Dryden's Absalom and the birth of King Monmouth

In the opening lines of his celebrated political satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681) John Dryden depicts a polygamous golden age when men freely spread their seed, unencumbered by the Christian law of marriage:

It was under this dispensation that Absalom, ‘so beautiful so brave’, was born to one of King David's concubines. Dryden's David represents King Charles II and Absalom his illegitimate son James, duke of Monmouth, who had been born to a woman called Lucy Walter. Charles had bedded her in 1649, during his exile in France. Now, in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, Monmouth, ‘the Protestant duke’, staked a claim to the throne against ‘the Catholic duke’, the king's brother and heir, James, duke of York. The fate of Protestant England, so it seemed to the Whigs, was in the balance, because Monmouth was barred from the throne by his illegitimacy. But what if Monmouth was not ‘illegitimate’ after all? What if ‘promiscuous use of concubine’ was no sin? Dryden ironizes a libertine and anticlerical view that nature's laws are more liberal about sexual morality than those sanctioned by the church. By imposing a priestly ceremonial apparatus upon marriage, the church had usurped control over the laws of bastardy and inheritance. But by the purer law of nature the duke of Monmouth was, quite simply, his father's eldest son. It was ‘priestcraft’ that excluded the Protestant heir.

A few months before the publication of Dryden's poem in November 1681, precisely this case for Monmouth's legitimacy was argued in a remarkable treatise by an aged Whig lawyer called William Lawrence. The book appeared in two instalments. Marriage by the Moral Law of God Vindicated was published in late summer 1680, but the printing of the rest was interrupted by a government raid against seditious printers. That was galling, for parliament was due to assemble on 21 October, and planned to debate the succession.