SOURCE: Springborg, Patricia. “Mary Astell and John Locke.” In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, edited by Steven N. Zwicker, pp. 276-303. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Springborg examines Astell's critique of the writings of John Locke, analyzing the differences and similarities between the two writers, as well as providing an overview of Astell's contributions to the political and literary debates of the Augustan era.]

A poor Northern English gentlewoman, Mary Astell was born in 1666 of a mother from an old Newcastle Catholic gentry family, and of a father who had barely completed his apprenticeship with the company of Hostman of Newcastle upon Tyne, before he died leaving the family debt-ridden when Mary was twelve. With customary spiritedness Mary Astell moved to London when she was twenty, making her literary debut by presenting to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, a collection of her girlhood poems, dedicated to him, accompanied by a request for financial assistance.¹ Whether or not the Archbishop, who numbered among the prominent members of the clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary, became Astell's patron in fact, we do not know. But Astell entered a circle of High Church prelates and intellectual and aristocratic women, including Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Catherine Jones. To Lady Catherine Jones Astell dedicated the Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) and her magnum opus, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church (1705). Later, as a known literary figure, Astell was to contribute a preface to Mary Wortley Montagu's Embassy Letters: The Travels of an English Lady in Europe, Asia and Africa (1724, 1725), a work now famous in the literature surrounding the “invention” of Eastern Europe.

Astell established herself with an impressively diverse array of canonical works, beginning with a tract on women's education, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697),² which very nearly won funding support for an exclusively female academy from Queen Anne. In Reflections upon Marriage (1700), written in response to the scandalous divorce of Hortense Mazarin, Astell displayed her powers as a social critic, for which she was emulated and imitated. Meanwhile the philosophical and theological seriousness of a carefully focused and strongly centered writer was manifested in correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist, John Norris, Rector of Bemerton, begun in 1693, and published at his instigation in 1695 as Letters Concerning the Love of God.³

On the strength of these credentials Astell entered the political and constitutional controversy over Occasional Conformity. Her three pamphlets of 1704, published, and probably commissioned by, the High Church printer Richard Wilkin, Moderation truly Stated, A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War,⁴ entered the Tory canon as specific responses to Whiggish works by James Owen, Daniel Defoe, and Bishop White Kennett, respectively.⁵ And in 1705 Astell published what she herself regarded as her magnum opus, her long and systematic philosophical and theological critique of Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, entitled The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church.⁶

Astell's last major published work, Bart'lemy Fair of 1709, is in a different genre altogether, an essay in Augustan belles lettres. Subtitled An Enquiry after Wit in which due Respect is had to a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, Bart'lemy Fair directly addressed the Letter, a work by the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke's pupil. But Astell took it in fact to be the work of Jonathan Swift and so wrote under the name of William Wotton, the author parodied by Swift in A Tale of A Tub. She thus entered the Battle of the Books, that literary controversy, begun in France and then transported to England, which marked the watershed between modernity and pre-modernity, as a self-conscious contender on the side of the moderns.⁷ Astell lived on until 1731, seeing her works reissued and debated. We have evidence that she continued to pursue Tory causes, although not in published works of her own, but in the research (for which she is acknowledged) for John Walker's massive study, The Sufferings of the Clergy (1714).⁸

Commentators have noted the capacity of Restoration women to live in the interstices of social institutions, in new literary and critical spaces created out of the great upheaval of the Civil War, as novelists, dramatists, and political pamphleteers. Astell's is a curious case. On the one hand she undertook a self-conscious critique of the very institutions at the root of female oppression: contemporary education and marriage practices. On the other she was a commissioned Tory pamphleteer. How do we explain this? It does little justice to the capacity of women to fabricate an existence amid the legal and structural constraints within which they found themselves to harp too much on their absence from the official record, if this were even true. To some extent the problem is definitional. But that we so readily acquiesce to a definition of the public realm that restricts it to the polis and its forms, is a story in itself. For this narrowness in the definition of public life excludes not only women. The Elizabethan period, one of the richest flowerings of commentary on the changing forms of public life in all their social and political dimensions, has been virtually expunged from the history of political thought. This is due to exclusions on the basis of genre, rather than gender. The works of Marlowe, Kyd, Spenser, and Shakespeare, intensely “political” in the broad sense, were cast for the stage or in verse, for a complex of reasons which included forms of lyric expression favored by Renaissance writers, a preference for “veiled allegory” due to religious and magical beliefs, involvement in foreign and sometimes treasonable causes and, not least, the activities of Elizabethan secret police under Secretary of State Walsingham. The New Historicists⁹ have sought to rectify the loss for which the Old Historians are guilty. But political theorists have yet to leap into the fray.

As further testimony to the power of our categories to frame history, early modern liberal theory set out to entrench the public/private split which had the consequence of expunging women from the public record. Mary Astell stands as a living witness to the artificiality of this distinction and the untruthfulness of its ramifications. For in Astell we have the curious case of a mainstream religious thinker and political pamphleteer, celebrated in her day, whose works in some cases ran through four editions and only gradually lost currency. Her most celebrated persona was as “Madonella,” the founder of an academy for “superannuated virgins” in Steele's satire of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in Tatler, nos. 32 and 63.¹⁰ As author of a project to “erect a monastery or religious retirement” for women, Astell was lampooned on the stage by Mrs. Centlivre in Basset Table,¹¹ although lionized by Samuel Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison¹² and as the model for Clarissa.¹³ It was this persona to which Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Lilia of The Princess (1847) refers, imitated in turn by Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida, their lampoon of a female academy over whose doors was emblazoned the motto “Let no man enter on pain of death.”¹⁴

To give some indication of the reception and circulation of Astell's works, Part i of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, of 1694, was reprinted four times and plagiarized at least as many. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, which followed in 1697, was even more notoriously pirated. Some 147 pages of chapter three, sections 1-5 of the 1697 edition of A Serious Proposal, Part II, were excerpted without acknowledgment in The Ladies' Library of 1714, a work widely circulated, which went through eight impressions up to 1772 and was translated into French and Dutch. Steele was until recently believed to be the compiler of The Ladies' Library, and the man to whom Astell herself, in the 1722 Preface to Bart'lemy Fair, attributed the plagiarism. But The Ladies' Library, according to the title page, “published by Mr. R[ichard] Steele,” who supplied a preface, and “written by a Lady,” was in fact compiled by George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, philosopher, and polymath, as recent scholarship establishes.¹⁵ Meanwhile, Astell's Reflections upon Marriage¹⁶ was to run to four editions, to the third of which (1706) she added a controversial preface, expanding her arguments of 1697 and 1700 to furnish one of the earliest and most percipient critiques of John Locke's political arguments.

Astell's revival as a positive model has largely been the work of feminists; Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and their associates, in the first instance; and the great wave of late twentieth-century feminists, in the second. Here we will briefly review the contexts for Mary Astell's feminism, her contribution to political debates in the Augustan age, her religiosity, and her enduring contribution to Augustan letters.

Mary Astell had an overwhelming concern to persuade general citizens of the sanity of Tory arguments and the dangers to the public interest of theories of social contract and resistance; theories that had ever gained but a little advocacy. New ideas were abroad, unsettling to old Tory views, and it is a mark of the complexity of Astell's thought that she reflects these tendencies also. John Pocock¹⁷ and Mark Goldie¹⁸ both remark on the inroads made in the second half of the seventeenth century by doctrines of natural right. They intruded into an environment of fairly parochial argument about the legitimacy of monarchy, where case and counter-case were argued in terms of English history: the ancient constitution, whether king or parliament were the true repository of immemorial custom, and claims made for the English common law as a fund of equity and justice and on behalf of the lawyer practitioners who articulated it. To the Continental legal tradition belonged the great European natural rights theorists, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), the former of whom Astell cites,¹⁹ along with their English counterparts, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose sojourns on the Continent had acquainted them with their European contemporaries.

