Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603-1689 2019016971

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions
Notes on Contributors
Part 1 Democracy and the People: Citizenship, Representation and the Commonwealth
Chapter 1 Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton
Levellers and Republicans
The Boundaries of Citizenship
Imagining Citizens
Citizenship and Slavery
Gender and Citizenship
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Chapter 2 Democracy, Toleration, and the Interests of the People
i
ii
iii
Select Bibliography
Chapter 3 ‘All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people’: Democracy in the English Revolution
i1
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
Select Bibliography
Chapter 4 The Place of Democracy in Late Stuart England
i*
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
vii
Select Bibliography
Part 2 Democracy and the World-Turned-Upside-Down: Religion, Emotions and Polemical Fire
Chapter 5 ‘A most dangerous rudeness’: Anti-populism and the Literary Justification of Absolutism in the Fiction of John Barcl
i
ii
iii
iv
v
Select Bibliography
Chapter 6 The Spectre Haunting Early Seventeenth-Century England (ca. 1603–1649): Democracy at Its Worst
Introduction*
Jacobean Anti-democracy (1603–1625)
Caroline Anti-democracy: Act i (1625–1642)
Caroline Anti-democracy: Act ii (1643–1649)
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Chapter 7 Anti-puritanism as Political Discourse; the Laudian Critique of Puritan ‘Popularity’
ii
iii
iv
v
Select Bibliography
Chapter 8 Presbyterians, Republicans, and Democracy in Church and State, ca. 1570–1660
Introduction
Presbyterians as Democrats
Independents as Democrats
Democracy in England Post-1649
Democratic Republicans
Nedham’s Anti-Presbyterianism
Harrington, the Presbyterians and the History of Ordination
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Chapter 9 Poetry, the Passions, and Anti-democracy in Later Stuart England
1660
1681–2
Select Bibliography
Part 3 Democracy and the Other: Slaves, Natives and Women
Chapter 10 Democracy and Anti-democracy: the Roger Williams and John Cotton Debate Revisited
Introduction*
Roger Williams
Natural Law and Calvinism
John Cotton
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Chapter 11 ‘The vulgar only scap’d who stood without’: Milton and the Politics of Exclusion
i
ii
iii
Select Bibliography
Chapter 12 A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England
Select Bibliography
Chapter 13 The Parliament of Women and the Restoration Crisis
Introduction
The Parliament-of-Women Genre
The Best Form of Government
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Democracy and Anti-​democracy in Early Modern England 1603–​1689

History of European Political and Constitutional Thought Series Editors Erica Benner (Yale University) Cesare Cuttica (Université Paris 8) László Kontler (Central European University) Mark Somos (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law)

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​hepct

Democracy and Anti-​democracy in Early Modern England 1603–​1689 Edited by

Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2019016971​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 2589-​5 966 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 8598-​6 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 0662-​9 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations and Conventions x Notes on Contributors xi



Introduction. ‘Gone Missing’: Democracy and Anti-​democracy in Seventeenth-​Century England 1 Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen

part 1 Democracy and the People: Citizenship, Representation and the Commonwealth 1

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton 21 Rachel Foxley

2

Democracy, Toleration, and the Interests of the People 45 Alan Cromartie

3

‘All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people’: Democracy in the English Revolution 66 Markku Peltonen

4

The Place of Democracy in Late Stuart England 88 Hannah Dawson

part 2 Democracy and the World-​Turned-​Upside-​Down: Religion, Emotions and Polemical Fire 5

‘A most dangerous rudeness’: Anti-​populism and the Literary Justification of Absolutism in the Fiction of John Barclay (1582–​1621) 113 Matthew Growhoski

vi Contents 6

The Spectre Haunting Early Seventeenth-​Century England (ca. 1603–​1649): Democracy at Its Worst 132 Cesare Cuttica

7

Anti-​puritanism as Political Discourse; the Laudian Critique of Puritan ‘Popularity’ 152 Peter Lake

8

Presbyterians, Republicans, and Democracy in Church and State, ca. 1570–​1660 174 Rachel Hammersley

9

Poetry, the Passions, and Anti-​democracy in Later Stuart England 194 John West

part 3 Democracy and the Other: Slaves, Natives and Women 10

Democracy and Anti-​democracy: the Roger Williams and John Cotton Debate Revisited 217 Camilla Boisen

11

‘The vulgar only scap’d who stood without’: Milton and the Politics of Exclusion 239 Martin Dzelzainis

12

A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England 260 Edward Vallance

13

The Parliament of Women and the Restoration Crisis 279 Gaby Mahlberg



Index 297

Preface Within the last sixty years democracy has become the political core of our ­civilisation. Yet, a now familiar refrain is that democracy is in crisis;1 that despite being a regime that was widely accepted across the world (especially, in the Western part of it), democracy is instead currently being contested as a weak and inadequate form of government.2 Although democratic values are widely shared today, their global attainment is farther away and even in Europe they meet increasing threats. The democratic deficit has become a common parlance. Even within the EU there is increasing scepticism about the people’s resources to scrutinise their governments and supranational organisations. Similarly at the forefront of media talk are the crisis facing democratic leadership in light of the recent electoral success of far-​right movements across Europe; the consequences of the Brexit referendum; the policies of Donald Trump; and the emergence of various illiberal solutions proposed to the perceived difficulties of democratic governance in countries such as ­Turkey, ­Russia, Poland and Hungary.3 This recent rise of populism and the challenges it poses to our democratic institutions make our project especially timely. Today, more urgently than ever before, we need to understand what the long history of democracy really is. It is here that the history of political thought has a lot to offer. It can show where certain ideas of democracy came from, 1 As for a standard definition, ‘democracy’ is generally characterised as the ‘government by the people; esp. a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity […] are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly’ (oed, ‘democracy’, www.oed.com, accessed on 1 June 2018). Modern developments include the notion of equal rights for all citizens regardless of distinctions of class, race, gender, wealth and so forth as well as principles of toleration and freedom of speech. It remains that a cornerstone of democratic procedures now is the equal right to vote in elections through which the people of a nation-​state are supposed to exert a form of control over their governors. The notion and practice of ‘universal suffrage’ is thus a given of normal democratic intercourse. 2 See e.g. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, ‘The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect’, Journal of Democracy, 27 (2016), pp. 5–​17, esp. p. 16. 3 Be it sufficient to check the websites of some of the main European (e.g. The Guardian, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, LaStampa, El Pais) or North American newspapers (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) for examples of this phenomenon. For one journalistic instance specifically addressing the alleged failures of liberal democracy’s institutions, notably vis-​à-​vis the consolidation of authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, see Simon Jenkins, ‘Blame Liberal Democracy’s Flaws for Erdoğan’s Win, Not the Voters’, https://​www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2018/​jun/​25/​blame-​liberal-​democracy-​flaws-​ erdogan-​win-​turkish, accessed on 26 June 2018.

viii Preface highlight their contingencies and the context in which they emerged. It can illustrate how embracing a certain idea of democracy was itself a choice, that there were other choices and ideas of democracy available –​other paths, as it were, which were not taken. By examining crucial, though hitherto neglected, aspects of democracy, and providing a new historical account of its development, the volume will offer new perspectives on the history and present-​day civil philosophy as well as discussions of political participation and democracy in the global world.

…

Whether concerned with the ‘representative versus direct democracy’ question, or with the coexistence of economic, gender, ethnic disparities (caused by capitalism’s advanced phase) and the legal requirements of equal citizenship, or with the exportability of democratic procedures and values to areas of the planet that might be less receptive to them, multidisciplinary research on democracy is growing steadily.4 Democracy is thus the object of myriad theoretical and political reflections as well as public discussion with regard to its nature, identity and fortune. We would make a mistake though if we thought that this was not also the case long ago. We would not do better either by maintaining that before the twenty-​first century this process only occurred in classical Athens. In fact, democracy was a highly disputed notion in seventeenth-​century England. By investigating how this came to be so during that historically eventful and intellectually rich century, we might come closer to a better, less blinkered, and perhaps inspiring understanding of democracy and of how it worked/​s or of why it did not/​does not work (as it should). This means to avoid the history of democracy Plato-​to-​NATO style, which turns out to be profoundly disconnected from the realities of socio-​economic, cultural and political dynamics going on at a specific point in time in a given context. This tunnel-​vision type of reading neglects the importance of context in the study of ideas as well as the latter’s practical impact on society, politics and intellectual life. Our book intends to rectify this tendency. 4 See e.g. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Acknowledgements This volume originated as a workshop that took place on 18–​19 July 2017 at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt (Germany). This event was part of a COFUND-​Fellowship project that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-​Curie grant agreement No 665958. It also received financial aid from the ‘Staff Unit ProUni –​Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Erfurt’ and from the University of Helsinki. We should like to thank all institutions for their financial support, especially Margrit Elsner of the University of Erfurt for her help with various aspects of the internal grant application. The mwk proved to be a very congenial place where to organise the workshop and tried our ideas out. A huge ‘thank you’ to the Kolleg for invaluable academic and logistic support. Bettina Hollstein showed enthusiasm for our project since day one and was immensely helpful with all sorts of technical issues related to it; Knud Haakonssen provided (as usual) extremely generous advice during the organisation of the workshop and took an active role in the discussion that went on on those two very productive days. Elisabeth Begemann, Claudia D.  Bergmann, Maximilian Gutberlet and Doreen Hochberg helped with our event’s preparation, including advertisements, posters and more. Last but not least, we should express our extreme gratitude to Diana Blanke and Oliver Schmerbauch without whose assistance, patience, efficiency and sense of humour we would have struggled to put together such a good event. Attendants and participants to the workshop asked stimulating questions and contributed to enliven the two days’ exchanges. At Brill, Arjan van Dijk and Ivo Romein have been ideal editors. Fellowships from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki and the Huntington Library at San Marino, California enabled us to work on the volume. Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen February 2019, Helsinki

Abbreviations and Conventions odnb oed

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​. Oxford English Dictionary, http://​www.oed.com/​.

Notes on Contributors Camilla Boisen is Lecturer of Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. Her main area of research is the intellectual history of empire and political theory in relation to the development of ideas of rights and trusteeship and their influence on contemporary problems such as postcolonial restitution. She is interested in how ideas have been formed and framed historically and how those concepts shape what our present structures of power and justification look like. She has published articles in, among others, History of European Ideas, Journal of International ­Political Theory and Grotiana and is co-​editor of Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought: perspectives on Finding a Fair Share (Routledge, 2016). Alan Cromartie is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. He is the author of Sir Matthew Hale: Law, Religion, and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1995)  and of The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and the editor of Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and Student, of the Common Laws of England (Oxford University Press, 2005). His present large-​scale project is a monograph on Hobbes. Cesare Cuttica is Lecturer in British History at the Université Paris 8-​Vincennes. He is the author of Sir Robert Filmer (1588–​1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-​Century Political Thought (Manchester University Press, 2012; Paperback 2015). He also edited with Glenn Burgess, Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe (London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2012), and with Gaby Mahlberg, Patriarchal Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). He has recently completed a monograph dealing with anti-​democratic ideas in early modern England ca. 1570–​1642 as well as a few pieces on the thought and methodology of various contemporary British intellectual historians (e.g. John W. Burrow and Stefan Collini). Hannah Dawson is Senior Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at King’s College London. She is the author of two books, Locke, Language and Early-​Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Hobbes: Great Thinkers on Modern Life (Pegasus, 2015), as well as numerous articles. She is currently editing Locke’s

xii 

Notes on Contributors

Disputations on the Law of Nature for the Clarendon Edition, and The Feminists for Penguin Classics. Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought at the University of Leicester. He is currently editing Milton’s Histories for The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford University Press); Andrew Marvell’s verse and prose for the Oxford 21st-​Century Authors series; and (with Edward Holberton) The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell. He is also General Editor, with Paul Seaward, of the Oxford edition of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Rachel Foxley is the author of The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2013). Her current work focuses on negotiations with the idea of democracy in English republican texts. She is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Reading. Matthew Growhoski is a postdoctoral Research Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Growhoski’s major interests are political satire and political thinking during the late-​sixteenth and early-​seventeenth centuries. He is currently writing an intellectual biography of John Barclay. Rachel Hammersley is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at Newcastle University, UK. Her areas of expertise include the exchange of ideas between Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the history of concepts such as republicanism, revolution and democracy. She is the author of French Revolutionaries and English Republicans:  The Cordeliers Club, 1790–​1794 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005) and of The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France:  Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). She has also recently edited a collection of essays entitled Revolutionary Moments:  Reading Revolutionary Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Rachel is in the last stages of writing an intellectual biography of the seventeenth-​century English political thinker James Harrington for Oxford University Press. For more detail visit www.rachelhammersley.com Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of the History of Christianity and Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt

Notes on Contributors

xiii

University. He works on post-​Reformation English History (mostly in the ­Elizabethan and early Stuart periods). He has authored eight books, including How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage. Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) and Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth i (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has edited various collections of essays. He is currently working on a book on Catholic critiques of the Elizabethan regime as a conspiracy of evil counsel and a tyranny, and on another about Samuel Clarke’s collections of godly lives. Gaby Mahlberg is a journalist and independent scholar based in Berlin. She is the author of ­Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009). She also co-​­edited with Dirk Wiemann European Contexts for English Republicanism (­Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)  and Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism ­(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), and with Cesare Cuttica Patriarchal M ­ oments: Reading Patriarchal Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). She is currently completing her second monograph on the English republican exiles in Europe. Markku Peltonen is Academy Professor and Professor of History at the University of Helsinki. His publications include Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–​1640 (1995), The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (2003) and Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-​revolutionary E­ ngland (2013) all published by Cambridge University Press. He has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996) for Cambridge University Press. He is completing a book on the political thought of the English Republic. Edward Vallance is Professor of Early Modern British Political Culture at the University of ­Roehampton, London. He is the author of A Radical History of Britain (­Little, Brown, 2009), The Glorious Revolution (Pegasus, 2006)  and Revolutionary ­England and the National Covenant (Boydell, 2005). With Harald Braun, he has edited two volumes on conscience and casuistry in early modern Europe: Contexts of Conscience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and The Renaissance Conscience (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2011). Most recently he has edited the collection, Remembering Early Modern Revolutions: England, North America, France and Haiti (Routledge, 2018). His articles have featured in Albion, English Historical Review, Historical Journal, Historical Research, History Workshop Journal, The

newgenprepdf

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Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, Renaissance Studies, and The Seventeenth Century. His most recent monograph is Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658–1727, published by Manchester University Press in 2019. John West is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His publications include Dryden and Enthusiasm:  Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Literature of the Stuart Successions: An Anthology (Manchester University Press, 2017). His research focuses on early modern political and religious literature and he is currently working on a project about succession writing from regicide to restoration.

introduction

‘Gone Missing’: Democracy and Anti-​democracy in Seventeenth-​Century England Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen The present collection of essays examines the variegated notions of democracy in seventeenth-​century England. Each essay has its own topic and thus reflects an individual author’s point of view, but taken together the collection has four main historiographical aims. First, we aim to show that, despite earlier historians’ lack of interest, democracy was widely explored and discussed in early modern England. Second, most early modern authors who discussed democracy emphasised its negative character. In other words, anti-​democratic currents and themes, which we still encounter today, have a long history. Third, despite the dominance of anti-​democratic themes, the seventeenth century is the first period in English history where we find positive views of democracy. Finally, and most importantly, whether seventeenth-​century writers criticised or advocated democracy, these discussions were important for the subsequent development of the concept ‘democracy’. Therefore, the overall goal is to demonstrate that the early modern period is far more relevant to the history of democracy than has hitherto been acknowledged. In this Introduction we shall place the essays of our collection in a wider historiographical context.

Democracy and Historiography

It has been customary to write the history of democracy first as a brief efflorescence of direct participatory democracy in classical Athens and elsewhere in ancient Greece, and then after a long break as the gradual rise of modern representative democracy, starting from ‘the democratic revolutions’ of the late eighteenth century. Whereas in ancient Greece democracy meant that the free male citizens governed themselves, in today’s world it means that political decisions and the government draw their legitimacy from the citizens, a move guranteed by universal suffrage. In this narrative, the early modern period has been seen, apart from a few isolated instances, negligible for the history of democracy. Of course, historians have paid attention to some forms of democratic thinking and practices in such places as Renaissance Italian

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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city-​states,1 early modern Switzerland,2 early-​seventeenth-​century New England colonies,3 revolutionary England4 and the late-​seventeenth-​century Dutch Republic.5 Nevertheless, they have seen these examples as isolated instances and the early modern period has mostly been considered devoid of any serious discussion of the nature of popular government. The origins of this historical trajectory are in large part to be located in R. R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolutions (1959–​64). According to Palmer, the American and French Revolutions played a key role in the emergence of modern democracy. Before the revolutionary period, he argued, the word ‘democracy’, although part of ‘political scientists’’ vocabulary, had hardly entered common parlance,6 but by the end of the eighteenth century there occurred a dramatic change, and ‘it was the last decade of the century which brought the word out from the study of politics and into actual politics’. The American and French Revolutions were democratic revolutions, which unleashed the world of liberal democracy. Palmer not only linked these eighteenth-​century revolutions with the revolutions of his own time in Asia, Africa and Latin America but also consistently associated democracy with modernity.7 Such an account has had a major impact on the subsequent interpretations of the history of democracy in general and of early modern democracy in particular. In other words, mainstream understandings of (the ideas of) democracy in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been profoundly shaped by later definitions and models. On the one hand, the period has always been seen as dominated by absolutism and the birth of the modern centralised state, which allowed no room for democratic principles to develop. Hence, the birth of modern liberal democracy was a dramatic and rapid change during the great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. 1 See e.g. John P.  McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2 See e.g. Randolph C. Head, Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, 1470–​1620 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3 See e.g. Jason S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4 See e.g. John Rees, The Leveller Revolution. Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–​1650 (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 5 See e.g. Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter De la Court (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), esp. pp. 26–​79. 6 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–​1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–​64; 2 vols), vol. i, pp. 13–​14. 7 Ibid, p. 18; R. R. Palmer, ‘Notes on the Use of the Word “Democracy” ’, Political Science Quarterly, 68:1 (1953), pp. 203–​26.

introduction

3

On the other hand, although there were no democratic polities, apart from some Swiss cantons, older histories have sometimes endeavoured to find the roots and anticipations of ‘modern democratic ideas’ from this era  –​especially in the English Revolution of the mid-​seventeenth century.8 More recent scholarship has only confirmed such traditional accounts. New histories of democracy often allude to a few examples of democratic doctrines from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but quickly conclude (again) that these are merely isolated instances and that the real beginning of modern democracy is to be located in ‘the democratic revolutions’ of the late eighteenth century.9 Histories of representative government also emphasise the end of the eighteenth century as an important turning point and note that the term ‘representative democracy’ started to be more widely used only in the mid-​ nineteenth century.10 This master narrative is also paradoxically confirmed by other recent works on the history of democracy, which explicitly set out to undermine old paradigms. There are two broad approaches normally taken by historians. One consists in examining authors who focused on ancient democracy mainly as a historical phenomenon. Another is to explore writers who can be seen as anticipating some aspects of modern democratic theory.11 The first approach is often adopted by classical historians, who investigate the attitudes about the direct or participatory democracy of ancient Athens in later discussions of democracy.12 However, their conclusions have only corroborated the old 8 9

10

11 12

See e.g. Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954). See e.g. John Dunn (ed.), Democracy:  The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1992); Kari Palonen, Tuija Pulkkinen and José María Rosales (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Josiah Ober, Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See e.g. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy:  Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Manuela Albertone, ‘Democracy and Representation’, in Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), A Companion to Intellectual History (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016), pp. 331–​43. Sophie Smith, ‘Democracy and the Body Politic from Aristotle to Hobbes’, Political Theory, 46:2 (2018), pp. 167–​96, esp. p. 168. See e.g. Pierre Vidal-​Naquet, La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1994); Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick (eds), Demokratia:  A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1996); Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy

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conventional view that classical direct democracy and modern indirect democracy are incompatible and that the change from the former to the latter took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. The second approach –​to assess possible anticipations of modern democracy in the early modern period –​dominated earlier scholarship, but it is still the prevalent tendency. This is true even when historians have specifically explored democratic thought in the early modern period; they have interpreted their findings merely as antecedents of modern democracy.13 It is usual to search for early examples of the values and ideals which are integral parts of today’s understanding of liberal democracy. Such historians are mainly interested in the history of democratisation –​which often concerns itself with establishing how certain thinkers anticipated the values of modern liberal democracy, and much less with what early modern authors said about democracy. A major recent example of this approach is James T.  Kloppenberg’s Toward Democracy (2016), which when it comes to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only focuses on Bodin and Montaigne, the Levellers and the New England Puritans. Kloppenberg insists that he is tracing ‘the diverse meanings’ of democracy, that ‘the discourse’ around it ‘is complex and multilayered’ and that ‘the history of democracy has never been unilinear’.14 Yet, he postulates a theory of democracy, whose gradual development in early modern Europe and North America he then traces. He not only fully embraces the idea of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century but also argues that democratic discourse has in fact a very monolithic character, consisting of three ‘contested principles’ –​popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality –​whose rise he unearths. So, rather than studying how democracy was understood and defined in early modern

13

14

and its Importance for Modern Democracy (Copenhagen:  The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2005); Peter Liddell, ‘Democracy Ancient and Modern’, in Ryan K.  Balot (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought (Chichester:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2009), pp. 133–​48, pp. 143–​7; Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy. Two Concepts of Liberty? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; transl.). See e.g. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–​1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–​1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origin of Modern Democracy (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010); Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–​1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). James T.  Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy:  The Struggle for Self-​Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 3, 8, 14, 18.

introduction

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Europe, Kloppenberg first defines democracy and then teleologically uncovers its origins. The same approach informs the even less common studies of anti-​ democratic theories. For instance, in one such rare sample, Joseph V. Femia pointed out (2001) that whilst ‘individual critics of democracy have received much scholarly attention, efforts to examine anti-​democratic thought as such have been few and far between’.15 Hence his book was an attempt to fill this gap. Yet Femia set off its anti-​democratic trajectory –​again, tellingly –​with the French Revolution in that ‘[a]‌nti-​democratic arguments’ emerged in full shape ‘only when democracy became a real possibility’.16 Displaying an uncompromising nominalist approach to the terminology of the past and its uses (since nobody called themselves a democrat, such a thing  –​and the talking about it –​did not exist), Femia dismissed the possibility (and the reality, as we do see in this book) of an enduring and theoretically constructed discourse aimed at discrediting popular rule.17 Similarly, some scholars have remarked that democracy ‘remained for the most part a learned term down to the end of the eighteenth century’.18 As for historiography’s often cherry-​picked chronological focus on some democratically fertile periods, Erich Kofmel’s Anti-​democratic Thought (2008) jumps from Plato’s ‘anti-​Democratism’ to John Stuart Mill’s ‘elitism’.19 Equally, Paul Cartledge’s recent contribution to the history of democracy (2016) offers a mere five pages in relation to democracy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and another few to democracy in seventeenth-​century England.20 This chronological “safe hopping” also applies to Wilfried Nippel’s Ancient and Modern Democracy (2016), which having analysed Greek and Roman ideas, moves quickly on to the political principles set forth by the American founding fathers and to the French Revolution.21 These attitudes though are nothing new. In surveying the history of democracy before the American Revolution, John Dunn’s Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (1992) offered three essays on Greece, one on the 15

Joseph V. Femia, Against the Masses. Varieties of Anti-​Democratic Thought since the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. vii. 16 Ibid., p. vii. 17 Ibid., pp. 1–​2. It is not surprising that Femia’s ‘interests are’ self-​confessedly ‘much more theoretical than historical’ (ibid., p. 6). 18 James Hankins, ‘Europe’s First Democrat? Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius’, in Ann Blair and Anja-​Silvia Goeing (eds), For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), pp. 692–​710, p. 699. 19 Erich Kofmel (ed.), Anti-​Democratic Thought (Exeter:  Imprint Academic, 2008), esp. pp. 1–​16, e.g. p. 2. 20 Cartledge, Democracy. 21 Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy.

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Italian city-​republics, one on the Levellers, but none on controversies about democracy in medieval or early modern political parlance.22 When it comes to early modern England and English political thought then, democracy –​with the exception of the Levellers (about whom the recurrent question is: ‘were they true democrats or were they not?’)23 –​has gone missing. Such accounts are problematic. They do not study democracy and the debates about it in the early modern period in their own right and in their own context, but reduce the epoch to a mere forerunner of the later proper discussions of democracy. Nor do they question the conventional narrative, according to which, the emergence of the idea of modern representative democracy took place suddenly in the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, things have started to change, and there are some recent studies which suggest that, although democracy was for the most part unthinkable in the early modern period, there was much more thinking about democracy going on than historians have hitherto realised.24 The essay on ‘Demokratie’ in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–​97) was an early attempt to chart the historical development of the meanings and usages of the concept ‘democracy’. Although it embraced Palmer’s account of the democratic revolutions, it nonetheless offered a brief assessment of the early modern period. However, it is limited to the question of whether democracy was taken to be the good or bad form of popular rule.25 In La contre-​démocratie (2006) Pierre Rosanvallon highlights the importance of vigilance and accountability in the history (including the early modern period) of democracy.26 Closer to us in time, Richard Tuck’s The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (2016) analyses some early modern notions of democracy in their own historical context, but his primary focus is on the invention of modern plebiscite, which he traces back to the early modern period.27 22 Dunn, Democracy: The Unfinished Journey. See also John Dunn, Setting the People Free: the Story of Democracy (London: Atlantic Books, 2005). 23 For serious engagement with this question see e.g. David Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in James H.  Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–​1700 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 412–​42. 24 Smith, ‘Democracy’; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Italian City-​ Republics’, in Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, pp. 57–​69. 25 Christian Meier, Hans Leo Reimann and Werner Conze, ‘Demokratie’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:  historisches Lexikon zur politischen-​sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart:  Klett-​Cotta Verlag, 1972–​1997; 8 vols), vol. i, pp. 821–​99, pp. 839–​45. 26 Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie. La politique à l'âge de la défiance (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 27 Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign. The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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Why Seventeenth-​Century England?

Rather than endeavouring to study the whole early modern period in Europe, this collection of essays focuses on seventeenth-​century England. We believe that even this subject has not been thoroughly dealt with; at least not in the systematic and chronologically broad manner we pursue here. One reason why democracy and anti-​democracy in seventeenth-​century England is a theme well worth exploring is that in traditional scholarship the roots of modern democracy were often located in the political upheavals of that time. Broadly speaking, there are four distinctive ways in which scholars have done this. The first, most traditional and perhaps most general way has been to see the English revolutionary period as an important step in the development of modern democracy. Perez Zagorin wrote that ‘it was in the English Revolution that modern democratic ideas began their great career’.28 Such sweeping statements were often made in earlier scholarship,29 but they can sometimes be found in more recent works as well. For instance, a few years ago one scholar talked in relation to the English Revolution about ‘the first modern enunciation of democratic principles by a legislative body’.30 The second, and perhaps the most common, way of referring to democracy during the revolutionary decades has been to focus on the Levellers and especially on their attempts to widen the franchise. In their numerous proposals for a new political system in England, they suggested that every freeborn man aged 21 or more should have the right to cast his vote in parliamentary elections. Historians might disagree about who precisely were included in the Levellers’ widened franchise, but traditionally they concurred that this was a democratic turn. When Zagorin talked about the beginning of modern democratic ideals, he clearly had the Levellers in mind. ‘[T]‌he first Leveller Agreement of the People’, he proclaimed, ‘exhibited a democratic vision’.31 Several other historians 28 Zagorin, A History, p. v. 29 John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p.  6. These perspectives entailed an unhistorical and anachronistic take on democracy whereby a certain number of thinkers (and their ideas) were defined as tout court democratic, when in fact they simply upheld notions of popular power in the pre-​societal arrangement theorised to explain the origins of government or principles of mixed government where one component of it represented the democratic element (generally parliamentary assemblies): see e.g. George Peabody Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959; i edn 1898), pp. v and 9–​50. 30 Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief. The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), p. 140. 31 Zagorin, A History, p. 13.

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have drawn very similar conclusions either by using such descriptions as ‘total democracy’ and ‘unmistakeably democratic’ in relation to the Levellers or by simply employing the label ‘Leveller democracy’.32 A third approach acknowledges the (limited) presence of some democratic ideals in early modern political and philosophical discourse, but nonetheless eschews any comprehensive engagement with the nature of the debates and controversies in which these were formulated. In some cases, this way of proceeding neglects all enquiry into the nature of ‘the people’ and their social and political identity. Above all, it fails to recover reactions articulated in different outlets (including theological polemics and ecclesiastical disputes) to theories and practices that were deemed democratic.33 In fact, to date, the only study dedicated to the many-​headed multitude as expression of mounting popular politics pre-​1642 is Christopher Hill’s more than fifty years old essay (1965).34 For all his seminal work on expressions/​explosions of popular politics,35 Hill emphasised the class-​conflict dimension:  notably, he described the fear the poor raised amongst the rich (nobles but also merchants). Hill exclusively heeded the fact that, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the two main traits attributed to the mass of the population (identified with the common people as well as with vagabonds, landless poor and unruly folks) were a relentless desire for novelty and the frequency with which its members rioted.36 Hill’s account did not attend to the variegated ideological gamut of

32

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34 35 36

Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The Great Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–​8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 236, 220; David Underdown, Pride’s Purge. Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 81, 80, 44; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Libery and Property. A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment (London:  Verso, 2012), p.  239; Elliot Vernon, ‘ “A firme and present peace; upon grounds of common right and freedome”:  The Debate on the Agreements of the People and the Crisis of the Constitution, 1647–​59’, in Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds), The Agreement of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 195–​217, p. 211. See e.g. Graham Maddox and Tod Moore, ‘Mainline Calvinists, Pamphlets and Democracy in Revolutionary Britain 1641–​1646’, in Jim Jose and Rob Imre (eds), Not So Strange Bedfellows: The Nexus of Religion and Politics in the 21st Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 26–​44. Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-​Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in Charles H.  Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-​Reformation. Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 296–​324. See e.g. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972). Hill, ‘The Many-​Headed Monster’, p. 298.

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those attacking the political, ecclesiastical and intellectual role of the lower orders.37 The fourth and most recent way of exploring the themes related to democracy has been to avoid the term ‘democracy’ altogether and speak instead of the ‘origins of democratic culture’ or ‘democratisation’. Underlying this move has been the observation that the terms ‘democracy’ or ‘popular government’ were mostly absent during the revolutionary decades. This has become almost like a trend ever since Jürgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (which originally came out in 1962)  was belatedly translated into English in 1989.38 What historians mean by the origins of ‘democratic culture’ or ‘democratisation’ are both the development of public opinion and some sort of widening of political participation. David Zaret concentrated on what he called the origins of ‘democratic culture’; Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker specifically referred to Habermas, arguing that ‘democratization’ was ‘not simply the history of the enlargement of the franchise and the process of ballot and election’, but that it was ‘the dispersal of authority and agency, the diffusion of power into the public imagination, even a public capacity to conceive itself as a political actor’. For them, all this was a consequence of the revolutions in seventeenth-​century England.39 Similarly, Jason Peacey has emphasised, alongside elections, more informal forms of popular participation. These include petitioning and lobbying, but also what Peacey describes as ‘continuous public oversight of the political elite and … [even] open government’. He has paid particular attention to ‘extensive reporting of parliamentary debates, investigative journalism and public debate’. Such forms of political participation, Peacey has contended, led to changes in communicative media and the invention of public opinion, and thus to ‘democratization or vulgarization of once privileged [political] ­information’.40 The present collection, whilst discussing much of this earlier scholarship, has a markedly different focus. We are interested in seventeenth-​century 37

For a recent exception (although limited in scope) to this historiographical lack of engagement with democracy in early modern England see Phil Withington, ‘An “Aristotelian Moment”: Democracy in Early Modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (eds), Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland. Essays in Honour of John Walter (Woodbridge: Boydel and Brewer, 2017), pp. 203–​22, esp. p. 205. 38 It had though been translated into numerous European languages before that. 39 Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture; Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, ‘Introduction:  Refiguring Revolutions’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N.  Zwicker (eds), Refiguring Revolutions. Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 1–​21, p. 19. 40 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also Alan Cromartie, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty, Popular Sovereignty, and Henry Parker’s Adjudicative Standpoint’, in Richard Bourke and Quentin

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definitions and understandings, meanings and images of democracy and popular rule. Rather than studying whether, or to what extent, some seventeenth-​ century authors or pamphleteers might be said to have anticipated today’s notion(s) of democracy, we take careful notice of their own notion(s), imagery and vocabulary of democracy and popular power. We ask how the concepts of democracy and anti-​democracy originated, developed and changed throughout the century in a panoply of different sources, discursive moments and genres. Equally pivotal is to recognise that in approaching democracy, and the opinions as well as assumptions surrounding this government in the early modern era, we are inevitably confronted by the key issue of defining ‘democracy’ according to seventeenth-​century authors and their standards, not ours. Likewise, it is crucial to any understanding of early modern democracy to reckon with the major source of political and ethical inspiration ancient Greece was for early modern intellectuals. Thus, when it comes to defining democracy according to its main ancient features, we should remember that they were not so much popular representation, human rights, toleration and universal suffrage as we might assume now, but rather rule by popular assembly, election by lot, ostracism, no property qualification for magistrates, payment for public service and reduced territorial extension. Hence the need to establish how these motifs influenced ideas of as well as assumptions about democracy in Stuart England.41 Another germane matter concerns the definition of ‘the people’. Who were they? Who did seventeenth-​century writers have in mind when referring to this –​often unstable –​entity called ‘the people’? Did they distinguish between ‘the common people’ and the always disparagingly portrayed ‘rabble’-​‘­populace’-​ ‘many-​headed multitude’? What about the middling sort? For all its uncertainty in meaning (chiefly due to the polemical intent of many writings), we think that the people can be looked at in, at least, four ways: 1) as a corporate body or as a conglomeration of individuals; 2) as a specific entity whose identity shifted but that was considered to be holding the reins of power in a popular government;

41

Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 142–​63. Sixteenth-​century translations of Continental works into English played a key part in influencing political theorising about democracy and in setting the tone for practical political goals too (see e.g. Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French academie […] newly translated into English by T.B. (London, 1586); Jacques Hurault, Politicke, moral, and martial discourses (London, 1595); Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius, The counsellor. Exactly pourtraited in two bookes […] Written in Latin by Laurentius Grimaldus, and consecrated to the honour of the Polonian empyre. Newlie translated into English (London, 1598)).

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3) as an often undefined collective subject who, pushed by demagogic leaders, aimed to promote and realise various forms of democratic politics; 4) as a caricatured character in a narrative whose negative features –​including moral, cultural, intellectual traits –​served to sketch what democracy was really like. Along similar lines, we deem it important to take into account who the people who wrote about democracy were –​socially, professionally, religiously and ideologically.

Goals and Method

A historiographical consensus asserts that in the early modern period democracy was reputed to be the worst form of government.42 However, this scholarly trend leaves a few major questions unanswered. It does not enquire into why this was so nor does it ask what democracy was held to stand for. Equally, it avoids any engagement with the issue of how criticism of popular government was articulated or with that of the ways in which different authors and polemicists depicted the people and their power. Scholars have failed to look into which political concerns and social prejudices informed attacks on democratic principles and practices. Moreover, they have been uninterested in knowing whether anybody expressed (semi-​)democratic opinions at the time and, if so, what these were. In order to address these (and other) points, our volume explores  –​for the first time and in detail  –​how democracy was conceived, viewed and criticised in political, theological, philosophical, literary and public discourse between the start of King James i’s reign (1603) and the Glorious Revolution (1688–​9). Relying on a cross-​disciplinary approach, whereby political ideas mingle with literary, gendered and religious motifs, the following pages focus on the theories and languages as well as the images and intellectual traditions deployed in treatises, pamphlets, sermons, poems and official documents in order to define democratic government. In particular, these served to construe democratic impulses in Parliament; notions of democratic citizenship; relations between gender, popular government and popular participation in the life of the polity; the battle of allegiance between king’s love and people’s feelings; petitioning and the role of women in it. This way of proceeding illustrates 42

See e.g. C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Anansi, 1965), p. 1.

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what were seen as the hallmarks of not just democratic governance but of its customs, values and mentality too. It also explains how and why within the timeframe here chosen different groups in England were singled out as the mouthpieces of this polity (e.g. Jesuits, Puritans, Presbyterians, some popular MPs, Scottish Covenanters, foreign agents, the Levellers, ­various sects). Most importantly, our volume intends to show that arguments surrounding democracy and criticism of it involved a broad plurality of discourses: from politics to religion, morality, knowledge, the metaphysical sphere, economy, language and literature. Moreover, we read sources that are not always considered in the scholarship in the history of political thought. In this respect, together with revisiting the doctrines of major thinkers (e.g. John Milton, M ­ archamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Dryden, John Locke, Algernon Sidney), our study deals with a great number of so-​called ‘minors’ whose opinions serve to display a particular mode of thinking about politics in early modern England. This is to say that our authors are predominantly representing the more ‘­normal’ level of contemporary discourse, more intelligible and accessible (therefore also more influential in immediate and practical terms) than the canon of ‘great’ thinkers (considered ‘great’ precisely on account of their innovative departures from the familiar language of politics –​which, however, also makes them less suitable for direct consumption). Besides, our work extends that of scholars who concentrated on ‘the birthpangs of a participatory democracy’ and the public sphere43 as well as complementing the writings of historians who studied the emergence of republican principles in England44 and of those who emphasised the allegedly 43

44

See e.g. Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–​1640 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2000); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth:  Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Lake, ‘ “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I” (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited’, in John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 129–​47; Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). See e.g. John G.  A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1975); Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69 (1987), pp.  394–​424; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–​1640 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Underdown, A Freeborn People. Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism:  A Shared

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democratic positions of groups such as the L­ evellers or of authors like the Digger Gerrard Winstanley.45 In contrast to the mainstream historiographical views illustrated above, our collection –​which is divided into three thematically-​organised parts (each of which is in turn chronologically set out) –​seeks to demonstrate that democracy represented a major challenge at a plurality of levels in English public life throughout the approximately ninety-​year long stretch our project takes into consideration. Democracy per se might not have been a European reality, but it was constantly discussed, interpreted and criticised in a composite spectrum of scenarios as well as materials. It was certainly seen as a pervasive and persistent menace to all order (not just political and ecclesiastical, but also divine, natural and metaphysical). Democracy was accused of giving political agency to base mechanics and demagogic rabble-​rousing orators. In addition to these social and intellectual considerations, our analysis tackles issues of gender, perceptions of national character, historical interpretations of the past (classical and non-​classical) associated with discourses about and of democracy and anti-​democracy. Above all, we give unprecedented space to religion (notably, in relation to the crucial place of theological and ecclesiastical disputes in the formation of both democratic and anti-​democratic public feelings), so as to cast new light on its role in the long process of the modernisation of politics and its values. Given the variety of topics comprised within our study as well as due to the remarkable width of professions, religions and backgrounds of those writing about democratic theories and practices, we dedicate particular attention to the importance of genre too. We thus ask what different types of

45

European Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; 2 vols); Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic:  The English Experience’, in van Gelderen and Skinner (eds), Republicanism:  A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1, pp.  307–​ 27; Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles:  Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Richard Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.  116–​43; Cesare Cuttica, ‘Kentish Cousins at Odds:  Filmer’s Patriarcha and Thomas Scott’s Defence of Freeborn Englishmen’, History of Political Thought, 28:4 (2007), pp. 599–​ 616. For good summaries of the vast historiography of early modern English republicanism and its bibliography see Rachel Hammersley, ‘Introduction: The Historiography of Republicanism and Republican Exchanges’, History of European Ideas, 38:3 (2012), pp. 323–​37 and Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg, ‘Introduction: Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism’, in Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (eds), Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 1–​12. See e.g. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; 2 vols).

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texts tell us about the ways in which popular government was conceived and its practical dynamics were thought of. Furthermore, as some of the contributors to the volume underscore, it is pivotal to ask what the experience of democracy was like back then. This is to say: how did our authors feel (about) democracy? How can that feeling be recovered? In this regard, we aim to say something about the spaces of democracy too:  urban areas versus courts and countryside; conventicles; sermons-​ preaching gatherings; churches; the mountains of Switzerland; the new world of the early colonies. We bring to the fore the relevance of the geographical dimension in studying such a complex political regime as democracy, and we do so not only from the traditional perspective of the history of political thought, but also from a more broadly-​conceived cultural angle. Ultimately, after decades of republicanism’s dominance in the field of the history of political thought,46 this book places democracy and criticism of it centre stage as one of the main narratives of the Stuart reigns, their politics, ecclesiastical policies and cultural mindset. In so doing, the thirteen chapters analyse how popular government was understood and how opposition to it, and indeed popular politics in its multifarious manifestations, were constructed. Methodologically, the volume combines the approach of intellectual history with the examination of Stuart culture and society. This is to say that it not only situates texts in their political context, but it takes into account the modalities of popular protests as well as the mechanisms of political participation both nationally and locally. This method avoids a too-​narrow focus on the textuality of texts typical of so much contemporary theory, and sheds light on their production, distribution and audiences. In tune with this, it also shows how the idea of popular government debated in lofty circles was intertwined with the perception of what were seen as the encroaching forces of democracy in the public imagery and at the level of practical politics.

Content

In detail, Part One of the collection focuses on democracy and its role in the political thought of the period. Its four chapters ask a simple but often ignored question: what did ‘democracy’, ‘popular rule’ or ‘the people’ mean in the seventeenth century, indeed to seventeenth-​century English thinkers and political actors? They seek to answer these and related questions by textually 46

See above footnote 44.

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and contextually exploring democracy’s role in seventeenth-​century political thinking and culture: how was citizenship translated and adopted by the Levellers as opposed to, amongst others, the republican Milton? How compatible was democracy with the burning issue of liberty of conscience during the English Revolution? How was the classical notion of democracy embraced in revolutionary England and how, for the first time, was the idea of representative democracy broached? How was democracy interpreted in late-​Stuart political thought? Most importantly, since back then democracy implied that the people had full governing authority, it is essential to ask how the people were understood in seventeenth-​century England. Hence this part also engages with how multiple definitions and understandings of ‘the people’ led to radically different conclusions about the legitimacy of democratic politics and governance (including a certain ambivalence  –​one made of attraction and repulsion –​towards the concept(s) of democracy). The chapters address these points and investigate the themes of liberty, citizenship and slavery, interests, law and religion. Part Two recovers a series of anti-​democratic voices which through satire, poetry, sermons, loyal addresses, tracts and pamphlets attacked popular government not only politically, but also with regard to the moral codes, emotional sympathies and intellectual faculties of its governors as well as of its inhabitants. By looking at the various ancient (e.g. Athens) and contemporary models (e.g. Switzerland, Anabaptist Münster) of de facto democracies, absolutists, Laudians, Catholics and Tories articulated searing critiques of the dysfunctional and dangerous nature of this form of government. However, as this portion of the book demonstrates, it would be a mistake to assume that these attacks were exclusively the outcome of polemical and highly biased positions. In fact, they revealed a considerable range of popular (democratising, for some) tendencies that were developing in seventeenth-​century England in response to absolutism, episcopacy and censorship. By highlighting the linguistic shifts and conceptual developments that affected democracy throughout the Stuart era (­including the significant change occurred to the reputation of the Presbyterians, who went from being portrayed as democrats in the Elizabethan era to ­being smeared as enemies of popular government in the 1640s), Part Two also provides a novel analysis of how anti-​democratic discourse contributed to more positive understandings of democratic ideas and practices that emerged in the post-​1649 context. This turning point brings our study to confront the much-​debated scholarly question of the role of republican principles at this historically decisive juncture in England and their relation to democratic ideals. Equally innovative is the approach chosen in Part Three where the major issues of democracy and its complex relations to and with slavery, the spiritual

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poverty of the passionate vulgar, toleration vis-​à-​vis the American Indians, female participation in politics through subscriptional texts are thoroughly dissected. These specific topics encapsulate larger ones concerning the connections between seventeenth-​century reflection on democracy and freedom, natural law paradigms, petitioning, notions of citizenship and gendered outlooks on the polity formulated within a still deeply patriarchal society. One striking example of this cluster of connected principles –​slavery, freedom, rational and racial inferiority of the masses and of slaves –​emerged in Milton’s oeuvre where a systematic and sedulous ‘politics of exclusion’ was relentlessly at work. Democracy –​with its fickle and unvirtuous multitudes catapulted to the fore of political participation and decision-​making –​was no exception. Such a series of perspectives towards democracy and anti-​democracy anchors democratic principles and moves as well as criticism of them in the particular contexts where ideas and practices were being exchanged, discussed and acted out in seventeenth-​century England. This methodological strategy examines political ideas as moving responses to specific circumstances, and survey political thought not just as a progression of worthy texts, but also as an engagement with the events of the day. It also looks at the languages and theoretical paradigms available to a large number of writers between 1603 and 1689. In so doing, one thing will clearly emerge:  democracy and anti-​democracy were not only available languages spoken on the ideological and intellectual stage of the seventeenth century. Most of all, they played a decisive and prominent part on it. Thus, the time span selected enables us to assess the types of transformations that occurred within the paradigm(s) of democracy and anti-​ democracy through key historical phases which saw major events shape life and thought in England, in the British Isles and in Europe. They involved the Jacobean internal conflicts surrounding episcopacy and parliamentary freedom of speech (1600s–​10s) as well as the international dimension of James’s diplomatic choices (1620s); the fateful conduct of Charles i (1620s–​30s) vis-​à-​ vis his adversaries (especially, Parliament) and the explosion of the Civil Wars (1640s); the instauration of the Commonwealth (1650s) and the intellectual turmoil it yielded up to the Restoration of the Stuart Charles ii (1660s); and, lastly, the Exclusion Crisis (1670s–​80s) and the Glorious Revolution (1680s–​ 90s). In brief, we will endeavour to contextually pose questions along these lines:  how did the discourse of democracy and its opposite adapt to changing historical circumstances? What flexibility did these competing arguments present in respect of issues of authority, political conduct and ecclesiastical power or with regard to moral values?

…

introduction

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By proceeding both thematically and chronologically we propose an insightful, and contextually rich, analysis of a precious portion of Western political reflection and an ideal platform for discussing principles that are still fundamental in our society. Indeed, we hope to clarify manifold aspects of what it means to reflect on, and theorise about, democracy (including, concepts and practices of representation as well as populism) in historical perspective, and to avoid some of the current anachronistic and often confused accounts of it put forward in contemporary political science, journalism and public opinion. Most importantly, and most fundamentally for the history of the early modern period, this study will bring democracy –​opposition to it as well as the discourses addressing the place of the ‘people’ (men and women) in the commonweal; the frequently ambivalent views of major thinkers towards popular government; and the crucial role of religion in the formation of democratic ideals –​at the forefront of the historiography of seventeenth-​century England.

