One of Margaret Cavendish’s most engaging and accessible texts, Sociable Letters (1662), is an epistolary exploration of a variety of topics relevant to the seventeenth-century reader, from women’s friendship and marriage to politics and civil war. While she shows her familiarity with royalist perspectives throughout, in the frequently quoted Letter #16, Cavendish enters civil war and Engagement debates about the proper derivation of a subject’s obligation and offers a powerful argument about women’s political status and their relationship to the state. If women do not take oaths, she reasons, then they must be neither citizens nor subjects of the Commonwealth. This chapter examines Cavendish’s strategic focus on oath-taking as a signifier of proper citizenship. In suggesting that women may not be bound to the state, Cavendish set herself apart from royalism, and from members of her own circle, including her husband and Thomas Hobbes. Her “no-citizen-no subject” argument belongs in the long history of women’s political writing, offering a perspective on women and the state that resonates with the later writings of Abigail Adams and the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

Chapter 9 explores the period 1649-53 as a time when all religious groups were forced to rethink the Church of England and to contemplate significant changes to their religious lives. Beginning with the radical reform programmes of 1649-53, it argues that many of these reforms (such as attacks on lay impropriations and tithes) had been prefigured in pre-war debates or could command more mainstream support, and can be studied in continuity with earlier reforming initiatives rather than as a radical break with the past. The stymieing of the 1640s Presbyterian settlement, and the political troubles of presbyterian royalists, are examined. The chapter discusses the practical and ideological problems that both Presbyterians and episcopalian royalists faced over how far they should adapt their customary forms of worship and administration of communion in the face of the new settlement, and documents their failure to create agreed positions on conformity. The chapter also outlines the negotiations conducted by Charles II and his ministers with the Scottish Covenanters, delineating not a simple capitulation but a series of negotiations involving foreign divines, where forms of reduced episcopacy were still being discussed, but ending with an alliance which drove episcopalian royalists to question the royal supremacy.