SOURCE: Flores, Stephan P. “Orrery's The Generall and Henry the Fifth: Sexual Politics and the Desire for Friendship.” The Eighteenth Century 37, no. 1 (spring 1996): 56-74.

[In the essay below, Flores contends that Orrery's heroic plays define “the need for bonds of friendship and faith in political and sexual relations that would not simply restore a mythic heroic past, but would also establish a socio-political practice equal to the conflicted demands of the present.”]

Scholars familiar with the popular heroic plays of Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery, have recently begun to explore in detail the ways in which his work articulates conflicts that proved peculiarly compelling to audiences who returned to playgoing at public theaters following the restoration of Charles II. Some critics have described his plays reductively as static disquisitions on rigid and précieux codes of love and honor.¹ Others, however, have noted or considered more closely the historical significance of the plays' enthusiastic reception by restoration audiences.² Samuel Pepys praised Henry the Fifth as “the most full of height and raptures of wit and sense, that ever I heard.”³ In this essay I attend to such interest and conflicts to suggest how Orrery's plays appealed to largely privileged audiences whose experience of the Civil Wars, and of preferment and punishment under the restored monarchy, had provided grounds both for renewed faith and doubt about the distribution of social and political power. Through his drama Orrery, who as a restored friend and political ally of Charles II moved within elite and often contentious circles of power, refigures identities, relations, and values that he perceived to be socially, politically, and sexually disruptive.

Restoration playgoers did not need to attend the theater to witness or to participate in sharp rivalries and uneasy alliances for power and place. They endured and enjoyed close and often conflicted relations that, for Orrery as for many others, produced political and social intrigues that undermined the restoration of solidarity, of faith in one's peers among the elite and especially at court. Under these conditions the pursuit of power often posed problems for one's identity, position, and honor that led to self-contradiction and compromise. Rather than go to prison for supporting Charles II's cause, Orrery himself served during the Interregnum on Cromwell's cabinet, was elected to Parliament, and urged Cromwell to become king. He later acknowledged his self-contradiction in a speech welcoming the Duke of Ormonde, Charles II's Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to Dublin in July 1662: “He [Ormonde] was entreated to ‘pass by what wee did when wee were not our selves, and to accept of what we now doe when wee are our selves.’”⁴ Orrery (then Lord Broghil), who was among many pardoned through Charles's Act of Oblivion and Indemnity (1660) which forgave nearly all who had trespassed against his father, garnered the title of Earl of Orrery, was appointed Lord Justice in Ireland and Governor of Limerick, and even received a request from Charles to write a play for production in London. Orrery's attempts to acknowledge such transformations and to resolve such contradictions in his plays show how he hoped to regenerate and to amend a heroic code that had become compromised by political intrigue and betrayal and that had failed the test of the Civil Wars. Beginning with the Restoration's first heroic play, The Generall, through the great success of Henry the Fifth and of Mustapha, to the relative failure of Tryphon, Orrery gradually defines the need for bonds of friendship and faith in political and sexual relations that would not simply restore a mythic heroic past, but would also establish a socio-political practice equal to the conflicted demands of the present.⁵

Anyone familiar with Pepys's diary realizes that after the restoration of the monarchy, political intrigue, particularly the art of in insinuating oneself into royal and aristocratic favor, was pervasive and necessary: advancement through such intrigue may also have seemed more legitimate and less of a political and ethical compromise than under the tainted rule of Cromwell.⁶ But the ready acceptance on stage and in the audience of the need to manipulate the political order belied the supposedly innate power, unified order, and privilege projected by the aristocracy and the court. The Duke of Newcastle's advice to Charles II represents such concerns and the need for their rhetorical expression.

So that ceremony and order, with force, governs all, both in peace and war, and keeps every man and everything within the circle of their own conditions … for when lower degrees strive to outbrave higher degrees, it breeds envy in the better sort, and pride in the meaner sort, and a contempt by the vilgar of the nobility, which breeds factions and disorder, which are the causes of a civil war.⁷

The power and privilege of which Newcastle speaks were represented, in part, by a cultural rhetoric that promoted the “heroic” stature of the elite in real life and in the drama, disguising, in consequence, the sometimes exciting but often mundane practice of maintaining actual power through relations and exchanges based upon social and political obligation, money, compromise, and betrayal.⁸ Such rhetorical disguise was necessary for these practices revealed the elite as heterogeneous, divided not simply from those they ruled, but also divided internally, fissured by competing ideologies and alliances. The rhetoric of aristocratic privilege provided both the criteria and the means for maintaining a political hierarchy and order with regard to those excluded from the elite, but it also proved less amenable to problems of internal strife, to problems of rivalry and betrayal among members of the elite itself. Ronald Hutton reports that after Charles's restoration, “So many gentry crowded into London to hunt places that prices soared. … It was a gold-rush atmosphere, with disappointment inevitable for most … [and with] the greatest honours … given to non-royalists.”⁹ Thus as the recent civil wars had proved, and as the sale of honors and the scramble for offices and preferment during the Restoration confirmed, the proffered cultural self-image—of traditional loyalties to and distinctions among kin, class, honor, and king—was subject to disrupting questions and devaluation as many strived against one another for recognition and for support.

Orrery's plays address this devaluation and blurring of distinctions, as do many of the plays popular in the years just after the Restoration, first by acknowledging the danger political intrigue poses to public order, then by ascribing the sources of political conflict primarily to sexual rivalry in order to evaluate its participants by the heroic codes of honor, which they transgress. Heroic faithfulness—to one's king, kin, class, lover, or spouse—functions as a metaphor and a formula for solidarity, for a social and political order constituted by a public recognition of one's allegiance to the court and to the upper classes and the values necessary to their hegemony. The heroic code of honor, against which one's public reputation was gauged, could not, however, fully acknowledge the private sexual and political intrigues and compromises behind the heroic façade. The theater audience thus receives a glimpse of the private conditions and the rhetorical strategies necessary for maintaining the cultural image of social and political unity. Given this insight into the rhetorical structure of the nation's backstage politics, audiences receive symbolic opportunities to acknowledge the structures of exchange that shape the value of honor, friendship, sexual desire, gender, and political expediency.

