One day in 1663 James Scott, Charles II's illegitimate son from a fleeting liaison with Lucy Walter, became Baron Scott of Tynedale, Earl of Doncaster, and Duke of Monmouth. Previously without rank, Charles's bastard instantly became the “fourth gentleman in the realm, taking precedence of all save the Duke of York and Prince Rupert.”Footnote 1 Thanks in part to Charles's indulgent elevation, Monmouth was to be the last royal bastard with clear pretensions to the English throne. When the so-called Popish Plot was revealed in 1678, these pretensions gained seriousness. Concerned about a Catholic subversion of the Protestant state, the Whigs attempted to exclude Charles's brother, the Catholic Duke of York, from the succession. When Charles declared publicly that the succession to the crown had to follow the true line to his brother, his relationship to the House of Commons deteriorated.Footnote 2

Monmouth's popularity soared. A military hero, a Protestant, and the king's eldest son, he embodied the hopes for an escape from the twinned threats of popery and unbridled royal power. Socially heterogeneous crowds of laborers, craftsmen, merchants, and apprentices thronged around Monmouth wherever he went, and his appeal to this “multitude,” as contemporaries referred to it, became a political problem for a court increasingly concerned about public unrest.Footnote 3 By 1683, however, the tide had turned in favor of the court. The discovery of the Rye House Plot—the plan to assassinate the king and his brother—led to the execution of several prominent Whigs and to Monmouth's exile in Holland early in 1684. When his father Charles died in 1685, Monmouth decided to put into action long-held plans for an uprising to gain the crown. Yet this uprising failed. Despite last-minute pleadings with the Duke of York, now James II, Monmouth was beheaded in the summer of 1685.

The Whig resistance to the Stuarts between 1678 and 1681, as Tim Harris has shown, relied heavily on the mobilization of the masses, but the political effects of Monmouth's special relationship to the multitude have not been appreciated.Footnote 4 The hesitations, lies, and betrayals that dot Monmouth's path have made it difficult for historians to take his political influence seriously. They have described Monmouth as “ambitious and gullible” and “a useful political tool.”Footnote 5 His relationship to the multitude has been belittled as “popular adulation” that remained ineffective because it lacked more substantive support from the gentry.Footnote 6 Monmouth's botched rebellion of 1685 and his embarrassing behavior after his defeat proved that his cause was lost long before he left England in 1684. Once the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had occurred, Monmouth's rebellion became an “episode” without larger significance for the political history of the seventeenth century.Footnote 7 Sixteen eighty-eight quickly overshadowed 1685.

We still lack a genuine revaluation of this narrative, but there are a few signs in recent scholarship that Monmouth's case could merit reconsideration. There is, for example, Melinda Zook's important book about Whig radicals, which attempts to revise our understanding of the Exclusion Crisis by showing how vitally it is linked to 1688 through a single “revolution culture.” This proposition would seem to entail a revaluation of Monmouth.Footnote 8 Richard Greaves's remarkable study of seventeenth-century radicalism shows more directly that the history of resistance in the 1680s cannot be written without consistently invoking Monmouth.Footnote 9 And Mark Goldie notes with apparent regret that “Monmouth's cause scarcely figures in the history of political thought.”Footnote 10 These revisionary stirrings are important, but they remain curiously half-hearted. Goldie's essay does not contribute much to the question of Monmouth's significance in the history of political thought.Footnote 11 In the end, Greaves never emphasizes Monmouth's importance for the history of resistance in the 1680s and excludes Monmouth from the Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, which he co-edited.Footnote 12 While Zook acknowledges that Monmouth's popularity far outstripped that of other radicals such as Lord Russell or Algernon Sidney, she follows the traditional line on Monmouth as a weak and unprincipled figure of resistance (even though he is included in her own list of radicals).Footnote 13

The reservations about Monmouth linger, but the biographical facts that seem to nourish them provide a poor measure for Monmouth's influence on the culture and politics of the late 1670s and early 1680s. That influence, I believe, can only be gauged if we reach beyond the biographical genre with its individualistic concepts of agency and its tendency toward character judgment. I suggest that Monmouth's profound ambiguity—his split allegiances to court and crowd, his reversals and indecision—increased rather than decreased his influence on the events of these years. To identify the bastard duke with one of the opposite sides that he always seems to represent or to show him up as an opportunist is to impose a standard of motivation and propriety that simply misses Monmouth's cultural and political power. I propose to view Monmouth's ambiguity not as a riddle that needs to be solved or judged but as the source of his power. Monmouth's impact on his culture results from the fact that he could be seen as simultaneously marginal and central, “both illegitimate and legitimate,” as one of the most active pamphleteers of these years put it.Footnote 14

Popular literature written about Monmouth between 1678 and 1686 widely exploited this fact. Well over one hundred ballads, poems, broadsides, and pamphlets published about Monmouth in this period amply document his popularity, but these largely unstudied materials offer more than a record of adulation. Read closely, they reveal that Monmouth's illegitimate body was deployed as a form of political thought that promoted the imagination of a body politic in which sovereignty and privilege were shared between king and multitude, the noble and the base. Monmouth's illegitimacy, as we shall see, was used to tie him to the multitude and to endow the multitude with a political body and political agency. Through Monmouth, the multitude became the object of representation in many of the texts I will discuss, but the multitude was also the audience that many Tory and Whig texts were seeking—and not just when obviously popular forms such as the ballad were involved. Even more demanding political pamphlets such as Elkanah Settle's The Character of a Popish Successour (1681), Roger L’Estrange argued, were seen as deliberately addressing the multitude.Footnote 15

