by Janet Todd
In The Emperor of the Moon, Behn ridiculed the gullible who expected a moon world complete with earthly hierarchies. Fontenelle she considered weakened his work on the existence of other planetary systems by imagining men in the Milky Way. Yet, she approved his popularising of the new thought. In her commendatory poem about Lucretius, she had praised Creech for making philosophy easy and inviting, suitable for any capacity: ‘No hard Notion’ interrupted understanding. Fontenelle was doing something similar in his New Worlds, with the science of Copernicus and especially Descartes, who had written in the 1630s and 1640s but was little known in England outside academic circles. She and Fontenelle were taking ‘the middle way’ to the public.
Fontenelle’s main point was that the stars were equivalent to other worlds, and the Earth was thus reduced to a subordinate place in the cosmos. The problem was of course religion, as both Fontenelle and Behn knew. With Creech, she had happily embraced the freethinking position against his fear, but she had since then learnt circumspection or, rather, equivocation. Although Fontenelle was careful to blur the line between fact and fantasy, remaining respectful of the ‘delicate Niceties of Religion’, Behn piously took him to task for omitting any mention of God. This apparent and exaggerated piety was, however, exploded by her use of the Bible to undercut itself.
Oscillating between serious point and parody of the scholastic method of dispute, Behn gave a dazzling display of biblical chapter and verse that must have bemused the serious readership of her old dramatic prefaces mocking preachers and pedants. The upshot was that the Church’s opposition to the Copernican system as incompatible with the Bible became absurd. She concluded: ‘Thus I hope I have performed my Undertaking, in making it appear, that the holy Scriptures, in things that are not material to the Salvation of Mankind, do altogether condescend to the vulgar Capacity; and that these two Texts of Psal.19. and Josh. 10. are as much for Copernicus as against him.’ To come to this point, Behn had put forward many decidedly comic arguments. For example, the Hebrews in the Bible have the moon and sun stilled for their benefit; so she asked, ‘Now when by this Miracle they had the Light of the Sun, of what Advantage could the Moon be to them?’ The various miraculous interruptions God makes are so radical that it would take ‘nothing less than two or three new Miracles, all as great as the first’ to ‘set the World in Order again’. In the meantime, His activities become ‘Inconveniences’ for everyone else. It was pretty much tongue-incheek, rather like her paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer. Just in case she might have been too offensive, however, Behn concluded, ‘I hope my Readers will be so just as to think, I intend no Reflection on Religion by this Essay; which being no Matter of Faith, is free for every one to believe, or not believe, as they please.’10 The double tone, so useful in this period, was one at which Behn was now skilled. She needed it, for she had before her the example of Charles Blount, one of Rochester’s later coterie of freethinkers, who had recently had his sceptical book suppressed.
With all her equivocation and parody, Behn knew she had a serious point. She was not really concerned with science—Descartes’ notion of liquid whirlwinds which moved each planet and star around in a series of interacting vortices was not critiqued as it might have been by reference to Isaac Newton, who had just disputed it with his more satisfactory idea of gravity (nor was it absolutely clear why she could not use the English word vortex, already employed in English for Descartes’ concept). Rather, her concern was with a history of thought as a human construction, the sense that religion was an ideology that could be destabilised by new systems of thought. Here again Behn was following Lucretius and Hobbes in mocking archaic and stupid pedantry, especially when applied to religion.
Within the same year, Behn came before the public with an even more controversial work, Fontenelle’s History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priest, itself based on a Dutch treatise by A. Vandale, De Oraculis Ethicarum, a covert attack on Catholicism. It was a comparative history of pagan religions, in which myths were brought together and compared. The plot was the slow disengagement of reason from superstition. Behn’s translation came out anonymously, with no publisher’s name on the title page.11 Perhaps Canning had become anxious.
Behn’s choice of work to translate placed her again firmly with Hobbes who, in the twelfth chapter of Leviathan, had scandalously discussed the pagan cheats in the same breath as Christian expedients.12 So too in Fontenelle, the oracles of the pagans were undercut, just as the miracles within the ‘Essay’ had been. The mockery stopped short of Christian miracles, but the implications were present. Priests of all sects seemed master frauds, duping a credulous and stupid people. However, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza had been much criticised for openly denying miracles; Behn was careful not to become quite so clear.