Select Bibliography

Bourke, Richard and Skinner, Quentin (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Head, Randolph C., Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, 1470–​1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Kloppenberg, James T., Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-​Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Maloy, Jason S., The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011). Peacey, Jason, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Smith, Sophie, ‘Democracy and the Body Politic from Aristotle to Hobbes’, Political Theory, 46:2 (2018), pp. 167–​96.

pa rt 1 Democracy and the People: Citizenship, Representation and the Commonwealth

∵

­c hapter 1

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton Rachel Foxley Democracy was a mutable concept in the republican writings of the interregnum period. In Marchamont Nedham’s hostile characterisation of the type of ‘Democratick, or Popular Forme’ which he attributed to the Levellers at the outset of his republican career, democracy favoured ‘licentiousnesse’ and the rule of the ‘lowest of the People’, becoming a kind of ‘Tyranny’; in formal terms it put ‘the whole multitude of the people into the equall exercise of the Supreme Authority’.1 But in James Harrington’s Oceana of 1656, ‘democracy’ became a term which could describe a highly stratified, mediated, and controlled exercise of ultimate popular sovereignty, wildly distant from Nedham’s hackneyed but nightmarish vision of mob rule.2 ‘Democracy’ could also be an evanescent word. When the Levellers were promoting the rule of an annually-​elected unicameral representative, Nedham labelled this ‘democracy’ but the Levellers did not. When Nedham himself started to promote the rule of an annually-​elected unicameral representative, he too ceased to call such a system a democracy. When Harrington’s avowedly democratic scheme of government became central to the rather desperate republican debate of 1659–​60, his worried rivals began optimistically to insist that some aura of ‘democracy’ might attach to their very different and (to our eyes) even less democratic proposals too.3 This tactical flexibility in the use or non-​use of ‘democracy’ for a whole range of non-​monarchical constitutional proposals which invoked the authority of the people is my justification –​or my excuse –​for using this chapter to compare the writings of the Levellers and of John Milton, who both steered almost entirely clear of the language of democracy, but were enmeshed in these evolving 1 Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Common-​wealth of England, Stated (1650), pp. 71–​2, 74. All pre-​1700 works cited were published in London. 2 Rachel Foxley, ‘Democracy in 1659:  Harrington and the Good Old Cause’, in Grant Tapsell and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 175–​96; Rachel Hammersley, ‘Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism, and Democracy’, History of European Ideas, 39:3 (2013), pp.  354–​70; Eugenio Capozzi, ‘Republicanism and Representative Democracy:  the Heritage of James Harrington’, European Review of History/​Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 5:2 (1998), pp. 197–​204. 3 Foxley, ‘Democracy in 1659’.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

22 Foxley debates about what the power of the people might mean, how it could be exercised, and, at some points, what it could be called. The subject of this chapter is citizenship –​the boundaries of citizenship, the duties and qualities of citizens, and the language which the Levellers and Milton used in constituting a body of citizens in their writings and in policing the attributes and boundaries of that citizen body. By exploring this language, I am intervening in ongoing scholarly debates which have implications for our understanding of early modern talk about democracy. This chapter sheds light on the debated relationship between the political thought of the Levellers and that of classical republicans, arguing that in spite of profound similarities between the Levellers’ and Milton’s thought, the ways in which they developed key elements of their thought ultimately yielded very different visions of the citizen body. My argument supports the developing consensus which is increasingly breaking down any rigid boundary between ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’ thought in the early modern period: both the Levellers and Milton used characteristic elements of both traditions, and it was the way in which they fleshed these out, rather than their simple use of ideas of rights, consent, freedom as non-​domination, or political virtue, which determined the ultimate character of their thought. Although my reading tends to reinforce interpretations of the Levellers as remarkably radical, and of Milton as more ambivalent about the potential of the people for citizenship, it shows that such views could grow from shared intellectual foundations.

Levellers and Republicans

The relationship between Leveller thought and republicanism has drawn recurring interest from scholars. Samuel Glover, setting up a distinction between popular and elitist republicanism, argued that the Leveller movement of the 1640s was more deeply influenced by classical republican theory than had been recognised, and that classical texts could be plundered for justifications for the political equality of the poor.4 Others have seen this more plebeian republicanism apparent in some of the 1650s republican authors and have also drawn comparisons with the Levellers.5 In the case of Milton, a tantalising gap 4 Samuel Dennis Glover, ‘The Putney Debates: Popular Versus Élitist Republicanism’, Past & Present, 164 (1999), pp. 47–​80. 5 Nigel Smith, ‘Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater’s “Heroick Mechanicks” ’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 137–​55. I have discussed the relationship between Leveller and republican thought at more length in Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton

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in the historical record –​the lack of an explanation for his failure to fulfil a commission to write against the Levellers –​has led to speculation about his possible sympathy for aspects of Leveller thought. An extensive, though to my mind problematic, case for this sympathy has recently been made by David Williams in his book Milton’s Leveller God, but the argument is not new.6 Although this chapter will ultimately argue against an over-​assimilation of Levellers and republicans, we will see that there are fertile grounds for comparison. Many of the structures of thought present in Leveller writing can also be found in republican texts. The growth of scholarship which identifies an early modern tradition synthesising ‘republican’ with ‘liberal’ elements of thought helps to draw the two closer together, highlighting the fact that few republican texts of the period are devoid of ideas of rights and consent to government.7 It is rare for either a Leveller or a Miltonic text to pause for long enough to set out an elaborated theory of freedom and government, but at the moments which come closest, they sound remarkably similar. Milton argued that ‘all men naturally were borne free’ and were ‘born to command and not to obey’.8 Leveller authors similarly emphasized the original freedom of every man (and, in Lilburne’s case, woman), but added an explicit statement of original equality which was not there in that Miltonic account. For Lilburne, all humans ‘are, and were [since the Creation of Adam and Eve] by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty’.9 For Overton, ‘by naturall birth, all men are equally and alike borne to like propriety, liberty and freedome’.10 Tellingly, when Milton did offer an account which emphasised that ‘prime Nature made us all equall’ he did not, like Lilburne and Overton, bring this equality into the present by using present-​tense verbs, but explained that human 6

7

8 9 10

Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013), ch. 6. David Williams, Milton’s Leveller God (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2017); for a review of the scholarship and a verdict which rejects the hypothesis of Milton’s sympathy with the Levellers on the basis of very different approaches to the law, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘History and Ideology:  Milton, the Levellers, and the Council of State in 1649’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68:1–2 (2005), pp. 269–​87. Vickie B.  Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Creation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Christopher Hamel, ‘The Republicanism of John Milton:  Natural Rights, Civic Virtue and the Dignity of Man’, History of Political Thought, 34:1 (2013), pp. 35–​65. Notes to Milton’s works are to the Yale edition unless otherwise stated: D. M. Wolfe et al. (eds), Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–​1982), 8 vols (hereafter cpw), 3.198–​9. John Lilburne, The Free-​mans Freedom Vindicated (1646), p. 11. Richard Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyrany (1646), p. 3.

24 Foxley imperfection  –​the Fall  –​had led people decisively away from this original state.11 However, the implications of the theory for political legitimacy were the same for the Levellers and Milton: those born free could only rightly be ruled by their own consent. Such ideas might, in the Leveller as well as the republican texts, be combined with more typically ‘classical republican’ elements, including an emphasis on the moral qualities and duties of citizenship. Furthermore, the characterisation of liberty in terms of freedom from domination, which for Skinner is the key to a distinctively early modern republican system of values, also meshed neatly with the argument that authority needed consent (this would ensure that authority was non-​dominating). The structural foundations of Leveller and Miltonic political argument were thus extremely similar. These deep structural similarities between Leveller thought and key points of Milton’s republicanism, however, do not mean that Leveller and republican discourses blend seamlessly together. The feel of most Leveller writing is very different from Milton’s classical republicanism –​with some telling exceptions. This difference in feel is partly, and revealingly, a matter of written style. The Levellers did not always live up to their self-​presentation as plain speakers who distrusted the tricks of rhetoric, but there is still a world of difference between their polemical pamphlets and the grammatical and stylistic elaboration of Milton’s English prose.12 Milton regretted exposing the reasoning of his divorce tracts to an English-​speaking audience rather than couching it in Latin; Leveller authors sought the widest possible audience of ‘free-​born Englishmen’ for their texts, and sought understanding through English, even when reading classical texts. Even though Richard Overton critiqued the pedantry and exclusivity of humanist education, it may be no accident that it was this Cambridge-​educated Leveller leader who often appears most similar to Milton in some of his attitudes to citizenship and the people.13 But the differences between the Levellers and Milton’s political rhetoric go well beyond issues of style. Even when they were constructing arguments based on the same foundations, invoking the same value systems, and using overlapping vocabulary,

11 12 13

cpw 2.661; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘The Politics of Paradise Lost’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 547–​68, p. 558. For the Levellers’ attitude to rhetoric, see Rachel Foxley, ‘ “The wildernesse of tropes and figures”: Figuring Rhetoric in Leveller Pamphlets’, Seventeenth Century, 21:2 (2006), pp. 270–​86. See Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 3, for Overton’s critique of humanist education.

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton

25

they did so in ways which opened up significant political space between them. In this essay I will explore the rhetorical strategies which create or reveal these differences.

The Boundaries of Citizenship

Both the Levellers and Milton rested essential arguments on the authority of ‘the people’, but it was never simple to translate this authorising concept into a clearly-​defined citizen body of those eligible to act for that people electorally and in other civic duties. When the Levellers and Milton talked about the qualities their citizens required, who were they even including within the bounds of citizenship? The fluctuations and contortions of Milton’s relationship with the English people (‘populus’) which he set out to ‘defend’ in his Latin propaganda have been the subject of much scholarship.14 The Levellers’ scattered and inconsistent franchise proposals also formed the basis for a long-​running debate, recently revived by Phil Baker, about how inclusive or exclusive their citizen body was supposed to be.15 Although the scholarship responding to Macpherson redeemed the Levellers from the accusation that they would exclude all wage-​earners from the franchise, revisionist work still foregrounded the exclusions which were contemplated or prescribed by Levellers and army radicals, and further fertile work on the Levellers has looked for the roots of their ideas of citizenship in the world of London freemen, an exclusive group. Thus Baker points out that as late as September 1648 the Levellers were demanding the restoration of the specific privilege of the exclusive group of the freemen of London –​the ‘comonalty’ of London –​to elect their Common Councillors –​an expansion beyond the current practice, but falling short of the harmonised electoral qualifications which applied to both national and local elections in the third ‘Agreement of the People’ in May 1649.16 In that final programmatic 14 15

16

Distinguished book-​length studies are Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1994); Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Philip Baker, ‘The Franchise Debate Revisited: the Levellers and the Army’, in Taylor and Tapsell (eds) The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited, pp. 103–​22. The debate was initiated by C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Baker, ‘Franchise Debate’, p.  115; but see also Rachel Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘free-​ born Englishmen’, Historical Journal, 47:4 (2004), pp.  849–​ 74, pp. 852–​4 on Lilburne’s willingness to undermine the exclusivity of the term ‘freemen’.

26 Foxley statement, the Levellers came as close as they ever did to enacting the right of Rainborowe’s ‘poorest hee’ to elect, but there were still exclusions on the basis of gender, age, economic dependence, and political allegiance:  ‘(according to naturall right) all men of the age of one and twenty yeers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served in the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices’.17 This was not the most restrictive of the franchise proposals put forward by or in association with the Levellers; it actively removed the ‘householder’ requirement of the Officers’ ‘Agreement’, retained, as Phil Baker points out, even in Lilburne’s dissident version.18 But the Levellers also drew on traditionally exclusive entitlements –​‘rights’, ‘liberties’, ‘privileges’ and ‘franchises’ –​in ways which did not respect their exclusivity. These entitlements, in Lilburne’s powerful rhetoric, became the rights of all ‘free-​born Englishmen’, a phrase which reverberated through Lilburne’s writing and set up a powerful vision of apparently equal and collective entitlements, even if actual proposals were less generous.19 Natural right and English birth together grounded an inclusive citizenship, which relatively small numbers forfeited or could not exercise due to economic dependence. Milton rarely engaged in constitutional prescription, so it is harder to pin down proposals which can be compared with his rhetoric. But aspects of his argumentation are very telling. Because he was defending the actions of a partisan and purged parliament whose claim to speak for the people was transparently contradicted by the public mood, Milton often used argumentative sleights of hand to claim for a minority the right to act for the whole people.20 This recurrent argument may not have been intended to establish the bounds of citizenship itself, limiting it to a politically and ethically sound minority, but at least in extremis, Milton was willing to contemplate very significant restrictions. In his writings resisting the restoration, Milton did propose a constitutional mechanism, a Grand Council, whose members would initially be ‘chosen by the people’, but who were ideally to sit for life.21 Resisting calls for rotation, successive re-​elections of the whole body, or the establishment of a popular assembly to sit alongside the Grand Council, in the second edition of the Readie and Easie Way Milton considered measures which could mitigate the danger 17 18 19 20 21

An agreement of the free people of England (1649), p. 3. Royalists were to be excluded for ten years only. Baker, ‘Franchise Debate’, p. 120. Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship’, passim. cpw 3.197; cpw 4.1.457; cpw 7.455. cpw 7.368; 7.432.

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton

27

of such courses. One possibility, if electoral politics was to be given a place, was to ‘wel-​qualifie and refine elections’, entrusting even the first round of a multi-​stage electoral process not to ‘a rude multitude’ but ‘only [to] those of them who are rightly qualifi’d’, and committing further rounds of winnowing of candidates to ‘others of a better breeding’ to ensure that only the worthiest were elected.22 Milton thus envisaged not only a hierarchy between electors, but the exclusion of some from electoral citizenship altogether, although he was silent on what would qualify some and exclude others. One candidate for that criterion was the intellectual or moral capacity of potential citizens.

Imagining Citizens

Both the Levellers and Milton drew on powerful descriptive vocabularies and associations to paint a picture of the citizen qualities they wished to see, and, in some cases, of the ways in which citizens could fall short of what was desirable. Thus they constructed and policed an idealised citizen body. Both Milton and the Levellers saw people’s intellectual and moral abilities as key to their ability to save or serve the polity. Indeed, the positive vocabulary both used suggested the importance of a certain combative and practical kind of virtue, a moral courage which would help to defend political liberty. At one level, too, both tended towards generous assumptions about the moral potential of the population, assumptions which were perhaps grounded in theological beliefs about salvation, but which can be seen to have further ramifications in political terms. William Walwyn, in a typically expansive self-​depiction, claimed to ‘truly and heartily love all mankind, it being the unfeigned desire of my soul, that all men might be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth’.23 Walwyn’s theology of universal grace, but not necessarily universal salvation, had much in common with Milton’s belief that all could be saved, if they exercised their freedom to accept this grace. Of course, while theology and politics were clearly intertwined for Milton and the Levellers, we should not assume a direct translation of spiritual equality into political terms. Milton’s republicanism itself was grounded in the Aristotelian assessment that the distribution of merit in the population was more equal than to justify or tolerate a king: in 1651 he went so far as to say that the ‘majority’ of men were ‘equal’ ‘in every state’; by 1660, discussing the same Aristotelian principle, he

22 23

cpw 7.442–​3. William Walwyn, A vvhisper in the eare of Mr. Thomas Edwards minister (1646), pp. 2–​3.

28 Foxley had retreated to the assertion that the nation need not ‘fear a scarcitie of able and worthie men’ if they were diligently sought out.24 As we have already seen, the Levellers’ characterisation of equality was rather more robust, as they asserted it to have been the original condition not only of mankind in an ancient state of nature but of everyone at their birth; this equality persisted and was fundamental to Leveller thought. In spite of this, however, both the Levellers and Milton sometimes castigated people’s moral or intellectual failings  –​in the context of their political failings –​in ways which linked them with lowly social status. For Milton, it was ‘the vulgar folly of men to desert their own reason, and shutting thir eyes to think they see best with other mens’.25 The hint of social judgement in ‘vulgar’ (although its main signification here is simply ‘common’) suggests that the active use of reason was unlikely to be found at the lowest levels of society, who were –​wilfully –​in the habit of being led. These tropes were common, and the Levellers occasionally resorted to them too. Overton reminds us of Milton when he talks of the ‘inconsiderate Multitude, whose judgements are guided by custome, more then by reason’, a thought which Walwyn echoed, in spite of his usual generous assertions about the capacity of all for understanding, when he argued that ‘most men are transported with flashy fancies, and are unapt to consider things judiciously’.26 Even Lilburne, when he thought he might end up on the rough end of the crowd rather than having it doing his bidding, was afraid that his enemies might manipulate the ‘rude multitude’ into stoning him or tearing him apart.27 In general, however, the Levellers avoided the use of the language of status or social description to make pejorative points. They resisted the characterisation of their supporters as the lowest of the low, and suggested economic solidity, middling social status, and perhaps moral substance too when they described them as ‘industrious and laborious’ or ‘nown-​substantive’.28 But ultimately they argued that ‘the greatest Peers in the Land’ should be no more ‘respected … then somany [sic] 24

25 26 27 28

John Milton, ‘A Defence of the People of England’, transl. Claire Gruzelier, in Martin Dzelzainis (ed.), Milton. Political Writings (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 99; the original reads: ‘ubi multi sunt aequales, ut sunt in omni civitate plurimi’: Columbia 7.126; cpw 7.449. This position of 1660 perhaps echoes Milton’s argument in the Tenure that a Christian prince should be aware that his nation will contain ‘so many thousand Men’ superior to him in virtue: cpw 3.204–​5. cpw 3.212. Richard Overton, The Commoners Complaint (1647), p. 4; William Walwyn, An Antidote against Master Edwards his old and new Poyson (1646), p. 19. John Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered (1646), p. 31. Richard Overton, An Alarum to the House of Lords (1646), p. 8.

Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton

29

old Bellowes-​menders, Broom men, Coblers, Tinkers or Chimney-​sweepers, who are all equally Free borne, with the hudgest men, and loftiest Anachims in the Land’.29 Milton, although his instincts too were to trust to the middling sort,30 by contrast seasoned his works liberally with the vocabulary of social denigration, often using it in contexts which implied the intellectual or moral inferiority of the lower ranks of society. He almost obsessively differentiated the ‘Worthies’ and ‘men of noblest temper’ (note the approbatory use of ‘noble’, another term of social status) from ‘Vulgar and irrational men’ prone to ‘sloth or inconstancie’.31 Social status appeared to be strongly correlated with moral qualities. It was possible for people to rise above their origins and achieve ‘true nobility’, becoming (in Claire Gruzelier’s neat translation) ‘their own ancestors’ through their worth;32 but, as we will see, it was also possible for a woman to rise above her gendered status or a man to fall below his, without that affecting Milton’s view of men’s natural superiority: we should not assume that these social terms are ‘mere’ metaphors, although even as metaphors they are extremely telling. But Milton, at some points, had high hopes for his fellow countrymen, who were certainly not born to be slaves. It was partly education which would help them to understand, love and deserve liberty, and the educative impulse was a constant in Leveller writings too: it was not to be taken for granted that people knew their liberties and were impassioned about defending them. Both the Levellers and Milton were concerned to ensure that the people were equipped to defend their liberties:  the Levellers’ writings were relentlessly and self-​ consciously educative in their repetitious exposition of native and natural liberties, while Milton in both Of Education and his political works understood education as fitting men for civic life  –​although his was an extensive programme of education which only ‘our noble and our gentle youth’ were likely to access.33 But again, divergences did open up between them. The Leveller authors tended (although not without exception) to assume that the essentials of religious and political life were easily understood, and that the people would be able to grasp them as long as they were not prevented from doing so 29 Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants, pp. 19–​20. 30 Hammond, Milton and the People, pp. 168–​9. He must, however, have had in mind a rather higher echelon of ‘middling’ given his scorn for shopkeepers as well as labourers (‘operas et tabernarios’) as the dregs (‘faex’) of the people: ibid., p. 165. 31 cpw 3.192. 32 Milton, ‘A Defence of the People of England’, in Dzelzainis (ed.), Milton. Political Writings, p. 62; ‘veram nobilitatem’ ‘ex se natos’: Columbia 7.32. 33 cpw 2.378, 406; cpw 7.443 (‘To make the people fittest to chuse, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education’).

30 Foxley by the oppression and deception (the two went together) of abusive elites. For Milton, however, that extensive but exclusive education may have been necessary to attain sufficient wisdom at least for any active role in politics –​without it, people would default to irrationality. Ultimately, Milton’s demanding conception of virtue as moral choice, even though it had no necessary political or social corollaries, seemed to push towards a moral exclusivity which was in danger of taking on a kind of social exclusivity too. Milton often denigrated the importance of mere numbers when compared against virtue: it was not the actions of the whole nation, or even the whole parliament, which counted, but those of the sanior pars.34 His lofty conception of individual virtue led him to envisage it, almost by definition, as displayed through resistance against the pressures of custom and tides of feeling which swayed the multitude. It came to seem almost inevitable that virtue was the property only of a few. In his divorce tracts, Milton charitably urged that laws be made which accommodated realistically the weakness of the ‘common lump of men’ who were not ‘heroically vertuous’. At other times, he was less forgiving of this widespread weakness; the virtuous, especially in politics, were precisely those people who were prepared to stand up against the crowd. Judges, magistrates, and commanders’ display of ‘civill prudence’ was assessed by whether they had the ‘magnanimity’ or ‘fortitude’ to stand by their own ‘judgment’ against the ‘obstinacie of [the] heard’ or ‘the rashnes and the clamours of their own Captains and confederates’, holding out against ‘what the boisterous Tribunes and Souldiers bawl’d for’.35 By contrast, the Levellers’ moral condemnations tended to be reserved for the vices of exploitative rulers: if the people were in danger of being enslaved to anyone’s lusts, it was those of their rulers, not their own. Thus Lilburne warned that the army would be used to serve ‘a few mens lusts and lawlesse Pleasures’, and that a small number of men were attempting to ‘enslave the Common-​wealth, to their owne Pride, Ambition, Lusts, Covetousnesse, and Domination if not Dukeship, or Kingship’.36 While Milton emphatically agreed that the tyrants and courtiers were as vicious as the broader populace who deferred to them, the Levellers had a far more vivid sense of the moral flaws of the rulers –​to some extent, perhaps, echoing Machiavelli’s sense of the characteristic passions of the dominant elite –​than of the ruled. That even applies to Overton’s most despairing rhetoric, which has something in common with Milton’s tendency to binary moral classification into ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’. 34 35 36

cpw 3.197; cpw 4.1.457: ‘pars … sanior’ means ‘the sounder part’; cpw 7.455. cpw 2. 253; 314–​15. John Lilburne, The second part of Englands new-​chaines discovered (1649), pp. 8, 16.

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Thus in 1647, when he was appealing from the fatally corrupted authority of parliament to the people at large, Overton anathematised anyone who endangered the human rights and freedoms which enable human society as an ‘enemy to mankinde’, and saw ‘this our Common-​wealth swarming with such Monsters in nature and humanity’.37 This vision drew on Cicero’s discussion of tyranny –​later used by Milton in his justification for regicide –​which saw tyrants as ‘fierce and savage monsters in human form’ who ‘should be cut off from what may be called the common body of humanity’.38 Overton here applied this to the collective tyranny of ‘usurpers and oppressors’ in parliament and their ‘unnatural faction’, but he still expressed hope that ‘every rationall honest Common-​wealths man’, under the leadership of the army in default of a valid parliament, could act together to prevent catastrophe. The wicked were to be ‘purged’, but Overton still imagined a strong body of citizens with the capacity to do so.39 Milton’s emphasis on virtue as resistance against the pressure of the many was so consistent that even though the multitude had contributed to the liberation of the country from Charles i’s tyranny in the civil war, Milton retrospectively denigrated their actions as the result of the desire for ‘noveltie’ which afflicted ‘most men’, only briefly countenancing the thought that these men had propounded to themselves just ends, before insisting that their ‘sloth or inconstancie, and weakness of spirit’, or even their ‘inbred falshood and wickedness’ meant that they inevitably failed to sustain the cause.40 As Paul Hammond comments, Milton only ‘temporarily recuperates’ the reputation of the ‘people’, ‘multitude’ and ‘vulgar’ who constituted the crowd when turning round the royalist narrative in Eikonoklastes; ultimately he still condemned their ‘fickleness and instability’.41 This kind of language is vanishingly rare in Leveller texts, unsurprisingly given Lilburne’s own involvement in the crowd action of the early 1640s42 and the Levellers’ willingness to mobilise the crowd in an extra-​constitutional way. The Levellers’ references to the multitude, or

37 38

Richard Overton, An Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body (1647), p. 26. cpw 3.212; Cicero, De Officiis Book 3.6.32, trans. Walter Miller, Cicero, On Duties (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913) p. 299; ‘sic ista in figura hominis feritas et immanitas beluae a communi tamquam humanitatis corpore segreganda est’. 39 Overton, An Appeale, pp. 26–​7. 40 cpw 3.192. 41 Hammond, Milton and the People, pp. 136–​17; cpw 3.578. 42 Philip Baker, ‘Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered: The Levellers, the Civic Past, and Popular Protest in Civil War London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76:4 (2013), pp. 559–​ 87, p. 567.

32 Foxley to multitudes of people, were generally emphatic rather than denigratory, in marked contrast to Milton’s.

Citizenship and Slavery

Citizens, by definition, were not slaves. The powerful language of slavery was woven through both the Levellers’ and Milton’s writings, creating a vivid picture of the threats hanging over the population. Milton and the Levellers were working from a shared theory of (political) slavery as dependence on another’s will, but their divergent uses of the theory resulted in different pictures of the citizen body. For the Levellers, largely uncorrupted citizens were faced with an external threat of slavery; for Milton, the citizen population itself was in danger of becoming servile. Both the Levellers and the classical republicans drew on the neo-​Roman idea of liberty to argue that dependence on the will of another was a total deprivation of freedom, resulting in slavery. The Levellers constantly characterised the political oppression and danger which they and the nation faced in terms of slavery. As Lilburne’s pamphlet titled Liberty Vindicated Against Slavery suggests, in the neo-​Roman model, political liberty and slavery were binary alternatives. In mid-​1649 Lilburne argued that the effect and intention of Pride’s Purge had been ‘by force of arms to … subject them [the people] to perfect vassalage and slavery’; this slavery arose from being subjected to another’s will, rather than able to choose their own governors: not even a ‘thousand[th] part’ of the people of England had ‘authorised Thomas Pride, with his Regiment of Souldiers, to chuse them a Parliament’.43 This conception of political slavery was shared with many of the classical republican authors, and Quentin Skinner has used Milton as a key exemplar of this kind of thinking.44 However, while the core ‘neo-​Roman’ definition of liberty as the absence of enslavement to another’s will was shared by Milton and the Levellers, its argumentative implications and the rhetoric associated with it could be developed in divergent directions. One of the puzzles about the ubiquitous political language of slavery in this period is what relation, if any, it bore to the existence of the actual slavery whose horror it drew on rhetorically. Mary Nyquist rightly warns that we should not be misled by the ‘obfuscatory privileging of figurative slavery’ over 43 44

John Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties (1649), title page. Quentin Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, Prose Studies, 23:1 (2000), pp. 1–​22.

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actual slavery in Milton’s texts into assuming that he condemned the institution outright.45 Steven Jablonski has made a compelling case that Milton endorsed the Aristotelian idea of natural slavery in the case of Africans, and found slavery to be in accordance with the secondary laws of nature which responded to a fallen world. In Jablonski’s reading of Milton, rightful deprivation of political liberty is simply one of a hierarchy of states of slavery which were justified by irrationality.46 The Levellers, by contrast, did not hint at any legitimate form of slavery. Milton’s reconciliation of slavery with original freedom was only possible through an emphasis on the Fall separating us from that original freedom –​which was not the Levellers’ position. While for Milton government itself might be a consequence of the Fall, for the Levellers consenting government was compatible with an unfallen state.47 They rejected the possibility of voluntary slavery outright: ‘according to the Law of God, Nature, and Reason … it is not lawfull for any man to subject himself, to be a slave’.48 Milton, of course, was able to use similar arguments when he invoked slavery in a political sense: for those who had the capacity and opportunity to be free (‘any freeborn man’) it was utterly shameful to submit to slavery, and to reduce oneself to the status of those ‘slaves and vassals born’ who had no choice.49 But the flipside of this rhetoric was a belief, firstly, that some might not be freeborn and hence might be rightfully enslaved (under the secondary laws of nature which also allowed for the creation of government), and, secondly, that any who did submit to slavery had, by doing so, displayed a kind of servility which deserved such domination. If any moral flaw could make a person unsuitable for, or disqualify them from, citizenship, it was servility. A  slave was the antithesis of a citizen. To depict the people as apt to servility was to depict a citizen body which was liable to moral collapse rather than steadfast in the defence of liberty and rights. The Levellers apparently agreed with Milton that (in John Pym’s words, quoted by Lilburne): ‘A servile condition doth for the most part beget in men 45 Mary Nyquist, ‘Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 356–​97, p. 357. 46 Steven Jablonski, ‘Ham’s Vicious Race:  Slavery and John Milton’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900, 37:1 (1997), pp. 173–​90. 47 Foxley, The Levellers, pp. 24–​8; cf. also the discussion of benign collective sovereignty in Regall Tyrannie Discovered (1647), p. 11. 48 Regall Tyrannie Discovered, p. 11. 49 Defensio 4.1.532 (Columbia 7.542  ‘homini ingenuo’; cf ‘corpore atque animo ad servitutem natos’ in the previous sentence and Columbia 7.546 ‘In libertate sunt nati’); Tenure cpw 3.237.

34 Foxley a slavish temper and disposition’.50 This thought was a powerful source of moral ­condemnation of the people in Milton’s rhetoric, but in spite of reporting the argument, the Levellers rarely dwelt on the possibility that the people had succumbed to such servility. Milton, by contrast, habitually used the pejorative language of slavery and servility (whether in English or Latin) to reflect on people’s moral qualities. In the lofty opening passage of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton argued that ‘bad men’ were ‘all naturally servile’ and thus prone to upholding tyrants.51 In 1660, Milton was still associating vice with ­servility, and arguing that monarchs wanted their subjects to be ‘basest, vitiousest, servilest’ and ultimately ‘sheepishest’.52 In spite of this strong moral condemnation, Milton did suggest that these servile traits were the consequence of slavery. People could be ‘enobl’d’ by liberty, but conversely they could ‘degeneratly’ or with a ‘degenerat and fal’n spirit’ fail to recognise or embrace liberty; they could suffer ‘debasement of mind’.53 These terms suggest a process of debasement or degeneration due to circumstance; indeed in the last case Milton was explicit that this debasement was not ‘natural’ for an Englishman.54 The only Leveller writer who condemned the vices of servility in a similar way was Richard Overton, who developed at length the theme of the morally and intellectually debasing impact of ‘generations of usurpers’ since the Norman Conquest. He argued that the people had ‘degenerated from being men’ and become ‘unman’d’, not in a gendered sense, but in the much more profound sense that they had become ‘bestiallized in their understandings’ and were ‘as bruits’.55 This language then led Overton to the charge that the people had become ‘contented slaves’.56 The people were still seen as victims  –​they were ‘the poore deceived people’  –​and Nicholas McDowell has read this passage, in the context of Overton’s vitalist belief-​system, as an expression of Overton’s ‘vision of an egalitarian society where all humans were free to become truly human and so more divine’.57 Nonetheless, when Overton described the people as ‘stupid, and grosly ignorant’ this began to make them 50 51

John Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties (1649), p. 40. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), in Neil H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (ed.) The Complete Works of John Milton, Volume vi: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 251. 52 cpw 7.460. Note the social status-​based disdain in ‘basest’ which is contrasted with ‘noble’ earlier in the passage. 53 cpw 5.1.441; cpw 7.455; cpw 2.226; cpw 3.344. 54 cpw 3.344. 55 Richard Overton, A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations (1646), p. 2. 56 Ibid., p. 2. 57 McDowell, The English Radical Imagination, p. 70.

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seem complicit in their own oppression in a way which was rare in Leveller writing, and certainly resonated with Milton’s much more frequent lamentations about the people’s apparent willingness to embrace tyranny.58 Both Milton and Overton linked political servility with degeneration to the level of animals –​seeing the people as capable of extreme degeneration from the ideals of citizenship. Overton thought that slavery had rendered people ‘as bruits’; Milton too labelled as ‘arrant beasts’ those who showed themselves to be ‘by nature slaves’, and extended the animal metaphor: they were ‘brutes’ who might be ‘stroked and tamed’ into subservience again.59 Even here, however, a fascinating space opens up between Milton and Overton which suggests that the animal comparison functions rather differently. For McDowell, Overton’s language of humanity and brutality was an expression of his materialist, monist, vitalist beliefs. Humans had the capacity to degenerate and become bestial, or to move towards the divine.60 Milton, at least later in his life, shared these heterodox materialist and vitalist views, and Fallon argues that his hierarchy of being was also a distinctively ‘dynamic’ one, where ‘direction is more important than position’.61 Nonetheless, Milton did not follow Overton’s remarkable step of attributing human dominion over animals to human sin and imagining that the animals’ innocence would be rewarded in heaven.62 Milton understood ‘dominion’ over animals to have existed, even before the Fall, as one of many forms of ‘beneficent hierarchy’.63 For Overton, to compare downtrodden people to animals was not to say that they should be subject to the dominion –​however benevolent –​of their superiors. For Milton, that was certainly the implication. Servility might be circumstantial, but for Milton, unlike for the Levellers, it might also be natural. This raises the possibility that there were men who would always have to be excluded from citizenship. Bad men were

58 Overton, A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations, p.  2. Cf. Richard Overton, The Ordinance for Tythes Dismounted (1645), p.  6:  the presbyters have discovered that the people won’t oppose them, being ‘either grosly ignorant, carelesse, or else cowardly and degenerate’. 59 cpw 3.581. 60 McDowell, The English Radical Imagination, pp. 65–​70. 61 Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1991), p. 103. 62 Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals:  Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 148–​56. 63 Diane McColley, ‘Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly’, in Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (eds), Spokesperson Milton (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 231–​48.

36 Foxley ‘naturally servile’ and the virtuous were ‘by right’ the ‘Maisters’ of those bad men who were vicious enough to be tyrants.64 Servility  –​or at least natural servility  –​justified exactly the kind of political subjection which Milton elsewhere described as slavery. A  people seeking the return of a king such as Charles i ‘would show themselves to be by nature slaves, and arrant beasts; not fit for that liberty, which they cried out and bellowed for’.65 Thus the naturally servile could actually deserve enslavement. But circumstantial servility, at least when it had been a process of degeneration which lasted generations and changed the character of a people or nation, could also, apparently rightly, invite servility. The ancient Britons, ‘through long subjection, servile in mind, slothful of body’, offered ‘vows of perpetual subjection to Rome’ in return for protection against barbarian attacks. The Saxons in turn degenerated, leaving them subject to Danish invasion, and prompting Milton to reflect that ‘when God hath decreed servitude on a sinful Nation, fitted by thir own vices for no condition but servile, all Estates of Government are alike unable to avoid it’.66 By contrast, even when the Levellers considered paradigmatic cases of national slavery, they saw that slavery as inflicted ‘(by force of Armes) in the nature of Turkish Ianisaries, or the Regiments of the Guards of France’ rather than as deserved by the people subjected to it.67 The authors of the ‘Agreement of the People’ saw that the nation was in danger of ‘returning into a slavish condition’, but the Levellers did not conclude that the people were slavish.68 They urged the English to ‘speedily look about them, and act vigorously’ to fend off this threat, and their more desperate pleas did come close to accusing their countrymen of defects in courage: ‘if you sit still and yeeld up your selves, as contented slaves, I cannot see, how you can be excused of madnesse or folly’.69 Lilburne in a rasher moment asserted that ‘no man can be a Slave but he that is afraid to die’, and felt that the authorities would only achieve slavery ‘by crushing in peeces (arbitrarily and tyrannically,) euery cordial hearted and Noun-​Substantive English man, that dare peepe out in the least to owne his freedomes and liberties’.70 In spite of this implied slur

64 cpw 3.190. 65 cpw 3.581; my emphasis. 66 cpw 5.1.130–​131, 259. 67 John Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative (1647), title page. 68 An Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace (1647), p. 1. 69 Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative, title page; Overton, An Appeale, sig. C. 70 John Lilburne, Strength out of Weaknesse (1649), p.  20; Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative, p. 67.

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on those who survived to be enslaved, the Levellers, unlike Milton, described not the people but the people’s oppressors as ‘servile’.71 The Levellers’ discourse of slavery emphasised the jeopardy the citizen body was in, but did not suggest that it was the qualities of the citizens which invited that, although a few servile men might choose to aid the oppressors. The Levellers remained able to envisage a citizen body largely united in moral courage, although their confidence did occasionally falter. In Milton’s vision, by contrast, slavery left a moral taint on the enslaved, and those who willingly yielded to slavery almost by definition deserved it –​even if that was just, as Christopher Hamel argues, because they were willing to connive in enslaving others.72 While dangerously servile individuals could undoubtedly endanger the state, Milton also imagined the mass of the people becoming servile. This raises again the question of the boundaries of his citizen body –​whether these might ultimately be based not on the natural free-​born status on which his grander statements about liberty rested, but on more compromised –​or fallen –​divisions or gradations between the noble and the base, the upstanding and the servile. Indeed, slavery or servility was for Milton the most extreme way in which a man might fall short of the kind of manhood which enabled him to be both an autonomous household head and a citizen.

Gender and Citizenship

Gender, and in particular the complex expectations of ‘manhood’ which contrasted ‘men’ not only with women but with boys and with slaves, was an important element in both Leveller and Miltonic constructions of citizenship. While both assumed the exclusion of women from formal political citizenship, the ways in which they used gendered language helped to build differing images of citizenship. The Levellers and Milton shared a gendered value-​system. Neither the Levellers nor Milton shook off the gendered norms of early modern politics, although Leveller women’s petitions and Milton’s divorce tracts (as well as his later poetry) actively reconsidered the significance of gender. Ann Hughes showed in an influential essay that the presentation of Leveller women in Leveller tracts served strategic purposes for the movement, and often centred on images of the 71 72

A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), p. 11; [William Walwyn], The English Souldiers Standard to repair to (1649), unpaginated: referring to hostile propagandists and army officers. Hamel, ‘The Republicanism of John Milton’, p. 59.

38 Foxley household, rightly headed by a male husband and householder, though potentially horribly disrupted by the exigencies of 1640s politics and the persecution of the male Leveller leaders.73 I am not quite as convinced as Hughes that the male householder (rather than males lacking that status) was always the paradigmatic citizen for the Levellers, and we should certainly note the contexts in which Levellers did evoke female equality. Lilburne did so in looking back to Adam and Eve as the begetters of ‘all and every particular and individuall man and woman, that ever breathed in the world since, who are, and were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority dominion or majesteriall power, one over or above another’. The implication, never spelled out, is that for authority to be exercised by men over women, just as for men over other men, ‘mutuall consent and agreement, for the good benefit and comfort each of other,’ must seal a transaction.74 The text, however, slides back into the male world of politics without considering whether this agreement would inevitably arise to establish a gendered order of domestic authority. The boldest of the Leveller women’s petitions claimed parity for women in spiritual matters (‘an interest in Christ, equal unto men’), but only a ‘proportionable’ (rather than equal) ‘share in the Freedoms of this Common-​ wealth’.75 However expansive their language might sometimes have been, the Levellers never sought political rights for ‘the poorest she’ to match those which Rainborowe demanded for ‘the poorest hee’ at Putney.76 Milton’s more extensive negotiations with gender are far too complex to do justice to here, and, like those of the Levellers, are ambivalent enough to have given rise to competing interpretations.77 But the importance of the household 73

Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan D.  Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 162–​88. 74 Lilburne, The Free-​mans Freedom Vindicated, p. 11. 75 ‘To the Supreme Authority of England, the Commons Assembled in Parliament, the Humble Petition of Divers Well-​affected Women’ (5 May 1649), in The Moderate, 43, pp. 1–​ 8, May 1649. 76 Patricia Crawford perhaps comes too close to suggesting that they were open to this possibility in Patricia Crawford, ‘ “The Poorest She”: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England’, in Michael Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) pp. 197–​218. 77 For an overview, see Catherine Gimelli Martin, ‘Introduction:  Milton’s Gendered Subjects’, in Catherine Gimelli Martin (ed.), Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–​15. Readings challenging Milton’s reputation for misogyny have often focused on Paradise Lost, influentially read by Diane McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Williams, Milton’s Leveller God claims Milton as a feminist. For a more negative view, see Diane Purkiss, ‘Whose Liberty? The

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for Miltonic politics is far clearer than for the Levellers:  in both his divorce tracts and his political works, Milton likened or linked the male householder’s autonomous exercise of authority over his wife and other subordinates in the household to his political freedom, and suggested that the political freedoms and duties of citizenship could not be meaningfully exercised by a man denied his authority at home.78 The authority of the male head of household should even extend, without the involvement of the state, to the ability to divorce an incompatible wife.79 While he conceded that, exceptionally, if a wife should ‘exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld’ she should indeed have authority over him as ‘the wiser should govern the lesse wise’, he never stopped to consider whether such women might thus also be entitled to political citizenship.80 Women, then, were assumed to be excluded from citizenship. In addition, both the Levellers and Milton saw masculinity as a characteristic feature of good citizenship. Lilburne repeatedly praised the publications of Levellers or sympathisers, including the petition of 11 September 1648, as ‘masculine’.81 ­Milton’s ideal citizen was depicted as manly and masculine in strongly gendered terms, although Milton also sought to redefine that masculinity away from merely physical courage and did not see all males as necessarily endowed with it.82 But more subtle differences open up in the use of this evaluative language. The Levellers hardly ever accused anyone of effeminacy (although Walwyn did throw the accusation back at Thomas Edwards), and although they sometimes referred to ‘weak’ or ‘silly’ women they did so in ironic tribute to the ordeals these women had faced or the wit and strength they had mustered, leaving an impression of women transcending the assumed limitations of their sex.83 Indeed, a Leveller woman might even act ‘like a true bred

Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts’, in McDowell and Smith (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Milton, pp. 186–​99. 78 cpw 2.229–​30; 2.438; 2.632; 4.625; 3.236. 79 cpw 2.347, 353. 80 cpw 2.589. 81 John Lilburne, The Prisoners Plea for a Habeas Corpus (4 April, 1646), unpaginated; Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative, unpaginated Proem; Lilburne, The legall fundamentall liberties, p.  20; John Lilburne, An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwel (1649), p. 5. 82 Gina Hausknecht, ‘The Gender of Civic Virtue’, in Catherine Gimelli Martin (ed.), Milton and Gender, pp. 19–​33. 83 Walwyn, A vvhisper in the eare of Mr. Thomas Edwards minister, p.  8; Overton, The Commoners Complaint, pp.  17–​18; William Walwyn, Walwyns Jvst Defence (1649), pp. 16–​17.

40 Foxley Englishwoman’, a phrase which comes close to creating a solid national body of women which compares with Lilburne’s ‘free-​born Englishmen’.84 This was where Milton’s use of language diverged from the Levellers’: not only did he explicitly assert that women were ‘an inferiour sexe’,85 but he also far more actively mobilised the value-​system of gender not just to praise good citizens but also to denigrate those men who fell short of this, whether an individual opponent like Salmasius, ‘effeminate and Uxorious Magistrates’ such as Charles i, or simply ‘unmanly’ citizens who could not be relied upon to uphold the cause of liberty.86 By using gender not just to assert the positive values of citizenship, but to cast doubt on the fitness of all men to live up to those values, Milton’s rhetoric was in danger of fracturing rather than building up the citizen body.

Conclusion

The Levellers and Milton used shared arguments to make the case for an ­ ngland not dependent on the will of a king, or of any arbitrary ruler. In discussE ing original freedom, consent, and political enslavement they used the same essential building-​blocks to construct their arguments, building-​blocks drawn from both ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’ traditions. Much of their positive evaluative vocabulary was the same: they valued vigorous, manly action in defence of liberty, based on reason and understanding. However, both theories and vocabulary could be differently deployed, and the resulting depictions of citizenship are strikingly different  –​challenging the claims of scholars who wish to assimilate Milton’s politics to Leveller thought. Milton’s vision of citizenship was more unsettled and ambivalent, oscillating between hope and doubt about the capacity of the people to rule themselves. When he invoked the authority of the ‘people’, it was a rather undefined or positively fictive body, which could be spoken or acted for by virtuous minorities. When he linked irrationality, immorality and servility with the ‘vulgar’ or ‘base’, he cast doubt on the capacity of the mass of the people ever to achieve the virtue necessary to speak for the people. When he likened men to women, children, or slaves –​those whose status or capacities put them outside the bounds of citizenship –​he cast doubt 84 Overton, The Commoners Complaint, p. 17. 85 cpw 2.589. 86 cpw 4.1.312; cpw 3.421; cpw 7.362; Hausknecht, ‘The Gender of Civic Virtue’, pp.  21–​4 rightly points out that although Milton did seem to fear a feminine kind of ‘contagion’, he also depicted men as falling short of being men through becoming boyish or bestial, as in this quotation where the ‘unmanly’ are compared to boys and babies.

