“Under our Cedar’s shadow”: royalist women poets and the English restoration

Abstract

This paper compares the work of three lesser-known royalist women poets (Rachel Jevon, Ann Lee, and the anonymous female author of The Sacred Historie) to explore the subtle ways in which these writers connect their personal literary projects to the specific requirements of the Restoration regime. Despite the strategic emphasis on masculine authority within the numerous panegyrics addressed to the king in the aftermath of the Restoration in 1660, an alternative impulse in female-authored texts configures the return of the monarchy as an event which women are especially qualified to celebrate. In elevating conventionally feminine values, these poets were able to associate themselves with the social and political agenda of the Restoration government, which aimed to reconcile the English people to their past, and ease tensions associated with the Restoration Settlement, the General Pardon, and the Act of Oblivion. Since the civil wars had created distrust and resentment concerning politics and polemic, women poets could exploit their position as literary and political “outsiders” to justify their rehearsal of the role of “public” poet. However, in promoting their own specific interests, as loyalists whose families had suffered for the Crown, women poets also assert their own hopes for the future path of the monarchy, reminding the king of the significance of his traditional supporters, and emphasising his duty to subordinate himself to God and the English Church