The issue of pagan and earlier religions was sensitive in England. The Anglican position was straightforward: old oracles were from daemons and miraculously ceased with the advent of Christ. Milton put the matter properly when Jesus tells Satan in Paradise Regained, ‘No more shalt thou by oracling abuse / The Gentiles; henceforth oracles are ceased/... for they shall find thee mute.’13 Fontenelle argued that the pagan oracles were priestly fraud from the start and so could not stop in this way. Indeed, they continued after the triumph of Christianity, which suggested that paganism had declined for political and social rather than divine reasons. The oracles, he declared, were simply silenced through Christian imperial action and there was no sudden transition from paganism to Christianity.
In making this claim, Fontenelle inevitably mocked the early Church Fathers who were responsible for much of the dogma and who, to make God more powerful, had accepted the notion of supernatural oracles defeated by Him. As he expressed it, ‘to gain a little upon the pagans, there was a necessity of yielding to them what they maintained with so much obstinacy.’ Christians allowed ‘something supernatural in the Oracles... and so Daemons were to be brought upon the stage’.14
Inevitably this sort of historical investigation of origins threatened modern Christianity as well. Thus, with seemingly limited aims, a study of paganism became a critique of the state religion. Its opponents were quite aware of the subversive implications, and faithful Anglicans and Catholics would answer the case for many years after Behn’s death.15
That Behn chose or agreed to translate this work as she had chosen or agreed to praise Lucretius must suggest something of her attitude to religion in general. This seems to have been fairly constant over the years for, as early as the epistle to The Dutch Lover in 1673, she had noted the confusion of early science, religion and poetry. With all her political enthusiasm for James II and appreciation of the tolerance at which, from one view, he was aiming, she can have had virtually no sympathy for his sense that a particular sect, Roman Catholicism, had a monopoly on truth. She might by now have accepted with Hobbes that a single religion tended to the coherence of the state, but, with Protestantism so entrenched as it was in England, Catholicism was surely inappropriate.
The parlous condition of the government, reeling under James’s zeal was displayed in the new dominance of the Scots at court, to which Behn’s dedicatees of these months testified. Scots were not usually of much account in the English government, but the King’s ability to antagonise almost all his natural English followers meant that he had had to turn to the nation that had often supported him and with whom, as a Stuart, he had an ancient connection. So, except for Sunderland and George Jeffreys (to whom Behn, in a complex political/religious move, dedicated her History of Oracles), the usual bevy of English aristocrats and politicians was replaced at court by untried Scots. In the past, Behn had shared the English distrust of the ‘schismatics’; she now followed her King in acquiring an ‘Esteem’ for Scotland.16
A Discovery of New Worlds was dedicated to one of the new men, the Earl of Drumlangrig. He was a Privy Councillor in Scotland and allied to Sunderland, who used him to help topple his enemy, Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, the earli
er dedicatee of Behn’s Luckey Chance. Lycidus, which came out about the same time, was addressed to a far more important man, the unlikeable, handsome and vain Earl of Melfort, the Scot who was fast becoming Sunderland’s most formidable rival. As a converted rather than a converting Catholic like Sunderland, Melfort was powerful in his association with the Jesuits, with extreme Catholics, and with the Queen. So he was not as easily ousted as the Protestant Rochester had been. Nor was he easy to flatter, and Behn was even forced to use his receipt of the newly revived (and much mocked) Order of the Thistle to congratulate him.17
In the circumlocutions in which all needed now to express themselves, Behn praised Melfort for not looking beyond James: he was not one who weighed ‘Advantages by Probabilities only, and fancying the future to out-poyse the present, cast there their Anchor of Hope’. In other words, he had not opened negotiations with James’s son-in-law, the Protestant William of Orange over the water. For his benefit, again she trotted out her belief that ‘the Royal Interest’ is ‘so greatly... the Property of Nobility’ that nobles should support the monarch over life and fortune, especially one ‘so truly just, so wise and great’ as James II.
