During the tumultuous decade inaugurated by the English Parliament's radical break in 1688 with long-standing principles of hereditary succession, in what has been described as the first modern revolution,Footnote 1 an anonymous author decided to republish the account of a rape and sodomy trial that had taken place almost seventy years prior. The new preface that introduced the 1699 edition of the Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin, Lord Audely of Castlehaven, at Westminster, April the 5th 1631 explains the reason for revisiting the trial at the dawn of a new century as follows:
I thought it could not more oblige the Publick, than … to publish it at this Juncture, that by Reading the Sin, so Tragically Delineated in its Horrid Shape, and ugly Visage, by the Grave and Learned Sages of the Law, and in the Death of a Noble Peer, other Men might be terrify'd, and scar'd from those Sins that are attended with nothing but Infamy and Death in this World, and Eternal Damnation in the next.
Seeing that the “Sin of Buggery … now Reign among our English Debauche's,” the anonymous author forces public attention to the dangers of sodomy by “Reading the Sin” and tracking its consequences: “Death in this World, and Eternal Damnation in the next.”Footnote 2 That this reading might instil fear and terrify men into living differently suggests a belief in sodomy's affective power, that unnamed force the author wishes to generate when conjuring sodomy's terror. Considering that sodomy was not, as Cynthia Herrup notes, a central theme in the trial's initial accounts and only became “the narrative's pivot in the 1690s,”Footnote 3 what terrible promise did this discourse of sodomy offer and why did “this Juncture” of the politically volatile 1690s compel its invocation? Less than two years following the republication of Castlehaven's trial, Parliament passed the 1701 Act of Settlement, a monumental piece of legislation that barred Catholics from the English throne and all foreigners from official positions of power below the Crown. Alongside the old criterion of religion, nationality seems to have become a new condition for political membership. In little over a decade, then, English politics had radically altered, and sodomy appears to have been just the right kind of terror this moment demanded.
This article explores how circulating rumors of monarchical sodomy at the turn of the eighteenth century became entangled with newly emerging conceptions of the nation and nationalized space. I analyze rumors of sodomy not as a category of truth and identity (was X homosexual?), but rather as a category of politics that concerns questions of authority and attachment to the body politic.Footnote 4 After the 1688 Revolution, accusations of the sovereign's sodomy increasingly mobilize spatial and territorial rather than theological understandings of sodomy's danger—rendering sodomy's terror from a satanic threat to the Christian kingdom to a public threat to the English nation. Focusing attention on affect, I show how this emergent discourse of national sodomy works to disrupt entrenched feelings of loyalty and allegiance to the monarch. Nationally inflected rumors of the king's sodomy, I argue, help unsettle political attachment to monarchical rule, turning subjects away from the king's body and towards the national body politic.
Despite ongoing debate on the particular elements that characterize “the nation,” many theorists generally agree that a defining feature of the nation is the idea of a distinct and bounded territorialized collective with a political claim to territorial self-determination.Footnote 5 “Modern states, nations and nationalism,” James Anderson argues, “are all territorial in that they explicitly claim, and are based on, particular geographical territories, as distinct from merely occupying geographical spaces.”Footnote 6 While many individuals have historically been aware of themselves as part of a distinct group, which they might call a “people” or “nation,” nationalists identify nations with certain bounded territories and put forward the political claim that sovereignty over a particular territory can only be exercised by members of the nation with which the territory is identified. Though the sovereignty of the modern nation-state is a territorial sovereignty, the two have become so entwined in our political imaginary that social scientists commonly define sovereignty through territory.Footnote 7 Yet territorial conceptions of sovereignty are, as intellectual historians have noted, relatively novel in the history of political rule.Footnote 8 How do we account for the territorialization and, ultimately, nationalization of modern sovereignty?
Historical explanations commonly focus on structural transformations to the state, highlighting some combination of developments in law, bureaucracy, warfare, and tax collection. In Perry Anderson's account, for instance, the incorporation of Roman law alongside institutional innovations, such as the formation of standing armies and centralized bureaucracies, gave rise to the absolutist state as a territorial entity.Footnote 9 Others point to the financial revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, where the monarch's personal authority diminished with the growth of new systems of public credit and debt.Footnote 10 Though they account for territorial developments in state institutions, these explanations do not attend to transformations in political feeling; that is, shifting attachments from the king to the nation. After all, for centuries people pledged loyalty to rulers who did not originate from the same territory as the ruled. Such foreign lineage was even a point of pride, as James Howell writes in 1661 of the newly restored monarchy of Charles II: “this King bears in his veines not onely that bloud [of the House of Denmark], but also the blouds of all the great Princes of Christendom, being nearly linked to the House of Bourbon and France, to the House of Austria, and consequently to the Emperour, and Spaine.”Footnote 11 How did we enter an era of national sovereignty, where many people now find such “foreign” rule contrary to the principle of self-determination?
Understanding the historical sedimentation of national sovereignty requires attending to the changing nature of political feeling, and in particular to the affective investment in the state as a limited and bounded space. As such, the literature on nationalism occupies a central place in the historiography of modern sovereignty. One enduring appeal of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is the extent to which he broached this question of how nationalism commands “such profound emotional legitimacy.”Footnote 12 “[I]t is doubtful,” he writes, “whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that people feel for the inventions of their imaginations.”Footnote 13 Spurred by the turn to affect in recent decades, scholars of nationalism have devoted increased attention to feeling as a constitutive force mediating attachments to the nation-state.Footnote 14 Situated within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, these studies take place within an already formed global terrain of nation-states. We have yet to locate and identify the role of affect in the pivotal transition from monarchical to national forms of sovereignty in the eighteenth century. The challenge is not only to explain how people become attached to a spatial understanding of the body politic, but also to account for the displacement of centuries-long investments in and loyalties to the personal rule of monarchs. Focusing on the affective domain of politics, therefore, this article attends to the unmaking of this prior allegiance to monarchical rule.
Given the imbrication of the theological and the political in early modern Europe, discussions of nationalism's emergence on the world-historical stage often point to shifts from religiously to nationally mediated understandings of the state. In “Western Europe,” Anderson writes, “the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought.”Footnote 15 While nationalism by no means supplanted theology, and the contours of their relationship remain subject to debate, the eighteenth century marks a certain frame shift in conceptions of sovereignty.Footnote 16 Where (Christian) religious discourses figure their communities as potentially coterminous with humanity, nationalist discourses reject this universalism in favor of the particularity of the territorial state. In other words, the historical emergence of the idea of the nation necessitated a turn from universal to spatially bounded visions of political rule.
