Behn's Monmouth: Sedition, Seduction, and Tory Ideology in the 1680s

Abstract

Behn's Monmouth:Sedition, Seduction, and Tory Ideology in the 1680s Toni Bowers (bio) Tower Hill, London, 15 July 1685. The crowd clamoring around the scaffold that summer day had gathered to witness an event unparalleled in English history: the execution without prior trial of a vigorous and beloved royal prince, the favorite son of the late king despite his illegitimate birth, and, in the opinion of many Protestants, the nation's best defense against Roman Catholic tyranny. Rumors, opinions, and debates flew around the place of execution: First, That it was barbarous and cruel to behead him without any form of Trial; certainly if People were never so guilty of Rebellion, and taken in the Fact, yet as they are Englishmen born ought to have a Trial for their Life by their Peers. . . . And certainly if any Favour is shewed, it should be to . . . the Son of a King. . . . Others said, you may see how popish Councils prevail; . . . Others said, . . .what was so done was according to Law, and there was no injustice done unto the Duke, for he was taken in the Fact, And Had He Been Cut to Death as Absalom was, he had his just Deserts.1 [End Page 15] The final speaker voices a Tory point of view. As Tories saw it in 1685, the prisoner, James, Duke of Monmouth, could only be condemned as a great and guilty sinner, a rebel against father and king. As the official representatives of Crown and Church also present at his execution insisted, Monmouth had betrayed the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, a definitive doctrine for both the Anglican Church and the Tory party in the late seventeenth century.2 But at the same time, the bastard prince also seemed to many to be more sinned against than sinning. Whether or not Monmouth had "his just desserts" was a question very much at issue, not only on the day of his execution, but throughout his notorious (though brief) public career, and even after his death. No doubt some of those present at Monmouth's execution could recall a similar scene 36 years earlier, when Charles I, the prisoner's grandfather, met death at the hands of a rebellious parliament. By 1685, Tories openly decried that event as the most dreadful act of collective folly in the nation's history; many fasted on January 30, the date of Charles I's execution, to show abhorrence of the regicide and veneration for the "royal martyr."3 Charles I, of course, had been brought to the scaffold despite his stature as the nation's reigning hereditary monarch. When they killed him, his subjects broke all previous rules of government and launched the nation on a new course: the political state actually became, for more than a decade before the restoration of Charles II, a republic (or "commonwealth") rather than a monarchy. In the early 1680s, the peace was seriously threatened again, not only by Monmouth's rebellion but also, as before, by disaffected and fearful parliamentarians. Those disquieted by echoes of the earlier execution could take comfort, though, in the great differences in circumstances between the execution of the "royal martyr" and that of the royal traitor taking place before them. The problem with Monmouth, after all, was that he was not the legitimate heir. Far from a victim of regicide like his grandfather, Monmouth stood convicted of having plotted that very crime against his uncle, the legally descended James II. So when Monmouth climbed the scaffold, observers would have been unlikely to find in him the "innocent lamb" or "Blessed martyr" that many by that time saw in the murdered king of an earlier generation.4 On the contrary, though certainly no Puritan, Monmouth seemed to his contemporaries, and especially to Tory observers like the one who thought he had his "just Deserts," only too like the revolutionaries of the 1640s.5 As poems, pamphlets, and broadsides from the 1680s make abundantly clear, contemporaries were used to imagining the bastard prince as a kind of walking paradox —the personification of all that was lovely and heroic [End Page 16] as well as all that was despicable, ungodly, and...