Sometime around the 1660 Stuart Restoration, the young naturalist Francis Willughby reflected on “how fatall Adulterie and women have bene to Princes.”Footnote 1 Modern historians would be unsurprised to learn that King Charles I, tried and executed by his own subjects a decade earlier, did not appear on Willughby's ensuing list of adulterous monarchs. Indeed, much like the parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell, Charles and his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, have traditionally been celebrated for their exemplary marital chastity. Not even recent evidence of the king's infidelity has shaken this perception of the English Revolution's three leading figures as paragons of sexual virtue.Footnote 2
The same cannot be said about Charles I's royal successor, the “archetypal sexual gymnast” Charles II,Footnote 3 whose stable of mistresses and self-proclaimed “politics of pleasure”Footnote 4 garnered him both considerable public criticism from exasperated contemporaries and the celebrated title of England's “Merry Monarch” from later admirers.Footnote 5 Faramerz Dabhoiwala has provocatively argued that his reign marked a pivotal transitional moment between England's medieval “culture of public discipline” and Enlightenment ideas of sexual freedom,Footnote 6 while many others have simply noted the remarkable change in sexual openness that accompanied his accession.Footnote 7 Credit for this transformation is usually attributed to Charles II himself, whose notorious promiscuity apparently represented a refreshing change of pace for his subjects after a decade of repressive puritan rule. The result was a novel cultural milieu in which the young king's personal sexuality became a central pillar of his political identity among supporters and critics alike.
Yet Restoration sexual politics were not as unique as they traditionally have been portrayed. During the English Revolution of 1642–1660, rulers who had long been protected from libelous slander by numerous legal and cultural injunctions were suddenly faced with extensive public sexual criticism for the first time in English history. Beginning in 1640, when extraordinary political upheavals sparked an unprecedented breakdown in press censorship, explicit sexual politics—defined here as the graphic appropriation of contemporary discourses of sex and the body to explain political, religious, and social change—became an inescapable fact of life for even the kingdom's most exalted leaders. By 1660, twenty years of sustained commentary on the sexual character of kings, queens, and lord protectors ensured that anyone who ascended to the throne, be it Cromwell's timid son Richard or the dashing Stuart heir, would be caught up in this novel polemical milieu. Restoration sexual politics, in other words, were not merely the product of Charles II's natural promiscuity or a knee-jerk reaction to puritan hyper-moralism; they were also the inevitable consequence of mid-century polemical culture.
H. N. Brailsford wrote in 1961, “[I]t is amazing how many rhymes a royalist scribbler can find for ‘whore’; the modern reader can supply yet another; it begins with b.”Footnote 8 His sentiments no longer reflect the burgeoning historiography of civil war sexual polemic. Among literary scholars, Susan Wiseman's pioneering 1991 analysis of mid-century porno-political discourse has been enriched by Sharon Achinstein, Joad Raymond, Diane Purkiss, Nigel Smith, and James Grantham Turner.Footnote 9 Historians have also contributed to this literature, beginning with Ann Hughes's important study of the “vivid language of sexual contrast”Footnote 10 surrounding the Leveller movement and continuing with the work of David Underdown and Jason McElligott on the later royalist newsbooks.Footnote 11 Additional case studies continue to appear from political historians, while ongoing scholarship on mid-century gender politics has highlighted the deep cultural significance of this ostensibly trivial material.Footnote 12 Virtually no work at all, however, has been done on its implications for the broader historiography of seventeenth-century English sexual politics.Footnote 13
This essay attempts to raise the stakes by arguing that the emergence of explicitly sexual anti-monarchical print polemic during the English Revolution permanently transformed the nature of early modern sexual politics by rendering them at once more visible, more participatory, and more openly obscene than ever before. Beginning with an overview of the prewar period's underground sexual polemic, it then turns to the extensive libelous histories of Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and Charles I that proliferated in mid-century print to argue for the development of a novel political style in the effervescent public culture of revolutionary England. As the closing sections show, that style contributed immensely to the shape of sexual politics after 1660 even as postwar controversies effectively erased it from the historical record. In sum, I argue, the Restoration's extraordinarily sexualized political culture was largely a product of the revolutionary upheavals that preceded it.
As a necessarily limited survey, this analysis purposefully elides important recent work on both the seventeenth-century “politics of the family” and the dissemination, circulation, and reception of mid-century print culture.Footnote 14 Instead, by privileging the transformation of what Alastair Bellany describes as a preeminent early modern “political language” from its scribal prewar roots into a widespread printed phenomenon during the 1640s and 1650s,Footnote 15 it seeks to decisively bridge the historiographical “great divide of 1660” by arguing for the importance of the English Revolution to the development of early modern sexual politics across the seventeenth century and beyond.Footnote 16
I
Libelous sexual politics suffused English culture long before 1640. Because sexual misconduct was a commonplace early modern metaphor for political, religious, and cultural corruption, men and women at all social levels were routinely abused with sexual slander during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote 17 Moreover, the contemporary equivalence between the patriarchal household and the English commonwealth ensured that even kings and queens were susceptible to sexual criticism for both personal and political missteps. Alongside perennial concerns about the royal succession and the self-consciously sexual imagery deployed by Tudor and early Stuart rulers in art, pageantry, and print, the linkage between monarchy and patriarchy ensured that in most contemporary discussions of kingly rule, sex and politics went hand in hand.Footnote 18
As a result, early modern governments utilized a collection of injunctions against libelous rhetoric to suppress overt sexual criticisms of political authority. When combined with a pervasive cultural emphasis on civil conversation—a genteel paradigm that strictly forbade the public expression of “sexually explicit or suggestive language”Footnote 19—these systems were generally successful in excising dissident sexual material from print before 1640.Footnote 20 Verbal commentary, however, was much harder to suppress;Footnote 21 so too were the sexual slanders that proliferated in illicit but widely circulated manuscript libels.Footnote 22 Despite numerous protective mechanisms, English monarchs from Henry VIII to James I were regularly maligned with transgressive sexual commentary in a variety of subversive forms.Footnote 23
During the early to mid-1620s, these discourses reached their peak in the vicious libels directed against James's favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. In particular, Buckingham's intimate relationship with the king sparked subversive whispers that the pair were secret lovers; several bold scribal satirists even described Buckingham as James's “Ganymede,” in reference to Zeus's boy-lover of classical myth. These scandalous critiques circulated widely, albeit clandestinely, in illicit manuscript and oral forms.Footnote 24 Meanwhile, contemporaries who aired similarly charged critiques in print and onstage were forced to mask their immediate political relevance through heavy-handed historical and mythological analogies.Footnote 25 Overtly hostile commentary on monarchical sexuality thus remained fundamentally off-limits in print throughout the early 1620s, even though the Jacobean court undeniably made for a juicy target.