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on whether the status of a man, or even a male householder, was enough to secure the status of citizen, or at least raised the possibility of gradations within citizenship. By contrast, the Levellers’ mantra of the ‘free-​born Englishman’ was designed to affirm that all men born in England qualified and their focus on ensuring political equality between citizens was central to their agenda. In practice they envisaged some exclusions from electoral citizenship based on dependence, but the rhetoric of their writings functioned to build up the solidity and uniformity of the citizen-​body of free-​born Englishmen, even while urging readers to live up to that perhaps demanding status. What role were these citizens, as imagined by Milton and by the Levellers, to play? Both Milton and the Levellers were writing to address moments of political crisis and political possibility: not politics as usual within a constitutional framework, but moments when the framework itself was under threat or was being remade. For both Milton and the Levellers the people had a crucial role in achieving and authorising such constitutive actions. In their right ‘of choosing, yea of changing their own Goverment’, in Milton’s terms, or in subscribing the third ‘Agreement of the People’, the final constitutional outline promoted by the Levellers, the people were exercising their ultimate sovereignty.87 But such constitutive acts of sovereignty stand at a distance from day-​to-​day governance. How regularly, and in what form, was popular power supposed to flow through the acts of everyday government? Michael Zuckert suggests that Milton’s framing of the right of the people to change their government in the Tenure ‘collapses the people’s constitutive power and their governing power’: there is no space for constitutionalism to stand in the way of the people’s will.88 Yet we have very little sense from M ­ ilton of what role the people should play outside times of crisis; and in times of crisis, it seems that the multitude will contribute to the momentum but may well defect from the cause, leaving a wiser minority to cope with the aftermath. Richard Tuck has suggested a new genealogy for modern democracy, running via Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau, and resting on the distinction between sovereignty and government, which enabled a ‘sleeping’ democratic sovereign to perform only occasional acts of sovereignty, while government was carried out without the direct involvement of the people.89 Although Milton did not separate sovereignty and government in this way, in practice he seemed happy for 87 88 89

cpw 3.207. Michael P.  Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 81. Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

42 Foxley popular authorisation of a government to become detached from the exercise of power, which in 1659–​60 he envisaged being done through a perpetual senate. Thus his high aspirations for citizen virtue might come to be expressed through a tiny group of active governors who did not even fulfil the Aristotelian requirement of ruling and being ruled in turn. The Levellers’ vision involved precisely the kind of fluid continuing relationship between popular and institutional sovereignty which Zuckert suggests for Milton.90 Since the electoral role of the whole population of independent free-​ born Englishmen was central, we might assume that this represented a step away from the virtue-​led ideals of classical republicanism, towards a wide but shallow kind of electoral citizenship. The Levellers gave the people the defensive role of curbing power and enforcing accountability91  –​through annual elections, the right of petitioning, a recall mechanism for errant MPs (in one 1647 document),92 and –​in extremis if not in everyday politics under a new constitution –​direct action of unspecified but potentially violent kinds. This might seem to reduce the people’s role to a kind of self-​defence rather than a positive political wisdom. But this view underestimates the Levellers’ generous assessment of the people’s potential, which partook of many of the moral and intellectual ideals which republicans might have thought suitable only for the members of a more narrowly-​defined citizen body, or only for people participating in the higher layers of that citizen activity. Voting itself could constitute a form of active citizenship;93 in the context of the increasingly politically-​ charged electoral activity which voters had experienced in the late 1620s and in 1640, the Levellers may well have imagined their broader electorate of well-​ informed and rational free-​born Englishmen voting on the basis of candidates’ proposed priorities and allegiances, and not just voting to throw out corrupt sitting representatives. One transitory proposal made by Lilburne or a supporter in 1645 suggested an even more meaningful form of citizen participation, proposing that ‘every free-​man of England, who is able, would bestow his servic[e]‌one yeere at least, freely for the good of the Civill State, in any Place or Office of Trust, whereof his skill and breeding doe fit him, to be most

90 Foxley, The Levellers, p. 77. 91 Cf. John P.  McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jason S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for suggestive accounts of robust democratic accountability mechanisms in early modern thought and practice, going beyond mere electoral accountability. 92 Overton, An Appeale, ‘Certain Articles’, p. 32. 93 Baker, ‘Franchise Debate’, p. 122.

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capable’. This ‘skill and breeding’ would not necessarily be associated with high birth: suitable men in financial need would be paid to enable them to undertake it.94 Harrington’s ‘modern’ republicanism was a ‘democracy’ where the people were distanced from power by tiers of election and the popular assembly protected the people’s interests purely by the exercise of a non-​deliberative veto. The classical republican reliance on the wisdom and virtue of a few still pervaded Oceana’s hierarchical constitution, but this ‘democracy’ included a role for those who lacked that virtue. Milton maintained a classical republican commitment to a citizenship which might be deeply demanding –​but was also apparently increasingly restricted, and might at most have ‘the resemblance & effects of a perfect democracie’.95 The Levellers’ model of both wide and meaningful participation was in dramatic contrast to both. Nedham was only slightly exaggerating when he said that the Levellers’ proposals put ‘the whole multitude of the people into the equall exercise of the Supreme ­Authority’ –​his definition of democracy.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Lilburne, John, The Free-​mans Freedom Vindicated (London, 1646). Lilburne, John, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton, An agreement of the free people of England (London, 1649). Milton, John, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe et al., (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–​1982), 8 vols. Nedham, Marchamont, The Case of the Common-​wealth of England, Stated (London, 1650). Overton, Richard, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyrany (London, 1646).

Baker, Philip, ‘The Franchise Debate Revisited: the Levellers and the Army’, in Grant Tapsell and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 103–​22. Foxley, Rachel, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 94 95

[John Lilburne or supporter?], England’s birth-​right justified against all arbitrary usurpation (1645), unpaginated. cpw 7.331 (my emphasis).

44 Foxley Hamel, Christopher, ‘The Republicanism of John Milton: Natural Rights, Civic Virtue and the Dignity of Man’, History of Political Thought, 34:1 (2013), pp. 35–​65. Hammond, Paul, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Hausknecht, Gina, ‘The Gender of Civic Virtue’, in Catherine Gimelli Martin (ed.), Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 19–​33. Jablonski, Steven, ‘Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John Milton’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900, 37:1 (1997), pp. 173–​90.

­c hapter 2

Democracy, Toleration, and the Interests of the People Alan Cromartie For most of its long history, the term ‘democracy’ has been regarded with hostility. Part of the fascination of the English Revolution has been the unusual spectacle, in a pre-​modern culture, of writers who were happy to appropriate the label. They understood ‘the people’ not only as the source from which all licit power must flow (a point on which there was in fact surprisingly widespread agreement) but as a political actor that had and ought to have a permanent and independent role in politics. The emergence of such thinkers is a surprising fact. It becomes yet more surprising when it is realised that those who were willing to think about ‘the people’ in this way were members of a relatively small minority even within the party that supported parliament. Whatever their other beliefs, they favoured ‘liberty of conscience’, that is to say, freedom of worship for those deemed conscience-​driven. In consequence, their major political problem was not so much the obvious one that Lady Fairfax shouted at King Charles’s prosecutor –​that ‘not half, not a quarter of the people of England’1 supported the procedures that led to regicide  –​as the fact that prospective arrangements involving majority rule were virtually certain to encourage persecution affecting significant numbers of English puritans. The problem, moreover, had little to do with former royalists. The parliamentarian mainstream was ‘presbyterian’ –​in other words, it favoured a uniform national church whose norms would be defended by some measure of coercion. As Edmund Whalley told the officers’ Council at the so-​ called Whitehall debate a week after Pride’s Purge, there was an incoherence in Leveller attempts to insert or imply a liberty in spiritual affairs as part of their ‘Agreement of the People’: ‘how can we term that to be an Agreement of the People which is neither an agreement of the major part of the people, and truly for anything I can perceive … not the major part of the honest party of the kingdom?’2

1 C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (Collins, 1964), pp. 154–​5. All books published in London unless otherwise stated. 2 ­Arthur S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1992), p. 134.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

46 Cromartie The history of the next ten years reveals that this perception was widely shared and probably well founded. The central political crisis of the English Commonwealth –​the Army’s intervention in 1653 to put an end to the Rump Parliament –​was shaped by a fear of the outcome of an unfettered vote even within a radically purged electorate. In the speech in which he welcomed the Rump Parliament’s successor (the unelected body since generally referred to as Barebone’s Parliament), Cromwell reported that the Rump had planned to use ‘qualifications’, that is, to take steps to prevent the disaffected voting. But the Army had feared that such measures would be inadequate: the officers ‘desired to know whether the next Parliament were not like to consist of all Presbyterians, whether those qualifications would hinder them or neuters?’ In Cromwell’s view, this justified exclusion of those ‘brethren’ –​a term that unmistakably meant fellow-​puritans –​who might be tempted to abuse their power: it is one thing to live friendly and brotherly, to bear with a love a person of another judgment in religion; another thing to have any set so far into the saddle upon that account as that it should be in them to have all the rest of their brethren at mercy.3 His anxiety was not that the election would be fixed, but that the likely consequence even of a poll successfully excluding cavaliers would be ‘bringing in of Neuters, or such as should impose upon their brethren, or such as had given testimony to the King’s party’.4 The two elected parliaments of his Protectorate confirmed that his anxiety was wholly rational. A  radical critic who quoted his speech complained that ‘notwithstanding these fine pretences, the greatest part of your Protectors first Parliament (so called) were Presbyters, Neuters or worse; and the second are as bad and worse than the former’.5 Nor did the subsequent experience of something that approached an unrestricted toleration significantly lessen its unpopularity. As Henry Stubbe remarked as late as 1659, ‘such is the posture of this nation at present, that if they be universally enstated in a perfect Liberty, they will invade Liberty of Conscience’. He added that ‘they who are for a free Toleration are the lesse numerous, beyond all proportion’.6

3 The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Wilbur Cortez Abbott, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), vol. iii, p. 59. 4 Ibid., iii, p. 59. 5 A looking-​glasse for, or an awakening word to the superiour, and inferiour officers (1658), p. 58. 6 Henry Stubbe, An essay in defence of the good old cause (1659), ‘Preface’ [sig.**4+4r.-​v].

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It might have been expected, then, that those who favoured liberty of conscience would have been drawn to one of two solutions. One way of addressing the problem was to sever the state from ‘the people’ in order to attach it to the coming reign of Christ. Fifth Monarchists objected to English parliaments precisely because parliaments resulted from elections:  ‘the greate objection which they made againste this Goverment [the Protectorate] was because it had a Parliament in it, whereby power is derived from the people, whereas all power belongs to Christ’.7 But this repudiation of parliamentary forms was hardly likely to win over moderate opinion. A more traditional response, adopted by John Milton, was to appropriate the term ‘the people’, but to identify that body with its ‘sounder part’. When his literary target Salmasius sarcastically enquired if it had been ‘the people’ (populus) who had purged the House of Commons, Milton responded I say populus. Why should I not say that the populus did what the more capable, that is, the sounder part of the senate did, in whom the true power of the populus was located. What if the majority of the senate should prefer to be slaves, what if they should prefer to sell the republic, should it not be permissible for the minority to stop it and preserve liberty if they can?8 Here Milton was appealing to an older way of thinking. One way of thinking of a populus was as what might be termed a moralised community: a group that became something more than a mere ‘multitude’ (the usual word, as we shall see, for a mere aggregation) because it was shaped by appropriate moral commitments. For Milton, the concept of popular rule was anti-​democratic because the phrase ‘the people’ implied the virtuous, a group that he assumed to be comparatively exclusive; he emphasised that he endorsed Salmasius’s opinion of ‘the lowest of the plebs’.9 In the last weeks of the Commonwealth, he was still fantasising about a self-​perpetuating aristocracy ‘wherin they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at thir own cost and charges’.10

7 8

The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth (Camden Society, 1894–​5), vol. ii, new series 54, p. 244. John Milton, The Works of John Milton, ed. C. W. Keyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), vol. vii, p. 356. 9 Ibid., vii, p. 392. 10 J[ohn] M[ilton], The readie and easie way to establish a free commonwealth, ‘The second edition revis’d and augmented’ (1660), pp. 27–​8.

48 Cromartie The weakness that was shared by such oligarchic schemes was that the characteristics that picked out the oligarchs had little if any connection with existing social structures. In the real political world, there was no solution to this problem: the more the regime reflected the balance of cultural power, the more likely it was to institute religious persecution. In the realm of ideas, however, there were developments that had the effect of rendering both liberty of conscience and democratic rule more thinkable. The distinction between a ‘people’ and a mere ‘multitude’ was not abandoned, but acquired a subtly different basis. The people was now conceived of a group of interest-​holders; political action, if licit, consisted in the rationally self-​interested defence of a regime protecting individual liberties. Though elements of this line of thought are implicit in Leveller writings, it found its fullest expression in pamphlets written in the 1650s by writers who appealed to classical ideas. A particularly striking characteristic of these writers –​John Streater, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, and Henry Stubbe –​was their explicit endorsement of the term ‘democracy’. When their underlying assumptions are correctly understood, the rise of toleration and of popular government turn out to form a part of the same story.

i

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to address two questions. The first has to do with the history of the concept of ‘the people’. The second has to do with the apparent paradox that thinkers who were happy to be called ‘democrats’ were actually members of a small minority with much to lose from genuine majority involvement. My argument diagnoses a discontinuity between an older classical conception of ‘the people’, in which the term itself implied a virtuous multitude, and a more modern conception in which the idea of virtue played no necessary part. It would, to be sure, be absurd to suggest that the ubiquitous notion of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ had no association with virtuous qualities; it proved, however, possible to mount an argument for giving ‘the people’ ultimate political control solely in their capacity as rational interest-​holders. As we shall see, it was of some importance that both the communal values involved in the earlier conception and the interest-​protecting procedures required by the latter could be described, in English, by the same term: ‘the laws’. Like most of the other materials that these thinkers had to work with, the notion of a rule ‘of laws’ could be found in Aristotle, whose categorisation of constitutional forms remained, throughout the period, the most important source in which ‘democracy’ came into focus. Aristotle had identified three

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different types of rule (by One, or by the Few, or by the Many). Each of these constitutions could be either good or bad, depending on whether the rulers pursued the public good or their own private interests. Within this familiar sixfold classification, the bad form of a single person’s rule was Tyranny; the good form, Monarchy. The bad form of rule by the Few was Oligarchy; the good form –​the rule of the virtuous –​was Aristocracy. ‘Democracy’ was the term reserved for the bad form of rule by the Many.11 It will be noted that this classification, according to which ‘democracy’ refers to a bad thing, implies a definite preference for government by the Few. The Greek word dêmos literally means ‘village’; in other words, it seems to connote a cross-​class whole. The Athenian assembly of the dêmos was in any case a gathering of the whole population. To the enemies of Athenian democracy, however, the dêmos referred to the Many, if not to the mob: a class that mismanaged the city for what it perceived (often wrongly) as its own benefit. For the most part, Aristotle plainly shared this attitude. It was a basic principle of his political thought that the distinctive purpose of the Greek city-​state was ‘living well’, that is, a life of virtue.12 Living well required a moulding of personality through habits ordained or encouraged by means of appropriate ‘laws’. Law was ‘mind without desire’; it was the necessary corrective of the distorting influence of the passions.13 The characteristic attraction of democracy was ‘freedom’,14 but the underlying assumption of his anthropology was that freedom without this corrective was undesirable. The version of rule by the Many that was unconstrained by laws gave opportunities to demagogues and in the end amounted to collective tyranny.15 The best form in practice achievable in many situations was the compromise solution that he called politeia, a kind of order balancing the claims of wealth and freedom.16 This kind of constitution had an obvious rationale: as rule by the Few was unstable, it was natural and prudent to buy stability by allotting to the Many some share of political power.17 A well-​known passage stated that this was best achieved where those of middling fortunes had a preponderance.18

11 Aristotle, Politics, ed. and transl. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 3.5.4. 12 Ibid., 3.4.3, 3.5.13. 13 Ibid., 3.11.4. 14 Ibid., 4.4.2; 4.6.4. 15 Ibid., 4.4.3–​7. 16 Ibid., 4.6.4–​5. 17 Ibid., 3.6.6, 5.6.4. 18 Ibid., 4.9.8–​10.

50 Cromartie Aristotle also mentioned two further arguments whose implications were pro-​democratic. In an admittedly tentative discussion, he noted that it is harder to corrupt a numerous assembly and also that the dêmos, considered as a whole, might have an expertise unmatched by any of its parts.19 These tentative suggestions remained available. It is striking, for example, that John Case’s treatise Sphaera Civitatis (1588) –​an academic commentary on The Politics –​ was relatively favourable to popular involvement. Case carefully distinguished ‘two types of multitude, one civilised, civic-​minded, and disposed to practical wisdom; the other rude, slavish, and impelled to evil: the former moved by intellect more than by appetite; the latter more by the senses than by mind’.20 He agreed with Aristotle that the former had a role in some varieties of decision-​ making: ‘mixed with better men they can much benefit the city (no less than subtle food mixed in with something coarse can benefit health)’.21 Though Case was sure that sovereignty should be possessed by monarchs, he saw an ancillary function for such a multitude in what he referred to as media administratio, including ‘counsels, judgements and elections’.22 Case’s example shows that a moral multitude could have a secure but subordinate role in a mainstream political theory that set out to make sense of Aristotle. In general, however, the Athenian experiment with democratic rule did very little to encourage democratic thinking. The Roman model was more influential. It could hardly be disputed that the ‘Senate and People of Rome’ had been an extremely successful compound actor and that the Roman populus had formed an ordered whole that exercised political power by voting. Moreover, every tolerably educated person knew that the very concept of the Roman populus was bound up with commitment to a cluster of shared values. In perhaps the best-​known passage of Augustine’s City of God, Augustine chose to criticise the Ciceronian view of the Latin word (or phrase) respublica: a term that was translated into early modern English by the English word (or phrase) a ‘commonweal’. On Cicero’s definition, a genuine respublica was a res populi –​ the idea of the ‘public’ presupposed the existence of a ‘people’ –​and a populus was ‘the assemblage (coetus) of a multitude associated by agreement on right (iuris consensu) and commonality of interest’.23 Augustine went on to remark that if this standard was applied, the Roman state had never been a respublica. 19 Ibid., 3.10.5–​6. 20 John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588), p. 253. 21 Ibid., p. 256. 22 Ibid., pp. 258–​9. 23 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and transl. W. C. Greene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, (2014), vol. VI, p.206.

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Within a pagan culture that knew nothing about ius (that is, about the absolute justice of the Christian God), there could be no true populus because there could be no consensus iuris. In consequence, he argued for another definition. The weaker sense of populus he chose to substitute referred to ‘the assemblage of a multitude not of beasts but of rational creatures associated by an agreed commonality of things (rerum) which it loves’ (in other words, earthly peace and earthly glory).24 This latter definition was an important move, detaching the legitimacy of human polities from claims they were founded on some kind of absolute right. But English thinkers generally focused on the former; given their patriotic pride in England’s legal system, they saw no reason to deny that the English common weal was founded in a true consensus iuris. Their main objection to the Ciceronian definition was to the disturbing idea that such a populus was kingless. As early as 1470, Sir John Fortescue remarked that ‘St Austen … saith that a People is a multitude of men associated by the consent of lawe, and communion of wealthe. And yett such a people beynge headless … is not worthye to be called a bodie’.25 A  people without a head was thus defective, so much so that ‘a people that wyll raise themselfs into a kingdome, or into any other bodie politique must ever appointe one to be chiefe rueler of the whole bodie’.26 But a people of this sort was still to some extent united even before it acted to erect a monarchy: ‘the lawe under the which a multitude of men is made a people, representeth the semblance of synews in ye body natural’.27 An important implication was that ‘as the head of a bodi natural cannot chaunge his sinewes … no more can a king which is ye head of a bodie politik chaunge the laws of ye bodie’.28 The social consequences were momentous. Unlike their counterparts in France, who lacked security of property, and were, it followed, poverty-​stricken and demoralised, the beef-​eating, beer-​drinking yeomanry of England were both industrious and valiant.29 The constitutional doctrine was inextricably fused with patriotic social theory. It is, however, worth noting that this vision of the people, if anything, cemented the role of monarchy. For Fortescue and most of his successors, the inescapable image of the body politic implied that acephalous order was

24 25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., pp. 230–2. I quote Mulcaster’s Elizabethan translation: Sir John Fortescue, A learned commendation of the politique laws of England, transl. Richard Mulcaster (1567), fo. 30r. Ibid., fo. 30v. Ibid., fo. 31r. Ibid., fo. 31v. Ibid., fos. 79–​86.

52 Cromartie inconceivable. Sir Thomas Elyot’s treatise The boke named The Governour (1531) defined a ‘public weal’ as ‘a body lyvyng, compacte or made of sondry astates and degrees of men, whiche is disposed by the ordre of equite, and governed by the rule and moderation of reason’30 and explained that the word ‘publike toke his begynnyng of people, whiche in latin is Populus; in whiche worde is conteyned all the inhabitantes of a realme or citie, of what astate or condition soever they be’.31 In Elyot’s view, ‘Aristocratia’ was open to corruption, while ‘Democratia’ would lead to tyranny or licence.32 He took it for granted, moreover, that ‘one soveraigne governour’ was ordinarily desirable.33 The English Reformation on balance reinforced the logic of this monarch-​ focused thinking. The famous opening sentence of Henry viii’s Act of Appeals (1533) echoed Elyot by speaking of ‘an empire … governed by one supreme head and king … unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people … be bounden to owe and bear next to God a natural and humble obedience’.34 On this royalist conception of the English polity, the unifying crown rules a variety of ‘people’ (there seems to be no question of a definite article). But on the crown’s own reading of what was happening, the Reformation was brought in by the head-​as-​attached-​to-​the-​body: in other words, by the king-​ in-​parliament. It was natural for Sir Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum (written 1565) to account for this by reference to a Roman analogue: ‘all that ever the people of Rome might do either in Centuriatis comitiis or tributis, the same may be doone by the parliament of Englande, which representeth and hath the power of the whole realme, both the head and the bodie’.35 Smith’s statement is rightly much-​quoted. It documents the presence, in a celebrated text, of a classical understanding of ‘the people’, in which parliament (including the ‘head’, that is, the monarch) effectively maps onto a republican assembly. Though Smith loyally insisted ‘that I  cannot understand that our nation hath used any other and generall authoritie in this realme neither Aristocraticall nor Democraticall, but onely the royall and kingly majestie’,36 his detailed account of the nature of English government was startlingly

30 31 32 33 34

Sir Thomas Elyot, The boke named the Governour (1530), fo. 1r. Ibid., fo. 1v. Ibid., fo. 6v–​7r. Ibid., fo. 6r. Geoffrey R.  Elton, The Tudor Constitution:  Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; ii edn), p. 353. 35 Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 78–​9. 36 Ibid., p. 56.

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hospitable to popular involvement. The sixfold classification of forms of government could offer helpful intellectual guidance, ‘yet you must not take that ye shall finde any common wealth or governement simple, pure and absolute in his sort and kinde’.37 The most striking single feature of his analysis was his surprising friendliness towards democracy. Even in modern monarchies, legitimate government required the ‘good will of the people’ at the moment of accession.38 Moreover, ‘changes of fashions of governement of common wealthes be naturall, and do not alwayes come of ambition or malice’.39 For example, ‘the source and naturall beginning of the rule of the multitude which the Greeks call Democratia’ was the wish of the Many ‘to save the politicke bodie, to conserve the authoritie of their nation, to defende themselves against all other, their strife being onely for empire and rule, and who should doe best for the common wealth, whereof they would have experience made by bearing office and being magistrates’.40 In English circumstances, Smith singled out freeholding yeomen –​‘which olde Cato calleth Aratores and optimos cives in Republica’ –​as the lowest class who regularly bore office, but noted that even the landless  –​England’s proletarii  –​were ‘commonly’ made churchwardens and ‘manie times’ constables.41 The best-​known Tudor book about the nation’s government thus went to some lengths to imagine the inhabitants of England in terms derived from classical writings about politics. It cannot be concluded that Smith was providing a record of a lived reality; the literary exercise that he was undertaking required that he discover the Roman civic virtues in England’s forty-​shilling freeholders. It is nonetheless important, for present purposes, that the availability of classical ideas about the nature of an ordered ‘people’ encouraged a positive vision of ‘democracy’ itself. The nature and the limitations of this kind of thinking might seem to point to an ideal of mixed government in which the political virtues imputed to the people (deriving from Fortescue’s picture of the English yeomanry) provided a possible basis for the kind of agency that is the focus of the present essay.42 It is, however, fundamental to my argument that this was actually the path not taken. In the political crisis of 1642, ideals of mixed government were of course available, but they were actually most

37 Ibid., p. 52. 38 Ibid., p. 53. 39 Ibid., p. 62. 40 Ibid., p. 62. 41 Ibid., pp. 75, 77. 42 The interpretation brilliantly expounded in John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

54 Cromartie prominent in the moderate royalist Answer to the Nineteen Propositions (1642). It was Charles, not his opponents, who insisted that ‘the good of Democracy is Liberty, and the Courage and Industry which Liberty begets’.43 As we shall see, the source of the democratising impulse lay in an altogether different pattern of ideas.

ii

When parliament gathered its Army in 1642 in order to resist the king’s foreseeable aggression, it carefully avoided claiming the power to make law. Its chosen legal instrument, the Militia Ordinance, was not, strictly speaking, a statute but a somewhat irregular measure that Commons and Lords together had judged appropriate. This feature of its position has often been ignored; historians have on the whole agreed with royalists that claims to an unfettered adjudicative power amounted to a grab for legislative sovereignty. But parliament’s way of framing its constitutional claims had a decisive influence on subsequent debate. In permitting the Houses to claim that they were acting as a court, it allowed them to pose as defenders of royal authority impersonally realised within the legal system. As the parliamentarian Charles Herle explained the faculty of Legem dare is not in difference, the question is about the Declarative, that of legem dicere, the Law is the rule, and cannot be framed without all the three Estates, but who must apply this rule by giving it the finall and casting resolution of its sense?44 Moreover, In Law, He judges not but by his Courts, in the meanest of which the sentence past stands good in Law, though the King by Proclamation or in Person should oppose it.45 Thus the Houses’ official position was that they were taking licit if extraordinary steps to defend the impersonal structures of Crown authority; conversely, 43

[Edward Husbands], An exact collection of all remonstrances, declaration, votes, orders, ordinances, proclamations, petitions, messages, answers, and other remarkable passages (1643), p. 320. 44 [Charles Herle], A fuller answer to a treatise written by Dr Ferne (1642: WingH1558B), p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 10.

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the royalist army was a gang of criminals. Under the circumstances of the crisis, the king had been absorbed within a legal apparatus. Unlike the theory of mixed monarchy (which of its nature valued the monarch’s agency as a component of an ideal mixture), this was a view of kingship that minimised the role of Charles’s personal opinions; indeed, it paved the way towards the radical conclusion that strictly personal monarchy was needless. In the event, the legislation that abolished kingship –​An Act for the abolishing the Kingly Office (March 1649) –​treated its personal aspect as at best superfluous: ‘the office of a king in this nation, and Ireland, and to have the same in any single person’ was ‘unnecessary, burthensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people’.46 There was, however, a weakness in this plausible position. The concept of representation to which the two Houses appealed was actually novel in its basic character. As we have seen, conceptions of the role of parliament encouraged by the notion of the body politic laid stress on the way it united the whole community: the king surrounded by the communitas regni was capable of doing things that the king alone could not. But the whole represented the whole. In the words by Smith we have already quoted, ‘all that ever the people of Rome might do either in Centuriatis comitiis or tributis, the same may be doone by the parliament of Englande, which representeth and hath the power of the whole realme, both the head and the bodie. For everie Englishman is entended to bee there present’.47 Commons and Lords together were the representative body (as opposed to the head) of the kingdom: the simultaneous presence of the whole community. The notion of ‘representation’ (that is, a ‘making present’) was a description, not an explanation, of the fact that the men who were present bound the absent. There was no need to speculate about the particular balance of interests involved or about the particular channels through which consent was passed. Given the situation of Tudor Protestants, this emphasis was very much what might have been expected. The Protestants were initially a small minority that wanted to use parliament to mobilise the nation. Their focus was thus on the power of the representative to act in ways that bound the represented. But in the 1640s it was harder to presume that the ability of representers to act so as to bind the represented could simply be taken for granted to the latter’s detriment. ‘Representation’ had become a problem, if only because royalists were anxious to cast doubt on parliament’s capacity to represent the people. As Henry Parker put it, ‘the vertue of representation hath beene denyed to the 46

J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–​1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; ii edn), p. 306. 47 Smith, De republica Anglorum, pp. 78–​9.

56 Cromartie Commons, and a severance has beene made betwixt the parties chosen and the parties choosing’.48 The intelligent royalist Dudley Digges responded that ‘the sense of it is, a trust is committed to [the Commons], and they are to be guided according to Conscience in the performance of it. Let it be so: but is not this clearely the Kings case, who is entrusted certainly as highly as they?’49 What was needed, it seemed, was an argument predicting that parliament’s behaviour would be better than the king’s. That argument was discovered in talk of ‘interests’. Charles Herle maintained that experience shews that most mens actions are swayed (most what) by their ends and interests; those of Kings (for the most part) as absoluteness of rule, enlargement of Revenue by Monopolies, Patents etc are altogether incompatible and crosse centred to those of Subjects, as Property, Priviledge etc, with which the Parliament’s either ends or interests cannot thus dash and interfere, the Members being all Subjects themselves, not only intrusted with, but selfe interested in those very Priviledges and Properties; besides, they are many, and so they not onely see more, but are lesse swayable.50 Just the same logic is observable in Henry Parker’s fascinating tract Ius Populi (1644). The main thrust of his argument is that parliament (without the king) quite simply was the people: it was ‘indeed nothing else, but the very people it self artificially congregated, or reduced by an orderly election, and representation, into such a Senate, or proportionable body’.51 In other moods, however, he tacitly admitted that this was an over-​statement. The argument that he presented for treating the two Houses as ‘the supreme reason or Judicature’ of the nation was that they could have ‘no interests different from the people represented, or at least very few, and those not considerable’.52 48 [Henry Parker], Observations on some of his Majesties late answers and expresses (1642), p. 15. 49 [Dudley Digges], An answer to a printed book intituled Observations on some of his Majesty’s late answers and expresses (Oxford, 1642), p. 32. There is more than one edition of this work allegedly printed at Oxford. I quote George Thomason’s copy. 50 Herle, Fuller answer, p. 10 (italics removed). 51 Henry Parker, Ius Populi (1644), p. 18. For a more elaborate account, see Alan Cromartie, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty, Popular Sovereignty, and Henry Parker’s Adjudicative Standpoint’ in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 142–​63. 52 Parker, Ius Populi, p. 19.

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It was, in other words, as interest-​holders that individuals were represented. When Ireton at Putney excluded the poor from elections, he naturally focused on their lack of interests: This, I perceive, is pressed as that which is so essential and due: the right of the people of this kingdom, and as they are the people of this kingdom, distinct and divided from other people, and that we must for this right lay aside all other considerations … For my part, I think it is no right at all. I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here –​no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom, and those persons together are properly the represented of this kingdom, and consequently are to make up the representers of this kingdom, who taken together do comprehend whatsoever is of real or permanent interest in the kingdom.53 What is most striking about this is the rapidity with which talk about ‘interests’ had been assimilated. Part of the explanation must lie in political writings with which the educated were quite familiar. Before the outbreak of the civil wars, the main political use of the idea of ‘interest’ was to supply analysis of foreign policy, as in the duc de Rohan’s famous maxim that ‘Princes command the people and interest [singular:  l’interêt] commands princes’.54 An interest-​based analysis could serve a range of causes; in Marchamont Nedham’s early work The case of the kingdom stated according to the interests of the severall parties ingaged (1647), ‘interest’ was the foundation of a case for royalism. There were, however, good reasons for the place of interests in proto-​democratic speculation:  the attraction of the concept was that interests predict. As we have seen, the occasion of the military conflict had less to do with power to create new institutions than with interpretation of the existing ones. It was widely assumed that the basic political problem was to locate the agent that possessed the right incentives to act as the defender of English liberties. The royalist solution was expressed by Dudley Digges, who thought it against common sense to fancy, that he which enjoyes all by the benefit of Lawes, should hinder the due administration of justice according to 53 Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 53–​4. 54 J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 36–​8.

58 Cromartie those Lawes, and so wilfully endanger not onely his rights, but safety, by putting his Kingdome into tumuls and combustion.55 The Rump’s official justification of its own position –​A declaration of the parliament of England, expressing the grounds of their late proceedings, and of setling the present government in the way of a free state (1649) –​made use of the language of interests to make very similar claims: They know their own Authority to be by the Law, to which the people have assented; and besides their particular Interests (which are not inconsiderable), they more intend the Common Interest of those whom they serve, and clearly understand the same, not possible to be preserved without the Laws and Government of the Nation; and that if those should be taken away, all industry must cease, all misery, blood and confusion would follow, and greater calamities, if possible, than fell upon us by the late King’s misgovernment, would certainly involve all persons, under which they must inevitably perish.56 Both views were plainly vulnerable to the same objection:  if rational self-​ interest predicts behaviour, then any government will have a clear propensity to put its private interest before that of the public. Only the people as a whole has no such interest. Thus John Streater’s A glympse of that jewel, judicial, just preserving libertie (1653) maintained that ‘seeing in Government that every Persons interest and good in that bodie is concerned, ’tis cleer that the power is essentially in the people’.57 The people, moreover, ‘have no other end in what they desire, but common equity; whereas otherwise great persons are swayed by several ends and interests’.58 Streater was not by any means indifferent to virtue –​his pamphlet is essentially a call to vigilance –​but he expected virtue to derive from understanding of the advantages of liberty: ‘everyone is to understand that he is equally interessed with any member in repect of the common Libertie’.59 The defence of law was crucial, but the object of the law was to preserve the status of individuals:  ‘all Law and Government originally ariseth 55 Digges, Answer to a printed book, p. 24. 56 A declaration of the parliament of England, expressing the grounds of their late proceedings, and of setling the present government in a way of a free state (1649: Wing E1499), pp. 24–​5. 57 John Streater, A glympse of that jewel, judicial, just preserving libertie (1653), p. 2. 58 Ibid., p. 12. 59 Ibid., p. 8.

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from the Law of Nature, to preserve all in being and propertie’.60 The solution that Streater favoured was thus a succession of frequent but shortlived parliaments allowing the represented to exercise control over the doings of their representers. To prevent the having the Power wrested out of the hands of the People by an assumed absoluteness of persons in trust; Suffer not great power to continue longer then one year in the hands of any one member of the Commonwealth. Doubtless, it was upon the same reason of State that that Act of Parliament was passed … that Parliaments should be chosen once a year, or oftner, if need be.61 At this stage, he avoided the term ‘democracy’, but he assimilated the English attitude expressed in legislation for annual parliaments to democratic elements of classical republics. As publisher of James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), he could claim to be the midwife to the greatest synthesis of interest-​talk with classical republican arrangements. If he was the J. S. who wrote What monarchie, aristocracie, oligarchie, and democracie is (1659), he came to believe that ‘democracy’ was just a synonym of ‘Free-​State, or Popular State, or Common-​ wealth’.62 There was, in other words, a clear democratising logic inherent in the English politics of interests. The working through of the idea that monarchs are entrusted with private interests encouraged the search for an agent that was fully trustworthy. If interests were predictive, then the correct solution was to trust in the agent –​‘the people’ –​with a collective interest in interests being preserved. These interests, moreover, consisted in individual rights of the sort that English law had long defended. In a revealing passage contesting Hobbes’s claim that ‘liberty’ had the same meaning under Turkish despotism as in the republican city-​state of Lucca, Harrington made it clear that political ‘liberty’ is ultimately reducible to private liberties: whereas the greatest [Turkish] bashaw is a tenant, as well of his head as of his estate, at the will of his lord, the meanest Lucchese that hath land is a freeholder of both, and not to be controlled but by the law; and that framed by every private man unto no other end (or they may thank 60 Ibid., p. 8. 61 Ibid., p. 3. 62 J. S., What monarchie, aristocracie, oligarchie, and democracie is. Together with a brief model of the government of the common-​wealth, or, free-​state of Ragouse (1659), sig. A2v.

60 Cromartie themselves) than to protect the liberty of every private man, which by that means comes to be the liberty of the commonwealth.63 Oceana prescribes representative institutions ‘so constituted as can never contract any other interest than that of the whole people’;64 the preservation of such institutions was to rest on the assurance that private interests infallibly add up to the public interest. The same untroubled confidence that interests predict pervades the ideas of Nedham in his democratic phase. In Nedham’s view ‘the main Interest and Concernment both of Kings and Grandees’ lay in keeping the people ‘in utter ignorance what Liberty is’; by contrast, ‘in Free-​States the People … become immediately instructed that their main Interest and Concernment consists in Liberty; and are taught by common sense, that the onely way to secure it from Great Ones, is, to place it in the Peoples Hands’.65 The ‘magnanimous, active, and noble temper of Spirit’ for which the peoples of free states were noted arose from ‘that apprehension which every Man hath of his own immediate share in the publick Interest’.66 Contrary to the assertions of the royalists and others, government by the people was ‘the onely preservative of Propriety’: the requirement of ‘common Consent’ had the foreseeable result that ‘every Man’s particular interest must needs be fairly provided for, against the Arbitrary disposition of others’.67 Moreover, talk of interests (understood as legal rights) evaded objections founded on the need for expertise; whatever else the people were incapable of judging, they could be assumed to have noticed if their rights were being infringed. As government was thought of as primarily a matter of redressing grievances, the people themselves were the experts on the art of government: they were ‘most sensible of their own burthens … and therefore it is but Reason, they should see that none be interested in the supreme Authority, but Persons of their own election, and such as must in a short time return again into the same condition with themselves’.68 It is true that Nedham, like Milton, insisted that ‘the people’ was not identical with the whole body of the population. The phrase did not mean ‘the confused promiscuous Body of the People, nor any part of the people who

63

James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 170–​1. 64 Ibid., p. 173. 65 [Marchamont Nedham], The excellencie of a free-​state (1656), p. 45. 66 Ibid., p. 54. 67 Ibid., p. 84. 68 Ibid., p. 36.

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have forfeited their Rights by Delinquency, Neutrality, or Apostacy etc’.69 But the spirit of their theories was wholly different. Milton’s ‘people’ excluded the poorest.70 It would forever be the case that the lowest of the plebs should be excluded from political action. By contrast, Nedham’s restrictive definition of ‘the people’ arose from a particular and local situation that would presumably be temporary; his interest-​based argument not only allowed but required the maximum feasible element of popular involvement. Streater, Harrington, and Nedham can thus be used to illustrate a single line of thought. In each case, the assumption that interests predict was used to press towards the shared conclusion that the correct solution was ‘successive parliaments’ elected by a vote of the whole people. The same can be said of a final instructive example: Henry Stubbe’s tolerationist pamphlet An essay on the good old cause (1659). What makes Stubbe’s thought revealing, for present purposes, is that he took up, and then dropped, the word ‘democracy’, but stayed in essence loyal to the pattern of ideas that seems to have made democratic politics compelling. An essay on the good old cause (1659) is highly sympathetic to Harrington’s ideas, ‘yet as limited to the good people which have adhered to the Good old cause’.71 This seems to have been thought of as a temporary expedient; another possibility was to introduce ‘some influencing Senate, who may so long continue as the necessity of the nation shall require’.72 In the long term, he thought that it was ‘as impossible for a Democracy to be partial, as for one upon a hundred Dice to cast as many [i.e.one hundred], or fifty-​one aces’.73 Only a few weeks later,74 though, his attitudes had hardened, apparently because he had thought through the implications of Sir George Booth’s presbyterian rebellion. His next publication, A letter to an officer of the army concerning a select senate, put flesh on the idea of an ‘influencing senate’ by distinguishing ‘the people’, who were the small minority of tolerationists who had been active in resisting Booth, from the ‘nation’, that is, the general population.75 The ‘whole Nation’ was to be charged with electing parliament  –​admittedly ‘upon due qualifications’ –​but the ‘people’ would choose the senate, which would control the army, the ministry, and the universities (that is the institutions where

69 Ibid., p. 71. 70 Milton, The Works, vii, p. 392. 71 Stubbe, An essay, ‘Preface’ [sig.**4+3v.]. Italics removed from Stubbe quotations. 72 Ibid., ‘Preface’ [sig.**4+3v.]. 73 Ibid., ‘Preface’ [sig.***4+4]. 74 George Thomason bought his copy of An essay at some point in September 1659. A Letter to an officer of the army is dated October 13. 75 Henry Stubbe, A letter to an officer of the army concerning a select senate (1659), pp. 61–2.

62 Cromartie the ministers were trained).76 Membership of the people was to be hereditary; ‘Papists, Prelatical and Presbyterial persons’ were to be forever excluded.77 In a startling about-​turn, Stubbe now argued that the Spartan constitution was a convincing precedent for aristocracy, while ‘the popular constitution of Athens presents us with very little that might endear it unto us’.78 Stubbe’s change of heart nicely reveals that it was toleration that he really cared about: the conclusion that he drew from the Booth crisis was that ‘the quarrel was Toleration or no Toleration, rather then Monarchy and the Stuartian interest’.79 It is, however, striking that he did not give up the underlying logic of his interest-​based thinking. He took it for granted that those who set up a government ‘may appoint Legislatours for themselves, but not for others directly’.80 The senate was to function as a supplementary safeguard, but ‘so much liberty is due to the such as oppose or are inconsistent with the rising Government, as may consist with the continuance thereof’.81 It was not ‘to intermeddle ordinarily either in the Executive or Legislative power of the nation’; its purpose was that ‘so they [i.e. ‘the people’] being secured, the other part of the Nation may enjoy that freedom which otherwise could not be permitted them with safety’.82 Though he dropped the word ‘democracy’, he did not abandon the thing. In other words, he favoured as much democracy as was compatible with toleration.

iii

Stubbe’s thinking is instructive because it clarifies the underlying structure of a cultural situation. In particular, it suggests a plausible answer to the perplexing problem that was raised at the start of this chapter: why did members of a small unpopular minority desire a political system that they themselves believed would be threatening to ‘liberty of conscience’? The essence of that answer lies in the possibility supplied by interest-​talk of radical separation between secular forms of order and private individual religious practices. To presbyterians like Richard Baxter, it was obvious that order required discipline,

76 Ibid., pp. 62–​3. 77 Ibid., pp. 59–​61. 78 Ibid., p. 5. 79 Ibid., p. 10. 80 Ibid., p. 49. 81 Ibid., p. 50. 82 Ibid., p. 61.

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and that religious discipline, provided by the church, was indissolubly a part of discipline in general; conversely, institutions that gave power to the people gave power to the enemies of Christianity. A long list of the enemies that godliness confronted included the Democratical Polititians that are busie about the change of Government, and would bring all into confusion under pretence of the Peoples Liberty or Power, and would have the Major Part of the Subjects to be the Soveraign of the rest; that is, the worst, that are still the most; and the ignorant, that cannot Rule themselves, and the vicious, that are enemies and hinderers of piety …83 The anti-​Presbyterians considered in this chapter had two convergent reasons to adopt a different view. First, the initial framing of civil war debate encouraged parliament’s soldiers to understand themselves as principled defenders of legal liberties. When the New Model Army leaders declared that ‘we are not a meer Mercenary Army, hired to serve an Arbitrary power of State’, they did so on the grounds that they had been ‘called forth, and conjured by the several Declarations of Parliament to the Defence of the People’s just Rights and Liberties’.84 Edward Sexby concurred that ‘if we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers’.85 In other words, the Army’s claim to standing in the matter rested upon defence of constitutional liberties that were, as it happened, primarily secular in content. One useful implication of this sort of emphasis was that the Good Old Cause could be regarded as distinct from the project of installing a Presbyterian church. Thus when Oliver Cromwell dissolved his first Protectoral parliament, he complained of a ‘strange itch’ of some MPs to ‘put their finger upon their brethren’s consciences, to pinch them there’, supporting his position with the well-​known remark that ‘to do this was no part of the contest we had with the common adversary, for religion was not the thing at the first contested for’.86 Secondly, the view of religion that all these writers shared depicted it as something that was plainly too important to be entrusted to another agent. In Harrington’s view, ‘democracy, being nothing but entire liberty –​and liberty of conscience without civil liberty, or civil liberty without liberty of conscience, being but liberty by halves –​must admit of liberty of conscience’.87 Religion 83 Richard Baxter, A key for Catholicks (1659), Ep. Ded. [sig.a4v]. 84 Looking-​glasse, p. 1. 85 Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, p. 69. 86 The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, vol. iii, p. 586. 87 Harrington, Political Works, p. 845.

64 Cromartie was a natural part of every human life; coercion intruded interest where it did not belong: ‘where religion is coercive, or in subjection to interest, there it is not, or will not long continue to be the true religion’.88 Nedham agreed that the effect of ‘bind[ing] mens Consciences to retain Notions, ordained for Orthodox, upon civill penalties’ was to ‘twist the Spiritual Power (as they call it) with the Worldly and secular interest of state’.89 Lastly, Stubbe thought that ‘things Spiritual’ were ‘of a different nature, and not subordinate’.90 The ‘most obvious and universall end’ of nations in erecting government was ‘the upholding society and entercourse by securing each in their property, and manage of commerce betwixt one another’.91 But things of a spiritual nature were entirely different: ‘men embody under Magistrates for upholding civill commerce, but they gather into Churches to maintain a spirituall communion’.92 Given disparities in spiritual gifts, it would be bafflingly irrational to ‘confer a power on their Magistrate to countenance, promote and uphold they know not what’.93 In an enthusiastic private letter, an Oxford friend regretted that you continued not your history of toleration downe to these times and [gave] us an account of Holland France Poland etc … when you have added the authority of dayly experience that men of different professions may quietly unite (antiquity the testimony) under the same government and unanimously cary the same civill intrest and hand in hand march to the same end of peace and mutuall society though they take different way towards heaven, you will adde noe small strength to your cause …94 The fact that this friend was the young John Locke is obviously suggestive: it seems to be a sign of a substantial overlap between the early history of democratic thought and the pre-​history of liberalism. It would be easy to conclude by drawing the connections:  the secular sphere occupied by talk of interests was conducive both to arguments for popular involvement and also to a politics that saw defence of rights as the sole licit reason for coercion. The more intense the focus on private interests, the more the magistrate’s duty of

88 Ibid., p. 845. 89 Nedham, Excellencie, pp. 148–​9. 90 Stubbe, Good old cause, p. 1. 91 Ibid., p. 12. 92 Ibid., p. 26. 93 Ibid., p. 27. 94 The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. i, p. 110.

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promoting godliness could be excluded from the moral picture. There is, however, another, perhaps less obvious, way in which these lines of thought can be connected. If, as has been suggested, these writers were inclined to think of ‘liberty of conscience’ as something too important to entrust to someone else, it followed that the interest-​talk of normal politics was something relatively unimportant. As Stubbe perceived, the unregenerate ‘nation’ could be entrusted with political power only when the true liberty he really cared about had been secured by rather different methods; the prize that really mattered had been taken off the table. In other words, democracy became acceptable precisely because the sanctity of liberty of conscience prevented it from being fully sovereign.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Case, John, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588). Harrington, James, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John G.  A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Nedham, Marchamont, The excellencie of a free-​state (London, 1656). Smith, Thomas, De republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Streater, John, A glympse of that jewel, judicial, just preserving libertie (London, 1653). Stubbe, Henry, An essay in defence of the good old cause (London, 1659).

Cromartie, Alan, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty, Popular Sovereignty, and Henry Parker’s Adjudicative Standpoint’, in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 142–​63. Foxley, Rachel, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Gunn, J. A. W., Politics and the Public Interest (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Pocock, John G.  A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1975).