While many researchers have explored various transformations in the theological structure of sovereignty in Western Europe during the eighteenth century, this scholarship has largely overlooked the question of sodomy. Historically, sodomy had the distinction of being the satanic antithesis of the biblical injunction to be “fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Given the centrality in medieval Christianity of the divine command to reproduce, sodomy signified the danger of “the erotic without connection to reproduction,” and as such represented the “unsurpassed example of divine retribution.”Footnote 17 A sin that all people could theoretically commit due to humanity's corrupt nature, terms such as “buggery” or “sodomy” could apply to various forms of nonreproductively oriented sex, such as anal, oral, and bestial.Footnote 18 In Protestant England, where Catholicism “was an anti-religion, a perfectly symmetrical negative image of true Christianity,” sodomy was “an archetypically popish sin … since it involved the abuse of natural faculties and impulses for unnatural ends.”Footnote 19 Given this overlap between politics and theology, sodomy was not a matter of “private” concern. As Edward Coke declared, sodomy was “Crimen laesae Majestatis”—high treason against the sovereign, whether “King Celestial or Terrestrial.”Footnote 20 An eminently political problem, therefore, sodomy poses a fertile ground for studying shifting investments in relations of political rule.
This article thus joins work by a handful of scholars studying the relationship between sexuality and national belonging.Footnote 21 In centering sodomy, however, I depart from analysis concerning homo-/heterosexuality and already existing nationalism to investigate the constitutive fear of sodomy in forming attachments to the emergent idea of the nation. Sodomy—that “utterly confused category,” as Michel Foucault famously remarked—does not signify homosexuality, with its psychological, lifestyle-oriented, identity-conscious, and communitarian elements.Footnote 22 Historically prior to the conceptual development of homosexuality, sodomy was a far more broadly reaching category, “designating religious blasphemy, political sedition, and even satanic activities including demonism, shamanism, and witchcraft.”Footnote 23 Given this range of signification, analysis must attend to how sodomy acquires its intelligible meaning not only from associated terms in a particular text, but also diachronically from a history of politico-theological terror. “Sodomy” is a mobile term, and so attention to the semiotic background that constitutes its intelligibility will illuminate how changes in the discourse of sodomy emerge alongside and with changes in sovereignty's meaning. Tracing sodomy's semiotic modifications while attending to its affective force will thus highlight the generative power of the discourse of sodomy to transform political attachments.Footnote 24
By following the specter of sodomy in early modern England, this article shows how a national framework of political power emerges at the turn of the eighteenth century in one Western European country. Attention to the sin of sodomy reveals how this new framework partly incorporates but also displaces a prior theological regime of authority. Examining a diverse archive of sodomy rumors spanning non-jurors, Tories, and Whigs, I show how changes in the discourse of sodomy had the effect of elaborating a novel image of the nation that transcends party lines. By highlighting the central role that gender and sexuality play in refiguring and transforming political authority, this article also puts forward methodological innovations for the study of sovereignty. I argue that changing frames of interpreting the illicit practices of the king's body shape how subjects make sense of the relationship between the king's natural body and the royal body politic and reveal shifting investments in and attachments to different figurations of sovereign power. Focusing on an affectively loaded concept such as sodomy brings to light the conceptual problem of political attachment and shows how attachments can be altered in fundamental ways. The historiography of nationalism often aims to provide us with a better understanding of what moves people to feel as one united national body, but this literature rarely asks the question of how prior political loyalties to the monarch were negated in order to make space for new investments in the nation.Footnote 25 Consequently, we have a weaker grasp of why individuals tied to dynastic rulers for centuries would suddenly give up these allegiances. As this article demonstrates, highlighting sodomy and its affective power sheds new light on the momentous shift in political attachments from the physical body of the king to the territorial body of the nation as the site of state sovereignty.
Monarchical and territorial attachments
Whereas birthplace suggests a “natural” or taken-for-granted site of political allegiance in the modern territorial state, in the premodern world physical location did not define one's political horizon. In the feudal order, Hendrick Spruyt argues, “territory was not determinative of identity and loyalty.”Footnote 26 Rather, sovereignties were split between personal bonds to lords and competing universal claims of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire over the Christian community of believers. In the feudal organizational structure, sovereignty entailed “rule over people rather than land.”Footnote 27 Even as monarchies became increasingly territorially bounded, rulers still “claimed full authority over all inhabitants of the territory” rather than over the territory as such.Footnote 28 By the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), as Hans Morgenthau argues, “sovereignty as supreme power over a certain territory was a political fact, signifying the victory of the territorial princes over the universal authority of emperor and pope, on the one hand, and over the particularistic aspirations of the feudal barons, on the other.”Footnote 29 From the perspective of subjects, then, allegiance was owed not to the increasingly defined territories of the kingdom but rather to the monarch whose territories they inhabited.
In early modern England, political allegiance did not mean devotion to an abstract entity like “the nation.” Rather, fidelity to the body politic meant quite literally loyalty to the material body of the king. A subject's allegiance to the monarch in his or her flesh signified their commitment to the divine and metaphysical Royal Body of the kingdom, which was, as Ernst Kantorowicz famously argued, incorporated in the king's organic body.Footnote 30 Given the unification of the body natural and body politic in the person of the king, courtiers competed to gain proximity to the king, since intimacy with the king's natural body facilitated a courtier's ability to influence the body politic.Footnote 31 The most coveted positions at the English court were those offices that dealt with the intimacy of the king's bodily maintenance, such as the grooms/ladies of the bedchamber, who aided in the monarch's dressing, or the groom of the stool, who assisted in the king's defecation and controlled his signature and money. Given this loyalty to the body politic through the king's organic body, we need to explain the loosening and unraveling of subjects’ fidelity to the royal body and its corporeal sovereignty in order to account for their reinvestment in the territorial sovereignty of the nation.
Though any world-historical dating serves as a metonym for transformations that both precede and exceed a singular year, 1701 represents a pivot point in the history of sovereignty. Following the death of the Duke of Gloucester and next heir to the throne in 1700, Parliament passed what has been described as “the most significant statute in English history.”Footnote 32 The 1701 Act of Settlement guaranteed the throne's continuity to a Protestant line by legislating that any Catholic be “for ever uncapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the crown and government of this realm.”Footnote 33 Passing over the Catholic James Francis Stuart, the Act stipulated that the crown should succeed to “princess Anne of Denmark,” but given the death of her only surviving child, it should succeed to “Sophia, electress and dutchess dowager of Hanover,” and “the heirs of her body, being Protestant.”Footnote 34 Although Jacobitism remained a threat throughout the century, the 1701 Act marked a momentous juridical break in the monarchy's history by barring Catholics from legally inheriting the throne.
