Desiring to deepen his understanding of the present world by turning to the past, between and the Cambridge student William Bright filled a small book with notes and commonplaces gleaned from political, historical, and religious writings. In he recorded political and military observations drawn from an anonymous pamphlet by 'D. P. Gent', listing five 'chiefe Causes of the mutations of Monarchies': 'Wants of Issue', 'Ambition', 'Lust', 'Effeminacy', and 'Taxes'. The original pamphlet, entitled Severall politique and militarie observations (), had listed six causes of the mutations of monarchy, with the first being the 'crying sinnes of a Nation'. Bright, however, only copied into his notebook those causes which could be illustrated by historical and contemporary rather than by divine example. Beside each of the causes, he included a short list of such exempla, including Julius Caesar and Richard III for 'Ambition'; Sextus Tarquin and Appius Claudius for 'Lust'; and Sardanapalus of Assyria for 'Effeminacy'. Bright's notes illustrate well the entanglement of political, gendered, and historical thinking in seventeenth-century England. Statesmen in Stuart England widely held that the rise and fall of historic kingdoms, republics, and empires formed patterns from which the student of contemporary politics might learn, and this record testified that the 'lustful' or 'effeminate' ruler who committed sins of the bedroom or household might topple an empire just as surely as might unjust taxation or crises in hereditary succession. Indeed, both Bright's notes and the pamphlet from which they were drawn argued that the effeminacy or lust of a ruler could well be the very cause of unjust taxation or hereditary crisis. D. P., Severall politique and militarie observations: upon the civill, and militarie governments; the birth, increase, and decay of monarchies, the carriage of princes, magistrates, commanders, and favourites. London, , . The Thomason copy includes the annotation, 'May d'.
