leaders applied the grammar of manhood to stigmatize, ridicule, degrade, and humiliate the Bachelor by portraying him as a man-child who did not merit the rights of men, fraternal respect, or civic standing. Their informal but influential message was that immature males were not free and equal men so much as overgrown children who should be excluded from public discourse, citizenship, and authority. Males who heeded the message might avoid exclusion by conforming to consensual norms of manhood and settling into family responsibilities and community respectability. Those who ignored the message exposed themselves to a coercive criminal justice system designed to control and penalize but also to rehabilitate males identified with subordinated masculinities. When James Winthrop wrote that “it is necessary that the sober and industrious . . . should be defended from the rapacity and violence of the vicious and idle,” he was asserting polite society’s demand to be protected against the Bachelor and other disorderly men.1
The English Bachelor and Redcoat
Late-seventeenth-century England hosted a debate on liberty and disorder. The Bachelor represented disorder. Mary Astell expressed a common viewpoint: “He who lives single that he may indulge licentiousness and give up himself to the conduct of wild and ungovernable desires . . . can never justify his own conduct nor clear it from the imputation of wickedness and folly.” The Bachelor’s wickedness was manifested in his unrestrained sexuality. He seduced women but refused to recognize his offspring. Aphra Behn wrote, “The roving youth in every shade/ Has left some sighing and abandon’d Maid / For tis a fatal lesson he has learn’d/ After fruition ne’re to be concern’d.” Critics attacked “the compleat beau” who produced ruined women and bastard children, cursed “predatory males” for leveraging lust into drinking, gambling, and crime, and linked the libertine to gangs such as the “Roysters, Hectors, Bucks, Bravados, Blades, [and] Bloods” that wreaked havoc in towns. Critics also condemned the Bachelor for spreading an antimarital gospel that equated bachelorhood to freedom and marriage to slavery. For instance, Robert Gould warned men who valued their liberty to steer clear of the “wild, rocky matrimonial sea.”2
Writers stigmatized the Bachelor as more slave than man. The Bachelor was a slave to lust, impulse, and avarice. He lacked self-restraint, rationality, and virtue, and lived by his “appetites” in a “lapsed state of mankind.” He suffered an “inconstancy” that rendered his word meaningless, his behavior frivolous, and his actions erratic. Women could not trust him to be other than a rogue, and men did not expect him to be a trustworthy neighbor. He also was a slave to “unnatural” proclivities associated with the effeminate “fop” who dwelled on appearances, haunted sporting, gambling, and prostitution houses, and cleaved to the latest fashion in “Gallic lust.” One satirist wrote, “Far much more time men trifling waste/ E’er their soft bodies can be drest / The looking glass hangs before / And each o’ th’ legs requires an hour.” Critics often condemned the fop’s abnormal sexuality. One pamphleteer announced, “The world is changed I know not how / For men kiss men, not women now . . . / A most unmanly trick / One man to lick the other’s cheek.”3 The Bachelor’s lust drew him alternately to the prostitute’s parlor and to a comrade’s chamber.
Some writers saw the Bachelor as seditious. He failed to father legitimate sons to replenish the ranks of freeholders dedicated to defending liberty: “A bachelor of age has broken the laws of nature [and] contributes little or nothing to the support of our freedoms. The money he pays in taxes is inconsiderable to the supplies given by others in children, which are an addition to the native strength of the kingdom. ... A bachelor can, in no sense, be esteemed a good Englishman.”4 The Bachelor was isolated in time. Having squandered any patrimony and sired no legitimate children, he was estranged from the intergenerational bonds of family and nation. The Bachelor was also unsettled in space. He wandered the English countryside and cities in search of pleasure, threatened other men’s families and property, and claimed rights without responsibilities.
What should be done with this parasite? Proposed solutions included preventive education and political remediation. John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education was a primer for fathers to teach sons self-discipline and social civility in anticipation of manhood, marriage, and citizenship. Others recommended sanctions. Magistrates should arrest “strumpets and harlots” who made “the lewder sort of men out of love with matrimony,” and legislators should enact “compulsive laws” to force bachelors to marry. One satirist suggested that a twenty-four-year-old bachelor should be taxed to defray costs resulting from his failure to procreate freeholders, and a twenty-five-year-old bachelor “ought to be reckoned superannuated and grown an old boy and not fit to be trusted with what he had, as not knowing the use and benefit of riches.” Regardless of actual age, “a bachelor is a minor” who “ought to be under the government of the parish.”5
Critics hoped to hasten the Bachelor’s progress to marriage by reforming male manners and female morality. Locke’s protégé, the third earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), praised the “man of sensibility” who claimed “manly liberty” to unite “a mind subordinated to reason, a temper humanized and fitted to all natural affections ... with constant security, tranquillity, [and] equanimity.” Unlike flatterers, seducers, and bullies, the genteel man knew that marriage to a good woman wed virtue to happiness.6 Others emphasized women’s morality. David Hume saw male lust as an immutable reality. What prompted men to accept the “restraint” of marriage and “undergo cheerfully all the fatigues and expenses to which it subjects men” was their egotistical desire to clone themselves by siring legitimate sons. Men could satisfy that desire only if they could find faithful wives. Accordingly, the Bachelor was more likely to choose marriage when female fidelity was fortified.7
Where education and remediation failed, the Bachelor was apt to embroil himself in family feuds, gambling debts, and crime. He often escaped harm’s way by being sent to or enlisting in England’s standing army. John Trenchard complained, “Our prisons are so many storehouses to replenish [the king’s] troops.” Trenchard considered the marginal males who composed the army’s rank-and-file redcoats to be rogues and mercenaries whose anarchist bent was commandeered by corrupt, aristocratic officers using draconian discipline to mold the army to the king’s despotic will. Critics accused the officer corps of synthesizing libertinism and brutality into an instrument of monarchical tyranny.8
Observing the standing army in peacetime, William Prynne asked, “What do these soldiers do all day?” He answered, “These lusty men spend their time eating, drinking, whoring, sleeping and standing watch . . . make off with wives and daughters and leave not a few great bellies and bastards on the inhabitants of the country’s charge.” Trenchard noted that the army rendered “men useless to labor and almost propagation, together with a much greater destruction of them, by taking them from a laborious way of living to a loose idle life.” That loose idle life encompassed “the insolence of the officers and the debaucheries that are committed both by them and their soldiers in all the towns they come in ... and a numerous train of mischiefs besides, almost endless to enumerate.” John Toland listed among redcoat mischiefs “frequent robberies, burglaries, rapes, rapines, murders, and barbarous cruelties.” Andrew Fletcher accused libertine officers of “debauchery and wickedness” as well as “frauds, oppressions, and cruelties.”9
If the Bachelor’s wickedness was evident in his tendency to see a woman’s ruin as “a step to reputation” as he built “his own honor on her infamy,” the Redcoat’s vices were manifested in his tendency to speak patriotism but practice selfishness. Toland noted, “If one . . . who would pass for a patriot has an interest separate from that of the public, he is no longer entitled to this denomination; but he is a real hypocrite that’s ready to sacrifice the common good to his private gain.” The idea that only “sober, industrious freemen” in the militia (as opposed to “ignorant, idle, and needy” redcoats) were sufficiently trustworthy to bear arms was the basis for a century-long attack on the standing army as an engine of anarchy and tyranny. That attack often returned to the Bachelor. Demobilized soldiers were mostly single males, many of whom traveled to London where they joined “loose fellows” engaged in antisocial activity and criminal behavior.10