without struggle. William and Mary took immediate measures to ensure that subjects would cooperate with the new regime, whatever their private thoughts about its legitimacy. New oaths of allegiance were drawn up, and penalties for those who balked were severe. Still there was considerable resistance, especially at first, and many English subjects continued well into the eighteenth century to feel the force of their former oaths of allegiance to King James. James's presence on the Continent was a source of anxiety to English governments for decades, and his supporters ('Jacobites') attempted more than once forcibly to restore his heirs to the throne. Eventually, though, the fact of possession, the reluctance of the nation to go to war for a tyrannical Catholic king who had deserted his throne, the increasing military and commercial success of Augustan England (interpreted by some as God's blessing on the revolution), and the sim -64- ple passage of time all worked together to smooth over the explosive possibilities of 1689. The succession continued to be granted to Protestants, even though James's son and grandsons survived until 1788. Doubt about the legitimacy of the changes effected by the Glorious Revolution or about the positions of subjects who had broken vows for purposes of expediency became something one did not openly express. Yet such doubts persisted, often in somewhat disguised forms.
One place where they surfaced with regularity was in amatory fiction's obsessive representation of broken vows. The usual vow-breaker in amatory fiction is the male seducer; but amatory fiction is also concerned with bigamy (a favorite theme of Manley, who was herself the victim of a bigamous husband), adultery, and lovers who are unfaithful to personal codes of honor (Philander in Behn's Love Letters; Mosco in Manley's New Atalantis). The representation of broken oaths links amatory fiction to wider crises of cultural conscience and political process in Augustan England.
For instance, Behn's
Eventually the two run off together, despite Isabella's vows. But once they leave the monastery, things begin to go badly. They are poor; Isabella becomes pregnant. At last, Henault reluctantly accedes to his father's demands, leaving Isabella behind to campaign with the army. He joins Villenoys's regiment, and they become close friends. The war itself is given characteristically short shrift. 'It is not my business to relate the History of the War,' the narrator says; we learn only that 'they acted very Noble' and that in one battle Henault falls. Isabella grieves extravagantly when she receives official news of his death. Though much courted, she turns down all suitors. But when Villenoys arrives, she has again fallen into poverty. She decides out of «interest» to favor Villenoys's suit after an extended period of mourning. -65-
Five years after what turns out to be a loving and comfortable marriage, Villenoys decides to go away overnight. That night a visitor calls on Isabella. It is, of course, Henault, who did not die after all but has been doing slave labor all these years. Terrified of the charge of adultery (and noticing that Henault is poor) Isabella sneaks into the guest room and smothers him. Only then does she feel love for him again. When Villenoys returns, Isabella is tormented by a sense of guilty innocence: 'She fell on her knees, and cry'd, 'Oh! you can never Pardon me, if I should tell you, and yet, alas! I am innocent of Ill! ' She tells Villenoys that Henault died naturally in his sleep. They decide to put the body in a sack and throw it in the river. But while Villenoys is waiting for her to sew the sack closed, Isabella deliberately stitches it to his coat. When he throws the sack into the river, he goes along with it and is drowned. No one suspects Isabella until a traveler who had been a slave with Henault exposes her as 'the Murderess of two Husbands (both belov'd) in one Night.' While awaiting execution, she spends her time exhorting others 'never to break a Vow.' Even on the scaffold she makes a speech 'of half an Hour long,' the burden of which is 'a warning to the Vow-Breakers.'
In Behn's representation, Isabella's decision to break her nun's vows and run off with Henault is to blame for all the macabre events that ensue. Yet Isabella is powerless not to break her vows. 'She had try'd all that was possible in Human Strength to perform,' the narrator informs us when as a young nun Isabella is struggling with her desire for Henault.