­c hapter 3

‘All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people’: Democracy in the English Revolution Markku Peltonen

i1

In His Majesties Answer to the xix Propositions in June 1642, Charles i famously declared that there being three kindes of Government amongst men, Absolute Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy, and all these having their particular conveniences and inconveniencies. The experience and wisdom of your Ancestors hath so moulded this out of a mixture of these, as to give to this Kingdom (as far as humane Prudence can provide) the conveniencies of all three, without the inconveniencies of any one, as long as the Balance hangs even between the three Estates.2 So, according to the King, England was a mixed monarchy  –​a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and these elements were represented by what he called ‘the three Estates’ –​that is to say, the king, the House Lords and the House of Commons. What happens, we may speculatively ask, if one or two of these elements would be removed and abolished? The King provided an answer by indicating the ‘inconveniences’ which would follow if only one of the estates remained –​‘The ill of absolute Monarchy is Tyranny, the ill of Aristocracy is Faction and Division, the ills of Democracy are Tumults, Violence and Licentiousnesse’.3 Now, it so happened of course that in March 1649, in two consecutive acts, first the monarchy, then also the House of Lords, were abolished. So, according to the royal logic, England 1 Quotation from the title: John Parker, The Government of the People of England (London, 1650), p. 7. I should like to thank Quentin Skinner for commenting on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 Charles i, His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions of Both House of Parliament (London, 1642), pp. 17–​18. 3 Ibid., p. 18.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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became a democracy with all its inconveniences of ‘Tumults, Violence and ­Licentiousnesse’. It is surprising, given all the scholarly attention devoted to the history of the English Republic, that historians have not seriously examined the possibility of the English Republic having been a democracy. But the surprise turns into astonishment when one realises that historians have not done this despite the fact that this was not only what numerous royalists had been declaring throughout the 1640s –​that the Parliament was endeavouring to make England a democracy –​but also that this was what the royalists and Presbyterians were loudly announcing in 1649 –​that now England had indeed been turned into a democracy. As early as December 1648, it was noted that the aim of the Army was to suppress ‘a Monarchicall power: and establishing a Levelling Democracy’.4 The duke of Ormond claimed in late January that he was witnessing ‘the subversion of Monarchy and setting up the rule and government of Democracy’.5 Underlying all this, one critic was convinced, was humanist school education. ‘England’, he wrote in late January 1649, ‘within these 8. Years past, hath payed deare for the learning her Latine tongue’.6 ‘Kingdoms are turned into Common-​wealths, and Monarchy into democracy’, Edmund Hall, a Presbyterian and royalist, declared in July 1649.7 Finally, one is completely baffled when, reading more of the pamphlet literature of the republican period, it emerges that numerous pamphleteers took a positive view of the idea that England was or could very well become a democracy, and yet historians have ignored this. Although historians have paid no attention to the debate about democracy in the English Revolution, it did not escape the attention of some earlier commentators. Henry Neville, for instance, wrote that after Pride’s Purge (1648) ‘a Democractical Government’ had been ‘declared’ in England.8 Montesquieu concurred. He had this to say about the English Republic: It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impotent attempts of the English to establish democracy among themselves. … [T]‌he government was constantly changing; the people, stunned, sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after much motion and many shocks

4 The Loyal Sacrifice (London, 1648), p. 11. 5 James Butler, duke of Ormond, The Declaration of his Excellency (London, 1648), p. 3. 6 A Warning-​peece to Commons (London, 1649), p. 4. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014; 3 vols), vol. 2, p. 334. 7 [Edmund Hall], Manus Testium Movens: Or, a Presbyteriall Glosse upon Many of Those Obscure Prophetick Texts ([London], 1651), p. 3. 8 Henry Neville, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698), p. 284.

68 Peltonen and jolts, they had come to rest on the very government that had been ­proscribed.9 Taking my cue from such ruminations, my aim in this chapter is to examine the debate about democracy during the English Republic. What I seek to argue is that there were numerous defenders of the English Republic who saw it as a democracy, and that for them it was a good thing too. The constitutional debate of the English Republic, I suggest, was amongst the most wide-​ranging discussions of democracy in early-​modern Europe. More importantly, it was one of the only times in the history of European political thought before the nineteenth century that democracy was discussed in highly positive terms. There are consequently four central claims I am putting forward. First, I seek to argue that there were writers who explored the ideas and themes of democracy in their proposals for the constitutional arrangements of the English Republic. Second, many of those writers who defended the newly founded English commonwealth or free state equated it with democratic ideas or even with a democratic form of government. Third, some of these defenders of the Republic coupled democracy with representation. None of them used the term ‘representative democracy’, but some of them clearly implied that England was a democracy, which was governed by the representatives of the people rather than directly by the people themselves. It is arguable that this is the first time in European political thought that democracy was seen in terms of representation. Finally, for many of these defenders, the democratic form of government provided the best means to guarantee political accountability and some of them even argued that the people should be able to use ostracism as a way to safeguard accountability.

ii

During the years from 1649 to 1653 numerous writers advocated not only republicanism, but democracy. Their writings formed part of a much larger attempt to discredit monarchy in general and the House of Stuart in particular and to defend the commonwealth and free state. Already in January 1649, before the King’s execution, the author of The Armies Vindication argued that it was perfectly legitimate to alter the form of government. Whereas monarchy

9 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], transl. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), bk 3, ch 3, p. 22.

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‘was the worst’ form, ‘amongst all formes of Civill Government, Aristocratical or Popular is best and safest for the People’, as the pamphlet stated.10 In March 1649 another anonymous writer also argued for democracy. The author, who used the initials N. T., had already defended the Army’s Remonstrance in November or December, or at least he said that much in early January when he defended Pride’s Purge and the King’s trial.11 Less than two months later the same author had made some progress in his understanding of the political situation in England and published a sequel to his earlier pamphlet.12 The author was still harping on the people’s right to resist tyranny and the justice of the King’s trial.13 More importantly, he now also discussed the future form of government. He was convinced that the Commons’ intention ‘touching the Government’ would turn out to be highly beneficial ‘for the Publique’. He also had a firm opinion about the best form of government. As he put it, ‘I can rationally conclude, that the best of Governments is that which Aristotle calleth Aristocracy (especially if it be in part mixed with Democracy)’. Although the anonymous author seemed to advocate an Aristotelian politeia, he was convinced that democracy should be the primary element of the new constitutional arrangement.14 In May 1649, at the same time with the publication of the final version of the Levellers’ ‘Agreement of the People’, Edward Harrison, a former preacher of Thomas Harrison’s regiment, defended it by seeing it as a ‘Democracy’.15 Very soon the themes of democracy and popular government began to be explored in a more thorough way, and from 1650 until the collapse of the republic in 1653 several pamphleteers offered their analyses and accounts of democracy. The anonymous author of The Engagement Vindicated (January 1650) gave short descriptions of the three forms of government and pointed out that he advocated ‘a Democracy’.16 Also in January 1650 a Plymouth gentleman, Robert Spry, defended the Engagement and examined the themes of democracy in his dialogue Covncel of States-​policy. The tract was reprinted in July 1653 with the new title Rules of Civil Government.17 In early March 1650 John 10 11

The Armies Vindication ([London], 1649), title page. N. T., The Resolver, Or, a Short Word (London, 1648), pp. 5–​8. Thomason’s copy is dated 23 January, but the pamphlet itself has the date 1 January. I have been unable to identify the pamphlet defending the Army’s Remonstrance. 12 N. T., The Resolver Continued (London, 1649). Thomason’s copy is dated 12 March, but the pamphlet itself has the date 20 February. 13 Ibid., pp. 1–​2, 8–​9. 14 Ibid., p. 16. 15 Edward Harrison, Plain Dealing (London, 1649), pp. 7–​8. 16 T. B., The Engagement Vindicated (London, 1650), p. 5. 17 Robert Spry, Covncel of States-​policy or the Rule of Government Set forth (London, 1650).

70 Peltonen Parker, whose precise identity has escaped historians,18 pointed out that the English were now living under ‘a popular Government’.19 In October 1650 the Independent minister Nathaniel Homes declared in his London sermon that ‘the time is now at hand, to dethrone Monarchie, and to raise Democracie’.20 The inveterate pamphleteer Henry Parker joined the advocates of democracy in August 1650. In his anti-​monarchical tract, The True Portraiture of the Kings of England, he not only deciphered the problems of monarchy but also the virtues of democracy. He acknowledged that no form of government was completely ‘free from oppression and injustice’ because every form had its ‘peculiar advantages, and disadvantages’. Portraying himself above all partisan conflicts, Parker went on to assume that the present free state in England was a democracy. The example of ancient Rome and those of contemporary states clearly demonstrated that ‘in Democracies’ the people ‘do more flourish, and truly injoy the due benefits of Liberty’ than in monarchies. Moreover, democracies were more inclined to promote commerce and thus the common good. It was equally evident that ‘the publike banks of Treasure’ could be maintained only ‘in Democracies’. More generally, ‘the sanctity and untemerated chastity of publike Faith’, which was ‘the best and firmest basis of all Government’, was kept intact in democracies. These were such undeniable facts that ‘to dispute’ them was ‘to undervalue the report of our own senses’, Parker claimed and added that to question them would amount to a desperate attempt by ‘the enemies of our present Government’ to ‘upbraide this our popular model’.21 In Reformation in Courts, and Cases Testamentary, which came out in November, Parker again spoke highly of democracy. This time he argued for a law reform and defended civil law and its use in England.22 One of his arguments in favour of civil law was that it suited exceptionally well democracies. Of course, it had appeared ‘usefull in Monarchies’, but, Parker pointed out, it had been thought ‘by some’ to be even ‘more usefull in Democracies’.23 In 1651 in Scotlands Holy War, Parker continued to portray England as a democracy,24 making it clear that ‘we in England being a Democracy’ and emphasising that ‘we are well-​wishers to

18 See Sybil Jack, ‘John Parker’, in ODNB. 19 Parker, The Government, p. 9. 20 Nathanael Homes, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable Thomas Foote, Lord Maior (London, 1650), p. 34. The surname has frequently been spelled Holmes. 21 Henry Parker, The True Portraiture of the Kings of England (London, 1650), sig. A2r–​v. 22 For the context, see Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 17. 23 [Henry Parker], Reformation in Courts, and Cases Testamentary (London, [1650]), p. 4. 24 For Parker’s tract and its context, see Mendle, Henry Parker, pp. 172–​9.

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Monarchy elsewhere, even whilst we make choise of Democracy in England upon diverse urgent emergent considerations’.25 In August 1651 a defender of the Engagement asserted that ‘may we live under a Democracy we shall never much lust after … a Monarchy againe’.26 The lawyer George Charles Cock also acknowledged that, since England was ‘this Establishment without Kings or Lords’, it only had ‘the Democractique estate’ and was ‘the Democratique State’.27 The author of Certain Particulars, likewise in 1651, defended the Engagement in terms of democracy. Specifically referring to the words of the Act Declaring … England to Be a Commonwealth and Free-​state, the pamphlet announced: ‘without a King and House of Lords; which seems to mean an utter extirpation both of Monarchy and Aristocracy, and the setting up of a Government by a State near to Democracy’.28 The army radical William Erbery wrote in 1652 that ‘the present Government’ was compared to ‘democracy’.29 It was also at this time that the astrologer Nicholas Culpeper maintained that The Sun’s eclips’d in’s Throne, and cries aloud, O Kings, why, being mortal, are ye proud! Your Scepter’s gone; Democracy takes place.30

iii

One the most vigorous arguments for democracy was put forward by Albertus Warren in The Royalist Reform’d or Considerations of Advice, which Thomason bought on 26 November 1649. Warren, a lawyer, has mostly been seen as a conservative advocate of both a law reform and de facto argument in favour of obedience to the republic.31 However, he can be identified with much less 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

H[enry] P[arker], Scotlands holy war (London, 1651), pp. 47, 61. John Drew, The Northern Subscribers Plea (London, 1651), p. 60. George Charles Cock, English-​law (London, 1651), pp. 94, 112. Certain Particulars, Further Tending to Satisfie the Tender Consciences of Such as Are Required to Take the Engagement (London, 1651), p. 3. William Erbery, The Grand Oppressor, Or the Terror of Tithes (London, 1652), pp. 23–​4. Nicholas Culpeper, An Ephemeris for the Year 1652 (London, 1652), p. 20. Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–​1653 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1974), p.  111; Margaret A.  Judson, From Tradition to Political Reality. A  Study of the Ideas Set forth in Support of the Commonwealth Government in England, 1649–​1653 (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1980), pp. 20, 78–​80; Kevin Sharpe, Image wars. Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 422.

72 Peltonen conservative, indeed radical, causes. In October 1647 he published a treatise defending the New Model Army’s famous declaration from 14 June 1647,32 where the Army demanded the expulsion of the 11 Presbyterian MPs.33 The ultimate failure of the republic and the restoration of monarchy did not deter Warren from radical politics. In the 1670s he belonged to a group of radical Whigs that included Henry Stubbe and Charles Blount.34 In 1680 he published a defence of Martin Clifford’s deistical A Treatise of Humane Reason, which had come out in 1674.35 In The Royalist Reform’d, Warren endeavoured to persuade gentlemen to embrace the new republic and compared monarchy with democracy. Not only was democracy a better form of government in general; it was better for gentlemen in particular. Gentlemen had nothing to worry about the change of government. Of course, ‘ancient riches, learning, valor’ were important for ‘gentlemen; and gentries reputation’, but ‘the virtue of their Ancestors’ and ‘bloud-​worthiness’ were useless and ‘idle’ unless they themselves showed an equal degree of virtue. More importantly, their gentle status would not be guaranteed in a monarchy, where honour was conferred ‘by meere grace of the Monarch’ rather than by virtue.36 In fact, their honour would be much more safely preserved in a democracy. This was so because ‘Heroical virtues will thrive, and may be exercis’d better in a Democraticall, then a Monarchicall dispensation’.37 Warren thus advocated the old humanist truism of virtue as true nobility and combined this with democracy. It was difficult to find a ‘greater, or more pregnant incouragement’ to a ‘noble mind’ than a commonwealth ‘where a Gappe is … set open, for every ingenuous spirit, by Vertues stairs, to climbe up Honors Temple’.38 ‘It will appear in reason’, he also explained, ‘that men under a Democratick or Senatory rule, shall not, will not be wholly at the devotion of 32

For the declaration and its context see Austin Woolrych, ‘The Debates from the Perspective of the Army’, in Michael Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 53–​ 78, pp. 60–​1; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates 1647–​1648 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 117, 126; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–​1653 (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 178–​9. 33 Albertus Warren, A Just Vindication of the Armie (London, 1647), pp. 7, 49–​50, 21–​2. 34 James R.  Jacobs, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 141–​3. 35 Albertus Warren, An Apology for the Discourse of Humane Reason (London, 1680). 36 Albertus Warren, The Royalist Reform’d or Considerations of Advice (London, 1650), pp. 1–​2. 37 Ibid., p. 4. 38 Ibid., pp. 5–​6.

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a Prince or Tyrant, capacitated or impowred to throw them down causelessely from their deserved honourable trust and pleasure’. In other words, virtues were properly rewarded, and meritocracy upheld under a democratic rule. But everyone, not just the virtuous, would benefit from such a system. ‘Under democracy’, Warren insisted, men in ‘places of publick imployment’ would ‘do justice more boldly, and discover to the world, upon every opportunity, their gifts of vnawed nature’.39 There were further advantages to be reaped from a democratic form of government. One was the efflorescence of learning. ‘In such governments’, Warren explained, ‘where preferments will be gainable by desert’, it was highly likely that ‘Learning’ would ‘flourish’. Under a democracy everyone, no matter how lowly and poorly born, had a chance to excel, which would promote learning and virtues. It was not ‘money, or favour of friends’ which would prevail, but ‘vertue’ which would be valued. When the English had been ‘under Regal government’, ‘prerogatives, priviledges and exemptions’, which were nothing but ‘Enemies to the Muses’, had nurtured ‘injustice or Tyranny’.40 University education was clearly not what Warren, who appeared to have no such education himself, had in mind. On the contrary, he warned gentlemen about university scholars for they were ‘only skilled in Contemplation’. They had only read such ‘books about governments’, which had been written ‘in old darke times when Tyrants were the only Kings’ and when people did not understand what it was ‘to be envasseled unto despoticall Arbitrary powers’. According to Warren, ‘Academick men’, who had been educated with such books and ‘whose interest, and dependancyes were linkt to the Royall Seat’, only asserted ‘a Monarchicall and Episcopall governments’.41 Fortunately, the English could now enjoy a different kind of learning, which would bring real benefits. When England was a democracy and ‘a man may get a fortune by his learning, sooner then by his friends’, it was clear than virtue and learning were about to flourish ­together.42 Another major benefit of democracy was equality before the law. Warren declared that ‘nothing is more hurtfull to a free People then particular exemptions from generall Lawes’. The new democratic ‘Authority’ had ‘curtayl’d’ all ‘Royall or Subject prerogatives’ and ‘Regall non obstantes’ ‘by subjecting all men generally to Law’, which was a major ‘happiness to a Nation’.43 Furthermore, 39 Ibid., pp. 4–​5. 40 Ibid., p. 7. 41 Ibid., p. 10. 42 Ibid., p. 7. 43 Ibid., pp. 7–​8.

74 Peltonen in a democracy magistrates and officers were much better than in a monarchy. Again, this followed from the fact that democracies promoted virtues, and thus the best and most virtuous and learned men became magistrates. They were elected ‘by desert’ rather than by ‘Aulicall favour’, and ‘under Democracy or State-​government, offices publick will not in probability be often referred to Deputies’.44 In 1653 Warren added yet another benefit which accrued from democracy. He now argued that the English common law was especially suitable for ‘a Democratick government’.45 But his views had also changed; the common law also suited ‘Aristocratick, Annually elective Government’ and even the military rule of a ‘Praetorian’ government. Little wonder then that Warren now spoke highly of the Army.46

iv

In his account of democracy and the benefits it would bring about, Warren never discussed what he meant by democracy. He simply took it for granted that England was now a democracy. But other advocates of democracy gave succinct but clear definitions of democracy. For most of them, democracy simply denoted a government where power and authority were in the hands of the people. This was the definition the author of The Armies Vindication put forward in January 1649, insisting that in a democracy the ‘Supream and Soveraign power alwayes’ resided in ‘the People’. It followed that ‘the People have power, not only to convent, but to censure, depose and punish their Kings for their Tyranny and misgovernment’.47 Other democrats concurred. ‘The Democratick way’, one of them explained, entailed nothing less than that ‘all Power’ was ‘fundamentally in the People’. In a democracy the people had the sovereign power. Moreover, whomever the people appointed as their magistrates and officers, they were only the people’s ‘Trustees’.48 When John Parker argued that ‘all Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people’, he was simply giving the definition of a ‘popular Government’.49 The anonymous author of Certain Particulars suggested that democracy meant that ‘the chief power’ did ‘rest in the people; which if it may be rightly composed, in my apprehension, 44 Ibid., p. 5. 45 Albertus Warren, Eight Reasons Categorical (London, 1653), p. 5. 46 Ibid., pp. 5, 6. 47 The Armies Vindication, title page. 48 N. T., The Resolver Continued, p. 16. 49 Parker, The Government, pp. 7, 9.

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cannot but be a happy and a lasting Government’.50 Culpeper’s succinct definition was: ‘a Democracy, or to write English, That the Government shall com into the hands of the People’.51 When they maintained that the English Republic was a democracy, these democratic writers can be seen as taking the momentous decisions of the House of Commons of March 1649 to their logical conclusion. To take away monarchy and the House of Lords of the mixed constitution made England a democracy. It should be emphasised that these democrats were clearly cognisant of the revolutionary character of those decisions and hence of their own choice of saying this out loud. This is most obvious in their attempts to distinguish between a proper or good democracy on the one hand and an extreme or bad democracy on the other. Edward Harrison, in his defence of the ‘Agreement of the People’, put forward such an argument. Relying on Aristotle’s authority Harrison described the proper form of ‘Democracy’ as ‘the power of the People, when mean and indifferent men are by them chosen; neither of the richest, to avoid Tyranny, nor of the poorest, to avoid Confusion’. If however power was in the hands of ‘many very mean’, the consequence would be nothing less than ‘Anarchy’. Distancing the ‘Agreement’ from such a confusion and anarchy, Harrison continued: ‘those societies which consist of mean persons in power, is very good, and those Cities and Commonwealths are well governed, wherein there are many of the middle sort, who have more power then both the other parties’.52 Whereas Harrison endeavoured to distinguish the ‘Agreement of the People’ from bad forms of democracy, many other democrats distanced their own notions of democracy from the Levellers and their ‘Agreement’. The author of Engagement Vindicated did exactly this when he extricated ‘a Democracy’ from ‘the Agreement of the People’. Of course, many opponents of the republic claimed, though falsely, that the Republic and its Engagement advocated the ‘Agreement of the People’ –​‘an Argument much prest in a publique Auditory’. However, although the ‘Agreement’ had been, as he said, ‘concluded by some Pieces or Parts of the Kingdom’, it did not ‘reflect on the whole’ and had not been ‘matur’d nor ratified’.53 Nathaniel Homes likewise said that his ‘heart trembles to think of a popular parity; a levelling Anarchie, to which these times, to my terror, much incline among the multitude’. But this was not the only available concept of democracy. There was also what Homes called ‘a 50 Certain Particulars, p. 3. 51 Nicholas Culpeper, Catastrophe Magnatum (London, 1652), pp. 45, 72. 52 Harrison, Plain Dealing, pp. 7–​8. 53 T. B., Engagement Vindicated, p. 9.

76 Peltonen regular Democracie, assisted with an occasional Aristocracie in Trust’ and this was ‘most safe; as some experience may be seen, in Switzerland, Venice, Low-​ countries, and New-​England’.54 Robert Spry emphasised the same point when he distinguished between ‘a Democracy’, which ‘is a Government of all, to the good of all’ and ‘a bad Democracy’, which is ‘A government of a multitude’ for their private good. Spry’s analysis of democracy was also largely based on Aristotle and he listed four different types of democracy.55 The first kind was ‘the most ancient’ and ‘best’. It was that of ‘Husbandmen’, whose ‘life being laborious and full of businesse, they have least leisure to mutiny from their private cares’. The second type was that of ‘Shephards’, which was more or less the same as the first. The third kind was based on ‘Artisans and Merchants’ and it was ‘full of innovations through their continuall whisperings and private devices at their meetings’. The fourth was ‘a mixture of all those kinds together’, which, according to Spry, ‘Aristotle condemneth utterly’.56 Ultimately, the difference between a good and a bad democracy was the familiar distinction between a democracy governed by laws and a democracy governed by men. In the former, as Spry interestingly explained, ‘all might be Rulers’, whereas in the latter ‘all might rule’.57

v

To call the English Republic, where monarchy and the House of Lords had been abolished and where the House of Commons (or what was left of it) held sovereign power, a democracy might be taken to imply that it was a representative democracy of a sort. But to make such a claim can also be considered highly anachronistic because, as the common wisdom has it, the notion (and especially the term) of ‘representative democracy’ is of much later origins. Yet, while it is true of course than none of the democrats I have been considering used the term ‘representative democracy’, I think there is reason to argue that something like that is what they had in mind. Moreover, it was,

54 Homes, A Sermon, p. 32. 55 Spry, Covncel of States-​policy, pp. 41–​2. Spry compresses Aristotle’s account to a few words. The fact that Spry here lists four different kinds of democracies perhaps suggests that he was following Le Roy’s commentary, see Aristotles Politiqves, or Discovrses of Government, transl. out of Greek into French Louis Le Roy, transl. into English I[ames] D[ickenson] (London, 1598), pp. 342–​3. 56 Spry, Covncel of States-​policy, 41–​2. 57 Ibid., p. 40.

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I  should like to suggest, precisely the idea that the English democracy was governed by the representatives of the people rather than the people themselves that ensured, according to some of these authors, that it was ‘a good Democracy’ or ‘a regular Democracie’. The author of Engagement Vindicated demonstrated this clearly when he said that, in addition to monarchy and aristocracy, a third form of government, and the one which was presently in England, was by ‘the Representatives of a people, and so a Democracy’.58 He went on to describe the government of the English Republic as being ‘composed of the Representatives or Choise of the Kingdom, voting together in consideration and determination of businesses of State, and having an influence upon all Officers, Courts of Iudicature, without the assistance of King or Lords’.59 The upshot is clear as it is striking. The English republic was a democracy because it was governed by ‘the Representatives of a people’. Nathanael Homes likewise depicted democracy in terms of representation. It is true that when he declared that the world ‘inclined to a Democracie’, his most telling examples were ‘the Athenians of old, and Helvetians of late’.60 However, in his account of the English democracy, he emphasised its representative character. This, he wrote, emerged in ‘our choice of Burgesses of Towns, and Knights of the Shire, to sit in Parliament’. And it was ‘our Representatives in Parliament’ who made the laws.61 Perhaps the strongest argument about the close relationship between a good form of democracy and representation was presented by George Charles Cock. According to him, there were several different kinds of democracies. The first was such ‘where there is equality, and the greatest number Rule’. Cock called this form of direct democracy ‘simple Democracie’ and his judgment was particularly harsh; it ‘ever was a dangerous State’. Another form of democracy was where there was a kind of representation. This took place where ‘the whole body’, rather than ruling itself, chose someone to rule in its stead. When this someone could be anyone –​however ‘vile a wretch, he is fit for the place’ –​ the result was not much better than in a simple democracy. Cock’s example of such a democracy was led by ‘a Tribune of the people’.62 Nonetheless, there was also a third form of democracy, which was quite different from the other two forms. This was a democracy where the number of those who could elect representatives and also that of those who could be elected as representatives 58 T. B., Engagement Vindicated, p. 5. 59 Ibid., p. 9. 60 Homes, A sermon, p. 33. 61 Ibid., p. 33. 62 Cock, English-​law, p. 102.

78 Peltonen were limited in various ways. Without elaborating upon the details of how power and authority should be organised in such a democracy, Cock put his emphasis on the restrictions of citizenship. This democracy was, he wrote, ‘­setled in several choices, refining the grosser pars [sic] by degrees, and by wise limitations, restraining the way of confused meetings, and yet giving just freedoms, and to keep Justice pure, limiting the Electors as well as the Elected’.63 He listed various characteristics which would make men ineligible and unable to cast their vote. These included anyone who was or had been ‘Vagabond’ or ‘Thief’ and more generally any ‘out-​lawed person’ and ‘perjured person’. But he also said that ‘no servant’ could elect or be elected. Other restrictions could also be imposed. ‘Some’, Cock continued, would ‘have Christianly added, cast out of the Church, a common Swearer, Lyer, Tavern-​haunter, prophaner of the Lords Day, a Gamester’. But some would go so far as to say that those who were ‘not received into a Church-​fellowship’ should also be excluded from citizenship.64 Whatever restrictions were imposed on citizenship, it was clear that, for Cock as for many other democrats, the best form of democracy was such where the representatives of the people rather than the people themselves had power and authority.

vi

There was one additional important aspect of democracy which many of our democratic authors explored. This was the question of political accountability. They were convinced that democracy was the only form of government where political accountability could be ensured. This question had of course been crucial in the debates during the Civil Wars. Generally speaking, at the beginning of the decade the debate had focused on whether the king was accountable and to whom, but from the mid-​1640s onwards the Parliament itself had also started to be called to account. We can begin from the heated days of November 1648. On November 20, it took the clerk of the House of Commons four hours to read the famous Remonstrance which the New Model Army had laid before the House. One of the things the clerk read was this:  ‘Suppose the best Constitutions and strictest Laws imaginable in any State, yet their insufficiency and impotency, as to the preserving of publike Interest, without a power to punish those that violate it

63 64

Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 102.

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and them … is obvious to each considering man’.65 The Remonstrance, in other words, maintained that even the best constitutions were insufficient and impotent unless they had decrees against those who violate the same. To remedy this, the Remonstrance suggested that since, the ‘Representative body’, elected by the people, held sovereign power, it followed that they should also have power to hold anyone to account and even to punish them. What was most striking in the Army’s Remonstrance, however, was that the representatives of the people should be able to both hold anyone to account and to punish them even without any law. Because the ‘Representative body’, the clerk read, had ‘the supream trust’, they could ‘in all such cases where the offence … is in publike Officers’, who have abused or failed their trust, ‘call such offendors to account … either according to the Law … or [according to] their own Judgement’ where there are no ‘particular Lawes’.66 So, the Army explained to the House of Commons, the people’s representatives could not only hold anyone to account; they could punish them according to their own judgment simply for an abuse or failure of their trust. The majority of the MPs were horrified. They understood that the Army intended to prosecute the King. As the Remonstrance propounded: ‘that capitall and grand Author of our troubles, the Person of the King … may be speedily brought to justice for the treason, blood and mischiefe, he is therein guilty of’.67 Historians, although they have studied the Army’s Remonstrance with care, have not paid sufficient attention to the intellectual ramifications of its radical suggestion. On one level, of course, it is just an application of the standard early-​modern resistance theory, according to which lesser magistrates could resist a ruler who had blatantly betrayed his trust. On another level, it can be seen as an application of the concept of sovereign power. Given that the representative body had supreme power in England, there could be no law above them. Hence, it was possible to argue that they could use their own judgment even in a case where there was no law. Nevertheless, there is a third intellectual context into which we can place the Army’s Remonstrance, or so I would like to argue. Marchamont Nedham, who at this stage was writing for the royalist cause, was quick to point this out. For him, the implementation of the Remonstrance’s suggestions would lead to nothing but popular democracy. Nedham called the constitutional arrangements of the Remonstrance ‘a military-​democraticall Forme of Government’ and ‘a mere popular Tyrannie’. 65

A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord Generall of the Parliaments Forces (London, 1648), p. 47. 66 Ibid, p. 16. 67 Ibid, p. 62.

80 Peltonen At the same time, he made a careful comparison between the possible trial of the King and the possible purge of the House of Commons (which he rightly predicted) to the ancient political trials in which the entire citizenry acted as the ultimate judge. To prove his point, Nedham cited examples from ancient Greece. In Syracuse, the deposition of Thrasybulus had led to the ‘Banishments of such among them as should at any time be suspected’. Very quickly ‘the State’ of Syracuse had become ‘wholly popular’. More importantly, in Athens, from whose system of banishment the Syracusan banishment had been copied, they had also, as Nedham wrote, ‘erected pure Democracy, or Government by the people’ as a consequence of ‘ostracisme’.68 For Nedham, the establishment of popular democracy with the people’s power to control and punish their rulers issued stark warnings to his contemporaries. Banishment, he assured, would be used for purely selfish and destructive ends. The Syracusan example, where ‘Democracy carried it self so wickedly, that God raised up Dionysius the Tyrant’, suggested that ‘our Cromwell’ might take after such a tyrant. On a more individual note, Thomas Fairfax, commander-​in-​chief of the New Model Army, should think hard about the Athenian ostracism, which had led to the banishment of Themistocles, their most famous general. Perhaps Fairfax would be banished as soon as democracy has been established in England.69 What I should like to suggest is that the New Model Army’s Remonstrance with its radical proposals and its intellectual pedigree, which Nedham revealed to underlie it, had important consequences in the next few years. There were of course many important aspects in the classical theory of democracy, but one which recent historians have particularly emphasised was the accountability of the rulers to the people. If a ruler or magistrate was unaccountable he was nothing less than a tyrant.70 In The Politics, Aristotle underlined that (in the words of the first English translation from 1598) ‘as the correcting and calling to account of the Magistrates … the assembly or congregation of the people haue the soueraigne authority of all matters’.71 The English democrats concurred. Central to the democratic themes they discussed were the questions of how 68 [Marchamont Nedham], A Plea for the King, and Kingdome (n.p., 1648), pp. 25–​6. 69 Ibid., p. 25. 70 Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny’, in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.  15–​ 51; Simon Hornblower, ‘Creation and Development of Democratic Institutions of Ancient Greece’, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy. The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1–​16. 71 Aristotles Politiqves, p. 340.

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the people could control and oversee their governors –​to hold them accountable. That is to say, democratic distrust played an important role in the democratic theories of the early 1650s. Jason Peacey has recently noted the ‘continuous public oversight of the political elite’ and ‘the people’s role in ensuring political accountability’.72 What these democrats did, however, was, instead of informal means of accountability (such as reporting of parliamentary debates and investigative journalism) explore more institutionalised forms of popular accountability and distrust. In March 1649 one of our democrats defended the execution of Charles i exactly as Marchamont Nedham had warned a few months earlier. He not only argued for democracy; he also insisted that ‘the Democractik way’ entailed direct political accountability. This could be done, the anonymous author explained, when ‘such Trustees be questioned for betraying or ill managing their trust’. ‘Let it surely be provided’, he declared, that those whom the people had trusted with power ‘be questioned for betraying or ill managing their trust’.73 What I  should now like to focus on is these authors’ commitment to the accountability of the officers and magistrates and the respective vigilance of the people. For many of them, the magistrates’ accountability and the people’s control over their rulers were not only indispensable characteristics of a democratic republic; they were also chief forms of the people’s political participation. For Robert Spry, one of the means to maintain ‘a popular State’ was that office-​holders should ‘be called to an account’.74 How was this accountability to be achieved? One obvious answer to this question, and the one which had often been suggested by the Levellers, for instance, was frequent elections and an equally frequent rotation of officers. Our democrats similarly insisted that there should be a healthy rotation, both in the representative institution as well as in officeholding. Spry, in listing the means to maintain ‘a popular State’, insisted that one important factor was ‘by suffering no man to continue long in Office’.75 Another form of accountability was a more direct control of the magistrates by the representatives or even by the people. Spry mentioned the ‘great censure’ of ‘Magistrates’ in ancient Athens and argued that every officer should be called to account as soon as his term in office had expired.76 Indeed, 72

Jason Peacey, ‘The People of the Agreements:  The Levellers, Civil War Radicalism and Political Participation’, in Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds), The Agreement of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 50–​75. 73 N. T., Resolver Continued, p. 16. 74 Spry, Covncel of States-​policy, p. 44. 75 Ibid., pp. 43, 44. 76 Ibid., pp. 44, 42.

82 Peltonen in democratic Athens every official was required to submit to a review of his official conduct. In such a review any citizen could bring in charges.77 The anonymous defender of the Engagement who saw England being ‘a State near to Democracy’ also argued that by the term ‘Common-​wealth’ should be understood ‘such a policy, wherein the original of Government lies in the people, both to depose Magistrates abusing their Trust, and to elect and chuse others in their places’. It followed that ‘no man should bear rule over others, but by their consents, and in case of male-​administration to be questioned by them’.78 William Erbery, the army radical, insisted that it was precisely this power to call every magistrate to account which was the distinctive element of democracy. As he put it, ‘Democracy is in Switzerland, because their magistrates there every yeer give an account to the people of their Acts’.79 Political accountability also lay at the heart of Albertus Warren’s notion of democracy. In a democracy officers and magistrates were controlled quite unlike in monarchies, which was perhaps the primary reason why magistrates were better in democracies than in monarchies. In democracies, ‘all things’, including the magistrates’ performance, or, as Warren put it, their ‘carriages of such places’, were ‘laid forth, and subjected to general and publique question’. Without going into any detail about how this was going to be done, he also wrote that ‘a fixt, standing power for appeales, in cases of injustice, wil be existent, for punishing offences starting up, for which no law was’. In other words, Warren was suggesting that, in a democracy, magistrates were controlled by some kind of public questioning. Moreover, he was also arguing, along the lines of the Army’s Remonstrance of November 1648, that, in cases of misbehaviour or offences, magistrates could be punished even without a law.80 John Streater, a belated democrat, was equally convinced that the people were the best guardians of their own liberty.81 To ensure that no one had ‘too much power’, it was essential to call governors to account before they became too powerful. Roman history provided a graphic example. The decline of Rome had been caused, Streater said, when the ‘persons in greatest trust insinuating into the peoples favour, by that meanes enlarged their power, and

77

Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Accountability in Athenian Government (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 78 Certain Particulars, pp. 2, 3. 79 William Erbery, The Babe of Glory (London, 1653), p. 48 80 Ibid., p. 5. 81 John Streater, Observations Historical, Political, and Philosophical (no.  5, 2–​ 9. May 1654), p. 35.

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consequently became unquestionable’.82 Who could question the magistrates and governors? Streater was convinced that it was ‘the right of every Member of the Commonwealth but also of their duty, to oppose all absoluteness or illegal power’. He therefore suggested that ‘all persons upon the resigning … their Office, be required to give a publick account’. If there was a suspicion that magistrates are betraying their trust, then ‘a people … may constitute a Power to question them for their actings’.83 It was nothing less than a distinctive mark of a freeman (as opposed to a slave), according to Streater, that he ‘can bring them to be accountable, that govern, command or rule’.84 The people’s power and ability to control the nobility and the magistrates is most powerfully argued by another belated democrat, Marchamont Nedham, after his democratic turn, in his editorial essays in the Mercurius Politicus. This theme first emerges in his account of liberty, where all the emphasis was put on the people being its best safeguard. The people were the best guardians of liberty, Nedham pointed out, because they were not ambitious; they, unlike the nobility, saw power and authority as a burden rather than a benefit.85 This meant that the people could control their magistrates and the elite. One way of doing this was, as we have seen, through elections, because, as Nedham explained the logic of frequent elections, as soon as ‘a Governor’ was ‘reduced to the condition of a Subject’, he could ‘with ease be brought to punishment for his offence’. More importantly, all tyrants must be ‘liable to account’ and should be punished ‘with death’. But this was only possible if the people managed to keep all ‘Monarchs’ and senates ‘in an accountable condition’. This in turn was possible only when there were ‘no standing Powers’. Hence, there had to be what Nedham called ‘a due and orderly succession of’ the ‘supreme Assemblies’. His most telling example came, just as Erbery’s, from Switzerland, where ‘the People’ were said to be ‘free indeed’, because ‘all Officers and Governors in the Cantons are questionable by the People’. 86 In answering possible objections to his conception of a ‘free state’, Nedham spelled out the implications of his Swiss example. It was possible, he clarified, to complain that the elite would feel insecure when ‘the People assume unto themselves, to accuse, or calumniate whom they please, upon any occasion’. Nevertheless, whereas calumniation should never be allowed, the people’s 82 83 84 85 86

John Streater, A Glympse of that Jewel, Judicial, Just, Preserving Libertie (London, 1653), pp. 5, 10. Ibid., pp. 10–​12. John Streater, Observations Historical (no. 11, 27. June–​4. July 1654), p. 83. Mercurius Politicus (no. 77, 20–​27 November 1651), p. 1222. Ibid. (no. 91, 26. February–​4. March 1652), pp. 1441–​5.

84 Peltonen opportunity to accuse anyone in front of the assembly was absolutely crucial for the liberty of the people. As Nedham wrote, the ‘Liberty of Accusation by the People, before their Supreme Assemblies … is a thing … essentially necessary for the preservation of a Common-​wealth’.87 It is of some importance to establish what precisely is being claimed here. Nedham is carefully following Machiavelli in suggesting some kind of political trials in which the people’s supreme assembly acts as an ultimate judge over prosecutions brought by any ordinary citizen against any governor, magistrate or member of the elite. As Nedham put it in a maxim, ‘it most highly concerns the freedom of a Common-​wealth, that the People have a liberty of accusing any persons whatsoever’. Whereas calumniations were a ‘crooked way’ and ‘less used under the People’s Form of Government’, the ‘regular course’ of ‘admitting and deciding of all complaints and controversies’ was ‘by way of Accusation’ and was, according to Nedham, nothing less than ‘absolute necessity to the safety and well being of a Commonweal’.88 Nedham insisted that it was easy to see ‘what miseries our own Nation hath endured for want of this liberty against Kings and their grand creatures’. His example was not only the earl of Strafford but also the 11 MPs of the summer of 1647. ‘The corrupt party’ had sheltered them until ‘the Army, with extream hazard, brought in a Charge against them’. 89 Hence, Nedham’s respective interpretations of the New Model Army’s actions in August 1647 and in November/​ December 1648 were exactly the same. In both cases the Army’s actions were examples of the people’s democratic liberty to accuse ‘any persons whatsoever’. Whereas in November 1648 he had censured such a custom, now in April 1652 he advocated the same.

vii

There was one particular ancient custom which many of our democrats held up as an inspiring example to be followed. This was the Athenian custom of ostrakismos –​ten years banishment voted by all the citizens. For Aristotle, ostrakismos had been a central element in democracy,90 and so it was for Jean Bodin, who pointed out that ‘the insolent libertie of the auntient Greeke popular Common weales, proceeded to that libertie … or rather lewd madnesse, as to 87 88 89 90

Ibid. (no 96, 1–​7. March 1652), p. 1507. Ibid., p. 1509. Ibid., p. 1509. Aristotles Politiqves, pp. 162–​7.

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banish them that were more wise and discreet than the rest for the managing of their affaires’.91 As we have already seen, Nedham compared the purging of the House of Commons in December 1648 to ostracism. This idea was taken up in the early 1650s. In Robert Spry’s dialogue the scholar mentions, in his account of Athenian democracy, that the Athenians ‘banished any by Ostracisme’. His interlocutor, the country man, immediately pursues this topic further and asks: ‘What banishment was that Ostracisme, and for what time, and what the Transgression that made men liable thereunto?’ The scholar then explains how ostracism operated and notes that ‘it was used not so much to punish other Offences, as to abate the immoderate power of the Noblemen’.92 Another advocate of the republic wrote: ‘We need not fear Darlings of the multitude in this State; every one will labour to be a darling of the people; and none will make himself great, unless he meanes to be ruined, and be an Ostracisme’.93 In 1651, there appeared a translation of Virgilio Malvezzi’s essay entitled ‘The Praise of Banishment’, which insisted that ‘in Republiques, banishment hath been (in a manner) their chiefest guerdon’.94 The royalists, just like Bodin, found this Greek custom a democratic abomination. As one of them rhymed in early 1650: ‘Therefore the Democratick Stars did rise,/​And all that Worth from hence did Ostracize’.95 Sometimes banishment was seen as a relatively lenient measure amongst much harsher ones. A ‘Scottish … cordiall well-​wisher of the just freedom, and true interest of the people’ advocated a whole list of harsh measures for safe-​ guarding ‘the Liberties of the Republick’. Referring not only to Machiavelli’s account of the usefulness of accusations for the maintenance of liberty but also to what he called ‘the impartiall and severe proceedings of the Athenian, Lacedemonian, Cretian, Carthaginian, and of other Common-​wealths’, he recommended particularly severe methods to be used against the enemies of the republic. He therefore declared that ‘all Malignant and formall Presbyterian Incendiaries, should one way or other, be rooted out, if we minde to maintain our own Liberties inviolable’. Whereas in the case of ‘Prime Incendiaries, and leading men’ this meant that they ‘should be finally cut off’, in case of others who were ‘not so deep in the guilt, deserve not Physically, but Politically to be cut off … either by banishment or imprisonment’.96 91

Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweale, transl. Richard Knolles (London, 1606), pp. 251, 430–​9. 92 Spry, Covncel of States-​policy, 42–​3. 93 Edward Peyton, The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family (London, 1652), p. 103. 94 Virgilio Malvezzi, Stoa Triumphans:  Or, Two Sober Paradoxes, transl. T.P. (London, 1651), p. 15. 95 R[ichard] B[rome], Lachrymae Musarum (London, 1649), p. 79. 96 The Key of True Policy (London, 1652), title page, pp. 7, 9, 10–​11.

86 Peltonen Ostracism was also Nedham’s recommendation as a form of punishment for those whom the people wanted to accuse of abusing power and authority. He not only argued ‘that the people have freedom to accuse whom they please’; he also pointed out that ‘the banishment called Ostracism among the Athenians, was instituted … upon a just and noble ground’.97 Streater was no less convinced by the efficiency of ostracism. In order to prevent the governors from becoming too powerful, he said, ‘the Athenians banished such as had obtained, or did endeavour to grow too great in the peoples favour, they looking upon them as dangerous persons’.98 Likewise, when George Wither, the republican poet, wanted to emphasise the importance of Parliament and parliamentary elections in spring 1653 (just before Cromwell dissolved the Rump), he wrote Let it be everlasting banishment To him, who shall to change this Government From being a Republicke, …99

viii

I have argued that there was a distinctive body of democratic speculation or theorisation in the aftermath of the English Revolution. A number of pamphleteers were committed to see the future of the free state in terms of democracy and thus wanted to explore political principles which such a future might consist of. I have also argued that these democratic writers examined the ways in which the people could oversee and control the governors of the free state. The solutions they put forward for the accountability of the magistrates included a review of a governor’s conduct at the end of his term, popular political trials and the ancient Athenian system of ostracism. To put these solutions in modern parlance, our democratic authors were as interested in popular control as they were in popular power. It is arguable that their willingness to explore such topics in part explains Thomas Hobbes’s famous remark in Leviathan that by reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, 97 Mercurius Politicus (no. 106, 10–​17. June), pp. 1659–​60. 98 Streater, A Glympse, p. 10. 99 George Wither, The Dark Lantern Containing Dim Discoverie (London, 1653), p. 59.

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and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers.100

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

The Armies Vindication ([London], 1649). Certain Particulars, Further Tending to Satisfie the Tender Consciences of Such as Are Required to Take the Engagement (London, 1651). Cock, George Charles, English-​law (London, 1651). Homes, Nathanael, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable Thomas Foote, Lord Maior (London, 1650). Spry, Robert, Covncel of States-​policy or the Rule of Government Set forth (London, 1650). T., N., The Resolver Continued (London, 1649). Warren, Albertus, The Royalist Reform’d or Considerations of Advice (London, 1650).

Hoekstra, Kinch, ‘Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny’, in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Hornblower, Simon, ‘Creation and Development of Democratic Institutions of Ancient Greece’, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy. The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 1–16. Judson, Margaret A., From Tradition to Political Reality. A Study of the Ideas Set forth in Support of the Commonwealth Government in England, 1649–​1653 (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1980). Peacey, Jason, ‘The People of the Agreements: The Levellers, Civil War Radicalism and Political Participation’, in Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds), The Agreement of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) pp. 50–75. Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert, Accountability in Athenian Government (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament 1648–​1653 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1974). 100 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 334.

