This article focuses on the manuscript of Lady Hester Pulter, a bundle containing 130 sheets found in 1996 in Leeds by Mark Robson, containing two series of poems and another 30 pages of a romance. I suggest that the sexual corruption of Charles II's court prompted Pulter to create a romance with distinctly republican overtones in which chastity is the highest value, sexual corruption the lowest vice, and rulers who commit such crimes forfeit both their right to rule and their right to live. The monarchs in Pulter's fiction use absolutist rhetoric to justify rape, and, contra her earlier poetic denunciations of Charles I's execution, rape now justifies regicide. Basing her fiction on the legends surrounding the Muslim conquest of Spain, I argue that Pulter adjusts her sources to present an alternative, Augustinian view of rape, one that blames the rapist, not the victim. The prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, however, displays a very different politics. The poems, likely written during the 1640s–'50s, demonstrate Pulter's wide reading and her near-fanatical Royalism. In the mid-1990s a manuscript was discovered containing the poetry and prose of a previously unknown female author, Lady Hester Pulter.
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