenary Rogues to be had out of Jayls, Streets, High-ways, Dunghills, that can lie cold, march, and pop off a Gun?”Footnote 65 As Christopher J. Wheatley has argued, the play defines honor in terms of character and action rather than social status, and Kastril's view of honor is portrayed as erroneous. “This Knight ought to be beaten, for talking thus of Soldiers,” Blunt is made to remark.Footnote 66
Susanna Carroll's The Beau's Duel; or, A Soldier for the Ladies (first performed in June 1702 a month after England had declared war on France) similarly compared her play's protagonists, Colonel Manly and Captain Bellmein, to the fops Sir William Mode and Mr. Ogle. Ogle fulfills a similar role to Sir Nicholas Dainty as the fop whose military aspirations are flawed by his effeminacy and his confused interpretation of “polite” values. Ogle is deterred from joining the army after hearing the recruiting sergeant describe the hardships of army life and the physical cost of combat—moreover, Ogle believes that it would be impolite to fight against the French court. Sir William Mode—a “Quintessence of Fopery” who places fashion above patriotism to the extent that “his Valet is forc'd to Counterfeit a Frenchman, or he would turn him away”—is depicted as an equal problem for the war effort.Footnote 67 In a society whose values are narrowly mercenary rather than broadly patriotic, Mode's wealth makes him an attractive prospective son-in-law, unlike the impoverished but “manly” Colonel. Thus, the plot revolves around Manly's attempts to thwart the marriage between Clarinda and Mode upon which Clarinda's avaricious and cynically immoral father is so set. Carroll's attack on such graspingly materialistic priorities is best summarized in the play's prologue written “By a Gentleman,” who warned the men in the audience that “She thinks't a Crime in any one to dare, / Or hope to gain a Conquest o're the Fair, / Who ne'er cou'd Boast a Victory in War.”Footnote 68
II
Pro-army playwrights stressed the army officer's political virtues and masculine qualities by modeling him on the Restoration Cavalier and comparing him favorably with other types of less manly men—the greedy cit, the cowardly miles gloriosus, and the effeminate fop. However, the army officer's interaction with women was as crucial to his rehabilitation in the drama of the period. By making the army officer the romantic hero, dramatists did more than make the military profession appear attractive. It also allowed them to make a series of political points in the army officer's defense. A proverbial grievance against the army was the charge of sexual immorality. Its members seduced wives and daughters, abducted heiresses, and left troops of bastards on the parish. Plays that contained a pro-army element directly engaged with the fear of the soldier as a sexual predator and social deviant. Instead, they presented him as an honorable lover who not only gets the girl but marries her too, thus becoming integrated into the fabric of respectable society as the socially acceptable head of a household.
In The Reform'd Wife, Burnaby depicts his hero, Captain Freeman, as an archetypal military rake who has an affair with a woman married to a cit. Burnaby's tactic of stressing his military protagonist's masculine qualities through the cuckolding of a lesser man has its origins in Restoration drama and its Cavalier heroes. Indeed Otway's The Soldiers' Fortune puts forward a similar scenario with its vigorous army officer protagonist, Captain Beaugard, cuckolding an anti-army cit. However, by circa 1700, relatively few army officers are portrayed as rakes or remain rakish by the conclusion of the play, and this was another way in which post-1689 dramatists firmly departed from an aspect of the Restoration stage Cavalier's persona.Footnote 69 This shift in characterization can also be seen as part of wider cultural change brought about by Jeremy Collier's critiques of the immorality of the stage and, more generally, by the climate created by the Reformation of Manners movement. The theater was coming under heavy attack for depicting libertinism in a favorable light and for straying from its classically prescribed purpose of “recommend[ing] Vertue, and discountenanc[ing] Vice.”Footnote 70 In response, playwrights (including writers of pro-army plays such as Addison, Centlivre, Cibber, and Steele) pioneered a new form of “sentimental” drama that eschewed or toned down the sexual innuendo and libertine characterizations favored by Restoration authors.