I shall show that in The Generall and in Henry the Fifth, Orrery's attempts to resolve the problems intrigue poses do not address directly the political and social contradictions that underlie them, but offer instead a symbolic reformation of political aspirations in terms of social and sexual relations, differences, and desires. This reformation dramatically recasts contemporary history by attributing the abuse of power by favorites and factions primarily to the political and personal effects of sexual rivalry for love. Sexual rivalries prove more amenable than political rivalries to the influence of Orrery's solution: a promulgation of the need for friendship, particularly male friendship that becomes preserved or restored, both against and through the agency of women.¹⁰ As Richard Braverman and Michael McKeon have demonstrated, restoration politics is played out against and within emerging sexual and gender differences and the rise of modern patriarchy.¹¹ In The Generall, at first the political efficacy of heroic identity and action becomes compromised and virtually deconstructed by political intrigue on all sides, but political order becomes restored by promoting patriarchal solidarity. In Henry the Fifth, such patriarchal solidarity—in the name of friendship—not only restores order but flexibly reconstructs national, political, social, sexual, and gender identities to suggest, albeit provisionally, ways to negotiate cultural change, mobility, and ideological differences.

IDEOLOGICAL CONFUSION AND COMPROMISE IN THE GENERALL

“For you will find, when these dissorders end,
They came not from a foe, but from a friend.”(12)

Orrery's first heroic play, The Generall (or Altemera, Dublin, 1662; London, 1664), begins in civil war. With the words quoted above, Thrasolin hopes to console fellow commanders who have just debated whether to kill themselves or to die fighting the rebels. More important, his words also disclose a confusion over convoluted relations of friendship, justice, and political intrigue that Orrery's plays will never quite resolve. Thrasolin reveals to Monasin, Filadin, and Cratoner that he instigated the rebels' counter-revolution against the usurper-king by deluding the army into believing that Clorimun, their banished general, was scheduled for execution. Thrasolin hopes the counter-revolution will persuade Clorimun to restore Melizer, the rightful heir to the throne. Rather than resenting such manipulation of the army and of themselves, the other commanders tacitly agree with Cratoner's assessment of Thrasolin's deceptive tactics: “The End is Noble though the way bee nott” (1.1.74-75).

This opening scene suggests both the play's cultural significance and its narrative structure: public displays of the heroic code modulate into private acknowledgements of political intrigue and compromise. Moreover, in terms of its rhetorical appeal, the scene's modulation into compromise implies that the commanders understand the necessity of political intrigue in a way that corresponds to the audience's own guilt-ridden experience of loyalties compromised by recent political rebellion against Charles I and service under Cromwell; an understanding that contains, as I have suggested, an unspoken contradiction between the heroic code of honor, by which the commanders fulfill their public reputation by choosing death by suicide or death by fighting, and the code of behavior offered by Thrasolin, which promises survival and power through political intrigue. Like many in the audience, including Orrery, the commanders adapt quickly; Filadin manipulates the usurper-king (and reinterprets the political situation to justify his own position) by suggesting even darker purposes to the rebels' actions:

Besides, what they for Clorimun pretend,
May bee their maske, and a worse thinge their End.
The Rebells forces are a mighty power,
And hourely looke for their brave Lucidor.

(1.1.132-35)

After the king agrees to recall Clorimun, and exits, the commanders joke over Thrasolin's deceit, with Cratoner commenting sardonically to Monasin on the pragmatic effects of their actions:

Well, 'tis an even lay that most of those
Whom to this mutinie thou did'st dispose,
Will suffer death or else some torturing paine,
And thou, for it, will high rewards obtaine.

(1.1.178-81)

The scene ends on this note of cynical opportunism on the part of characters who seem at once to have been, much like Orrery himself, traitors to the rightful heir and potential counter-revolutionaries on his behalf.

As the opening scene makes clear, justice and honor are largely nominal tools through which the commanders manipulate not only the army, but the king, Clorimun, and the leaders of the rebellion Thrasolin has incited. Yet the audience is neither encouraged to interpret such manipulations of the political order as inherently subversive, nor to plumb too carefully those depths at which the commanders themselves might be regarded as tools of the values, strategies, and relations they seem to control. As counter-revolutionaries, Altemera's brother Memnor and his friend, Clatus, offer little in the way of a political or a heroic alternative to the usurper or to the commanders' intrigues. When, for example, Clatus asks Memnor to second him in a duel with Lucidor, Memnor stops Clatus from explaining what provoked the disagreement, since he believes, like the commanders, that success in the fight does not depend upon one's virtue. Unlike Lucidor, who regards Memnor as his future brother, Memnor asserts that his “friendship” with Clatus is more important than any kinship tie devolving upon him from his sister's impending marriage to Lucidor.¹³ Thus the relative lack of moral discrimination in both personal and political commitments on the part of the leaders of the rebellion is itself dangerous and seems to call for their manipulation. In this way the commanders' manipulation of rebels like Memnor and Clatus encourages the audience to minimize not only the subversive potential of the rebellion, a nominal “rebellion” made acceptable because it is directed at a king who has usurped the throne, but also the subversive practices of the commanders themselves, whose political adaptability and skill at deception does not project the heroic ethos of an immutable and aristocratic political order, but rather the lack of an alternative to political intrigue.

