The Captive's Position by Toulouse Teresa A.;

Author:Toulouse, Teresa A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Virtue and Highest Power

This need accounts for Mather’s dedicatory and concluding comments to the earl of Bellomont. At the history’s end Mather praises King William and addresses Bellomont as the “Illustrious Image of His own Royal Virtues.” Bellomont is especially lauded for his role in persuading William of Orange to lead his own revolt against the Stuart monarchy. Surely, his “Conduct” as governor will similarly impress and subdue disputatious colonials. In him meet “Virtus et Summa potestas” (virtue and highest power).38 While such language serves as the conventional language of praise, it seems extraordinarily overblown even for a text already filled with exaggerated descriptions. Its excess suggests Mather’s own extreme pleasure in Bellomont’s status, so close to the throne itself. The connection between such noble status and the attributes it joins together demands further attention, however. Bellomont’s nobility seems to depend on two terms that need not fit together—“virtue” and “highest power.” Linking the two under the aegis of nobility clearly appears to solve several problems Decennium Luctuosum has raised. First, given the clear relation in all of the history’s classical sources of virtue and virtù, Bellomont’s nobility would seem to usher in the “manly” body the text has exposed in so many places as lacking. His nobility will thus abrogate the need for women like Hannah Dustan to step out of culturally appropriate gender positions. In so doing, Bellomont’s nobility will also symbolically solve the problem of male identification with a pleasurable and dangerous female aggression against the older patriarchal order. Putting “highest power” in the hands of a nobleman will implicitly resolve the problem of aggression against New England by competing colonial sons. “Virtue” in the shape of a newly legitimated imperial governing power will be restored by a body who legally represents the new royal “father.”

Such, at least, seems a final tentative “answer” proffered by Decennium Luctuosum. It is also the problematic solution yearned for in the Book of Judges. According to the logic of Judges, Jaels would no longer be needed, Delilahs would no longer triumph, and most tellingly, the sons of Israel would no longer rise up against one another instead of against external threats, were there only a “king in Israel.” Throughout the Book of Judges runs a longing, at once defended and criticized, for a new king who will unify the tribes internally and drive out all enemies claiming possession of the land of Israel. The analogy to the unstable colonial situation, in which third-generation men are massively competing for new power and status in a changing imperial political context as well as for justification of their own and the “fathers’” original acts of Indian dispossession, seems obvious. In the wake of the political failures and the literal deaths of the English-born first- and, increasingly, the second-generation “fathers,” Lord Bellomont could symbolically provide the new imperial “king in Israel,” by whose authority alone colonial male aggression could be controlled, confusion dispelled, and a unified (male) identity (re)stabilized (Judges 2K25).39

But there is another way to read this fantasy of stabilization in a nobility uniting “virtue” with “highest power.

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