­c hapter 4

The Place of Democracy in Late Stuart England Hannah Dawson

i*

On the face of it, it is methodologically odd to ask whether there were any democrats in late Stuart England. Of three leading revolutionary polemicists of the period, neither Henry Neville, nor Algernon Sidney, nor John Locke identified themselves as such. Indeed, in various ways they positively distanced themselves from the appellation. To look, therefore, for democracy in their writing risks being deeply ahistorical, retrojecting our concerns onto them and thereby eclipsing their own. It risks putting abstract theoretical taxonomies above historical reality, and making castles in the air that bear no relation to what these authors thought they were doing. And if one were to look, and then to find, democracy in their writing, one would hazard not only anachronism, but also a high-​handed, arguably incoherent, epistemology. It would amount to our saying: they did not know that they were democrats, but they were. Or it might amount to a Straussian reading: they did know that they were democrats, but they had to hide the fact. It was the case, however, that these three authors wrote in fear, or danger, for their lives. Neville had been imprisoned in the Tower after the Restoration in 1663 for his intense participation in and defence of the Commonwealth. Locke, on Shaftesbury’s side in the Exclusion crisis and anxious about being associated with the Rye House plotters, fled to the Netherlands in 1683, and only, and then anonymously, published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689. Sidney was executed for treason on Tower Hill in 1683. One has to take seriously the possibility that they toned themselves down, that they were walking a vertiginous tightrope between what they wanted to say and what they thought they could get away with. Words are deeds, as they knew so well, and it would not be surprising if they stepped gingerly around the highly and negatively charged term ‘democracy’. It would have been both personally dangerous and rhetorically unwise to mobilise this dirty term in the war (of words) they were fighting. Moreover, the fact that they felt the need, explicitly and energetically, * I thank Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen for their extraordinarily kind, expert, and ­efficient editing.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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to dissociate themselves from the term raises the real possibility –​on a psychoanalytic as well as a communicative plane –​that they were protesting too much. That is, not only did they fear that they would have been perceived as democrats in their own time, but also that at some level they understood their proximity to, if not consummate embrace of, the concept of democracy. This possibility raises the further, albeit related, question of whether one can be said to possess a concept without the corresponding term. Specifically, might late Stuart revolutionaries be said to have believed in something at least akin to what we think of as essential to the concept of ‘democracy’, even if they did not call it that? This question is debatable. For a start, there is the objection that concepts and (which might be the same thing) meanings of words themselves change over time, so that what we mean by ‘democracy’ is different to what speakers in the late seventeenth century would have meant. This threatens to blow the whole project out of the water; it makes one wonder what on earth we are looking for when we are looking for ‘the concept’ of ‘democracy’. There is no essence of a concept; there is only language in use. Furthermore, since language is at least as constitutive of thought as it is reflective of it, it is hard to grasp how one might conceive of something as conceptually complex and precise as democracy in the absence of the linguistic structure in which it is enmeshed. Nonetheless, I am going to argue that there was (and is) something basic to the concept of democracy, strongly indicated in its etymology, to which these three writers were drawn. This is the idea of the rule of the people, the idea that the people should in some sense govern themselves. I do not mean thereby to ignore the doubts about anachronism, intentionality, and conceptual change that I have expressed above, far from it. Indeed, I hope precisely to bring out the ambivalence and historical specificity of their interventions. My argument is that these writers were engaging, often with frenetic self-​awareness, with the idea of self-​government, both in sympathy and anxiety. They felt both pulled and repelled by the prospect of democracy, and in the process stamped their own particular imprints on the concept. This chapter will bring out the conflicted character of their impressions. In many regards, these writers held wildly different views from one another. I treat them as a group, however, insofar as the three texts on which I am going to focus –​Neville’s Plato Redivivus, written 1679–​80, Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government, written 1681–​3, and Locke’s Two Treatises, written ca. 1681–​2 –​were broadly contemporaneous, written in response to the same practical context, and each a volley against, among other things, the absolute and arbitrary monarchy of Charles ii. They were writing, in at least one incontrovertible sense, in the same language, explicitly on behalf and in defence of ‘the people’.

90 Dawson This chapter will twist and turn in a series of manoeuvres that I  hope I have already begun to justify above. I begin by witnessing these writers self-​ consciously shield themselves from the charge of ‘democrat’. I then propose three ways in which their views are nonetheless consistent with ideas that might be thought core to the concept of democracy, namely: their belief that the origins and limits of political power lie ultimately with the people; their commitment to popular representation in government; and their thought that what the government ought to do is serve the people’s will and interest, irrespective of its moral content. Having laid out these writers’ democratic principles, I proceed to argue in a contrary direction that for all their flirtation with the popular will, in the end this is trumped by the public good. This appears to wrench our authors away from Pericles and back to Plato. The argument is not over yet, however. There is, it seems to me, a bracing combination of realism and scepticism that returns our authors, albeit in different moods, to something like democracy. I conclude by revisiting the methodological territory with which I began. The complexity and specificity of our authors’ engagement with –​for want of a better word –​‘democracy’ demonstrates not only the gulf that separates them from ancient Athens, but also the radical historicity and indeterminacy of concepts per se (if that is not a contradiction in terms).

ii

Revolutionaries in early 1680s England trod circumspectly around the term ‘democracy’ as if it might explode. With much ostentation, Sidney avers that ‘a pure Democracy can never be good’.1 By ‘pure Democracy’, he means that state ‘where the People in themselves, and by themselves, perform all that belongs to Government’.2 He is, as he is throughout the Discourses, countering Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, a text completed in 1631, but repurposed (and published for the first time) in 1680 to support Charles ii in the Exclusion crisis.3 At the point when we find Sidney distancing himself from ‘pure Democracy’, he is staving off Filmer’s claim –​supposedly via Xenophon –​that Athens and Rome were ‘places where the best Men thriv’d worst, and the worst best’.4 That is, a democracy, runs the accusation, is a place where the mob, who are no better than 1 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698), p. 138. 2 Ibid., p. 149. 3 See Cesare Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer (1588–​1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-​Century Political Thought (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 4 Sidney, Discourses, p. 138.

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beasts, run wild. Of this depravity Sidney desperately wants to wash his hands. At one point he admits that ‘pure Democracy’ could be good in ‘a small town’, but only there.5 Elsewhere, he insists that it is a fantasy. ‘I know of no such thing’, he pronounces with a jarring certainty, going on to declare, ‘and if it be in the World, [I]‌have nothing to say for it’.6 One can almost see him putting his hands over his mouth. He seems to have displaced himself entirely from the term. Interestingly, though, it bubbles up recurrently throughout his text. Locke hints at the explosiveness of the term when, also in full throttle against Robert Filmer’s patriarchalism in his (Locke’s) First Treatise, he throws the dreaded accusation of ‘Democracy’ at Filmer. All the farcically myriad ways in which ‘Fatherhood’ might, on Locke’s account of Filmer, ‘come into any hands’ –​for example, by election as well as by heredity, and even (apparently) by usurpation  –​issue in the unwelcome result that ‘his Politicks give to Democracy Royal Authority’.7 When it comes to nailing his own colours to the mast, now in the Second Treatise, Locke picks his way cautiously around ‘a perfect Democracy’, that is, that form of government wherein ‘the Majority … imploy all that power [of the community] in making laws for the Community from time to time, and Executing those Laws by Officers of their own appointing’.8 A ‘Common-​wealth’, he goes on purposively, is ‘not a Democracy’. Rather, it is simply ‘any Independent Community’.9 Like Hobbes, then, he is separating a (legitimate) state from any specific form of government.10 While Hobbes did not need to worry on this score, Locke felt he had to take care to emphasise that his preferred form was not (necessarily) democratic.11 These three citations are the only explicit mentions of the term in the entire Two Treatises. Neville makes it clear that ‘Commonwealth’ might, in fact, be synonymous with ‘Democracy’. Of course, when the monarchy and House of Lords were abolished in 1649, it was ‘a Commonwealth’ that England was declared to be. During that extraordinary period when constitutional opportunity was cracked 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 149. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 194. Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., p. 355. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 129–​31. See the interchange between Kinch Hoekstra and Richard Tuck in Annabel Brett, James Tully and Holly Hamilton-​Bleakley (eds), Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.  171–​218. Cf. Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign:  The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016).

92 Dawson wide open, democracy was openly called for, and it is likely that it was Neville who wrote or promoted the arrestingly entitled A Proposition in Order to the Proposing of a Commonwealth or Democracie, a broadside published on 14 June 1659 in support of Neville’s friend James Harrington’s ‘Propositions for settling the Government of this Commonwealth’.12 The synonymy recurs in Plato Redivivus, although the sympathy is now veiled behind the swathes of voices of the dialogic form, the author strategically decentred by the Noble Venetian, the Doctor, and the English Gentleman, Neville ostensibly hiding behind the albeit huffing and puffing, never settled, continually undermined, monarchism of the latter, while the Noble Venetian is allowed to unfurl his serene republic. The Doctor, picking up overtly on the English Gentleman’s prevarication, interjects ‘I begin to smell, that you would be nibbling at the pretence which some had before His Majesties Restauration of a Commonwealth or Democracy’.13 The English Gentleman rushes at the prosecution with denial, but almost immediately destabilises his position. ‘No, I abhor the thoughts of wishing, much less endeavouring any such thing, during these Circumstances we are now in; That is, under Oaths of Obedience to a Lawful King’.14 Practicality, then, emerges as a bigger block to democracy than its (un)desirability, but the energy of the sentence is clear: renunciation.

iii

Even so, I will now lay out three beliefs that all three authors express that seem to add up to a robust democratic agenda. The first of these beliefs is that political power derives from, and is ultimately limited by, the people. For all of Locke’s silence on the term ‘democracy’, he is explicit that political power lies with the people. Indeed, Locke’s concept of the people is political all the way down. Unlike other contractarian philosophers, such as Hobbes, who see the political sphere only come into being in the context of the state, Locke believes 12 13

14

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for ‘Neville, Henry’. Cf. Rachel Foxley, The Levellers:  Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013). Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus:  Or, A  Dialogue Concerning Government, Wherein, by Observations drawn from other Kingdoms and States both Ancient and Modern, an Endeavour is used to discover the present Politick Distemper of our own, with the causes, and remedies (London, 1681), p. 209. Ibid., p.  209. Cf. Gaby Mahlberg, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century:  Dreaming of Another Game (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009).

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that the people are naturally political. That is, they all, insofar as they are rational creatures subject to the law of nature, have the right to execute the law of nature, which is to preserve mankind.15 This right is nothing less than Locke’s definition of ‘Political Power’, which as Locke says, ‘every Man’ possesses ‘in the state of Nature’.16 Since, for Locke, individuals cannot effectively exercise this right in the state of nature, being at once too partial towards their own cause, and too weak in their own person, they must delegate it to the community as a whole, and thence to government.17 But in a deep, inalienable sense, it belongs to them, and it is circumscribed by the obligation to care for them. Coming at the people’s ownership of political power from an overlapping perspective, Locke also points to the freedom of the people in a different sense, employing a negative concept in parallel with his normative one. The right to preserve mankind, which is an emanation of one’s duty to God, is accompanied by, or runs together with, the freedom from subordination to another person.18 This means that people, and then ‘the people’, can only find themselves under legitimate human rule if they choose it. A rightful government, that is, ‘has its Original only from Compact and Agreement, and the mutual Consent of those who make up the Community’.19 Moreover, Locke stipulates that the people’s agreement must be ‘express’; it is not enough to take acquiescence as a tacit sign of consent as Hobbes had argued. Rather, the sole means whereby one might become a ‘Subject’, and ‘Member of any Commonwealth’ is by ‘actually entering into it by positive Engagement, and express Promise and Compact’.20 ‘Every Man’, as Locke declares, being ‘naturally free … nothing’ can ‘put him into subjection to any Earthly Power, but only his own Consent’.21 And by the same token, they may remove that earthly power if it breaches the terms of the agreement. Government only ever has, as Locke calls it, ‘a Fiduciary Power to act for certain ends’.22 The people entrust power to their rulers; in

15 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 271. 16 Ibid., p. 381. 17 Ibid., pp. 351, 332, 281. 18 See Hannah Dawson, ‘Natural Religion: Pufendorf and Locke on the Edge of Freedom and Reason’, in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen (eds), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), vol. i, pp. 115–​33. 19 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 383. 20 Ibid., p.  349. See John Dunn, ‘Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke’, The Historical Journal, 10:2 (1967), pp.  153–​82. Cf. Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–​1682 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005). 21 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 347. 22 Ibid., p. 367.

94 Dawson the event of a breach of trust back flows the power. With regard, then, to the balance between the people and their government, ‘there remains’, declares Locke, ‘in the people a Supream Power’.23 This sounds, therefore, like a political theory grounded ultimately and unequivocally on self-​government and ­people’s ­power. Before I proceed, I must interrupt my argument by noting the grating sound of Locke’s gendered language. ‘Every man’, we hear, possesses political power. ‘Every man’ may choose his government, and dispatch it if he pleases. What about women? Are they included in ‘mankind’, as the charitable interpretation goes? Locke does not spell it out at this juncture; the question does not occur to him, but the likely and implied answer is no. As he explains in his account of ‘Conjugal’ (as opposed to ‘Political’) society, the wife is subsumed under the person of her husband. Since they have distinct minds, and as Locke says, will therefore ‘unavoidably sometimes have different wills too’, one of them must have ‘the last Determination, i.e. the Rule’.24 ‘It naturally’, concludes Locke, ‘falls to the Man’s share, as the abler and the stronger’.25 While political society is animated by choice, on the basis of equality, marriage is organised according to the natural hierarchy between the sexes. As Aristotle, a believer in equality among equals, had suggested that if there were a person superior to others in excellence he should be a king to those people, so Locke appeals to nature to justify the variety of social structures.26 Locke’s account of a wife’s subordination to her husband is in line with the common law doctrine of coverture, according to which a wife’s juridical identity was assimilated into her husband’s, and all her property became his, including any gifts he might give her.27 Locke is not talking about single women, who in England at the time could function like men economically.28 However, even in the 1650s, when the relations between human beings were most radically levelled in the imagination, no one proposed that men and women might be equal politically. While ‘the people’ it behove government to serve might include women, albeit in a subordinate

23 24

Ibid., p. 367. Ibid., p.  321. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, California:  Stanford University Press, 1988) on women’s exclusion from, and subordination within, the social contract. 25 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 321. 26 Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 81–​3. 27 Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England (Harlow:  Pearson, 2012), pp. 45, 131. 28 Ibid., p. 46.

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way, women were excluded from ‘the people’ whose right it was to select and deselect the government. With this omission in mind, which immediately bleaches the deepest shades of democratic discourse, I  return to the rhetoric of self-​government. Sidney had already made it clear in his Court Maxims, written in exile in the mid-​ 1660s, that it is fundamentally the people who create and control government, which is why they have every right to get rid of it. The only possible rationale, explains Eunomius, why people would choose to be ruled by a king, would be, as he says, to ‘take off all their burdens’. If, then, they find themselves disadvantaged by their choice, then they may ‘repent of their choice and endeavour to unmake what they have made’.29 Sidney reiterates the point in the Discourses, again with an eye to revolution. Kings only exist for the ‘good’ of the ruled. They are ‘made by and for the People’.30 This is why, for Sidney –​and here we see him pushing back at the boundaries of language, sidling into the semantic field of ‘democracy’ –​one might go so far as to call ‘Monarchies’ nothing other than ‘Popular Governments’, since ‘the Power is conferr’d … by the free consent of a willing People’.31 Here, then, is democracy in monarchy. Playing again with the terminology, wanting to inject popular sovereignty into politics across the board, Sidney also turns his bombastic talents to the concept of a ‘Commonwealth’ –​a term that as we have seen was used synonymously with ‘democracy’ as well as being the name, still doubtless resonant for Sidney’s readers, given to England’s post-​regicide republic. Sidney insists that ‘all the Regular Kingdoms in the World are Commonwealths’ insofar as they are grounded on ‘general consent’.32 ‘All just Governments’ insists Sidney are grounded on the consent of all the people.33 Though Neville does not spell out the revolutionary implications as unambiguously as Locke and Sidney, he too is clear that the origins of governments lie in the people’s choice. First, they consented not to interfere with the property of other people. Then, they consented ‘to Laws, and a Government’ to protect that property.34 And again, the extent of political power is constrained by the intention behind that consent. As Neville’s English Gentleman puts it, government ‘was instituted for the good and preservation of the Governed, and

29

Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier and Ronald Janse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7. 30 Sidney, Discourses, p. 7. 31 Ibid., p. 149. 32 Ibid., p. 23. 33 Ibid., p. 23. 34 Neville, Plato Redivivus, pp. 29–​30.

96 Dawson not for the Exaltation and Greatness of the Person and Persons appointed to Govern’.35 It would be madness for the people to give up their natural liberty and let someone else control them unless they stood to gain thereby. The English Gentleman elaborates on this popular impetus in the context of ancient Athens. He recalls how the people of Athens ‘flock’d about Solon … desiring him to take upon him the Government, and be their Prince’, and declared that when they met in their assembly he would be their ‘choice’.36 Solon declined, telling them ‘he would never be a Tyrant’, but would instead forgive the people’s debts.37 His magnanimity bred the same in the aristocracy, or ‘great ones’, whose ‘hearts’ his example had ‘so changed and inlarged’. As a result, they too cancelled the debts owed to them by the people, and asked Solon ‘to make them a New Model of Government, and Laws suitable to a Democracy’.38 Thus was born ‘the Greatest, the Justest, the most Vertuous, Learned and Renowned [City] of all that Age’.39 Democracy appears as the superlative form of government, albeit shrouded in history and the anonymised speech of the English Gentleman. Moreover, it appears as compatible with significant roles for the one and the many. In Neville’s beloved Athens, as in the more general narratives of each of our authors, it is –​nominally at least –​the bright light of popular sovereignty that shines through the architecture of the commonwealth.

iv

The second arguably democratic belief that our authors articulate is an extension of the first. That is, they fill out their commitment to popular sovereignty with an intense interest in popular representation. Far from paying easy lip service to ‘the people’, they are preoccupied with how precisely the voice of the demos might be heard. They manifest this preoccupation in their careful and minute attention to constitutional arrangements. They do not for the most part, it should be noted, advocate the pure democratic form of government; as we have seen above, they distance themselves from this. Instead, as has also already been intimated, they tend to advocate a mixed, or finely balanced, mutually inhibiting, constitution whereby the interests of the many, as well as the one and the few, might be represented. There are two ways of glossing this 35 Ibid., p. 30. 36 Ibid., pp. 54–​5. 37 Ibid., p. 55. 38 Ibid., p. 55. 39 Ibid., pp. 55–​6.

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democratically: one is if the interest of the many (as opposed to the one and the few) is understood as the distinctly ‘democratic’ element, and the other is if the combination of the democratic, aristocratic, and monarchic elements is understood as the interests of people as a whole. Insofar as our authors employ the term ‘democracy’, they tend to speak in the former sense, but they are also committed to the latter point. That is to say, government ought to represent in a fine-​grained sense the people, both qua plebs, and qua everyone. Sidney and Neville both espouse a mixed constitution. Sidney says that ‘the wisest, best, and far the greatest part of mankind’ who had considered how to design a state had rejected the ‘perfect’ forms of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, preferring instead ‘Governments mixed or composed of the three’.40 Sidney is not neutral with regard to the mixture, however. The dynamic of the balance flows fast in the direction of democracy. As he says carefully, democracy probably only suits a ‘small Town’, but this does not mean we should ‘run into the other extream’, and then goes on to list a number of exemplary polities with a heavy popular element, ranging from Athens, in which ‘all Judgments concerning matters of the greatest importance, as well as the Election of Magistrates, were referr’d to the People’, to nations in this day, such as Venice, Genoa, and Lucca.41 It feels as though democracy is Sidney’s default position; it just needs support, rather than stamping out. Neville casts ‘this harmonious Government of England’ in this tripartite mould. ‘For our Constitution’, says the English Gentleman, his emphasis somewhat desperate, ‘was really a mixture of the three, which are Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy’.42 Neville not only draws monarchy into republican territory, but he explicitly refigures mixed constitutionalism as the definition of democracy. A ‘Democracy’, he explains, ‘is a Government where the chief part of the Soveraign Power, and the exercise of it, resides in the People’. However, when he goes on to describe what this means in more detail, he explains that ‘it doth consist of three fundamental Orders. The Senate proposing, the People resolving, and the Magistrates executing’.43 In a dazzling redefinition of the terms of debate, then, England appears in at least the partial guise of a democracy, and mixed constitutions as essentially democratic. Not content with the English Gentleman’s wishful refashioning of how England is governed, Neville concludes his text with some constitutionally radical prescriptions for how England ought to be governed. The four powers of 40 Sidney, Discourses, p. 23. 41 Ibid., pp. 130–​1. 42 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 132. 43 Ibid., pp. 45–​6.

98 Dawson the crown –​the power of ‘making War and Peace’, the power over ‘the Militia’, the power to appoint officers, and control over public revenue –​should be devolved to four corresponding councils. These should operate according to majoritarian principles and be accountable to, and drawn in rotation from, Parliament.44 This ‘circulation’, like the circulation of the blood, keeps the body politic healthy, stopping the people from becoming too ‘insolent’.45 While Locke does not go down the Harringtonian rebalancing route, he is clear that the centre of constitutional gravity should lie with the people. The legislative, which is the representative body of the people, is the highest power in the commonwealth, and no one is above its law.46 It is itself limited by the terms of the trust reposed in it by the people –​that is, to protect their lives, liberties and estates. It may not, therefore, for example, take their ‘property’ without their consent.47 It is superior to the executive, and separate from it, ensuring that the public good, as opposed to any private or selfish good, is served.48 There are structural mechanisms in place, therefore, to guard against that ‘too great a temptation to humane frailty apt to grasp at Power’, and to certify that ‘the good of the whole’ is promoted.49 Locke is aware, though, that ‘the people’ do not in fact tend to think as a whole. He seems in some moods to be neither afraid nor avoidant of their actual multiplicity. This is why the whole must in fact be determined by the larger part of that whole. As he explains, when any number of Men have, by the consent of every individual, made a Community, they have thereby made that Community one Body, with a Power to Act as one Body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any Community, being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move one way; it is necessary the Body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible it should act or continue one Body, one Community.50 44 Ibid., pp. 237–​41. 45 Ibid., p. 241. 46 Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 356, 358. 47 Ibid., p. 360. 48 Ibid., p. 364. 49 Ibid., p. 364. 50 Ibid., p.  332. See Mark Knights, ‘John Locke and Post-​Revolutionary Politics:  Electoral Reform and the Franchise’, Past & Present, 213:1 (2011), pp.  41–​86. Cf. Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain:  Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005); Mark Knights, ‘Petitioning and the Political Theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London’s “Monster” Petition of 1680’, Past and Present, 138:1 (1993), pp. 94–​111.

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Majoritarianism is therefore the only way to make sense of the fiction of a body politic created by the consent of the people. Locke’s attention to the granularity of ‘the people’ also emerges in his strictures on the rule of law. Locke not only says that the law ought to operate equally between different persons in a generic expression of equity, but he specifies that there ought not to be ‘One Rule for Rich and Poor, for the Favourite at Court, and the Country Man at Plough’.51 Up close, therefore, as well as from a distance, it seems that our authors are committed to the people’s involvement and reflection in government.

v

The third democratic principle I find in these authors is the commitment to the people’s will and interest. The idea that the purpose of political rule is to secure the public good had run throughout political theory of all colours. It had been the criterion of legitimate rule, the difference between monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, democracy/​polity and anarchy/​democracy (ah! Note the long history of ambivalence about democracy). The idea, however, that politics ought to serve the people’s interest, in the sense simply of what was to their advantage, regardless of its rights and wrongs, was not so straightforwardly or canonically propounded, and indeed was often thought to run in a contrary direction to politics properly understood. The public good, that is, was often figured as the opposite of particular interests, and it was the role of government to eclipse the latter in favour of the former. Relatedly, the idea that government ought to enact the people’s will, in the sense simply of what they happened to want, also went against the grain of political discourse. The will, if it is to have normative force, must be a good will. Since antiquity, various sceptical or hedonic theorists had countered that there was no such thing as the good, or a good will per se, but rather simply what seemed good to someone, abridging the good simply to the object of desire, to a person’s particular pleasure. Here ‘good’ is emptied of its moral content, and reduced to the subjective perception of advantage or preference. Sometimes, our authors explicitly suggest that the goal of politics is to reflect the people’s ‘will’ and ‘interest’. That they use these terms, rather than sticking exclusively to the ‘public good’ (to which they also appeal), strikes me as a democratic move. I am not thereby attributing to them a sceptical moral theory, nor a liberal political philosophy, simply drawing attention to their 51 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 363.

100 Dawson linguistic emphases and the vision of politics that these evoke: one bounded by the people’s will and interest, making no mention of a higher normative end. Interest operates ambivalently in late seventeenth-​century political discourse, both as the negative emanation of our selfish partiality, but also as that which nonetheless the commonwealth should nurture, as well as shot through with monetary connotations. Locke leaves us in no doubt of the problematic force of the phenomenon. ‘Interest’, he says, ‘biases’ us in our own favour, making it hard for us to see the objective good.52 He yokes it to that other ethical wrecker, ‘Passion’. Together, these powers cloud our moral vision, which is why legislators must not ‘Rule by extemporary Arbitrary Decrees’, but rather by ‘promulgated standing Laws’.53 It had been an almost perennial preoccupation for political theorists to stop one party in the state from pursuing their interest above the interests of other parties, and Locke is no exception. This is why members of the legislature should not sit in perpetuity. Just as with absolute monarchs, they might then pursue their own ‘distinct interest’, and, for example, ‘increase their own Riches and Power, by taking, what they think fit, from the People’.54 However, for all the disdain and anxiety that surrounds the notion of interest, it is precisely ‘the common Interest of the People’ that government is meant to oblige.55 This is not (always and exclusively) some transcendental moral concept of the sort that Rousseau would go on to make (in)famous, but rather, as Locke makes clear when he drills into his principle of majoritarianism, a somewhat messy, fractious agglomeration of the disparate interests of individuals. ‘In all Collections of Men’, Locke states, it will ‘unavoidably happen’ that there will be a ‘variety of Opinions, and contrariety of Interests’, which is why the only realistic approach to divining the interest of the whole is really just to add up the numbers.56 Sidney, who is also acutely aware of the way in which ‘interest’ can ‘pervert’ government, is simultaneously committed to the golden rule of promoting ‘the interest of the People’.57 He is also unblinking about the fact that this interest is selfish. ‘Rational Creatures’, he states baldly, act ‘in consideration of their own Good’.58 Neville’s English Gentleman is thrilled at the way in which his envisaged ‘new Constitution’ will make it structurally impossible for any particular interest to gain the upper hand, so that, for example, ‘The Lords cannot have 52 Ibid., p. 351. 53 Ibid., p. 258. 54 Ibid., p. 361. 55 Ibid., p. 409. 56 Ibid., p. 332–​3. 57 Sidney, Discourses, pp. 15, 342. 58 Ibid., p. 15.

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any Interest or temptation to differ with the Commons’.59 ‘All differences between the several parts of any Government come upon the account of Interest’, he says, but he has crafted the commonwealth in such a way that these different interests might be digested.60 Interest qua ‘expediency’ is not eliminated in this narrative but managed, and applauded as much as it is abhorred.61 Nestling alongside the valorisation of the people’s interest(s), in all its pragmatism, is the commendation of the people’s will. This is held aloft as the loadstone for political legitimacy. ‘The Will of the People’, says Sidney, is the only means whereby the English crown could have become hereditary.62 It is clear that, sometimes at least, Sidney is talking about the people’s will, blank and unadorned, in the sense simply of the people’s pleasure. As he explains, for example, no king is in office de iure, but only de facto, if the people wish it. ‘The People, and their Representatives’ have ‘in themselves the power of receiving, authorizing and creating whom they please’.63 Locke similarly invokes ‘the publick Will’ as the bedrock of executive authority. Magistrates do not act according to their own ‘private Will’ but rather according to ‘Will of the Society’.64 This insistence that the people must act according to their own will rather than the will of another identifies these texts within the tradition that Quentin Skinner has taught us to read as the neo-​roman liberty. A  person, and a people, are only free if they are sui iuris, that is, under their own will rather than dependent on the will of another.65 Sidney declares that ‘a People acting according to the liberty of their own Will, never advance[s] unworthy men’.66 Since, once more in unmistakable neo-​roman phrasing, ‘Liberty being only an exemption from the dominion of another’, it is the natural condition of men, and any dominion to which they choose to subject themselves might be just as freely dispensed with.67 Sidney not only seems to suggest that it is the liberty of the will that is paramount in guaranteeing political legitimacy, but that this is the case regardless of the content of that will. Should a government not provide ‘justice and protection’, then ‘the People’ may ‘best please themselves’.68 59 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 255. 60 Ibid., p. 253. 61 Ibid., p. 255. 62 Sidney, Discourses, p. 88. 63 Ibid., p. 411. 64 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 368. 65 See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cf. Philip Pettit, Republicanism:  A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 66 Sidney, Discourses, p. 150. 67 Ibid., p. 406. 68 Ibid., p. 407.

102 Dawson Again, this is the will of the people as the pleasure of the people. The people, in this formulation, are at liberty to do as they please. Locke seems to chime with Sidney. Hitting precisely the same, distinctive, notes, he declares that in the state of nature men are perfectly free to act ‘without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man’.69 By the same token, ‘The Liberty of Man, in Society, is to be under no other Legislative Power, but that established, by consent, in the Common-​wealth, nor under the Dominion of any Will, or Restraint of any Law, but what the Legislative shall enact, according to the Trust put in it’.70 Here, then, republican discourse pours into what I have been seeing as a conceptually democratic pool.71 To review that pool for a moment: the people are sovereign, they ought to be represented in government, and it is their free will that determines their political circumstances.

vi

For all their excursions into popular sovereignty, however, these authors also write in a contrary, anti-​democratic, direction. The people, on this competing account, are not free to do what they want, but are in fact bound by a superior, and divine, moral end. Government, it alternatively appears, is subject not to the people’s will as such, or indeed at all, but rather to a good will –​which might, it turns out in the most extreme volte-​face, belong according to Locke to none other than an absolute monarch. This, then, is emphatically not liberal democracy. It is not the case that anything goes, but instead a very specific normative course is prescribed, one that the recalcitrant multitude are as much in need of as any prince. If we look back to Locke’s definition of the natural liberty of man, we find that his ‘State of perfect Freedom’ operates ‘within the bounds of the Law of Nature’.72 That divine injunction to preserve mankind that we saw above as the basis for the people’s political power also ties their hands. Just as they are entitled to devise and pull the strings of government in order to protect the lives, liberties and estates of the people, so this is the absolute limit of their 69 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 269. 70 Ibid., p. 283. 71 For a parallel analysis of the mixture of political languages, see Rachel Hammersley, ‘Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington:  Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy’, History of European Ideas, 39:3 (2013), pp. 354–​70. 72 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 269.

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legitimate sphere of action. They, like the government to which they consent, are not free to do harm. This is why for Locke consent is a necessary but not sufficient condition for political legitimacy, and why a government for all its elective foundations might still be removed if it breaches the law of nature. Man’s ‘State of Liberty’, that is, ‘is not a State of Licence’.73 Sidney steps into line, rounding on Filmer’s assault on ‘the desire of Liberty’: ‘I desire it may not be forgotten’, he intones, ‘that the Liberty asserted is not a Licentiousness of doing what is pleasing to every one against the command of God’.74 The people are not free to do what they want, but only to act well. No one, however high or low born, should have ‘an unrestrained Liberty of doing that which is evil’.75 Proceeding along similar lines to Locke, Sidney explains that liberty is not the end, or only, goal, but rather, as he says, ‘the Nurse of … Vertue’.76 He quotes Machiavelli, and cites Roman history, to show that it works the other way round, too, that ‘Vertue’ is ‘essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty’.77 The people’s freedom is not enough; it needs to be accompanied, and constrained, by virtue. Legitimate government, it here appears, is determined not by the public interest or will, one-​sidedly understood, but rather insofar as it promotes ‘the publick good’, as Neville phrases the old, familiar, gold standard.78 It is, again to return to Locke’s account of the origins of politics, the definition of ‘Political Power’ that all its awesome scope over the life and death of human beings is ‘all … only for the Publick Good’.79 This means, says Locke, now kicking up the lines he had seemed to want to draw forever in the sand, that the executive might in fact rule by ‘discretion’, over and above the legislative, if he needs to do so in the service of the public good.80 This is why, deep into the anti-​absolutist territory of the Second Treatise, Locke suddenly comes out in favour of prerogative power, ‘prerogative being nothing’, he says defensively, ‘but a Power in the hands of the Prince to provide for the publick good’.81 Writing against his own 73 Ibid., p. 270. 74 Sidney, Discourses, p. 6. 75 Ibid., p. 154. 76 Ibid., p. 108. 77 Ibid., p. 105. Cf. Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 315–​35; Blair Worden, ‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, 24:1 (1985), pp. 1–​ 40; John G. A. Poock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 78 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 34; cf. also ibid., p. 255. 79 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 268. 80 Ibid., p. 375. 81 Ibid., p. 373.

104 Dawson cast-​iron neo-​romanism, he says that one might in fact be dependent on the will of another if that will is a good will. As he explains, ‘absolute power, where it is necessary, is not Arbitrary by being absolute, but is still limited by that reason, and confined to those ends’.82 Here, then, ‘arbitrary’ emerges as a moral category, as opposed to simply being a function of the will, the arbitrium. It is immoral government that is the problem, rather than absolute government, at this shattering moment in the text. Again, Sidney echoes Locke’s extraordinary move. Unpicking the notion of arbitrarinesss from the other direction to Locke, he explains that all government in the final analysis is ‘arbitrary’ insofar as it is the result of one will or another. That is both inevitable and non-​problematic. What matters is that government should be directed to the proper end. As he elaborates, ‘the difference therefore between good and ill Governments is not, that those of one sort have an Arbitrary Power which the others have not, for they all have it; but that those which are well constituted, place this Power so as it may be beneficial to the people’.83 This, the trump card of the public good, is why, in a moment not quite as startling as Locke’s embrace of prerogative power, but nonetheless indicative, Sidney avows his ‘veneration’ for monarchy ‘which is mixed, regulated by Law, and directed to the Publick Good’.84 Neville, who also takes ‘arbitrary’ to mean ‘by will’, explains that even ‘the most unlimited and arbitrary Monarchy’ would be satisfactory, and serve the moral ends of politics, if it were based on a relatively equal distribution of property.85 If what matters is a good will, rather than the people’s will, good rule rather than the rule of the people, then the situation looks especially parlous for the people, who do not always appear in a virtuous light. Each of our authors gives voice to this anti-​democratic moralism, to the idea that the masses might be the worst sort of people. Of course, this prejudice is exactly what Sidney is fighting from the pen of Filmer, who had relished citing Xenophon on Rome and Athens ‘as places where the best Men thriv’d worst, and the worst best’ with a view to ‘disallowing Popular Governments’.86 However, even as Sidney is wrestling to deny the supposed hydra of the mob, he gets entangled in

82

Ibid., p.  361. See Quentin Skinner, ‘On Trusting the Judgement of Our Rulers’, in Richard Bourke and Raymond Geuss (eds), Political Judgement:  Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 113–​30. Cf. Lena Halldenius, ‘Locke and the Non-​Arbitrary’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2:3 (2003), pp. 261–​79. 83 Sidney, Discourses, p. 455. 84 Ibid., p. 106. 85 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 88. 86 Sidney, Discourses, p. 138.

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affirming it. Depravity is not restricted, he admits, to such as that ‘dissolute crew that us’d to be companions to the Tarquins’ in Rome before the Republic, to the ‘licentious fury of these lewd young men’; there have ‘in all times’ been ‘the like vicious Wretches’.87 Trying to bring Aristotle round to the cause of ‘Popular Government’, Sidney says that the philosopher thought it was fine, ‘unless the multitude be composed of such as are barbarous, stupid, lewd, vicious, and uncapable of the Happiness for which Governments are instituted; who cannot live to themselves, but like a herd of Beasts must be brought under the dominion of another’.88 The mask of humanity slips in these texts, revealing creatures that are incapable of a rational will, unable to govern themselves directly, let alone collectively. Neville, likewise, stands in judgement over the people when he explains that one way in which the rot can set into a polity is when ‘the meaner sort of People’ are admitted into government, ‘these being’, as he says disparagingly, ‘less sober, less considering, and less careful of the Publick Concerns’.89 While Locke tends to refrain from insulting the people, probably because he is the least democratic of this chapter’s triumvirate and therefore never looks the people squarely in the face, he does, almost inadvertently, nail his colours to the mast. It is precisely because the people cannot govern themselves in the condition of nature that they need government to put a lid on the war, which though not identical with nature, as it was for Hobbes, nonetheless tends that way. ‘In the State of Nature’, he reminds us, man has the ‘right’ but not the ‘enjoyment’ of his safety. Indeed, there he is ‘constantly exposed to the Invasion of others’, where ‘the greater part’ of his fellows are ‘no strict Observers of Equity and Justice’. Left to their own devices, the people live in a state ‘full of fears and continual dangers’.90 The people, on this account, cannot, should not be trusted to govern themselves.

vii

But the world is not as it should be and we have to work with what we are. It seems to me that, both pulled towards and repelled away from the people, our authors settle in pragmatically democratic territory. For Locke, for whom the poverty of the people’s judgement was the reason for government in the first 87 Ibid., pp. 152–​3. 88 Ibid., p. 104. 89 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 68. 90 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 350.

106 Dawson place, in the end the people’s judgement is all we have to determine whether that government is acting properly. We therefore come back, full circle, to where we began: to the will of the people, however tattered it may be. In response to the ‘common Question’, ‘Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust?’, Locke replies ‘The People shall be Judge’.91 And if the people judge that their government means them harm, then, their court of appeal turned assailant, they may appeal to heaven to decide the case and take up arms. Locke’s realism that the people, for all their faults, must, in the absence of anyone else, determine political legitimacy is compounded by his epistemological scepticism, or to put it more precisely, his probabilism. As human beings we do not possess the sunshine of perfect knowledge; in moral matters we have ‘the candle’ that God has ‘set up in us’, and though Locke is desperate for that to shine ‘bright enough for all our Purposes’, he struggles throughout his life to put moral knowledge on a certain footing, and in old age seems to give up hope altogether.92 Locke’s return to the people, then, having spent so much of the Second Treatise trying to get away from them, is more a function of desperation than celebration. Sidney, on the other hand, not only has a matter-​of-​fact belief that the right of resistance is the only effective way to hold government to account, but he positively cheers on the revolutionaries. A citizenry that stands up for itself is a citizenry with ambition and courage, a citizenry that will bring glory to the commonwealth with which it identifies. It is in the nature of popular governments that they strengthen the people, ‘filling them all with such a love for their Country, that every man might look upon the publick Cause as his own, and be always ready to defend it’. The stronger the people, the more fired up they will be, alive with divergent views, and the more likely to spark conflict and insurrection. But this, says Sidney, is a good thing. Not only does it keep the government honest, but it keeps the polity healthy, flushing out corruption in a messier version of Neville’s circulation of officers. Yes, says Sidney, a vital, judgemental, people ‘may sometimes give occasion to Tumults and Wars, as the most vigorous bodies may fall into Distempers’, but ‘they soon recover, and

91

Ibid., p.  421. Cf. Neville, Plato Redivivus, p.  168. See John Dunn, ‘The Concept of Trust in the Political Theory of John Locke’ in Richard Rorty, J.  B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History:  Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 279–​301. 92 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H.  Nidditch (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1975), p.  46; John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity in Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 195.

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for the most rise up in greater Glory and Prosperity than before’.93 Sidney’s applause for disorder recalls Machiavelli’s. As we read in Machiavelli’s own Discourses, one cannot ‘regard’ Rome’s ‘tumults as harmful’.94 For a political body to thrive, it needs disparate interests to fight it out, precisely so that the common interest, or the public good, and –​connectedly –​true, self-​willing, liberty and free statehood, will be achieved. It is because ‘the populace’ fought ‘the upper class’ that Rome ascended the heights that it did; ‘all legislation favourable to liberty’, confirms Machiavelli, ‘is brought about by the clash between them’.95 While Neville’s English Gentleman spends much of Plato Redivivus distancing himself from revolution and civil war, he agrees with Machiavelli that it was ‘in the most turbulent times’ of the Republic that ‘Rome was much more full of Vertuous and Heroick Citizens, than ever it was under Aurelius and Antoninus’.96 The people might not have sufficient knowledge or goodness to pursue the public good, but our authors’ conclusion is that they turn out to be the highest authority on earth. That Locke and Sidney, and even, by implication, Neville, give the right, if not the monopoly, of violence to the people, puts a final democratic stamp on these theorists.

vii

I do not want to end, though, with the sound of the gavel. This chapter has demonstrated precisely the uncertainties, the contradictions, and the deep ambivalence of our authors towards democracy. It is impossible to say ultimately whether they were for or against it. And that is not simply because they express both democratic and anti-​democratic views. It is because there is no essential concept of democracy that they might accept or reject. Concepts only get their life through the thought, speech, and interactions of particular individuals at particular points in time and space. They are related to specific words, but they do not have the fixity, nor the identifiability of words. They transcend and move between words, as well as embodying them, blooming here and decaying there according to the specific purposes and pressures of speakers and circumstances. They have no independent existence abstracted

93 Sidney, Discourses, p. 209. 94 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 114. 95 Ibid., p. 113. 96 Neville, Plato Redivivus, p. 43; cf. ibid., p. 218 on ‘the Devil of Civil War’.

108 Dawson from their contexts, no consistency through history, and even when you try to pin them down at a precise moment they dissolve into air. Even, for example, at the apparent point of convergence between Locke and Sidney on the people’s right of resistance in England in the early 1680s, a fissure opens up between their democratic visions. Whereas Sidney presents the people as champing at the bit, Locke portrays them as conservative and disengaged from politics, only drawn in reluctantly when they can bear no longer the yoke cutting into their neck. ‘The people’, he avers, ‘are more disposed to suffer, than right themselves by Resistance’, and therefore ‘not apt to stir’.97 They tend to exhibit ‘a slowness and aversion … to quit their old Constitutions’.98 This bifurcation, in turn, reflects two approaches to democracy. One, intimated by Sidney, recalls the ancient agora that sucked you to its centre, and made the political personal with its demanding ethic of civic participation. The other approach, Locke’s, intertwines with a tolerationist agenda that pulls away from the centre, that wants to carve off a space for the individual –​the most important space, for the care of one's eternal soul –​where the state cannot reach. This, albeit with deep incoherence, points forward to liberal democracy. There is no such thing as a stable concept of democracy that the authors discussed in this chapter could have endorsed or repudiated. What I have shown instead are the mercurial ways in which Locke, Sidney, and Neville each strenuously confronted the power of the people, by turns fearful, disparaging, distancing, and approving, but never denying their might nor their right.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996). Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1988). Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 1998). Neville, Henry, Plato Redivivus: Or, A Dialogue Concerning Government […] (London, 1681). Sidney, Algernon, Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1698).

97 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 418. 98 Ibid., p. 414.

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109

Sidney, Algernon, Court Maxims, ed. Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier and Ronald Janse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).



Secondary Sources

Dunn, John, ‘The Concept of Trust in the Political Theory of John Locke’ in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 279–​301. Foxley, Rachel, The Levellers:  Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (­Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Hammersley, Rachel, ‘Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy’, History of European Ideas, 39:3 (2013), pp. 354–​70. Knights, Mark, ‘John Locke and Post-​Revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise’, Past & Present, 213:1 (2011), pp. 41–​86. Skinner Quentin and van Gelderen Martin (eds), Freedom and the Construction of Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Tuck, Richard, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

pa rt 2 Democracy and the World-​Turned-​Upside-​Down: Religion, Emotions and Polemical Fire

∵

­c hapter 5

‘A most dangerous rudeness’: Anti-​populism and the Literary Justification of Absolutism in the Fiction of John Barclay (1582–​1621) Matthew Growhoski This essay examines the political theory of the Neo-​Latin writer John Barclay –​or Jean de Barclay (1582–​1621) –​as presented in his two major works: the Menippean satire Satyricon, published in two parts in 1605 and 1607; and the semi-​satirical romance Argenis, first published in 1621.1 The author’s signature technique was the mixture of fact and fiction: he is best-​known as a pioneer, if not the originator, of the political roman à clef.2 What has not been sufficiently recognised is that his recreations of recognizably real events served a higher purpose: that of illuminating various problems in political philosophy and law, the implications of which his characters explore in lengthy, learned debates. Central to both works is a single, arch-​canonical question: ‘what kind of government is the best and most just …?’3 My aim here is to explicate the treatment of what Barclay termed, in the most direct instance, ‘popular[e]‌ imperi[um]’ or popular rule –​i.e., democracy.4 In short, Barclay’s fiction consistently represents popular democracy to be the worst of all possible forms of government, a thing born of ignorance, unjust and unworkable in practice, and inevitably destructive to the body politic. That he held a negative view is not unusual or interesting in itself: he was a member of the aristocracy, and his strong preference for one-​man rule –​i.e. 1 I wish to thank Vanderbilt University and the Huntington Library for generously supporting my research and the writing of this essay. 2 David A. Fleming, ‘Barclay’s Satyricon: The First Satirical Roman à Clef’, Modern Philology, 65:2 (1967), pp. 95–​102; Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), ch. 4, esp. pp. 160, 180–​5. 3 In the original, ‘ecquod inter homines esset aequissimum imperii genus’ in John Barclay, Argenis, ed. Mark T. Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber, Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae (Assen:  Royal Van Gorcum, 2004, pp.  204/​5). Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Barclay refer to the bilingual critical editions. Page numbers in the format ‘#/​#’ indicate facing Latin/​ English texts. 4 Ibid., pp. 206/​7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

114 Growhoski monarchy –​was in keeping with most European thinkers dating back to antiquity. Barclay’s ideas about democracy are historically significant in relation to his belief that kingly authority should have no earthly limits whatsoever. The familiar term ‘absolutist’ is entirely appropriate to describe him, so long as one accepts that there was a broad spectrum of absolutist thought, and that Barclay sat towards the far end of that spectrum, to the right of Jean Bodin and King James vi & i, his two most obvious influences.5 As I will demonstrate, Barclay’s vehemently negative depiction of popularity was key to establishing and justifying his case for the superiority of absolutism. He was one of the best-​selling popular authors of the seventeenth century, and nowhere more popular than in Britain, where he spent the longest settled period of his adult life.6 In long-​term perspective, his major achievement was the use of appealing fictions to disseminate a distinctively anti-​democratic and anti-​populist strand of absolutist thought throughout the whole of Europe and beyond.

i

Barclay’s early modern readers, on both sides of the English Channel, understood him to be a British author, first of all because that is how he represented himself in print. I use ‘British’ advisedly: the dedication to Satyricon i, his literary debut, addresses James vi & i as ‘Britanniarum Monarchae’. The same letter describes the king as his sovereign and patron, and boasts of his access to the royal ‘secretum’, or private chambers.7 Barclay’s friendship with James proved to be contingent, but it was not a fiction. His sense of British identity, meanwhile, was hereditary and lifelong. He was born in Lorraine and his mother tongue was French. Nevertheless, he was by birth-​right a Scottish aristocrat, by law a recusant Catholic exile, and by inclination a Stuart loyalist. His father, the noted jurisconsult and absolutist theorist William Barclay (1546–​ 1608) was born in Aberdeen:  the tragic example of Mary, Queen of Scots is 5 My conception follows that of Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Royalism’, in James H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 347–​50. Cf. the more restricted definition in Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 6 Mark Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber, ‘Introduction,’ in Barclay, Argenis, p. 30. 7 John Barclay, Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (Euphormio’s Satyricon) 1605–​1607, transl. David A. Fleming, Bibliotheca Humanistica & Reformatorica 6 (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1973), pp. 2/​3.

