Empress and Duchess of Newcastle’s friendship

Empress and Duchess of Newcastle’s friendship joins political authority to literary and philosophical companionship: the Empress of the Blazing-World invites the Duchess’s soul into her world as a prospective scribe, then keeps her as a trusted friend whose counsel shapes both private ambition and public government. Their intimacy is reciprocal rather than merely ceremonial. The Empress chooses the Duchess for her sense and reason, listens when she challenges a proposed work, and later seeks her impartial judgment; the Duchess, in turn, moves from longing to possess the Empress’s kind of sovereignty to making a world within her own mind.

The Duchess’s soul becomes the Empress’s companion

The friendship begins after the Empress has settled the Church and State of the Blazing-World and turns her attention to the world from which she came. She questions learned inhabitants about whether immaterial spirits exist, then summons spirits to learn about her birthplace, acquaintances, and the writers and students of that other world. Their account includes the attempted Cabbalas of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly, whose claims to learning and spiritual authority are treated with skepticism. The Empress’s inquiry ranges beyond historical information: she asks what spirits can know, how they move, and whether they can assist her in making a Cabbala.

When the Empress declares that she wants to compose a Jewish Cabbala, the spirits disappear. After they return and offer assistance, they explain that they can dictate but need a human hand or body to write. The Empress asks for a spiritual scribe. The spirits dismiss celebrated ancient and modern writers as too attached to their own opinions or too self-conceited to take on that role, and recommend the Duchess of Newcastle instead: not as the most learned or eloquent, but as a plain, rational writer. The Empress accepts the recommendation partly because the Duchess is of her own sex, and the spirits remark that Platonic lovers can be especially close and subtly influential.

The Duchess’s soul arrives with a qualification: her handwriting resembles characters more than well-formed letters, so a reader must learn to recognize it. The Empress answers that her secretaries can learn the hand and have the writing copied clearly. Before they begin, however, the Duchess questions whether the Empress should pursue the Cabbala at all. She recommends seeking a Jewish sage if the Empress truly wants instruction in that tradition, and cautions that spirits, like mortals, have limited knowledge. Created spirits cannot possess universal understanding or know the Creator’s mysteries unless granted divine knowledge. Her advice is not to treat supernatural access as a guarantee of certainty.

Counsel redirects ambition into world-making

The Duchess advises the Empress to leave the Cabbala aside. In her view, its mystical interpretation offers no necessary advantage to the Empress or her people; ordinary reading of Scripture is more instructive than interpretations fashioned according to individual fancy. The Empress tests alternatives aloud: a philosophical Cabbala, then a moral one, then a political one. The Duchess answers each in turn, arguing that sense and reason can teach what is knowable about nature, that morality needs no elaborate system beyond fearing God and loving one’s neighbour, and that government rests on reward and punishment. If the Empress insists on making a Cabbala, the Duchess recommends a poetical or romancical one, whose metaphors and allegories may be interpreted freely. The Empress accepts her advice, makes her a favourite, and keeps her in the Blazing-World for a time.

The Duchess is eventually allowed to return to her husband and kindred in her native world, on the condition that her soul visit the Empress from time to time. The visits do continue, and the narrative presents them as the basis of an unusually intimate friendship between two women. Their connection is figured through spiritual embraces and kisses, while the text calls them Platonic lovers. The bond therefore crosses both bodily and political boundaries: the Duchess’s soul travels away from her own world, but her conversations with the Empress remain a source of continuing attachment and influence.

On one visit, the Duchess confides that her melancholy comes from extreme ambition. She says that her ambition has no measure she or anyone else can know, but identifies her present wish as becoming a great princess. The Empress replies that a duchess already holds a title above that of a prince in the hierarchy she describes. The Duchess sets that dispute about rank aside and names her real desire: to become an empress of a world as the Empress is. The Empress wishes her success and proposes asking the Immaterial Spirits whether another world exists for her to rule.