At this point, a new factor agitated politics. In her brief life, Queen Mary of Modena had suffered eight pregnancies, all resulting in miscarriages or short-lived infants. So, news of her being with child again did not immediately alarm those whose political hopes rested on James’s death. By early 1688, however, it was known that the pregnancy was going well, and Behn’s friend, the literary cleric Thomas Sprat, helped draw up plans for a day of thanksgiving and prayers for the birth of a boy.
Though there was little enthusiasm in the nation—‘’tis strange to see, how the Queen’s great Belly is everywhere ridiculed’—James’s enemies and critics grew anxious.18 The birth of a boy would continue Catholic sway and, in the event of the King’s death, result in the regency of the ultra-Catholic and increasingly haughty Mary of Modena. The anxious naturally became devious. Ciphered messages flew between London and The Hague where William was always in waiting. Indeed his propaganda machine was already in action and his pamphlets were being widely distributed throughout England. He needed only to accelerate the activity. The few loyal poets that were left to James were ordered to work.
It was a difficult moment for propaganda. If a poet wrote glowingly of the event and a girl were born, William would have been needlessly offended, since his wife Mary, James’s eldest daughter, would remain the heir; but, if it were a boy and the poet had been silent, this would upset James. If one were going for the former option, one might as well line up with the extreme Catholics, who saw the pregnancy as a miraculous sign of England’s impending conversion and assume the miracle would include correctly sexing the child.
Behn’s Congratulatory Poem to her most Sacred Majesty, on the Universal Hopes of all Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales was one of the few robustly to express the extreme Catholic position—which is why it was published both in London by the very pro-James Canning and in Edinburgh by the King’s own printer.19 It claimed that the ‘Mighty blessing is at last arriv’d’ and ‘the Wond’rous work achiev’d’. While it is God who has taken his time in the matter, Behn also gave the comic impression of a lengthy earthly conception: ‘monarchs are not fashion’d at a Heat’. Her conceit was again the godlike monarch, ‘For Gods and Kings ally’d most nearly are’, a god now begetting a saviour son. Like his predecessor, the child will ‘call the wand’ring, scattered Nations home’ and princes will come to worship him as they did Christ. It was no more over-the-top than the Coronation Ode but, since the child had not even been born, there was some audacity in hailing him ‘Royal boy’. As for Mary, to whom the poem was addressed, she was only the ‘Sacred vessel’, exhorted to guard her pregnancy with care.20
In fact this faith in the birth of a boy, which loyal poets were urged to express, helped increase Protestant suspicion of a fake pregnancy. Probably Behn’s poem was one of several works that fed into the much credited story, that the whole matter was a fraud and that a baby boy was, at the crucial moment, to be smuggled into the royal bed in a warming-pan.
In her poem, the hostility to William was overt: the new child would overthrow all the designs of the Dutchman. Yet, there was some uneasiness amidst the celebration. Behn used the image of fortune’s wheel being arrested by the birth, as if the downfall of James were inevitable without it, and again she noted the silence of the Muses. This was due to their fright by Mars. Decoded, the image meant that the martial William was causing writers to defect. Against such political realities she could only assert a personal vision:
A young APOLLO, rising from the Gloom,
Dress’d in his Father’s brightest Rays, shall come...
And bless the Earth with New-created LIGHT.
As for James, the child would quell ‘sawcy Murmurs’ and make him ‘Absolute’. Behn ended ringingly, ‘You will, you shall, and must for ever Reign.’ In such strenuous linguistic effort she herself seemed mimicking the divine word.
As ever, however, her own concern was patronage. James had not stimulated it: his son would.
He the faint Muses shall a-new inspire,
And from his Beams, kindle their useful Fire:
His Rights Hand Crowns, his Left shall Lawrels give;
And POETS shall by Patron PRINCES live.