She had try'd Fasting long, Praying fervently, rigid Penances and Pains, severe Disciplines, all the Mortification, almost to the destruction of Life it self, to conquer the unruly Flame; but still it burnt and rag'd but the more; so, at last, she was forc'd to permit that to conquer her, she could not conquer, and submitted to her Fate, as a thing destin'd her by Heaven… and this being her real Belief, she the more patiently gave way to all the Thoughts that pleas'd her.
Like other resisting-yet-desiring maidens in amatory fiction, Isabella is 'forc'd to permit' just what she most wants. Behn is careful not to present Isabella's submission as mere self-delusion, a simple capitulation to her own desires; the point is that she is really being compelled, she honestly resists. Helpless against 'Fate,' she is nevertheless guilty, too.
Never break a vow, Behn's story warns a vow-breaking society. In 1689, such a moral could not have been more appropriately placed than -66- in a tale where vows are impossible to keep. Henault, like King James, is apparently gone forever; but really the first husband remains alive, and comes back to expose his wife's unintentional perfidy (as well as her continued love). The story represents sympathetically the moral and religious uncertainty many were experiencing in the context of the Glorious Revolution, the sense of being without choice but nevertheless at fault. One critic has called Behn's attention to vow-breaking 'a mere excuse for a romantic and improbable tale,' thus reinforcing the traditional view of amatory fiction as irrelevant rubbish. But on the contrary, The History of the Nun is as political as it is 'romantic.' As Ann Messenger observes, 'although the sexual passion of a French nun may seem far removed from the turmoil of England's government in 1688, the issue of broken loyalty unites them.' Behn's conflation of politics and sexual relations gives the lie to traditional distinctions between public and private concerns, male and female experience, amatory and realistic fiction. Without being any less sensational, melodramatic and bizarre, her story is at the same time a political parable of the Glorious Revolution in an anxious contemporary voice.
The obsession with broken vows epitomized in Behn's History of the Nun is related to another source of amatory fiction's extraordinary power: its persistent representation of agency (and therefore, responsibility) as complex and shifting, never finally assignable. Like the matter of broken vows, the problem of political agency was enormously troubling at and after the Glorious Revolution. Who, many wondered, was responsible for what had happened? Was it God's will that James lost the throne, or was it the tragic result of the king's own error, or of his subjects' disobedience? Was James's flight an act of abdication, or was his replacement a treasonous usurpation? Amatory fiction places questions of agency in a sexual. context, participating in feminized guise in the central political issues of its day, issues that continued to haunt British consciences until at least the 1740s when the last organized Jacobite uprising took place.
As we have seen, sexual relations are most often figured in these texts as relations of force and deceit; rape is the central paradigm for sexual experience. Yet these writers almost always include complicating factors that mitigate the helplessness of victims (i.e., women), making them complicit in their own undoings. When Manley relates a story involving a young woman named Louisa and her bigamous seducer, she is careful to insist that Louisa herself must be held partially responsible -67- for her own downfall: ' Louisa had no very strong Head; his superficial Reasons might quickly take place, especially when they were seconded by Inclination: Unknown to her self she lov'd him, else all his Attempts would have been insignificant.' At the same time, Louisa's responsibility is oddly denied, too. After all, she can't help it that she has 'no very strong Head,' and her love for her seducer is 'unknown to her self.' Manley's formulation is typically dissonant, but need not be dismissed as merely contradictory or slapdash. Instead, it may indicate how complex a subject seduction was for Augustan writers. Unable to decide whether they had been conquered or liberated in 1689, disturbingly aware that abdication and usurpation had become indistinguishable, Augustan writers expose as interested and false the traditional habit of distinguishing seduction from rape according to definitive assignments of agency.
This complex attitude toward agency is epitomized in Haywood's Love in Excess, the eighteenth century's best-selling work of amatory fiction. When Haywood's Melliora finds herself solicited by her guardian, Count D'Elmont, she is disturbed to find that although she feels powerless and afraid, and does all she can to resist his advances (going so far as to plug up the keyholes to her room and eventually entering a monastery to escape), she