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cited frequently in his influential refutation of resistance theory, De regno et regali potestate (1600).8 Upon reaching the age of majority in 1603, John accompanied William on a visit to London. He was introduced to James vi & i, England’s new king, who personally invited the young man to stay and join the royal household as a gentleman-​in-​waiting.9 Barclay lived in London from 1605 to 1615 and throughout this time, worked tirelessly on James’s behalf to justify and defend the royal supremacy over church and state.10 Belying his reputation as a steadfast Catholic, he either conformed himself or, more likely, converted to the king’s Protestant religion.11 Barclay’s corpus of controversial and apologetic works includes the official, Latin account of the Gunpowder Plot, two volumes of elegiac verse –​all three published by the King’s Printer –​and the Pietas, a massive and learned defence of his late father’s thought and reputation.12 Most impressively, he assisted King James with the translation of the 1608 Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance and was among the men tasked with delivering it into Catholic Europe.13 Barclay’s fiction slots neatly into the same British context. Satyricon i, composed between 1603 and 1605, clearly echoes James’s published political doctrine. Its 1607 sequel Satyricon Pars ii, written post-​Gunpowder, does the same,

8 9 10

11

12

13

William Barclay, De regno et regali potestate adversvs […] monarchomachos […], Libri Sex (Paris, 1600). The invitation is memorialised in [Guillaume de Barclay to Salisbury] (Angers, October 8, 1605), SP 78/​52/​250. On Barclay’s career in politics and controversy, see David A. Fleming, ‘John Barclay: Neo-​ Latinist at the Jacobean Court’, Renaissance News, 19:3 (1966), pp.  228–​ 36; David A.  Fleming, ‘Introduction’, in Barclay, Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, pp. ix–​xxxvi; David A.  Fleming, ‘A Study of John Barclay’s Satirical Narrative Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (1605–​1607)’, PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1965; Matthew Growhoski, ‘The Secret History of a “Secret War”:  John Barclay, His Satyricon, and the Politicization of Literary Scholarship in Early Modern Europe, 1582–​1621’, PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015; David Harris Willson, ‘James I  and His Literary Assistants’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 8:1 (1944), pp. 35–​57. See the following note, however: the modern consensus in favour of Catholic constancy rests ultimately on the authority of Pierre Bayle, who acknowledged but dismissed the ample evidence to the contrary, taking Barclay at his word. Cf. ‘Barclai (Jean)’, in Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam, 1697), vol. 1, pp. 469–​70, n. H. John Barclay, Series patefacti nuper parricidii (London, 1605), ESTC S106498; John Barclay, Syluae ad serenissimum & potentissimum regem … &c (London, 1607), ESTC S118240; John Barclay, Poematum libri duo (London, 1615), ESTC S118238; John Barclay, Pietas, sive publicae pro regibus ac principibus et privatae pro Guilielmo Barclaio parente vindiciae, adversus Roberti S. R. E. cardinalis Bellarmini tractatum (Paris, 1612). See Growhoski, ‘The Secret History of a “Secret War” ’, pp. 657–​725.

116 Growhoski but goes further in its ad hominem denunciation of James’s enemies. The Puritans and Jesuits, whom the king characterised as functionally equivalent in their embrace of populism and resistance theory, are among its central targets. But it was Barclay’s unkind representation of Pope Paul v in Part ii that earned Barclay a place on the Roman Index of Forbidden Books.14 Significantly, the sequel was dedicated to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, who funded the author’s travel to Paris ahead of its first printing.15 Argenis, too, ‘though it had a forraine birth’ at a Parisian press, ‘was first conceiued’ in England –​this according to the book’s third English translator Robert Le Grys, who seems to have known the author.16 The fact that Barclay defected to Rome in 1615 complicates his political legacy, but it does not negate his contributions to British political thought.17 Nor did the betrayal shake the general impression in England that he was a native son. King James, in spite of his oft-​noted resemblance to Meleander, fictional king of Sicily, commissioned Ben Jonson to translate Argenis into English in 1623.18 In 1628, Le Grys reminded his readers that Barclay had been ‘long bred’ in England.19 In 1667, John Evelyn nominated him for inclusion in a portrait gallery of ‘Learned & Heroic persons of England’, alongside Edmund Spencer, the Venerable Bede, and Pope Adrian iv.20 Even the republican John Milton –​ offended as he was by Barclay’s depiction of English religiosity as sectarian and extremist –​emphasised rather than denied his native status when denouncing him as ‘a fugitive Papist traducing the Land whence he sprang’.21 14

On the Oath, see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, in Ethan Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp.  162–​84. Sommerville was the first to suggest that the Oath controversy was Satyricon II’s native context:  see ‘Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’, PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1981, pp. 79–​80, 95. 15 [Warrant to Repay … 100£. to Mons. Jean de Barclay], SP 38/​08 Oct. 26, 1607. 16 John Barclay, Iohn Barclay His Argenis, Translated out of Latine into English: … Published by His Maiesties Command (London, 1628), sig. A2 v, ESTC S100796. 17 Barclay reaffirmed his Catholicism and retracted his former support of King James in his Paraenesis ad sectarios libri II (Köln, 1617), VD17 12:107769L. 18 This text was lost to fire. See Ben Jonson, Execration against Vulcan (London, 1640), sig. B3 r, ESTC S107918; as cited by Riley and Pritchard Huber, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30–​1. 19 Barclay, Iohn Barclay His Argenis, sig. A2 v. 20 Epistle LXXXVII [John Evelyn to Edward Hyde], (March 10, 1667), British Library, Add 78298, fo. 165r. I thank David Magliocco for the reference. 21 John Milton, ‘The Reason of Church-​Government’, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Marion Wolfe and Merritt Y. Hughes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), vol. 1, pp. 796 (cf. n. 16–​8). For the passage that incensed Milton, see Barclay, Icon Animorum,

‘A most dangerous rudeness’



117

ii

Today, it is only in Germany –​where his name is linked to Martin Opitz’s and so relatively well-​known –​that Barclay ranks as a serious thinker in his own right.22 Erich Hassinger credits him with nothing less than inventing the concept of ‘genius aetatis’ or ‘Zeitgeist’, a key step on the path to today’s ‘rational’, ‘empirical’, and ‘historicist conception of history’.23 More to the point, the sole scholar to have acknowledged Barclay any significant, independent place in constitutional history is Susanne Siegl-​Mocavini, whose work catalogues the long list of doctrinal influences at play in his ‘absolutist’ fiction, with the emphasis on his father’s foundational refutation of Franco-​Scottish resistance theory. Significantly, Siegl-​Mocavini also recognises a distinctly historiographical quality in Barclay’s work, classifying his ‘Summa Politicae’ Argenis as a ‘Fürstenspiegel’ –​indeed, a ‘Fürstenspiegel absolutistischer’. In English terms, it is a ‘mirror for princes’ or prudential history, of an absolutist bent.24 Other than its deciphering key, the most-​commonly cited feature of Argenis –​present in Satyricon, also –​is its constant use of intertextual allusion: the reader familiar with classical literature and history will recognise an endless stream of references, clever puns, and the like. Above and beyond this layer of meaning, there is another available to the reader schooled in sixteenth-​ century jurisprudence and political criticism –​in Barclay’s day, the latter field had only recently grown out of the former, and remained deeply entangled with it.25 Neither type of allusion is merely ornamental or incidental: I however argue that the reader does not need to correctly interpret, or even recognise, many or any of the learned references in either book to enjoy them or grasp the

22 23 24 25

or, The Mirror of Minds, ed. Mark T Riley, transl. Thomas May (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), pp. 116/​7–​118/​9. John Barclay, Johann Barclaÿens Argenis. Deutsch gemacht, transl. Martin Opitz (Breßlaw, 1626), VD17 3:310615U. Erich Hassinger, Empirisch-​rationaler Historismus:  seine Ausbildung in der Literatur Westeuropas von Guiccardini bis Saint-​Evremond (Bern: Francke, 1978), pp. 147, 12, 5 (my transl.). Susanne Siegl-​Mocavini, John Barclays ‘Argenis’ und ihr staatstheoretischer Kontext:  Untersuchungen zum politischen Denken der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen:  M. Niemeyer, 1999), p. 6, see esp. chs. iv and ii. Donald R.  Kelley, ‘Law’, in Burns and Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–​1700, pp.  66–​94; Donald Kelley, ‘Civil Science in the Renaissance:  The Problem of Interpretation’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-​Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 57–​78; Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-​Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

118 Growhoski essential meaning. Often translated, Barclay was also something of a translator himself, one who moved arcane and intricate arguments out of the privileged realm of Latin scholarship and into the popularly appealing and accessible medium of satire. In the pre-​modern understanding, history was a rhetorical art: its purpose was to ‘instruct, and at the same time, to touch, the reader’, in a manner ‘accurate, prudent, and eloquent’.26 Barclay’s histories were universally esteemed for their eloquence: numerous testimonials compared him favourably to Tacitus, both for his Latin style and the compelling nature of the many speeches and dialogues he produced. They were also prudent, in that they aimed to instruct the reader in prudence, the highest of moral virtues and the most important in politics, by presenting examples of virtue and vice for imitation and avoidance, respectively. Barclay’s satirical histories were also accurate, in that they depicted a recognizably real, if distorted, image of the political world. The early moderns did not expect exemplary content to be factually true, in every detail: on the contrary, fiction was arguably better suited to illustrating prudence, the facts being fully in the author’s control.27 It is within the generic context of prudential history that Barclay’s remarks about democracy take on their fullest, clearest meaning, although I  stress that satire anciently and enduringly shares the same moralizing function. Merging the two literary traditions, Barclay treated popular government as a vice, depicting its dire consequences in art so that they might be avoided in life. Lest anyone mistake the overall rhetorical intent, Barclay made it explicit. Satyricon opens with an angry screed, delivered by its narrator-​protagonist Euphormio –​apparently also the author, given that Barclay used the same name as his pseudonym –​who vows to put the entire world on trial for the many wrongs he has suffered. He relates the story as if to the judge and jury in a courtroom. Argenis similarly features a fictional poet-​historian –​identified in most decoding keys as the author himself –​who announces a plan to write a ‘grandem fabulam historiae instar’, i.e. ‘a great fiction in the manner of a history’, in which he will ‘unmask’ all error, faction, and sedition, and lead the people to virtue. Paraphrasing Lucretius, he states that its bitter

26 27

On the Artes historicae, see esp. Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 11 and passim. On satire, see Howard D.  Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered:  From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p.  2; and on the truth in fiction, Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 123.

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lessons will be sweetened with action and romance, like a child’s medicine. The result will be universally appealing and accessible. ‘I know the character of our people’, the poet boasts:  ‘they will love it as much as a show at the theatre or arena’.28 Love it they did: Argenis was quantifiably one of the best-​selling books of the seventeenth century, appearing in thirty-​two distinct Latin editions before 1700. Due to its innate appeal, it was useful for inducing restless adolescents to study their Latin, but Latin literacy was not a requirement: between print and manuscript, there survive at least thirty-​four vernacular translations in thirteen different languages.29 Attesting to Argenis’s broad appeal and reception, two of the five distinct English versions in print were made by women, for the express benefit of other women.30 The Satyricon, in spite of its prohibition, enjoyed similar success, with over thirty distinct Latin editions, in various configurations, and at least six independent ­translations.31 The surviving reception evidence, which is plentiful, confirms that Barclay’s readers, great and humble alike, recognised and valued the prudential content in both fictions. A typical copy is filed with marginalia and notes: readers such as Cardinal Richelieu (1585–​1642) –​whose personal copy of Argenis survives –​ were especially keen to identify the real people and places disguised within the fiction.32 Others underlined or otherwise flagged Barclay’s many sententious dialogues, and/​or copied them into commonplace books for easier reference. While still a student, Edward Lhuyd of Lanforda (1635–​1681) –​in later life, father of the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and a royalist –​compiled lengthy ‘collectae sententiae’ from Argenis and Satyricon into his notes, suggestively alongside another collection ‘ex Seneca philosopho’ and a sizeable 28 My transl.; cf. Barclay, Argenis, pp. 334/​5–​336/​7. 29 Siegl-​Mocavini, John Barclays ‘Argenis’, pp. 4, 5; Apps. 2 and 3 in Barclay, Argenis, pp. 51–​8. 30 See Judith Man, Judith Man, selected and introduced by Amelia A.  Zurcher (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Nicolas Coeffeteau, An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus … Translated out of the French into English by a Yong Gentlevvoman. Dedicated to the Lady Anne Wentvvorth, transl. Judith Man (London, 1640), ESTC S104485; John Barclay, The Phoenix, or The History of Polyarchus and Argenis, transl. Clara Reeve and Robert Le Grys, 4 vols (London, 1772). 31 App. A in Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 355–​7. 32 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp.  1–​9, 65; Louis-​Gabriel Bugnot, ‘Joannis Barclaii Vita’, in Io. Barclaii Argenis. (Amsterdam, 1659), sig. **[1]‌r-​**3r. On the similarities, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: m.i.t. Press, 2000), p. 18 n. 6. Richelieu’s copy is in Paris: John Barclay, Argenis (Paris, 1625, iv edn), Bibliothèque Nationale de France Mitterrand, Y2–​2970.

120 Growhoski excerpt from Tacitus.33 By implication, Barclay’s prudential histories were functionally equivalent to, and no less valuable than, those of the ancients as sources of political exempla.34

iii

This brings me to Barclay’s exemplary representation of the populus and popular government, and a fuller proof of Barclay’s absolutism. I have asserted that both Satyricon and Argenis are centrally concerned with establishing which form of government is the ‘best and most just’, and that popularity is depicted negatively in both, with the consistent intention of demonstrating, by negative example, the relative superiority of monarchy. I begin with the Satyricon i of 1605, as the original and enduring pattern. In keeping with established Menippean practice, Barclay borrowed liberally from earlier works and clearly signalled his debts. The title is of course Petronian; the prosecutorial intent is however Senecan, as acknowledged by frequent allusions to the Damnation of Claudius and the derivative, anti-​Guise Satyre Ménippée of 1593.35 As Jozef IJsewijn astutely observed, Satyricon i is also a ‘reversed [Utopia]’: rather than critiquing our world through an implied comparison with an ideal society, as Thomas More had done, Barclay brought a member of that society to our world, so that he could directly experience and condemn its many failings. Unlike Hythloday, who experiences only one alien culture, Euphormio travels across the whole of Europe, from ‘Italia’ in the South to ‘Gallia’ in the North –​ the names of countries, where given, are usually not disguised.36 No less important than More, both as a theoretical touchstone and as a structuring influence, is Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la République (1576). While the plot is meandering, Euphormio’s journey is not aimless: nor is the intent behind it merely to represent and ridicule genuine cultural difference, although the satire does plenty of that. It also illustrates the variability of governmental 33 34

[Reliquae Lhuydianae, Vol. IX] (ca. 1650), Bodleian Library Oxford, Ms Ash. 1825. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129:1 (1990), pp. 30–​78. 35 On the importance of Seneca to the Menippean tradition, see Ingrid De Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters, 1581–​1655, Travaux Du Grand Siècle No. 2 (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1996). On the latter text, see esp. Satyre Ménippée: De la vertu du Catholicon de’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris, Édition critique de Martial Martin, Textes de La Renaissance 117 (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2007). 36 Jozef IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-​Latin Studies (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990; ii edn), vol. 1, p. 131, vol. 2, p. 74; De Smet, Menippean Satire, p. 76.

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forms. The system that prevails in each place Euphormio visits is different, uniquely suited to local conditions, and uniquely reflective of the quality and character of its governors. Euphormio bears witness to all three of the classic forms: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Through his own, serial indictment and prosecution, once under each of the three systems, he discovers also that there is a distinct style of justice particular to each. He does not label them as such, but they correspond to Bodin’s harmonic, commutative, and distributive models, respectively, as discussed in the final chapter of the République.37 Read on this level of meaning, Satyricon i is not only a prudential history, it is also –​and not incompatibly –​a comparative jurisprudential history. The jurisprudential intention is signalled at the very start of the book, when Euphormio visits a decrepit law school. Inside, an elderly professor is lecturing about civil law, on two specific subjects: the contrast between Roman freedmen and the foreign-​born dedititii, who had no rights whatsoever under Roman law; and the abrogation of obsolete law.38 Both topics –​in combination with the recurring pairing of the words ‘lex’ and ‘mos’, echoing the technical distinction between statute ‘law’, and common law, which is founded on ‘custom’ –​signal that Satyricon i is to be a book about the relationship between government and legal justice and, more particularly, one concerned with the still-​contested concept of legal sovereignty.39 The power to abrogate law –​which is described in Digest i.iii.32.(1) –​has great significance within the Bodinian absolutist tradition.40 Joined with the power to make law as its inverse function, it is the first and foremost of Bodin’s signature ‘vraies marques de la souveraineté’, from which all the others derive.41 I draw your attention to the book’s sole example of popular government, which exists in a remote, mountain region that Euphormio never names. A passing reference to its ‘famous oath of confederation’ lets us know that it represents Switzerland, the sole example of popular government in early modern Europe. From the description alone, there is no mistaking Barclay’s rhetorical intent. The inhabitants are as ‘savage’ as the landscape they inhabit: dressed in ‘foul and squalid garments’, everyone –​even the innkeepers –​either ignore

37

Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1583), bk. v, ch. 6, pp. 1013–​60, USTC 1721; Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-​Weale … Out of the French and Latine Copies, Done into English, by Richard Knolles (London, 1606), pp. 775–​94, ESTC S107090. 38 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 6/​7–​8/​9. 39 See Growhoski, ‘The Secret History of a “Secret War” ’, pp. 402–​51. 40 Justinian I, The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, transl. Alan Watson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), vol. 1, p. 13. 41 Bodin, République [1583], bk. i, ch. 10, pp. 222–​3; Bodin, Common-​Weale [1606], p. 162.

122 Growhoski Euphormio in ‘ill-​meaning silence’, or answer his questions ‘petulantly’. To eat, he is given only ‘stone-​hard’ bread and some ‘ugly’ meat, roasted directly on the coals and served ‘unwashed’. The natives themselves drink more than eat, seemingly for religious reasons: the local deity is Bacchus.42 Requisite though it might seem, Barclay’s inclusion of Switzerland in his satirical history of jurisprudence invites comparison with Bodin. Being the only live example, the Confederation plays a key role in Book ii.7 of the République, which is devoted in its entirety to ‘l’estat populaire’. Bodin probed the inner works of Swiss democracy, describing the form and manner of elections and the responsibilities of the several magistrates and councils.43 Euphormio shows no such interest, mentioning only briefly that the Swiss federal assembly exists to keep the peace, by sponsoring friendly drinking contests between the constituent ‘Nations’. One might find additional significance in the fact that, when speaking of/​to the local mayor, Euphormio uses the term ‘Dictator’ interchangeably with ‘Magistratu[s]‌’.44 There is, however, a clear correspondence between Euphormio’s subsequent experiences in Switzerland and Bodin’s one and only practical example of the Swiss national character. ‘[I]‌n the moneth of May 1555’, we read in Bodin, ‘the Comminalitie of Linguedine, having not received the money promised them by the Spaniards’ in payment for a mercenary contract ‘laid hand vppon the Spanish pentioners amongst them to torture, afterward condemning them in a fine of ten thousand crownes to be by them paid into the common treasure’. The anecdote, which abruptly and rather awkwardly follows Bodin’s technical discussion of Swiss democracy, is meant to illustrate how ‘the people of the Grisons hold themselves in nothing subject or pliant unto their officers’: in other words, it proves that the population is unruly, fickle, and disrespectful of authority, even when that authority is of its own making.45 Compare what happens to Euphormio, after he elects to throw a rock at a farmer’s head. Impulsive at the best of times, he is moved to this rash action by the sight of a male adult milking a cow, which he deems a ‘degradation of the manly state’. As fate would have it, the rock misses, hitting not the farmer but the cow, which, startled, rampages through the town. Quick to blame the ‘foreigner’ –​with good reason, it must be said –​the angry townspeople capture Euphormio and debate whether or not to ‘torture’ him. He confesses his ‘crime’ 42 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 120/​1, 112/​3–​114/​5, and 118–​19. 43 Bodin, République [1583], bk. ii, ch. 7, pp.  332, 336–​37; Bodin, Common-​Weale [1606], pp. 244, 247–​8. 44 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 120/​1, 122/​3. 45 Bodin, Common-​Weale [1606], bk. ii, ch. 7, p. 248; Bodin, République [1583], pp. 336–​7.

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and pleads for mercy, but finds none. He next invokes aristocratic privilege, dropping the name of his lord Callion, but this only angers the crowd further. In unison they shout, ‘Does any one race think it can cause trouble in our regions with impunity? Why should we fear a foreign nobility –​we who have overthrown our own?’ The setting of the sun prevents Euphormio’s immediate, public execution: he is thrown in a squalid prison, wherein the jailors earn extra money ‘decorat[ing] quilts with a variety of colors’ and making ‘wom[e]‌n’s belt[s]’.46 A second attempt to execute Euphormio is interrupted by the timely arrival of Callion himself, at the head of a large army. It is not however force that secures Euphormio’s release, but rather Callion’s flattery of the local mayor. In spite of their earlier intransigence, the Swiss happily release the criminal to the custody of his friends. Whether and how much Bodin’s stray anecdote influenced Barclay is unclear. Nonetheless, in Bodin and Barclay, Switzerland is depicted as a disordered commonwealth, whose people defy the assumed natural order in several respects. The République stresses their insolent resistance to the native magistracy; Barclay, recalling Swiss history, privileges their disdain for hereditary nobility, especially if foreign. In light of the characteristically patriarchal nature of British absolutist thought,47 I wish to highlight Barclay’s imputation that the Swiss have no respect either for conventional gender norms: Switzerland is a world turned fully upside-​down.48 Although legendary for their martial prowess and courage, the men are so emasculated they willingly perform women’s work. A few flattering words from a foreign nobleman are enough to induce them to abandon the rule of law and their egalitarian principles alike. The overall emphasis in Barclay is on the failings of the Swiss justice system:  it is mob-​and rumour-​driven, summary, violently cruel, disorganised, inflexible, and, worst of all, completely indifferent to merit. In other words, it is radically commutative –​an allusion to Bodin, even though there is no direct reference to what Bodin himself wrote about Switzerland. To close the argument, I  note that a contrasting, distributive example is provided in the city of Basilium, which is ruled by a closed elite that values only merit. When Euphormio is arrested there –​this time, as a result of stones being thrown at, rather than by, him –​a single mention of his master is all that is required to secure his freedom.49 The coincidence of the two cases is meaningful, in that it 46 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 116/​7–​118/​9. 47 Cf. the ideas of King James and Robert Filmer (on whom, see below). 48 On the centrality of patriarchalism to British absolutism, see Cesare Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer (1588–​1653) and the Patriotic Monarch:  Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-​Century Political Thought (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 49 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 62/​3, 68/​9–​70/​1.

124 Growhoski depicts disordered popular and aristocratic rule/​justice as more or less equally dangerous extremes. The characters in Satyricon i express a great many opinions, many of which are incompatible with each other. Nevertheless, the book as a whole has a distinct voice of its own: and although not voiced directly, its constant purpose is to validate Bodin’s assertion that harmonic, i.e. monarchical, justice is ‘le plus parfaict’ among all the imaginable alternatives.50 Although we see only the disordered side of the Bodinian ledger in live performance, there is one, solitary example of unquestionably ‘great virtue’ present in the narrative –​which, however, Euphormio knows only by reputation. He is the jewel-​collecting King Neptunus, under whose wise and absolute rule ‘the Irish lyre has joined with the leopards and the lions’ in a song of ‘unified order and harmony’.51 Only the dimmest of readers could have failed to recognise that he is a mirror image of the Britanniarum Monarcha to whose ‘virtue’ Euphormio’s ‘bitter attack’ is dedicated.52

iv

By reputation, Argenis is a prose romance. It also, however, satisfies all of the very few formal qualifications of Menippean satire: it is written in a mixture of prose and verse, treats subjects philosophical and political, and, last but not least, parodies through appropriation. It does not merely mimic Sidney’s Arcadia:  it inhabits its very skin, re-​appropriating its genre along with its plot and character names. In the process, the quintessentially English, Elizabethan, and ‘republican’ romance becomes a regret-​filled reflection on the unfulfilled promise of Jacobean absolutism –​revealing the true reason, I argue, for Barclay’s 1615 departure from England.53 Compared to the earlier Satyricon –​ Parts i and ii –​ Argenis is straightforward, even pedantic, in expressing its ideological thesis. Where the earlier work performs the full range of governmental forms before the reader, Argenis re-​enacts the ancient debate about which is 50 Bodin, République [1583], bk. vi, ch. 6, p. 978; Bodin, Common-​Weale [1606], p. 755. 51 Barclay, Euphormio’s Satyricon, pp. 110/​1. 52 Ibid., pp. 2/​3. 53 Joel C.  Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 12–​13; De Smet, Menippean Satire, p. 81 and cf. p. 77; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, p. 4; Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 183. On the ‘republicanism’ of Arcadia, see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and Growhoski, ‘The Secret History of a “Secret War” ’, pp. 781–​816.

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‘best and most just’ (see below). The answer is never seriously in doubt, and the narrative focus never drifts far from the problems faced by monarchical states, which are explored in depth. The main setting is ancient Sicily, sometime before the rise of Rome. Its ruler, Meleander, is elderly and infirm, and the succession is worryingly unsettled. His only child, the Princess Argenis, is in need of a husband but refuses to marry –​she has set her heart on Poliarchus, a handsome foreigner newly arrived at court. Meleander is kind to a fault:  under his indulgent rule, the nobility have grown over-​powerful and restive. Most ambitious of all is the corrupted favourite Lycogenes, who has secretly raised an army and begun stirring unrest among the commons. After deviously inducing the king to proclaim Poliarchus a traitor, thereby removing his most potent obstacle, he attempts to seize Argenis and the throne –​the two are conflated throughout –​for himself. This is not all: aroused by Sicily’s weakness and Argenis’s beauty, the foreign tyrant King Hippophilus of Hispania invades. To drive the point home, the latter exemplum is repeated later in the book, when mighty Hippophilus directs his Armada against Queen Hyanisbe of Mauritania –​invariably identified with Elizabeth i –​whose feminine nature is not dissimilar to Meleander’s. The canonical question i cite in my introduction takes places very early in the book, at a dinner party attended by representatives of Sicily’s royalist and rebel factions. There is no great difficulty in cutting through the fictive rhetoric of the exchange, particularly if one perceives its affinity with/​appropriation of the Agricolan ‘anti-​genre’ of formal dialogue.54 The subject of government emerges from a polite conversation about bees, when Anaximander challenges the opinion, inherited from ‘deluded vain and credulous antiquity’, that the insects are ruled by ‘king[s]‌[regem]’. ‘All creatures’, he counters, ‘by the course of nature desire liberty [libertatem] and not a king or the insolence of [foreign [alieni]] government [imperii]’. ‘Why’, he asks, ‘should all things depend upon one’s will, whom no fear or modesty can restrain if he grow vicious; why by his cruelty and bad example may deeply wound the [republic [reipublicae]]; and lastly, who so uses his country and subjects as if nature had made them all for his sake’? The best state imaginable is one in which ‘the people [populus]’, possess ‘liberty [libertate]’, which is now clearly defined as the capacity to ‘live under their own laws [legibus suis]’ joined with the ‘power to make or pull down [facere et premere] their magistrates’.55

54

Roger Deakins, ‘The Tudor Prose Dialogue:  Genre and Anti-​Genre’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 20:1 (1980), pp. 10–​11, 18–​23. 55 Barclay, Argenis, pp. 202/​3–​204/​5.

126 Growhoski Anaximander’s arguments are drawn from natural law and are eminently logical, and his warning against arbitrary rule is compelling. Anaximander’s rhetorical authority, however, is greatly undermined by the fact that he is a ‘young man’, and also a nephew of the villain Lycogenes –​and Lycogenes, we soon learn, plans to legitimise his coup d’état with ‘a tumultuous election [electione] of the people’. For him, if not also his faction, democracy is not a genuine or desirable end.56 Inherently more credible is the man who immediately answers Anaximander: Nicopompus, whom the text has already introduced as ‘a man eminent for learning and the king’s favour’.57 You will remember him as the author of the allegorical history of Sicily, conspicuously like Argenis, described in section ii above. His counter-​argument, which applies to democratic and aristocratic rule at once, boils down to this: If mankind of their own accord could be contained within the bounds of justice, in that universal goodness all kinds of government were not only needless, but also unjust … But since from the wickedness of men so great a happiness cannot be hoped for, that form of government that comes nearest to nature that forbids men to wander from the rules of virtue or nature itself … the matter is not how many or how few are governors, but under what government the people live best. A genuine respublica popularis could not be as just as Anaximander imagines, due to the ‘wicked and factious spirits’ that must inevitably ‘by flattery, cunning carriage, and deceitful eloquence commonly apply themselves to sedition, fury, to misleading or deceiving the people’.58 The narrative of Argenis, the logic of which is isolated from that of the characters’ rhetorically ambiguous speech, more than validates Nicopompus’s opinion. The people of Sicily –​termed variously ‘populus’, ‘vulgus’, ‘plebes’ –​ are depicted throughout the book as an anonymous mass, devoid of individual agency and reason, and incapable of self-​government. They do not speak, as such: they shout and cry, with one voice, making a confused ‘noise [sonus]’.59 Their emotions are likewise unruly, volatile, and polarised. ‘Sudden’ expressions of joy and love are frequent  –​especially if the beloved princess Argenis is present –​but so are explosions of blind and vengeful ‘rage’.60 Being so 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., pp. 206/​7, 208/​9. Ibid., pp. 120/​1. Ibid., pp. 206/​7. Ibid., pp. 386/​7. Ibid., pp. 386/​7, 390/​1, 350/​1.

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simpleminded, the people are easily manipulated and misled. The villain Lycogenes is an especially adept manipulator: time and again, he and his agents are seen spreading ‘rumour[s]‌[fama]’ and false reports ‘among the people’, to fan the flames of dissent.61 The quotation in my title belongs to a ‘tumult’ that occurs just prior to the discourse about bees, justifying its conclusion before the fact. Although set in Sicily, it might well bring to a reader’s mind the demonstration of Swiss commutative justice we witnessed in Satyricon:  the lesson is timeless and universal. Having been falsely condemned as a rebel, Poliarchus is in hiding, sheltered by the noble lady Timoclea. To protect Poliarchus, she spreads word that he is dead, but their friendship is widely known. The local ‘peasants [rustici]’ suspect that the news is ‘vana’, or ‘fake’:  gripped by ‘rash counsel’ and ‘madness’, an armed and angry crowd storms Timoclea’s home. There, ‘with a most dangerous rudeness’, ‘stubborn pride’ and a presumption of ‘imperium’, they demand entry. The Latin term says it all: this is popular ‘government’ in action.62

v

I conclude my reading of Argenis with a final example of its British, or rather English, reception: Patriarcha, by Sir Robert Filmer (1588?–​1653), a book conventionally viewed as an extreme outlier in the history of political thought.63 At the head of the text, we read that ‘Sir John Hayward, Adam Blackwood, John Barclay and some others have learnedly confuted both Buchanan and Parsons, and bravely vindicated the right of kings in most points’.64 John Locke, among others, would later conclude that Filmer had surely meant to name the father William Barclay, not the son: it was William, after all, who made his name by labelling his countryman Buchanan a ‘Monarchomach’ in De regno et regali potestate. I do not however assume that Filmer was mistaken or confused about his name, any more than Milton was about his nationality: and if we take Filmer at his word, none of John Barclay’s works more neatly fits the description

61 62 63 64

Ibid., pp. 146/​7, 246/​7, 262/​3. Ibid., pp. 182/​3–​184/​5. On Filmer, see James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); and esp. Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer. Robert Filmer, ‘Patriarcha or The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of the People’, in Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–​68, p. 3.

128 Growhoski than Argenis, the most popular.65 The points of correspondence between Filmer’s doctrine and Barclay’s are all the more compelling when considered in close historical context. Not forgetting the highly gendered, patriarchal cast of Filmer’s thought –​ which we have seen also in Barclay –​one of its most unusual and most cited elements is the assertion that kings may tax their subjects without their consent. By what authority did Filmer justify this argument? Although the practice was well-​established in France in times of emergency, Jean Bodin judged it to be a violation of natural law in the République –​likewise King James, in his Trew Law, and William Barclay, in De regno et regali potestate. Even Francis Kynaston, Filmer’s close contemporary, admitted the subject’s natural right to positive consent.66 But as Cuttica observes, Filmer had access to several other, less canonical sources of inspiration. He began writing Patriarcha in the wake of King Charles i’s first experiments with extra-​parliamentary taxation in the late 1620s, and was refused permission to publish the book in 1632. It is all but certain that such regime apologists as Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Maynwaring –​whose hectoring sermons in support of the Forced Loan caused public outrage –​were among the ‘some others’ to which Patriarcha alludes.67 To this, I can only add that the late John Barclay, one-​time Jacobean apologist, had made much the same argument about arbitrary taxation, not many years earlier, in Argenis –​which book was, at this very moment, newly current in Britain, thanks to the printing of Le Grys’s translation in 1628 and its reissue in 1629.68 I direct you to the point of crisis in Book iv of Argenis –​as Englished by Le Grys –​wherein Barclay’s absolutism finds its clearest, and most concise, positive formulation. Queen Hyanisbe’s Mauritania faces an imminent invasion by sea: she must raise an army but lacks sufficient funds. ‘But what conveniency is there now’, she laments, ‘of assembling the States of the whole Nation [ex toto gente councilio]’ –​the earlier, 1625 Long translation reads ‘Parliament’ –​‘whose authoritie must of necessity concurre to the granting of Subsidies?’ Hearing this, 65

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690), p. 4, ESTC R2930; cf. Daly, Sir Robert Filmer, pp. 20–​1. 66 Ibid., pp. 22–​3; Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution, p. 38; Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Royalism’; Johann P.  Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots:  Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–​1640 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999; i edn 1986). 67 Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer, pp.  145–​6; See Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–​1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 68 John Barclay, Barclay His Argenis: Or, The Loues of Poliarchus and Argenis, transl. Kingsmill Long and Thomas May (London, 1625), ESTC S106944; John Barclay, Iohn Barclay His Argenis, transl. Robert Le Grys, ESTC S100798 (London, 1629).

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virtuous Poliarchus is ‘amazed, being bred in a free Monarchy [liberis regnis]’, and ­boldly urges her to ‘shake off … that yoke of a most pernicious custome [pessimi moris]’: Did not then the Kingly Prerogative [ius regium][,]‌Did not the hazzard of the State carry in them force sufficient to compell the people [populum] to contribute, except themselves by men of their owne election [legatos] doe give their assent? Shall then, forsooth, the sinewes of the Empire [imperii] that is the treasury, bee in the power of the people [potestate populi]? Shall they bee the moderators of affaires of State, and with that one power being made their King[’]s King [regum regem], give the Law [iure] to all designes, counsels, and forces of the Kingdome? Questionlesse the true Lawes of Kingdomes [regnandi veras leges] did not brooke it: neither did it agree with the title of an absolute Monarchy [summi imperii nomine].69 Although Barclay reflected the problem through his Elizabethan glass of state, it is quite likely that he hoped in 1621 that his readers would recall King James’s perennial dispute with England’s national ‘council’ over supply, as well his Trew Law. Stung by the collapse of the Great Contract in 1610 and the Addled Parliament of 1614, James did not call another until 1621, and only then due to a recession and rising tensions with Spain.70 If a few readers saw a deeper, perhaps familiar, theoretical meaning in Poliarchus’s opposition of base custom and kingly law, so much the better. A reader in 1628–​9, such as Filmer, would have been as likely to see a further, more topical parallel in the same passage, with the ever-​worsening relationship between Parliament and James’s son King Charles i. In Patterson’s astute reading, Charles himself was one such reader. I think it not at all unlikely that Argenis’s forceful endorsement of the absolute prerogative over taxation was what induced Charles to commission –​i.e., ‘command’ –​his servant Le Grys to undertake his translation, the second printed in the span of just three years.71 69 Barclay, Iohn Barclay His Argenis, p. 354; cf. Barclay, Argenis, pp. 732/​3. 70 On James and Parliament, see Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–​ 1629 (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1979), esp. pp.  88–​9; Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution:  English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–​1624 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies (eds), The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament:  Literary and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 71 Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp.  183–​4; Barclay, Iohn Barclay His Argenis, sig. A2 v.

130 Growhoski In the moment, this new English Argenis –​bearing the reigning king’s imprimatur –​would serve much the same polemical function as the sermons of Sibthorpe and Maynwaring, but with sweetness, and with longer-​lasting effect.72 That Barclay’s stridently anti-​populist fictions enjoyed continued relevance long after his death is not in doubt. Patterson credits him as the ‘true progenitor’ of the ‘royalist romance’ genre of the Civil War era.73 To much the same point, Siegl-​Mocavini notes that the last editions of Satyricon and Argenis were printed in 1772 and 1792, at the dawn of the age of revolution: once the People had shaken off the yoke of kingship, there was no more demand for Barclay’s ‘absolutist propaganda’.74 If it can be acknowledged, as I argue it must, that Barclay and his anti-​populist fictions have a rightful –​I do not mean exclusive –​place in the history of British politics, literature, and ideas, then we must also rethink the persistent notion that there existed no discernible absolutist influence, and no genuine absolutists, in England or Scotland prior to 1642.75

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Barclay, John, Argenis, ed. Mark T. Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber, 2 vols. (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004). Barclay, John, Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (Euphormio’s Satyricon) 1605–​1607, David A. Fleming (transl.) (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1973). Barclay, William, De regno et regali potestate adversvs […] monarchomachos […] (Paris, 1600). Bodin, Jean, Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1583). Bodin, Jean, The Six Bookes of a Common-​Weale. Translated by Richard Knolles (­London, 1606).

Fleming, David A., ‘John Barclay:  Neo-​Latinist at the Jacobean Court’, Renaissance News, 19:3 (1966), pp. 228–​36. 72

On the crisis of the late 1620s and the origins of the Personal Rule, see Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–​1629; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists:  The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–​1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Matthew Growhoski, ‘Peace and Quiet:  The Politics of Arminianism’ (MA Thesis, University of California, Riverside, 2007). 73 Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 180. 74 Siegl-​Mocavini, John Barclays ‘Argenis’, p. 6 (my transl.). 75 Cf. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution.

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Franklin, Julian H., Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-​Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). Patterson, Annabel M., Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Siegl-​Mocavini, Susanne, John Barclays ‘Argenis’ und ihr staatstheoretischer Kontext:  Untersuchungen zum politischen Denken der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen:  M. Niemeyer, 1999). Sommerville, Johann P., Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–​ 1640 (London: Longman, 1999; i edn 1986). Willson, David Harris, ‘James I and His Literary Assistants’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 8:1 (1944), pp. 35–​57.

­c hapter 6

The Spectre Haunting Early Seventeenth-​Century England (ca. 1603–​1649): Democracy at Its Worst Cesare Cuttica Introduction* Churchill once famously declared: ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.1 This was not true for the great majority of thinkers who wrote about politics in the early modern period. In fact, deep mistrust of popular rule that had originated in ancient Greece, and had persisted through to the Roman epoch into the Middle Ages, found fertile ground in early seventeenth-​century England. Yet the observation that since democracy back then did not exist, pre-​nineteenth-​ century criticisms of it are not worth exploring has led the historiographical mainstream to neglect some major questions:2 why was this so? How was such widespread criticism of popular government articulated? In what ways did different authors and genres depict the people and their power? Which * Some of the primary material used here appeared in Portuguese in Cesare Cuttica, ‘Análise da “Pior Forma de Governo” no Início da Inglaterra Moderna: A Democracia Entre a Popularidade, o Radicalismo Religioso e o Inculto Homo Democraticus’, in Evaldo Becker, Marcelo de. St. A. A. Primo and Saulo H. S. Silva (eds), Moral, Ciência e História no Pensamento Moderno (São Cristóvão, Brazil: Editora ufs, 2018), pp. 11–​54. 1 See http://​wais.stanford.edu/​Democracy/​democracy_​DemocracyAndChurchill%28090503%29 .html; accessed on 3 June 2017. 2 See e.g. Richard Wollheim, ‘Democracy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 19:2 (1958), pp. 225–​42; C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Anansi, 1965); Moses I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985, revised edn; i edn 1973); Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989); John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508BC to AD1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Loren J.  Samons ii, What’s Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2004); Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–​2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009); Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-​imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions. America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–​1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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political concerns, social prejudices and clusters of values informed this anti-​ democratic paradigm? What was democracy actually thought to stand for? In order to address these points, the following pages analyse how anti-​ democratic ideas were elaborated in various sources in the Jacobean and ­Caroline reigns. In particular, they offer a panoramic view onto the variegated landscape of anti-​democratic thought to show the remarkable continuity informing its rhetoric. They also reveal how political and religious discourse(s) as well as events were defined by concerns surrounding democracy –​not republicanism,3 so much so that we can speak of democracy as an omnipresent challenge at a plurality of levels in early modern English public life. Inevitably selective, the chronologically-​ordered sections of this chapter provide a hopefully innovative illustration of an important but overlooked topic whose ­relevance is all the more considerable in today’s political debate.

…

To begin with, one should reckon with a simple but pivotal consideration: excoriating descriptions of democracy have to be read in conjunction with the early modern exaltation –​mystical, divine, historical –​of monarchy. The ‘marvellous halo’ encircling the institution and the rituals of monarchy gave to it moral credibility that enhanced people’s loyalty and obedience to their sovereigns.4 With regard to the ‘magical language of politics’, monarchical kingship dominated thanks to its rooted apparatus of collectively persuasive beliefs, aesthetic performances and artistic images.5 By comparison, democracy lagged behind monarchy when it came to displaying its visual power, which possessed nothing of the sacred aura and richly symbolic identity attached to kings/​queens.6 Democracy failed to foster an image of itself as legitimate government, emblem of virtues and repository of glory. After all, kingless rule was rarely imagined before the regicide of 1649. 3 On the idea that too many scholars have overemphasised the presence of republican ideals in pre-​Civil War England as well as on the dismissal of the notion that republicanism contributed to the killing of Charles i and the instauration of the Commonwealth see e.g. Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic:  The English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; 2 vols), vol. 1, pp. 307–​27. 4 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 197. 5 See e.g. Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars. Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​ 1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 6 See e.g. Cesare Cuttica, ‘A Thing or Two about Absolutism and its Historiography’, History of European Ideas, 39:2 (2013), pp. 287–​300.

134 Cuttica Moreover, democracy in England was attacked from a plurality of angles and was associated with different things: the actions of the dangerous multitude, social levelling and religious parity. Its alleged mouthpieces shifted as they were identified sometimes with the common people or middling sort galvanised by radical MPs; sometimes with the Jesuits; sometimes with the P ­ uritans; in other occasions, with the exponents of Presbyterianism; and, subsequently, with the Levellers and with the Independents. Criticism of democracy extended to groups like Anabaptists and Brownists, who were reputed to empower the people with decision-​making roles in ecclesiastical matters, notably to the detriment of episcopacy. Often the outcome of polemical vitriol, the arguments deployed in treatises, sermons, pamphlets and official documents to decry democratic politics were more than simply political, but involved ethical, theological and social concerns. Equally, scorn for democracy had many roots: biblical, classical, historical and philosophical-​metaphysical. From attacks on the uneducated, irrational and, therefore, politically incapable rabble formulated in ancient Greece to episodes taken from recent European history accounting the troubles ensuing from popular government (e.g. Anabaptist Münster, 1534–​5), on to depictions of existing democracies as the inversion of all established order (e.g. Switzerland), democracy fared very badly across the ideological spectrum and trans-​confessionally too. In one word, democracy was seen as the end of civilised society and the transformation of both State and Church into confusion-​ridden arenas where dangerous and mad-​brained members of the lower orders had the upper hand. Despite a certain ambiguity surrounding the ways in which such terms as ‘people’, ‘rabble’ and ‘multitude’ were used, a general consensus viewed democracy as a nefarious scenario. In early modern England, democracy was the bugbear of much political, social and religious reflection because it symbolised the opening of the floodgates for the worst types of disruptions:  the abolition of traditional hierarchies and societal practices charged with maintaining deference; the instauration of all sorts of heresies and profanities; and the appropriation of a public voice by uncouth mechanics expressing their judgement on things they knew nothing of. Democracy was a dirty word and remained so in the 1640s, which –​contrary to prevailing historiography –​did not see the dawn of a new, democratically-​inclined, era.

Jacobean Anti-​democracy (1603–​1625)

Since the time he reigned over Scotland right up to when he became King of England (1603), James vi and i (1566–​1625) was a strenuous propagator of the

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anti-​democratic narrative. In Basilikon Doron (1599) he attacked the Puritans for their doctrines of democratic power openly threatened kingship:  James stressed that he was ‘calumniated in their populare Sermons, not for any euill or vice in me, but because I  was a King, which they thought the highest euill’.7 Seditious in both ‘Church and Common-​weale’, these fanatics  –​the touchy Stuart charged  –​essayed to take the whole of society in democratic directions by advancing the fanciful tenet that each individual had the right to express their opinions according to ‘their conscience’.8 James’s message was to be a lasting one in that it articulated the idea that when ‘some fierie spirited men in the [ecclesiastical] ministerie’ succeeded in controlling the people, they ‘fantasie[d]‌to themselues a Democraticke forme of gouernment’. In their democratic manoeuvre, these popular spirits found ready-​made inspiration in what James derided as ‘that imagined Democracie’ that had contaminated demagogues-​infested classical Athens. Prompted also by the fervent ‘hope to become Tribunis plebis’, these modern democrats deceived the lower orders into believing in their subversively egalitarian projects, so as ‘to beare the sway of all the rule’.9 In a similar vein, in 1606 the godly Warwickshire magistrate Sir John Newdigate (1571–​1610) underscored the perils of eloquence-​imbued democratic types ‘pandering to the multitude’, whom he stigmatised as ‘a flock of sheep’ that must be guided by a superior authority in order for any polity to last.10 Here just like with James, classical heritage and strategic pressures of the day combined to shape the highly negative meaning of democracy. In particular, democracy was portrayed not only as a cauldron of political and ecclesiastical disruption, but also as a regime in thrall to mentally unstable firebrands. In a reign where the Gunpowder Plot (1605) was regarded as the brainchild of disgruntled rebellion-​stirring Catholics, and where popular conspiracies were considered the outcome of radical Protestants’ increasing antagonism towards the Church, Jesuits and Puritans were regularly exposed as the intellectual mouthpieces of democratic creeds. By the same token, in the aftermath of enclosure riots such as the Midland Rising (1607) at the head of which stood the Leveller-​Digger avant la lettre 7

King James vi and i, ‘Basilicon Doron’, in King James VI and I. Political Writings, ed. Johann P.  Sommerville (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.  1–​61, p.  26 (italics added). 8 Ibid., pp. 26–​7. 9 Ibid., p. 26. 10 Cited in Richard Cust, ‘Reading for Magistracy: The Mental World of Sir John Newdigate’, in John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England. Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 181–​99, p. 195.

