By the late 1670s, England's political culture had witnessed the defeat of consensus and the triumph of contention. The battle over the country's political and religious future pitted the old republicans, the first Whigs, and Protestant nonconformists against Tories, High Anglicans, and Catholics. No public figure, work, or spectacle was immune from the rage of party. Those who made their living by the pen felt this disputatious atmosphere keenly. Many a poet, ideologue, scribbler, and hack drew his pen 'for one Party', or both, or first for one and then for the other. Jonathan Scott may have exaggerated the fluidity of political loyalties in the era of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis with his remark, that '1678's “Whigs” were 1681's “Tories”', but he made an important point so often missed in recent scholarship. Politics was divided into camps in the late Stuart era, but those camps were hardly fortresses. Combatants often slipped back and forth. Writers, in particular, were attuned to the twists and turns of political fortune. Both the poet, Elkanah Settle, and the propagandist, Henry Care, after years of producing very effective Whig polemic, transferred their loyalties (Settle in 1681, Care in 1683) and put their talents to work for the court.

But this was not true for Aphra Behn, one of the most prolific writers of the Restoration. Her politics throughout the 1670s and 1680s remained consistent. True, Behn had positioned herself on the winning side of the debate in the early 1680s when Whig debacle followed Whig debacle. But there she remained even as James II’s policies after 1687 made his Tory and Anglican supporters ever more queasy. Behn was not ‘disillusioned with James’s sagacity’ or any more ‘tolerant’ of the opposition in 1688 than she had been in 1681. Her Toryism was never ‘less than wholehearted’. She died in April 1689, an unreformed and unreformable Tory.