Naseby, Milton, and the Politics of Marital Intimacy

Abstract

This chapter uses the relationship between King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria to examine how perceptions of marital intimacies informed debates over political intellection in the mid-seventeenth century. Royalist defenses of the king and queen’s correspondence emphasize the necessary intimacy of a couple’s mutual thoughts as foundational to any healthy marriage, arguments that had their roots in long-standing cultural expectations regarding the equality that should attend marital decision-making. While supportive of conversational intimacy, John Milton’s ambivalence toward this argument’s political implications would lead him to emphasize masculine headship in ways more consonant with Parliament’s presumptive position as the primary source of deliberative authority within the nation. Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of a world in which individuals cannot fully control the reception and distribution of their inner thoughts seems deliberately calibrated to rebut royalist claims regarding the king and queen’s marriage advanced in the aftermath of the Naseby debacle.