136 Cuttica John Reynolds (d.1607), anti-​democratic debate took even more concrete ­dimensions. The royal chaplain William Wilkes (d.1637) warned justices of the peace, city magistrates and churchwardens  –​tellingly, categories directly ­involved in the running of the country –​against people who promoted innovation (‘newfanglisme’)11 so widely and so radically as to corrupt all public sectors, ­including ‘the Lawes’.12 In so doing, ‘this Newfangled faction’ intended to democratically ‘leuell’ every aspect of life ‘in this settled State’.13 These were ‘Geneuating passauantians’,14 namely anti-​conformists who not only subjected religion to a ‘popular’ ballot, but who in political matters aimed to create ‘a strange pollicie’ cast according to the Swiss model.15 For Wilkes, their ‘dangerous positions’ (bolstered by the theories of Thomas Cartwright and George Buchanan) were not simply detrimental to ‘monarchie’,16 but most of all they embodied the essence of ‘democraty’.17 As these passages illustrate, critiques of (what were perceived as) democratic tendencies developing amongst the financially-​strained rabble, and within radical Calvinist milieus, contained mounting ­anxiety about changes to the deep-​seated structure of a hierarchical and deferential society. Following various parliamentary efforts to limit James’s prerogative (1610, 1614), and in the aftermath of the murder of Henry iv in France (1610), the hardliner and stern disciplinarian Bishop of Oxford John Howson (1556/​ 7–​1632) attacked Puritans and Jesuits for promoting ‘Democracie’ (1616).18 Going further, he maintained that ‘this age hath many Monarchomachos, I  may say Theomachos’:  democratic opposition to monarchy went hand-​ in-​hand with regicide and godlessness. Howson aimed primarily at those Presbyterians who seeking after schism in the Church did ‘affect Statizing, and Cantonizing in the Commonwealth (which they would haue popular)’.19 The Swiss paradigm in ecclesiastical and in political affairs was taken

11 See Oxford English Dictionary, ‘newfanglist, n.’, http://​www.oed.com; accessed on 7 August 2017. 12 William Wilkes, A second memento for magistrates Directing how to reduce all offenders […] (London, 1608), p. 18. 13 Ibid., pp. 22, 19. 14 Ibid., p. 29. ‘Passauantians’ recalls the French verb ‘passer avant’ (‘to go ahead, to go forward’), which defined ideological and practical innovators. 15 Ibid., pp. 36, 37. 16 Ibid., p. 54. 17 Ibid., p. 60. 18 John Howson, Certaine sermons made in Oxford, anno Dom. 1616 […] (London, 1622), p. 162. 19 Ibid., pp. 92–​3.

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as the wicked inspiration for those opposing episcopacy and monarchy in England, whose main objective, according to Howson, was to set up ‘the Puritans Democracie’.20 This wave of attacks on non-​conformists as exponents of democratic principles and practices did not hit only the shores guarded by the defenders of the Church of England, but (paradoxically) it swept Jesuit territory too. The Saint-​Omer-​based Jesuit polemicist and theologian John Floyd (1572–​1649) singled out François Hotman, Theodore Beza, John Goodman, John Knox and the usual Buchanan as authors whose doctrines (especially, their making a king ‘subiect to the peoples pleasure, no more sure of his state, then wethercocks that must turn with the wind’)21 had incited ‘some Puritanes of the last Parlament in their discontented meetings’ to be so ‘bold’ as ‘to propose the changing of the gouernment of the Realme from Monarchy into Democracy’. As if these circumstances were not worrying enough at home, these monarchy-​ haters did not lack allies abroad either: certainly not in France thanks to the popularity of the Protestant thinker ‘Turquet’ who had ‘in his booke written in commendation of Democracy aboue Monarchy’, nor ‘in Holland to which this French Democratist Turquet dedicated his aforesayd booke’ in recognition of this country’s democratic –​not republican –​nature and in support of its inhabitants’ –​as we know, improbable –​effort ‘to bring the same into the rest of reformed Countries’.22 At a time when ‘the tide of international politics turned against’ continental Protestantism,23 the pro-​Jesuit Antwerp-​based writer, publicist and intelligence agent Richard Verstegan (1548/​50–​1640) scathingly criticised the 20 21

Ibid., p. 159. John Floyd, God and the king […] (Cullen [i.e. Saint-​Omer], 1620), p.  13. An analogous opinion was expressed by the Jesuit controversialist Sylvester Norris (1572–​1630), for whom English Puritans supported ‘Democracy’, namely a regime which was ‘often ruined with the tumults […] of the vnconstant and diuersly-​headed multitude’ (S. N. (Sylvester Norris), An antidote or treatise of thirty controuersies […] (Saint-​Omer, 1622), p. 191). 22 Floyd, God and the king, pp. 23–​4. However, Louis Turquet de Mayerne (1550?–​1618) did not propagate the concept of popular government (see Louis Turquet de Mayerne, La Monarchie Aristodémocratique […] (Paris, 1611), e.g. p. 121; it had been composed twenty years earlier). Whilst arguing that sovereignty ultimately resided in the people, Turquet saw ‘Democracy or Popular State’ as marred by the ‘levity, impatience, envy, sudden and inconsiderate rudesses of the people towards men of honour and merit’ (ibid., p. 172). In fact, democracy was no ‘Commonwealth [‘République’]’, but a degeneration of it in that power was in the hands of ‘the vilest and most corrupt’ citizens whose sole goal was ‘insolent liberty and gain’ (ibid., p. 328; all translations are mine). 23 David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture:  Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 173.

138 Cuttica ‘Republique of the Switzers’24 and the United Provinces for privileging a ‘regiment’ with too many governors. Even worse, the Swiss and the Dutch gave ‘hope that any Beer-​brewer, or Basket-​maker by vulgar commendation of his friends’ could at some point occupy active political positions in the polity as if they were competent to do so.25 On Verstegan’s account, the Swiss cantons and the Dutch republic were democratic entities that epitomised a catastrophe not just for good politics in that they empowered uneducated artisans through dubious habits, but also for all societal order because they erased all differences of status and ability. For the Catholic controversialist Matthew Pattenson (fl.1623), who was writing in the tense climate of the Spanish Match (the Stuart heir Charles’s proposed marriage to the Spanish Infanta), not only Calvin and Beza, but Luther too, had pushed for democracy. Through their theories, which were spread directly to the people by way of inflammatory public sermons, they had encouraged subjects across Europe to dispose of kingship altogether.26 Most i­ mportantly, they had explicitly favoured ‘democracie and popularitie, as more consonant to the aduancement’ of their consistories and elders.27 These questionable accusations were part and parcel of a broad antagonism towards C ­ alvinism, which as ‘a religion of the word’ was seen as stirring up ‘the lower orders by giving them a spurious interest in matters above and beyond them’.28 As Pattenson put it, by depicting kings as unworthy of people’s obedience, the ‘Svvisser’ Calvin was culpable of having galvanised many a zealot to turn a monarchy into a democracy (‘to Cantonize a kingdome’).29 Invectives against people held to be supporters of democracy were being fired off in all –​geographical as well as ideological –​directions. However, in the years leading up to the Caroline regime Swiss cantons, republican Holland and various Protestant groups became the primary targets in these important public controversies. As is well-​known, at this time national and international dimension mingled for obvious reasons (e.g. Arminianism, the Spanish Match, James’s policies in the Palatinate); less acknowledged is that anti-​democracy 24

Richard Verstegan, Obseruations concerning the present affaires of Holland and the Vnited Prouinces […] (Saint-​Omer, 1621) p. 65. 25 Ibid., p. 19. 26 Matthew Pattenson, The image of bothe churches. Hierusalem and Babel vnitie and confusion. Obedienc [sic] and sedition (Tornay [Tournai], 1623), p. 86. 27 Ibid., pp. 82–​3. 28 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-​Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England. Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–​1642 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–​106, p. 85. 29 Pattenson, The image, p. 89 (misnumbered as p. 98).

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played a salient part in this process too, especially so vis-​à-​vis the ostensible foreignness of democratic government. Things were only going to get worse.

Caroline Anti-​democracy: Act i (1625–​1642)

The start of Charles i’s (1600–​1649) reign did not allay political tension nor religious conflict. On the contrary, it cemented the authorities’ strong hostility towards ideas of popular government and democratic practices, be these identified with vociferous MPs opposed to absolute royal prerogative or with demagogic spirits endeavouring to enlarge people’s participation in State and Church. Thus, in the contentious Appello Caesarem Richard Montagu (bap.1575–​1641) targeted ‘popular irregularitie, and puritanicall paritie’ propagated by Calvinist divines whose chief goal was to place ‘Popes in every Parish for the Church’ and equally install ‘popular Democraties and Democraticall Anarchies in the State’.30 Like many of his Jacobean predecessors, Montagu argued that papists too wanted ‘to bring in Genevanisme into Church and State, wholly, totally’.31 Bearing witness to continuity in anti-​democratic parlance, Montagu depicted these two groups as disciples of Cartwright for they laboured to set up ‘the Presbyterian Anarchie’ in England.32 For the Laudian Montagu, democracy was more than an insult to be laid at the door of those who wanted to alter the organisation of the Church: it was a real threat to the stability of the State and to the order of society, and thereby to the survival of both. Having faced unprecedented criticism over the levying of the Forced Loan (1626–​7), in the much-​eventful 1628, Charles found himself confronted with the Petition of Right, the mob-​lynching of Dr Lambe (the Duke of Buckingham’s astrologer) and the popularly-​acclaimed murder of Buckingham himself. In this climate, the multitude was compared to boisterous sea-​waters, depicted as essentially sick, and, above all, vilified as mentally insane, morally irresponsible and politically unfit.33 Agreeing with this view, in 1629 Charles suspended all parliamentary sessions and began an eleven-​year period of so-​called ‘Personal 30

Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem: a Just Appeale from Two Unjust Informers (London, 1625), pp. 3, 44. 31 Ibid., p. 72. 32 Ibid., p. 112. 33 See Richard Cust, ‘Was There an Alternative to the Personal Rule? Charles I, the Privy Council and the Parliament of 1629’, History, 90:299 (2005), pp. 330–​52, e.g. p. 340.

140 Cuttica Rule’.34 This tactic was seen as necessary in order to halt the path of MPs who were then striving to instil democratic attitudes in what Sir Francis Kynaston (ca. 1586–​1642) called ‘the baser universall sort of the Populace’. Sundry of his compatriots, Kynaston thundered, seemed to have forgotten that a man living in a democratic commonweal ‘is so unfortunate’ for, should he offend the State, he would never be pardoned or shown mercy regardless of his merits. This man could be killed or barred from his city (ostracism) –​as had occurred countless times in ancient Greece.35 Even recently, Kynaston continued, the Republic of Venice (tellingly branded ‘that suspicious State’) had made an indiscriminate use of proscriptions to ban many virtuous people from its territories. This, for Kynaston, was the true face of democracy: one pockmarked with repression.36 Concurrently with the heated debates concerning Ship Money (1634–​39), a much unpopular levy, troubles erupted in Scotland too: the disputes over the imposition of the Prayer Book (1637) prompted many people to accuse the Covenanters of being rabble-​seducers and anti-​monarchical rebels.37 On his part, King Charles imputed all problems to factious Parliamentarians like John Pym, who had corrupted the better part of the nation by inculcating in them ideas of political levelling.38 Along similar lines, the absolutist John Cusacke,39 an Irish gentleman who worked on the fringes of the court of wards during the Jacobean and Caroline periods, articulated (between 1615 and 1647)  his uncompromising anti-​ democratic creed by asserting that to doubt whether the king may produce or exercise the proper and perfect acts of his royal prerogative without the assent of the Commons in 34 35 36

37 38 39

See e.g. Lawrence J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Francis Kynaston, A True Presentation of forepast Parliaments, to the view of present times and posteritie (1629), British Library, Lansdowne MS 213, fos 146a–​76b, fos 171b–​72b. Ibid., fo. 173b. This likely referred to the Bedmar conspiracy organised by Spain against Venice, after which the Spanish ambassador Alfonso de la Cueva, First Marquis of Bedmar, was forced to leave Venice (1618). On the whole, the practice of exiling people (e.g. Bajmonte Tiepolo and his friends in the fourteenth century or the Jesuits in 1606) for threatening the republic with plots, or for not respecting travel bans during epidemics, was a typically Venetian punishment. I thank Jaska Kainulainen and Rosa Salzberg for clarifications on this issue. See e.g. Richard Cust, Charles I. A Political Life (Harlow and New  York:  Pearson, 2005), pp. 227–​8. Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 235–​58, pp. 254–​5. Dates of birth and death are unavailable.

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parliament is to turn monarchy into democracy and to make him the servant of the people instead of being a divine vicegerent and their master; and to expose common law to the judgement of the Commons is to cast a pearl before swine.40 Cusacke put the blame for England’s predicament on the supporters of ‘popularitie’, for trying ‘to establish a profane and insane democratic regime’. These ‘seditious flatterers of the people’ persuaded the latter that it was they who were the supreme authority in Parliament, not the monarch.41 Equally caustic opinions were vented by the royalist lawyer John Spelman (1594–​1643), for whom democracy was much ‘unpleasing to God’ and ‘pernitious to the people themselves’. Democracy was characteristic of polities where despite a pretention ‘of doing justice, or preserving true religion’, what really mattered was the attainment of private goals.42 Spelman explained that it was commonly believed that tyrannical conduct happened more likely in monarchies, which was why people ‘instituted, in some places Aristocraticall, in some places Popular government’. This was a mistaken principle (held by democrats like Henry Parker) because these forms of government were nothing more than ‘other faces of the same tyranny’. Indeed, democratic ‘absolute’ governments could be just as ‘obnoxious’ as the tyrannical rule of a ‘Prince’ governing alone. The only solution to this impasse was a balance of the three in what ought to take the shape of a mixed monarchy.43 However, Spelman was quick to clarify that there existed ‘no authority committed to the people, in case the Prince failes of his Duty; nor of any sword that is to be born by them’. Unfortunately, Spelman complained, this did not prevent some ambitious fomenters from coaxing ‘the people’ into assuming that they had the same ‘authority of Princes’: in fact, it was all a ruse. Because ‘the people’ were ‘naturally jealous, and impatient of the violation of their supposed Right or Liberty’ as well as gullible, irrational and immoderate, it followed that they gave themselves up so irresponsibly to these false beliefs as to ‘bring upon themselves the evills that they most doe feare from others’. It was precisely this scenario, Spelman concluded, that had emerged in all its devastating force in ancient Rome following the plebs’ abolition of the monarchy in favour of the republic, which 40 41 42 43

Cited in Linda Levy Peck, ‘Beyond the Pale: John Cusacke and the Language of Absolutism in Early Stuart Britain’, Historical Journal, 41:1 (1998), pp. 121–​49, p. 140 (italics added). Cited in ibid., p. 148. John Spelman, Certain Considerations Upon the Duties of both the Prince and the People […] (Oxford, 1642), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 19–​20.

142 Cuttica had ‘introduced’ a much worse ‘Tyranny’ than ‘that of their Kings’.44 Distrust of the populace’s intellectual faculties, political nous and moral standards were for Spelman preeminent reasons why it should not wield any power. In England, the 1640s saw an unparalleled proliferation of pamphlets, texts and sermons, which for some historians signifies a process of democratisation of opinion(s) at the forefront of which stood readers and citizens.45 The decade is thus deemed to have drastically changed the role of public opinion for the people were given new consideration by those in power. The authorities ‘felt the need on an unprecedented scale’ to address and persuade the common people, despite not heeding their grievances.46 According to David Wootton,47 the 1640s viewed the emergence of the concept that ‘the representative body of the people’ (the Commons) was the servant of ‘the represented’, who  –​because of their sheer number  –​could not gather to take decisions, without great inconvenience. This reading of the events produced by the war, and the ideas it yielded, insists that a new era of political discourse dawned in England, and that at the centre of this new beginning was a different assessment of popular power. However, this approach makes too much of change, especially in relation to visions of democratic participation and popular institutions.48 As the next paragraph shows, a brief look at some post-​1642 writings reveals that even though some of the targets of anti-​democratic discourse shifted and new ones were introduced (above all, Levellers and Independents), the same types of arguments deployed in the previous four decades were used in the polemical battles of the Civil Wars. It was rare to find authors who approved of the full political participation of the citizenry (republics), let alone of that of the rabble (democracies), especially in a country of considerable territorial size and population like England. To emphasise the place assigned (by some) to representation as the means through which notions of citizenship or democracy could be applied to the English polity, and as the device with which people’s sovereignty was conveyed, neglects both the continuous presence of 44 45 46

Ibid., pp. 23–​4. See e.g. Zaret, Origins, e.g. pp. 262ff. Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500–​1600. The Politics of the Post-​Reformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 187. 47 See David Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in James H.  Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 412–​42. 48 For the opinion that the Civil Wars were no watershed in terms of political ideas see Johann P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots. Politics and Ideology in England 1603–​1640 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999; i edn 1986), p. 238.

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anti-​democratic opinions and the limitedness of these allegedly new principles’ applicability. De facto, representative government signalled the empowerment of a fictional people rather than of a truly popular entity. Even the supporters of the belief that Parliament derived its authority from the people reserved for the latter only a passive role.49 The ‘mechanical’ common people continued to be seen with much suspicion, and their audacity was almost universally disparaged.50 If it is true that they acquired a new visibility on the political scene (and –​thanks to the Parliamentarians’ embrace of the theory of mixed government  –​in political debates too), it is also important to remember that for the majority of Englishmen this was the tragic consequence of their having been made (legitimate) political actors by noisy democratic factions in the Commons.51 Reactions to ideas of popular power and democratic government remained unwavering and uncompromising for quite some time.

Caroline Anti-​democracy: Act ii (1643–​1649)

One year into the conflict opposing King and Parliament, the royalist controversialist Edward Fisher (bap. 1611/​2–​ca. 1656) asserted that there existed no passage in the Scriptures speaking of a king elected ‘by the voice of the people’ nor of the invention of a ‘Democracy’.52 On his part, Bishop John Bramhall (1594–​1663) targeted the Parliamentarians not simply for promoting the theory of the popular origins of power, but above all for employing Parker’s tenets with which ‘the headie and raging multitude’ was –​regardless of its ‘untameable nature’ –​democratically put ahead in State and in Church.53 Bramhall warned that if it became allowed for ‘the sheep’ to ‘dislike the shepherd’ to the extent that the latter was forced to submit to the former, ‘the People’ would 49 50 51

52 53

John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 185. See e.g. Edward Symmons, Foure sermons […] (London, 1642), pp.  10–​11, 21, 33–​4, 147; Anon., A Diuine Oade (London, 1641 [i.e. 1642]), fol. 1; Matthew Griffith, A patheticall perswasion to pray for publick peace […] (London, 1642), pp. 40–​1. See e.g. Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-​Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in Charles H.  Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-​ Reformation. Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New  York:  Random House, 1965), pp. 296–​324, p. 311. Edward Fisher, An appeale to thy conscience […] (London: s.n., 1643), p. 13. John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve:  or a Remedy for the Biting of an Aspe […] (?, 1643), pp. 14, 13.

144 Cuttica be made ‘greater than the king’, so that ‘a Monarchy’ would be turned into ‘a Democracy’. This situation was akin to having a natural body standing on its head instead of its heels; it also corresponded to a deformation of divine creation. Politically subversive and morally wicked, democracy  –​Bramhall charged –​was also an inversion of patriarchal order: masters would be superseded by their ‘Servants together, or the Major part of them’ and fathers would be controlled by their ‘Children’ losing thus their claims to ‘Fatherhood’.54 Democracy with its representative system proved to be impracticable too: it did not work in the household, let alone in much larger entities such as State and Church.55 Essentially, for Bramhall, people like Parker (branded ‘the masterpiece of our modern incendiaries’)56 wanted to reduce England to ‘an Aristo-​ Democracy’, which was unable ‘to protect’ or ‘to punish’.57 This was exactly what suited ‘the Citty of Venice’, but could ‘not fit the Kingdome of England’. Tumults were part and parcel of the Venetian government’s history just as of the past of the popular polities of Genoa and Florence whose inhabitants lived in a considerably happier state ‘now, then they did before in a Republick’. This was easy to explain: during its republican phase Florence made it possible for ‘a bare legged Fellow out of the Scumme of the People’ to control the city’s political authorities.58 In light of the lower orders’ idiocy and malevolence, it was only natural that the Florentines should presently be ‘freer then when they did injoy those painted rayes of spurious Liberty’. As for the Netherlands, Bramhall was equally dismissive of what he saw as their seditious ‘Popular Government’.59 Returning to the more immediate troubles he found England engulfed in, he pointed out that, should ‘the Independents […] prevail’, they would ‘bring in the Trojan Horse of their Democracy, or rather Anarchy’, which, in turn, would engender a monstrous confusion of cults on a scale not seen even in ‘Affricke’.60 In Bramhall’s analysis, democracy epitomised 54 Ibid., p. 18. 55 This was a maxim attributed to Lycurgus with regard to why Sparta was no democracy. It was frequently used in early modern England (see e.g. Thomas Hurste, The Descent of Authoritie […] (London, 1637), p. 33). 56 Bramhall, The Serpent, p. 13. 57 Ibid., p. 152. 58 Ibid., p. 153. Florence experienced under Girolamo Savonarola (1494) a so-​called ‘governo largo’ (a ‘democratic republic’) whose cornerstone was a large popular assembly (‘the Great Council’), which was opposed by those who preferred a ‘governo stretto’, namely an oligarchic republic modelled on Venice (John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 7). 59 Bramhall, The Serpent, p. 153. 60 Ibid., p. 213.

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madness not only politically (as to be expected), but also metaphysically, physically and religiously (polytheism).61 A sign of the same abiding fear(s), and vehement reactions, that democracy engendered in the 1640s just as before, Bramhall’s criticism combined ad hoc attacks on the latest democrats with deep hatred of the lower orders and with savaging European countries whose political systems were non-​monarchical. In fact, even when deploring past and present republics, his principal focus was on unveiling their being ­popular states. Amidst bloody battles between the opposite armies, the creation of the New Model Army (1645) and the growing demand for religious toleration maintained tension in the country at very high levels. As campaigners for ‘equality’, the Levellers attracted the ire of people on both sides of the conflict. Thus, the anonymous A Sectary Dissected depicted the Leveller petition of March 1647 as an ‘Ochlocraticall’62 manifesto in which the ‘Arbitrary’ nature of both a ‘tyrannicall’ and a ‘licentious’ government was being promoted.63 The former corresponded to a polity where ‘the insolent’ had the upper hand, whilst the latter had ‘the foolish’ in charge. Between the two, A Sectary Dissected gave preference to tyranny because a tyrant might be followed by a moderate successor, whereas when the populace held power a state was destined to incur ‘a never dying succession of confusion’. A Sectary Dissected compared ‘the populacy’ with ‘the Sea’: as the latter could not be trusted in that it ‘sometimes deceive[d]‌ the eye, with the smoothnesse of its glassy surface’ even though it could at any time turn into ‘storms & tempests’, devouring ‘whom ever […] it smiled upon’, so ‘the unbridled multitude’ acted in misleading ways until the moment it could erupt with all its rage so as to sink ‘the whole Ship of the Common-​ wealth’. Cultivating ‘the popular windes’ in order to obtain their private goals, 61

The argument that democracy corresponded to polytheism was to be articulated (1652) by Sir Robert Filmer (1588–​1653) for whom advocacy of people’s freedom to select their form of government led straight to ‘the liberty of the people’s choosing their religion’, which allowed men to be ‘of any religion, or of no religion’. As ancient Greece and Rome became ‘as famous for their polytheism, or multitudes of gods, as of governors’, having imagined ‘aristocracy and democracy’ both ‘in heaven’ and ‘on earth’, so centuries later an identically deleterious situation affected the United Provinces and Venice (Robert Filmer, ‘Observations Concerning The Originall of Goverment […]’, in Filmer. Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P.  Sommerville (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.  184–​234, pp.  207–​8; see Cesare Cuttica, ‘The English Regicide and Patriarchalism: Representing Commonwealth Ideology and Practice in the Early 1650s’, Renaissance and Reformation, 36:2 (2013), pp. 127–​60, p. 144). 62 ‘Ochlocracy’ referred to ‘the government of the rabble’. 63 Anon., A Sectary Dissected, or, The anatomie of an Independent flie, still buzzing about city and country […] (London, 1647), p. 10.

146 Cuttica the authors of the petition intended to set up ‘a Plebeian Consulate’.64 Like all democrats, the Levellers endeavoured to bog Parliament down with intricate tricks so as to be able to carry out their devious schemes ‘unseen’, until it was too late to stem their abominable flow.65 In the same way as A Sectary Dissected, the Scots Presbyterian Robert Baillie (1602–​1662) –​no friend of the Caroline regime –​resorted to the term ‘ochlocracy’. This time though it was to decry the Independents as well as ‘Brownism’ and ‘Familisme’ (1647).66 As evidence that political vocabulary was responding to the dramatic circumstances of the 1640s, Baillie distinguished between ‘[t]‌his new Ochlocratorick republick’ promoted by the sects (a regime empowering ‘the most poor, base, weak, foolish creatures’) and ‘Democracies’. With the reality of groups like the Levellers advocating ideas close to universal ­enfranchisement, and with events like the Putney Debates (1647) where the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army imagined the abolition of the monarchy, some authors felt the need to separate democracy in which ‘the better sort only of the people have voyce in Government’ –​again, not everyone –​from ‘ochlocracy’ where, instead, ‘every individuall participates of the Soveraignty’ –​something held to be beyond the pale.67 For people like Baillie –​for whom times were ‘very miserable’, given that ‘the common multitude’ was being catapulted at the forefront of political life68 –​the great appeal of the Independent cause made it necessary to employ the (Polybian) pejorative ‘ochlocracy’ so as to smear more damagingly their ‘new Utopian Republick’.69 For Baillie, this situation was particularly frightening because the sects’ ideas 64 65 66

See ibid., pp. 11–​12. Ibid., pp. 33–​4. This was also the year of the contested appointment to the role of Vice-​Admiral of the Navy of the Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, a reviled figure due to his defence of the politicisation of the common soldiery and the poor (Robert Ashton, The English Civil War. Conservatism and Revolution 1603–​1649 (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), p. 324). 67 Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, the true fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme […] (London, 1647), p.  63. Baillie had been similarly severe vis-​à-​vis the Independents two years earlier when he had argued that to ‘set up the common people, not onely above their Officers in the Church, but also above their Magistrate in the State’ meant to ‘draw in a popular government and Ochlocracie both in Church and State alike’ (Robert Baillie, A dissuasive from the errours of the time […] (London, 1645), p. 194 (italics added)). 68 Baillie, Anabaptism, ‘The Epistle’, sig. 2r. 69 Ibid., p. 63 (in the margin). ‘Utopian’ was likely an allusion to the lack of leisure associated with strict godly views to be found in Geneva, to the impracticable regime set up at Münster as well as to Thomas More’s characterisation of the frugal inhabitants of the island of Utopia (Thomas More, Utopia. Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George

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manifested an ‘Anabaptistick root’ first put down in Münster.70 The lesson to be drawn from all of this, Baillie concluded, was that democracy was a disease whose degeneration, ochlocracy, was now infecting England in ways that, if not properly fought, would be deadly.71 Such outspoken emissions from the land of anti-​democracy need to be read in light of increasing mob activity in London and rampant religious radicalism, which were interpreted as signs of the world turned-​upside-​down.72 Soldiers freely preaching from the pulpit Amsterdam-​style were identified with a serious threat to order,73 so much so that by 1647–​8 many who had been radicals ended up taking more conservative positions, going as far to embrace counter-​revolutionary stances.74 In such a tense climate, mobilisation of the lower orders was a weapon chosen by royalist and parliamentarian factions alike: the presence of violent ‘royalist City’ mobs in the summer of 1647 was meant to counteract confusion spread by anti-​monarchical sectarian firebrands.75 By and large, there existed a paralysing fear of popular violence, irrespective of who rioted and revolted. Each of these factors contributed therefore to perpetuate opposition to anything smacking of democratic principle, value or practice.76 Despite the identification of democratic creeds switched further to the left of the ideological spectrum, hatred of democracy remained universal as is confirmed by the fact that not even the allegedly democrat John Lilburne (1615?–​1657) used the term ‘democracy’ positively. In harshly addressing the New Model Army grandees led by Cromwell, and what remained of the Long Parliament after Pride’s Purge (1648), the people-​supporter Lilburne stated that Charles and the royalists had accused the early Parliamentarians of wanting ‘to destroy Liberty and Propriety, meum and tuum, and to subvert the Laws, and introduce new forms of arbitrary government, & to introduce Anarchy, a parity and confusion by levelling of all degrees and conditions’. On Lilburne’s M. Logan, Robert M. Adams and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), bk ii, e.g. pp. 129, 145, 171). 70 Baillie, Anabaptism, p. 65. The association of Anabaptism with democracy was common in Elizabethan and Jacobean political thought too. 71 Ibid., p. 66. 72 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down:  Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972), passim. 73 Ashton, The English Civil War, pp. 148–​56, 224. 74 Others though moved in the opposite direction (ibid., pp. 350–​1). 75 Derek Hirst, England in Conflict 1603–​ 1660. Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London: Arnold, 1999), p. 240. 76 For the same opinion see e.g. Zaret, Origins, p. 215.

148 Cuttica account, the King had also maintained that by cloaking their true goals under the pretence of the ‘advancement of Religion, Justice, Liberty, Propertie, and Peace’, his adversaries had pandered to the baser sorts. As a result, if successful, they would have altered ‘the whole frame of government’ to such an extent that only the evil twins of ‘Democracy and Parity’ would be left standing. Distorted as Charles’s outlook was, this passage seems nonetheless to indicate that for the Leveller Lilburne democracy –​if given free rein –​led to the abolition not only of ‘King’ and ‘Gentlemen’, but also of ‘Law, Liberty or Property’.77 In other terms, these lines reveal that –​despite viewing both King and Parliament as oppressive powers, and despite supporting popular consent to representative government, an enlarged franchise and a new written constitution defending people’s ‘inalienable rights’78 –​Lilburne was no democrat. He adopted a traditional negative definition of democracy as a government conducive to disorder and one with which he did not want to be associated. Distrust of, and contempt for, the people did not desert John Milton (1608–​ 1674) either: the republican stalwart complained that they did not know how to do liberty.79 Indeed, Milton was so influenced by classical criticism of democracy that his politics need to be placed ‘in relation to the anti-​democratic tradition’.80 On his part, Oliver Cromwell (1599–​1658) dismissed the populace as an entity with ‘no interest but the interest of breathing’.81 Hostility to democracy –​also shared by people like the parliamentary leader, regicide and Cromwell’s son-​in-​law Henry Ireton (bap. 1611–​1651) –​was strengthened by the opinion that it was impossible to concede the franchise to those who, by not being property-​owners, had no permanent interest in the country.82 Opposed to democratic principles stood the contention that manhood suffrage implied financial freedom, so that even for the Levellers servants and alms-​takers (according to the second ‘Agreement of the People’ of January 1649, wage-​earners too) were not entitled to vote since they were not sufficiently independent.83 77

John Lilburne, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England, Revived, Asserted, and Vindicated (London, 1649; ‘The Second Edition, Corrected and Amended’), p. 7. 78 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Lilburne, John’, http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​; accessed on 7 August 2017. 79 See Hill, ‘The Many-​Headed Monster’, p. 316. 80 Rachel Foxley, ‘ “Due Libertie and Proportiond Equalitie”:  Milton, Democracy and the Republican Tradition’, History of Political Thought, 34:4 (2013), pp. 614–​38, p. 622. 81 Cited in Anthony Arblaster, Democracy (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002; i edn 1987), pp. 30–​1. 82 Ibid., p. 32. 83 John Sanderson, “But the People’s Creatures”. The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 115–​16.

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The exact same critical attitudes were to have long-​standing traction: the anti-​democratic rhetoric of T.B. Macaulay’s speech delivered in the Commons in March 1831 is only one of its most striking instances.84

Conclusion

In early seventeenth-​century England the popular component of the body politic was depicted mostly as irrational and dangerous; it was deemed to be subject to uncontrollable passions that led to the dissolution of monarchy in favour of the institution of democracy. Historical examples were employed to describe the troubles caused by popular government; classical and other sources alike served to target the populace whose ferocity and ignorance of political affairs was a continuous threat to civilisation and order. The idea that the liberty of the masses ought to be sought after as a most desirable objective was completely rejected. Many theorists highlighted the lethal effects of democracy on State and Church. Whether concerned with dismissing the popular origins of government or more interested in dismantling all legitimacy and feasibility of democracy, a great number of writers characterised it as the government of the rascal many-​headed multitude. Democracy amounted to an eruption of violence, to a state of constant warfare and to an irresponsible search for politico-​ecclesiastical novelty. Democracy also appeared to be a hybrid lacking the purity of monarchy; a regime where since the multitude had the authority to express its opinions, government was seen as unnatural. Most importantly, democracy was portrayed as a disease affecting the State (politics), the Church (religion), the household (patriarchy) and the soul (morality). In fact, criticism of democracy was a way of splitting the world into two parts: good and evil, order and chaos, rationality and irrationality, maturity and (infantile) incompetence, effective government and anarchy, salvation and damnation. Such criticism was an instrument through which a 84

See Thomas B.  Macaulay, ‘A Speech Delivered to the House of Commons, 2nd March 1831’, in The Works of Lord Macaulay:  Speeches, Poems and Miscellaneous Writings (London:  Longmans Green, 1898), pp.  407–​26. According to Macaulay (who delivered his speech in the context of the Great Reform Act, 1832), the multitudes –​affected by their passionate nature and extremely distressed –​were easily manipulated and therefore politically unfit. Consequently, only propertied and intelligent people –​not the masses –​ should govern (ibid., passim). Democracy remained a dirty word across the ideological board throughout the nineteenth century (Robert Saunders, ‘Democracy’, in David Craig and James Thompson (eds), Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 142–​67, esp. pp. 142–​4).

150 Cuttica very large portion of the politically active population in England could exorcise fears of a world turned-​upside-​down and single out categories of people who were thought to threaten the integrity of society by giving a voice to the plebs. Anti-​democratic feelings did not belong exclusively to one social group. They were pervasive in that they conveyed a common negative tendency towards the possibility that the populace might become a legitimate political interlocutor in the polis. This does not signify that opposition to democracy was informed by one (may it be political, social, religious or emotional) vision of how things were and ought to be:  instead, this ideological horizon was marked by a plurality of shifting points of views and agents. The anti-​ democratic front did not present a coherent political blueprint created to defeat its adversaries, which also denotes the lack of uniform definitions of the terms used (e.g. ‘people’). Yet it did offer a clear, if composite, assessment of why democratic government was an unviable prospect in State as much as in Church affairs. Ubiquitous both theoretically and in regard to the different social backgrounds, religions and professions of the authors here encountered, criticism of democracy was a persistent feature –​more so than generally acknowledged in the scholarship and more decisively so than republicanism –​ of the Jacobean and Caroline eras. In this respect, this chapter shows that the Civil Wars did not change the general discrediting of democracy. Although in the course of the 1640s new actors on the political stage (e.g. Levellers, Independents) proved to be more sympathetic vis-​à-​vis forms of popularity, generating for the first time interest in the rights –​and plights –​of the people, their efforts did not entail a less disparaging view of democracy. Even the use of ‘ochlocracy’ (democracy’s corruption), or the critical references to  –​republican  –​states like Switzerland, Venice, Florence and Holland, served to reiterate how terrible the democratic cancer was. Democracy and its cognate practices remained unacceptable. Not to see this is to misunderstand that historical phase by anachronistically imposing on it concepts and considerations that are ours, not theirs. The anti-​democratic paradigm was to have enduring influence in that it was adopted by the great majority of thinkers up to the nineteenth century. Centred on a relentless attack on the people (rabble, populace, multitude) and their political, moral, intellectual characteristics, a multiplicity of languages, prejudices and spheres of discourse was employed to make democracy shine in all its monstrosity, so much so that this criticism was more than the rejection of a specific type of government. It was directed at a form of life involving the –​then despicable and nowadays increasingly odd –​spectre-​character homo democraticus.

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Baillie, Robert, Anabaptism, the true fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme […] (London, 1647). Bramhall, John, The Serpent Salve: or a Remedy for the Biting of an Aspe […] (?, 1643). Floyd, John, God and the king […] (Cullen [i.e. Saint-​Omer], 1620). Howson, John, Certaine sermons made in Oxford, anno Dom. 1616 […] (London, 1622). Montagu, Richard, Appello Caesarem:  a Just Appeale from Two Unjust Informers (­London, 1625). Verstegan, Richard, Obseruations concerning the present affaires of Holland and the Vnited Prouinces […] (Saint-​Omer, 1621).

Cuttica, Cesare, ‘A Thing or Two about Absolutism and its Historiography’, History of European Ideas, 39:2 (2013), pp. 287–​300. Cuttica, Cesare, ‘The English Regicide and Patriarchalism:  Representing Commonwealth Ideology and Practice in the Early 1650s’, Renaissance and Reformation, 36:2 (2013), pp. 127–​60. Foxley, Rachel, ‘ “Due Libertie and Proportiond Equalitie”: Milton, Democracy and the Republican Tradition’, History of Political Thought, 34:4 (2013), pp. 614–​38. Hill, Christopher, ‘The Many-​Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in Charles H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-​ Reformation. Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York and London: Random House, 1965), pp. 296–​324. Sommerville, Johann P., Royalists and Patriots. Politics and Ideology in England 1603–​ 1640 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999; i edn 1986). Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

­c hapter 7

Anti-​puritanism as Political Discourse; the Laudian Critique of Puritan ‘Popularity’ Peter Lake This chapter is not about democracy proper. None of the authors discussed below used the term, and none of their targets would have owned it. Rather it is about the use of anti-​puritanism as a form of political discourse, a way to articulate a certain set of political values, a vision of order and the threats thereto. The crucial term employed in the texts I will discuss here was not democracy but popularity. In taking the latter term as in some sense a surrogate for the former, I am drawing on important work by Cesare Cuttica on the anti-​ democratic discourse of the early modern period, which sees ‘popularity’ as central to early modern attitudes to things democratical and which places as much stress on equality and parity as simple majority rule, as defining characteristics of what was taken, at the time, to be the ‘democratic’ threat.1 My particular area of interest here is provided by what I will call Laudian constructions of puritanism as a populist (if not democratic, then democratising) threat to all order in church and state. The authors I will be discussing below were all defenders of the Personal Rule of Charles i and in particular of the Laudian church policies pursued during the 1630s. They defended those policies in officially endorsed texts  –​visitation, court and assize sermons, tracts designed to defend the signature policies of the regime over the altar or the sabbath –​and in freelancing works of polemic and doctrinal experiment and assertion. Their aim in so doing was twofold. First, they deployed a certain vision of puritanism in order to articulate and legitimate a peculiarly Laudian vision of true religion and order in church and state, which vision they then presented as the only effective antidote to the threat of puritan disorder. Secondly, they were concerned to defend the Personal Rule and its policies from actual puritan attack. In the first mode, they were responding to their own image of puritan deviance, in the second, they were responding to the arguments of actual puritans.

1 Cesare Cuttica, ‘Popularity in Early Modern England (ca. 1570–​1642): Looking Again at Thing and Concept’, Journal of British Studies, 58:1 (2019), pp. 1–​27.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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Their efforts in this regard drew on a range of assertions, tropes and tendencies inherited from earlier generations of conformist defenders of the ecclesiastical status quo against puritan assault. John Whitgift and a range of other ‘Calvinist conformists’ from Elizabeth’s reign had sought to vindicate the causes of order and authority from puritan/​Presbyterian attack by labelling the puritans popular. The popularity of which the puritans were accused was defined firstly in terms of the substantive content and implications of the presbyterian platform. These resided in the assertion of parity between ministers and parishes, and the expanded role given to members of the laity, and indeed to the election or consent of the people, in administering ecclesiastical discipline, up to including excommunication and in the appointment and ordination of ministers. However, the popularity of the Presbyterian movement was not confined to the content of its ideology, but also encompassed the nature of the methods through which the puritan platform was canvassed; that is to say, the ways in which the godly sought to raise support for their position and to ‘persuade’  –​their opponents would have said coerce  –​the authorities in church and state to accede to their demands. These methods included appeals, launched through the pulpit, print, circulating manuscript and rumour, to promiscuously popular audiences, aka ‘the people’.2 Later, more adventurous ‘avant-​garde conformists’ –​Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Montague prominent amongst them –​went beyond the analysis of the subversive, populist implications of the puritan critique of the church and the Presbyterian platform, to depict puritanism as a subversive style of religious belief and practice; word centred, predestinarian, inherently popular, anti-​hierarchical in its implications and consequences, and popular in its demotic, rabble rousing sermons.3 The Laudians presented the signature policies of the Personal Rule –​the crackdown on predestinarian speculation and preaching, the altar policy, the assaults on puritan sabbatarianism, on lectures, conventicles and sermon gadding, together with the far stricter insistence on conformity to new and improved standards of ceremonial performance –​as necessary responses to, or antidotes against, decades of corrupting

2 Peter Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy: or John Whitgift, Puritanism and the “Invention” of Popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:3 (2010), pp. 463–​95. 3 On Hooker see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Hooker to Laud (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), ­chapter 4 and conclusion. On Andrewes see Peter Lake, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and Avant Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 113–​33.

154 Lake puritan influence over the religious practice and doctrinal profession of the national church.

ii

Central to the making of that case was a certain vision of puritanism and its pathologies, and what I am going to do in the rest of this chapter is talk about the more political, explicitly anti-​democratic, aspects of that vision of the puritan threat. For the Laudians, puritanism was first and foremost a religion of the word, and as such had inherent within it certain tendencies, both intended and unintended consequences, of a decidedly popular, levelling, even democratical sort. Puritanism was a religion of the word in two senses. Firstly, at least according to the Laudians, the puritans collapsed all religion, the entire worship of God and public profession of the faith, into preaching. Secondly, they regarded scripture as the ultimate source of authority, in terms of which everything done not only in the church, but also in the state, had to be judged. Such beliefs not merely allowed, they encouraged, the ordinary Christian, armed with his or her own copy of the Bible, and prompted by his or her own scripturally infused conscience, to judge not only the highest matters of church and state, but also the performance, in and out of the pulpit, of their own pastors. To turn to their obsession with preaching first, for the Laudians, this utterly unbalanced the puritan version of divine worship. It downgraded the role of the sacraments and public prayer and put no premium at all on the performance of divine worship as the Laudians understood it. The church was reduced to the status of a lecture hall, with the godly only turning up to hear the sermon and leaving as soon as it was finished. Worse still, the puritans restricted the term preaching to their own ex-tempore, supposedly spirit-​drenched, ravings. They did the same thing with public prayer, preferring their own extempore, tautologically irreverent, and again supposedly spirit-​drenched, rants to the public prayers mandated by the church. All of which introduced an entirely subversive element of subjective judgement and consumer choice into the life of the church, with the laity rejecting what was on offer in their own parish, in search of the right sort of ‘godly preaching’ elsewhere. Here the puritan obsession with preaching came together with the obligation of every Christian to try the spirits, and judge matters according to their own understanding of scripture and the promptings of conscience. Hence proceeded two equally subversive practices: sermon gadding, whereby the laity voted with their feet and deserted their own parishes

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to hear the right sort of preacher elsewhere; and stipendiary lectures, whereby, by clubbing together, the puritan laity got to hire (and fire) the right sort of preacher as they saw fit. This created the most dreadful, ‘popular’ dynamic, with the people listening only to preachers of whom they approved, and with preachers desperate to win the loyalty and attention of ‘the people’. Thus puritan ministers preached only what the factious people (not to mention their gentry patrons) wanted to hear, in the process pandering to their auditors’ basest instincts in order to increase their own popular following. Edward Kellett denounced what he termed ‘those base people-​pleasers or publicolae, who make or esteem tradesmen, and youth, and ill nurtured, unlettered idiots … the competent judges of controversies’,4 while Humphrey Sydenham lamented that the ‘glory of the pastor hath not a little wrap’d and declin’d since divinity hath been so much acquainted with the stipend and the trencher. We raise doctrines now-​a-​days according to our pay; fill others’ ears, as they our hands or belly’.5 Similarly, John Browning decried puritan preachers who spouted their divisive and seditious opinions ‘out of a desire of pleasing others, or profiting themselves by gain, lucre, or vainglory’.6 Commentators like Sydenham alternated between denouncing puritan ministers who would do anything for ‘the applause of the multitude’7 and ‘the heat of superstition, the rage and fury of the people, whoring after novelties’.8 All too often the result was a sinister and subversive co-​dependency established between the puritan preacher and his lay following. For, Sydenham explained, ‘the hearts of the simple’ ‘are more prone rashly to consent than judge, which is a main symptom of spirits emasculate and sick, indiscreetly and womanishly zealous, that are carried along with beliefs merely, not out of choice and judgement, but a partial opinion of him they fancy’.9 And once thus possessed with error, the people insisted on being told only what they wanted to hear, maintaining ‘that as I am opinioned, so I please to understand, and as I please to understand, so am I edified, and as I am edified, so is my zeal enflamed’.10 All of which meant, Sydenham lamented, that ‘when the minds of the people are once entangled’ with ‘the doctrines’ of such ‘foolish prophets’,

4 5

Edward Kellett, Miscellanies of divinity (Cambridge, 1633), book 1, pp. 182–​3. Humphrey Sydenham, Sermons upon solemn occasions (London, 1637), pp. 299–​300, from The good pastor, a visitation sermon of 1633. 6 John Browning, Concerning public prayer (London, 1636), p. 51. 7 Sydenham, Sermons, p. 258, from The foolish prophet, a visitation sermon of 1636. 8 Ibid., p. 230. 9 Ibid., p. 259. 10 Ibid., p. 260.

156 Lake ‘though these doctrines all this while are snares, it is not in the power of learning either to dissolve or untwist them. For popular conceit is headstrong, and whereas wisdom is ever carried by strength of allegation, folly and popularity are tyrants to themselves’.11 Moreover, if preaching was the sincere interpretation and application of the word to the experience and exigencies of the auditory, it could be done anywhere, not only in church, or in time of divine service, and more subversively still, it could be done by anyone with the requisite spiritual gifts and scriptural insight, and thus not only by clergymen. After all, since the puritans habitually encouraged the laity to check the claims of the clergy and indeed the doings of the great and the good, against the dictates of scripture, it was but a relatively small, and yet momentous, step from that to letting the godly lay person i­nterpret and apply the scripture for him or herself. Thus Edward Boughen lamented that I know there be many in the world that never saluted either university, and have no tongue but what their mothers taught them, that hold the scripture every man’s possession, and think themselves so well seen in the book of God, and so thoroughly acquainted with his secrets, that they are able to explain the most difficult scripture … with as much ease as sup a mess of broth, because Christ hath promised to reveal his will to babes and sucklings.12 This, Boughen observed, had become a pervasive tendency: ‘every man hath too good a conceit of his own understanding; every man that can read the scripture, and hath a memory to pot scripture, will undertake to expound scripture’.13 At this point, we enter the world of the puritan conventicle, which, for Laudians, along with the stipendiary lecture and the practice of sermon gadding, represented the very quintessence of puritan privacy, factionalism and subversion. Conventicles were private meetings held in puritan households, ostensibly for the repetition of the heads of sermons first heard in the public congregation. That claim was of the essence, for it prevented the conventicle from being regarded as, or indeed from becoming, the site of private expositions and

11 12

Ibid., pp. 262–​3. Edward Boughen, A sermon preached at St Paul’s Cross, the 13 April, 1630 (London, 1635), p. 26. 13 Ibid., p. 33.