Between the English James, Danish Anne, and Dutch-born Hanoverian Sophia, the struggle over succession tracked theological and not national concerns. Yet occluded by a strictly religious focus is the Act's role in juridically consolidating emergent fantasies of the nation. Alongside prohibiting Catholics to the throne, the 1701 Act excluded all foreigners from formal political power:
No person born out of the Kingdom of England, Scotland, or Ireland, or the Dominions thereunto belonging (although he be naturalised or made a denizen, except such as are born of English parents) shall be capable to be of the privy council, or a member of either house of parliament, or to enjoy any office or place of trust, either civil or military, or to have any grant of lands, tenements, or hereditament from the crown, to himself or to any other or others in trust for him.Footnote 35
Any person born outside the British Kingdom, even those who became part of it via naturalization, were now barred from holding political office, from sitting in Parliament or privy council, and from receiving land from the Crown. Although the monarch could still be foreign-born, all other political members of the body politic could not. A split thus appears to have emerged between the monarch and the rest of the state, as proximity to the nation's borders rather than the king's body marked the threshold for participating in the state.
The 1701 Act was not the first time that Parliament limited the rights of foreigners, however. The 1544 Act for the Marriage of Queen Mary to Philip of Spain (1. Mar. Sess. 3 c. 2) stipulated that Philip “shall not promote, admit, or receive to any office, administration or benefice in the said realm of England, and the dominions thereunto belonging, any stranger or person not born under the dominion and subjection of the said most noble queen of England.”Footnote 36 Although the Marriage Act appears at first to prohibit foreigners in much the same way as the Act of Settlement, the “stranger” of 1544 is not the foreign national of 1701. The 1544 Marriage Act excludes from office any person “not born under” the queen's dominion and subjection, and so a “stranger” is someone who owes political allegiance to a foreign monarch, not to a foreign nation. As Edward Coke put it in 1608, “no man will affirm, that England itself, taking it for the continent thereof, doth owe any ligeance or faith, or that any faith or ligeance should be due to it: but it manifestly appeareth, that the ligeance or faith of the subject is proprium quarto modo to the King.”Footnote 37 In contrast, the 1701 Act excludes any person “born out of the Kingdom,” highlighting foreign territory and not foreign monarchs as the category of inclusion. The 1701 Act thus signals a change in understandings of sovereign allegiance, as it was no longer the king but place of birth that served as the site of loyalty and allegiance.
Although the end of the eighteenth century often serves as a more common starting point to herald the nation's arrival, in recent decades historians such as Steve Pincus have argued that conditions in late seventeenth-century England were ripe for emerging ideas of the nation.Footnote 38 A burgeoning press, a national and accessible postal system, and a growing public sphere of coffeehouses and clubs provided the conditions in which anonymous strangers could imagine themselves as a community within a bounded and limited space.Footnote 39 The same year as the Act of Settlement's passage, Daniel Defoe remarked on the novelty of English concern with foreigners. A response to John Tutchin's The Foreigner (1700), Defoe's The True Born Englishman notes “Tis worth observing, that we ne'er complain'd / of foreigners” until there arose a fascination with the bizarre subject called the True Englishman.Footnote 40 By 1738, Bolingbroke wrote confidently that “the spring from which this legal reverence [for governors] … arises is national, not personal.”Footnote 41
Though categorically targeting foreigners, the 1701 Act did not emerge from concerns about foreigners as an abstract category. Rather, as historians have noted, the article excluding foreigners “was clearly a result of the jealousy with which William's foreign favorites were regarded,” and in particular two men, William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, and Arnold van Keppel, Earl of Albemarle.Footnote 42 Both favorites received considerable tracts of land from the king, enjoyed civil and political office, and were elevated into peerage, which enabled them to take seats in the House of Lords—all of which the Act of Settlement barred to foreigners. Notably, both men were also the primary subjects of sodomy rumors concerning the king.
Given that political sovereignty was vested in the king's body, sexual slander against the king and those who had intimate access to his body could express political critiques of the monarchy's organization of authority and power. As Curtis Perry argues, the “discourse of corrupt favoritism is this period's most important unofficial vehicle for exploring constitutional unease concerning the nature and limits of personal monarchy.”Footnote 43 To what extent did rumors of sodomy fuel feelings of animosity towards these foreign favorites and motivate politicians to pass the Act of Settlement barring foreigners from participating in the official politics of the state? What is the relationship between the discourse of sodomy, its affective power, and the constellation of ideas and laws shaping the nascent English nation? Unfortunately, these sodomy accusations have rarely received serious scholarly attention, and where the topic does arise, discussion often centers on whether the king was really a homosexual.Footnote 44 Concerned with questions of identity, then, the political implications of these sodomy rumors have gone unremarked.
For the European aristocrats of the seventeenth century, illicit sex was something of an open secret. As long as they kept their houses in order, the nobility largely tolerated the sexual escapades of its more libertine members, who were by no means limited solely to “heterosexual” pursuits.Footnote 45 At the royal courts, pathways for patronage and favoritism frequently involved eroticized forms of submission to superiors.Footnote 46 Sexual scandals, sometimes involving kings and queens, were therefore a common feature of court life.Footnote 47 Accordingly, the pressing historiographical question is not whether sex did or did not take place, but rather why the question of sex becomes a relevant and urgent matter at this particular juncture. I do not seek to settle the rumors concerning the king's sodomy, as if to reveal the truth of the king's sexuality. What requires explanation is not the act of having sex but its meaning: when and under what conditions does sex become figured as a politically relevant problem in the first place?
The sovereignty crisis of 1688
In November 1688, William of Orange landed in England, ousted James II from his seat of power, and was soon thereafter installed as a joint sovereign with his wife, Mary. The reign of hereditary monarchy seemed to be in crisis, as Parliament avowedly broke with principles of hereditary succession by electing a new ruler.Footnote 48 Debates raged over the proper language to use regarding the throne: was it “usurped” by William or “abdicated” by James?Footnote 49 Many argued that in deciding who should be king, it was Parliament that now occupied political power. England, they claimed, had given up its hereditary tradition in favor of democracy.Footnote 50 Far from being just a change of kings, the revolution sparked a crisis in the principles of government.
As a part of this tumultuous event, different visions of political power competed to capture the newly disjointed feelings of allegiance. There were not simply opposing accounts of who should be sovereign (James, William, or Parliament), but also conflicting visions of how to conceive of sovereignty altogether, whether theological–universal or nationally bounded. There emerged on the one hand theological discourses that portrayed William as God's warrior in a Protestant crusade against Catholicism, and on the other hand nationalist discourses that figured William as protecting the English nation from a tyrannical monarch (whether James II or Louis XIV).Footnote 51 While debate on whether 1688 was a religious or nationalist affair largely centers attention on Williamite propaganda, there also circulated antimonarchical discourses that contested the court's overall claims to be the source of sovereign power.Footnote 52 I argue that critics of the court articulated an idea of the nation that, in contrast to Williamite propagandists, did not portray William as its protector and in fact challenged the dynastic model of political power altogether.
