"'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

15For an excellent analysis of the European rationalization of colonialism and Locke's justification of colonial sovereignty in America in Two Treatises as typical of contemporary views see chapter 5 of James Tully's An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), and Herman Lebovics 252-66. In Patriarchs, Tyrrell voices a number of points similar to Locke's views in ch. 5 of Two Treatises. Tyrrell's Eurocentric assumption is that the Indians are a primitive people because they "have all the Country in common" (111 ) and thus "no distinct propriety in Land." Therefore they have no governments such as "among us," whose main end is to decide disputes over property (120). In the absence of a "European" type of

government, the settlers' appropriation of native land without consent is absolutely legitimate considering also the fact that this land is "waste":

These planters have divided this unoccupied land .... It is an injury... in any Indian who is at peace with them ... to break up this enclosure, or take away anything that is there planted without the consent of the owner. For since the owner hath possessed himself of this land, and bestowed his labour and industry upon it ... he hath no right to take away this land from the owner. (112)

See also 100, 109, 110,113. In this context the planters' war against the natives for the protection of their property is considered "lawful" defense.

16Hughes points out that the liberation of Lady Fancy and the two Julias (The False Countand The Lucky Chance) involved servitude or rape, but in this play the lover, also, becomes a murderer.

17See Richard Ashcraft, "The Two Treatises." Tyrrell's view of "the nature and original of Propriety" from which follows that "there must be laws made to maintain this Propriety" (114) is typical of the Whig evolutionary model:

For as where a Country is thinly peopled, and produces all the necessaries for life only by the labour of the Inhabitants in hunting fishing, and the like imployments of that life which we call barbarous .... and that the People do

neither need nor desire those superfluous things that others doe ... so likewise where the People are more than the Country can well maintain from its own Products, there will presently arise a necessity of division of lands ... and of Trade abroad. (113)

On these evolutionary premises the historicity of absolute monarchy is turned into a political anachronism on the basis of its incompatibility with the sophisticated forms of civil government demanded by the increase of wealth, trade, and capital investment, such as a representative body. In Britannia Languens: Or, a Discourse of Trade (1689), William Petyt analyzes the incompatibility of contemporary absolute monarchies, "where... the conditions of Men are little better than that of Brutes," with trade since the latter requires "Freedoms" for its improvement (142). For a typical instance of Whig economism, also see Neville 85, 87, 93-95, 110, 113.