It would oversimplify the position to argue that the English legal tradition had been parochial for long. As Pocock in his Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law well shows, the Continental feudal law tradition had early been inserted into the debate against the common law parliamentarians. The “ancient constitution” lived on as a conceit, which it may always have been, against the onslaught of the rationalists, whether they be canon law proponents of popular sovereignty, earlier, or Whiggish adherents of natural rights, latterly, whom Astell wisely lumps together. And many conservative arguments, including those of Astell, were philosophical, not historical, and grounded in an appeal to reason.²⁰

Natural rights doctrines, although less immediately recognized, and more narrowly subscribed to, were to prove more devastating. Drawn in initially as resources in the constitutional crisis of 1688 and developed in the refinement of the Whig position, they were to open a new chapter in political debate. Notwithstanding the fact that she uses it to entrench traditional positions, Astell participates in a rationalism that is ultimately corrosive of Tory causes, to the extent—which is not as great as sometimes claimed—that they depended on historicist arguments. Here we have the anomaly of a theorist contributing to the very movement that was to render her political philosophy obsolete—supplying perhaps an explanation for the removal from the political theory canon of a woman whose works in her day regularly ran to five editions.

Astell is among the most trenchant critics of Locke and Hobbes. Yet she participated in the Continental philosophical tradition out of which Hobbism and Lockeanism grew. Under the tutelage of John Norris, and through the medium of such contemporary popularizers as Richard Allestree (1619-81), Astell was an early convert to the view of Descartes that introspection, complemented by faith, provided the fundamental truths of philosophy.²¹ English philosophy of her day represented commentary on Descartes. Hobbes, most famous of the early modern atomists and materialists, had supplied Objections to Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637), later published with the French philosopher's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). It was in exile in France, as a member of the circle gathered around Marin Mersenne, that Hobbes had first sought to establish his credentials as a philosopher, in the company of the like-minded Epicurean and sceptic, Pierre Gassendi and others. To a greater extent than is usually acknowledged Hobbes's metaphysics belong to the history of the reception of Descartes, so many of whose ideas he absorbed. It was this tradition of epistemology to which Locke contributed so greatly with his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690): an epistemology, like that of Hobbes, which laid the foundations of modern behaviorism, pioneering the notion of the mind as a black box, which processed sensations as inputs and produced ideas, simple and complex, as outputs.

Astell satirized Locke's theory of the association of ideas, atomist, materialist, and Gassendist, as it was.²² Too frequently modern commentators have missed this, tracing Astell's feminist reformism, like that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor, whose views are otherwise so different, to an epistemology founded on Lockean principles. For the philosophies of both Descartes and Locke provided the foundations for a gender-neutral theory of mind. If, as Descartes maintained, the great truths of existence were affirmed by the solitary thinking subject, and if the mental processes of the thinking subject facilitated reason, the claims of men to rule women were baseless. The equality of all believers, which Protestantism preached, and to which Descartes was responding, had to include women or its very foundations were breached. Alternatively, if as Locke maintained, Descartes was wrong about ideas of existence being pre-theoretically imprinted in the human mind; and if, as Locke asserted, the mind was a clean slate receptive to sense impressions, gendered mind was once again an incoherent concept. It was Descartes, whose Platonist idealism Locke followed Hobbes in rejecting, who so profoundly influenced Astell.²³ And Astell's critique of Locke on “thinking matter” in The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church, lies at the heart of her refutation of Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity in particular and his epistemology in general.²⁴

In the realm of social theory, Astell made that particular politico-juridical legacy of Hobbes and Locke, the theory of social contract, the target of her attack. Designed to explain the relation between subjects and rulers as the outcome of a pact by which subjects exchanged obedience for protection, social contract relied for its force on the only form of legal contract with which ordinary people had experience, the marriage contract. In doing so, social contract theory drew an implicit parallel between the voluntary submission of wives, who enter the marriage contract as free and equal partners but emerge as radical unequals in the marriage estate; and subjects, who contract as free and equal individuals, but enter the political estate bound to an absolute sovereign. The marriage contract/social contract homology, which Hobbes and Locke bequeathed to liberalism as a paradigm for the future,²⁵ was subject to Astell's assault in Reflections Upon Marriage; a sortie as deadly as her assault on the Whig fabrications of a Popish Plot and the French alliance in An Impartial Enquiry.²⁶ She thus attacked the program of Locke and the Shaftesbury circle on all fronts.

ASTELL, LOCKE, AND THE PROBLEM OF RESISTANCE

Astell's critique of social contract may well be one of the first published critiques of arguments central to Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Certain it is that Astell's Impartial Enquiry belongs to a genre that deals no less with the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the succession crises in the reign of Anne, than it does with the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. Thus Locke's and Astell's works belong to the same political milieu, a politics which, from the Exclusion Crisis to the end of Anne's reign is, in many respects, a seamless whole.

The greater issues on which these particular debates turned were the following. The ultimate source of law: was it customary right enshrined in common law, or the will of the prince? The true guardian of the law: was it the parliament as representative of the people, or the Crown, with its duty of protection in exchange for allegiance? The provenance of the ancient constitution: did it lie in immemorial custom or the institutions of the Crown? The nature of the relationship between the Crown and its subjects: was it contractual, or was it defined by submission to providential rights or rights of conquest? The entitlement rights of subjects in their own person and to their property: did they exist by nature, or by contract? Another set of questions concerned the respective antiquity of the institutions under contest and their historical status. Were they relatively indigenous, native to Englishmen; were they feudal, or rooted in Roman Law; or were they ahistorical, originating in the “natural right” of individuals, belonging to the human condition itself?

The long contest begun in the 1640s between parliament and the Crown had seen a disaggregation of customary rights and the ancient constitution.²⁷ The upshot of the contest was the hijacking of customary right by the parliamentary party (later the Whigs) and of the ancient constitution by the Royalists (later the Tories). If such a characterization seems too crude, it is worth noting that party politics in the age of Anne, in which Astell participated, turned on just these principles, and are barely comprehensible without them. From Sir Edward Coke's time on, juridical thought had conceived of the ancient constitution as comprising the Crown, its institutions, and the entirety of common law, and statutory law enacted by parliament sitting as a high court. But the heightening conflict between the Crown and the parliament over the royal prerogative brought with it a contest over their antiquity and, therefore, the superior claims of one against the other.

The long process of disaggregating the ancient constitution and customary rights, marked the juridically most sophisticated, perhaps the politically most participatory, certainly the party-politically most polarized, and the most vigorous pamphlet war in the history of the early modern English state. It was ultimately won by the Whig side, with limitations on royal prerogative put in place successively from 1649 to 1702. Goldie, in his review of politics and the press for the period concludes, “Between 1689 and 1714, newspapers apart, the figure of five to six thousand, or on average four per week, would not be an unrealistic guess at the total number of polemical pieces coming off the presses.”²⁸

Astell was implacably opposed to the removal of James II from the throne and hostile to William and Mary as imposters. Her allies numbered prominent non-jurors, and her early works are replete with double entendre aimed at William III and his apologists. Much of Astell's case against the fickleness with which men treat their marriage vows in Reflections upon Marriage can be read at another level as criticism of the fickleness of those who undertook oaths of allegiance to William and Mary despite solemn and binding oaths to James II still in force. In this way Astell characteristically turned to her advantage the marriage contract/social contract homology. So for instance in the famous 1706 Introduction to Reflections upon Marriage, Astell combines insistence on the rule of queens as affirmed by Salic Law in general, and endorsement of the rule of Queen Anne in particular, with jibes at Locke, Defoe, and William's propagandists who, in forsaking James II, forsook the lineage of the great Queen Elizabeth I:

If they mean that some Men are superior to some Women this is no great Discovery;²⁹ had they turn'd the Tables they might have seen that some Women are Superior to some Men. Or had they been pleased to remember their Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, they might have known that One Woman is superior to All the Men in these Nations, or else they have sworn to very little purpose. And it must not be suppos'd, that their Reason and Religion wou'd suffer them to take Oaths, contrary to the Law of Nature and Reason of things.³⁰

Only the radical Whigs, among whom Locke of the Two Treatises of Government belongs, along with Tyrrell, Samuel Johnson, Atwood, Blount, and Defoe, “used a natural law case for resistance or right of deposition”—although a Whig middle group used contractual resistance in some form.³¹ Astell mounts against them a brilliant case, calling upon distinctions between authorization and designation that are to be found in Hobbes and Filmer, drawn ultimately from scholastic debate and now put to similar use by thinkers otherwise very much at odds, to deny a right to dethrone kings, even bad kings.