In this anti-court terrain of conflict, sodomy served as a key political metaphor to give conceptual meaning and emotional force to the nascent idea of the English nation. Long figured as an unnatural and illicit form of penetration, sodomy was a symbolically available and affectively rich metaphor to signify threats to a territorially bounded body politic.Footnote 53 While the Whigs are more often identified as articulating burgeoning ideas of nationalism against their Tory rivals, who are usually considered adherents to classic conceptions of embodied royal sovereignty, attention to sodomy accusations against the king reveals a nationalist discourse in anti-Williamite literature. Though targeting William, this archive is not simply Jacobite propaganda. As Esther Mijers and David Onnekink note, “William's enemies are still largely dismissed as ‘Jacobites’, without actually identifying or differentiating between the members of this group.”Footnote 54 The majority of the texts I analyze circulated anonymously in manuscript form, and the two published accounts I examine (“The Coronation Ballad” and “The Foreigners”) both led to the arrest of their authors. Though primarily anonymous, this archive contains texts from non-jurors, Tories, and even Whigs. This political range reveals how nationalist portrayals of courtly sodomy could originate across the political spectrum. Moreover, this archive conceptually expands Toryism as a political category by showing how non-Jacobite Tories took up and transformed critiques of the monarchy often associated with the Whigs. By tracing the discursive shifts in sodomy attacks against the king and his court, I show how a diverse set of texts help transform affective investments in the body politic and give new meaning to the category of sodomy. I argue that sodomy and sovereignty are co-constitutive. Discourses of sodomy alter understandings of political power as struggles over sovereignty reconfigure the kinds of political threat that sodomy can present.
Rumors of sodomy
With the emergence of new forms of literary production in the seventeenth century, the circulation of libel and rumors by the latter half of the century occurred “at a rate and intensity that was completely unprecedented.”Footnote 55 Rumors of sodomy about William and his favorites frequently found textual expression in satires that not only mocked the king but sometimes went so far as to ridicule the whole structure of favoritism organizing relations of patronage at court. Contemptuous laughter against the king for the illicit activities he conducted with the royal body threatened to deflate feelings of reverence for the king and unravel the affective relations of obedience and attachment to the royal body politic that the court sought to instill in its subjects.Footnote 56 As such, jurists identified satirical libels against the king as seditious for undermining the respect owed to persons of state, and authors and publishers frequently faced arrest for producing such material.Footnote 57
Whatever their truth, rumors about the king's sodomy did not need to be accurate to affect the communities in which they circulated. Indeed, rumors often derive their power not from the truth of their claims but rather from the fact of their circulation.Footnote 58 While traveling to The Hague, Portland confessed that he “was thunderstruck” when he heard the “malicious gossip” spreading throughout the city and the army: the “kindness which your Majesty has for a young man, and the way in which you seem to authorize his liberties and impertinences make the world say things that I am ashamed to hear.” Although Portland believed “it was the malicious in England who fabricated these things” and that William was “far removed” from such rumors, he was taken aback at the reach they had acquired. These accusations, Portland finally admitted, “made my life unbearable”—so unbearable that he felt compelled to leave the king's inner circle.Footnote 59 Portland's departure from the intimate relations of favoritism reveals how rumors can affect their recipients and impel action regardless of their truth status or their recipients’ subjective belief. Whether and how Portland acknowledged these rumors in his public actions is, politically speaking, of greater concern than his personal knowledge about them. The political question this archive poses, therefore, is not whether the rumors are true, but rather, what do they do? How do rumors of the king's sodomy affect subjects’ attachments not only to William as sovereign but to an entire structure of sovereignty more generally?
Whether and how sodomy rumors trouble relations of attachment to a particular king or to kingship as such depends on the meaning that discourses of sodomy accrue as they circulate throughout the kingdom. In the following sections, I chart two genres of sodomy accusations, which I call ungodly sodomy and national sodomy. The first (ungodly sodomy) is an older genre that targets particular kings and their courts but does not trouble the larger theological structure of monarchical sovereignty. The second genre (national sodomy) takes hold in the context of the 1688 Revolution and plays a critical role in disrupting the relationship of the king's two bodies by producing new national figurations of sovereignty and the affective attachments that sustain them. While the exact audiences of these genres are difficult to identify, the following texts document a larger oral culture of gossip circulating not only in the aristocratic world of the court but also in the army, tavern, and social club. The ubiquity of these rumors points to shared ways of rendering sodomy intelligible. As such, they provide a snapshot of the dominant grammars through which diverse subjects made sense of the lingering rumors concerning their king's sodomy.
Ungodly sodomy
This section explores a cluster of sodomy rumors that together make up the first genre of accusation I call ungodly sodomy. What distinguishes ungodly sodomy from national sodomy, which I explore in the next section, is the use of imagery that disfigures and animalizes the sodomite's body and associates it with witchcraft or devilry. Unlike national sodomy, this genre of rumor depicts the sodomitical body not as a nationally foreign body hailing from outside England but as an unnatural body originating from hell. Ungodly sodomy thus draws its affective power from association with theological signifiers of the beastly, monstrous, and deformed. Exemplary of this discourse is a poem titled “The Coronation Ballad, 11th April 1689,” written by the nonjuring priest Ralph Gray, who was sentenced to the pillory for its publication.Footnote 60
Playing on the double entendre of Bentinck with the word “bent,” suggesting unnatural (and unstraight) sexual proclivities,Footnote 61 the ballad openly accuses William of sodomy: “buggering of Benting doth please to the life.” Immediately before, the poem suggests the king's castration by the “midwife's knife,” thus evacuating William of political virility.Footnote 62 Together, these images of buggery and impotence contribute to the poem's overall figuration of William as a deformed man: a “carcass,” “lump,” and “rotten stump.” Elsewhere, he is reduced to his basest biological functions: “At Crowning the Orange the juice flew out. / They that like not the smell, let them hold their snout.” While proponents of the doctrine of the king's two bodies argued that “the Body politic wipes away every imperfection of the other [natural] Body,”Footnote 63 “The Coronation Ballad” remains within this logic but reverses its terms. In exaggerating the king's biological failures, the ballad renders the king's natural body so grotesque that it overwhelms and undermines his body politic.
Moving beyond these biological failures, the ballad suggests that William's body is anything but natural. Resembling “more of a monkey” with “the head of a goose and the legs of a swan,” the king is a chaotic chimera. Portrayed as “an unnatural beast,” the royal body inverts the kingdom's natural order. Not simply un-sovereign but anti-sovereign, William's arrival is a “monster's invasion” that guarantees “confusion” in the realm. The king's unnatural body entails chaos for the body politic. Undermining the sacred body upholding the political order, the king's deformed and beastly body thus provides the terms in which sodomy gains its meaning in order to redirect any affective ties away from William and toward James.
