Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660–1714 by Melinda S. Zook (review)

One of the casualties of the Civil Wars and Republic, the wisdom goes, was the widespread acceptability of an enthusiastic mingling of religion and politics. From Hudibras to the History of the Royal Society, Restoration society turned on the zealots, deeming what they saw as religious bad faith to be the cause of the political turmoil and disorder of the middle years of the century. In its place, people espoused a political and religious moderation and came increasingly to value a more detached, ironic, and irenic stance. Ms. Zook’s engaging, smooth, and very readable study both confirms and complicates this picture, nowhere more compellingly or tellingly than in the intriguing vignette with which she concludes. In 1694, Bridget Bendish—granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell, daughter of the regicide Henry Ireton, and herself a Dissenter, worshipping with the Independents and given to episodes of rapturous enthusiasm—had a meeting with Queen Mary II. Not only did their religion and political allegiances differ, but the Queen’s grandfather, Charles I, had been brought to execution by the regicides in Bendish’s immediate family, to whom she remained intensely loyal. One might therefore expect the encounter between the two women to have been adversarial and hostile. Instead, the Queen, known for her espousal and advocacy of religious moderation, took the enthusiast Bendish in her stride, the two women exchanged pleasantries, and Bendish was promised a pension. In the study of Restoration and late Stuart political sympathies and activities, one needs to be prepared for the counterintuitive.

This anecdote is not only evocative but also indicative of the book, which argues that the equilibrium and affiliations between religion and politics, dissent and religious orthodoxy, High Church and Low Church, Whig and Tory, were complex, nuanced, and unstable. The anatomization and elaboration of these intricate and evolving positions and identifications are the strength of Ms. Zook’s book.

Her thesis is that women continued to play an active part in politics, both radical and conservative, after the Restoration and that the impulse behind their interventions was religious devotion. Indeed, the categories of religion and politics continue to be inseparable even after—and in reaction against—the perceived excesses of the revolutionary period. It was just that now the driving religious affiliation was as likely to be liberal and moderate as it was radical and separatist. The book’s straightforward aim is “to illustrate the religiopolitical actions and utterances of women” between 1660 and 1714. The focus on political actions, from petitioning and joining mass gatherings to dispensing patronage and philanthropy, presents methodological hurdles. Some of these activities are patchily recorded; some, in highly conventionalized forms, such as funeral orations, make it difficult to distinguish intervention from eulogy.

Such difficulties notwithstanding, Ms. Zook has fulfilled her own brief and written an instructive and compelling history through a series of case studies. The first chapter focuses on dissenting women, including Bridget Bendish, who continued to work in opposition to the restored monarchy, and concentrates in particular on the Baptist Elizabeth Gaunt, burnt to death at Tyburn in 1685 for treason, which consisted mostly in harboring and helping “on-the-run” conspirators and rebels. Subsequent chapters focus on Mary Speke, a Puritan from Somerset, named by the authorities the most “dangerous woman in the West”; Aphra Behn and her political revulsion toward dissent; Queen Mary II and her work to safeguard domestic and international Protestantism; and finally the contrasting political allegiances and interventions of Elizabeth Burnet (Low Church, Whig) and Mary Astell (High Church, Tory) in the new century.

Some chapters are fresher than others: Behn’s and Astell’s Tory affiliations and hostility to religious dissent, for example, are well known. The chapter on Queen Mary was, to me at least, new and surprising, showing how her religiopolitical agenda—her latitudinarian advocacy of “rational religion,” her desire to reinforce the Church of England but also accommodate Protestant nonconformity, and her wish to safeguard reformed religion in the...