‘All The Monarchies Of This World Are Going Down The Hill’

Abstract

The monarchy longed for at the beginning of the Long Restoration period by at least some English-speaking people was not a reinstating of the human kingship, but a very different matter altogether. When Trapnel declared (in The Cry of a Stone) that ‘all the monarchies of this world are going down the hill,’ she defiantly predicted the final end not just of monarchy, but of Cromwellian rule. This essay explores the strategies developed in Trapnel's pamphlets to make it possible for the famished body of the woman prophet to bear a revolutionary message. It shows that Trapnel's divided position – between the public and the private, between associatively feminine positions and resonantly masculine ones – opens up these discursive possibilities at the beginning of the Long Restoration period. Prophets might mask the significance of their own voice, but they could make some very radical points through the person and voice of their God.