These elements of ungodly sodomy—the beastly, monstrous, deformed, and hellish body of the king—find expression in a series of poems following William's coronation.Footnote 64 Though critical of the king, the discourse of ungodly sodomy ultimately shares the same theological framework of much Williamite propaganda. Official texts and sermons defended the revolution by portraying William as God's warrior king striking a blow against Protestantism's satanic foe.Footnote 65 Both discourses equate sin with treason, whether James's promotion of Catholicism or William's usurpation of the throne. They both mobilize a shared politico-theological critique of sin and portray allegiance to the king as identical with loyalty to God. Not unique to William's reign, the discourse of ungodly sodomy relied on older religious conventions that figured the sodomite as disfigured, nonhuman, and otherworldly.Footnote 66 Following this literary tradition, accusations of William's sodomy depict the sovereign's body as bent, beastly, and hellish, but none mark the king as nationally foreign.
National sodomy
It has become something of a consensus among historians of sexuality that around the turn of the eighteenth century a dramatic shift or, some might say, rupture took place in the history of sodomy. As H. G. Cocks writes, “homoerotic desires appear to come into focus at the end of the seventeenth century as a particular problem distinct from their usual placement within transgressions of the seventh commandment. A new, secular figure of homoerotic lust seems to have emerged, apparently representing the beginnings of the process by which sexual desires are used to individuate and classify people.”Footnote 67 Where an ungodly discourse of sodomy constellated together images of the sodomite as a popish devil, beast, and monstrous creature, there began to take shape a newly secularized discourse that portrayed the sodomite as an identifiable figure with its own gestures, demeanors, spaces, and subculture.Footnote 68 A shift in the discourse of sodomy accusations against the monarch during the 1690s thus marks an unexplored but politically significant event. Unlike the genre of ungodly sodomy, there emerges a second genre of rumors that forgoes references to devils, monsters, beasts, and deformed bodies. Instead, sodomy is portrayed in more earthly, concrete, and territorial terms. William's sodomy comes to represent a foreign body out of joint with the English body politic, and rather than a strictly theological issue, his sodomy becomes a national concern.
In altering the structure of sodomy's threat to the body politic, national sodomy not only reworks but in fact tears apart the king's two bodies. Whereas the sodomite king's ungodly body poses an ‘interior’ risk to the body politic, the sodomite king's foreign body no longer bears any internal relation to the state. The king's sodomy comes to invade the nation from outside its borders and the courtly body associated with it becomes foreign to the new national body politic. The genre of national sodomy reveals how sodomy is not a category with a timeless set of significations that impinge on and affect the more tumultuous terrain of politics. The category of sodomy is not outside the political domain but is itself being resignified and reconstructed in relation to struggles around the authority of the court, as political actors alter sodomy's meaning and affects as part of their fight for political power.
Emblematic of a transformation in the symbolic structure of sovereignty, a national genre of sodomy accusations indexes a shift in what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling.” According to Williams, qualitative changes in systems of thought and institutional arrangements are often preceded by “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate.”Footnote 69 Marking a difference in how subjects articulate concern about the corporeal structure of the royal court, modifications in the form of sodomy rumors disclose emergent transformations in how subjects affectively relate to structures of political rule. Such changes are not meant to serve as causal explanations, as if shifts in the genre of sodomy attacks are somehow responsible for the court's loss of power. Rather, the genre of national sodomy dramatizes an emergent atmosphere in which certain ideas of authority become increasingly attractive and others lose their plausibility. They index changes in “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,”Footnote 70 revealing the affective history of fluctuating investments in sovereign forms (monarchical versus national) prior to their explicit articulation or institutionalization.
Take, for example, “A Litany for the Reducing of Ireland” (1690), which describes the libertine court as nationally foreign:
The stanza begins with a list of sexual sins: Queen Mary's (“Molly”) and Princess Anne's (“Nanny”) infidelities; William's (“Billy”) sodomy with Portland (“Playing the Italian” = practicing sodomy).Footnote 72 Having listed these sins, the following stanza figures the court's sexual excess as foreign. The phrase “Nan of Denmark or Dutch Molly” portrays the queen and princess as Dutch, even though both Mary and Anne were born in London and grew up in England. The following line then nationalizes sodomy in its image of Portland spawning an heir. Mobilizing the term “Mynheer,” a Dutch address equivalent to “Sir,” the author represents Portland as a Dutchman. Rather than state “Mynheer Benting,” however, the usage of “Mynheer” alone suggests an anonymous collective address, linking sodomy to Dutchness as such rather than to Portland in particular. Furthermore, the poem refers to claims regarding the illegitimacy of James II's son (“true Prince of Wales”),Footnote 73 and suggests that sodomy with a Dutchman will birth a “true” successor. As such, royal succession will be truly Dutch and sodomitical, in line with the “true” nature of William's reign.
The poem further nationalizes the court by coding the king's army as foreign. When listing a series of “unnatural rebellion[s],” the author alludes to those soldiers who refused to fight William as “From an army that lost England for want of fighting.”Footnote 74 No longer English since they “lost England,” the defecting army is now part of a non-English Dutch regime. The poem portrays 1688 not as a monarchical conflict but rather as a national struggle. As the Whig Sir Peter Colleton stated a year later, “I think it is not consistent with the interest of this kingdom for [sic] to have foreign officers over an English army when we have so many brave, courageous men amongst us. The Englishman can have no interest but the good of his own country; what foreigners may have I cannot tell.”Footnote 75 With the passage of the 1689 Bill of Rights, Parliament prohibited the king to keep a standing army in England without parliamentary approval. Over the next decade, Parliament reduced the king's standing army to its lowest possible size and insisted that every soldier be a native-born Englishman.Footnote 76 In the background of these challenges to monarchical power were William's military wars in the Low Countries surrounding the Dutch Republic and in North America. Following eight years of financially draining warfare, William Stephens reinforced a growing attachment to English soil against the foreign monarch's wars, preaching in his 1696 Thanksgiving Day sermon that “Passive Obedience to the Law of the Land, is the Doctrine of Jesus; Passive Obedience to the will of the Prince, is the Doctrine of Judas.”Footnote 77 Just a few years later, the Act of Settlement formalized this nationalist antipathy and declared that the nation will not fight for a foreign leader's interests: if “the crown and imperial dignity of this realm shall hereafter come to any person, not being a native of this kingdom of England, this nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the defense of any dominions or territories which do not belong to the crown of England.”Footnote 78 No longer seemingly invested in the corporeal body of the king and its interests, the loyalty and obedience of subjects was now tied to the geographical body of the nation.