The largely anonymous remains of Monmouth's popularity deserve serious study because they engage a fundamental problem in the history of political thought: the problem of the “many” versus the “one.” This problem took on fresh urgency in a period marked by growing anxiety over the power of the multitude. Christopher Hill has argued that the peasant unrests of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the turmoil of the civil war generated profound anxieties about the multitude. These anxieties fed the endless stream of derogatory adjectives that attached themselves to the multitude, from “hydra-headed” or “many-headed,” to “senseless,” “furious,” “dissolute,” “ignoble,” “base,” “mad,” and “rude.”Footnote 16 Following Etienne Balibar, I argue that these anxieties about the multitude are dialectically linked to the development of absolutist theories of state.Footnote 17

For the English context, this link can be seen in Thomas Hobbes's The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (1640). Composed on the tumultuous eve of civil war, The Elements of Law testifies to the rising power of the multitude by delivering one of the earliest systematic critiques of its claims to political agency. Even as his materialist framework forces him to acknowledge the origin of political power in the multitude (for Hobbes the equivalent of raw political matter), Hobbes painstakingly denies the multitude a political body. Because it is a “heap” and not a body, the multitude cannot “demand or have a right to any thing. … When they say ours, every man is understood to pretend in several, and not the multitude.”Footnote 18 Sovereignty, Hobbes argued with Jean Bodin, can only reside in one, and a well-formed body politic depends on the clear subordination of the many to a single will.Footnote 19 A political body that assigns agency to the many, on the other hand, is doomed to deformity and chaos. The popular literature about Monmouth puts pressure on this logic by using his illegitimate body to elide the difference between the many and the one. Crowd and court, multitude and sovereignty, democracy and monarchy could mingle in the alluring image of the bastard prince.

On his excursion into the north of England in the fall of 1682, Monmouth was greeted by a group of women at the Crown Inn, close to Nantwich. One of them managed to kiss his knee, exclaiming “God in heaven bless you! You’re so like your father, I’m sure you’re no bastard!”Footnote 20 For this woman, the exclusive association with the father—evidenced by Monmouth's close resemblance to Charles—signified a legitimate birth. Behind this popular belief lurked the traditional hierarchy of male and female in sexual generation, which was especially critical in matters of royal reproduction. Ultimately going back to Aristotle, who privileged the male as the active principle that shaped inert and inchoate female matter, this hierarchy continued to influence scientific and popular discourse about sexual generation in seventeenth-century England.Footnote 21 Its persistence even in texts that otherwise make claims for female agency in generation probably owes something to the value attached to the male heir in a culture that still reproduced much of its wealth through primogeniture.Footnote 22 The law of coverture, meanwhile, by ratifying the dominance of the male over the female in marriage, inscribed this sexual hierarchy into wedlock.

The exclamation of the woman at the Crown Inn counteracts the widespread belief that an illegitimate birth unsettled such sexual hierarchies. When Shakespeare's Edmund contrasts in King Lear the “lusty stealth of nature” that occasioned his conception to the “dull, stale, tired bed” that creates “a whole tribe of fops / Got ‘tween sleep and wake,” he articulates a common stereotype about marriage among the propertied elite.Footnote 23 Since marriage in elevated social spheres was frequently not dominated by considerations of love but of property and alliance, passionate sex between such partners could seem unusual. While mutual pleasure was seen as important for marital conception, consensual sex out of wedlock was easily assumed to be much more passionate on both sides. Instead of letting the male do his shaping work, illicit and highly passionate sex activated the female factor, which could overwhelm form by an excess of chaotic matter. The products of such unions were thus often depicted as morally or physically deformed, effeminate, malleable, promiscuous, or combining opposing tendencies.Footnote 24 Identity, or so the thinking went, threatened to be ambiguous when the multiplicity of matter was not reduced to clear form.

Numerous Tory attacks on Monmouth activated the associations of the bastard with multiplicity, matter, and deformity. The frequency with which these attacks responded to the resemblance between Charles and Monmouth indicates a sensitive area—sensitive beyond the legitimacy that resemblance could seem to suggest. Grimalkin; or, The Rebel-Cat (1681), for instance, imagines Monmouth as the “Bastard Leopard,” “natural son” to the “true-born Lyon” and the base panther.Footnote 25 When the author mentions how impressed the common people are by Monmouth's “many exact resemblances” to his father and how these are “much softned with a milder, more agreeable Aspect of his own,” he does not hesitate long before he rereads Monmouth's body as deformed. Such deformity is attributed to the undue influence of Monmouth's mother Lucy, who was rumored to be a prostitute:

Lucy's unrestrained sexuality gains the ascendancy over the male's ability to reproduce his form clearly. Instead of the lion imprinting his form on the panther, “such promiscuous and vile Engendring” produces a debasing mixture that finds its permanent manifestation in the spotted coat of the leopard, its “Motley Skin.”Footnote 27 This skin signifies the illicit mixture of form and matter, of male and female, and of classes and families. Monmouth, this “Novell” informs us, “is a Creature born of two Families at once.”Footnote 28

Despite reports of his resemblance to his father, Monmouth's female parts dominate and “embase” the “refined” male part; they mire his spirit in matter. As John Dryden suggested in Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the parts that Monmouth received from his father—his “mounting spirits bold”—are dampened by his “Mothers Mold.” Monmouth's illegitimacy compromises his spirit by tying it to his mother's base materiality—to “her earth,” as Dryden also put it.Footnote 29 The same assumptions inform Nahum Tate's rewriting of King Lear (1681), in which Edmund was said to be a “half-blooded Man,” irredeemably split between the nobility of his father and the licentiousness of his mother, and in which the legitimate Edgar makes good on his claims by insisting that he is the child of one—his father.Footnote 30 The bastard is a mother's boy, and this notion may have inspired the canting name Monmouth received in conspiratorial correspondence, which referred to him as “the lady.”Footnote 31