In this, as in other instances, Astell demonstrated her consistency and care in argumentation preparatory to her great attack by ridicule on the social contract/marriage contract analogue in Reflections upon Marriage and An Impartial Enquiry. The attempt, in scholastic theory, to drive a wedge between authorization and consent as sanctions for institutions public and private, had its legacy in Hobbes's finely crafted theory of simultaneous authorization and consent in the moment of social contract. If for Hobbes popular consent was the necessary but not sufficient condition for legitimacy, the fabric of social institutions could nevertheless not be allowed to hang by such slender threads. Mainstream scholastic theory had sought to secure the social power of even secular institutions, the magistracies of state, and semi-secular ones, notably the family, by separating out as different acts the authorizing of an institution and the appointment of an incumbent to it. Authorization fell to God alone, but in the act of designation the people had their day. Where the Roman Catholics Robert Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez took the more radical position that only a community could authorize the transfer of power from a community to a ruler, Hobbes fell back on the older scholastic position that vests power to authorize with the author (in this case God), leaving only the designation of an incumbent to popular choice.³² Hobbes's extension of contract theory to the recesses of household and family was not necessarily inconsistent. Scholastic theory held, correspondingly, that entry to the estate of marriage could only be divinely authorized, as registered in the marriage vows, but that the choice of incumbents could be left to consent, as recognized by the marriage contract between the parties.

Astell, who tipped her hand against the marriage contract/social contract analogue in Reflections upon Marriage, argued her case systematically in An Impartial Enquiry and The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church. Themes from contemporary parliamentary and pamphlet controversy dominate these works. In An Impartial Enquiry, she proceeded to invoke Paul, Romans 13,³³ although not by name, the very text canonically recited by the rationalists and pragmatists of her day, who claimed as a practical necessity of government that God, while ordaining good governors, also permitted bad ones to be obeyed. It was once again an argument only permitted on the grounds of the scholastic distinction between ordinatio commissionis, and ordinatio permissionis³⁴ which absolved the Deity of whatever bad choices the people might make in choosing incumbents to offices. Since these were offices that only God could authorize, and because their continued stability was in his care, the consent of the people was a non-revocable act: once made it could not be withdrawn. This was precisely the argument made by Hobbes. It was also the basis for the Christian case against divorce. Astell in Reflections upon Marriage, by no accident, used the opportunity of a celebrated divorce case between the courtesan Hortense Mazarine and her husband, a close relative of Louis XIV's famous Cardinal, to reflect on duty and contract in the public and private spheres.

ASTELL AND THE “GLORIOUS REVOLUTION” OF 1688

It is ironic that Locke's Two Treatises, written, it is now argued, between 1681 and 1683, constantly revised and secretly guarded until their release was safe after 1689, may have been disguised as the mysterious work Tractatus de Morbo Gallico, “Concerning the French Disease,” which had a double meaning: syphilis in one sense, despotism in another, both considered by the English to be peculiarly French.³⁵ But then the Whigs trumped up threats of a French alliance, popery, and despotism, as justifications for the deposition of James II and grounds for continuing fears of reinstatement of the Pretender, latterly in exile in France. Mary Astell reserved her most stinging invective for such subterfuges. Presbyters, not Popes, were the greatest threats to the prevailing civil order, she charged; and Presbyterians were more than popish in their tactics. Just as Whigs charged Tories with popery and francophilia, so Tories charged Whigs with Presbyterian-Calvinist plots against church and state.

The Act of Allegiance of 1689, in its first wording, had raised the specter of “Jesuits and other wicked persons” advising James II “to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people.”³⁶ It was on the basis of such calumnies, admittedly moderated somewhat in the final form of the bill, that clerics mindful of their oaths to the Stuarts had been deprived of their livings. Among them Mary Astell numbered her most revered authorities, Archbishop Sancroft, her earliest patron, Lord Clarendon, upon whose History she relied, Henry Dodwell, and Bishop George Hickes. Astell's anti-Whig treatise, An Impartial Enquiry, the weightiest rebuttal that White Kennett's inflammatory sermon to commemorate the death of Charles I ever received, is firmly anchored in the politics of the Glorious Revolution.

Political events in 1701 had conspired to give Lockean arguments a rerun, heralded by the reissue of radical tracts from 1649 and 1689. The Tories, enjoying the heady powers conceded to the parliament by the Revolution of 1688 which fell to them after their electoral victory of 1701, provided the conditions. They sought to curtail William III's campaign against the French by denying him funds and by seeking to impeach the Lords Somers, Halifax, Portland, and Orford for their Continental involvement. The Kentish Petitioners, who demanded the Crown fund a new war with France and were jailed for their efforts, were the catalyst.³⁷ Somers and the indefatigable Daniel Defoe, a publicist for Locke, leapt to the defense of the right of subjects to petition. Somers, citing Locke's Two Treatises, argued precisely for government as a pact between property-owners, whereby consent of the governed to government as a species of protection agency entailed that the people might also submit grievances where their liberties seemed to be jeopardized. Charles Davenant, in Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad (1704), on which Mary Astell comments in the long prefatory discourse to her pamphlet Moderation Truly Stated (1704), pointed out that, in the Civil War itself, radical proponents of consent had not more loudly proclaimed rights of resistance and parliamentary accountability.³⁸ Davenant, preoccupied with Machiavellian theories on corruption engendered by war, followed up with the trenchant True Picture of the Modern Whig, which showed modern Whigs to be careerists prosecuting war with France to gain political place and personal profit,³⁹ just the line of argument followed by Astell in An Impartial Enquiry. This was also the argument made by Astell, in Moderation Truly Stated, where her target appears to be Locke, although her tract was read by contemporaries as a refutation of Davenant.⁴⁰

The Kentish Petitioners had raised in the minds of pamphleteers on both sides constitutional issues which never lay far beneath the surface. But Whig strategies to keep alive the threat of French despotism and the Pretender as a pretext for war, cast serious doubt on their credentials as defenders of immemorial rights, while “Tory writers manipulated the ancient constitution myth by levelling it at its perpetrators.”⁴¹ Hence we have Charles Davenant, and even Mary Astell, declaring the English constitution to be a mixed constitution consisting of “the harmony of a prince ‘who is Head of the Republic’, the lords and the commons.”⁴² Davenant, using Machiavellian language, speaks of a constitution balanced between arbitrary government and democracy (Crown and Commons), arguing that a fourth estate for the common people with separate rights, such as the Kentish Petitioners had pressed for, would be destabilizing. Mary Astell, in An Impartial Enquiry, argues similarly against “the People's Supremacy”:

And since our Constitution lodges the Legislative Power in the Prince and the Three Estates assembled in Parliament; as it is not in the Power of the Prince and one of the Houses, to Make or Abrogate any Law, without the Concurrence of the other House, so neither can it be Lawfully done by the Prince alone, or by the two Houses without the Prince.⁴³

Whatever Locke's position on the ancient constitution may have been—and his official position is, as usual, silence, despite the role he played in drafting a constitution for the American Carolinas—Mary Astell was quick to convict him of opportunism. She observed the antinomy between the reductionism of his sensationalist psychology that placed collectivities for ever out of reach, and his predilection for the fictions of the “state of nature” and “natural rights.” This was the point of her constant parody of appeals to “the rights of freeborn Englishmen” made by Locke, Defoe, and John Tutchin.⁴⁴ If Locke in fact endorsed a “mixed constitution,”⁴⁵ he would not have endorsed that peculiar version of “mixarchy” to which Lord Clarendon or Astell subscribed, a version of the ancient constitution as comprised of king, Lords, and Commons. For Clarendon, like the bishops who promulgated the theory under Charles II, the Lords included the bishops of the Anglican Church, jealous in the protection of their ecclesiastical power,⁴⁶ something Astell supported and Locke denied. If Locke's constitutional monarchy looked down the centuries in its anticipation of modern constitutional forms, it did so precisely by virtue of a lack of commitment to the constitutional niceties of which Astell and Clarendon, along with those Whigs who tried to reconcile contract and conquest, were zealously protective.