This forlorn faith in generous royal patronage had been Aphra Behn’s hope throughout the 1680s; it was ironic that it should come to rest with the child who would grow up to be the Old Pretender—with no patronage in England at all.
On 10 June, the happy event occurred and a Prince of Wales was born. Apart from those who, like the Duchess of Mazarine, had felt the baby kicking in the womb, a whole army of people witnessed the birth, including Charles’s Queen Catherine and Lady Sunderland, though, significantly, not James’s daughter Princess Anne, who chose to be absent. Bonfires were ordered in celebration on 17 June and again on the 29th, when it seemed the child would live. Sunderland decided at last to become a Catholic.
Behn was ready with another poem, this time for James rather than his wife. A Congratulatory Poem to the King’s Most Sacred Majesty, On the Happy Birth was published by the loyal William Canning, who also packaged the two birth verses together as Two Congratulatory Poems. Obviously such work was aimed at the King not the country, which dreaded the implications of the event and was seething with warming-pan rumours. Behn linked the new poem to the Universal Hopes by addressing again the ‘happy KING’ and insisting on the child’s divinity, as well as its future ability to unite all into ‘One SOUL’—if not into ‘One FAITH’. But the new work added little to the earlier one and showed signs of strain; clearly Behn was finding it difficult to cap or equal her previous performance. Yet, however constrained and tedious the Congratulatory Poem, she did use it to make a few useful personal and political points.
First, that she, Aphra Behn, had been hymning James for many years now and had not been afraid to foretell this ‘Glorious’ moment. She would like the King to take more note than he had. Second, that William would be mightily put out: ‘Methinks I hear the Belgick LION Roar, / And Lash his Angry Tail’, frustrated at the birth of a prince ‘Whose BROWS his Boasted Laurels shall Adorn’. Here William was reduced to a farcical villain howling like the devilish opposition in the Coronation Ode. Third, the child was truly James’s, for his eyes proved him a Stuart, of ‘the Forgiving KIND’. In this, apart from scotching warming-pan nonsense, there may have been some implied advice to James on recent disastrous events. Having raged at the Archbishop of Canterbury and six Anglican bishops for refusing to read out his Declaration of Indulgence to Catholics, the King had sent them to the Tower. It would certainly have been better for the country if James had forgiven them before matters reached this dangerous pass. When, just after the birth, on 30 June, the Anglican bishops were acquitted by the courts, it was to ‘mighty rejoyceing, in ringing of bells, discharging of gunns, lighting of c
andles, and bonefires in several places’.21 James had sunk further in popularity.
Behn was quite aware that she had written a tired poem. Diplomatically, she blamed this on her joy, which had been too great for ‘Thought or Wit ’; so she had produced only ‘Scanty VERSE ’, too narrow to contain all she wished to say.22 In reality, she might have been irritated at delayed or inadequate payment; in addition she was possibly by now hampered by political fears.
Like many affable, talkative people, Behn had a competitive streak, which had grown stronger in her later years. In the preface to The Luckey Chance, she had insisted that she was equal to any man as a playwright and, even in the dedication to the translated Agnes de Castro, she had felt obliged to stress the excelling power of her portrait. So, when John Baber appeared to denigrate her as a court poet, she was prepared to fight hard.
Baber was the son of a Presbyterian royal physician, one of those who had helped Charles II out of life. He was the frequent butt of lampoons, some copied into ‘Astrea’s Booke’; one called him ‘sly Mr Baber’ who is ‘a plaguy sharp writer of satire’. Behn knew the practice of self-mockery—‘in Lampoons... your selves revile’ because ‘None else will think it worth their while’—and she must have suspected Baber as the author of this gentle satire.23 Although lampoons suggested he was a writer of ballads and even a provider of the scurrilous Julian, Baber had had only two acknowledged works published, one on the coronation and the other on the birth of the Prince of Wales. They were suitably careful and courtly, making the high principled and stubborn James into a model of justice and peace. Often Baber and Behn echoed each other: in his coronation ode, Baber alluded to the awkward fact that the sublime couple had failed to produce an heir as quickly as was desired and he too suggested that heaven took its time to make a king.