Yet after James's scandal-ridden reign, Charles I's 1625 accession appeared to herald a dramatic shift in royal sexual politics. The new king was intent on reforming his father's “licentious court” into a “moral community,” and he policed the sexual behavior of his courtiers accordingly.Footnote 26 Viewed alongside his queen's personal paradigm of chaste, courtly love, Charles's obsession with “moral gravitas” enabled a highly positive reading of 1630s sexual culture.Footnote 27 As Bellany writes, by mid-decade, “even its harshest critics acknowledged that Charles's court now seemed a moral place.”Footnote 28
But certain elements of Caroline court culture also exposed Charles to considerable sexual criticism. The king's emphasis on “highly sexual, prolific marriage” as a political metaphor subverted his wife's emphasis on chaste romanticism,Footnote 29 while his patronage of libertine poets inflamed godly critics.Footnote 30 Indeed, although puritan attacks on court morality rarely appeared in print, those that did were usually explosive: the godly firebrand William Prynne, for one, was brutally punished for obliquely counting the queen among the court's “Women-Actors, notorious whores,” in his 1633 Histrio-mastix.Footnote 31 Charles clearly recognized that attacks on his wife's chastity also impugned his political authority. As a French canon had written decades earlier regarding a scandalous Catholic attack on James's alleged homosexuality, “To cast light on such things . . . what is this but to jeopardize the lives and properties of kings and princes, and to engender rebellions and civil wars?”Footnote 32
In Charles's case, the order of operations was reversed. During the early 1640s, as his kingdoms spiraled toward civil war, England underwent a communications revolution. Catalyzed by successive political crises and the collapse of regime press licensing, enterprising polemicists unleashed an explosion of partisan print.Footnote 33 In the resulting mélange, sexual stereotypes contributed to burgeoning factional identities, while prominent political figures past and present increasingly fell victim to personal sexual libels in full public view. Equally troublingly, old rumors about the sexual lives of Charles's predecessors returned to political relevance.Footnote 34
The combination of unprecedented press freedom and irreversible political breakdown proved transformative for early modern sexual politics. As scholars have demonstrated, print publication during the tumultuous 1640s revolutionized English politics by fostering a deeply participatory culture of public engagement. Moreover, the costs of military mobilization led partisan writers to broach previously taboo topics in print in hopes of spurring contemporaries to action.Footnote 35 These developments rendered the underground sexual politics of prewar culture at once more visible, more dialogic, and more explicit than ever before. In short, as Valerie Traub writes, the early 1640s “reconfigured the terms of what could be said and written about sex in public,” and by October 1642, explicit sexual polemic was threatening to overwhelm even the English monarchy's long-standing protections against libelous criticism.Footnote 36
II
Shortly thereafter, Queen Henrietta Maria became the first domestic royal victim of mid-century sexual politics. Given the age-old Protestant equivalence between popery and lasciviousness, English puritans had long viewed Charles's French Catholic wife as a sexual threat. Even before the royal wedding in 1625, scribal commentators had repeatedly warned about the dangers of a popish foreigner in the monarch's bed. Afterward, Prynne's underhanded slanders against the queen in Histrio-mastix were regularly echoed in casual conversation.Footnote 37 Before 1640, however, such criticisms were limited largely to scribal and oral culture, while publicly the queen's chastity remained a central conceit of court life.
Everything changed with the outbreak of war. First during the heated debates of 1640–42, and even more forcefully after Henrietta Maria's impeachment by the Commons in May 1643, parliamentarian apologists transformed long-standing rumors about the queen's sexual character into a staple of their partisan polemic. The result was a sustained and shockingly public press campaign against her chastity that reached its peak between 1643 and 1646.
Modern historians have never examined this material in detail.Footnote 38 Instead, scholars have emphasized how the queen's Catholicism and unwomanly assertiveness contributed to hostile depictions of the king as uxorious, effeminate, and popish.Footnote 39 But in contrast to one recent argument that “fears of Henrietta's sexual domination” were “secondary” to those regarding her religion—a critique that ignores the fundamental early modern linkages between sexual and spiritual malignancy—sexual slander was effective precisely because cuckoldry cut to the heart of patriarchal kingship: a cuckolded king, like a cuckolded husband, could rule no one effectively.Footnote 40 Attacks against the queen's chastity thus compromised both Charles's patriarchal authority and the legitimacy of the royal succession, simultaneously destabilizing both the present and future of the Stuart monarchy in a way that no other libelous mode could.
The campaign unfolded in two stages. Initially, sexual slanders against the queen emerged very slowly in opposition polemic. Although dubbed “that Papist wench that lyes by [Charles's] side” by anonymous scribal Scottish commentators in 1640,Footnote 41 Henrietta Maria went largely unnamed in print until the outbreak of armed conflict, when puritan radicals began depicting her as Charles's personal Babylonian “whore.”Footnote 42 By early 1643, parliamentarians were publicly bemoaning her “absolute unlimitable power over the Kings sword and Scepter” (i.e., his penis) but remained otherwise coy about the queen's chastity.Footnote 43 Even her 1643 impeachment articles did not mention sexual misconduct outright, probably because parliamentarians remained wary of implicating the king too directly.Footnote 44 But political exigencies soon rendered their concerns irrelevant.
That summer, parliamentarians were forced to mobilize in print to counteract an abysmal spring campaign season, when a string of decisive royalist military victories left the coalition in Westminster reeling. The resulting press offensive—authorized by parliamentarian leaders desperate for a win against Charles's surging forces—made explicit reference to the queen's chastity for the first time in hopes of galvanizing support from sympathetic readers.Footnote 45 These formally licensed pamphlets compared the “incestuous extractions” of Henrietta Maria's “Florentine” ancestors with “the nobilitie, chastitie, and beautie of the German Dames”;Footnote 46 recounted the story of “Adams, Solomons, or Ahabs seducements by their wives”;Footnote 47 and railed against Romish “seducers” operating in the “Bedchamber, if not Bed,” of the king.Footnote 48 The parliamentarians’ critiques only intensified with time, and soon hostile writers were routinely accusing the queen of sexually controlling the king's “Scepter”Footnote 49 through her nightly “Curtaine Lecture[s]” in the royal bedchamber.Footnote 50
Most outrageously, the queen's enemies repeatedly claimed that she was cuckolding her husband with her chief household courtier, Sir Henry Jermyn. Whispers of impropriety had dogged the pair ever since Jermyn, a well-known philanderer, joined the queen's household in 1627.Footnote 51 The poet Thomas Carew was alleged to have caught them in bed together during the 1630s,Footnote 52 and by 1641 even the Venetian ambassador reported that Jermyn was “accused of too great an intimacy with the queen.”Footnote 53 The rumors are impossible to verify, although Jermyn's constant proximity to Henrietta Maria certainly lent them credibility. Charles, for his part, apparently paid them no heed. Parliamentarians, however, recognized in them an unparalleled opportunity to traduce in one breath the queen's morality, her husband's patriarchal authority, and the royal succession.
The semi-official newsbook Mercurius Britanicus was the first to mention the queen's adultery in print. In September 1643, its editors innocently noted Henrietta Maria's alacrity in following Jermyn (described as “either Chamberlaine to Her Majestie, or in some place as neer for certaine”)Footnote 54 “beyond sea” in late 1641.Footnote 55 But they grew significantly bolder in December, when two successive issues dubbed Jermyn a “Mortimer” in an incendiary reference to the fourteenth-century Earl of March who had conducted an illicit affair with Edward II's queen before subsequently assisting her in deposing her husband.Footnote 56 No educated reader would have missed this provocative allusion. Moreover, Britanicus was just getting started.