Representations of the monarch as Dutch and therefore outside the nationalized space of England also occur in poetry targeting William's advisers.Footnote 79 In “Satire on Bent[in]g” (1689),Footnote 80 the narrator describes Portland as “that topping favorite at Court / (The King, though, has some private reasons for't),” suggesting that Bentinck is the active penetrating partner and the king is the “bottom” passive partner. In mobilizing dominant gender norms tying masculinity with penetration, the poem lobbies a political critique. No longer the top of the hierarchy, the penetrated monarch is now passively subservient to his advisers, to whom, the next line reads, “all for preferment now resort.” As such, it would be “fitter” to send Portland to the land of sodomy, that is, “To Italy … / Than nose his master with his buttocks here.” Neither beastly nor deformed, Portland uses his enticing “buttocks” to get his “nose” in royal affairs.
What kind of undesirable advice does Portland offer the king and, in so doing, threaten the sovereign's body politic with his sodomitical body? Describing Portland's character, the poem explains that he, “like a coxcomb [dandy], made blunt Grafton wait / To show's Dutch breeding in his English state.” The Duke of Grafton was the Lord High Constable under James II but defected to William's forces during the revolution. Although the illegitimate son of Charles II, Grafton was not part of debates over succession, and so we should read the possessive “his [i.e. Grafton's] English state” to indicate national rather than dynastic possession of the state. According to the poem, then, Portland betrayed Grafton and the English revolutionaries of 1688 by making them wait until after William secured the crown to reveal his “Dutch breeding.” In other words, it is Portland's nationality that makes intelligible the meaning of his betrayal and threat to the “English state.” The poem thus presents Portland's body and the sodomy for which he puts it to use through national markers opposed to the English nation. The allure of Portland's buttocks grants him access to the king, and this intimacy is dangerous because this arse belongs to a foreigner's body.
Some poets illustrate the danger that foreigners pose by associating the king's sodomy with sexualized violence against the nation.
This anonymous manuscript squib creates a parallel between the Dutch boor, his rape, and the girl on one side and William, his buggery, and the nation on the other.Footnote 82 With the word “ravishes” implying a sexual relationship between William and “the whole nation,” the text portrays William as the “Dutch boor” who violates the feminized “nation,” as his buggery is made equivalent to (or possibly worse than) rape. Associating the bodily violation of sodomy and rape with the national particularity of Dutch rule, antimonarchical tracts chastising the king as a “Dutch boor” unnerved the court. William Anderton, for instance, was executed for high treason “against the King in his own Royal Person” for printing Remarks on the Present Confederacy (1693), a text that decried the lack of “Affection our New Governours have for the English Nation” and their “Partiality and Tenderness for the Dutch,” which has resulted in “such a Yoke as none but a Dutch Bore could ever have fixed upon English Necks.”Footnote 83
Two noteworthy features differentiate this series of texts from the discourse of ungodly sodomy. First, they lack imagery that disfigures, debases, or animalizes the sodomite's body, associating it with witchcraft or devilry. Second, having abandoned such imagery, they depict the royal sodomite's body as a nationally foreign body. Drawing from an emotional reservoir of horror associated with sodomy, these texts cathect sodomy's terror to nationality. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner argues, insists that rulers and ruled share the same national identity: “if the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than that of the majority of the ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes a quite outstandingly intolerable breach of political propriety.”Footnote 84 The discourse of national sodomy illustrates how the history of gender and sex shapes what, to borrow Gellner's evocative language, this “breach” might feel like. Foreign rulers not only dominate the national body politic but risk tearing it apart, which is to say that to be governed by foreigners is to be sodomized by them.
Theological and national foreigners
A reader might object that the representation of William's sodomy as a foreign threat was not novel to the revolutionary period. After all, since at least the fourteenth century, critics portrayed sodomy as originating in foreign lands and entering England through contact with or the arrival of foreigners.Footnote 85 However, ideas of what it meant for sodomy to be “foreign” were not static. By comparing William's sodomy rumors with earlier cases of sexual slander targeting “foreigners” at the royal court, I show how sodomy's signification transformed as part of an emergent nationalism. I argue that the meaning of sodomy's “foreignness” underwent territorialization at the end of the seventeenth century, as sodomy increasingly came to signify a national and not just strictly theological threat.
Although a descendant of the Tudors, James VI and I was a Scottish and not an English king and, like William, he too was the subject of sodomy rumors. Pointing to the intimacy he shared with his Scottish and English favorites, critics mobilized charges of sodomy to critique the king of moral corruption, military weakness, promoting social upstarts, and giving away lucrative offices.Footnote 86 Yet, unlike in the case of William, James's accusations lack reference to his or his favorites’ foreign origins. As Michael Young explains, critics “did not associate [James's] homosexuality with his foreignness. They did not portray it as a Scottish practice that he brought with him to England.”Footnote 87 Rather, critics represented sodomy in theological terms. Worried that James's “darling Sinne … be the cause of more Mischiefe in Christendome,” the author of Tom Tell-Troath argues that a “Protestant King” should not be “so notoriously wicked in his person.”Footnote 88 Similarly, the author of Corona Regia sardonically writes that “it is almost divine” how the king devotes such “unceasing effort to your religious love affairs. You enjoy an Alcibiades and you can philosophize; you are a king and you act like Socrates; you make love and you are pious.”Footnote 89 Making use of religious examples, critics described sodomy at James's court as “diabolical” and “devilish,” with his favorites having “bewitched” the king and entering him into a “Diabolicall contract.”Footnote 90 Although James's Scottishness was a source of contention during his reign,Footnote 91 rumors of the king's sodomy did not refer to his Scottish origins and instead deployed a theological grammar of ungodly sodomy.
A second illuminating example to consider is Charles II's French mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Focusing on her intimacy with Charles, critics charged Portsmouth with controlling access to the king, monopolizing patronage, siphoning the realm's finances, and being a French spy driving policy in support of France.Footnote 92 In contrast to James, sexual slander against Portsmouth did refer to her foreign birth but it did not portray sex as a national problem. For example, the Articles of High-Treason and other High-Crimes against Portsmouth claimed that the king's mistress endangered the “Kings person, in whose preservation is bound up, the weal and happiness of the Protestant Religion.”Footnote 93 Accused of trying “to introduce Popery and Tyranny” into the kingdom and the “subversion of the Protestant Religion and Government,” Portsmouth threatened not a national so much as theological body politic. Charged with “promoting the French Popish Interest,” her “Frenchness” signified Catholic tyranny. Insofar as the English opposed Portsmouth for being “foreign,” they articulated this opposition primarily in theological terms. As Tim Harris argues, Francophobia in Restoration England “was not straightforward xenophobia, in the sense of an intense or irrational dislike or fear of the people of another country,” but rather a hatred “of French religion and French tyranny.”Footnote 94 Accordingly, it is not coincidental that when a mob confronted Nell Gwyn's coach in 1681, suspecting Portsmouth to be inside, Charles's English mistress allegedly yelled, “good people, be civil: I am the Protestant whore,” and not “I am the English whore.”Footnote 95
For most of the seventeenth century, then, it seems that sexual slander against foreign rulers and their favorites tended to deploy a theological and not a national grammar of political subversion. Sexual critiques of “foreigners” did not always highlight questions of foreign birth, and when they did they tended to center around the problem of belonging to a foreign religion rather than a foreign nation. Such critiques were not narrowly confessional, however. Popery signified both religious and political proclivities. As the most monstrous popish sin, sodomy was perceived to be an inroad for Catholic despotism. As critics of James I argued, the king's ungodly activities turned the king into “the pontiff in a royal persona” and enabled his “minions” to accrue “as much power and respect as Catholique Princes.”Footnote 96 Consequently, sodomy's “foreignness” was not marked by a national geography of territory but by a political theology of tyranny.
