First performed in 1682, The City Heiress is another overtly political drama which reveals Behn’s disdain and dislike for Whigs, while advocating Tory values. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, the political climate between the two developing parties remained hostile and antagonistic. The arts served as a method by which the politically motivated could exert influence, and satirise and vilify their opponents. Behn often sought to conflate religious dissent with political rebellion and threats to the monarchy and traditional order. She believed that puritan and non-conformist religious teaching was used as a means to promote political ideas that destabilised the current social structure. The author despised what she viewed as the Whigs’ attempts to undermine duty, loyalty and obedience to the Crown and state church.
The City Heiress centres on two characters: the Whiggish Sir Timothy, and the Tory cavalier Tom Wilding. The play opens with Sir Timothy announcing to his nephew, Wilding, that he is going to marry and have children in order to dispossess the young man of his inheritance. Wilding determines to try to impress his uncle by stating he is to marry the City Heiress of the title. However, he fails to secure his inheritance and begins to employ disguises and attempt to trick his uncle by more elaborate methods. Behn characterises the older man as a lecherous, unscrupulous and repellent hypocrite; a Whig that lacks dignity and integrity and whom the playwright links to the avarice of the proto-capitalists of city life. In contrast, she portrays her Tory hero as a young, attractive rake, whose desire for sexual freedom is to be viewed as enticing and admirable, and a riposte to the moralising disapproval of libertinism by the Whigs.