The efficacy of the heroic ethos is also questioned by the similar manipulation of rivals in love. The manipulation of Clorimun, Lucidor, and the usurper, who romantically aspire to heroic alternatives to political intrigue, only diminishes heroic virtue and prompts us to question not simply its ability to resolve political and personal rivalry, but also our ability to discriminate between opportunism in politics and opportunism in love. Lucidor, a leader in the rebel camp, tells Altemera that he is going to war against the usurper-king for her sake, not for his own glory, and he reassures her that the gods' justice will enable him to prevail in protecting her against “the Tyrants Lust” (1.2.243). Unlike Thrasolin, Lucidor does not define justice in terms of political intrigue, mention Clorimun or Melizer, or explain any political motives for his rebellion. His priorities derive from sexual politics, which become the primary source of political disorder. With its foregrounding of Lucidor, Clorimun, and Altemera, the play starts now to shift its ideological appeal by repressing the political sources of rebellion in favor of what appears as a private and apolitical source of rivalry among men no longer differentiated by their political ideologies: the conflict of passion over Altemera.

For example, Clorimun adopts the role of the misanthropic hero, retires to a hermit's cell to conquer his passions, and refuses to return to save either the usurper or the country from the rebels, who now appear to fulfill Filadin's description of them as a dangerous splinter group removed from Thrasolin's control. But Clorimun unwittingly plays the part intended for him in the political plot once Thrasolin suggests Altemera may be in danger from Lucidor's gaining enough power to demand her love. He accepts Thrasolin's advice to “thinke on Love and Honour” (1.2.386), and declares “Love” and Thrasolin his friends, hoping the glory he plans to win in the usurper's cause will win him Altemera's love. He quickly requires the army to submit to the usurper-king, a king whom he has just described to Thrasolin as a tyrant, and takes charge of Lucidor and Memnor, who were taken by surprise just as they were about to duel. Clorimun, however, accepts Memnor's word as his prison bond and treats Lucidor with all the admiration and courtesy due to one with whom he identifies in terms of his status, in terms of his fundamentally apolitical stance, and in terms of his desire for honor in the service of Altemera's love. Political differences are now subordinate to identities based upon class, gender, and sexual desire.

In short, the play's solution to the ideological problems it has posed depends upon the audience's acceptance of this fundamental identity of rank and desire shared not only by Clorimun and Lucidor, but also by the play's other characters, particularly the men. Once again, the commanders serve as a cynical counterpoint that tends both to undermine the virtue of pursuing love and honor and the value of differentiating among men preoccupied with women. Monasin, for example, believes women, especially married women, are inconstant, licentious coquettes; he prefers a woman who has money rather than wit or learning. The commanders are sceptical of marriage and of platonic love, and Cratoner voices the dilemma of the true rake: “But I can Love none, for the faire are wonne / By too much time; the rest are gain'd too soone” (2.2.211-12). Yet, like their general, they desire women and regard them as the spoils of war. Political differences have been translated into identities based upon the problems of ownership and exchange (of women) faced by men in a patriarchal society.

But if the play asks its audience to accept the essentially patriarchal solidarity of the male characters—represented by their mutual recognition of a code of honor and their mutual desire for women—it also asks us to accept its having invested women, or at least one woman, Altemera, with a good deal of influence and political acumen. As the primary locus of desire, Altemera becomes the arbiter of social behavior and, to a great extent, of political events. When Clorimun, for example, enters the rebel camp with a bloody sword and tells Altemera he betrayed the rebels for her, she rebukes him with a trenchant riposte: “You raise mee only to a higher State, / Therby your owne sin to extenuate” (2.4.393-94). Without disguising her love for Lucidor, Altemera finally persuades Clorimum to save Lucidor from execution, and even suggests that he use the army to restore Melizer. Clorimun, however, refuses to compromise his honor by betraying the usurper-king and Altemera quickly retracts her request (3.2.230).

Clorimun's refusal marks a limit to Altemera's influence: politics is not a woman's province. It also shows how the threat of female power to the social bonds and political control of men comes to serve a cultural rhetoric promising the restoration of aristocratic male solidarity in the aftermath of civil war. For playgoers who accept the play's ideological appeal, the power of Altemera's virtue, beauty, and perspicacity—her acute understanding of herself and others—comprises both the source of social and political discord and the promise to restore order and control to the rightful heir and to the men she appears to redeem, or more accurately, to re-socialize.

As one entrusted with the power of redemption, Altemera is presented as largely free of the doubt and self-contradiction that disrupts the men's understanding of themselves and their relations with others. Clorimun, who believes the king to be a usurping tyrant whom he should not have helped to the throne, nevertheless serves him and will not consider moving against him. The commanders, led by Thrasolin, are steeped in political intrigue aimed at redirecting their former support of the usurper to Melizer. Lucidor and Memnor, who appear, at first, to have the best claim to being self-consistent rebels on Melizer's behalf, reveal themselves to be motivated by much more local, self-promoting desires and ambitions. Even the usurper, who agrees to spare Clorimun's life at Altemera's request, seems to believe his own rhetoric, claiming that her love will bestow virtue and victory upon him.

But Altemera's autonomy and apparent self-control may be misleading: the play's rhetoric requires her character to appear as the source of desire and discord. Both Altemera and the opposed stereotypes of women she embodies and transforms are largely subject to the patriarchal culture that dictates their roles. Although this rhetoric focuses our attention on sexual desire and on gender relations, it also carries the stamp of the post-civil war polity and the court, changed and chastened by the image of Charles I's execution. Altemera, for instance, is not, like Evadne in Beaumont's and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, a lustful, ambitious regicide—she rejects Candaces's suggestion that she avenge her honor by killing the usurper; but neither is she so passive and quick to internalize guilt as Lucina in Valentinian: Altemera asserts that no matter what happens her honor will remain pure. Charles II's act of indemnity functioned similarly to redeem his subjects, including Orrery, from their political sins and to purify their honor. Yet like Evadne and Lucina, Altemera fulfills her dramatic and cultural role as the object of male rivalry, and like her heroic predecessors—which includes the Cavalier rhetoric presenting Charles I as a royal martyr—she offers herself in sacrifice, by drinking poison, to restore order and to preserve not solely her own honor but also that of the men she reclaims for society. In Act 3, for example, she saves Lucidor and Clorimun from the usurper; in Act 4 her arguments and apparent death move the usurper to repent, though just before Melizer kills him he still believes he “merited a Crowne” (4.6.449); and in the play's last scene, she awakes suddenly from her deathly sleep to be wounded parting Lucidor and Clorimun, who were fighting beside her supposed corpse.