Monmouth's illegitimacy thus lent itself to the charge that he was always more than one, both refined and natural, male and female, spirit and matter, noble and ignoble. When illegitimate conceptions are imagined as dehierarchizing mixtures, these terms cannot appear purely but are always confusingly mingled. Such mixtures acquired strong political implications during the late 1670s and early 1680s, when an increasingly polarized struggle over questions of succession and sovereignty gripped the nation. The author of Grimalkin, for example, saw the argument for the succession of a mixed creature as ultimately motivated by an argument for radical equality: “All the beasts are equal, and … Nature having left us no exact scale of Creatures, it could be none of her Intendment, that any one should have Rule or Sovereignty more than another.”Footnote 32 If we acknowledge the claims of mixed species, the author suggests, we unhinge the chain of being and thus the political order. Mixture undermines not only the rule of patriarchal resemblance but also the law of natural difference.

The degree to which mixtures became politically loaded during this period of polarization can also be gauged by the emergence of another political animal, the so-called trimmer who opportunistically moved between political camps.Footnote 33 Monmouth's mixed constitution helped to associate him with such trimming, as the following poem indicates:

Like Monmouth, trimmers extended flattery to both popular and regal power. “The King is but one man,” a trimmer observed in another 1683 text, “but the People of England are very numerous; and what wise man will disoblige and provoke a Multitude?”Footnote 35 Trimmers shuttle between the one and the many.

Sixteen eighty-three was a particularly rich year for satirizing trimmers because suspicions that Monmouth played a double game between Whig conspiracy and crown reached a new high, especially after the plan to assassinate the king and his brother was revealed and Monmouth was approached by Lord Halifax about a reconciliation with his father Charles. Already notorious for his own defense of trimming, Halifax acted on Charles's behalf; between October and December his mediation produced a series of apologetic and confessional letters from Monmouth and some awkward meetings with Charles and the Duke of York.Footnote 36 It also produced a popular ballad in which Monmouth is shown to salute Halifax as the new leader of the Whig opposition and pledges, “We’ll show ’em a trick for their trimming.”Footnote 37 The elaborate theater of reconciliation collapsed in early 1684, but it associated Monmouth even more indelibly with a double allegiance between court and crowd, Tory and Whig.

Dryden capitalized on this association in The Duke of Guise (1683). The play drew on recent French history to attack Monmouth and fantasize about his murder. It dramatized Guise's (Monmouth’s) double allegiance to king and crowd in a powerful scene that replayed Monmouth's spontaneous return from banishment in 1679, and it accuses Monmouth of being “two Men”— one who hotly plots rebellion and one who is “Cautious and cold” at court.Footnote 38 In his epilogue, Dryden returned to the theme of double allegiance when he imagined a dialogue between a Tory and a trimmer. The dialogue concludes with an outbreak against trimmers that seems to belong more to the author than his Tory character:

Harking back to the Duke of Guise's allegiance to both court and crowd, these lines let us hear Dryden's exasperation over the effectiveness of such species-defying politics. Monmouth was neither one nor the other but both and therefore nothing.

Monmouth defied the categories that facilitated unambiguous identification. Tory pamphleteers played up the uncertainty of his paternity to underscore this point. While Charles was unwavering in his belief that Monmouth was his son, the Tory press took advantage of the old maxim that the mothers of bastards are always certain, but the fathers always uncertain (mater certa, pater semper incertus). In the following poem from 1683, the resemblance of Monmouth to Charles is challenged by the conceit that multiple fathers contributed to his person. Monmouth's tutor Tom Ross addresses him from the grave:

I strive in vain thy Infected Blood to cure,

Streams will run muddy where the Spring’s Impure

In all Your meritorious Life we see

Old TAFF's invincible Sobriety.

Places of the Master of the Horse, and Spy,

You (like Tom Howard) did at once supply:

From sidney's Blood Your Loyalty did spring;

You show us all your Fathers but the king,

From whose too tender and too bounteous arms,

(Unhappy He who such a Viper warms;

As dutiful a Subject, as a Son,)

To your true Parents the whole Town you run.Footnote 40

Monmouth's meritorious life is impure because it springs from too many sources, none of which is dominant enough to assume shaping powers. Lord Taafe, Tom Howard, and Charles were known to each other during Charles's exile in the 1650s. All had affairs with Monmouth's mother Lucy.Footnote 41 While Lord Taafe communicated his heavy drinking, the poem has Tom Howard provide the office of spy and master of horse.Footnote 42 Sir Robert Sidney was rumored to be Monmouth's father, but the passage also alludes to his son, Algernon Sidney, whose republican convictions led him to join, in early 1683, the Monmouth cabal of six.Footnote 43 Since the bastard does not receive the gift of singular resemblance, Monmouth is like all of these men and many more, but unlike any one person, and especially unlike the king, whose fatherhood nowhere appears as “likeness.” In showing that the multiplicity of the illegitimate body contradicts the self-confirming fullness of true likeness, the poem suggests that merit and equality produce nothing but a hodgepodge.