The newsbook would go on to reference the queen's adultery in nearly thirty issues between 1644 and 1645. Its editors constantly intimated that “lusty young Harry”Footnote 57 had earned his position through his sexual exploits, claiming that “King followes Queen, and Queen followes Henry.”Footnote 58 Multiple issues rehashed the rumored Carew incident from the 1630s.Footnote 59 Furthermore, Britanicus posited that while Charles had ennobled many of his followers, “Harry Jermin” had been “Lorded [by Henrietta Maria] upon a different occasion,”Footnote 60 and its editors made repeated references to “Harry Iermin Esquire . . . of the Queens body.”Footnote 61 A 1645 issue suggested that Jermyn in fact serviced the royalists’ entire “Female Junto,” who had held a “publike Thanksgiving . . . for the great deliverance of Harrie's Testiculanorums” after the queen's “Female-Prerogative” had “inva[ded]” his “Representative body.”Footnote 62 Britanicus even argued that Jermyn was taking turns with another royalist, George Digby, in sneaking up the queen's “backestaires without a candle”Footnote 63 for “one of Clock Consultations” while the king “was contented to lie abed for quietnes sake.”Footnote 64 In each scenario, Charles's cuckoldry was made clear: “Curst Cowes have short hornes,” the newsbook declared in April 1645.Footnote 65
Other parliamentarian writers also attacked “young Harry . . . Her Majesties Jockey . . . or Rider if you please,”Footnote 66 while one manuscript satirist dared to question whether the queen “that swears that their Heirs / came from a Norman” had in fact borne two princes that “came from a German.”Footnote 67 But even this outrageous scribal suggestion paled in comparison to John Booker's A Rope Treble Twisted, which featured a satirical sonnet, purportedly composed by the queen, which declared that when lordly husbands proved to have “weake backe[s],” their wives were justified in “tak[ing] our Groomes, by stealth, / To bring base blood ith’ common wealth.” It concluded with a cordial recipe requiring “Gelly of Harts-horne, of Iermyns owne making”: the product of a cuckolded king.Footnote 68 Meanwhile, Britanicus continued to ask why Jermyn, now dubbed the “prime Secretary to the Supreme Smock,”Footnote 69 had become a “Master of the horse, when his betters went on foot.”Footnote 70 Only after Charles's surrender to the Scots in mid-1646 did the story fall into temporary abeyance.
We do not know exactly how Britanicus's extensive readership assessed these shocking libels. Royalist polemicists, at least, were vocally affronted by the “transcendent villany”Footnote 71 with which parliamentarians “abus'd the Queene with scandalls,”Footnote 72 including jokes about her control over Charles's “Scepter.”Footnote 73 But even when royalists condemned their opponents for “call[ing] his Majestie Cuckold, the Queen Whore, and the Prince Bastard,” they never named Jermyn, perhaps for fear of lending the rumor additional weight.Footnote 74 They were clearly aware of the charge: in June 1642, for instance, Charles's chief secretary wrote to two Yorkshire justices of the peace requesting the prompt punishment of a man who had provocatively referred to one of the royal princes as “halfe French [and] halfe Germain.”Footnote 75 Later, another man was presented for saying that “the Queene was gone overnite to Holland [with Jermyn in tow] to play the whore and that all the kings issue were bastards,”Footnote 76 while others were punished after 1646 for calling her “a whore & a bawd”Footnote 77 who had been “delivered of a child at Oxford when as she had not seene his Ma[jes]tie for twelve month.”Footnote 78 Even if such language reflected mundane gossip rather than parliamentarian propaganda, it speaks to a contemporary fascination with royal sexuality that the king's enemies were clearly eager to exploit, and which royalists were equally intent on suppressing.
Between 1643 and 1646, then, parliamentarian writers conducted a sustained printed campaign against the queen's chastity that drew heavily on her genuinely intimate, although most likely nonsexual, relationship with her chief courtier. In doing so, they adapted broader cultural anxieties about Catholicism, cuckoldry, and paternity into a deeply political critique of royal sexuality that systematically undercut both the king's political authority and the legitimacy of his heirs. Moreover, Charles's alleged uxoriousness enabled an even worse reading of the affair.Footnote 79 As Britanicus noted in June 1645, it was difficult to explain why the king and “Harry Iermyn” could be so “intimate” in their “Letters” when the courtier was so literally intimate with the queen.Footnote 80 One possible answer, parliamentarians implied, was that Charles was really a wittol: a willing accomplice to his wife's infidelity.Footnote 81 This was the most shameful of all masculine categories, and the implications for his rule—especially his potential complicity in the so-called “popish plot” against England's national church—were too horrifying to contemplate.Footnote 82
Although sexual slanders appeared in print against political targets of all ranks during the first civil war, the parliamentarian attack on the queen's chastity was unrivaled in its audacity. No other person in the kingdom apart from Charles himself was ostensibly more immune to public defamation, and breaches of that protection prior to 1643 had resulted in vicious punishments. With the collapse of Caroline hegemony and the explosion of partisan print, however, opposition pamphleteers were finally free to exploit underground rumors about Henrietta Maria's sexual character, and therefore also her husband's, with an unparalleled level of visibility. Ultimately, by simultaneously arraigning the queen's chastity, the king's political authority, and the legitimacy of the succession, explicit sexual polemic became the perfect weapon against a royal couple whose preferred metaphor for monarchical authority had long been sexual, marital love.
III
Unlike Henrietta Maria, the Huntingdonshire puritan gentleman Oliver Cromwell was rarely a target of libelous sexual politics before 1640. By the time he became England's Lord Protector in 1654, however, he was perhaps the most vilified figure in the kingdom. As royalist writers tracked his meteoric ascent, they attacked Cromwell endlessly in serial newsbooks, stand-alone pamphlets, and broadsides from the mid-1640s until their virtual disappearance from English public discourse during the early 1650s. All told, although never a monarch in name, “King Cromwell” was the royalist press's most terrifying bogeyman.Footnote 83 Consequently, he also became a premier victim of royalist sexual slander.
Barring the excellent work of Laura Lunger Knoppers and Diane Purkiss, anti-Cromwellian sexual libel has largely escaped scholarly analysis.Footnote 84 Yet between 1647 and 1650, royalists shaped Cromwell into the perfect inversion of Charles's own husbandly self-image, both as a metaphorical adulterous usurper into the sacred marital relationship between king and people and a mundane tyrannical lecher. Exemplified in the “Mistress Parliament” pamphlets of summer 1648 and the satirical figure of the “Bull of Ely,”Footnote 85 respectively, these two sexual criticisms suffused royalist anti-Cromwellian polemic throughout the revolutionary decades and beyond.
The royalist offensive against Cromwell's chastity began in late 1647. That fall, as the New Model Army clashed with parliamentary Presbyterians over the kingdom's postwar future, Charles's revivified press corps began experimenting with a new polemical trope. Figuring the army's radical “Agitators” and City Presbyterians alike as “Whelps” of “Cromwells own breed,” several royalist writers placed the upstart Cromwell—now the army's second-in-command—at the center of parliamentarian radicalism with a striking inversion of the traditional English equivalence between household and commonwealth.Footnote 86 Their logic was straightforward: as a military leader, parliament man, and puritan radical, as well as a literal parliamentary father figure (several of his daughters had married into the army leadership), Cromwell virtually encapsulated the cause in a single, masculine body.Footnote 87 In other words, he was the rebellion's ideal patriarch.