The last scene contains another dramatic revelation, but one whose purpose moves beyond the sensational in its disclosure of an alternate and unitary source of disruption: Candaces. Altemera's confidant, Candaces, disguises herself as a man, in itself a symbolic and dangerous appropriation of male power, and with a friend attacks Lucidor as he mourns beside Altemera's corpse. Clorimun springs from hiding to defend his rival, and the dying Candaces, before asking pardon, reveals that she is Altimast, the usurper's son, who became Altemera's confidant, betrayed the rebel camp, incited his father to threaten rape, gave Altemera feigned poison, and fomented distrust between Lucidor and Clorimun. Altimast's revelation enables the audience to displace responsibility for much of the social intrigue and violence away from Lucidor and Clorimun, who are described by Altimast as moving in “strictest Rules of Honour and of Love” (5.1.60). The cross-dressing, category-disrupting Altimast functions as a grotesque sign of usurped identities and positions, yet his disclosure may also subtly reinforce Altemera's position as the ultimate if strictly innocent source of violent and destructive desire.

Altemera now compels her rivals to friendship for her sake, vowing she will die if Clorimun does not give her to Lucidor with good will. Clorimun agrees and redirects his desire, deciding to court glory abroad and declaring, when Melizer appoints him general of the war in Sicily, to “make my happinesse depend on mee” (5.1.430). Altemera's power to reconcile Lucidor and Clorimun symbolically restores order and friendship for all: Melizer forgives Lucidor for taking arms to defend Altemera's chastity and pardons Memnor in words that recall Charles II's Declaration of Breda (1660) and the Act of Oblivion: “Past faults I'le never to Remembrance bring, / For which the word I give you of your king” (5.1.411-12). The play ends, however, somewhat as it began, with the commanders soberly observing that war will never be completely abolished because “all men wicked are” (5.1.439) and because war is their punishment. War abroad, however, consoles Thrasolin and, by implication, Orrery's audience for it promises the restoration of unity and “peace at home” (5.1.444). As the audience would soon discover, however, the Second Dutch War failed dismally to realize such promises; promises that are extended and explored further in Orrery's Henry the Fifth.

THE EXCHANGE OF FRIENDSHIP IN HENRY THE FIFTH

“He who of friendship knows the sacred ties,
Will value more his friends than victories.”

(2.1.40-41)

Fortunately for King Henry, friendship produces victory in war and in love. In the first scene, the king's pledge to Owen Tudor—“When Fame, when Life, when Empire are at stake, / All thoughts of those for thee I can forsake” (1.1.53-54)—articulates a bond of friendship whose strength depends less upon residual ideologies, such as an abstract or external code of honor, the pursuit of glory, kinship ties, or Tudor's political duty to king and country, than upon the immediacy and intimacy of the two men's personal relationship. In Henry the Fifth, Orrery first suggests clearly the idea of friendship as a solution to discord in love and in politics.¹⁴

After its initial and extremely successful run of nine or ten nights at the Duke's theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields in early August 1664, the play was revived several more times, receiving performances when the theaters reopened after the plague in December 1666, July 1668, and possibly in 1677 when the play was reprinted. The play's popularity probably derives in part from characters whose cultural positions are more polarized and formulaic, and who are linked less directly to the pain of the recent civil wars, than those in The Generall. The initial appeal of seeing Betterton, Harris, and Smith in the royal coronation robes may have suggested to playgoers a more direct parallel between Henry the Fifth's friendship and Charles II's friendly patronage of the Duke's theater, and by extension, the king's friendship and patronage to many of the courtiers in the audience. Though the two plays are not explicitly connected, Henry the Fifth begins where The Generall concludes—with a nation unified by the threat of war abroad. England's past internal political strife and civil war have been displaced onto France, whose own history of betrayal and intrigue provides an ideological counterpoint to Tudor's and King Henry's friendship. By the play's end, this friendship serves as a partial solution to the social and political problems symbolized by Henry's and Tudor's rivalry over Katherine; the rhetorical power of King Henry's tribute to the bonds of friendship over the claims of empire fades, however, as the definition of “friendship” modulates, in response to the intrigue of the Dauphin, De Chastel, and the Duke of Burgundy, into a form of political power and a means of exchange. The play thus implicitly addresses the audience's growing concern over the interrelated issues of social mobility and rivalry, and political intrigue and order.¹⁵

In the first act, Henry's royal stature and noble treatment of prisoners preempts any threat France seems to pose to England's political solidarity, honor, and power. Count Blamont's description of Alanson's defeat, for example, neatly sums up the king's success: “But though Alanson did stupendous things, / A Subjects Sword could not resist a Kings” (1.3.208-09). But King Henry's success in love and the strength of his friendship with Tudor are not so quickly assured. Asserting that his love “moves not in common waies” (2.1.105), Henry has invaded France to win Katherine (1.3.440), and considers her the “reward” of war rather than, as Anne and Bedford have prudently suggested, the “price” of peace (2.1.83). Katherine and Tudor eventually realign themselves with Henry, but in contrast to Anne and Bedford's relationship, they also suggestively introduce values opposed to basing preference solely upon one's rank and glory.