Mary Astell's political pamphlets gravitate around the twin pillars of Toryism: abhorrence of the doctrine of right of resistance and abhorrence of Nonconformity. They also represent a response to the upsurge of Lockean language occasioned by the two events already mentioned as critical: the demands of the Kentish Petitioners, who raised again the question of Ancient Liberties, a constitutional myth which the Whigs defended and the Tories manipulated; and the Occasional Conformity Bill, introduced into parliament in 1703, but not passed until 1711. For Mary Astell, the Occasional Conformity crisis presented the true test of theological seriousness. On this subject two of her three important pamphlets of 1704 turn. In Moderation Truly Stated (1704), her 185-page rebuttal of James Owen's pamphlet, Moderation a Virtue (1703), whose defense of Occasional Conformity was not unreasonable, Astell adopts the extreme tactic of representing this sort of reasonableness as treason. If the Church of England was established by law, then attempts to bypass the requirement that office-holders must be communing Anglicans were unconstitutional at the very least, she maintained. Astell dealt a particularly stinging and belittling riposte to Daniel Defoe, himself a Dissenter, whose string of satirical pamphlets on the hysterical harangues of Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and others drew her ire in A Fair Way with Dissenters and their Patrons.

On the issue of Occasional Conformity Astell was at one with some of the most conservative writers. Goldie has suggested that the real roots of Tory constitutionalism in the revolt against James lay in the choice of church over king.⁴⁷ Archbishop Sancroft and Edward Hyde (1609-74), first Earl of Clarendon, the former Mary Astell's patron, the latter her intellectual mentor and much cited source, were representative of the Anglican hierarchy of the 1680s, uncompromising on the status and independence of Anglicanism, and hostile to Presbyterianism and popery.⁴⁸ The language of toleration was, to Astell, the language of schism: schism in religion and schism in politics. Occasional Conformity meant opening the door to religious and patriotic slackness, one of her most sustained objections to it. Thomas Edwards, author of Gangraena, and “the most voluble opponent” of the religious sects,⁴⁹ is among her most cited sources. Astell agrees with John Nalson, whom she cites in An Impartial Enquiry, that religion, in the household as in the commonwealth, is what makes people observe the covenants they have made. The moderate Earl of Clarendon, Astell's intellectual mentor, who also lay the disorder of the Great Rebellion at the door of the Protestant sects, saw the same consequences: “Children asked not blessing of their parents … The young women conversed without any circumspection or modesty … Parents had no manner of authority over their children.”⁵⁰

In An Impartial Enquiry, Astell introduces her onslaught on Lockean principles, for which White Kennett is the surrogate. It is no accident that the occasion of Mary Astell's pamphlet should have been the memorial day for the commemoration of the death of “the Royal King and Martyr.” Tory iconography depicting Charles I “as a mythological but appealing figure”⁵¹ dates in fact to the work Eikon Basilike of 1649—a sentimental and embroidered version of Charles's last reflections. Its authorship was entangled in debates over the Civil War to which Mary Astell contributed, for glorification of “the Royal Martyr” had been a calculated Tory stratagem.⁵²

ASTELL, LOCKE, SHERLOCK, AND THE ALLEGIANCE DEBATE

Astell entered public debate at the end of a century of biblical patriarchalism which had never been more baldly stated than in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha of 1680, the work of a man desperate to restore his standing with the Crown.⁵³ Filmer categorically denied the view argued by Aristotle and entrenched by Aristotelianism that different power sets establish qualitatively different spheres. Aristotle, in his distinctions in the Politics between forms of paternal, marital, despotic, and political power (as the power of a father, husband, slave owner, and magistrate, respectively) had created a distinction between private and public spheres that Hobbes and Locke, for different reasons, were keen to revive. Ignoring Aristotle's caution against confusing the rule of a large household for that of a small kingdom,⁵⁴ Filmer claimed in fact that men were born into states by being born into families and that the power of kings was the power of fathers and nothing more. Filmer's claim raised the counter-claim that if fathers were indeed kings, the sovereign was superfluous.

Not only was such a notion intolerable to Hobbes and Locke, but so were the assumptions of biblical fundamentalism associated with Puritanism that underpinned it. Moreover, the separation of public and private spheres on which they insisted had a larger purpose. The great stress Hobbes laid on the state being “artificial” rather than natural was designed to erode any self-authenticating powers the Scriptures may be claimed to have in the Protestant community of believers. At the same time it prepared the way for an analysis of the particular artifice in terms of which the creation of the state was brought about: a contract. Scripture had its uses in acclimating people to negotiation by covenant or contract, of which marriage was the most immediate experience in the everyday life of most people. For the marriage contract to function as an analogue for social contract as an institution-creating artifice, the spheres had to be categorically distinct.

Astell, who had much in common with Filmer, and whose mentor, Archbishop Sancroft, had assisted Edmund Bohun in arranging the 1685 publication of Patriarcha, was nevertheless gravely offended by his patriarchalism. She shared Filmer's concern to distinguish the separate moments of authorization and designation, noting however the propensity of the Presbyterians to borrow scholastic casuistry:

Yet upon the grounds of this doctrine both Jesuits and some over zealous favourers of the Geneva discipline have built a perilous conclusion, which is “that the people or multitude have power to punish or deprive the prince if he transgress the laws of the kingdom.” Witness Parsons and Buchanan … Cardinal Bellarmine and Mr Calvin both look asquint this way.⁵⁵

Like Filmer she supported the notion of a unitary state, divided not into spheres but into power zones in which power was distributed hierarchically. But she marshaled an impressive line of biblical women to remonstrate against the misogyny of the Apostle Paul and those adherents who argued the natural inferiority of women.⁵⁶ And here Astell appealed to canons of reason established by Descartes and vouchsafed by Hobbes and Locke, for whom men and women were naturally equal but made radically unequal by the marriage contract, as the model for the radical inequality of citizen and sovereign powers achieved by the social contract.