When the poem notes that, in the end, Monmouth's closest affiliation is with the urban crowd, it mobilizes popular and legal lore according to which the bastard is both everybody's and nobody's child (filius populi and nullius filius). John Fortescue's late fifteenth-century treatise In Praise of the Laws of England cites civil law and “a certain poet” to justify the common law strictures on bastards: “To whom the people is father, his father is to him nobody and everybody; to whom the father is the people, he has no father.”Footnote 44 Monmouth's origins in the crowd made him both no one's and everyone's child, and other pamphlets exploited this idea in similar fashion when they referred to Monmouth as the “Son of the People” or mocked him as the man in whom “seven Fathers have a share.”Footnote 45 One effect of such multiple origins was the uncertain identity expressed by Dryden's Guise, whose first line in The Duke of Guise is: “I’m what you please to call me: Any thing, / Lieutenant General, Chief, or Constable, / Good decent Names, that only mean your Slave.”Footnote 46 Dryden plays up Monmouth's dependence on his coconspirators, but he also captures his uncertainty about his name, function, and place. Monmouth will be “Any thing” that others make him because he does not have the identity provided by legitimate descent. The lack of self-possession that characterizes the slave resonates with Monmouth's condition.

For many Tory texts, then, the bastard duke signifies a destabilizing excess of potential origins and likenesses that dissolve singular identity and inherent value. Monmouth's mixed constitution threatened nothing less than a leveling of all natural, political, and social order. This sounds like hysterical party invective, but the Tory critique was, broadly speaking, on target. It recognized, even as it distorted and denounced, that Monmouth's ambiguous origins defined his efficacy as a political agent. The lower and middling ranks were drawn to Monmouth both because he was the king's oldest son and because he was a prince who lacked the exclusive claims of patriarchal descent and inherent right. Because such lack was tied to Charles, it made kinds of order imaginable that escaped the strictures of legitimate resemblance and natural difference without relinquishing the idea of monarchy. One of the more remarkable incidents in the history of Monmouth's cultural appropriations demonstrates how enabling Monmouth's lack could be. The case of Thomas Dangerfield teaches us much about the way in which Monmouth's bastardy propelled the imagination of a different social and political order. A convicted counterfeiter of coins, Dangerfield had previously plotted against the opposition, by fabricating evidence about a presbyterian plot to overthrow Charles (named the Meal-Tub Plot after the location of supposedly incriminating documents). After the collapse of the Meal-Tub Plot, Dangerfield lost public visibility and ready cash.Footnote 47 Then, on several occasions in the early 1680s, Dangerfield began impersonating Monmouth. His appearances as Monmouth were compressed into a single narrative in the pamphlet entitled Duke Dangerfield Declaring How He Represented The D. of Mon—— in the Country (1685). The satirical broadside claims that Dangerfield imitated Monmouth in a desperate attempt to regain the prominent status he felt he deserved. Contemplating his past exploits, he asks: “Shall I now be afraid to take upon me the person of a Duke? The D. of M—— A Duke out of Fashion, and out at heels, no place nor being in the Earth, and but a Vagabond, no more then my self?” These reflections vaguely allude to Monmouth's recent misfortunes, but they also imply that it is feasible to appropriate Monmouth because he is a placeless bastard. Just like the baseborn imitator, Monmouth is but a vagabond in the world of birthright and clear origins. Monmouth is a natural target for the counterfeiter because he was himself charged with being “the base and inglorious Counterfeit” of Charles's original.Footnote 48 “I will be a Duke,” Dangerfield asserts, “and a King for the time, and why shou’d I not? I am an English Man as well as he, and I am as good a Subject as he, and for ought I know, have as good a Title to the Crown.”Footnote 49 Similar feelings motivated the ironmonger William Baker, who got into legal trouble for claiming that “the Duke of Monmouth is as lawfully begotten as I am.”Footnote 50 Monmouth's illegitimacy helped level social distinctions and promote acts of copying that undermined the idea of a singular body and inherent value. Dangerfield, indeed, soon proceeds to imitate Monmouth's own imitation of Charles II when he tried to heal people of scrofula, better known as the king's evil, and, as if by natural extension, knights “the scum.” Echoing Monmouth's own sudden elevation to the peerage, a blacksmith, a weaver, a cobbler, a carrier, and a kettle tinker become noble lords.Footnote 51 Dangerfield's violation of the hierarchy between copy and original mirrors the violation of social difference; both are motivated by the bastard's merely acquired right and his multiple origins.

Even in this satiric rendering, the Dangerfield story captures something that is central to the appeal Monmouth had for the multitude. Weavers, tanners, cobblers, and others were able to see their own baseborn status in Monmouth. “Base” could signify both low rank and illegitimacy, and such semantic flexibility promoted the identification with Monmouth. The freethinker Charles Blount played on the same soft boundary when he noted, in a notorious and widely cited pamphlet, that “No person is fitter [for the crown], than his Grace the Duke of Monmouth, as well for quality, courage and conduct, as for that his Life and Fortune depends upon the same bottom with yours: he will stand by you, therefore ought you to stand by him.”Footnote 52 Monmouth and the multitude share the same base, and this qualifies Monmouth for a kingship that would recognize the political rights of the multitude. “The old Rule is,” Blount goes on, “he who hath the worst Title, ever makes the best King; as being constrain’d by a gracious Government, to supply what he wants in Title; that instead of God and my Right, his Motto may be, God and my People.”Footnote 53

This prospect—that King Monmouth's lack of title would force him to prove himself in a closer union with his people—was conjured by the opposition press when it turned to depicting Monmouth's relationship to the multitude. These depictions bring the multitude into the field of political agency by stressing Monmouth's dependence on merit and his ease of interaction with the baseborn.

