Political Verse and Satire: Monarchy, Party and Female Political Agency

Abstract

The period from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century was the great age of political writing in Britain. The once widely held view that women declined public themes in favour of small, intimate, private concerns has been challenged in recent years by literary histories that emphasize the political origins and meaning of women’s writing in the seventeenth century, including groundbreaking accounts by Carol Barash and Paula McDowell.1 We now know that women produced nearly every form of political writing that circulated during the period: pamphlets and treatises, topical ballads, partisan dramas, squibs and satirical broadsides, ceremonial odes, royal elegies and panegyrics. They declared themselves Tories, Whigs and Jacobites; Anglicans, Catholics and dissenters. They lent their pens to a range of widely differing political interests, from the ‘good old cause’ of godly republicanism to the Jacobite cause of a Stuart restoration. They stated opinions on affairs of state, smeared political enemies, displayed loyalty, entered into religious controversy, shaped public opinion and explored the questions of allegiance, integrity and national memory that troubled nearly all thoughtful members of the political nation during this uncertain time. In addition, they used political verse to chart their own complicated relation as women to the public order.