Although the changing portrayal of the army officer's sexuality can be linked to these broader social, cultural, and literary trends, this shift can also be viewed as an attempt by pro-army dramatists to rehabilitate the sexual and political reputation of the army officer, as Kevin J. Gardner has suggested.Footnote 71 Captain Thomas Dilke's The Lover's Luck, which premiered in December 1695 and was dedicated to Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, an army officer and a Groom of the Bedchamber to William III, illustrates something of this transformation. The chief protagonist of The Lover's Luck is the rakish Colonel Bellair, who frequents the company of prostitutes early on in the play. However, he finds that he is increasingly disgusted with such dissipation and quits it on falling in love with the beautiful Mrs. Purflew.Footnote 72 Mrs. Purflew is understandably anxious about putting herself and her fortune into “the hands of a Libertine,” but her cousin argues in Bellair's defense that “Your men of mettle must be allow'd some small Extravagances, which are generally abated by the accomplishment of a faithful Passion.”Footnote 73 Mrs. Purflew's guardian comes around to the match in the end and concludes to Bellair that “you, Collonel, have added fresh Lawrels to the Deeds of your worthy Ancestors, and have maintain'd an indisputable Character of a Man of Honour.”Footnote 74
George Farquhar took a similar approach to the sexual behavior of the hero of his popular The Recruiting Officer, first performed in April 1706. Farquhar's earliest plays, Love and a Bottle and The Constant Couple (premiered in 1698 and 1699, respectively), protested at the treatment of disbanded officers and soldiers after the Treaty of Ryswick. Farquhar himself was a lieutenant in the army between 1704 and 1705, and he publicly acknowledged the assistance of his commanding officers, the duke of Ormond and Charles Boyle, fourth earl of Orrery, in The Recruiting Officer's dedication. The first scene of The Recruiting Officer opens with Captain Plume arriving in Shrewsbury to discover that he has fathered a bastard on his last visit. He instantly sets about remedying the situation by persuading his sergeant to acknowledge responsibility by bigamously marrying the mother and adding her and the child to the muster roll. But Farquhar provides a sympathetic apology for such behavior. Not only does he make Plume a veteran of the battle of Blenheim, he also places the following speech in the mouth of the respectable country gentleman, Justice Balance, who explains to his fellow justices (and the audience) that “I shall be very tender in what regards the officers of the army; they expose their lives to so many dangers for us abroad, that we may give them some grains of allowance at home. … Were it not for the bravery of these officers we should have French dragoons among us, that would leave us neither liberty, property, wife, nor daughter.”Footnote 75 Like Mrs. Purflew's guardian, Justice Balance eventually grants his blessing to the match between his daughter, Silvia, and Plume, and Plume declares in the last lines of the play that he will now “raise recruits the matrimonial way.”Footnote 76
By the turn of the century the rakish (but reforming) officer was himself being replaced by the officer as a devoted lover or husband. Shadwell's Colonel Hackwell is an early example of this trend, as is Colonel Standard in Farquhar's The Constant Couple and Sir George Truman in Addison's The Drummer. So, too, is Lord Hardy in Captain Richard Steele's The Funeral, first performed with some success in December 1701 to an audience that included a substantial number of army officers, soon after the start of the mass levies of troops to recommence the war against France.Footnote 77The Funeral can be viewed as an especially heartfelt exploration of this ideal, particularly if it is understood in the context of Steele's own biographical history as a soldierly rake on the road to reform, as a companion piece to his moral tract The Christian Hero (1701), and in relation to contemporary discussions about godly manliness. These debates linked together piety, patriotism, and political virtue and pointed to how the sins of lust and sexual vice rendered men effeminate and thus of limited use to their country as fighting men.Footnote 78
The subtitle of The Christian Hero—“No Principles but those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great Man”—encapsulated Steele's argument, and he consciously used the tract to promote the idea of the morally virtuous (and thus patriotic) army officer. He suggested that his “Fellow-Soldiours” would find the work helpful “for all the vicissitudes they are to meet with” and dedicated it to his commanding officer and patron, John, Lord Cutts.Footnote 79 Steele not only praised Cutts as a gentleman devoted to king and country—“a worthy descendant of an Ancient and distinguish'd Family, which has serv'd the Crown in the most eminent Stations”—he also lauded Cutts as a Christian soldier: Cutts had “ever been so far from running into the Fashionable Vice of exploding Religion, that your early Valour first appear'd against the profess'd Enemies of Christianity.”Footnote 80
The Funeral takes a similar stance. The virtuous Lord Hardy (yet another soldier-patriot who has been wrongly disinherited) is in love with Lady Sharlot, and the play follows his endeavors to marry her. Steele stresses that Hardy is not attracted to marriage for transiently sensual motives. “I expect my Felicity from Lady Sharlot, in her Friendship, her Constancy, her Piety, her Household cares, her Maternal Tenderness,” Hardy states.Footnote 81 In this sense, the play—one of the earliest sentimental comedies—is a celebration of honorable love and conjugal domesticity, and the theme is underpinned by Steele's dedication of The Funeral to the recently married countess of Albemarle, whose army officer husband was a favorite of William III.