Like Shakespeare's “true-born Englishman” Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV in Richard II), Monmouth was seen to engage in a “courtship with the common people” to validate his claim to the throne.Footnote 54 When Nahum Tate revised Richard II (1681) for performance in the Duke of York's theater, he acknowledged the bond between Monmouth and Bolingbroke. He switched the source of corruption at Richard's court from Italy to France, added the term “Rebellion” to describe the goal of Bolingbroke's intimacy with the multitude, and wrote a new scene in which Bolingbroke shows his obligation to a crowd that includes “Shoomaker, Farrier, Weaver, Tanner, Mercer, Brewer, Butcher, Barber, and infinite others with a Confused Noise.”Footnote 55 Tate could count on the fact that Bolingbroke was an established precedent of Blount's “old rule” that the best kings have weak titles. Charles's genealogist Francis Sandford noted that Bolingbroke was able to gain the throne because of “the Dukes acceptableness to the people, in whose hearts he had already reigned, having won them by a generous and obliging carriage, and always asserted their Priviledges, that their Election would better pass for a Title to the Crown.”Footnote 56 Others reinforced this parallel. John Somers, for example, argued for the exclusion of the Duke of York by contending that Bolingbroke's elective title was legitimate and secure. The Earl of Shaftesbury was accused of comparing Charles II to Richard II.Footnote 57

Unable to embody the Stuart line because Lucy had “mix’d her baser Earth” with Charles's noble form, Monmouth depended on the demonstration of merit to further his cause.Footnote 58Sol in Opposition to Saturn (1683) articulated such dependence with appealing subtlety. It greets Monmouth thus: “Hail Royal Prince! Our happy Morning Star, / The Genius of our Place, the Soul of War: / High by descent, by vertue higher yet, / Which make the people crowd to kiss thy Feet.”Footnote 59 Monmouth's virtue exceeds his descent, and the difference thus opened up between bloodline and personal merit allows the poem to modify the gesture of slavish submission, which it strategically overplays. Monmouth's destiny, Sol suggested, depends on continued virtuous striving. “Finish the Vertuous Race thou hast begun,” it cheers Monmouth, “And future toils, with former Vigour run / To keep those Lawrels, thou’st already won.”Footnote 60 Monmouth could not rest on his descent or his laurels; his virtue required persistent demonstration. It is this continued toil and effort that brought the crowds to their knees, but their prostration both conceals and reveals the conditional expression of appreciated merit.Footnote 61 Displaying deference to his rank, the poem subjected Monmouth to the judgment of the crowd.Footnote 62 Monmouth's constitutive ambiguity thus becomes a way to do what was natural—paying deference to the fourth peer of the realm was an unambiguous imperative—and to shift the meaning of what was natural by endowing the crowd with judgment. In the process, Monmouth's merit becomes almost an idol, a risk Sol deems worth taking.Footnote 63

The same risk, in the interest of the same objective—the political activation of the multitude through Monmouth—was taken by A Relation of the Birth, as well as of Several Remarkable Passages during the Minority of the Victorious James, Duke of Monmouth (1679). This rough opposition pamphlet presented a detailed narrative of Monmouth's military exploits and culminated in a description of his leave-taking from London, necessary because Charles decided to banish him in 1679. After Monmouth enters the barge that takes him away from court, Relation of the Birth notes:

These breathless lines capture the compulsiveness of the connection between Monmouth and the multitude that many texts invoked.Footnote 65 Monmouth is here so powerful a presence that he literally rivets the popular gaze to his slowly vanishing barge. Even if you wanted to take your eyes off this “happy Object,” you would not have the power to do so. Such visual fixation might be (and was) condemned as idolatry, but what is more striking in the end is the crowd's activity, which is again prompted by Monmouth's virtue.Footnote 66 After seven pages of detailed narrative about Monmouth's heroic behavior on the battlefield, the pamphlet's departure scene does not pay attention to Monmouth and focuses on the behavior of the multitude. Their tears, sighs, and sorrows suggest an unusual intimacy and almost parental concern over Monmouth's destiny. When they seem to “gaze away their souls,” the passive gaze becomes active, stretching toward a more concrete connection to Monmouth, an enduring “Company.”

This concrete connection is made explicit in a poem about Monmouth's departure. It solicits the tears of England because Monmouth's noble actions “Are only squared for the common good”:

The feelings of the multitude are enlisted for the provision of a safe journey, but the journey to the royal port also assumes symbolic meanings. Despite some careful wishing for Charles's reconciliation with Monmouth, the poem imagines a Monmouth whose devotion to the common good prompts the multitude to waft him to the throne.

If the mutuality between Monmouth and multitude is clad in poetic imagery here, other texts resorted to a more literal sense of mixture to imagine a differently composed body politic. They take more direct advantage of Monmouth's ease of interaction with the baseborn. A True Narrative of the Duke of Monmouth's Late Journey into the West (1680), for example, documented Monmouth's progress in the west, which was designed to test the revolutionary potential of his popularity. At one point the broadside celebrates, not without some awkwardness, “the honest kind Good-women [who] with rustick sincerity presented to him bottles of Wine, which he courteously accepted and tasted. Some of these proud Dames could not restrain their joys, but in their homely phrase call’d out to him thus, Master, we are glad to see you, and you are welcome into our Country. And then some caught hold of his Feet, some took him by the Hand, some by the Coat, but all cried, Welcome, welcome, no Popery, no Popery, &c.”Footnote 68 Monmouth's drinking of the women's wine is as crucial an act of communion as the women's touching of his coat, hands, and feet. These physical connections figure a dehierarchized body politic of the kind that was for many undone by the increasingly hostile relationship between Charles and the House of Commons and the even more threatening prospect of Catholicism and arbitrary government under Charles's successor James. Monmouth's very particular “Welcome” and its opposite, “Popery,” appear so close to each other in the last line that the multiple, tangible connections between Monmouth and the women seem deliberately staged as a counter to the threat of undivided sovereignty. Fittingly, Monmouth is characterized as “a true hospitable lover of our dear true Protestant Englishmen.”Footnote 69

