In the 1650s and early 1660s, Katherine Philips (1632–64) writes at the center of a network of royalists, many with prominent court ties both before and after the restoration. She exchanges poems and letters famed for their extravagant praise of friendship and their outspoken support of the English monarchy with interlocutors such as Sir Charles Cotterell, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Edward Dering, Francis Finch, and Henry Lawes, using coterie names drawn from the royalist-identified genres of romance and tragedy. One of those coterie names – Antenor, given to her husband James Philips – points toward the startling complexities of Philips's poetry and its place in the bitter conflicts of the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and Restoration.

Most scholars stress that James Philips's coterie name of Antenor alludes to the Trojan counselor who advocates peace with the Greeks. Naming James Philips Antenor casts him as an intermediary between two political sides – aptly, given that he, in contrast to Katherine Philips's royalist coterie, supports Parliament and Cromwell, serving as a Member of Parliament from 1653–62. The name Antenor therefore seems to suggest reconciliation between violent extremes. Antenor reappears in the Renaissance in Dante's Inferno, however: the second region of the ninth and lowest circle of hell, reserved for betrayers, is named Antenora. In it live those who have betrayed their political party or their homeland. The circle of Antenora thus raises the questions that animate this chapter: how could James and Katherine Philips live together with such different views and different intimates?