But the plays of the post-1700 period depicted the army officer as more than just a devoted suitor. He was also presented as the liberator of oppressed womankind, a characterization that carried strong political, as well as the conventionally romantic, overtones. Such a characterization operated in two ways in particular. First, although plays sympathetic to the army attacked the stereotype of the army officer as a socially destructive philanderer, a number of works delved further. In addition, such plays scrutinized the whole paradigm on which the stereotype was based, to reveal—and critique it—as a tyrannical discourse that denied women their own agency and enslaved them as property. Second, the army officer's interactions with the opposite sex allowed dramatists to draw upon the long established convention of using the patriarchal family as a political allegory for the relations between a monarch and his subjects. They then deployed it for the pro-army cause and presented the army officer as the enemy—and not the prop—of arbitrary power and its abuses.Footnote 82
The theme was central to the work of Susanna Carroll (who took the name of Centlivre upon her third marriage in 1707).Footnote 83 An actress and writer, Centlivre was outspokenly Whiggish in her politics, particularly in the later years of Queen Anne's reign, and her male protagonists were often army officers. The plot of The Man's Bewitch'd; or, The Devil to Do About Her (first performed in December 1709), revolves around an imprisoned heroine, Laura, and the attempts of her lover, Faithful, who has served in a campaign, and his army officer friend, Captain Constant, to free her. Centlivre provides a highly politicized context by setting up a parallel between the unlawful behavior of Laura's legal guardian, Sir David Watchum (who has locked up Laura to force her into marrying him so that he can gain her fortune) and that which exists in absolute monarchies. As Constant comments, when defending the imposition of taxes to fund the war effort, “we are at Wars with a Prince that cares for no Laws but his own, nay he breaks them too, when 'tis his Interest.”Footnote 84 Like Louis XIV, Sir David Watchum is a tyrant who abuses the power entrusted to him and disregards the law of the land. It is fitting, then, that he is challenged by those who have been recently fighting against Louis XIV, and Laura's cause is portrayed as that of freedom from despotic rule.Footnote 85 When Constant's future wife fears that marriage is “a Fetter,” Constant reassures her that he will “not make it one” for he is “a true British Subject … for Liberty and Property.”Footnote 86 Centlivre's political message was underscored by her dedication of the play to William Cavendish, second duke of Devonshire—Lord Steward to Queen Anne, a prominent Whig, and an associate of Marlborough's.
Centlivre's The Perplex'd Lovers (premiered in January 1712) tells a similar tale and was likewise dedicated to a prominent Whig politician and military financier, Sir Henry Furnese MP. Colonel Bastion and Constantia are in love, but their marriage is opposed by her brother and her father, the latter wanting her to marry the debauched Lord Richlove (whose general moral and patriotic degeneracy is indicated by the fact that he has a French valet). For Constantia, “Love is a free-born Passion of the Mind, not to be purchas'd at a sordid Price.”Footnote 87 She spurns Richlove's advances but Richlove, angered at her rejection, tries to assault her. She is only saved by the timely assistance of Bastion, whose name suggests his protective, defensive role, both as a soldier for his country and as Constantia's champion.
Courtship and marriage played an important part in pro-army drama as a means of demonstrating the army officer's sexual respectability, and his commitment to and integration into, the society he risked his life for on the battlefield. Yet the women in pro-army plays did not serve only as a way by which the army officer's political and sexual virtue could be measured. A number of these plays were keen to explore female patriotism as an issue in itself. How could the female sex serve their country and take up the Revolutionary cause against popery, arbitrary government, and Louis XIV's France?