Though Katherine feels compelled by her rank to marry a king, we learn that she wishes Tudor were a king and she regrets having to scorn his love. She also doubts, as does Tudor, whether Henry's bloody conquests are the best way to win her love (1.3.53-54). But love's potential power, in Anne's words, to level “the pow'rful down to those that sue” (1.3.325), never fully undermines the cultural regulation of position and place. The play incorporates love into the social and political order to illustrate two points: first, when Tudor resigns any pretension to Katherine, he subordinates rivalry and perhaps even Katherine herself to Henry's and Tudor's friendship; second, when Katherine chooses Henry, the play not only confirms the king's inherent superiority but also offers an example of the system's power to accommodate something as inherently subversive, in Warwick's words, as Henry's inclination to “hazard too much in private gallantries” (3.7.381) and his willingness to have Katherine choose freely without regard to rank.¹⁶

The dominant cultural values projected by Henry and the new relations he establishes thus appear as positive choices on the part of Katherine and Tudor rather than denials of self.¹⁷ Katherine's attitude toward Henry softens, for example, when he agrees to spare the Dauphin (3.5), who had attacked the king after discovering him courting Katherine in her chamber. And when the despondent Tudor reveals his love for Katherine to Henry—“The charming name of Friend will make me speak / When, even my King, could not my silence break” (4.4.367-68)—the king feels obliged to become his advocate and quickly apologizes to his friend: “My ignorance alone has made me do / What Love it self could not have forc'd me to” (4.4.381-82). In the interests of friendship, duty, and male solidarity, Tudor resigns Katherine to the king. Thus reduced to an exchange commodity, Katherine is quick to question Tudor's action. She accuses him of paying only lip service to friendship and love—and implicitly, to the social freedom they encourage—while paying true homage to the traditional system of preference based on rank and the needs of state: “I would have had you like your self appear, / And not with Friendships name disguise your fear.” (5.4.383-84). Katherine chooses Henry, but placates (and yet erotically chastises?) Tudor by saying: “I'le your Friendship, Sir, like Love esteem” (5.4.406).

Even as she threatens provocatively to dissolve distinctions between love and friendship, Katherine also distinguishes between Tudor's dutiful subjection to Henry and his friendship with the king. Her potentially deconstructive tribute to friendship, love, and individual merit, delivered as she chooses Henry over Tudor, thus ostensibly resolves for the audience the problem of how to acknowledge social mobility and encourage personal merit and virtue without undue risk of destabilizing the social or political order. But the political order, in particular, remains secure because of the way the king's new “friends” among the French and Portuguese undermine and co-opt the intrigues of the Dauphin, de Chastel, and Burgundy.

Orrery initially presents the French, who are on the verge of civil war, as corrupt counterparts to the English. The Dauphin, whose mother has denied him the crown and leadership of the army out of hate or fear, has retired from the court, but hates the thought of seeing the Duke of Burgundy advance, “he who Murd'red Royal Orleance” (1.2.94). When De Chastel advises him to revenge himself upon Burgundy and to regain his mother's favor by kind submissions and art, the Dauphin thanks him and affirms their friendship in lines clearly juxtaposed to those of Henry and Tudor in the previous scene: “Thou in all storms hast been my constant Friend, / I'll on thy wisdom and thy care depend” (1.2.109-10). But for the French (and gradually, to some extent, for the English too), friendship is primarily a means to political power, and such friendship places the Dauphin under the guidance of an ambitious subordinate.

Burgundy, who plays a subtler and more dangerous political game than the Dauphin or De Chastel, also manipulates “friendships” to secure power. Having promised Henry that he will try to restore his provinces in exchange for peace, Burgundy first argues at the French council meeting that Anjou, Normandy, and Aquitaine are Henry's by right and asks the Queen to “pursue the Acts of Justice” (2.2.228). But he reveals privately to his son Chareloys that he hopes to prolong the war to fulfill a pact made with De Chastel and the Dauphin, who have promised him preferment and forgiveness. When Chareloys pleads with his father to abjure the treacherous friendship of De Chastel and the Dauphin, and reminds him of his vow to Henry and his plea for justice, Burgundy asserts that he is only following the dictates of reason: “A States-man all but int'rest may forget, / And only ought in his own strength to trust” (3.2.34-35).¹⁸ As his son fears, Burgundy is undone by his new friends. But Burgundy's undoing occurs in a way that allows Orrery to remind his audience how women seem a prerequisite for dangerous conflict that can affect even such men as Burgundy and the Dauphin, who seem relatively free of sexual desire.

Burgundy is betrayed when the Countess of La Marr, whom De Chastel loves, learns from him about the plot to prolong the war and to usurp the Queen's power. La Marr, in turn, betrays De Chastel's confidence for the sake of her “friendship” (4.2.143) with the Queen. The Queen acts swiftly, forging letters from Burgundy to Henry that seem to betray the Dauphin, and arranging for them to fall into the latter's hands. The Dauphin takes the bait and, upon his orders, De Chastel stabs Burgundy without warning. In consequence, rather than suffering from French intrigue, Henry actually benefits politically from these events and from the new friendships they promote. Chareloys, for example, offers much in return for Henry's aid in avenging Burgundy's death:

The Crown of France I'le settle on your head.
And, when you wed the Princess Katherine,
The States shall then entail it on your Line.
Of those most are my Friends and Allies.

(5.1.132-35)

Henry agrees to this arrangement, which includes a rich settlement to persuade the Queen to retire from the throne in comfort. In a sense, Orrery's political acumen would please an audience well-acquainted with the pragmatic value of such alliances, particularly an audience receptive to the symbolic resonance behind Orrery's redefinition and resolution of contradictions in social, political and economic relations in terms of “friendship.”