Such hospitality, especially when shown by women offering wine, could be constructed in a less sympathetic light—as was Monmouth's mingling with crowds more generally. One pornographic pamphlet seized on such hospitality when it notes, in the voice of Monmouth's collaborator Robert Ferguson, how willing married women are to support the radicals. They readily offer wine to ease the passage into a sexual intimacy designed to produce an army of bastards that carry the “Seed of Rebellion.”Footnote 70 This might or might not be an allusion to A True Narrative, but even that pamphlet is a little overinvested in the corporal union between Monmouth and what it calls the “incredible … confluence of people of all Qualities, Sexes, and Ages” that surround the Protestant duke.Footnote 71 In a slightly dysfunctional figure of speech, Monmouth's “hospitable loving” reaches an exquisite limit. On his travels Monmouth eventually reaches the town of Chard, “where was presented to him,” A True Narrative tells us, “a Collation of great variety and excellency, the second Course was the hearts and tongues of very numerous people.”Footnote 72 No literal cannibalism is intended, of course, but such figurative slippage nonetheless underscores the pamphlet's desire to escape the limits of the singular royal body and to show Monmouth's more immediate union with the multitude.

Monmouth's healing of a young woman on the same exploratory journey in the west underscores the political significance of his encounters with the populace. Elizabeth Parcet suffered from the king's evil and believed that the mysterious running sores on her body could be cured by touching the bare skin of the duke. Her first attempt misfired. “Prest in among a Crowd of People,” the pamphlet recounting Monmouth's healing explains, she was only able to touch Monmouth's glove. She persisted, however, convinced that she “must touch some part of his bare skin.” When a second opportunity suddenly came her way, she “ren[ds] off her Glove” in such haste that she breaks “not only the sores, but the skin.” The duke's own glove, meanwhile, had conveniently come off: “his hand-wrest was bare; she prest one and caught him by the bare hand-wrest with her running hand; (saying God bless your Greatness; and the Duke said God bless you).”Footnote 73 The results of this encounter were visible within a few days. Elizabeth was completely healed.

This suspenseful narrative, climaxing around contact with the duke's bare skin, caused some uproar because it appropriated for Monmouth a healing gift that was reserved for the king's touch.Footnote 74 In fact, Charles took special care to claim his ability to heal the king's evil as a unique expression of his divinely vested kingship.Footnote 75 Charles began practicing the royal touch, a customary manifestation of divine kingship since Edward the Confessor, in exile as a way of promoting his claim to the English crown.Footnote 76 Once returned to England, he regularized the ceremony to avoid fraud and improve efficiency. He engaged surgeons to determine beforehand whether the afflicted suffered from the right evil, he coined special gold medals, so-called touch-pieces, which he placed around the neck of those he cured, and he introduced strict bookkeeping to register every person who was touched.Footnote 77 As a result, we have credible numbers documenting Charles's activities. He was by far the most active of all royal healers (around 100,000 people were touched during his reign) and, as his healing in exile suggests, Charles viewed this activity in political contexts. In the year of his restoration Charles touched a remarkable 6,725 people. This number advertised how much the nation needed his divine gift and how clearly legitimate kingship was associated with his inherent right.

Charles's attention to the politics of royal touching helps explain the excited response to Monmouth's healing (and to Dangerfield's when he posed as Monmouth). The most virulent Tory response to Monmouth's touching translated the episode into blunt political terms. “A Canto on the New Miracle Wrought by the D. of M. Curing a Young Wench of the King's Evil” (1681) was published right before the last exclusionist parliament met at Oxford. Responding to the latest account of Monmouth's healing in the Protestant Intelligencer of 7 January 1681, the crass satire of “A Canto” hopes “to prevent false reports” and the impact they might have on the deliberations over the succession at Oxford. To the author of “A Canto,” Monmouth's touching is a carefully timed act, a suspicion perhaps not unwarranted given that it coincided with the Whigs’ explicit espousal of Monmouth, whose claims Shaftesbury pressed on Charles during the Oxford Parliament.Footnote 78

The poem begins with a group of “Popish Farriers” who appeal, in idolatrous fashion, to “Heav’ns Master of the Horse” (an allusion to Monmouth, who had occupied this post). They ask Monmouth to heal “the Farcy,” a horse disease roughly equivalent to the king's evil (both typically involve glandular swelling).Footnote 79 The poem then shifts its ground and turns this crowd of supplicants into a similitude of Elizabeth. Just like these lower rank craftsmen, “So to His Grace of M—— trots / A Folly Fole that had the Botts.”Footnote 80 As this “skittish Jade” impetuously grabs the delighted Monmouth's hand, the poem denounces Monmouth's touching as a sinful, diseased, and sexualized mingling of body fluids that has no capacity for healing:

The sexual and national-political dimensions of such illicit, diseased mingling are made explicit later in the poem, when Monmouth is accused that, by “touch[ing] a Kingdom for Kings-Evil. / He means to make it for its health, / A Common-Whore, a Common-wealth.”Footnote 82 The poem thus recognizes Monmouth's healing of Elizabeth as an expression of a distinct politics of touching that levels, sexually and politically, the nation. It reinforces this link by making Monmouth's sweaty and scabby hand the object of a political fortune telling. For this purpose Elizabeth changes, with dreamlike ease, into a “young Gypsie” who reads in Monmouth's hand that “The men of Westminster shall pass / High Votes in Honour of your Grace; / No prayers for fear of Black Rod, / They’ll vote (I fear) no King, no God.”Footnote 83 Reading the scene of the degraded mingling, Elizabeth sees political victory for Monmouth, but whispers in the voice of royalist politics that such victory equals not only the disappearance of divine right, but of monarchy itself. Contained in this movement from bodily mixing to the deciphering of a godless and kingless commonwealth is the realization that Monmouth's healing of Elizabeth symbolized a different political state whose origins in the illicit mingling with the multitude prevents the constitution of a healthy national body. Closely read, the mixed substances in Monmouth's hand represent the dispersal of sovereignty that would result from his election. Such dispersal, in fact, had already begun with Monmouth's appropriation of Charles's gift.

