ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the possible origins of the story of Henry Hills' adultery with the tailor's wife, and the way in which that act of sexual dishonesty has been treated, by his contemporaries and some later scholars, as an example in miniature of Hills' duplicitous nature, and as a means by which we can shorten the gap between what Hills seemed to be and what he really was. There is every possibility that the story of Hills' adultery, when read in the contexts from which it first emerged, is bound up with specific forms of royalist satire, in which "sexual depravity" functioned as shorthand for the "political hypocrisy and tergiversation" of Cromwell's republican cohorts. Conspicuous by their absence in Bibliotheca Parliamenti's mock title is the tailor, Hams, and his unnamed wife; moreover, no reference is made to Hills' published confession of 1651, The Prodigal Returned.
