DOI: 10.5117/9789048563104_ch10 ISSN:

Passive Obedience and the Problem of Tyranny in Rivall Friendship

Emily Griffiths Jones
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In Chapter 10, Emily Griffiths Jones observes how Rivall Friendship weighs the problems of whether, when, and how subjects should resist tyrannical authority. These questions connect Manningham’s romance with Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, an influential source for seventeenth-century romance writers. However, Manningham believes that the regicide of 1649 violated human and divine law, and so struggles to reconcile the legacy of Sidney’s anti-tyranny romance with her own belief that subjects owe obedience even to bad monarchs. As a royalist writer, Manningham considers her political principles alongside the trope of resistance to tyranny. In so doing, she anticipates by many decades the later royalist doctrine of passive obedience, and she also considers what must be done when passivity is insufficient.

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