Astell with characteristic irony enlisted the support of Bishop William Sherlock (1641?-1707), Dean of St. Paul's, against Locke. Sherlock, whom she names among the three Whig bishops who preached the 31 January memorial sermon for Charles I,⁵⁷ might have been thought of as in Locke's camp. But Astell invokes him for his distinction between authority and title made against Locke. She phrases the distinction thus: “For, allowing that the People have a Right to Design the Person of their Governour; it does by no means follow that they Give him his Authority, or that they may when they please resume it.”⁵⁸

Astell could not have known that Locke had actually put into print a rebuttal of Sherlock's distinction, which he considered it important to refute. Sherlock had argued quite cogently that the necessity of government was logically prior to the title of any particular sovereign. If authority was the right to command obedience, decided, it turned out, on de facto grounds, legitimate title was a question of constitutional law, de jure.⁵⁹ Sherlock then carefully distinguished three modes of political empowerment: patriarchal, on the grant of authority made to Adam, Noah, Moses, and all subsequent fathers; by divine command (as to a Chosen People); and by consent. He dismissed the patriarchal argument and the argument from consent; the former because it ignored all the usurpations, beginning with Nimrod; the latter because consent, once given, could be withdrawn. He dismissed any historical arguments concerning legitimate title as “carrying men into such dark Labyrinths of Law and History, etc., as very few know how to find their way out of again.”⁶⁰ He came down rather on the side of the Hobbesian reciprocity of protection/allegiance, citing Paul, Romans 13, and concluding, “If the prince can't Govern, the Subject can't Obey,”⁶¹ a view shared by the secular Engagers, Anthony Ascham and Marchmont Nedham. Sherlock tried to distance himself from the controversial Hobbes, however, for whom “dominion is naturally annexed to Power,” whereas he, Sherlock, was at pains to stress the moral duty of allegiance.⁶²

Locke, whose comments on Sherlock constitute his only recorded remarks on political obedience postdating the Two Treatises of 1689, ridiculed Sherlock for attempting to separate legal title and God's authority—as if the law could breach the latter—seeming certainly to subscribe to obedience and non-resistance in this instance: “Q. Does not god['s] authority whch the actuall K[ing] has bar all other human claims & are not the subjects bound to maintain the right of such a prince as far as they can.”⁶³

Locke, like Sherlock, distanced himself from Hobbism, but this time Sherlock's “submission” was not enough for legal title; it had to be consent: “Where there is noe resistance ther is a generall Submission, but there may be a general submission without a general consent w^ch is an other thing.”⁶⁴

Sherlock had argued, quite to the contrary, and indistinguishably from Hobbes on conquest: “All Mankind have this natural Right to submit for their own preservation”; a submission that “is a voluntary Consent, tho' extorted by Force.”⁶⁵ Astell does not even deal with Sherlock's argument, but she demolishes Locke's, turning against him exactly the argument he uses against slavery. Locke's case for freedom was based on the eloquently expressed argument against slavery:

For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases. No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own Life cannot give another power over it.⁶⁶

This is just the argument that Astell uses to make the case for a distinction between authority and title, but on assumptions that are otherwise directly contrary to Locke on authorization. People may choose the person of the governor, but they cannot empower him, because: “None can give what they have not: The People have no Authority over their own Lives, consequently they can't invest such an Authority in their Governours.”⁶⁷ The argument with which Astell then proceeds seems to be explicitly aimed at Locke:

And tho' we shou'd grant that People, when they first enter into Society, may frame their Laws as they think fit; yet these Laws being once Establish'd, they can't Legally and Honestly be chang'd, but by that Authority in which the Founders of the Society thought fit to place the Legislature. Otherwise we have been miserably impos'd upon by all those Arguments that were urg'd against a Dispensing Power.⁶⁸

ASTELL ON THE INCONSISTENCIES OF CONTRACTARIANISM

Astell cogently argues the Tory case, interspersing her exegesis of the Tory canon, in the form of her authorities, the Bible, the Earl of Clarendon, and Henry Foulis, with broadsides in all directions. On the subject of factiousness she lashes out at fanatics: “Malignants, High-flyers and what not.”⁶⁹ She takes a shot at Hobbesian mechanism as voiced by White Kennett: “we are told, that the Prime Engines were Men of Craft, dreadful Dissemblers with GOD (what is meant by adding and Heaven, I know not, for the Dr. is too zealous against Popery, to suffer us to imagine that he takes in Angels and Saints).”⁷⁰ Then she dares to turn against Dissenters and regicides Hobbesian charges of demonology: “They shou'd not suffer Men to infect the Peoples Minds with evil Principles and Representations, with Speeches that have double Meanings and Equivocal Expressions, Innuendo's and secret Hints and Insinuations.”⁷¹ It is not the only time that she uses explicitly Hobbesian language to hoist the famous author on his own petard. Nowhere is her parody of Hobbes more explicit than in her defense of popery against the worst charges of the Presbyterians, notoriously popish casuists. There she echoes the great master's comments about hay and stubble and straw men:⁷²

Now they who are curious to know what Popery is, and who do not rail at it at a venture, know very well, that every Doctrine which is profess'd by the Church of Rome, is not Popish; God forbid it shou'd, for they receive the Holy Scriptures, and teach the Creeds. But that Superstructure of Hay and Stubble, those Doctrines of Men or Devils, which they have built upon this good Foundation, this is Popery.⁷³

Having demolished faction, Astell recommends against democracy: “For we have the sad Experience of our Civil Wars to inform us, that all the Concessions the King and his Loyal Subjects cou'd make to the Factious and Rebellious, cou'd not satisfie.”⁷⁴ She even suggests that the outspoken, and presumably the press, should be muzzled: “Governours therefore may very justly animadvert upon, and suppress it. For it is as much their Duty, and as necessary a Service to the Public, to restrain the Turbulent and Seditious, as it is to protect the Innocent, and to reward the Deserving.”⁷⁵

Astell's charge that the Scots, John Pym, and the French Cardinal Richelieu had conspired to trump up the French threat in the 1630s and 1640s is a constant refrain. At one point she even enlists Grotius against “factious, turbulent, and Rebellious Spirits,” by which she means Pym and company, otherwise known as “Presbyterians, or Whiggs, or whatever you will call them.”⁷⁶ Having produced a litany of offenders against political obedience and supporters of passive resistance outstanding in this particular debate, she proceeds to give an equally impressive list of evil ministers, intent on “appeas[ing] the Party … obstruct[ing] the King's Business, and … weaken[ing] his authority”; the cause, as Henry Foulis instructs us, of “‘perpetual Hurly-burly … and … Leap-frog Government.’”⁷⁷ She does not mention Locke by name, but he could well be chief among “those Mercenary Scriblers whom all sober Men condemn, and who only write after the Fact, or in order to it, to make their own Fortunes, or to justifie their own Wickedness.”⁷⁸ Locke it was who, in his anonymous and unpublished Minute for Edward Clarke, declared:

Every one, and that with reason, begins our delivery from popery and slavery from the arrival of the prince of Orange and the compleating of it is, by all that wish well to him and it, dated from King William's settlement in the throne. This is the fence set up against popery and France, for King James's name, however made use of, can be but a stale to these two. If ever he returne, under what pretences soever, Jesuits must governe and France be our master. He is too much wedded to the one and relyes too much on the other ever to part with either. He that has ventured and lost three crowns for his blinde obedience to those guides of his conscience and for his following the counsels and pattern of the French King cannot be hoped, after the provocations he has had to heighten his natural aversion, should ever returne with calme thoughts and good intentions to Englishmen, their libertys, and religion. And then I desire the boldest or most negligent amongst us, who can not resolve to be a contemned popish convert and a miserable French peasant, to consider with himself what security, what help, what hopes he can have, if by the ambition and artifice of any great man he depends on and is led by, he be once brought to this market, a poore, innocent sheepe to this shambles; for whatever advantageous bargains the leaders may make for them selves, tis eternally true that the dull heard of followers are always bought and sold.⁷⁹

These do not sound like the words of a democrat, or even of an abstract political theorist. Locke's reputation for being overly philosophical is not something he necessarily enjoyed in his own day. Astell quite clearly sees him as a polemical political theorist, whatever the undoubted merits of his psychological theory might be. As James Farr and Clayton Roberts note, even passages in the Two Treatises apparently concerned with obligation in the abstract take on a different significance, seen in the light of this private document. And so do apparently contradictory statements, such as his claim in his criticism of Sherlock's The case of allegiance due to soveraign powers, that, “Allegiance is neither due nor paid to Right or to Government which are abstract notions but only to persons having right of government.”⁸⁰ While such a statement might seem to deny all attempts to provide a de jure rather than de facto basis for government, more closely scrutinized it reads differently. The “Right or … Government” deemed abstract are in fact Divine Right and hereditary monarchy.

