The Empress’s restoration of the Blazing-World’s former government

The Empress’s restoration of the Blazing-World’s former government is a proposed return to political and religious uniformity, prompted by factional conflict and advised by the Duchess’s soul. It turns the intimacy of their Platonick friendship into a moment of state counsel: the Duchess urges the Empress to undo her alterations and recover the order that preceded them, even at the cost of learned societies and their claims to useful intelligence. The scene makes political peace depend not merely on wisdom but on limiting the institutions and differences that can disturb it.

Background: A Realm Made Unquiet

The advice comes as the Duchess’s soul is preparing to return to her own world. The Empress permits her departure on the understanding that they will visit one another when they can, and the Immaterial Spirits promise to try to make peace between Fortune and the Duke of Newcastle. Before the Duchess leaves, however, the Empress asks for a further conference. She trusts her friend’s impartial judgment and wants counsel about the government of the Blazing-World.

The Empress describes a change in the realm’s condition. It had been well ordered when she first became its ruler, but, after receiving absolute power from the Emperor, she altered the form of government. She links the change to women’s delight in variety, and now sees that the world is less quiet than before. The immediate danger is persistent contention among the Worm-men, Bear-men, Fly-men, Ape-men, Satyrs, Spider-men, and others, whose divisions, she fears, may grow into open rebellion and ruin the government. The reform is thus framed as a response to a specific political deterioration: a ruler who once inherited a settled order has exercised her authority to change it, and now seeks a way to prevent faction from becoming revolt.

The Duchess’s Program of Unity

The Duchess advises the Empress to restore the form of government that existed when she first began to rule: one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language. In her formulation, the whole world should be like a united family. Political unity is joined to religious and linguistic conformity; the recommendation does not distinguish a single sovereign from a single public faith or a shared legal and linguistic order.

To explain the stakes, the Duchess contrasts the imagined realm with the Duchess’s Native World. She depicts that world as fragmented by competing sovereigns and supposed governors, multiple religions and opinions, excess laws and bribery, political schemes and fears, covetousness, ambition, and disputes. The accumulating contrasts make division appear not as a harmless variety of institutions but as a condition in which government, justice, and knowledge are continually compromised. Against that catalogue, the Blazing-World’s former unity becomes an image of political happiness—an order the Empress risks losing if she persists in changing it.

The Duchess also makes a direct institutional recommendation: dissolve the learned societies. The Empress has complained of factions among the societies’ members and their perpetual disputes. The Duchess argues that their intelligence is not worth the disorder they generate. In her account, learning itself tends to bring controversy: members compete to appear wiser, insist that their own arguments are closer to truth, cling to opinions, or defend positions they privately recognize as poorly grounded because changing them might bring disgrace. Disagreement within schools can therefore become faction, and faction can, in time, threaten the state. The proposed restoration is not simply a constitutional adjustment; it entails removing organized intellectual bodies that the Duchess regards as a source of political instability.

Authority, Persuasion, and the Cost of Reversal

The Empress is willing to follow the counsel but worries that changing her own decrees, acts, and laws would be an eternal disgrace. The Duchess answers by reversing the meaning of that apparent failure. To return from a worse arrangement to a better one, she says, would bring eternal honor: it would show that the Empress is wise enough to recognize her errors and good enough not to persist in them. The counsel presents self-correction not as a sovereign’s loss of authority but as proof of sound judgment.

The exchange also recalls the political logic already voiced in the Blazing-World. Its statesmen had defended monarchy by comparing a many-governed commonwealth to a body with many heads, and had linked one Emperor to belief in one God. The Duchess’s proposed single sovereign and single religion echo this ideal of unity, while extending it explicitly to law and language. Yet the ideal has a restrictive edge. In the realm’s established religious arrangements, women are absent from the public congregations: the priests explain that women pray at home rather than attend their own assembly. Against that exclusion, the Empress has previously founded churches and a congregation of women, teaching them herself and winning their devotion. The political counsel’s insistence on restoring the former order therefore sits within a world where female sovereignty and public religious practice do not necessarily expand women’s access to institutions; the Empress’s own intervention had created a congregation that the prior arrangement lacked.

The treatment of learned disagreement sharpens the same tension. Earlier, when she threatened to break the Bear-men’s Telescopes, the Empress relented and allowed them to keep the instruments on condition that disputes remain inside their schools and do not disturb the state or government. The later counsel goes further. Rather than contain controversy within academic boundaries, the Duchess recommends dissolving the societies altogether. The difference marks the escalation of the political problem: a restriction that once seemed adequate no longer answers a realm the Empress fears is approaching rebellion.

Friendship and the Unreported Outcome

The advice is delivered in a relationship of affection as well as political trust. After the Duchess speaks, the Empress’s soul embraces and kisses her with an Immaterial Kiss and sheds Immaterial Tears at their approaching separation. She values the Duchess precisely because she is not a flattering parasite but a true friend. The narrator adds that their Platonick friendship continues through repeated meetings and the pleasure they take in one another’s company. Their bond supplies the condition for candid counsel: the Duchess can criticize the Empress’s decisions because the friendship is represented as affectionate without being merely deferential.

The Empress says she will willingly follow the Duchess’s advice, and the scene closes with their emotional parting. It does not go on to narrate the dissolution of the societies or establish that the single-law, single-language program is fully enacted. The restoration is therefore most precisely understood as a decisive counsel and an announced willingness to reverse course, not as a detailed record of completed administrative measures. Its significance rests in the prescription itself: domestic peace is to be recovered through unified sovereignty and institutions, while intellectual organizations judged to foster faction are to be removed. The episode’s ideal of quiet order consequently carries an unresolved cost—the reduction of public difference is offered as protection against political ruin.