Throughout 1648, as printed debates devolved into renewed civil war, royalists repeatedly claimed that the “Devills in Parliament” were mentoring “sons . . . nurs'd up so long in rebellion”Footnote 88 over whom Cromwell presided as the “Father of all Schisme, Sedition, Heresy and Rebellion.”Footnote 89 Consequently, branded the “master” of the parliamentarian “Family of seperation,”Footnote 90 Cromwell became the metaphorical progenitor of the entire parliamentarian cause in royalist print. The implications of that argument, including the possibility that an alternative lineage of puritan “Saints begotten of [Cromwell's] owne body” might unseat the Stuart monarchy, grew increasingly dire as Charles's military prospects collapsed.Footnote 91
If Cromwell was an obvious patriarchal progenitor, royalists were initially vague about the maternal “State-Catamites” upon whom the rebellion had been “begotten.”Footnote 92 By the spring of 1648, however, royalist polemicists had adapted an earlier configuration of the Long Parliament as a “painted whore” to create a new allegorical partner for Cromwell's malignant sexuality.Footnote 93 Dubbed “Mistris Parliament,” the Houses were reimagined as a woman who had fled from her rightful husband, Charles, to become “a Whore, and no better than the arrantest Strumpet that ever went upon two shoes.” After having “imprisoned her Husband,” she had “prostituted her body . . . to every lowsy Ill-dependent Rascall in the Army,” thereby utterly subverting the kingdom's proper patriarchal order.Footnote 94 Predictably, her chief adulterous partner was “king Cromwell,”Footnote 95 while their perverted offspring—the antichristian national church envisioned by puritan reformers—was figured as a monstrous “childe of deformation.”Footnote 96
Mistress Parliament marked an important escalation from earlier anti-Cromwellian sexual polemic. Rather than merely positing a heterodox genealogy of rebellious radicalism, her adultery directly indicted the kingdom's population for their complicity in the parliamentarian uprising. It also suggested that Cromwell might permanently usurp Charles's role in England's rightful household order. As the king's political fortunes imploded after the defeat at Preston in August 1648, that possibility seemed increasingly likely. Furthermore, if Cromwell did emerge victorious, royalists knew what came next: the “Rebells” would “have no King to reigne over them, except he be of the Royall Proginy of Mrs. Parliament.”Footnote 97 Cromwell's intrusion into the happy marriage of king and people thus heralded a world turned eternally upside down by the everlasting rule of the saints.
By arguing that all parliamentarian rebels had been made in Cromwell's image via a monstrous union with an adulterous parliament, royalists consolidated their long-running campaign against parliamentarian lechery into a single porno-political trope by mid-1648. But the regicide of January 1649 soon necessitated a change in polemical strategy: with Charles dead at his subjects’ own hands and his heir fled abroad, there no longer existed a stable patriarchal kingdom-household for Cromwell to subvert. Royalists adjusted their libelous portrait accordingly by transitioning away from the potent genealogical language of the previous eighteen months and instead recasting Cromwell—whose elevation as the temporary head of England's new ruling Council of State rendered him even more visible—in the familiar mold of the tyrannical lecher.Footnote 98 Thereafter, descriptions of literal sexual misconduct dominated royalist anti-Cromwellian polemic.
Of course, Charles's partisans had regularly slandered Cromwell's literal chastity before the regicide, when he was attacked for a host of sexual transgressions ranging from casual dalliances with puritan “Whory-sisters” to sodomy.Footnote 99 Nor did they totally abandon the familial metaphor after it: throughout 1649, Cromwell remained the “Father” of the Parliament's “blessed Family” in royalist print,Footnote 100 siring “Brat[s] of the Prerogative”Footnote 101 and “Cubbs”Footnote 102 of reformation with that “common-Strumpet”Footnote 103 the state in hopes that the resulting “children” would ensure “for ever and ever Parlament everlasting.”Footnote 104 But the royalists’ overwhelming focus was now Cromwell's personal chastity, which they explored through an imagined history of sexual misconduct that stretched from his youthful excesses in East Anglia to an alleged ongoing affair with the wife of his chief military subordinate. As with Henrietta Maria's purported escapades, most of these stories were entirely invented; but also like the queen's relationship with Jermyn, at least one remained plausible enough to significantly boost their political potency.
After the regicide, royalists accused Cromwell of an incredible variety of sexual crimes. Alongside generic accusations of spreading the “pox”Footnote 105 and cavorting with his puritan “sisters,”Footnote 106 Cromwell was also described as a pimp (both to his own children and the royal princess)Footnote 107 and even accused of “towz[ing]” the “Back-doore[s]” of his parliamentarian colleagues.Footnote 108 Royalists famously satirized Cromwell's large nose as a pox-infected instrument of sexual pleasure,Footnote 109 but in addition to lampooning his “notable Head-piece,” they also parodied “another Piece too”—“every inch of him.”Footnote 110 During the 1649 Irish campaign, for example, royalists announced that Cromwell had “lost Lusts Instrument” when a “brace of bullets in his Gennitals” shot off his diseased “Main-yard” but “missed the rest of his Tacklings.”Footnote 111 In each case, Cromwell's sexual “concupiscence” became a key part of his treasonous character: his “flesh” simply “Rebell[ed] against the spirit,” just like “hee against the King.”Footnote 112
These exploits were often subsumed under the libelous moniker of the “Town Bull of Ely.”Footnote 113 This trope, derived from Cromwell's imagined sexual dalliances as an East Anglian youth, encompassed his most notable carnal attributes—hyper-masculinity and effeminate cuckoldry—in a single label that hostile writers deployed recurrently after the regicide. After a wild string of sexual conquests, the royalists’ story went, Cromwell had been exiled from Ely “for getting Bastards”Footnote 114 with “seven Wenches”Footnote 115 (others insisted it was only “six”), but not before he was “forced to Marry” his “Fathers Maide” after “having got [her] with Child.”Footnote 116 From there, due in part to his talent for seducing a “Shee-Saint” with a “Town-bull trick,”Footnote 117 he relocated to London and subsequently clawed his way to political and paternal ascendancy: all parliamentarian rebels, royalists argued in a familiar genealogical idiom, were “Calves of this Town-Bulls begettting [sic].”Footnote 118
Just as bulls embodied aggressive sexuality, the most iconic element of Cromwell's “Town Bull” persona was his alleged affair with Frances Lambert, wife of the parliamentarian general John Lambert. As royalist libelers well knew, Cromwell and Frances were undeniably close, although modern biographers insist that the relationship was nonsexual.Footnote 119 But even friendly intimacy proved sufficiently incriminating. The accusation first emerged in a September 1648 newsbook, which claimed that Lambert's “Pretty Spouse,” “being Ambitious to tast of the fruites of Royalty,” had offered herself to “King Oliver.”Footnote 120 Thereafter, accounts of Cromwell “feed[ing] upon the sweet flesh”Footnote 121 of Mrs. Lambert during their “sweet Paphian sports” became a staple of anti-Cromwellian sexual libel.Footnote 122 Not only did graphic depictions of Cromwell “driv[ing]” his “Nayle” into “Lamberts wife, the Jael of the day,” indict the Commonwealth's chief political leader and its preeminent military commander as an adulterer and a cuckold, respectively; they also pointedly contradicted the new regime's professed commitment to moral reformation.Footnote 123 When compared with Charles's self-presentation as a loving patriarch-king, the Cromwell-Lambert affair was damning indeed.
