“Taking you a wife for his own lusts”

Abstract

Beginning in 1642, the plots of Jacobean and Caroline plays, in which An attack on the chastity of marriage between monarch and nation, Or husband and wife, had been the most significant measure of Tyranny, were resurrected and retold in political tracts. But in the context of actual conflict between a ruler and his subjects, defence of chastity was more explicitly represented as an exercise in self-preservation. For Parliamentarians, tyranny lay in the actions of a Royal government that disrupted household order, and thus the political rights of subjects. Although their stories placed significant emphasis on the property rights of the husband and householder, the rape or seduction of a wife remained the central violation to be resisted. If Royalists measured tyranny through a similar view of household rights, the “household” under assault in their stories tended to be the king’s. The tyrants were rebellious political subjects who destroyed their own liberties while they prostituted the sacred union of monarch and nation. Each side accused the other of endangering England, its religion, and its orderly households by joining with familiar enemies: sectarians, papists, and Presbyterians. More openly than ever before, however, the possible responses to tyranny, the limits of resistance available to those who wished to preserve the governments that created and recreated an ordered society, came under explicit discussion, as subjects fought to defend their liberties, their king to protect his prerogatives.