The spirits instead persuade the Duchess to reconsider what sovereignty would give her. A monarch, they argue, has the general burdens of government, while subjects enjoy the world’s pleasures in particular places; even the Empress does not know every country and domain she governs. Glory depends on other people’s opinions and does not necessarily bring tranquility or bodily ease. By contrast, the Duchess can create and alter an inner world without the troubles and limitations of governing a material one. The Duchess accepts this counsel, gives up the ambition to rule an external world, and resolves to create one of her own. The Empress recognizes that she can possess both a world without her and one within herself, and the two friends part for a time to bring their imagined worlds to completion.

The Duchess’s effort to make a world is not effortless. She tries several philosophical models, but each creates a different obstacle: demons compel her in the world framed according to Thales; Pythagorean numbers exceed her arithmetic skill; Platonic ideas are difficult to set in motion; Epicurean atoms produce confusion; and Aristotle’s account conflicts, for her, with the problem of creating something from nothing using an immaterial mind. This sequence gives concrete form to the advice that had redirected her ambition. Her inward sovereignty is an act of imaginative making, but it still involves choices, limitations, and revision.

Friendship becomes political counsel

The Duchess’s visits also make her a counselor on the Empress’s government. After a dispute involving Fortune and Honesty, the Duchess weeps over her concern for her husband’s welfare. Honesty reproves her for desiring Fortune’s favour, and the Empress objects that Honesty lacks Prudence’s discretion. Although the exchange leaves Honesty briefly abashed, the figures soon reconcile. The Duchess then asks to return to her husband; the Empress agrees, while asking her to visit when she can and promising to visit in return. The spirits also promise to work toward peace between Fortune and the Duke.

Before the Duchess leaves, the Empress asks for her advice about the Blazing-World. Although it had been well ordered when she first became Empress, she explains, she had altered its government after receiving absolute power from the Emperor. The result is unrest: the Worm-men, Bear-men, Fly-men, Ape-men, Satyrs, Spider-men, and others are in continual contention, and the Empress fears their divisions may become open rebellion. She asks how to restore peace and stability, treating the Duchess’s judgment as more valuable than flattering agreement.

The Duchess recommends restoring the earlier arrangement: one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so that the world may act like a united family. She contrasts that projected unity with the political and religious disorder of her own native world, where competing rulers, laws, religions, opinions, interests, and judgments multiply disputes. She also advises dissolving the learned societies, arguing that disputes over who knows more or reasons better can harden into factions and ultimately threaten a state. The advice connects intellectual disagreement with political disorder, but it also proposes suppressing institutions that have supplied the Empress with information.

The Empress hesitates because changing her decrees and laws might seem an eternal disgrace. The Duchess reverses that calculation: returning from a worse arrangement to a better one would demonstrate wisdom in recognizing error and goodness in refusing to persist in it. The Empress embraces and kisses her friend’s soul and sheds immaterial tears as they part. She recognizes that the Duchess is not a flattering dependent but a true friend, and the account says their Platonic friendship repeatedly brings them together in joyful conversation.

Intimacy, authorship, and sovereignty

The relationship gives the Duchess a role in the book that exceeds the original offer of scribal labor. The Empress first selects her as a writer whose work is grounded in sense and reason, though the Duchess herself jokes that her handwriting is difficult to read. Their exchange about the Cabbala then makes the Duchess’s judgment more important than her penmanship: she prevents the Empress from mistaking spiritual testimony for absolute knowledge and redirects her from an ambitious but uncertain project toward imaginative composition. The fictional Empress’s choice of the Duchess’s soul thus makes the authorial figure a participant in, as well as a narrator of, the imagined world.

Their friendship also holds two forms of female sovereignty beside one another. The Empress rules a material world, with the public responsibilities and disputes that accompany absolute power; the Duchess, after abandoning the wish to equal that position, pursues creative authority through an inward world of her own. Later, she again speaks into the Empress’s public decisions, advising her to change the political order rather than preserve her own decrees for the sake of appearances. The bond is therefore neither simply private affection nor uncomplicated agreement: it is sustained by candid counsel, the Empress’s willingness to listen, and a shared imaginative life that crosses worlds.