Contemporaries in early modern England often pointed to Italy as the birthplace of sodomy. As the home of the Roman Catholic Church, Italy did not designate a national so much as a religious origin.Footnote 97 Understanding Italy as a politico-theological site of sin clarifies how some poems, such as “The Ladys complaint,” take up and transform the genre of ungodly sodomy into a critique of national sodomy.Footnote 98
Responding to the theological discourse of an “apocalyptic battle between two mystical churches,”Footnote 99 the poem expresses shock (“Ah! who wou'd have thought”) that Protestantism no longer provides assurance against the Catholic vice of sodomy. Instead, signifiers that mark William as outside England but still in the terrestrial world—he is the “Holland Reformer” from the “low country”—territorialize the king's sodomy. The court is filled with foreign sodomites (“Bardashes” = the penetrated partner) who have corrupted the sovereign, making the court “partiall” to foreign interest.Footnote 100 Emphasizing this point, the final line juxtaposes William's sexual body (Italian love) with his political body (Dutch government). The poem thus reconfigures the fears of popery underlying Italian love into a national concern, staging sodomy as a politically corrupting force by infusing it with the spatial markers of Dutchness.
I have been arguing that the emergence of a new grammar of sodomy indexes changes in and to the structures of feeling that gave meaning to political rule in early modern England. By centering land as an object of political attachment, national figurations of sovereignty disrupt the traditional relationship between the king's natural and political bodies. In the famous Duchy of Lancaster case (1561), on which Plowden makes his often-cited commentary on the king's two bodies, Queen Mary wanted lands leased by King Edward VI returned, since Edward, she argued, had never reached the age of majority during his reign and so could not lease the lands as king. The judges rejected Mary's claim and ruled that “by the common Law no Act which the King does as King shall be defeated by his nonage. For the King has in him two Bodies, viz. a Body natural, and a Body politic … and for this Cause what the King does in his Body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.”Footnote 101 The incorporation of the body politic and the body natural in the person of the king negated the natural body's disabilities, whether it be the problem of age, health, or even death. As such, the judges ruled, the natural body's particularities are irrelevant to the question of land ownership because the king acted in the capacity of his political body.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, land was no longer just a disputed object of royal possession but rather a territorial site through which one pledged allegiance to the state. In the early 1690s, William gifted tracts of land in Ireland and Wales to Portland and Albemarle instead of selling them for the public good, as MPs had expected.Footnote 102 As part of the hostility to the land grants, Robert Price told Parliament that he feared England now had a “Dutch Prince of Wales”: “The Kings of England always Reigned best, when they had the Affections of their Subjects, and of that they were secure, when the People were sensible, that the King was Intirely in their Interest, and loved the English Soil.”Footnote 103 Whereas the doctrine of the king's two bodies dismissed the natural body's particularities when considering actions undertaken as king, the national particularity of the king's body now undermined his capacity to act as the body politic. As Price's comments about loving English soil indicate, kings must (now) display their investment in the territorial body of the nation, but William's foreign body prevents him from doing just that. The Commons went on to declare that only a parliamentary Act could bequeath public land, and in 1700 voted to reappropriate the Irish land grants.Footnote 104 Parliament thus reasserted control over the nation's territorial body from the Dutch bodies at court whose foreignness allegedly nullified any positive relationship they may have to the state.
Within this newly emerging political framework, the discourse of national sodomy showcases not only the separation of the foreign court from the sovereign nation but also the danger that such foreign bodies pose to the nation's territorial body. In “Advice to a Painter” (1697), possibly written by Tory MP William Shippen, the author uses the grammar of national sodomy to portray Portland as the nation's enemy:
The Crown's “antient Honours,” which the previous line suggests are the land “Grants” William gifted his favorites, are no longer the king's but the nation's honors. Having obtained them through “black designs and Lust,” Portland is declared a “Foe” to the “British Name.” Accordingly, his sodomy poses a national threat: “Let English Rights all gasping round him lie, / And native Freedom thrown neglected by.”Footnote 106
The foreigner's use of sodomy to steal “national” resources is also the topic of the radical Whig John Tutchin's “The Foreigners” (1700), the publication of which led to his arrest on charges of seditious libel.Footnote 107 Referring to the “Lavish grants” that William gifted Portland, Tutchin explains that what Portland got the “Nation lost.”Footnote 108 Why, he asks, should the Dutch “our Land engross, / And aggrandize their fortunes with our loss?”Footnote 109 Shifting to Albemarle, the poem speaks of both his and Portland's sodomitical rise to power:
A national rather than theological danger, sodomy enables “upstart Foreigners” to rob England of “our Treasure” and “our Land.” Their sodomy endangers not the king's body with which they are intimately associated but rather the nation's body from which they are excluded, as repetitive use of the word “our” severs Albemarle and Portland from the “prudent People” of the English nation. Notably, Tutchin does not advocate death but rather expulsion for their crimes: “Let them in foreign States proudly command, / They have no Portion in the Promis'd Land.”Footnote 111 Nationalizing conventional religious imagery by reconfiguring England as the “Promis'd Land,” Tutchin suggests that the nation requires not the sodomite's eradication (as in the universalist vision of sin) but rather exclusion from its borders.
Less than a year following the publication of “The Foreigners” in 1700, Parliament would pass the Act of Settlement, banning foreigners from access to the nation's land and political posts. By 1702 William had died and passed the throne on to Queen Anne, a direct heir of James II who had grown up in England. In her first speech to Parliament, Anne alludes to the national qualifications that William lacked, explaining that “as I know My own Heart to be entirely English, I can sincerely assure you, there is not any Thing you can expect, or desire of Me, which I shall not be ready to do for the Happiness and Prosperity of England.”Footnote 112 Anne's speech heralds a new era of national politics, where an English heart in the monarch's natural body was now necessary to display allegiance to the national body politic.Footnote 113 Yet, in her attempts to reconstitute the relationship between the king's two bodies by highlighting the national character of her natural body, Anne's comments betray the deep transformation in the political structures of feeling that had been underway since the revolution. Indeed, that same year of her accession, the court abolished the Esquires of the Body, an institution formalized during Henry VIII's reign for the purposes of protecting the king's natural body in the vulnerability of its slumber.Footnote 114 With these attendants now gone, it appears as if it was no longer the monarch's but some other sovereign body that required political protection.
