ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Centlivre's fears about popery and Nonjurism and explores her efforts to convince her audiences that it was High Churchmen and women, rather than the Whigs, who posed the real threat to the established Church. It considers Whig responses to the issue of female politicization. Centlivre was an actress, playwright and author of a number of occasional poems and articles between circa 1700 and her death in December 1723. The Flying Post's article can be seen as illustrative of the ambiguous reaction of Whig writers towards female political engagement. In The Gotham Election, Gotham's mayor is a crypto-Catholic Jacobite and a bad father, who intends to send his daughter, Lucy, to a French convent so that he can appropriate her dowry to buy a peerage for his equally Jacobite son. Centlivre's heroines are usually politically aware young women, committed to the Revolution and Protestant Succession.