III
The Revolution's attack on patriarchalism appeared to complicate the basis for other forms of patriarchal authority, particularly that of men over women. This prompted a number of female writers to reconsider the place of women within the established gender hierarchy and led them to critique justifications for patriarchy within the “little commonwealth” of the family by invoking the same rhetorics of “tyranny” and “arbitrary power” that had been employed to attack the absolute monarchy of Charles II and James II. The succession of two queens regnant, Mary II and Queen Anne, provided additional impetus and inspiration for reexamining the grounds for debarring women from most official forms of political participation.Footnote 88 As one essayist remarked of Anne, “This Active Reign is a Demonstration, that Woman was born for Government as well as Man. … Ladies may lie under the Disadvantages of the want of Manly Education … yet Her Majesty's assiduous Application, and rare Qualifications that irradiate Her Crown, are pregnant Proofs, that Female Succession is not prejudicial to any State.”Footnote 89 The 1690s and 1700s saw works by Mary Astell, Judith Drake, Sarah Egerton, and Mary, Lady Chudleigh, among others, which provided a vigorous defense of the female character on the grounds that it was custom rather than reason that shaped the position and perceptions of women within society.Footnote 90
At the same time, women from all social ranks—or so it seemed to contemporaries—were becoming noticeably involved in the factional strife of a period shaped by furious argument over fundamental issues relating to religion and government, and marked by frequent and hotly contested parliamentary elections. Since the religious and political stakes appeared so high, women may well have felt that their political activities were not only justified in terms of familial interests and kinship ties but ideologically necessary, for the sake of their country and their God. Queen Anne's female attendants, in particular Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, and Abigail Masham, were the most high profile of these female politicians.Footnote 91 There were numerous other women who lobbied on behalf of their family's political interests, acted as conduits for political information, promoted party causes through socializing and fashion, and wrote politically inspired material in support of particular party initiatives or attacking high profile politicians (such as Delarivier Manley's literary assault on the duchess of Marlborough).Footnote 92 Research into their activities has raised important questions about the reception and impact of a prescriptive “separate spheres” ideology (which emphasized the significance of female domesticity) on the everyday lives of women and has complicated our understanding of how women experienced and acted out gender roles in the “private” and “public” spheres.Footnote 93
The extent to which women were actively and prominently engaged in political activities was a matter of acute contemporary concern in the early decades of the eighteenth century. But while most commentators were perturbed by female political activity, they also recognized that it could not be ignored. The idea that women enjoyed informal political clout through their persuasive influence over the opposite sex was a literary commonplace.Footnote 94 Whigs were especially sensitive to the conundrum of female political participation since it was widely held that women were more likely to be Tories or Jacobites. As a result, they were impelled to engage with women as a sex in order to win over female support for the Revolution of 1688–89 and the Protestant Succession. Indeed, the Whig case was pressed using the argument that arbitrary rule, popery, and the oppression of women went hand in hand. An epilogue to performances of George Etherege's The Man of Mode and Addison's The Drummer spoken by the actress Anne Oldfield in March 1716 and “clapped by a full house,” explained to the audience that “Women have dreadful Reasons, more than Men, / T'exert their Force against a Tyrant's Reign, / For, where those Rule, they double Fetters wear.” Having pointed to the wretched state of women in Turkey, Persia, Spain, and Italy, it concluded that Britain was the best place for women to live and called on women to defend their country's liberties. “Since then such Joys in Britain only flow, / How much to guard them, Ladies, lies on you?”Footnote 95
How women might fulfill a constructive role in the service of their country was thus an issue that, in the circumstances, Whigs such as Addison and Steele felt needed to be explored. Both authors were at the forefront of the move to reconstruct gender roles in a way that put renewed focus on the domestic (and maternal) qualities of ideal womanhood (as Steele's characterization of Lady Sharlot in The Funeral suggests).Footnote 96 The classical past provided them with readily available examples of women who acted as patriots but within a reassuringly familial, marital context. In The Christian Hero, Steele praised Brutus's wife, Porcia, as an exemplar of the “noble Roman Wife” who staunchly supported her husband's political actions even though they brought her great personal unhappiness. Indeed, Porcia physically tortured herself to prove that she was able to keep any important secret that her husband confided in her and thus could share his “most hidden Griefs” as a true wife—rather than a mere concubine—should. Steele held up this “Memorable Wife” as “an everlasting Argument, how far a Generous treatment, can make that tender Sex go even beyond the Resolution of Man.”Footnote 97 Steele himself may have been harking back to Porcia's example when he counseled his wife in March 1714 to “be a Roman Lady and assume a Courage equall to yr Goodnesse” when he was under investigation by the House of Commons for seditious writings.Footnote 98 Addison similarly turned to early Roman history as a way of constructing a political role for women that was appropriate for the sex. He suggested that women could fulfill an important function as peacemakers in an England torn by party faction and cited “those illustrious Matrons, who, in the Infancy of Rome, reconciled the Romans and the Sabines, and united the two contending Parties under their new King.”Footnote 99
