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.

The eighteenth century was a period of dramatic change in political and legal thought. Much of the way in which we currently conceive of democratic institutions and the responsibilities and rights attached to citizenship can be traced back to concepts that dominated eighteenth-century thought. The social contract was debated by figures such as John Locke, Algernon Sidney, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Among the many issues under deliberation were the validity of consent, the will of individuals, the role of virtue, and the rights of self-governance. Legal thought was very closely tied to political thought because law was a foundation of political authority. Natural law, which was associated with divinity, rose in importance because it protected inalienable rights, such as self-preservation. Positive law, that is, laws of civil society such as common law and statute law, could be reformed and updated as civil society evolved. This flexibility was praised by jurists such as Lord Mansfield, but it also drew attempts to clarify and systematize law by Sir William Blackstone and Jeremy Bentham, as they prepared the citizenry for a growing engagement with the law.

Chapter 7 engages with Henry Neville’s fictional travel narrative The Isle of Pines (1668) as a work of exile. Like Sidney’s Court Maxims, Neville’s story of shipwreck and survival is a contemporary political commentary as well as a reflection on the nature and failings of patriarchal monarchy. It comments on the Second Anglo-Dutch War as well as the growing naval and economic power of the United Provinces versus England’s perceived decline since the time of Queen Elizabeth. In addition, it weighs up the strengths and weaknesses of patriarchal monarchy versus republican rule through an engagement with recent English history, including the Commonwealth, the rise of Cromwell and godly, republican rule and the Stuart Restoration. It is also notable for its use of Scripture, showing close familiarity with Old Testament texts while at the same time rejecting any literal interpretations of the Bible. Neville’s Isle is quite different in character from the radical Puritan writings of Ludlow and Sidney, not least on account of his chosen genre, yet, like Ludlow’s ‘Voyce’, it is also a deeply personal reflection on exile that engages with the vagaries of travel and making a home away from home, while remaining closely involved in the affairs of England.

The conclusion reflects more broadly on the significance of a gendered reading for understanding early modern political thought. It also offers a brief take on the Reformation, a topic most important for early modern politics and marriage. The focus on the Reformation is tied up with one of the most important reflections that this Conclusion offers, namely an engagement with the idea of patriarchal political thought. Earlier scholarship has assumed that ‘patriarchalism’ was the dominant take on the family in early modern political thought. This book however has offered a comprehensive re-examination of this trope and has shown that more important to Renaissance political thought than the father–king analogy was the wife–citizen connection. The Conclusion gives some explanation of the changes that the seventeenth century saw and in which, indeed, fathers became lords, and citizens degraded from a wife-like status to their early modern incarnation as child-like subjects.