The virtue of the Williamite settlement was that it could be presented as virtually an elective monarchy if the right construction was put upon the empowering oaths; in other words, the notoriously unstable Stuart patrilineal line had suffered an interloper in the form of William III, on the strength of popular sentiment. Much of Locke's effort in the brief to Clarke was to ensure that the Whig project to convert a de facto into a de jure settlement was accomplished.⁸¹ Such a purpose casts Locke's claims in the Two Treatises concerning de facto power and the basis of citizenship in a new light. There he asserted both that “An Usurper … [can never] have a Title, till the People are both at liberty to consent, and have actually consented,”⁸² and concerning how individuals “come to be Subjects or Members of [any] Commonwealth,” that, “Nothing can make any Man so, but his actually entering into it by positive Engagement, and express Promise and Compact.”⁸³

Locke's critique of Sherlock, and his political behavior more generally, might seem to fly in the face of his claim in the Two Treatises, that “there cannot be done a greater Mischief to Prince and People, than the Propagating wrong Notions concerning Government.” But he was consistent in his view, as the brief to Clarke demonstrates, that royal claims to rule by divine right should be treated with “public condemnation and abhorrence.”⁸⁴ His critique of Sherlock merely affirmed what he elsewhere asserted, that oaths of allegiance took precedence over hereditary right, as supplying that element of consent prerequisite to social contract. However, for those who were not willing to swear allegiance, the alternative was “separation from the Government”⁸⁵—a position perilously close to the sanctions against Occasional Conformity which Locke could not have approved. The more immediate problem was to cut a swathe through the conflicting oaths that tied the non-jurors to the Stuart dynasty, and this Locke could do.

It had been the accomplishment of Thomas Hobbes to justify government on non-providential grounds.⁸⁶ Locke was in this respect a successor to Hobbes, but one who argued less for the necessity of government than for its conventionality—both prongs of the Hobbesian position—emphasizing not the injunction of reason on citizens to obey, but the motivations for governments to contract and citizens to consent. The elaborate juridical artifice by means of which citizens, like wives, children, and servants, were deemed voluntarily to have contracted into subordination had as little credibility in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as it does today, but for different reasons. In the early modern era providential arguments still reigned supreme; in ours different conclusions are drawn from contractarian arguments, which seem to have won the day.

Notes

1. Mary Astell's Collections of Poems Dedicated to the most Reverend Father in God William by Divine Providence Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (1689), Rawlinson MSS poet. 154:50, Oxford: The Bodleian Library; excerpted in Bridget Hill, The First English Feminist: “Reflections Upon Marriage” and other Writings by Mary Astell (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1986), pp. 183-84, and printed in full in Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 400-54. I would like to thank Bridget Hill, Mark Goldie, John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Lois Schwoerer, and my editor, Steven Zwicker, for their comments on an earlier version of this piece. Sincere thanks to the Australian Research Council, the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, under whose joint auspices it was written.

2. Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, London, Printed for R. Wilkin, 1694 (Folger Library, 140765 [Wing A4063]). Second edition corrected, 1695, London, Printed for R. Wilkin (Folger Library, 145912 [Wing A4063]). Fourth edition, 1701, London, Printed by J.R. for R. Wilkin (Folger Library, PR3316.A655.S3.Cage).

3. Mary Astell, Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris, Published by J. Norris, Rector of Bemerton nr. Sarum, London, Printed for Samuel Manship, 1695 (Wing 1254).

4. Astell's three commissioned Tory tracts of 1704 are in order of publication: Moderation truly Stated: or a Review of a Late Pamphlet, Entitul'd Moderation a Virtue, or, The Occasional Conformist Justified from the Imputation of Hypocricy … With a Prefatory Discourse to Dr. D'Avenant, Concerning His Late Essays on Peace and War, London, Printed by J.L. for Richard Wilkin, at the King's-Head, in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1704 (Folger Library, BX5202.A8.Cage); A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, London, Printed by E.P. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church-yard, 1704 (Folger Library, BX5202.A7.Cage); and An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom in an Examination of Dr. Kennett's Sermon, Jan. 31, 1703/4, and Vindication of the Royal Martyr, London, Printed by E.P. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1704 (Folger Library, BV 4253.K4.C75.Cage).

5. See James Owen, Moderation a Vertue: Or, the Occasional Conformist Justify'd from the Imputation of Hypocrisy (London, 1703); Daniel Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church (London, 1702) and More Short-Ways with the Dissenters (London, 1703); and White Kennett's A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War: In a Sermon Preached in the Church of St. Botolph Aldgate, On January 31, 1704, the Day of the Fast of the Martyrdom of King Charles I (London, 1704).

6. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England in a Letter to the Right Honourable T.L., C.I., London, Printed by S.H. for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1705 (Folger Library, 216595).

7. See Joseph M. Levine's magisterial The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). It is symptomatic that women should have participated in pathbreaking ways in this discourse on the cusp of modernity. Astell recognized the particular contribution of her acknowledged role model, Anne Lefevre Dacier (1654-1720), a French scholar and classics translator (see A Serious Proposal, p. 10). And she must have valued the contribution of her Chelsea acquaintance, the English antiquarian and linguist, Elizabeth Elstob (see Levine, The Battle of the Books, pp. 378-79).

8. Hill, The First English Feminist, p. 48.

9. Formative works of the New Historicists include Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); the Shakespearean studies of contributors to Jean E. Howard and Marian F. O'Connor (eds.), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1987); and Don Wayne's work on Renaissance country-house poetry, especially that of Ben Jonson, in Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (London: Methuen, 1984). “Cultural Materialism,” in the works of British scholars such as Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore shares a similar emphasis on the material circumstances of texts, their social function in society, and the ways in which cultural texts enact the work of subversion and containment. See Sinfield and Dollimore (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). I owe these observations to Steven Zwicker and thank him for his kind assistance.

10. See Astell's Forward to the second edition of Bart'lemy Fair, 1722 (p. A2a), on how Swift put Steele up to the satire of her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies in Tatler, No. 32, from White's Chocolate-house, 22 June 1709, “a little after the Enquiry [Bart'lemy Fair] appear'd.” See also Tatler, No. 63, 1-3 September 1709. Ruth Perry, in The Celebrated Mary Astell (pp. 229-30, 516 n. 81), and Bridget Hill, in “A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery,” Past and Present, 117 (1987), pp. 107-30 (esp. p. 118, nn. 47 and 48), ascribe authorship of the Tatler pieces to Swift, but the revised Tatler does not, and Astell clearly believes them to be the work of Steele:

    But tho' the Enquirer had offended the Tatler, and his great Friends, on whom he so liberally bestows his Panegyrics, by turning their Ridicule very justly upon themselves; what had any of her Acquaintances done to provoke him? Who does he point at? For she knows of none who ever attempted to erect a Nunnery, or declar'd That Virginity was to be their State of Life.

11. The Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre, 3 vols. (London, 1761), vol. i, pp. 210, 218, cited in Hill, “A Refuge from Men,” p. 120. Susannah Centlivre, a gentlewoman whose family fled to Ireland at the Restoration, may have disliked Astell's politics, Basset Table having been written after the publication of Astell's Royalist political pamphlets of 1704. The widow of two husbands, Centlivre had raised herself from obscurity by writing plays, was a friend of Richard Steele, and in 1706 married Queen Anne's chief cook, Joseph Centlivre (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn., vol. v, p. 674).