This sexist gem of royalist poetics fully recognized that touching the duke and being touched by the duke were important elements in the opposition effort to break down the difference between king and multitude.Footnote 84 Because his bastardy represented the mixture of class and gender and because Monmouth was Charles's son, his mingling with the multitude could become a spectacular enactment of a more interdependent relationship. Monmouth's mingling made forms of political composition imaginable in which the multitude partook of sovereignty and could pass judgment even though monarchy was not questioned. On the contrary, its divine nature was alive in Monmouth's blood, as Elizabeth's healing showed. At the same time, however, Monmouth's and Dangerfield's touching for the king's evil also decentered what could only take place at court and made common what Charles tried to render exclusive. By appropriating the divine sovereignty that Charles's touching was designed to demonstrate, Monmouth and Dangerfield also showed that sovereignty belonged to more than one. In response, Charles accelerated his own healing activity. After 1660, Charles touched between 3,000 and 4,000 people annually, but in 1681 that number suddenly jumped to 6,007, and in 1682 Charles cured an unprecedented 8,577 sufferers.Footnote 85 By healing large numbers of people, Charles tried to counter Monmouth's popularity among “the rabble” with his own popular politics of touching.Footnote 86 In a political struggle over sovereignty and succession that involved the deliberate mobilization of the masses by the Whigs, touching the people became an important weapon.

The Tory press tried hard to associate Monmouth with what they portrayed as a republican leveling of all social, political, and natural difference, but Monmouth's insistent ambiguity suggested a different political order. While Monmouth's face displayed the sovereign's image and fed rumors that he really was legitimate, Monmouth's close relationship to the multitude was explainable as an effect of his illegitimacy, which questioned the legally and sexually sanctioned primacy of patriarchal form. Whig writers—perhaps most dramatically Robert Ferguson—knew how to play such ambidexterity. On the one hand, the opposition financed pamphlets about a “black box” that supposedly contained conclusive evidence about the marriage between Charles and Monmouth's mother.Footnote 87 On the other hand, once these rumors had become so public that they forced Charles's Privy Council to declare that Monmouth was illegitimate, Ferguson penned his fiendishly clever Letter to a Person of Honour (1680) to declare that Tories, not Whigs, had initially planted the rumor of the black box to ridicule the possibility of a legal union. After strenuously arguing that the determination of Monmouth's legitimacy should be made by Parliament, not Charles's Privy Council, Ferguson pointed out that an illegitimate birth had never prevented anyone from becoming king or queen, “provided all things else have corresponded with the desires and Humours of the people.”Footnote 88 Monmouth's illegitimacy both was and was not the issue. The black box pamphlets nourished a useful indeterminacy that could gather people and king around Monmouth's alluring blend of the base and the noble. Monmouth's relationship to the multitude turned on the frisson that, while it was likely that he was Charles's bastard, he might really be—or could become—the king's legitimate son. Keeping both possibilities open was crucial to the effort of promoting a body politic in which sovereignty belonged to “the mixture of partners or sharers in government.”Footnote 89 In the Whig deployment of Monmouth's illegitimate body, such mixed government became concrete.

With an irony befitting Monmouth's debt to Charles II's loins, the concept of mixed government rose to prominence in seventeenth-century constitutional debates through a document that was intended to defend royal privilege, Charles I's His Majesties Answer to the XIX. Propositions of both Houses of Parliament (1642).Footnote 90 Charles's answer hoped to rein in an increasingly assertive and independently acting Parliament by invoking the Polybian concept of a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy as the best safeguard against the likely degeneration of more simply constituted political bodies.Footnote 91 If pure monarchy easily slid into “Tyranny” and pure aristocracy into “Faction and Division,” pure democracy was likely to produce “Tumults, Violence, and Licentiousnesse.”Footnote 92 Mixture, Charles argued, was superior to purity, more resilient and less likely to disintegrate. Though he was to regret such language, Charles referred to this model as a “regulated Monarchy.”Footnote 93 While Charles's pamphlet had initially conciliatory effects, its embrace of mixture as a constitutional principle was quickly taken up by radical pamphleteers, who used the language of mixture to advance the idea of a complex, shared sovereignty.Footnote 94 Robert Filmer's 1648 attack on what he called “the anarchy of a limited or mixed monarchy” reflects the royalist's disenchantment with mixture and the success with which the radicals had adopted it.Footnote 95

In the early years of the restoration, the issue of mixed government did not have much urgency, but it became pressing again during the Exclusion Crisis, when it gained additional traction through the popular images of Monmouth's relationship with the multitude.Footnote 96 John Brydall complained in 1680 that the Stuart opposition “intoxicat[ed] the Vulgar, with a new State-devised Principle, viz. That in Monarchy, the Legislative power is Communicable to the Subject, and is not Radically in Sovereignty in one but in more; so that they fancy a Mixture or Coordination in the very Supremacy it self; That the Monarchy, or highest Power it self is compounded of three Coordinate estates; And this some call a Mixt Monarchy.”Footnote 97 As Brydall's use of the term “coordination” suggests, the Whigs used mixture to undo the subordination that slotted the three estates of king, lords, and commons into a single body possessing “Unity at top.”Footnote 98 Instead, mixture rendered these estates strictly cooperative in their law-making capacity. The body politic resembled thus a “compound,” uneven and unsubordinated, in which sovereignty is exercised by a “concurrence of severall powers belonging to several estates which being mixed together make up one whole and entire power.”Footnote 99 Political mixture produced a complex interdependence of parts that cannot be captured by the figure of a singular, hierarchical body. Power was not unitary or centralized and a single will could not animate this conjunction of parts.

