ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next examine political pornography's role during Charles IPs reign in staking the Stuart regime's claim to be custodian of English common law and the guardian of the body politic's integrity. The claim was designed to put the Crown on surer legal and political footing by offering a model of political subjectivity capable of uniting the nation under Stuart rule. In order to make the crown's alignment with English common law creditable, though, loyalists had to paint republicanism's appropriation of common law as untenable. Against the common law's unified body politic, loyalist satirists pitted portraits of republicans who had no integrity and republican ideology as a political personality bedeviled by its own irreconcilable desires. A variety of mass culture polemics and the records of two important court cases indicate the extent to which pornographic satire was at the vanguard of this multifaceted effort to reclaim the body politic not merely waging a sidebar argument to larger, more legitimate, political concerns.
