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James, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85) embodied the paradoxes involved in distinguishing between force and fraud in late seventeenth‐century England. He appears as both seducer and victim of seduction in innumerable literary productions of the late 1670s and early 1680s, including John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681). The figure of Monmouth proved a magnet for a Protestant nation anxious about a Catholic succession, specifically that of the aging Charles II's designated heir, James, Duke of York. Monmouth led an armed rebellion after James's accession in 1685, a rebellion that resulted in bloodshed, dislocation, and, eventually, governmental savagery against his supporters. The Monmouth Rebellion became a site for public debate over the doctrine of passive obedience and the problem of imagining virtuous resistance to authority. Monmouth's cause and execution continued to resonate, paradoxically, among tory writers, for whom his tragic career as seduced seducer made visible pressing anxieties about their own positions as collusive and coerced subjects.

On January 1, 1684, Daniel Defoe married Mary Tuffley. The economy of England at this time resembled that of what is now called a developing nation. In his The Compleat English Tradesman, Defoe gave ample enough illustrations of the ways in which a business might fail. Defoe mentioned the Monmouth Rebellion sparingly. Somehow, perhaps by managing to flee the country or by going into hiding, Defoe escaped the vicious reprisals that followed the failure of the rebellion. James II wanted the rebels hanged for all to see, and with the aid of his Chief Justice, Sir Robert Jeffreys, men were hunted down throughout the region. In An Appeal to Honour and Justice, he described his disagreement with many among the Dissenters who believed that James II ought to be trusted as his second disagreement with his fellow Nonconformists became known after he had upbraided them for supporting the Turks during the siege of Vienna.

In 1682, Lady Henrietta Berkeley eloped with her brother‐in‐law Ford, Lord Grey, one of Monmouth's closest personal friends and an avid follower in his rebellion. The scandal, much‐watched in the popular press and the subject of avid contemporary gossip, found its most memorable representation in Aphra Behn's Love‐Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7), arguably the first novel in English. Love‐Letters draws on the salacious details of the Berkeley–Grey affair, including details that emerged in the subsequent trial, and places the story of sexual perfidy and perversion squarely in the context of the Monmouth Rebellion. Against that backdrop, Love‐Letters delineates the complexities of late seventeenth‐century tory sensibility and attacks what Behn saw as the faithlessness and treason of exclusion‐era Whig ideology. Familiar seduction topoi and gender roles are satirically revised, while sexual encounters are shown consistently to complicate the categories of rape and seduction, undermining the regime of “force or fraud.”

The Restoration settlement which placed Charles II on his throne allowed the king a small defensive military establishment consisting of guards and garrisons. But since it could not deploy a field army, it barely qualified as a standing army. The subsequent expansion of the English army during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars and the suppression of the Monmouth Rebellion revived the fear of a standing army as a tool of absolutism and popery in the French manner. Moreover, the need to buy or reward the support of the aristocracy wiped out whatever progress toward a merit system of awarding military offices had been achieved in the Parliamentarian and Royalist armies during the civil wars, and reasserted the distinction between gentlemen and professional officers. A purchase system for commissions took root and received official sanction. This system reserved the choicest military offices in the home army for courtiers and noblemen, and drove experienced officers and soldiers into destitution or military service in foreign armies.