12. The Works of Samuel Richardson, 19 vols. (London, 1811), vol. xvi, pp. 155-56, cited in Hill, “A Refuge from Men,” p. 121. See also the authoritative modern edition of Richardson's History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), vol. ii, pp. 255-56 and notes.

13. See A. H. Upham, “A Parallel Case for Richardson's Clarissa,” Modern Language Notes, 28 (1913), pp. 103-05. It is notable, however, that standard works on Richardson, including the authoritative biography by T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), and Tom Keymer's study Clarissa and the Eighteenth Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), do not even include Astell in the index.

14. The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (London, 1905), pp. 167, 176, cited by Hill, “A Refuge from Men,” p. 107.

15. See E.J.F. and D.B., “George Berkeley and The Ladies Library,” Berkeley Newsletter (Dublin), (1980), pp. 5-13; and G. A. Aitken, in “Steele's ‘Ladies' Library’,” The Athenaeum, 2958 (1884), pp. 16-17.

16. Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion'd by the Duke & Dutchess of Mazarine's Case …, London, Printed for John Nutt, 1700 (Wing A4067). Second edition (no known copies extant). Third edition, Reflections Upon Marriage. To which is added a Preface in Answer to Some Objections, London, Printed for R. Wilkin, at the King's Head in St. Paul's Church Yard, 1706. Fourth edition, 1730.

17. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

18. Mark Goldie, “Tory Political Thought 1689-1714,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge (1978).

19. Astell in An Impartial Enquiry, p. 48, cites Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of Our Pretended Saints … 2nd edn., Oxford, Printed by Henry Hall for Ric. Davis, 1674 (Folger Library, F1643, 204, 205): “The Blood of many thousand Christians, shed in these Wars and before, crieth aloud against Presbytery, as the People only guilty of the first occasion of Quarrel … Of whom Grotius says, ‘That he looks upon them as factious, turbulent, and Rebellious Spirits.’”

20. This is emphasized in Johann Sommerville, “History and Theory: the Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought,” Political Studies, 34 (1986), pp. 249-61.

21. For instance, Astell both cites and paraphrases Richard Allestree's The Ladies Calling in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, as on pp. 4, 9, 37, 122, 148, 153ff. of the 1694 edition, which correspond to the following sections of Allestree: part 1, section 5 (1673), 1705 edition, p. 100; part 2, sections 2 and 3, “Of Wives” and “Of Widows,” 1703 edition, pp. 201ff., 231ff.; part 2, section 3, 1705 edition, p. 257; part 2, section 1, “Of Virgins,” 1705 edition, p. 172; part 2, section 3, 1705 edition, p. 232; part 2, section 3, 1705 edition, p. 125, respectively. On many substantive points Astell's program for women echoes Allestree, who in The Ladies Calling had remonstrated against the reduction of women, denied education, to menial status and had argued in favor of “Home-education” and against sending children abroad.

22. See for instance her sarcastic remark in An Impartial Enquiry, p. 40: “Only let me recommend to all such Thinkers, Mr. Lock's Chapter of the Association of Ideas; they need not be afraid to read it, for that ingenious Author is on the right side, and by no means in a French Interest!”

23. Astell in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part i, 1694 edn., pp. 85-86, recommends Englishwomen were better to improve themselves with the “study of Philosophy (as I hear the French Ladies do) Des Cartes, Malebranch and others.” In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, she draws heavily on Descartes, citing “Les Principes del la Philosofie de M. Des Cartes, Pt. I. 45,” at some length on p. 134 (1697 edn.), declaring on pp. 250-51: “But this being already accounted for by Des Cartes [Les Passions de l'Ame] and Dr. More, in his excellent Account of Vertue, I cannot pretend to add any thing to what they have so well Discours'd.”

24. “Mr. Locke's Supposition that it is possible for Matter to Think, consider'd” comprises sections 259 to 271 of Astell's The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church, pp. 250-63, the first two parts of which (sections 1-105, pp. 1-95) are devoted to establishing “What it is that a late Book concerning the Reasonableness of Christianity, etc., pretends to drive at.” For commentary by modern philosophers see the excellent articles by K. M. Squadrito, “Mary Astell's Critique of Locke's View of Thinking Matter,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987), pp. 433-40; and Patricia Ward Scaltas, “Women as Ends—Women as Means in the Enlightenment,” in A. J. Arnaud and E. Kingdom (eds.), Women's Rights and the Rights of Man (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990).

25. See R. W. K. Hinton, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” Political Studies, 15, 3 (1967), pp. 291-300 and 16, 1 (1968), pp. 55-67; Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought,” Western Political Quarterly, 32 (1979), pp. 79-91; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

26. See Patricia Springborg, “Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke,” American Political Science Review, 89, 3 (1995), pp. 621-33; and my introductions to Mary Astell (1666-1731): Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II (London, Pickering and Chatto: 1997).

27. See Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 233ff.

28. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 38.

29. Astell may well be referring to theories of Nicolas Malebranche, 1638-1715, De la Recherche de la Verit, ou l'on traitte de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme, & de l'usage qu'il en doit faire pour viter l'erreur dans les sciences, 4th revised and enlarged edn. (Folger Library B 1893.R.3.1678.Cage). Astell treats Malebranche's principle of “seeing all things in God” at length in her correspondence with John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, of 1693, published in 1695. She addresses Malebranche's revisions to Descartes in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, of 1697, and no more critically than on the subject of sex differences. Malebranche deals with the different structures of mind between the sexes in part 2 of the The Search for Truth, “Concerning the Imagination,” 1.1, “Of the Imagination of Women.” See the 1700 translation by Thomas Taylor, Father Malebranche his treatise concerning the search after truth … Printed by W. Bowyer, for Thomas Bennet, and T. Leigh and D. Midwinter, 2nd corrected edn., London (Folger Library M318), which Astell may well have used. Discussing the greater excitability of women, Taylor, Father Malebranche, p. 64, accurately translates Malebranche, 1678 edn., pp. 105-06:

    But though it be certain, that this Delicacy of the Fibres of the Brain is the principal Cause of all these Effects; yet it is not equally certain, that it is universally to be found in all women. Or if it be to be found, yet their Animal Spirits are sometimes so exactly proportion'd to the Fibres of their Brain, that there are women to be met with, who have a greater solidity of Mind than some Men. 'Tis in a certain Temperature of the Largeness and Agitation of the Animal Spirits, and Conformity with the Fibres of the Brain, that the strength of parts consists: And Women have sometimes that just Temperature. There are women Strong and constant, and there are Men that are Weak and Fickle. There are Women that are Learned, Couragious, and capable of every thing. And on the contrary, there are men that are Soft Effeminate, incapable of any Penetration, or dispatch of any Business. In Fine, when we attribute any Failures to a certain Sex, Age, or Condition, they are only to be understood of the generality; it being ever suppos'd, there is no general Rule without Exception.

30. Preface to the third edition of Reflections upon Marriage, p. iv.

31. See Mark Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), pp. 473-564, esp. pp. 508-09.

32. See Patricia Springborg, “Thomas Hobbes and Cardinal Bellarmine: Leviathan and the Ghost of the Roman Empire,” History of Political Thought, 16, 4 (1995), pp. 503-31.

33. “Let every person render obedience to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those in authority are divinely constituted,” The Holy Bible (Nashville, Tennessee: Gideons International, 1986), p. 843.

34. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 100. See especially Johann Sommerville's perceptive treatment of Hobbes and Bellarmine in Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Context (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 113-19, which complements his overview of papalist theory and Anglican responses in his Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-40 (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 189-203. On the perceived convergence of Presbyterianism and popery on the power to depose kings, see Sommerville's “From Suarez to Filmer: a Reappraisal,” Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 525-40; and the Introduction to his edition of Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. pp. xv, xxi-xxiv. On the medieval roots of consent theory see Francis Oakley, “Legitimation by Consent: the Question of the Medieval Roots,” Viator, 14 (1983), pp. 303-35, and Omnipotence, Covenants, and Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 48-91.