Another aspect of the “Town Bull” persona—its prominent horns—undermined Cromwell's masculinity even as it showcased his alarming fecundity. Gender scholars have long recognized that early modern moralists identified hyper-masculine sexuality with cuckoldry due to an immoderate obsession with lust.Footnote 124 Accordingly, Cromwell's wife, Elizabeth—who by all accounts shunned public affairs even after her husband became lord protector—also featured in royalist anti-Cromwellian libel as an enthusiastic adulteress.Footnote 125 Among her rumored paramours were parliamentary administrators and puritan divines as well as at least one “impoverished Cavalier” who played “at the In and In”Footnote 126 with Cromwell's “yeast and graynes Lady” while her husband was away on campaign.Footnote 127 Her usual partner was the parliament-man Herbert Morley, one of Cromwell's fiercest opponents during the 1650s, and multiple tracts depicted Elizabeth being “devoutly kist”Footnote 128 by Morley while they cavorted together in the Parliament's “Nurceries of Sodomy, Lust, and Uncleanness.”Footnote 129 The fact that royalists also accused Cromwell of “Pymp[ing]” for his wife made her transgressions even more conspicuous.Footnote 130 Finally, by trumpeting Cromwell's cuckoldry, royalists also questioned the legitimacy of his offspring. As in the case of Henrietta Maria, anti-Cromwellian sexual slander was a multipurpose political weapon.
New Commonwealth censorship legislation passed in September 1649 eventually put an end to most royalist anti-Cromwellian sexual libel. Unfortunately, apart from seditious verbal comments on Cromwell's chastity, little evidence survives of its reception among contemporaries.Footnote 131 Even so, its significance is self-evident. Although sexual libel comprised just one element of royalist anti-Cromwellian defamation, it served several important polemical purposes by slotting Cromwell into the long-standing anti-puritan stereotype of the lecherous puritan zealot while also harnessing broader social anxieties about unfit patriarchs and adulterous wives. Moreover, the Mistress Parliament metaphor uniquely embodied royalist interpretations of the parliamentarian rebellion as a deeply gendered subversion of proper sexual-political order. Indeed, that language proved prophetic for some royalists, who saw the regicide as proof that the kingdom itself had become a whore to “Crumwells lust.”Footnote 132 As the birth of the English Commonwealth proved, when combined with Cromwell's hyper-fecundity, Mistress Parliament's procreative power threatened to permanently turn the world upside down.
As time went on, royalists focused increasingly on Cromwell's literal sexual misdeeds, first as a Cambridge youth and later as a wayward husband to his equally wanton spouse. The change was linked to Cromwell's own perceived transition from rebellious subject to upstart head of state, although he never held more than a temporary leadership position in the republican regime. Even so, as the specter of “King Cromwell” loomed throughout 1649, royalists seized on both the classical association between lust and tyranny and Cromwell's public friendship with Frances Lambert to attack his personal chastity and through it the Commonwealth's political illegitimacy. In doing so, they crafted a debauched Cromwellian lineage (even going so far as to indict his “great Grand Father” for the far-fetched crime of “committ[ing] Incest” with “his own Daughter” and later murdering their child) to argue that the entire family was sexually corrupt. In sum, both metaphorically and literally, royalists claimed that the Commonwealth's “Monstrous Government” was the result of Cromwell's unnatural virility.Footnote 133 They would continue to do so covertly throughout the interregnum until the Restoration once again brought Cromwell's libelous history to the forefront of public debate.
IV
Only one person in the kingdom remained ostensibly immune from public libel when royalists began their campaign against Cromwell's chastity in late 1647: Charles I himself. Granted, like his predecessors, the king had long been accosted by seditious oral and scribal commentary, but overtly sexual criticisms remained largely anomalous throughout the early 1640s. Indeed, even as hostile writers began to target other members of the royal family in print, the parliamentarian fiction of Charles's “evil counsellors” protected him from all but the most subversive libelous polemic.Footnote 134 Yet this fable, along with the traditional protections from public defamation that all English monarchs had enjoyed prior to 1640, rapidly deteriorated as the war dragged on. Parliamentarian publications, including Britanicus, soon took direct if controversial aim at the king's person, and by mid-decade puritan radicals were blaming Charles personally for the ongoing strife.Footnote 135 By 1647, the king's previous immunity from public libel hung on by a thread.
Royalists were not complacent during this alarming process of desacralization. Between the pervasive household/commonwealth analogy and the king's preferred political metaphor of fecund, marital love, Charles's partisans had long recognized that sexual politics could prove particularly devastating to his authority. As such, they actively rebutted sexual criticisms of the king throughout the period by reassuring readers that Charles (always presented as a loving patriarch-king) remained “a president of unblemisht Chastity,” despite all those who “would have held it a Preferment to be Attorny to His Royall Lust, or Secretary to His Bosom Sinne.”Footnote 136 Royalist apologists were aided by the lack of any visible evidence that Charles was debauched; even his opponents praised the king's “temperate, chast, and serious” demeanor in comparison with the well-known “debosheries” of his father's court.Footnote 137 By the decade's end, however, not even Charles's impeccable reputation could save him from the all-encompassing reach of mid-century sexual politics.
In January 1649, the king's personal chastity was directly challenged in print for the first time. Just weeks before his execution, the radical newsbook The Moderate printed a lurid account of Charles's undue affections for the “hansom” “young Ladies” who visited him in captivity, while also noting his “hot and eager” longing for a “black Wench” who had allegedly attended him on the Isle of Wight.Footnote 138 This minor aside, which cast the king as a randy fornicator, may have been based on the secret affair conducted between Charles and the royalist spy Jane Whorwood during the previous summer.Footnote 139 Regardless of its veracity, it was undeniably a landmark moment; no one had ever before claimed in print that Charles was sexually lascivious. Crucially, however, The Moderate was a radical outlier at the margins of parliamentarian politics. No other hostile publications dared to question the king's chastity before his trial, perhaps to make it easier for him to plead guilty and thereby save his own life.Footnote 140
Yet everything changed after the regicide. Although historians have generally followed Kevin Sharpe's argument that after the king's death, “no one cartooned Charles I's body either in images or words,” a thorough reading of post-regicidal republican polemic reveals that the king's chastity did in fact become a target for Commonwealth polemicists by the summer of 1650.Footnote 141 As a result, anti-monarchical sexual libel was decisively transformed from a cultural taboo into a regular feature of English public politics.
That revolutionary development was sparked by several political emergencies that confronted the new republic shortly after its inception, including the publication of the king's enormously popular posthumous memoir, Eikon Basilike, and the outbreak of renewed war with Charles II's Scottish allies in 1650.Footnote 142 Faced with these threats, the Commonwealth abandoned its earlier reluctance to publicly address Charles's sexual character. Beginning in 1649, parliamentarian apologists challenged the political and moral credibility of their resurgent royalist enemies by attacking the dead king's crown, his family, and, eventually, his person in explicitly sexual terms. By the mid-1650s, Charles I's sexual reputation, along with that of his ancestors and the English monarchy itself, had been thoroughly tarnished by Commonwealth apologists. Moreover, his exiled heir had become a perennial target of similar rhetoric. Consequently, when Charles II finally gained the throne in 1660, he was a practiced veteran of sexual politics.
