Abstract
‘Something is branded in, so that it stays in the memory’, a philosopher observes, ‘only that which hurts incessantly is remembered’.1 In Restoration nonconformist political and religious memory martyrdom is the dominant figure for the ceaseless pain of the past, and its meanings in the present. Yet, for a memory to operate as a prompt to political action in the present it must be freed of some of its ties to the past — a branding in of memory involves, inevitably, a burning out of some details of the original event. Here I explore the legacy of an event from 1651, the treason trial and execution of the Presbyterian Christopher Love. My central texts are the narratives of two women, Elizabeth Jekyll and Mary Love. These texts, which I examine in some detail, seem to have had at least limited circulation after the Restoration. They offer a case study that we can use to consider, even re-evaluate, three interconnected issues: the place of the feminine voice in narrative produced by women in building Restoration nonconformist culture, the relationship between religious radicalism before and after the Restoration, and, more abstractly, the interconnection of law and narrative.
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Notes
F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford University Press, 1996), 42–3. See also Judith Butler, The Psychic Life ofPower (Stanford University Press, 1997), 3; Wendy Brown on political memory ‘Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political Formations’, in Joan B. Landes (ed.), Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford University Press, 1998), 448–74.
P. Goodrich, ‘Of Law and Forgetting: Literature, Ethics and Legal Judgement’, in Law in the Courts ofLove: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (Routledge, 1996), 112.
T.Howell, Complete Collection of State Trials (1816), vol. 5: 51; C.H. Firth (ed.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 3 vols (HMSO, 1911) vol. 2: 120–1, 550.
R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 147–9.
See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution (Yale University Press, 1994), 132.
Ibid., 1271. See also Joan Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’ (University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 68; John Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563–1694 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 144.
See John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason, an Introduction (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 132–40.
P. Gregg, Free-born John: a Biography of John Lilburne (Dent, 1961; repr., 1986), 300–1.
See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers (Clarendon Press, 1996).
‘Petitions Love and his supporters presented and a long debate in the Commons generated a reprieve and so he did not die on the appointed date, 15 July.’ Howell, Complete Collection, 43. See also C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (HMSO, 1911), vol. 2: 550–1.
P. Goodrich, Languages of Law: from Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), vi.
C. Steedman, ‘A Weekend with Elektra’, Literature and History, 3rd series, 6/1 (Spring 1990), 21.
See Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels (Mercer University Press, 1985), 33; Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge University Press, 1974), 243–8.
D. Underdown, A Freeborn People (Clarendon Press, 1996), 110; Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Elizabeth Jekyll’s Spiritual Diary: Private Manuscript or Political Document?, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 9, ed. Peter Beal and Margaret J.M.Ezell (British Library, 2000), 218–37.
Patricia Crawford, ‘Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty & Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1993), 57–76, esp. 57.
Here I am drawing on the work of Phil Withington. See, for example, ‘Citizens, Community and Political Culture in Restoration England’, in Alexandra Shepherd and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2000), 134–55.
A. Lisle, Madam Lisle’s Last Speech (1685), The Dying Speeches of Several Persons (1689), The Second and Last Collection of the Dying Speeches of those Eminent Protestants Who Suffered in the West of England (1689). For discussion of the possibility that women’s scaffold speeches had special propaganda value, see Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Women and the Glorious Revolution’, Albion 18:2 (1986), 195–218, 214.
T. Hall, quoted by Ann Hughes in ‘The Frustrations of the Godly’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration (Collins & Brown, 1992), 70–90, 88–9.
R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion (Maurice Temple Smith & St Martin’s Press, 1984), 231–4, 245–6.
The Dying Speeches. For extensive discussion of the role of local revenge in shaping Restoration politics see Ronald Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford University Press, 1985).
R.L. Greaves, Enemies under his Feet (Stanford University Press, 1990), 245, 247.
See SP/29/417 (part 3), ‘Votes in Councill’, which associates him with strong players in petitioning the Crown to disappoint Roman Catholic ‘hopes of a popish successor’, such as Papillon, Dubois or Player. See also Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion 1678–81 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 280, 330–1; J.R. Woodhead, The Rulers of London 1660–1689, (London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1965), 98, 100. In this connection the king ordered Jekyll to be brought before him at the Council (CSPD 1670, 312). In 1670 he and Alderman Hayes were both imprisoned, apparently as ‘jurymen that were fined for finding not guilty the Quakers’. CSPD, 1670, June 4, June 9, June 27 (300–1, 312), November 22 (545), Dec 7 (566), ibid., 1671, July 18, 386. See ibid., 1671, 497 as part of a plot against the king, revealed by Blood. The text this is drawn from is described by the calendar as ‘Notes by Williamson’, ‘in parts illegible’ and the same sentence is read by R.L. Greaves as referring to Captain Roger Jones. See Greaves, Enemies under his Feet, 211. Renewed nonconformist protests and defiance followed Charles’s proclamation against conventicles of 3 February 1675.
N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconfonnity (Leicester University Press, 1987), 78–82. See also Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
M. Zook, ‘“The Bloody Assizes”: Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution’, Albion 27 (Fall 1995), 373–96, writes of ‘The interplay between memory, radical propaganda, and reader expectations’ in Whig polemic after the Glorious Revolution, 374.
Aristotle, ‘On Memory’, in The Complete Works ofAristotle, revised translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1984), 715–16; Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: the Destruction of Experience (1978), trans. Liz Heron (Verso, 1993), 91.
S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 16–17; Krell, 2.
Natalie Zemon Davies and Arlette Farge (eds), A History of Women in the West (Belknap, 1994), 169. Compare Merry Weisner’s assessment of female citizenship, ‘The Holy Roman Empire: Women and Politics’, in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 305–23, 316. See also Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (Cornell University Press, 1990), 308; Patricia Crawford, “The Poorest She”: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England’, in Michal Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 197–218. See also Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England 1640–1832 (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Particularly significant for male citizenship in this period are the arguments about natural law, what Richard Tuck calls ‘inalienable right’, both in terms of the defence of a larger social body against its ruler and, as significantly, in terms of the claims of the individual’s inalienable rights (‘every man by naturall instinct aiming at his owne safety and weale’ as Richard Overton put it). These issues were important as were the demand from the Levellers and others for government by constitution, expressed at the Putney debates and embodied in the different versions of The Agreement of the People. In sum, these debates meant that the citizen, though the term itself might not be used, was coming into sharp focus in the debates about the rule of Charles I to the establishment of the republic. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 147, see also 148–9; Richard Overton, An Appeale from the degenerate representative body (London, 1647), in Don M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution (Humanities Press, 1944; repr. 1967), 162. As C.B. Macpherson notes, the Leveller demand that the franchise be extended to include all men who were not servants or beggars (doubling the number of voters) would have been enough to concentrate the minds of lawyers, MPs and soldiers on the questions of the nature of’citizenship’. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford University Press, 1962; repr. 1990), 117.
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Wiseman, S. (2005). Martyrdom in a Merchant World: Law and Martyrdom in the Restoration Memoirs of Elizabeth Jekyll and Mary Love. In: Sheen, E., Hutson, L. (eds) Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597662_10
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