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"'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
Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2002 by Velissariou, Aspasia
The king's argument of the Indian legitimate right to sovereignty is therefore based on its ancient origin, as indeed is his own rule. In this sense, he correctly talks of the Europeans as usurpers of native right. On the other hand, the principle of the origin of authority as a justification for its continuation is no longer self-evident because it had been a contested political notion for a number of years. At the same time, however, the Indian king grounds his case on precedence as constitutive of the Indian right to sovereignty. In the context of the competing claims of Whigs and Tories on the notion of historical precedence in which each party sought to appropriate for itself the constitutional and legal history of England in order to justify its own version of rule, this argument is more difficult to refute: it suggests the antiquity of custom as validation of an original right.13 Therefore, Bacon quickly brushes aside the king's just protest against imperialist aggression and uses his inheritance right as a legitimate origin of his own authority.
Bacon's speech succinctly describes the full circuit of English economic expansionism and the concomitant rationalization of colonial rule. His seizure of a land that rightfully belongs to the natives, skillfully masked by the phrase "finding here my Inheritance" (emphasis added), reinscribes the possession of property as a legitimating agent. This time, however, the latter disguises expansionist aggression by naturalizing the colonialist right to the appropriation of native land. Appropriation of land from its original owners by force normally does not confer title.14 In the colonial context, however, occupation and cultivation of native land convey title since Indian land does not constitute legitimate property. Therefore, occupation creates right and this, in its turn, lawful defense; by the same token, the latter engenders war for the protection of land against its original owners. That this war in reality draws its legitimacy from conquest is suggested by the word "slaves" used by the Indian king to describe his people's subjection to the Englishman's "fore-fathers." Ironically it is also confirmed by Bacon himself: in his self-contradictory statement his war is for the protection of a land which his "sword...first cut out."15
In the ensuing battle (IV.ii.) Bacon will kill the king and accidentally his own beloved, queen Semernia, who had fought in male disguise. Derek Hughes observes that "Bacon's pursuit of Semernia provides Behn's greatest critique of the adulterer as liberator," and that her death by his hand, due to misrecognized identity, emphasizes the alienation that informs sexual and cultural relationships in the play (372).16 Even so, Bacon's violence co-exists with, and is finally superseded by, his nobility, underscored by his final gesture to fight with the betrayed king on "equal terms" (29). As Fearless says, "his Romantic humour will undo us" (44), but it is precisely Bacon's romantic humor that rescues him from the charge of violence. At the same time, it is his heroic ethics vested in his language of honor that Behn uses to provide the ultimate argument for his claim to lawful authority. Bacon's case against the Indians is essentially just because of his romantic attachment to bravery and generosity. Predictably the defeated party, i.e. the king, fully recognizes the moral superiority of the aggressor in a scene where the cowardice of his fighters, whom he significantly now calls "slaves" (7), is contrasted with Bacon's nobility. Over his dead body Bacon says he "cou'd weep over the Hero I my self destroy'd" (62-63).
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