The full republican attack on Charles I opened with John Milton's Eikonoklastes, which appeared in late 1649 with the regime's formal assent in order to challenge the massive success of the Eikon Basilike. Sex was not the prevailing theme of Milton's riposte, but even so, it repeatedly assailed Charles's gentlemen as “the ragged Infantrie of Stewes and Brothels” and his “Court Ladies” as “not the best of Women.” Milton also attacked the “licentious remissness” of Charles's “Sundays Theater,” long depicted by godly writers as a hotbed of illicit sex, and questioned whether there were “any Males” at all among the “dissolute rabble” of his courtiers. In each case, Milton indicted the Caroline court as inherently debauched and insufficiently masculine—a legacy that was partly “deriv'd from the example of his Father James.” In a hereditary monarchy, it seems, lechery could prove a potent inheritance.Footnote 143
Milton took more aggressive aim at Charles's favored analogy between kingship and fatherhood. Addressing the common patriarchal depiction of parliaments as female consorts of the monarch's “procreative reason”—an argument that had tacitly underwritten the Mistress Parliament tracts of 1648—Eikonoklastes offered a different reading: “Certainly it was a Parlament that first created Kings,” Milton wrote, “and not onely made Laws before a King was in being, but those Laws especially, wherby he holds his Crown.” Therefore, “if he count it not male,” parliament's proper female analog was not wife or daughter but rather the “Mother” of monarchy, and Charles's tyrannical pretensions were nothing less than the realization of Nero's historic “dream of copulation with his Mother.”Footnote 144 Alongside his imputations against the dead king's debauched court, Milton's attack on the fatherhood/kingship analogy thus challenged the sexual validity of patriarchal monarchy, the Stuart family, and, somewhat obliquely, Charles himself. Although Eikonoklastes was not intended as a manifesto of republican sexual politics, all three themes would reappear in Commonwealth polemic for years to follow.
Meanwhile, the regime's broader sexual case against patriarchal kingship was already well underway. Its inaugural declaration of March 1649 had accused Charles of exceeding all his “Forefathers” in pursuing the “lusts . . . of a Tyrant,”Footnote 145 and even before that Milton had numbered “rapes” and “adulteries” among the crimes associated with tyrannical rule.Footnote 146 The republican campaign later that year amplified these critiques into a staple of anti-monarchical print, as numerous regime apologists reflected on the historical connections between sexual license and tyrannical kingship. Polemicists referenced the “very lascivious”Footnote 147 Henry VIII and suggested that Mary Tudor's malignancy was due her “incestuous” origins,Footnote 148 while others reminded their readers that William the Conqueror was himself a bastard, thereby compromising the legitimacy of all post-Conquest monarchs.Footnote 149 Still more apologists evoked the biblical story of David's adultery with Bathsheba to make a similar point: all kings were dangerously susceptible to lust.Footnote 150
The historical argument was only one element of the republicans’ case against monarchical sexuality. Building on a classical equation between lust and political absolutism that prefigured the “rapist-tyrant” figure of the Restoration, Commonwealth apologists relentlessly equated political tyranny with sexual excess.Footnote 151 Even before the regicide, the puritan prophetess Elizabeth Poole had described Charles as a sexually troubled “Father and husband” to his subjects, whom he hoped to make “a generation to his own pleasure” as if “a wife for his own lusts,” and republican polemicists took a similar line after his execution.Footnote 152 George Walker observed that “the greatest Tyrants” were identifiable by the “vicious and debauched” nature of “their lewd lives,”Footnote 153 while John Goodwin stressed infidelity rather than rapacity when he argued that “A King, and a Tyrant, are as specifically distinct, as a lawfull husband, and an adulterer.”Footnote 154 In most cases, the “Rapes and Ravishments” inflicted by tyrants on “the Priviledges of this Commonwealth” thus did not preclude the existence of good kingship,Footnote 155 but for others, “fowle mistris Monarchy” (notably gendered female) was an inherent enabler of the “lusts of one man and his posteritie.”Footnote 156 Marchamont Nedham noted in 1651 that “Cato called a King . . . a Ravenous Creature,” predisposed to “Cruelties and Rapine,”Footnote 157 while Anthony Ascham made the same case in starker terms: “The nature of Marriage and of Government differ extreamly,” he declared, because “to take this or that woman to wife, is a thing of free choice; but it is not so alwaies with the People in relation to Kings, who have many of them committed great Rapes upon them.”Footnote 158 For these extremists, sexual license was not merely the mark of a tyrant but a constitutive feature of kingly government.
Throughout, republican polemicists argued that sexual incontinency in a king boded ill for his people, and this was nowhere clearer than in the case of Charles's own family. Although scandalous accounts of James's court had appeared in print as early as May 1643,Footnote 159 it was not until many months after the regicide that the Stuarts became a republican obsession. The chief catalyst was Charles II's 1650 alliance with the Scots, which prompted a flood of attacks against the (Scottish) House of Stuart in hopes of discrediting its young heir and his northern subjects.Footnote 160 Thus, while neither James nor Mary Stuart had featured heavily in the initial republican assault, both were soon deeply caught up in Commonwealth polemic.
Between 1650 and 1652, Charles's ancestors appeared repeatedly in republican print. One tract described Mary Stuart as a “lusty young Widow” well versed in adulterous trysts,Footnote 161 while Anthony Weldon's posthumous Court and Character of King James—probably edited for publication after Weldon's death by a regime affiliate—reflected on James's “passion of love” for male courtiers with “young Faces, and smooth Chins,” which Weldon argued had led him to publicly fondle his male favorites and demand sex from especially comely subjects.Footnote 162 James's “Natural inclination to effeminate faces” quickly became a running theme of anti-Stuart print polemic.Footnote 163 Meanwhile, others detailed Mary Stuart's extramarital sexual escapades and questioned whether the royalists’ uncritical “devotion to succession” meant that they had pledged their allegiances to a bastard rather than a lawful Stuart heir.Footnote 164 When combined with general attacks on the Scots’ sexual “uncleanness” (an attribute presumably shared by Scottish kings), sexual libels against Charles's ancestors allowed republicans to challenge the hereditary legitimacy of their current Stuart foe while also demeaning his predecessors’ moral authority.Footnote 165
Yet while both Charles's family and his crown fell victim to sustained sexual criticism shortly after his execution, the dead king's personal chastity remained basically untarnished for more than a year. True, Milton had indicted Charles as “effeminate and uxorious” in Eikonoklastes and hinted further that “the lukewarmness of his life” was the fault of the “polluted trash of Romances and Arcadia,”Footnote 166 while other critics had alluded to Charles's tyrannical “lusts.”Footnote 167 Otherwise, however, Charles's chastity remained largely off-limits from direct attack until the spring of 1650. At that point, prompted by the recent success of Claudius Salmasius's Defensio Regia Pro Carolo I—a scathing Latin indictment of the regicide by an internationally recognized French intellectual—republican writers unleashed a sudden blitzkrieg against the dead king's sexual character.Footnote 168 As Milton wrote four years later, although he had strenuously avoided “insulting the departed spirit of the king” in Eikonoklastes, “Salmasius then appeared.”Footnote 169 With the Commonwealth's reputation under assault from a prominent foreign apologist, Charles's chastity finally became an acceptable target.
The delay needs explaining. Why, after accusing the dead king of tyranny, popery, and the murder of his father, did his personal sexuality remain unmentioned until prompted by Salmasius's international polemic?Footnote 170 Despite its voluminous political significance, adultery hardly outranked patricide in early modern moral thinking. The answer, it seems, was just as much personal as political. First, depictions of Charles as a promiscuous adulterer were simply not believable; a radical newsbook had even argued against Charles's legitimacy in October 1648 by suggesting that he was obviously too “sober” to be James's son.Footnote 171 But even more importantly, for subjects “to prye into their Princes Curtaines” was profoundly transgressive, and by mid-1650 those “curtaines” marked the only remaining vestiges of Charles's once-pervasive protections against public libel.Footnote 172 Considering that he had already been tried, executed, and dragged through the mud in republican print, the Commonwealth arguably had nothing more to gain from peering into the bedchamber of a king who—unlike his long-dead father—still commanded a great deal of reverence among English subjects. Only with Salmasius's provocation, on an international stage, did the republicans decide to breach that final frontier.