Pro-army dramatists also situated female patriotism within the familial life of the Whig nation (although in a contemporary rather than classical context and with an emphasis on unmarried rather than married women). Cibber's The Non-Juror is especially illuminating in this respect if it is understood as a broader political allegory about the perils of bad government. Colonel Woodvil's father, Sir John Woodvil, represents the well-intentioned but misguided monarch; the devious Dr. Wolf, the evil counselor, in league with the nation's enemies; and Colonel Woodvil, his sister Maria, and her suitor Heartly, the monarch's loyal subjects. While Woodvil and Heartly have an important role in exposing Wolf, so, too, does Maria. Indeed, it is the “free-born Englishwoman” Maria, who substitutes the document conveying Sir John's property to Wolf for another naming her brother as the beneficiary, thus saving her father and family from ruin and providing the play's denouement.Footnote 100 If the play is read as a broader political allegory, then Maria's strong characterization could be viewed as an argument both for the benefits of women's Whiggish politically inspired activities and a hint that women, too, were valuable—and possibly underestimated—members of the political community. Both Colonel Woodvil and Heartly are amazed by the astuteness that the frivolous and flirtatious Maria has displayed, and a shocked Wolf is hauled off to prison crying “Outwitted by a Brainless Girl.”Footnote 101 Only Maria remains nonplussed and curtly interrupts her brother's declaration of thanks with “Come no set Speeches.”Footnote 102
Pro-army playwrights focused on the issue of female patriotic activity by exploring how women could promote their country's interests through an emotional commitment to their army officer lovers. Playwrights did not gloss over the fact that marriage to an officer might ensure women a financially (and emotionally) uncertain future, with possible widowhood in wartime and poverty on half-pay after the Peace.Footnote 103 But they stressed it was an honorable action that would give women the opportunity to demonstrate their wholehearted commitment to the Revolution. It would resolutely refute “common Report” that “all Women are Jacobites” since they were “ready to Reward the Soldiers Service to the Nation with their Persons and Fortunes,” as the father of Centlivre's heroine in The Beau's Duel observes.Footnote 104
This was a favorite theme of Centlivre's, who indeed insisted on the equality, if not superiority, of military rank to all others. In Centlivre's world, her patriotically minded heroines regularly turn down aristocratic and landed suitors and favor army officers (as Centlivre's second husband reputedly was).Footnote 105 In The Perplex'd Lovers, Colonel Bastion fears that Constantia will prefer Richlove: “He's a Lord, and she's a Woman; Grandeur and Titles charm that Sex beyond the power of Constancy and Love.” By contrast, Bastion's “Sword is all my Fortune, and Love the only Jointure I can make.”Footnote 106 Yet Bastion worries needlessly. Constantia firmly rejects Richlove, telling him that the man she loves “holds more Virtues than all thy Ancestors could boast.”Footnote 107 Centlivre concludes the play with the marriage of Constantia and Bastion, urging the audience to follow their example May ev'ry brave Defender of our Isle,Be thus rewarded for his warlike Toil;And after Sieges, Winter-Camps and Storms,May some kind Female take him to her Arms.Footnote 108
This was also a key preoccupation in Centlivre's successful A Bold Stroke for a Wife (debuted in February 1718). Colonel Fainwell and Ann Lovely (“a Fortune of Thirty Thousand Pound”) are in love, but Ann's four guardians block their marriage. Ann is set upon marrying the Colonel and explains one of her reasons for wanting to do so: “There's something so Janteé in a Soldier … that makes 'em more agreeable than the rest of Mankind—They command Regard, as who should say, We are your Defenders, We preserve your Beauties from the Insults of rude unpolish'd Foes, and ought to be prefer'd before those lazy indolent Mortals, who by dropping into their Fathers Estate set up their Coaches, and think to rattle themselves into our Affections.”Footnote 109
Pro-army playwrights not only suggested that women could fulfill a patriotic role suitable to their sex by encouraging their husbands and lovers to acts of heroism in defense of their country. They emphasized that women could also help soldiers retain their civic virtue too, by providing a civilizing influence which ensured that military valor remained elevated above mere bloodlust. Such sentiments are bound together in a conversation between Hackwell and his future wife, Eugenia, in Shadwell's The Volunteers.