Such political mixture was also embraced in the one printed declaration of political principles that survived Monmouth. The Declaration of James, Duke of Monmouth (1685) was drafted, with the help of Ferguson, possibly Algernon Sidney, and others, over three years and was published in the earliest stages of Monmouth's rebellion.Footnote 100 The declaration opens with the fundamental point—familiar from Sidney and others—that government “was originally instituted by God” but that its actual form was “chosen and submitted to by Men.”Footnote 101 Historically, the declaration goes on to argue, the English nation possessed a “limited” monarchy. This point is made at instructive length:

This vision of the body politic strives to combine democracy and monarchy in such a way that the differences setting them apart are generated by a preceding unity. The welfare of the people defines the limits that empower the king. In this way, “the king can do no wrong,” a phrase much bandied about between Tories and Whigs. Although crown and subject are clearly distinguished, they cannot “justle” one another because the people's rights make the king great. The closeness of the union between the welfare of the subject and the prerogative of the king, along with the use of such key terms as “limited” and (later on) “balanced,” identifies this as a form of mixed government. One of the most influential theorists of mixed government in the seventeenth century, Philip Hunton, expressed sentiments closely related to the ones on display in Monmouth's declaration when he described the English constitution as “unparalleled for exactnesse of true policy in the whole world; such a care for the Soveraignty of the Monarch, such a provision for the liberty of the People, and that one may be justly allayed, and yet consist without impeachment of the other, that I wonder how our Forefathers in those rude unpolished times could attain such an accurate composure.”Footnote 103 The same “composure” was depicted in the opening passages of Monmouth's declaration. But this was a vision of the past. The “primitive frame of the government,” as the pamphlet goes on to explain, had disappeared in James II's attempt to turn “limited Monarchy into an absolute Tyranny.”Footnote 104 The country had to be returned, as Monmouth's friend Henry Booth put it in the House of Commons in 1680, to a sense that English government is “compounded of an absolute Monarchy and a Commonwealth.”Footnote 105 Given this aim of combining monarchy and democracy, it is unsurprising to see that Monmouth's declaration replicated the opposition strategy of claiming both legitimacy and illegitimacy for Charles's son. Monmouth declared that he did not doubt “in the least” that he was his father's legitimate son, but that he preferred to have parliament decide his title.Footnote 106

Monmouth's rebellion may have ended ingloriously, and his declaration may not have had the impact its framers had hoped for, but these failures do not tell us much about Monmouth's influence on the culture and politics of the late 1670s and early 1680s. To understand Monmouth's contribution to the history of political thought in these years, I have argued, we need to attend to a different vehicle, his illegitimate body. Drawing on the rich lore about bastards in English culture, Tories and Whigs made this body a weapon in the contest over sovereignty and succession. Both parties tried to exploit Monmouth's ability to cross the borders drawn by those who argued for indivisible sovereignty and inviolable bloodlines. Representations of Monmouth's body concretely blended, not just mediated, the conceptual divisions absolutist theorists such as Bodin, Filmer, and Hobbes imposed on the idea of political power. The one and the many, form and matter, monarchy and democracy melded as the politics of illegitimacy unfolding around Monmouth showed that sovereignty could be shared, that a well-formed body politic did not depend on subordinating matter and multitude, that kings could be elected, and that government was more durable and effective when it mixed the species of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The principle of political mixture—abhorred by Hobbes, who could see nothing but deformity in mixed government—took on flesh and blood in Monmouth's heterogeneous constitution as the king's and the people's son.Footnote 107 What seemed monstrous to many Tory pamphleteers meant revolutionary integration to many Whig writers.

Monmouth was not a major actor on the political stage, but under the pressures of the Exclusion Crisis his bastardy turned him into an “evocative object”—a term I borrow from Sherry Turkle, who has, in a very different context, emphasized how objects that stand “betwixt and between” can “fascinate, disturb equanimity, and precipitate thought.”Footnote 108 Understood in this way, Monmouth's illegitimate body served as a figure around which political thought could be incited that escaped the polarizations of this period. More effectively and more insistently than any trimmer, Monmouth prompted the imagination of more complex states of political composition in which multitude and crown touched.

Such promptings can even be felt in what some might consider the rarefied atmosphere of political theory. It is intriguing, for example, that Monmouth's diary records a conversation with his father in which Charles warned him about associating with John Locke.Footnote 109 Locke and Sidney both knew Monmouth and contributed to his cause, and their political arguments show obvious traces of the politics of illegitimacy around Monmouth.Footnote 110 I cannot demonstrate this here with the depth it deserves, but it is worth mentioning that both Locke and Sidney argue for the succession of bastards, the sovereignty of the multitude, and mixed government, and that both see these issues as closely related.Footnote 111 Much work is still needed to understand in full the hold Monmouth had on the culture and politics of the exclusion years. But it is safe to say that the popular spectacle of Monmouth's illegitimate body weakened the new theories of indivisible sovereignty that had asserted themselves through the turmoil of the civil war years; it strengthened the concept of mixed government, which would dominate early eighteenth-century constitutional thought.Footnote 112