In fact, Milton's initial 1651 response to the Defensio Regia had pointedly avoided Charles's “more private habits and hidden retreats” by warning Salmasius to demur, “lest I be forced to recount stories of Charles which I would otherwise gladly pass over.” Of course, he then spoiled the effect by presenting Charles's habits of “kiss[ing] women wantonly” and “play[ing] with the breasts of maids and mothers” as sufficient evidence of his debauchery; but even these slanders were published in learned Latin rather than for popular, public consumption.Footnote 173
Others were more forthright. Writing just before the publication of Milton's First Defense, the author of Eikon Alethine resurrected the rumor of the queen's adultery and suggestively wondered whether “the late King and she, differed a little in [sexual] honesty as well as Religion.”Footnote 174 In a different vein, Henry Parker worried that Charles II had been infected by his father's “polluted loyns,”Footnote 175 and another writer claimed that the dead king had been debauched since his youth, when “King James” had participated in his son's first sexual experience by “lay[ing] on that same bed” and “blowing the bellowes to that fire.”Footnote 176 Meanwhile, William Lilly argued that Charles “did not greatly Court the Ladyes” although “he was manly and well fitted for Venerious spoarts,” and he “rarely frequented illicite Beds.” “I do not heare,” Lilly concluded, “of above one or two naturall Children he had, or left behind him.”Footnote 177
The most vicious slanders against Charles's chastity appeared in Edward Peyton's Divine catastrophe of the kingly family of the House of Stuarts (1652). Peyton was an old, embittered parliament-man whose millenarian anti-monarchism led him to exhaustively tabulate the executed king's “unsatiable desires” as proof of the regicide's providential significance. First, Peyton argued that Charles had somehow “bedded” Henrietta Maria prior to marriage, and in return she had “horn-beaten” him by indulging in numerous extramarital affairs.Footnote 178 Indeed, the royal marriage was predicated on infidelity, since “one had the freedome of Mistresses, and the other of Servants.” To demonstrate Charles's “lubricity with divers Ladies,” he described how one gentlewoman had so satisfied the king that Charles had sent her husband “into the Low-countries” so that he “might have more freedome with her.” (This was clearly a spin on the David and Bathsheba story beloved by other republican writers.) Peyton also attacked Charles's ancestors, even claiming that James's wife, Queen Anne, had “initiated” her son Henry into “the Court of Cupid” by “shut[ting] him under lock and key in a chamber with a beautiful young Lady,” while rejoicing that with the end of monarchy, “there will be no beautiful Rosamonds to hinder a pious government; no Mortimers to entice to his bed and lust the wives of princes.” In sum, Peyton's libelous tract showcased the full run of sexual attacks against Charles, his family, and his crown.Footnote 179
At the climax of the English Revolution, sexual politics thus became an integral part of the republican case against Charles I. Unsurprisingly, contemporaries paid attention. Some readers were clearly unimpressed: one copy of A Disingag'd Survey contains a handwritten objection that Mary Stuart was in fact “not illegitimate” because “the marriage was made good,”Footnote 180 while another skeptic refuted Lilly's claim that Charles had fathered several bastards by scribbling, “I never could hear of any” in a marginal note.Footnote 181 The case of Helen Wood, arraigned in 1649 for saying “that the late king of England would have Ravished her,” is suggestive: might she have been inspired by portrayals of Charles as sexually rapacious?Footnote 182 On balance, however, many observers like the Oxfordshire minister Thomas Wyatt, who described Charles in 1649 as “proper of person & a virtuous & a good king” who had “loved” his queen “intirely & had by her much fayre issue,” were probably unconvinced by republican descriptions of Charles's sexual malignancy.Footnote 183 Of course, that did not deter Commonwealth apologists from making their case.
They found one very attentive audience in the dead king's partisans, who had always numbered chastity among Charles's greatest attributes. Accordingly, praise for his sexual restraint increased dramatically after 1649, although some royalists continued to insist that the royal couple's remarkable fecundity had led to “Progeny, as numerous as the Planets, [which] kept their royal Station in this Earthly Heaven.”Footnote 184 Whether the post-regicidal emphasis on Charles's “Unbatter'd Chastity”Footnote 185 in the face of “millions of provocations”Footnote 186 was merely a feature of his new martyr image or an active response to the “lewde slanders” of republican polemicists, it became a fixture of royalist elegies during the 1650s.Footnote 187 Neither friends nor foes overlooked the political significance of royal sexuality, even in death.
The post-regicidal debates over Charles's chastity marked the culmination of nearly a decade of acrimonious public sexual politics. Like the earlier campaigns directed against Henrietta Maria and Oliver Cromwell, republican sexual libels against the king adapted a set of well-known gendered metaphors to fit the novel political milieu of revolutionary England. It did not hurt that in the first two cases especially, there were viable, albeit improbable, grounds for suspecting sexual misconduct. Even so, in airing such allegations in partisan print, hostile writers transgressed a fundamental rule of prewar political culture. The Commonwealth's decision after 1650 to posthumously slander Charles's personal sexuality—a subject so taboo that it remained off-limits in republican polemic long after he had openly been dubbed a vicious tyrant—proved the decisive blow. Never again would royal sexuality be immune from public commentary.
V
In 1653, a parliamentarian historian celebrated that while it had once been a “Crime even to name Kings” because “the Beams of that Majesty” were “too bright and splendid to be overcast with the Mantle of Malice,” the Commonwealth's victory had ensured that all monarchical “Examples of baseness, and unworthiness” would now be “truly and genuinely related” in order to “deter” other rulers from poor behavior.Footnote 188 The surprisingly virulent polemical atmosphere of the interregnum proved him right. Just as the Commonwealth continued to focus on the erotic overseas adventures of Charles II, royalists slandered Cromwell's sexuality in manuscript and subversive print throughout the decade after his coronation as England's lord protector further entwined his personal moral character with the English state.Footnote 189 Meanwhile, underground cavalier polemicists reproduced numerous prewar manuscript libels in printed poetic “drolleries”—including several attacks on the lasciviousness of James I's court repurposed by royalist writers to combat the stifling hyper-morality of interregnum puritanism—that rapidly drew the ire of Cromwellian authorities.Footnote 190 For his part, Charles II soon grew so inured to hostile sexual criticism that by 1659 he could joke that “they have done me to[o] much honore in assigning me so many faire laydies, as if I were able to satisfie the halfe.”Footnote 191
After Oliver's death in 1658, his son Richard inherited the libelous attention of royalist critics who repeatedly questioned his parentage and accused him of homosexuality.Footnote 192 But Richard did not reign long before an army revolt set in motion the events culminating in the 1660 Stuart Restoration, and his forced abdication occasioned a flood of vicious printed tracts against his rebellious predecessors.Footnote 193 Oliver was a particularly popular target, and the dead protector's escapades with Mrs. Lambert quickly became fodder for pamphlets announcing that “Lambert would also borrow the block, / As well as my Lady did Olivers cock.”Footnote 194 Eventually, the tryst even appeared on playing cards.Footnote 195 Similarly obscene references circulated in Restoration polemic for decades to follow.