Hackwell: We fight for Peace and Love, the End and the Reward of War: For what but Liberty and Beauty are worth a good man's Sword; I value your Favour so vastly above all Wealth, Power, and Honour, that I would quit for you my Country, and my chase of Fame; but that I know you would despise me for't.Eugenia: Nay, think not, Sir, I'de have you quit so glorious a Cause as Consecrates each Sword that's drawn for't.Footnote 110
Steele's The Funeral also makes explicit the dialogue between male and female patriotisms in the epilogue spoken by Hardy. Addressing the soldiers in the audience, Hardy tells them that it is their “Country's Honour” that they “must secure” in the war that is soon to be declared against France and goes on to declaim, presumably with a gesture to the front boxes of the theater, where the ladies sat, Courage is Brutal if untouch'd with Love.If soon our utmost Bravery's not display'd,Think that Bright Circle must be Captives made.Let Thoughts of saving them our Toils beguile,And they Reward our Labours with a Smile.Footnote 111
Pro-army plays situated female patriotism within a romantic, domestic context. The question remained, nevertheless, as to whether women could fulfill a more physically active part in the fight against popery and arbitrary government by taking up arms themselves. Addison dismissed the idea of English “Amazons” at the time of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion, and emphasized the decorative quality of female patriotism in his assertion that “The Men will take the Work of the Field off their Hands, and shew the World, that English Valour cannot be matched, when it is animated by English Beauty.”Footnote 112 By contrast, Bernard Mandeville argued in The Female Tatler in 1710 that women could—and indeed had—led armies, and he drew up a catalog of historical examples of them doing so.Footnote 113 Catharine Trotter provided a forthright contribution to the question in her historical tragedy The Revolution of Sweden (first performed in February 1706), which she dedicated to Marlborough's daughter, Lady Henrietta Godolphin. Designed to incite a “resolute Care of the Publick Good,” one of the play's heroines leaves her husband, after he proves a traitor, to fight in battle for her country.Footnote 114 The female soldier was also a popular figure in ballad literature.Footnote 115
Pro-army playwrights generally avoided depicting their heroines as soldiers (despite the dramatic and erotic interest created by providing the lead actress with a “breeches role”) or presenting them in a combat situation. And even if they did, it was once again within a familial or romantic context. Silvia, the heroine of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, joins the army but as part of a temporary stratagem to obtain the army officer whom she loves rather than because she wishes to express her broader patriotic zeal. As she explains at the end of the play, she “only laid by the woman to make sure of my man.”Footnote 116 The heroines of Shadwell's The Volunteers, Eugenia and Clara, are more determined to follow their soldier lovers, Hackwell and Welford, in the actual “hazards and … toiles” of combat rather than merely dressing up as soldiers, but their motives are similarly described in terms of romantic devotion. As Clara declares, “with my Welford I could stand a pass, with shours of Bullets flying about our Ears, and only be concerned, least an unlucky one, should cut him off,” to which Eugenia rejoins, “for mine, I would gladly intercept the Bullet that would hit him.”Footnote 117 Shadwell's soldier son, Charles Shadwell, also presented his heroines in this way in his The Humours of the Army, which debuted in January 1713, dedicated to his commanding officer.Footnote 118 The play is set on campaign, and his cast of characters includes the wife and daughter of a senior officer, who both disdain to retreat to safety or show fear in the face of an attack.Footnote 119 Another female character, Belvedera, disguises herself and enlists, vowing to embrace fully her military vocation. “Let the World see how much they are mistaken in my Sexes Cowardice,” she remarks, and goes on to declare: How well, how great 'twill look in after Story,When they shall read a Woman gain'd this Glory,To Fight, to Vanquish, Govern and Command,And like a Hero dyed with Sword in Hand.Footnote 120
Yet, for all that, her motives for enlisting are conventionally romantic. She has joined the army to find the lover with whom she has quarreled.