35. See Peter Laslett's Introduction to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 62-65.

36. See Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689,” pp. 473-564, esp. p. 476.

37. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 167. For the more general political context see Lois Schwoerer, “The Right to Resist: Whig Resistance Theory, 1688 to 1694,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 232-52; and on the legal ramifications of the Kentish Petitioners' claims, see Philip A. Hamburger, “Revolution and Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt's Opinion in City of London v. Wood,” Columbia Law Review, 94, 7 (1994), pp. 2091-153.

38. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 168.

39. See John Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 436-48; Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 168.

40. See the remarks of the eighteenth-century commentator George Ballard, in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752), cited by Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 196.

41. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” pp. 169, 173.

42. Davenant, Essays upon Peace at Home and War Abroad, 1704, in Works, 5 vols. (London, 1771), vol. iv, sections 1 and 13.

43. Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 34.

44. Ibid., pp. 8, 14, 30, etc., mocks the language of the country Whig, exemplified in particular by John Tutchin (1661?-1707) who combined reverence for the ancient constitution, parliament, and “native right” with xenophobia, declaring of the constitution “she's as well beloved now by all true Englishmen, as she was by our Forefathers a Thousand Years ago” (Observator, 7-10 April 1703). His views were set out in the Observator from 29 September to 7 November 1703, focusing on resistance and targeted at Charles Leslie (see Phillipson and Skinner [eds.], Political Discourse, p. 217). They were bound for this reason to have come to the attention of Astell, who includes a poke at Leslie in the title to A Fair Way with the Dissenters, claiming her work “Not Writ by Mr. L———y, or any other Furious Jacobite, whether Clergyman or Layman; but by a very Moderate Person and and Dutiful Subject to the Queen.” Astell complained in her Postscript to that work (A Fair Way with the Dissenters, pp. 24-27), that the “High Flyer” Leslie had gotten the credit for her own Moderation truly Stated. And in An Impartial Enquiry (pp. 8ff.) Astell gives the impression that Kennett held the same views as Tutchin. Tutchin, it is true, admired “those two great men, Mr. Sidney and Mr. Locke,” defenders of ancient liberty, “the one against Sir Robert Filmer, and the other against a whole Company of Slaves.” (See Tutchin, Observator, 14-18 September 1706, cited in Nicholas Phillipson, “Politeness and Politics in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians,” in J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer [eds.], The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 [Washington, DC: Folger Institute, 1993], pp. 211-45, esp. p. 218.) But this, the only occasion on which Tutchin names Locke, is too late for Astell's pamphlet.

45. See Martin Thompson, “Significant Silences in Locke's Two Treatises of Government: Constitutional History, Contract and Law,” The Historical Journal, 31 (1987), pp. 275-94, esp. pp. 291-92; and Lois Schwoerer, “Locke, Lockean Ideas and the Glorious Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 51, 4 (1990), pp. 531-48, esp. pp. 540-41.

46. See Richard Tuck's Review of Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), Journal of Modern History, 59, 3 (1987), pp. 570-2.

47. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 64.

48. Ibid., p. 63.

49. Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past and Present, 13 (1958), pp. 42-62, esp. p. 55.

50. Clarendon, Life, vol. i (London, 1827), pp. 358-59, cited in ibid., p. 57.

51. See Quentin Skinner, “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement 1646-1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 85.

52. Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 195.

53. See Sommerville, Introduction to Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings. See also Gordon Schochet's authoritative treatment, Patriarchalism and Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).

54. Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, paragraph 2, 1252a 9-15, Loeb Classical Library edn., ed. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 3:

    Those then who think that the natures of the statesman [politikon], the royal ruler [basilikon], the head of an estate [oikonomikon] and the master of a family [despotikon] are the same, are mistaken (they imagine that the difference between these various forms of authority is between greater and smaller numbers, not a difference in kind—that is, that the ruler over a few people is a master, over more the head of an estate, over more still a statesman or royal ruler, as if there were no difference between a large household and a small city.)

55. Filmer, Patriarcha, p. 3. Astell in An Impartial Enquiry, pp. 24-28, undertook to supply chapter and verse, drawing on Henry Foulis, The History of Romish Treasons … 1681 edn. (Book 2, ch. 3, pp. 75ff.) who had analyzed the specific indebtedness of Presbyterian advocates of popular sovereignty to the Scholastics and Jesuits, a claim which Astell repeated, to target Locke and the Whigs.

56. See William Nicholls (1664-1712), The Duty of Inferiors towards their Superiors, in Five Practical Discourses, 1701, London (Folger Library, 178-610q), Discourse iv, “The Duty of Wives to their Husbands,” which Astell attacks in the opening pages of the Preface to the 1706 edition of Reflections upon Marriage.

57. Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 16: “Since a Dr. Binks, a Mr. Sherlock, a Bishop of St. Asaph, and some few more, take occasion to Preach upon this Day such antiquated Truths as might have past upon the Nation in the Reign of K. Charles II. or in Monmouth's Rebellion.”

58. Ibid., p. 34.

59. William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Case of Allegiance, 1691, p. 11, cited in Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 93.

60. Sherlock, The Case of Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers, 1691, p. 2, cited in ibid.

61. Sherlock, ibid., pp. 21, 14, 45, 42, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 94.

62. Sherlock, ibid., p. 15, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 95.

63. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, Locke MSS c.28, fo. 9iv, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 103.

64. Bodl. Locke MSS c.28, fo. 96r, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 104.

65. Sherlock, Vindication of the Case of Allegiance, pp. 18, 13, cited in Goldie, ibid., p. 104.

66. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Book 2, paragraphs 23, 24, p. 284.

67. Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 34.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., p. 7.

70. Ibid., p. 5.

71. Ibid., p. 8. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 29-30, for Hobbes's famous account of words as counters. Hobbes attributes “insignificant” speech to an ignorance of the relation between sign and signifier:

    Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise, or more mad than ordinary. Nor is it possible without Letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or … excellently foolish. For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

    Hobbes's marvelous images for “insignificant” speech often involve the entrapment of birds, as in Leviathan, p. 28. If ‘truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations,” he says, then “a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in limetwigges; the more he struggles, the more belimed.” And, again, Leviathan, p. 28:

    For the errours of Definitions multiply themselves, according as the reckoning proceeds; and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoyd, without reckoning anew from the beginning, in which lyes the foundation of their errours. From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little summs into a greater, without considering whether those little summes were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the errour visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to cleere themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their bookes; as birds that entring by the chimney, and finding themselves inclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glasse window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in.

72. Hobbes frequently invokes the scarecrows and straw men created by Catholic casuistry, that, “built on the Vain Philosophy of Aristotle, would fright [men] from Obeying the Laws of their Country, with empty names; as men fright Birds from the Corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick.” Leviathan, p. 465.

73. Astell, An Impartial Enquiry, p. 22.

74. Ibid., p. 9.

75. Ibid., p. 8.

76. Ibid., p. 48.

77. Ibid., p. 32.

78. Ibid., p. 29.

79. Bodleian MS Locke e.18, reprinted in James Farr and Clayton Roberts, “John Locke on the Glorious Revolution: A Rediscovered Document,” The Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 385-98, esp. pp. 395-98.

80. Ibid., p. 292.

81. See Mark Goldie, “John Locke's Circle and James II,” The Historical Journal, 35, 3 (1992), pp. 557-86.

82. Locke, Two Treatises, book 2, section 198, p. 398.

83. Ibid., book 2, section 122, p. 349.

84. Bodleian MS Locke e.18, fo. 5, reprinted in Farr and Roberts, “John Locke,” pp. 395-98.

85. Ibid.

86. See Quentin Skinner, “Conquest and Consent”; and Mark Goldie, “Tory Political Thought,” p. 98.