Orrery also uses this moment to offer maxims calculated to appeal to his audience in more topical terms. The audience has listened, for instance, to an exposition recounting both England's right to France and the nation's successful resolution of their recent civil wars; though somewhat static dramatically, this historical review reminds the audience of their shared heritage, of their existence as a nation unified in the aftermath of war, and of their need to sustain a social and political solidarity based upon trust among the ruling elite, as one of Henry's maxim's implies: “Trust is the strongest Bond upon the Soul: / That sacred Tye has Vertue oft begot; / It binds where 'tis, and makes it where 'twas not” (5.1.168-70).

Moreover, such trust is not merely an abstract principle but has immediate and valuable rewards. In tribute to Charles II's new bride, Catherine of Braganza, and with an approving glance toward England's recent seizures (summer 1664) of Dutch ships and colonies, Orrery has the King of Portugal, Henry's “Kinsman, and [his] Friend” (5.1.27), help the English win a sea battle.¹⁹ This victory prompts Henry to reflect upon the monarch's and the Parliament's responsibility to promote a navy and even to declare war to maintain trade: “Trade, which does Kings and Subjects wealth increase; / Trade, which more necessary is than Peace” (5.1.61-62).²⁰

The play draws to its end with France in “humble posture” (5.11.69) but Orrery is careful not to abrogate the power of monarchy, even if it is the French monarchy, by granting its parliament, the States General, the power to alter the crown's succession from the Dauphin to Henry and Katherine. Though the Bishop of Arras agrees Henry should succeed to the throne, he does not countenance the suggestion that royal prerogatives can be forfeited or encroached upon:

No man can make a forfeit of his Crown.
Much less can I admit the States Decree
Has power to give away this Monarchie.

(5.3.300-2)

The Bishop's defense of succession and royal prerogatives had a peculiarly apt resonance for court and nation in 1664. Charles II's wishes had recently been challenged quite effectively: “His direct power over the community was truncated by the permanent abolition of the prerogative courts, and his ability to wage war and to censor the press depended upon the goodwill of Parliaments.”²¹ The question of succession, which would dominate the nation during the furor over the Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81), was present in embryo from the first years of Charles's reign. Charles's brother James, the potential successor to the throne should Catherine continue to prove barren, had recently prompted widespread displeasure over impregnating and then marrying the Lord Chancellor's daughter, Anne Hyde, when he might have helped the nation more by marrying a foreign princess. James's leanings toward Catholic Rome also prompted talk of legitimizing Charles's bastard Monmouth, who was eventually put forward by some Whigs as a successor to Charles during the Exclusion Crisis. Charles had made Anne's father a baron to prevent James from marrying a commoner, and during the Protectorate many, including Orrery, had suggested that the Cromwells' rule be made hereditary. Ronald Hutton sums up the situation: “The Duke … was revealed as deficient both in intelligence and integrity. … The death of one brother, and the discredit of the other, made the question of the King's own marriage, and the heir which it ought to produce, of some urgency.”²² Orrery indicates his friendship to the crown quite clearly in addressing this delicate issue symbolically.

By the final scene of Henry's coronation, the idea of friendship, which has modulated sufficiently to embrace the idea of social intimacy in Henry's, Tudor's, and Katherine's relationship as well as the idea of political and economic alliance with Chareloys and the Queen, has also prepared the audience for the resolution of the fundamental ideological opposition with which the play opened: the cultural difference between the English and the French. The audience, whose identity is expressed at the play's beginning largely in terms of the English characters' heroic opposition to their French counterparts, now witnesses a promise of an identity that depends not upon a potentially disruptive and antagonistic opposition of cultural difference, but one that instead represents a unified national identity that connotes a self-sufficiency and privilege not subject to question. Orrery shows the English moving rhetorically from repressing England's lack of mastery over itself because of its fearful relation to an (Other), to incorporating the Other (France), a move that depends upon a Utopian desire to transcend the threat of cultural difference. Elite playgoers, for example, could attest that soon after Charles's return from France to the English throne, French fashions in music, drama, and dress became in vogue at court. Such hybridization of national identity and cultural distinctions proved alarming, particularly to those concerned about the potential French influence on court politics and the nation's security.²³

Orrery voices and responds to such concerns. When representatives of the French nobles, the clergy, and the people acknowledge Henry as France's king, Henry sums up the implications of having incorporated a cultural opposition into a unifying whole, and both the generous and ruthless means by which this whole will be secured:

English and French now but one people are:
And both shall have my equal love and care.
But Charles of Valoys [the Dauphin] we shall soon destroy;
And, by his ruine, France shall Peace enjoy.

(5.7.551-54)

In other words, Henry projects a national consciousness that does not simply repress and exclude the potentially disruptive work of its social and political unconscious, as represented, for example, by the social pretension of Tudor's passion for Katherine, and the politically subversive friendship of the Dauphin, De Chastel, and Burgundy. He and the play offer instead a means of symbolically resolving the contradictions of an identity and a position based upon maintaining a hierarchy of difference—whether it is social, political, or economic—by redefining these differences as part of a whole created through friendships and gender roles that seem to reconcile the contradictions inherent in relations governed solely by heroic codes of honor, political duty, class privilege, or ties of blood. A rhetoric focused on friendship and on gender differences manages to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the audience by appealing to their desire to control their socio-political relations; it also quietly assumes a basis for such friendship and gender roles by recognizing an essential and largely patriarchal solidarity or shared identity among its members, who belong largely to the privileged elements of English society. In Orrery's subsequent plays, however, the power and meaning of friendship become increasingly subject to question as residual ideologies that recognize the power of political intrigue, social custom, blood relations, and sexual rivalry, attack and appeal to an audience whose faith in the restored social and political order had also begun to wane.²⁴

