This chapter situates Milton's “experience of defeat” in relation to that of sectarians, particularly female visionaries who in the 1650s and '60s contributed to a literature of suffering. In the early modern period, England subsumed the history of ancient Israel into its national providential narrative, which for dissenters and millenarians was to culminate in a temporal regnum Christi. Male and female prophetic writers originally subscribed to this notion of England's chosen or “peculiar” status, but already in the 1650s went on to lament the nation's failure to live up to its early promise. The concept of election in fact demanded constant adjusting in the face of shifting personal and national events, including the “experience of defeat,” which Christopher Hill and Marxist historians of early modern England identify with the failure of the Good Old Cause.

In his influential study of the response of Milton and male radicals to the aftermath of the revolution, Hill admits: “I was disappointed not to be able to find any woman who left adequate evidence of her experience of defeat.” Since women were valued members of the religious sects, Hill attributes the lack of records about women's testimonies, including those on personal and political defeat, to the general dearth of information about women in the period. He nevertheless canvasses a number of possible female candidates, among them Margaret Fell, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Aphra Behn, who might have participated in the development of such a tradition.