The pro-army plays of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then, put forward a model for female patriotism that was grounded in women's domestic and romantic roles. It can thus be viewed as providing a basis for later eighteenth-century ideas about female patriotism, which similarly stressed that women could and should inspire and support male valor and that male and female patriotisms complemented each other.Footnote 121 Such an approach by pro-army playwrights is understandable if we consider their wider purposes. Pro-army drama was a commercial product that also sought, for political reasons, to present the army officer as socially, politically, and sexually respectable and to encourage patriotic behavior in the sexes. Important to the success of all three strategies was the presentation of the play's heroine in a conventionally acceptable fashion: as an attractive, intelligent young woman with a strong desire to help her country but who was also wedded to the existing gender hierarchy.
Warfare has been viewed as having a significant impact on relations between the sexes and ideas about gender roles.Footnote 122 Indeed, the wars of the 1750s have been described as seeing a hardening of conventional gender divisions within British society, with female patriotism taking on an auxiliary, dependent, marginalized quality.Footnote 123 To determine whether or not the 1690s to 1710s saw a similar phenomenon requires an analysis of the material, as well as textual, experience that is beyond the possible scope of this article. Nevertheless, although there are inherent difficulties with transposing the conceptual and imaginative onto everyday existence, prescriptive texts can still be viewed as molding contemporary expectations of “appropriate” gender roles, even though these expectations might then be modified or reinterpreted in the course of day-to-day life.Footnote 124 In this sense it can be argued that by placing the heroines of pro-army plays within the recognizable context as daughters and future wives rather than as “Amazons,” playwrights provided young women from the social elites with a patriotic role model that they might wholeheartedly and realistically emulate.Footnote 125
But while the female protagonists of pro-army plays operate almost exclusively within a domestic context as patriotic helpmeets, we need to recognize that they also set their own patriotic agenda, in some cases independently of their family unit. Each chooses her soldier lover because she herself detects his patriotic worth, despite his poverty and society's residual anti-army prejudice. Almost to a woman, they fight a domestic battle against tyrannous, politically malevolent, or misguided fathers and guardians in order to marry the army officer protagonist, linking their own future with that of the Revolution and nation. The heroines of pro-army dramas may be used as a means of rehabilitating the army officer's reputation. But, in turn, the army officer is also used to test and prove the female protagonist's own political virtue. In this sense, the patriotic credentials of both the hero and the heroine depend upon each other.
IV
Between 1689 and 1720, the depiction of the army officer underwent a transformation on the English stage. Playwrights worked to fashion the army officer as a patriotic gentleman—hero and the epitome of masculinity and through such characterization underline both the political reliability of the officer corps of the standing army and the considerable drawbacks of the militia. As part of this project, playwrights turned to examine the nature of female patriotism and matched the army officer hero with the play's heroine who acknowledged, inspired, and rewarded his military endeavors against popery and arbitrary government. In this way, playwrights made an important rhetorical contribution to the pro-army cause—as the apparent enthusiasm for the genre among audiences suggests.
We can trace this enthusiasm from the 1700s onward. While we lack reports (detailed or otherwise) concerning staging, acting, and audience interaction for the majority of performances of pro-army plays, theater scheduling gives some idea of the contemporary interest in the subject. The theater seasons of 1702–3 and 1703–4 saw the premier of several pro-army plays: Centlivre's The Beau's Duel; Farquhar's The Twin Rivals (which featured a soldier hero, Captain Trueman); and Baker's Tunbridge Walks. There were also performances of Steele's The Funeral, and Farquhar's The Constant Couple. The next two seasons, 1704–5 and 1705–6, saw the premier of Steele's The Tender Husband (with a soldier protagonist Captain Clerimont) and the first long run of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. There was the debut, too, of Centlivre's pro-army The Basset Table.Footnote 126 Interest in the ongoing Allied campaign in Spain was catered for by a play staged at Bartholomew Fair in August 1706 entitled The Siege of Barcelona.Footnote 127 Additionally, there were performances of Otway's The Soldiers' Fortune, and the pro-army plays of Farquhar, Steele, and Baker.
