In January, 1649, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, signed a treaty with the Catholic Confederacy, not knowing that the king on whose behalf he spoke was on trial in London. On January 30, 1649, Charles is executed, and a week later England became a republic, having a nonmonarchical form of government. A Council of State was created, and John Milton was appointed its “Secretary of Foreign Tongues.” The Council charged Milton to write observations on Ormond’s peace treaty and other recent documents from Ireland. The most geographically interesting reflection on Ireland to involve Milton’s work the resulting Articles of Peace offers a map of Ireland, a cultural and political geography overlaid on the ancient provinces of the island, to which Milton adds complicated interisland tensions, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. Articles reflects the complexity of the situation in Ireland, ramified by English management: A Protestant Royalist signs an extraordinarily generous Peace Treaty with Irish Catholics; the Parliamentary representative in Dublin complains of English influence; the Ulster-Scots make the case for a Protestant Church in Ireland that is neither Anglican nor Episcopalian.

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.

This chapter explores the reasons behind the dramatic fluctuations in print output noted in Chapter 1 and analyses the precise context for a wide range of publications, many of which have not become part of the canon of major texts. During the English civil wars, drastic changes occurred in the popular dissemination of new types of political writing. Radical and first-time authors gave English readers access to a wholly unprecedented range of publications, suggesting that the scope for creative political thinking in England in the 1640s, continuing into the 1650s, was greater than anywhere else in Europe and far more visible than either before or after these turbulent years. By comparison, pamphlets from the French Fronde were more limited in political range and seem to have had less radical impact on contemporary readers and wider public opinion. The Netherlands had very different political structures and a more decentralised printing industry during the critical upheavals of 1650 and 1672.