Conclusion
At the turn of the eighteenth century in England, monarchs, politicians, pamphleteers, and poets found new meaning in something they called “England.” Allegiance to the sovereign body in the king's flesh waned as the English nation compelled newfound attachment, which was not simply an imagined idea but a felt reality. Neither natural nor inevitable, the disinvestment in the royal body requires explanation. This article has argued that in the context of the crisis of sovereignty engendered by the 1688 Revolution, actors from across the political spectrum mobilized the rhetoric of sodomy to both shore up and reconfigure attachment to political authority. Those who believed that William transgressed divinely ordained principles of hereditary succession turned to the classic genre of ungodly sodomy. By associating sodomy with theological images of the monstrous, deformed, and inhuman, this discourse figured the king's sodomy as both a sign of and a cause for the destruction of the body politic. In contrast, those who viewed the court's corruption as an attack against the nation employed an alternative grammar of sodomy to render these national threats intelligible. Unlike the genre of the ungodly, national sodomy threatens not the apocalyptic undoing of the sovereign body of the king, but rather the domination and submission of the sovereign body of the nation. Figuring the court's sodomy as foreign, this national rhetoric of sodomy is a political rhetoric of citizenship. As witnessed by the passage of the 1701 Act of Settlement banning foreigners from political office, this discourse both indexed and played a role in the revolutionary transformations taking place in and to the structures of feeling investing subjects in sovereign authority.
As the circulation of a new discourse of national sodomy both signalled and helped enact a disinvestment from the body of the king and a reinvestment in the body of the nation, we see how sodomy played a vital role in the displacement of theological politics and the establishment of a spatial and territorial sovereign imaginary. The discourse of national sodomy forms a foundational pillar in what Lauren Berlant describes as the “National Symbolic”: the entangled collection of texts that constitutes the idea of a national “public” and aims “to link regulation to desire, harnessing affect to political life through the production of ‘national fantasy’.”Footnote 115 In the fantasy of national sovereignty, self-determination means that (1) rulers must be of the same nation as the ruled, (2) political action should only benefit the public interest of the nation, and (3) only fellow nationals may obtain and use national resources. Terrorizing this national fantasy, sodomy enables foreigners to obtain and thus steal national resources, to aggrandize foreign and thus private interests, and to rule over and thus oppress the people. Associated with a nationally suspect royal court, then, the monarch's foreign body became an abject body that threatens to sodomize and render subservient the nation. Robbed of its power, “the nation,” as David Hume suggestively writes in his history of England, lies “prostrate at the feet of the monarch,” vulnerable to foreign invasion/penetration.Footnote 116
As a transformation to the established genre of ungodly sodomy, the discourse of national sodomy forms a constituent part of the political dismemberment of the king's divine and mortal body in the eighteenth century. Despite Anne's claim to an English heart, opponents accused the queen of undertaking “some dark Deeds at Night” with her favorite who, contemporaries claimed, “Reign'd like a King.”Footnote 117 Following Anne's death in 1714, the accession of the ‘un-English’ George I only seemed to further diminish the Crown's sovereign claim to the nation. Opponents of the Hanoverian king sang hymns declaring, “No more shall foreign scum pollute our Throne; / No longer under such We'll blush & groan; / But Englishmen an English King will own / What, shall a German Cuckold & his Fool, An Ox & Ape ore generous Britons rule.”Footnote 118 No longer the passive subjects of dynastic regimes and their theological politics, many increasingly felt themselves to be political members of a national body politic that they called England.
Hence emerge the societies for the reformation of manners shortly after the revolution. These voluntary organizations sought the nation's moral regeneration by rooting out illicit sex and prosecuting adultery, prostitution, and sodomy.Footnote 119 Organizing the first mass arrests of sodomites in England's history, society leaders warned that “Sodomites are Invading our Land.”Footnote 120 They argued that sodomy endangered the whole nation and so campaigns against it were “very Beneficial to all Ranks and Degrees of Persons.”Footnote 121 Although sometimes resisted, the societies had a broad appeal: one journalist praised them for acting “from a Sense of their Duty, and Love of their Country.”Footnote 122 The societies advocated for popular participation in the fight against illicit sex. “You are engaged, you see, in a necessary War,” Thomas Bray argued, “and you must one Way or other, you see, be Actively Engaged in it.”Footnote 123 It was not just citizen activists who promoted ideas of popular civic engagement. Sir Daniel Dolins, chairman of the grand jury in 1726, encouraged people “to give proper Informations and duly to Prosecute and Convict” sodomites.Footnote 124 “[E]very Man in his Place and Station” should help as an informant, he argued, because every “True Informer” is “to the Publick Body what Eyes and Ears are to the Natural Body, very serviceable Organs and Senses, to be valued.”Footnote 125 In Dolin's account, the citizen-as-snitch comes to occupy a key part of the body politic traditionally reserved for the king. It was no longer just the king but any Englishman who could be at the head of the body politic.
By the eighteenth century, the fight against sodomy and other illicit sex had thus become a national problem and concern for all political subjects. No longer an otherworldly and phantasmatic figure alongside witches, monsters, and devils, the sodomite had become a concrete and identifiable form in the temporal world and the threat he posed demanded the active resistance of citizens and the state. Like the homosexuals of the early twentieth century, sodomites were considered to be always and already outside the political body of the nation.Footnote 126 Here perhaps begins, then, the violent imbrication of nationalism and heteronormativity that, by mid-century, would be taken for granted. “Go where we will, at ev'ry time and place, / Sodom confronts and stares us in the face,” complains one anonymous author in 1766. “Britons, for shame! be male and female still. / Banish this foreign vice; it grows not here.”Footnote 127
Acknowledgments
For incisive advice and helpful thoughts, I would like to thank Steven Pincus, Cynthia Herrup, Lisa Wedeen, Linda Zerilli, Adom Getachew, Michael Young, Darrin McMahon, Agatha Slupek, Dalaina Heiberg, Onursal Erol, Annie Heffernan, Rose Owen, Boris Litvin, Burak Tan, Michael Amico, and Avshalom Schwartz. I also benefited from comments by audience members at the University of Chicago Political Science Workshop, the University of Northwestern, British Society for the Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, the Susan B. Anthony Workshop at the University of Rochester, and the Western Political Science Association Conference. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors at Modern Intellectual History for their productive feedback. Funding for this research was generously provided by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
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