Pro-army drama continued to be staged after the Whig electoral defeat of 1710, Marlborough's fall from office as Captain General, and despite the Tory-backed peace proceedings that followed. Centlivre's Perplex'd Lovers opened on 19 January 1712, with an unperformed epilogue with a complimentary allusion to Marlborough, timed just three weeks after the duke's dismissal. William Taverner's The Female Advocates (which also had an army officer as its hero) premiered in January 1713, the same month as Charles Shadwell's Humours of the Army. The latter was performed for six nights—a respectable opening run.Footnote 128 There were also the usual performances of pro-army plays by Farquhar and Steele in 1711–12 and 1712–13, as well as another revival of Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers.Footnote 129
Measuring dramatic success in this period is complicated by the fact that the length of a play's first run does not necessarily provide a reliable guide to its popularity. Furthermore, performance records are fragmentary until 1705, and audience tastes appear to have been markedly unpredictable in the late 1690s and early 1700s. Many new plays failed across the spectrum.Footnote 130 Keeping this in mind, however, we might note the following. Burnaby's The Reform'd Wife, Taverner's Female Advocates, and most of Centlivre's plays were ephemeral pieces, with a run of only a couple of days. By contrast, Otway's The Soldiers' Fortune, Dilke's Lover's Luck, Shadwell's Humours of the Army, and Centlivre's Bold Stroke for a Wife had greater initial success and were later revived on several occasions. Even more successful were Steele's The Funeral and The Tender Husband, Farquhar's The Constant Couple, and Baker's Tunbridge-Walks, which all became very regular staples of the repertory. But their success was surpassed by the astonishing popularity of The Recruiting Officer. This had an impressive opening season of ten nights followed by frequent performances for decades afterward, making it one of the most popular plays of the century.Footnote 131
The post-1713 period saw no letup to this sort of scheduling.Footnote 132 Indeed, pro-army drama appears to have become established as a theatrical genre in itself by March 1736, when Henry Fielding's satirical Pasquin was premiered. Pasquin's plot includes the marriage between Colonel Promise and the pro-army daughter of a local mayor, with the colonel earnestly announcing to his betrothed, in a loose pastiche of a Centlivre comedy, that “the Army is very much obliged to you for the Zeal you shew for it: Me it has made your Slave for ever.”Footnote 133 Echoes of Centlivre—whose plays became very popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—can be heard in Sheridan's The Rivals (1775), the plot of which hinges on the heroine's belief that it is more romantic to marry a poor junior army officer than a wealthy landed gentleman.
The support of audiences was vital to the staging of such plays. Robert D. Hume has pointed to the importance of the “ideological pressure” exerted by the box office, noting that the sex comedies of the 1670s lost popularity as a genre when audiences turned against them.Footnote 134 It can be argued that similar pressure was exerted with regard to pro-army plays, most strikingly at the end of Anne's reign. During these years, theater managers were keen to steer as neutral a political course as possible.Footnote 135 Nonetheless, pro-army dramas continued to be presented despite the ministry's anti-war initiatives. Pro-army plays were staged in this period, as they were in earlier and later decades, because theater audiences were—it appears—prepared to pay to see them.
If pro-army drama had an impact upon eighteenth-century theater repertoires, to what extent did it affect the course of the debate over standing armies and militias? Concern over a standing army continued to dog annual parliamentary sessions after 1713, inspired by the anti-army literature of the late 1690s and widespread knowledge of the fate of the Roman republic.Footnote 136 Although the British army was reduced in size at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1715 it was estimated to be just under 16,000 men strong, and it continued to expand. It stood at just over 18,000 men by the late 1720s and just over 26,000 men by the 1730s.Footnote 137 The growth in the size of the army during the postwar period might well be better explained by ministerial concern about internal as well as external political security, principally relating to Jacobite activity, and the fragmented nature of the parliamentary opposition, rather than by the weakening of anti-army sentiment. This would account for the resurgence in parliamentary interest in reforming the militia in the mid- to late 1750s against a backdrop of ministerial instability.Footnote 138
It could be argued, nevertheless, that enthusiasm for militia reform in the 1750s was driven less by fears of a professional army per se—particularly given that the senior officer corps was closely linked to the political elites (around 270 out of the 374 appointees to proprietary colonelcies between 1714 and 1763 were either landed by the time of their death or closely related to aristocratic and gentry landowners).Footnote 139 Rather, it was motivated by concerns over the supposedly effeminate condition of the nation's men and a fierce dislike of foreign mercenaries—the Hanoverian and Hessian troops who were used to supplement the strength of the regular army during times of national emergency. A shift in attitudes toward a professional army appears, then, to have taken place over the course of the first half of the eighteenth century; the presence and influence of pro-army plays in theatrical repertoires provides one explanation for this change.