If Orrery's “heroic” plays suggest the promise and the precariousness of his hopes for reciprocity, friendship, and solidarity among the elite, they also suggest the need for—but the difficulty of a return to—an ideologically critical and serious drama that could rely upon heroic individuals and a heroic ethos. In Orrery's as well as in Dryden's heroic drama, rhetorical efforts to privilege a heroic ethos cannot help but foreground contradictions that disrupt the symbolic oppositions upon which it depends. In terms of popularity, restoration audiences found the dramatic exchange and negotiation of cultural roles and values much more pleasurable when presented in such comic and tragicomic forms as Dryden began to adapt and develop in the late 1660s, producing plays whose popularity derived largely from his finely gauged symbolic commentary on social, political, and sexual relations, and their presentation in serio-comic forms that could both heighten and defuse his cultural critiques.²⁵ Yet Orrery's plays remain compelling and their success impressive. In the plays explored and mentioned here he manages to represent the acute conflicts and compromises of life under Charles II, juxtaposing the desire for restoring friendship and trust and renewing a heroic ethos against socio-political aspirations and rivalries that produced political intrigue, disappointment, and eventually Orrery's own fall from power.

Notes

1. William Clark believes Orrery's plays “really make no pretence to deal with the fundamental realities of human activity” (96); Robert Hume (195-96) and Eugene Waith (199-203) also discuss briefly the plays' Caroline lineage of “super-précieuse sentiment and versified ethical disputation” (Hume 196). Richard W. Bevis largely concurs, stating that no “English dramatist ever carried the spirit of French romance further than did Boyle” (49). Kathleen Lynch also traces Orrery's literary antecedents, but her biography interprets the plays as a mixture of pleasurable diversion, autobiographical apologetics, and political advice (146). Laura Brown notes the plays' “royalist and nationalist” ideology (8). Laurens J. Mills notes Orrery's “king-worship,” but he does not consider how friendship mediates sexual and political relations and differences in the plays. See The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark II, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1937); Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, (Oxford, 1976); Eugene M. Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (New York, 1971); Richard W. Bevis, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660-1789 (London, 1988); Kathleen M. Lynch, “Conventions of Platonic Drama in the Heroic Plays of Orrery and Dryden,” PMLA 44 (1929): 456-71, and Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery (Knoxville, 1965); Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form 1660-1760 (New Haven, 1981); Laurens Joseph Mills, “The Friendship Theme in Orrery's Plays,” PMLA 53 (1938): 795-806.

2. Susan Staves notes Orrery's self-justification in The Generall (53), arguing that Orrery depends upon romance because there were “no realistic solutions” (60), and believes the plays' success indicates that audiences “could both respond with admiration to heroic behaviour and laugh at it” (201). Mita Choudhury sees Orrery's plays as “straightforward allegories” (56) that “reinforced the grandeur of monarchy” (56). But Choudhury's description of Orrery's rhetorical strategies as “straightforward” attempts to “maintain the status quo” (51) tends to belie the particular ways that Orrery refigures social, political, and gender relations. Nancy Klein Maguire also considers contemporary allusions, suggesting, for example, that Clorimun closely parallels not only Monck but an idealized Orrery. Maguire indicates helpfully how Orrery's plays may function as guilt-ridden, reparative autobiography, but her analyses of The Generall and Henry the Fifth prove rather cursory. See Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, 1979); Mita Choudhury, “Orrery and the London Stage: A Loyalist's Contribution to Restoration Allegorical Drama,” Studia Neophilologica 62 (1990):43-59; Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671 (Cambridge, 1992), 164-89.

3. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds. Robert Latham and William Mathews, 11 vols. (Berkeley, 1970-83), 5:240 (8-13-64).

4. Lynch, Roger Boyle, 116.

5. My interest in heroic friendship complements John M. Wallace's emphasis on obligations and gratitude in Dryden's plays, “John Dryden's Plays and the Conception of a Heroic Society,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley, 1980). I follow more closely J. Douglas Canfield's probing observations on reciprocal trust and friendship in the works of Orrery and others, in his “The Significance of the Restoration Rhymed Heroic Play,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1979):49-62. Canfield argues that “the Restoration rhymed heroic play is an attempt to reinscribe across the pages of a disintegrating cultural scripture the chivalric code which had underwritten aristocratic society for centuries” (50). In a more recent study Canfield shows more fully that the structure of patrilineal genealogy demanded political and sexual fidelity to enable the patriarchal “transmission of power and property”; see Word as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration (Philadelphia, 1989), xiii-xiv. Finally, I find Richard Braverman's sophisticated argument concerning the restoration of normative political order via sexual differences in such heroic plays as Orrery's Henry V informed, adept, and provocative, though I depart from his position by suggesting that these plays also disclose and anticipate less stable, and perhaps more negotiable, aspects of such “normative” differences; see Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge, 1993).

6. Note in the Diary, for example, Pepys's hopes for rising with Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, 1:167 (6-2-60); his own plot “concerning my issuing of warrants, which they did not smell the use I entend to make of it,” 3:106 (6-12-62); and his comment on courtiers' precarious positions: “all may see how slippery places all Courtiers stand in,” 3:282 (12-15-62).

7. Quoted in Joan Thirsk, The Restoration, (London, 1976), 157-58.

8. See Miriam Slater's comments on promoting solidarity through reciprocal obligations: “What this society did offer—in fact demanded—from its members was reciprocation in a bewildering variety of forms” (Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Verneys of Claydon House [London, 1984], 49).

9. Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), 144-45.

