“Virtue’s commonwealth”: gendering the royalist cultural rebellion in the English interregnum (1649-1660)

Abstract

Historians and literary critics have acknowledged the ways in which royalism during the English civil war period came to be associated with the “feminisation” of Stuart court culture, and of the king’s cause as a whole. However, they have failed to attend adequately to the deliberate focus on women and female cultural authority within the literature associated with the “royalist cultural rebellion” (the movement that sought to preserve and recall the ethos and identity of the banished Stuart court). While male poets adopted a self-mocking tone when advertising their artistic dependence on female patrons, alluding self-consciously to their own “feminised” retirement, women’s active role in commissioning, preserving, disseminating and composing royalist literature suggests that their cultural importance was enhanced by the conditions of the Interregnum. Both royalist and parliamentarian propagandists exploited anti-feminist satire to condemn what they saw as illegitimate forms of government. However, royalist traditionalists overtly connected elite royalist women with the ethos and situation of the eclipsed Stuart monarchy, and sought to address a burgeoning female readership by stressing women’s advantages under the Crown. Royalist women in turn responded to these cultural constructions of royalism and femininity, creating powerful authorial identities that would remain potent after the Restoration in 1660