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.