"'Tis pity that when laws are faulty they should not be mended or abolisht": Authority, legitimations, and honor in Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter

FRIENDLY How now Major; what, they say Bacon scar'd you all out of the Council yesterday: What say the People?

DULLMAN Say? They Curse us all, and Drink young Frightall's Heath, and swear

they'll fight thro Fire and Brimstone for him.

FRIENDLY And to morrow will hallow him to the Gallows, if it were his chance to come there. (III.i.1-6)27

The reduction of the people to an unthinking mass, which, as such, is inherently dangerous, is also implicit in Bacon's own treatment of them. Behn places him in a position in which he is constantly shown either to prevent the violence of his followers or to distance himself both physically and morally from them.28 In either case he treats his people as mere appendices to his personal authority and not as the source of his own political legitimation. Therefore, he repeatedly undercuts his real basis of power precisely by figuring as the leader of an amorphous mass. For this reason, however, he makes himself vulnerable to the charge of anarchy. The Tory staple of mob rule as synonymous with the dissolution of society and the destruction of all human bonds surfaces in the. language of the Council. Both Whimsey (I.ii.6-9) and Dunce (III.ii.150-53) picture Bacon as a prospective murderer of themselves and of their children, a violator of their wives, and a destroyer of Jamestown. From this phantom of total anarchy the rebel emerges as "Lord and King." However base the speakers are, their monstrous exaggerations of Bacon's intentions, should he prevail, reinforce Downright's charge of Bacon with sedition. Bacon is unable to counter this precisely because he allows himself to be inscribed by the discourse of his adversaries. In his crucial confrontation with Downright and Wellman the overdetermination of his position by their principles of lawfulness is typified by his assertion that his highest ambition is to be an "honest Subject." Insofar as he insists on this claim, then, his case appears contradictory, and his pretence to a legitimate cause collapses; therefore he is truly guilty of usurpation of authority.

Through Bacon, Behn's aim is to project a type of political ethos meant to contrast with, and transcend, the power politics of personal interest that informs the position of the majority in the Council. In this sense, Bacon's isolationism with regard both to the "Rabble" and to the deceitful practices of the authorities is instrumental in the construction of an essentially moral politics. Her hero's commitment to avision of honorable politics is clearly out of place in a context of political corruption, baseness, and compromise. An integral part of this vision is Bacon's belief in the essential moral uprightness of language based on a supposed organic correspondence between words and things (Todd, Gender 53-54).29 To him, the word of honor signifies precisely this, because it embodies this inherent link in a paradigmatic manner. As a result, for example, he trusts the Council's invitation to appear on his own in front of them so as to receive the long-awaited commission. When Dareing incisively comments that this invitation is yet another one of their deceitful politics, Bacon scolds him by invoking the "honorable" nature of the Gentlemen of the Council (II.i.60-65).