Abraham Cowley's qualification that the poet may sometimes be a Stoic philosopher and yet speak as Sappho delineates the two contradictory traditions that emerge from Katherine Philips's poems of mixed obligations in amicitia. These two poles, Stoic and Sappho, come to define Philips for posterity. In the process of opposing, rather than combining, the political and the passionate, later readers reach the conclusion that titles this chapter: “women, like princes, find no real friends.” This assertion, in a mid-eighteenth-century manuscript miscellany, characterizes self-interest as the threat to women's and princes' friendships, for “All who approach them, their own Ends pursue, / Lovers, & Ministers are never true.” This poem denies friendship to women twice over: first overtly, then in the substitution of “lovers” for “friends.” This chapter explores the path from Philips's politically engaged women's amicitia to this outright dismissal of women's friendship.

Chapter 2 demonstrates the political value of Philips's amicitia: she uses lyrics of friendship's dissolution to shape political alliances and exemplify political virtues in the interregnum and afterwards. Philips offers a model of political obligation simultaneously clear-eyed in its acknowledgment of the inevitabilities of betrayal and hopeful in its assertion that the most resilient political system therefore focuses on reconciliation, rather than a fantasy of complete agreement.