Meanwhile, Charles II recognized that his best chance of subverting the explicit sexual politics that had become an inescapable feature of English public culture was to transform his sexuality from a political liability into a personal emblem. Accordingly, the young king pioneered a new “aesthetics of pleasure”Footnote 196 in which he “presented himself as an amorous husband to the nation” and trumpeted his virility as evidence of his political prowess.Footnote 197 By proudly parading his mistresses in public and encouraging the libertine tendencies of his courtier companions while simultaneously sanctioning lascivious anti-puritan printed satires alongside other deeply sexual poetic, artistic, and dramatic works, Charles invited his subjects into the royal bedchamber like never before. As Erin Keating has shown, sympathetic writers responded by theorizing a new affective connection—framed in specifically sexualized terms—between king and people in popular secret histories that figured Charles II as a romantic hero.Footnote 198 In the short term, the king's decision to embrace the sexual politics of revolutionary England appeared highly effective. When Alexander Brome wrote in the preface to an obscene 1662 printed collection of anti-puritan verse that “now . . . there is no Cavalier, because there is nothing else,” he was signaling the cultural apotheosis of explicit royalist sexual politics.Footnote 199
Ultimately, however, the king's new strategy proved highly problematic. While many contemporaries embraced his new promiscuous persona, others vocally disapproved, and their protests only increased as Charles's amorous adventures yielded numerous bastards but not a single legitimate heir. The disastrous mid-1660s intensified their antagonisms even further, and by the decade's end, even as he flaunted his promiscuity as a personal symbol, Charles was regularly falling victim to vicious slanders that connected tyranny and sexual corruption in a similar manner to those that had appeared in print against his father a decade earlier—including a slew of hostile references to his monstrous penis-scepter. Remarkably, however, these new libels were often even more vicious than those that had dogged Charles I. One representative poem described the king standing with his penis in hand while “ten thousands maids . . . all c[un]ts of honor, some of Queenly Breed . . . come to be anointed with thy royal seed.” The catalyst for this heightened obscenity was Charles's own enthusiastic support for libertine poetics and pornographic anti-puritan discourse. By thoroughly demystifying his debauched private life, the king provided a wealth of ammunition for observers who responded with increasingly coarse commentary on Charles's personal sexual habits. In time, lampooning the royal body also became a kind of courtly game: even the king's boon companion the libertine Earl of Rochester eventually dared to satirize him as “the sauciest one that ere did swive . . . [and] break through those to come to any cunt.”Footnote 200
Renewed press censorship confined most of these libels to manuscript and oral forms during the first two decades of the reign; like his father, Charles II recognized that overtly hostile critiques of royal sexuality represented a considerable danger to the state. Yet concurrent developments in Restoration culture enabled the widespread dissemination of libelous anti-Stuart manuscript polemic.Footnote 201 In booksellers’ shops and professional scriptoriums, scribal texts were reproduced and circulated at a rate that caused the royal censor Sir Roger L'Estrange to fume in 1675 that manuscript libels were “well nigh as Publique” as those that appeared in print.Footnote 202 The rise of new public spaces such as the coffeehouse provided additional avenues for the proliferation of oppositional sexual libel. Moreover, after the temporary expiration of the Licensing Act in 1679, and again after its permanent lapse in 1695, those discourses returned to print with a vengeance.Footnote 203 As evidenced by Samuel Pepys's unabashed enthusiasm for discussing his monarch's penis and ogling his numerous mistresses, the sexualized royal body had become a permanent subject of public discussion across the political spectrum.Footnote 204
Meanwhile, Restoration press censorship simultaneously worked to erase the legacy of mid-century republican sexual politics. As we have seen, much like his son—albeit with markedly different emphases—Charles I had deployed royal sexuality as a political metaphor. By 1660, however, the elder Stuart's amorous self-image had been substantially undercut by his post-regicidal reinvention as a chaste martyr.Footnote 205 Indeed, odes to Charles I's “pure, chast, and unspotted”Footnote 206 character proliferated so extensively during the interregnum that one Restoration apologist felt compelled to publish a hasty corrective: while the dead king's “chastity” was “so exemplary” that he was even “thought less than a man by some,” this anonymous author wrote, the “happy fruit and satisfactions of a Matrimonial Bed” had utterly “vindicated that suspition.”Footnote 207 His struggle to rescue Charles I's fecund self-representation was complicated by the new regime's efforts to suppress a set of printed republican attacks from the 1650s, several of which made reference to the dead king's alleged debaucheries.Footnote 208 Together, these developments effectively muted the linkages between the innovative sexual politics of Charles I's reign and those that characterized his son's libertine court. Even thirty years later, as different polemicists feuded over the legacy of Stuart tyranny, Charles I's chastity remained largely unblemished, while the sexual escapades of both James I and Charles II received substantial libelous coverage.Footnote 209 With very few exceptions, slanders against the martyr-king's sexual morality never again surfaced in print after 1660.Footnote 210
Only Cromwell's libelous sexual history survived the Restoration intact; indeed, at least one late-eighteenth-century biographer still believed that he had “probably . . . had natural children.”Footnote 211 But Oliver's debauched legacy also eventually disappeared with time, partially prompted by his nineteenth-century rehabilitation by Victorian nonconformists.Footnote 212 With that final transformation, the Restoration's exuberant sexual culture was permanently decoupled from the revolutionary upheavals that had engendered it. Later efforts to revisit the effusive sexual politics of the civil war period, including those of Whiggish historians to mine the lurid republican histories of James's court for evidence of corrupt Stuart absolutism, were decisively crushed by the revisionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. By disqualifying printed sources as ideologically compromised and, in some quarters, preemptively dismissing contemporary criticisms of Charles I in hopes of rehabilitating his poor political reputation, revisionists once again relegated mid-century sexual politics into historiographical irrelevance.Footnote 213 They are only just beginning to return to our attention.
VI
Sexual politics were not invented in 1660. Instead, Restoration sexual culture owed a considerable debt to the novel polemical milieu of the English Revolution, which by mid-1650 had transformed prewar England's underground sexual politics into a widespread polemical phenomenon from which not even monarchs were safe. Both as a mundane tool of libelous polemic and a novel public transcript through which contemporary readers—the inaugural members of what Traub calls England's “nascent sexual public”—could assess and debate the character of their political leaders, explicit sexual polemic emerged from the revolutionary decades as an inescapable feature of English monarchical politics.Footnote 214 The remarkable openness of Restoration sexual culture was largely the result of Charles II's innovative attempts to confront and contain that new political reality, which would remain a fact of English public life throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.Footnote 215
Granted, late Stuart sexual culture was unique in several respects, not least in terms of Charles II's own public promiscuity, which stood in stark contrast with the somber moralism of his immediate predecessors. But even the young king's personal dissoluteness may have been purposefully amplified in order to blunt the inevitable impact of mid-century sexual politics. England's celebrated Merry Monarch, in other words, may well have intentionally adopted his promiscuous persona out of political necessity rather than merely submitting to a natural predisposition toward lechery. If so, it was a remarkable achievement.
One thing, at least, is certain: like Francis Willughby, historians must reevaluate the usefulness of “fatall Adulterie”—in print, if not in practice—for understanding the causes, course, and consequences of the English Revolution.Footnote 216 Clearly, the high-minded rhetorics of universal human rights, religious toleration, and political liberty that have dominated recent accounts of the period were not the only meaningful fruits of mid-century polemical debate. Nor, considering the fulsome sexual politics of postwar England, were they the most immediately important. Instead, the unprecedented outpouring of sexual polemic during the English Revolution numbered among the most significant political inheritances bequeathed to both Charles II and his most committed opponents. As demonstrated by the ongoing historiography of Restoration sexual exceptionalism, it proved to be an era-defining legacy.