10. On the homosocial character of such friendship, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985). Though Pepys records the political effects of heterosexual relations among the elite in a patriarchal society, he rarely ascribes political rivalries directly to male sexual rivalry over women: “And among other discourse, he told me that it is expected that the Duke will marry the Lord Chancellor's daughter at last. Which is likely to be the ruine of Mr. Davis and my Lord Barkely, who have carried themselfs so high against the Chancellor—Sir Ch. Barkely swearing that he and others have lain with her often, which all believe to be a lie” (Diary, 1:315 [12-10-60]).

11. See Braverman, 32-47; and Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995):295-322.

12. Roger Boyle, The Generall, in Works, Vol. 1, ed. Clark, 1.1.24-25. Future references to Boyle's (Orrery's) plays refer to this volume and are cited in the text.

13. Memnor's privileging of “friendship” above kinship challenges the contemporary estimation of the importance of kinship ties, which according to Lawrence Stone, was probably heightened after the Restoration. See The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, abridged edition (New York, 1979).

14. Clark suggests that Katherine Philips, “the matchless Orinda,” and her promotion of the Society of Friendship in Dublin after her arrival in the summer of 1662, influenced Orrery's interests in the theme of friendship (Works, 73). Slater writes, however, that it “would have required a very different social and economic structure for the modern ideal of friendship to have been a common reality.” She notes the “high incidence of the use of the word ‘friend’ as a synonym for kin designations, particularly when the relative involved was expected to offer a favor or service of some kind” (35).

15. Pepys is upset, for example, at being seen at the theater by “four of our office Clerkes, which sat in the half-Crowne box and I in the 1s. 6d.” (Diary, 2:18 [1-19-61]); he also dreams of being a Knight, of keeping a coach, and decides once again on a course of frugality (Diary, 3:40 [3-2-62]). Stone observes that “ties of blood or marriage” found increasing competition “from the alternative principles of money or merit” (Family, 97). See also Stone's and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone's reevaluation of social mobility in An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984), 3-29, 397-426.

16. The attitude towards Henry's “private gallantries” resembles contemporary attitudes towards Charles II's amorous relations, which provoked scandal but which were acknowledged as the king's privilege. Pepys expresses some initial anxiety over whoring at court (Diary, 2:167 [8-31-61]), and notes a sermon on adultery aimed at the king (Diary, 3:60 [4-6-62]), but he cannot help being enamored with Charles II's mistress, Lady Castlemaine, even though he is puzzled by his empathy for one he considers “a whore” (Diary, 3:139 [7-16-62]).

17. Given Owen Tudor's and Katherine's eventual secret marriage after Henry's death, such sacrifice would also have been tinged with irony for Orrery's audience. On not defining power simply in terms of repression, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York, 1980), 119. I would modify Foucault's position by acknowledging more reciprocal relations between subjectivity and discursive structures. See Louis Montrose, “New Historicisms,” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York, 1992), 392-418.

18. The resonance of Burgundy's politics to an English audience is even clearer in the debate over territorial rights to Anjou, Aquitaine, and Normandy. In 4.1, Burgundy urges France's claims, cleverly employing England's own history of civil war against it by citing the de facto legitimacy of the House of Lancaster's usurpation of the House of York.

19. This reference to the King of Portugal is a far cry from Pepys's entries where Captain Lambert describes the king as a “very rude and simple fellow” (Diary, 2:197 [10-17-61]), and Lord Sandwich relates “the King of Portugal is a very foole almost, and his mother doth all” (Diary, 3:191 [5-24-62]). Portugal was very successful, however, in bribing the Privy Council to further Catherine's marriage to Charles and their own alliance with England against Spain. See Hutton, Charles, 159.

20. The passage recalls, for instance, the Duke of Newcastle's advice on how to achieve domestic peace by foreign wars: “for making a foreign war keeps your Majesty safe at home both from invasion and a civil war” (quoted by Thirsk, 4). Barely a year later England entered into a trade war against the Dutch in earnest, an action that Parliament supported with enthusiasm and the greatest money for supply ever voted an English monarch. See Hutton, Charles, 220; and J. R. Jones, Charles II, Royal Politician (London, 1987), 70.

21. Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658-1667 (Oxford, 1985), 181-82.

22. Hutton, Restoration, 150. Maguire speculates that Orrery compliments the Duke of York “by marrying the brother of Henry V to Princess Anne (Anne Hyde)” (Maguire, 175).

23. On French fashions see Hutton, Charles, 185-86. Pepys writes: “And indeed, we do naturally all love the Spanish and hate the French” (Diary, 2:188 [9-30-61]). With the news early in 1661 of an upcoming marriage between Queen Henrietta Maria's daughter to the brother of Louis XIV and Charles's agreement to a “closer union” with France, England's relations with France had markedly improved (Hutton, Charles, 159); the alliance, however, remained precarious and finally dissolved when the Second Dutch war gradually brought France into war against England. Later Orrery himself suggests Charles II invade France in his prologue to The Black Prince (1667). Braverman argues deftly that Henry rationalizes “the feminine Other as it is manifest by the ‘usurping’ French as well as the heroine herself” (Braverman, 39).

24. In a companion piece I explore how friendship in Mustapha (1665) becomes redefined via nominalistic rhetoric as political power, with tragic consequences that also depend upon the seductive influence of such women as Roxolana. I also show how the less popular Tryphon (1668) differs in degree from its predecessors through a painful exposure, rather than successful symbolic disguise, of past and present usurpations of political positions and of friendship. See an earlier version of these analyses in my Ph.D. thesis, Recognition and Repression: Ideology and Dramatic Success on the London Stage, 1660-1680 (Ann Arbor, 1988), 45-85.

25. For example, see my essay “Negotiating Cultural Prerogatives in Dryden's Secret Love and Sir Martin Mar-all,” PLL: Papers on Language & Literature 29 (1993): 170-96.

I wish to thank James Winn and Doug Canfield for their astute comments on an earlier version of this essay, and the University of Idaho Research Office for its support.