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applications of the scripture by the laity; in effect the occasion of lay preaching to self-​selected, soi disant ‘godly’ audiences. But that was precisely what the Laudians claimed was going on; in effect, the removal of what the puritans took to be the central act of public worship from the church into secular space, from clerical into lay hands. Here is Edward Kellett’s description of the typical puritan conventicle: ‘After sermons ended, the giddy people flock together and under the specious title of repetition, (forsooth) they repeat only their own vanity’. These were ‘conventicles contrary to the law’, in the conduct of which lay people stow themselves in the house of one of the most furious zealots, make long prayers, filled up with their professed repetitions; censure, rail, mis-​expound scriptures; propound foolish and curious questions, and receive back ridiculous answers; gather up sums of money to uphold the faction, and to animate the obstinate ones; breed up youth to boldness, fierceness and self-​ conceit, and to swallow down a presumption of their own salvation. Then they proceed to declare who shall be saved and who shall be damned … What scandals have been offered, what sins under that cloak committed.14 According to Richard Tedder, conventicles provided the means whereby ‘the heretic and schismatic convey themselves, in a sneaking manner, into God’s house, under the covert of holiness. These St Jude compares to creepers’.15 Conventicles represented the withdrawal of the puritans into privacy, into a space away from the public face of the congregation, hidden from the prying eyes of public authority; a place where private spirits, mere lay men and women, even artisans and tradesmen, could interpret and dispute about the scriptures according to their own sense. For the Laudians claimed that while puritans did indeed subject all things to the authority of scripture, they then subjected scripture itself to their own interpretation. ‘Scripture shall be the rule’, conceded Thomas Laurence, ‘but only they interpreters, for ’tis not canonical, though it hath the stamp of the church, unless it hath theirs besides, and so become themselves that infallible Antichrist they declaim so much against’.16 James Buck lamented the puritan propensity to appeal to what he 14 15 16

Edward Kellett, Tricoenium Christi (London, 1641), pp. 557–​8. Richard Tedder, A sermon preached at the primary visitation of the bishop of Norwich (London, 1637), p. 22. Thomas Laurence, Two sermons (Oxford, 1635), the second sermon preached at Laud’s metropolitical visitation, p.  8. Also see Foulke Robartes, God’s holy house and service (London, 1639), p. 71.

158 Lake termed ‘the private ghost of every hearer, which suits to the lust of women and vain men, who thereby are exempt from all judgements but their own, and made judges of scripture, and at liberty to deny whatsoever they list not to say the scripture means, and to take unto their faith what they please to hold the scripture intends’.17 We had reached a point, raged Kellett, when ‘every idiot should claim the privilege of an apostle’18 and ‘everyone, illiterate man or woman, at their own pleasure, may judge of scripture and interpret the scripture, and believe their own fancies of the scripture, which they call the evidence of the spirit’. But in fact the only spirit they possessed was ‘the spirit of self-​deceit and pride’; a spirit that was leading people ‘in depths beyond their capacities’, where, ‘daring to take from the holy word of God that divine sense which it hath’, they ‘fasten their own false sense upon it’, ‘to their own destruction’. 19 Thus the people, ‘presuming that they can give better answer than the ephod, … oversee the seers who ought (by the express commandment of God himself) to have the oversight of them’. Now the people will expound scriptures, contradict their pastors, censure their labours, judge their judges, even in matters of such speculation as they may safely be ignorant of, and, under pretence of desire to have their consciences well informed, will not be informed at all in anything against their humour and fancy, but monopolise the spirit to themselves.20 Thus, Humphrey Sydenham contrasted the visions had by the apostles, ‘dictated by the spirit’, with ‘the rheumatic enthusiasm’ and ‘languishing ejaculations’ of the puritans. While the former had been vouchsafed ‘in the temple’, the latter were the product of ‘a cloister, a barn, a wood, a conventicle. They were in the temple with one accord too, with one office, one spirit, one mind, one faith, not here a separatist, there a Brownist, yonder a familist, near him an Anabaptist, but as their faith was one so was their life’.21 Kellett recalled his run-​in ‘with an Anabaptistical woman’ in order to illustrate what could happen when the belief that even the humble and unlearned could and should interpret the scripture for themselves was compounded by a claim to the autonomous testimony of the spirit vouchsafed by God to his chosen saints. 17 James Buck, A treatise of the beatitudes (London, 1637), pp. 137–​8. 18 Kellett, Miscellanies, book 1, p. 181. 19 Ibid., book 1, pp. 149–​50. 20 Ibid., book 2, p. 63. 21 Humphrey Sydenham, The Athenian babbler (London, 1627), p. 40.

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We heard her determine great depths of divinity as confidently as ever St Paul did … and as nimble as ever an ape cracked nuts; yet so ignorantly, and with such non-​sense, that we both wondered at her incredible boldness. The Revelation she had at her fingers’ ends; she thought that she understood it better than St John himself, and defined, in a few hours conference, more depths of divinity than councils would in a long time. It was a performance she based on the testimony of the spirit. ‘She would conclude “because the spirit bloweth where it listeth, that the spirit instructed her in the right way.” A fit consequence for such a pseudo-​prophetissa’.22 For the Laudians, therefore, the puritan conventicle was the thin end of a wedge that led from the preference for the private over the public, to schism, heresy and (crypto-​if not actual) separation. The conventicle was the culmination of a whole series of characteristics central to the puritan impulse. The obsession not merely with preaching and the exposition of the word, but with ex-tempore preaching and prayer, taken to be authentic expressions of the testimony of the spirit; the consequent weakening, if not erasure, of the dividing line between the clergy and the laity; the downgrading of formal worship, set prayer and of the sacraments, and the definition of the church as a community of godly persons, rather than as a holy place, all came together in the conventicle. For not only did those principles and preferences invade and subvert the public performances of the church, with ex-tempore prayer and disorderly preaching pushing out the prayer book, and the ordered gestures of external worship and reverence that attended it, they also led the puritans out of the church altogether, into the private, disordered world of the conventicle. Here was a veritable world turned upside down, where lay people and even women preached and expounded the word; where worship took place in unconsecrated, secular, profane and ritually impure locales; where the clergy pandered to the laity and the bishop’s writ did not run. Here, then, was the ultimate breeding ground for faction, schism and heresy. For, given the Laudians’ obsession with reverent external worship, set public prayer, the sacerdotal power of the clergy, and the apostolic authority of the bishops, withdrawal from the public, sacred space of the visible church into the private, profane spaces where conventicles were kept was tantamount to separation. Here, therefore, was the logical destination of the puritan impulse, private groups of schismatics, heretics and mechanic preachers, meeting in caves, woods, barns and parlours, separated off from the public meetings of the Catholic church and the wider 22 Kellett, Miscellanies, book 1, pp. 152–​3.

160 Lake Christian community and, as such, tearing and rending the integrity and unity of Christ’s mystical body, the church. There was, however, something of a paradox here. For, on the one hand, the conventicle represented a withdrawal from the public domain of the national church into a private space hidden from the purview of authority, the logical culmination of which was some sort of separation, either formal or informal, involving either internal or actual exile in Holland or New England. Yet, on the other hand, the private doings of the puritans hidden away in their conventicles could not but have the most dangerous of public, political consequences. According to Robert Skinner, conventicles and private meetings, under colour of religion, too often serve unto dangerous practices. Seditious opinions and turbulent positions have ever been first invented and vented in private. There it is that peremptory pens and saucy tongues are thought conscientious, because audacious, and he commonly reputed the best man, that is the worst subject. Skinner denounced those ‘who love to whisper in a corner, that stand so much for a private spirit or a private brother in a private place’. For ‘interminglings and adulterate doctrines have been still begotten in private, and have passed by piecemeal from the chamber to the chapel, and so to church’. Away with this parlour preaching and these chamber congregations, … For, I  beseech ye, where hath been the meeting place of their anti-​ canonical canonists, and where have they enacted their anti-​synodical sanctions but in deserto or in cubiculo? There is, therefore, no believing them. Alas, when they have set up once in private the great idol of this their own imaginations, and have consulted their grand oracle … at the idols table, they will not stick to say and decree anything. No appealing then from David to the son of David in this case, both are for the public, for the solemn assembly, both for the temple and the holy place, the beauty of holiness.23 The political results of all this were, according to Edward Boughen, disastrous; ‘the fear of God, and the fear of the king are banished from our hearts’.24 ‘We 23 24

Robert Skinner, A sermon preached before the king (London, 1634), pp. 40–​3. Edward Boughen, A sermon preached at St Paul’s Cross, the 18 April, 1630 (London, 1635), p. 21.

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will be lords and kings; all law-​makers and law-​givers; yea, domini dominantium, equal to the pope at least, we will overule him that does, or at least should, over-​rule all within his dominions and kingdoms’.25

iii

The effects of these practices went truly public in the activities of the leading puritan opponents of the Personal Rule and the Laudian church, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne. Like the mass of the puritan clergy, these men were all malcontents, anxious to make a name for themselves with the people. In secular political terms, their ideal type was provided by Absalom,26 and, in church affairs, by heretics like Arius, Aerius and Montanus, who, disappointed in their ambitions for ecclesiastical office, had turned to the people to make a name and a following for themselves.27 Like these prototypes, the puritan triumvirs were popular spirits, determined to take their message to the dregs of the people whose ‘itching ears were well taken with hearing of those that are in authority boldly taxed, and their faults (as they conceive them) ripped up’.28 For a series of Laudian polemicists, Henry Burton was the ideal type of the seditious puritan preacher, his pulpit rants ‘profane and vain babblings’, comprised of an ‘intermixture of fables, news, or passionate declamations’.29 Men like Burton, Christopher Dow proclaimed, made ‘the pulpit a stage to act their passionate distempers and spleen, to ransack the affairs of state, and to pick out thence such things as may claw the people’s itch, who are ever content to hear those above them taxed’.30 The result, he remarked, was that Burton’s various screeds, in pulpit and press, represented ‘a gangrene edifying to nothing but sedition and the subversion of the church’. As a quintessentially ‘turbulent man’, Burton esteemed ‘loquacity eloquence, and to speak evil of others, the sign of a good conscience’.31 His only aim was ‘to please the people, and his

25 Ibid., p. 22. 26 For Absalom see B.L. Additional Mss, 20,065, fols. 68v.–​69r., from a sermon ‘preached before the king, December 9, 1634’, by Robert Skinner. 27 For Montanus, Aerius and Arius see ibid., fol. 105r., from a sermon ‘preached before the king at Whitehall, December 15, 1635’, by Robert Skinner. 28 Christopher Dow, Innovations unjustly charged upon the present church and state (London, 1637), p. 13. 29 Ibid., p. 158. 30 Ibid., p. 156. 31 Ibid., p. 13.

162 Lake works only calculated for the meridian of their liking’.32 On this basis, Heylyn felt able to proclaim that Burton himself was ‘no more a preacher, but a prevaricator, a dangerous boutefeu and incendiary’,33 who had ‘set his faith to sale for popular breath’,34 and was now determined to expose the leaders of the church ‘to the common hatred’, ‘with false and sinister conceits of the present time’;35 conceits to be spread with ‘many intolerable affronts to authority, by public invectives, private whisperings, and false suggestions, buzzing into the people I know not what dangerous issues (mere fictions of a pettish fantasy)’.36 Burton’s, then, was a ‘tribunician spirit’.37 Desperate to ‘draw the prelates into obloquy with the common people’, Burton set out to cast them as the ultimate evil counsellors, all of them parties to a conspiracy to ‘usurp a power peculiar to his sacred majesty’.38 But Burton’s pitch was not limited to ad hominem attacks on the bishops. It was rather a far more general warning to whoever would listen that ‘both tyranny and popery were likely, in short time, to be thrust upon them’.39 Thus, ‘knowing that there is nothing which they [the people] prize so highly as the defence of their religion and lawful liberties, you lay about you lustily, to let them see how much they are in danger of losing both. For this cause you accuse the prelates almost everywhere for bringing in of popery, tooth and nail for popery … Next you cry out how much the people are oppressed, contrary to their rights and liberties’, something for which Burton (again) at least affected, to blame the bishops.40 In this vein, Burton had cited both his own and Prynne’s recent legal difficulties in order ‘to raise an outcry ac si Annibal ad portas, as if the liberty of the subjects was endangered in the free use and benefit of the laws, as you please to phrase it’.41 For Burton invoked his own and Prynne’s legal travails –​which, as Dow complained, he insisted on characterising as a form of ‘persecution’42 –​ as justification and ‘cause of your seditious libeling against church and state, as if the one were like to devour the other, and all were in a way to ruin, but for such zealots as yourself, the careful watchmen of the times’.43 32 Ibid., pp. 18–​19. 33 Peter Heylyn, A brief and moderate answer to master Henry Burton (London, 1637), p. 6. 34 Dow, Innovations, p. 166. 35 Heylyn, A brief, ‘The preface’, sig. C3v. 36 Dow, Innovations, p. 105a. 37 Heylyn, A brief, p. 31. 38 Ibid., p. 102. 39 Ibid., ‘The preface’, sig. B4r. 40 Ibid., p. 184. 41 Ibid., p. 145. 42 Dow, Innovations, p. 105a. 43 Heylyn, A brief, p. 145.

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But if Burton represented himself as a sort of tribune of the people, prompted by conscience and the word of God to speak truth to power, he used much the same pitch to call on the people to support him; citing as he did so what Heylyn termed that principle of ‘parrhesia which you so commend against all king’s and princes’44 as though ‘you would have every man … as bold a bravo as yourself, to bid defiance to the king, at least to stand it out against all authority’.45 This was ‘to make the common people think that they have more than private interest in the things of God, and in the government of states; nothing more plausible nor welcome to some sort of men, such whom you either make or call “free subjects” ’.46 This was a move that Robert Skinner had imputed to the puritans more generally in sermons preached at court as early as 1631. According to Skinner, by combining arguments drawn from the doctrine of callings and the appeal to ‘conscience’ the godly constructed a rationale for calling into question all of the arcana imperii of both civil and ecclesiastical government. They are subjects, they are neighbours, they are Christians, and one of these relations will serve them at all turns. As subjects, they care for the public; here you must give them leave; all are to stand for the common good and, under this pretense, they will be lewd and licentious, as if the safety of the kingdom did wholly depend upon their copyhold. As Christians, they are bold for the gospel, and here they will be pardoned, for they have souls to save, and they desire to go the right way to heaven. With this vizor they take upon them to question the doctrine and to condemn the discipline of the church, … Lastly, they are neighbours, as well as Christians, and, as neighbours, they are privileged to have an oar in everyone’s boat. 47 Having made that move, Skinner explained, the puritans then turned the topic under discussion ‘into a case of conscience. Will ye forbid them what they ought to do? Will you counsel their conscience? They can do no less in conscience’. And, Skinner asked, ‘what will men refuse to do in such a mood, when they are fully persuaded all is done in discharge of their conscience?’48 ‘Too, too manifest it is’, Skinner concluded, ‘if their “ought to do” be not prevented, they will dare 44 Ibid., p. 52. 45 Ibid., p. 58. On parrhesia in the political discourse of the time see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 46 Heylyn, A brief, pp. 188–​9. 47 B.L. Additional Mss, 20,065, fols. 13r.-​v., from a sermon ‘preached at Whitehall, before the king, December 27, 1631’. 48 Ibid., fol. 24v., from a sermon ‘preached before the king at Whitehall, December 6, 1631’.

164 Lake do anything, though it be against Christ himself’.49 After all, as Edward Kellett reminded his readers, Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry iv, ‘the Heros of our time, his natural sovereign’, had ‘followed his conscience, but his conscience had ill guides’.50 Thus, in what was almost certainly a reference to the recent assassination of the Duke of Buckingham, Skinner told his court audience in 1631 to look back upon the direful attempts of ancient or modern times, and say if they sprang not mainly from this principle. “Thus it ought to be.” I will not remember you of fresh and bleeding executions upon glorious princes, peers and people, in all countries, by the basest instruments, upon this bare persuasion, “thus it ought to be”.51 Moreover, as Heylyn and Dow kept pointing out, Burton’s focus on the bishops as quintessentially evil counsellors could not disguise the fact that his real target was the King himself. His whole project involved the spreading of ‘seditious, false and factious discourses’, expressly designed to ‘inflame the people and bring them into ill opinion, both of their king and those to whom the government of the church is by him entrusted’.52 Thus, however much he might seek to blame the bishops, or even Laud personally, when Burton claimed that such things as come out in the king’s name … “tend to the public dishonor of God, and his word, to the violation and annihilation of the commandments, the alteration of the doctrine of the church of England, the destruction of the people’s souls, and that they are contrary to his solemn royal protestations”, ‘what doth he else but persuade the people … that his majesty is (I tremble to speak it out) such as he makes them, whom he entitles to those acts?’53 The consequences of all this for monarchical government were, Dow claimed, dire, for ‘if men may, at their liberty, father the king’s acts upon the prelates, or any other whom they favour not, and then rail at them at their pleasure, and reject them as none of his, his majesty will, ere long, be fain to stand to his subjects courtesy for obedience to his royal commands’.54 It was, after all, 49 Ibid., fol. 24v. 50 Kellett, Miscellanies, book 1, pp. 175–​6. 51 B.L. Additional Mss, 20,065, fol. 25r., from a sermon ‘preached before the king at Whitehall, December 6, 1631’. 52 Heylyn, A brief, p. 6. 53 Dow, Innovations, p. 39. 54 Ibid., pp. 38–​9.

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as Dow observed, ‘an old fetch to put the bishops between, when he levels his envenomed shafts of detraction against his sacred majesty, thereby hoping to procure them envy and to get a starting hole to avoid the danger of broad mouthed treason’,55 which, as Dow and Heylyn both more than implied, was indeed the offence of which Burton was really guilty, but for which he had not (yet) been arraigned. It was Heylyn rather than Dow who explained at length the precise political implications of all this. The ‘triumviri’,56 i.e. Burton, Bastwick and Prynne, had laboured to persuade the people that the king had failed to keep the ‘solemn covenant’ made with them in both the petition of right of 1628 and the declaration before the articles of religion of 1629; that, despite the claims of the royal declaration, there was indeed a ‘secret purpose to suppress God’s truth and to bring in contrary errors’57; that the book of sports ‘tendeth mainly to the dishonor of God, the profanation of the sabbath, the annihilation of the fourth commandment’;58 that ‘the chapel royal and the furniture thereof’ could usefully be compared with ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image and Julian’s altar’, and, therefore, that, ‘by consequence the king resembled to those wicked tyrants’ and persecutors of the true church; and that, therefore, there was a realistic prospect of the ‘setting up of mass in his majesty’s chapel’.59 Thus, having taught the people that all obedience to the king is founded upon a mutual stipulation between him and them, and telling them how often, and in how great matters, he hath broke the covenant made between them, you have released the people ipso facto of all obedience, duty and allegiance to their sovereign, and thereby made them “free subjects”, as you please to call them, so free that it is wholly in their pleasure whether they will obey or not.60 On this basis, Heylyn attributed to Burton what he termed the ‘puritan tenet, that kings are but the ministers of the commonwealth and that they have no more authority then what is given them by the people’.61 While, as even Heylyn admitted, Burton did not explicitly say that, the language used throughout his tract, For God and the king, certainly implied as much. Hence Burton’s 55 Ibid., p. 149. 56 Heylyn, A brief, p. 178. 57 Ibid., p. 180. 58 Ibid., pp. 53, 180. 59 Ibid., pp. 57, 59. 60 Ibid., pp. 179–​81. 61 Ibid., p. 26.

166 Lake dislike that any notion of absolute authority or ‘sovereignty’ be attributed to the prince, or any sort of unconditional obedience be required of the subject; both of which tenets he affected to include amongst the innovations spread by the bishops.62 Over against absolute royal power, Burton proffered a vision of limited authority for the prince, and conditional obedience for the subject. The ‘condition or limitation’ was that our subjection unto the king is to be regulated by God’s law, the rule of universal obedience to God and man; so by the laws of the king, the king, as you inform us, having entered into a solemn and sacred covenant with his people to demand of them no other obedience than what the good laws of the kingdom prescribe and require, as, on the other side, the people swearing no other obedience to the king than according to his just laws.63 Burton, Heylyn alleged, ‘grounded all obedience on the people’s part’, and thus all power on the king’s, ‘on that mutual stipulation which the king and his subjects make at his coronation, where the king takes an explicit solemn oath to maintain their ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom’.64 The authority of the prince and the obedience of the subject were thus entirely dependent on the subjective opinions of the people, who were left to judge whether or not the king had legal warrant for his actions, or had, in fact, broken his agreement with them. For if the subject shall conceive that the king’s command is contrary to God’s word, though indeed it be not; or to the fundamental laws of state, although he cannot tell which be fundamental; or if he find no precedent of the like commands in holy scripture, which you have made the only rule of conscience, in all these cases, it is lawful not to yield obedience.65 Under such circumstances, or rather in the presence of such misapprehensions, misapprehensions that Burton and the others were currently doing their best to foster, they are released ipso facto from all obedience and subjection, and that by a more easy way than suing out a dispensation from the court of Rome. 62 Ibid., pp. 28. 63 Ibid., pp. 37–​8. 64 Ibid., pp. 39–​40. 65 Ibid., p. 29.

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You tell us of the king’s free subjects, and here you have found a way to make them so, a way to make the subject free, and the king a subject … I have before heard of a free people, and of free states, but never till of late of a free subject, nor know I any way to create free subjects, but by releasing them of all obedience to princes.66 In this, Heylyn alleged, Burton’s opinions were almost entirely in line with, and in all likelihood derived from, Buchanan and Beza, or perhaps Paraeus, where the inferior magistrates, or Calvin, where the three estates, have an authority to control and correct the king. And should the king be limited within these narrow bounds, which you would prescribe him, had you power, he would, in little time, be like the ancient kings of Sparta, in which the ephori, or the now duke of Venice, in which the senate, bear the greatest stroke, himself in the mean time being a bare sound and an empty name.67 In this way, by extrapolating out of Burton’s tract a version of Calvinist resistance theory and juxtaposing it against a version of divine right absolutism, drawn, if not word for word, then certainly trope for trope, from James’ own True law of free monarchies, Heylyn was able to cast the puritan triumvirs, not as they presented themselves to the world, that is to say, as loyal defenders of an Elizabethan or Jacobean reformed status quo, currently being subverted from within by the machinations of an Arminianising episcopal conspiracy bound and determined to usher in popery by the back door, but rather as classic puritan revolutionaries, sinister throw-​backs to the bad old days of the Elizabethan puritan movement, to the collapse of which both Dow and Heylyn made a number of minatory references.68 Thus, Heylyn recalled both the radical subversiveness of that moment and movement, and the fate of many of the main movers and shakers within it. ‘What’, he asked, ‘became of these jolly fellows? They perished, and as many as followed after them …; nothing remaining of them now than the name and infamy’; a ‘calamitous ruin’ he threatened to all who now ‘pursue their courses, and either furiously run, or else permit themselves to be drawn along into, those rash counsels’.69

66 Ibid., p. 40. 67 Ibid., pp. 28–​9. 68 Dow, Innovations, p. 194. 69 Heylyn, A brief, pp. 189–​90.

168 Lake

iv

But if we want to follow the Laudian critique of puritan popularity to its logical conclusion, it is to the Large declaration that we should turn. This was a response to the Scottish Covenanters produced in 1639. It was intended to justify to his Scottish subjects Charles’ up-​coming invasion of Scotland. This was presented not as a war between England and Scotland, still less as one to be waged by the king against his own subjects, but rather one to be fought against ‘a revolt of some rebels’, against whom Charles intended ‘to make use of the arms and aid of our loyal subjects’ in both kingdoms ‘for the security of this kingdom, and safeguard of our person’. The text is conventionally taken to have been authored by Walter Balcanqual, but it was written in the first person, using the royal ‘we’, and issued as if, as the first page proclaimed, ‘by the king’. Through a detailed recounting of the king’s dealing with the covenanters the tract identified all of the main characteristics of puritan popularity and subversion, outlined above, at work in producing what amounted to a Presbyterian revolution. The main movers and shakers were presented as a small-​ish cabal of discontented noblemen and an equally small cadre of radical ministers. This ‘faction’70 is then presented using all of the major forms of puritan popularity; rabble rousing sermons, delivered not merely in churches but in ‘common and profane places’; libels and false reports spread amongst the people, by manuscript, rumour and from the pulpit; and finally printed pamphlets and manuscript tracts. Again, as with Burton, Bastwick and Prynne in England, so in Scotland, the tract noted that copious use was made of the threat of popery, or, as Charles put it, of ‘that false opinion of our averseness from the religion reformed and our inclination to popery’.71 Again, just like Heylyn and Dow in the English case, the Large declaration complained of the covenanters’ ‘perpetual working of the people, both in their pulpits and at their other meetings, to new insolences and greater heights of rage and fury’.72 Repeatedly the covenanters ‘bestirred themselves by might and main to disperse rumours amongst them [the people]’ to mischaracterise the concessions made by the king as a conspiracy tending ‘to the utter subversion of their religion and liberties’.73 Again, the trope of evil counsel, centred on the 70 Charles i (?), A large declaration concerning the late tumults in Scotland (London, 1639), p. 193. 71 Ibid., p. 125. 72 Ibid., p. 113. 73 Ibid., p. 136.

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bishops in both Scotland and England, was used to mispersuade the people about their king’s intentions and the king about his subjects’ loyalty. In this way, Charles complained, ‘these new covenanters may … with the same hand both strike and stroke us, in one sentence swearing to defend our person and authority, and yet in the next swearing to defend one another against all persons whatsoever, not excepting us, if not principally intending us, we leave it to the world to consider’.74 ‘Their meaning was’, the tract concluded, ‘that they will continue obedient subjects, if we will part from our sovereignty, which is in effect that they will obey, if we will suffer them to command’.75 This, of course, was to repeat, for the covenanters, the same analysis to which Heylyn and Dow had subjected Burton’s claims to be speaking For God and the king, as the title of his most notorious pamphlet proclaimed that he was. In one passage, a preacher, one Rollock, having been scheduled to preach in the hall of the college of Edinburgh, and finding ‘the crowds of people to be too great for that place’, is described mounting ‘upon the top of a pair of stairs which went up to the upper ground, in an open place which was only covered by the heavens’, and thence preaching ‘to a great troup or multitude, whose breath is the only air he desireth to live in, being shot quite through the head with popularity’.76 In another, the covenanters are described using a distracted ‘young maid’s weakness’ to further their cause. Finding that, out of her blind zeal, she was wonderfully affected with their covenant … and perceiving that she was well skilled in the phrases of scripture, and had a good memory, so that she could remember the bitter invectives, which, both in the pulpits and elsewhere, she had heard made against the bishops and the service book, they thought her a very fit instrument to abuse the people, and cried her up so much that the multitude was made believe her words proceeded not from herself, but from God. The result was that when her fits came upon her –​occasions that were carefully stage-​managed and well-​advertised –​she was attended by ‘an incredible concourse of all sorts of people … of all ranks and qualities, who watched or stayed with her day and night during the time of her pretended fits, and did admire her raptures and inspirations, as coming from heaven’. 74 Ibid., p. 70. 75 Ibid., p. 110. 76 Ibid., p. 405.

170 Lake The joy which her auditors conceived for the comfort of such a messenger from heaven, and such messages as she delivered from thence, was many times expressed by them in tears, by none more than Rollock, her special favourite, who, being desired sometimes by the spectators to pray with her, and speak to her, answered that he durst not do it, as being no good manners in him to speak while his master was speaking in her.77 Here, then, is Edward Kellett’s ‘pseudo-​prophetessa’, leaving the closed and fetid world of the puritan conventicle, to play a central role in the political overthrow of all right authority in church and state. Here, too, is Sydenham’s sinister alliance between a popular ministry and a depraved and vulnerable people coming home to roost. What the Laudians had feared, indeed prophesied, could happen in puritan England, was here coming all too true in covenanting Scotland. But worse even than that, the principles that the likes of Heylyn and Dow had had to extrapolate from the works of Burton and Prynne were now being given explicit expression in Scotland, for the Scottish rebels were not ashamed to aver that all sovereign authority was originally in the collective body of the people, by them conferred with their own consent upon the prince, and therefore, if the prince shall omit to do his duty, he either falls from his right, or his right is interrupted, until he return to his duty, but in that mean time the sovereign right and authority doth return to, and remain with the people, from whom it was first derived from the prince.78 On this basis, it was alleged that the protestation of subjects against laws established, whether it be made coram judice or non judice, before the judges of the people, or the people themselves, who are born to be judged, doth void all obedience to these laws and dischargeth all the protesters from any obligation to live under them, before ever these protestations or the validity of them shall come to be discussed before the competent judges of them.

77 Ibid., p. 227. 78 Ibid., p. 410.

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Here then was a claim to something like popular sovereignty, to be exercised through what we might term democratic means, since Charles, or his literary amanuensis, maintained that implicit within the current practice of the covenanters was the principle that a number of men, being the greater part of the kingdom, because they are the greater (and in that sense, say they, the more considerable part) may do anything which they themselves do conceive to be conducible to the glory of God and the good of the church, notwithstanding of any laws standing in force to the contrary; and that this greater part, especially met in a representative assembly, may, without any authority of us, against the express commandment of us and our council, and our judges’ declaration of it to be against the laws of our kingdom, choose some few noblemen, gentlemen, ministers and burgesses, who … shall sit and determine of things concerning the church and state, as if there were neither king, council, nor judge in the land.79 It followed that [i]f these covenanters shall ascribe unto themselves the government because they are more in number than those who disassent from them, then certainly in all kingdoms and republics the established government must go down, for in them all, they who are ruled and governed are far more than the rulers and governors.80

v

Thus, for all its levelling, populist and indeed democratising tendencies, for the Laudians puritanism was ultimately a scam and a conspiracy; or rather a series of conspiracies. It was a site where a series of corrupt impulses, false opinions 79 80

Ibid., p. 413. Ibid., pp. 193–​4. Is it still worth observing that, on this evidence, and on the royalist side at least, in their inception, the British civil wars were not perceived primarily as wars of religion, but rather as disputes over the nature and locus of monarchical power? A Large declaration makes it quite clear throughout that the reason that Charles has to use force against his subjects in Scotland is not because of their religious errors, but because of their trenching upon his powers as their prince. And, in so doing, it is quite in line with the official, and pseudo-​official, responses to Henry Burton, to whom precisely the same political errors are attributed by Heylyn and Dow as A Large declaration attributes to the covenanters.

172 Lake and errors, and self-​serving factional and social interests, all duked it out for supremacy. For all its apparently utopian claims to ‘reformation’, it could only lead to a thoroughly dystopian anarchy, characterised by the oscillation between mob rule, elite conspiracy and oligarchy, and actual or potential tyranny; precisely the dreadful scenario being acted out, in real time, in Scotland, by the covenanters. We are, of course, confronted with a polemically constructed image, a malign caricature, of the puritan impulse. As many historians have pointed out, this was decidedly not how most puritans saw themselves. In their own eyes they represented the mainstream of the English reformed tradition. As Patrick Collinson famously remarked, ‘on its own terms and within its own perspectives’, puritanism was about as ‘factious and subversive as the Homily of ­Obedience’.81 And yet the Laudians were not just making it up. We are dealing here with a caricature, a stereotype, not a mere fantasy. For all the parti pris of their account, the Laudians were commenting upon, excerpting and exaggerating (for their own partisan purposes) real enough trends and tendencies within the puritan impulse; tendencies which other aspects of that impulse, not to mention the integration of a great many puritans into the structures and hierarchies of the contemporary social and political orders had, to this point, held back. The irony was that in taking the sort of radical, innovatory and no holds barred action that they deemed necessary to see off their version of the puritan threat, the Laudians delegitimated and disrupted the very structures that had, to this point, kept puritanism under some sort of control. In thus undermining the sort of de facto trade-​offs, the implicit bargains and compromises, that had kept the godly safely within the national church, the Laudians helped create the circumstances under which the puritan impulse could fully realise its rather considerable radical, populist and, in some senses, democratising potentials in the decades that followed. In that sense, the anti-​ democratic discourse of the Laudians had rather a large role to play in the eventual emergence of something we might want to call ‘democracy’ in early modern England.

81

Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants:  The Church in English Society, 1559–​1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 177. To be fair to him Collinson here does not use the p-​word, but refers rather to ‘Calvinist paternalism’, but since he was using that term to denote men like Samuel Ward of Ipswich the substitution cannot be said to distort his meaning.

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Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

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Charles, I (?), A large declaration concerning the late tumults in Scotland (London, 1639). Dow, Christopher, Innovations unjustly charged upon the present church and state (­London, 1637). Heylyn, Peter, A brief and moderate answer to master Henry Burton (London, 1637). Kellett, Edward, Miscellanies of divinity (Cambridge, 1633). Laurence, Thomas, Two sermons (Oxford, 1635). Sydenham, Humphrey, The Athenian babbler (London, 1627).

Colclough, David, Freedom of Speech in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–​1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Cuttica, Cesare, ‘Popularity in Early Modern England (ca. 1570–​1642): Looking Again at Thing and Concept’, Journal of British Studies, 58:1 (2019), pp. 1–​27. Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Hooker to Laud (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Lake, Peter, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy: or John Whitgift, Puritanism and the “Invention” of Popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:3 (2010), pp. 463–​95.

­c hapter 8

Presbyterians, Republicans, and Democracy in Church and State, ca. 1570–​1660 Rachel Hammersley

Introduction

Examining how the relationship between democracy and Presbyterianism was perceived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reveals a puzzle. The earliest recorded use of the term ‘democratical’ in English print appeared in 1574 in a contribution by John Whitgift, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Admonition controversy concerning the doctrines and organisation of the Church of England.1 As Peter Lake has demonstrated, it was in the context of this controversy that Whitgift associated Presbyterianism with populism and set the conformist defence of the English monarchy and church against his opponents’ image of Elizabethan England as a monarchical republic.2 Consequently, in the late sixteenth century, populism, republicanism, and democracy became associated (usually negatively and as terms of abuse) with Presbyterianism. Yet, by the 1650s a very different picture is in evidence. At this point some of the most democratic republican writers set themselves against the Presbyterians, whose ideas they derided as anti-​democratic. Exploring these two moments, and the path between them, complicates our understanding of democracy in this period and, at the same time, serves to assert the importance of contributions made by sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century thinkers to the development of that concept.

1 However, the term ‘democratie’ occurred earlier (1546: see Early English Books Online, Text Creation Partnership search engine). 2 Peter Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Antipuritanism, and the “Invention” of Popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:3 (2010), pp. 463–​90.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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Presbyterians as Democrats

The pamphlet An Admonition to the Parliament of 1572 was aimed at enacting further reformation within the Church of England.3 The debate it initiated pitted John Whitgift against the religious controversialist Thomas Cartwright, with whom he had already clashed in internal Cambridge University politics.4 In Whitgift’s pamphlet Defense of the Answer to the Admonition, against the Reply of Thomas Cartwright of 1574 the term ‘democratical’ was invoked in an English printed work for the first time, prompting discussion of the concept. The specific context for this linguistic innovation lay in the debate about whether the appropriate form of church government had been set down in scripture or whether it could, and should, be moulded to fit the government of the state. Whitgift not only attacked Cartwright for adopting the former position, but went on to condemn him for suggesting that the government of the state should be fitted to that of the church rather than the other way round: not long after you adde that the common wealth must be stamed a[…] cording to the church, as the hangyngs to the house, & the government thereof with her government, &c. & not contrary: meaning that the government of the commonwealth ought not to be monarchical, but either democratical, or Aristocratical, bicause (as you say) the government of the Church ought to be such. What this in time will breed in this common wealth, especially when it cometh to the understanding of the people, who naturally are so desirous of innovations, I referre it to the judgment of those that can and ought best to consider it.5 Though Lake rightly presents Whitgift’s association of Presbyterianism and populism as a construction, or useful argument, he also acknowledges that it proved successful precisely because it had merit on several grounds.6 In the first place, Presbyterianism had initially developed in the city states of Switzerland and southern Germany. These states were governed in a republican

3 Anon., An Admonition to the Parliament Holden in the 13 Yeare of the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth of Blessed Memorie. Begun Anno 1570 and ended 1571 (Leiden, 1617). 4 William Joseph Sheils, ‘Whitgift, John (1530/​31?–​1604), archbishop of Canterbury’, ODNB and Patrick Collinson, ‘Cartwright, Thomas (1534/​5–​1603), theologian and religious controversialist’, ODNB. 5 John Whitgift, The defense of the aunswere to the Admonition against the replie of T. C. (London, 1574), p. 389. 6 Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy’, pp. 465–​8.

176 Hammersley fashion, and that context no doubt influenced and coloured the development of Presbyterian theory –​and how it was viewed. There were also various substantive reasons why Presbyterianism could be seen to be associated with popular rule. By its very nature, Presbyterianism demanded limitations on royal authority. The separation of church and state meant that in ecclesiastical affairs the monarch, despite being head of the realm, was subject to spiritual authority. Moreover, even in secular affairs (s)he was expected to follow the advice of the godly clergy. Cartwright, in his contributions to the Admonition debate, provided more material for Whitgift’s argument by emphasising the importance of popular consent and election within the church. Despite this, however, Cartwright did not characterise his vision of church government as purely popular, but rather presented it as a mixed system.7 Finally, in addition to the contextual and substantive grounds for associating Presbyterianism with populism, Lake notes that Whitgift also made this argument on account of the methods of the Presbyterians, and in particular their use of print culture to spread ideas. This use of sermons and pamphleteering meant that ideas that had previously been regarded as private were now disseminated and discussed much more freely. Cartwright’s emphasis on popular consent and election within the church pointed to another contentious issue within the Admonition debate that again had implications for the concept of democracy. The Admonition to the Parliament argued that no minister ought to be placed in any congregation but by the consent of the elders and people. Yet in the Church of England the authority to install a minister lay in the hands of the Bishops.8 This issue was debated in greater detail in the mid-​1580s. In An answer to the two first and principall treatises of a certaine factious libell, Richard Cosin, a protegé of Whitgift, responded directly to William Stoughton’s views on this issue as set out in An Abstract, of Certain Acts of Parliament. Stoughton did not deny a role for the Bishops entirely, but insisted on the involvement of the people in the process of installing a minister, and in doing so he drew a parallel between the election of civil officers and that of ministers of the church: by all the customes of the Realme, where any Mayor, Bayliffe, Shreiffe, or head officer of any Borough, Towne, or any incorporation is to be elected, or where any knight of the sheire, any Burgesse, any Constable, any 7 On this, see also Peter Lake, ‘ “Puritans” and “Anglicans” in the History of the Post-​Reformation English Church’, in Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–​1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 352–​79. 8 An Admonition to the Parliament, pp. 2–​3.

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Crowner, any Vergerer within any forest, and such like are chosen, the same officers, are alwayes chosen, by the greatest part of such mens voyces, as have interest in the action.9 Cosin did not accept the conclusion Stoughton drew from this analogy: For it is notorious, that in cities & townes, not everie one that is to be governed, hath voice in electing their officers; but certeine which be culled out of the rest, and speciallie trusted. So is there none admitted to the election of knights of the shires, but Legales homines, which may dispend xl. shillings in land of freehold by the yéere. And yet manie besides are interessed therein, and may be prejudiced thereby, as being to be governed by the one sort, or to be tied to such statutes, as by the consents of the other are passed. If therefore in these actions for avoiding of stirres and confusions, elections were put into a few mens hands; much more reason was it, that the multitude should not have stroake in election of ministers, being for the most part utterlie unable to judge of their sufficiencie in learning, which is the cheefest thing to be respected, but yet not debarred to object what they can against their conversation.10 Like Whitgift before him, Cosin again used the language of democracy to tarnish his opponent, displaying a thorough (and rather provocative) understanding of the issues that implementing the popular election of ministers would raise: Now it had béene verie requisite, that our author for the approoving of these democraticall elections the better unto us, should (with proofe out of scripture for everie particular) have shewed; Whether women and children of some reasonable discretion, should have voices in the election of their minister? Whether he should be chosen by all, by the greater part, or by the better part? Whether the wives voice should be accompted severall, or but one with hir husbands, or whether she might dissent from hir husband, or the sonne from his father? Whether the patrone not dwelling 9

10

[William Stoughton], An Abstract, of Certain Acts of Parliament: of certaine her Majesties Injunctions: of certaine Canons, Constitutions, and Synodalles provinciall: established and in force, for the peaceable government of the Church, within her Majesties Dominions and Countries, for the most part heretofore unknowen and unpractized (London, 1583), pp. 61–​2. Richard Cosin, An answer to the two first and principall treatises of a certaine factious libell (London, 1584), p. 98.

178 Hammersley in the parish shall have a voice, or dwelling there but a single voice? Whether the greater number of voices shall be accompted in respect of all the electors, or onelie in respect of him which is to be chosen, having more voices for him, than any other hath? Whether all absent shall be accompted to dissent or to assent? Whether sicke men, and other necessarilie imploied, that would come and cannot, may send their proctor being no parishioner, or compromit their voice to a parishioner?11 These examples, then, demonstrate that the terminology of ‘democracy’ in the late sixteenth century was utilised by opponents of the Presbyterians to tarnish and condemn their call for further reformation of the Church of England. Yet, not only was the Admonition debate important in prompting the use of the terminology of democracy in the 1570s, and associating it with the Presbyterians, but it also had a lasting influence. As Lake notes: ‘for many contemporaries, throughout the period down to the civil war and beyond, there remained an indelible link between “puritanism” and “popularity” ’.12 This ongoing connection is evident in the Basilikon Doron, James vi and i’s letter of advice to his eldest son and heir Prince Henry. In describing to Henry the different groups within the country and the things he needed to know about each of them, James asserts that because the reformation in Scotland was made by popular tumult and rebellion, rather than being imposed by the prince (as it was in England): some of our fyerie ministers got such a guyding of the people at that time of confusion as finding the gust of gouvernment sweet, they begouth to fantasie to themselves a Democratick forme of government … & after usurping the liberty of the time in my long minoritie, setled themselves so fast upon that imagined Democracie, as they fed themselves with that hope to become Tribuni plebis: and so in a popular governement by leading the people by the nose, to beare the sway of all the rule.13 Presbyterians continued to be attacked for their democratic tendencies well into the 1640s and 50s.14 In The Discovery of Mysteries of 1643, Gryffith Williams 11 Cosin, An answer to the two first and principall treatises, p. 100. 12 Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy’, p. 485. 13 James I, Basilikon Doron, Devided into three books (Edinburgh, 1599), pp. 46–​7. 14 For further examples from the early seventeenth century see Cesare Cuttica’s contribution to this volume ‘The Spectre Haunting Early Seventeenth-​Century England (ca. 1603–​1649): Democracy at its Worst’, pp. 132–51, especially pp. 134–9.

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(the bishop of Ossory and an anti-​puritan controversialist) accused the Presbyterians and their associates in Parliament of seeking to advance their cause of founding ‘their new Church, and the establishing of their famous democraticall government & popular Common-​wealth’.15 Similarly, the anonymous author of Good English of 1648 insisted that: ‘to ingage for Presbytery, is to indeavour the introducing of a Democraticall form of Government’16 and in 1653, Sir Thomas Urquhart, another staunch anti-​Presbyterian, attacked the ‘Democratical tyranny of the Kirk’.17

Independents as Democrats

By the civil war period, however, the charge of seeking to introduce democracy was no longer being levelled only against Presbyterians. The Laudian Peter Heylyn in Theologia Veterum of 1654 accused both Presbyterians and Independents of favouring democratic or popular government in the church, when it ought to be aristocratic.18 The emergence and growth of congregationalism offered a new target for democratic accusations and not only Laudians like Heylyn, but also Presbyterians themselves were quick to seize the initiative. The Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford, in his critique of New England congregationalism, The Due Right of Presbyteries, firmly rejected the ‘democratic’ church government of the Independents.19 Similarly, the vociferous English Presbyterian Thomas Edwards accused the group of leading Independents who authored An Apologeticall Narration in 1643 of encouraging democracy.20 For Presbyterians of the 1640s and 50s the advantage of being able to turn the democratic label once used against them onto their opponents, was that it allowed them to clarify their own position and to distinguish it clearly from the dangerous democratic tendencies of others. This could be done by drawing a distinction between positive and negative democratic practices. For example, Daniel Cawdrey in Vindiciae Clavium of 1645 distinguished what he saw as unacceptable popular power –​which was exercised directly by the people –​from

15 Gryffith Williams, The Discovery of Mysteries (London, 1643), p. 33. 16 Anon., Good English (London, 1648), p. 7. 17 Thomas Urquhart, Logopandecteision (London, 1653), ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie, To No-​body’. 18 Peter Heylyn, Theologia Veterum (London, 1654), pp. 387–​8. 19 Samuel Rutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries, or, A Peaceable Plea for the Government of the Church of Scotland (London, 1644). 20 Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (London, 1644), p. 221.

180 Hammersley acceptable popular power, which was mediated via representatives.21 A similar position was adopted by those who maintained Cartwright’s argument that the Presbyterian system of government was a mixed system. In An assertion of the government of the Church of Scotland of 1641, Rutherford’s friend George Gillespie declared that whereas episcopal government is monarchical, Presbyterian government ‘is partly democraticall, in respect of the election of Ministers and Elders, and the doing of matters of chiefest importance, with the knowledge and consent of congregations: partly aristocratical in respect of the parity of the Presbyters and their consistorial proceedings and decrees’.22 It was Christ, of course, who held the monarchical position within this system. Gillespie firmly set this mixed Presbyterian system against the notion of popular church government, which he admitted was asserted by some, insisting that the idea that ‘the Government of the Church must needs be popular, exercised by the collective body’ was a prejudice that needed to be erased. Responding systematically to the arguments of those who put the case for popular church government, and again looking back to the history of the early church, Gillespie insisted that most powers of the apostolic church had been exercised by the presbytery rather than by the congregation as a whole and that this was the best system.23 Edwards in Reasons against the independent government of particular congregations was even more emphatic in his denial of any association between Presbyterianism and democracy, explicitly contrasting the aristocratic nature of Presbyterian church government with the oligarchic or democratic structure favoured by the Independents.24 A similar contrast is drawn in Ezekiel Charke’s A pretended voice from heaven, which appeared in 1659. There Charke attacks the unordained preacher Walter Postlethwait, whom he describes as ‘an earnest contender for Democratical, and against Presbyterial Government’.25 The man is so obsessed with democracy, Charke suggests, that 21 22 23 24

25

Daniel Cawdrey, Vindiciae Clavium:  Or A  Vindication of the Keyes of the Kingdome of Heaven, into the hands of the right Owners (London, 1645), especially ‘Animadversions upon the Brethrens Epistle to the Reader’, and pp. 28 and 74. George Gillespie, An assertion of the government of the Church of Scotland in the points of ruling-​elders and of the authority of presbyteries and synods with a postscript in answer to a treatise lately published against presbyteriall government (Edinburgh, 1641), pp. 194–​5. Ibid., pp. 109–​15. Thomas Edwards, Reasons against the independent government of particular congregations: As also against the Toleration of such Churches to be erected in this Kingdome. Together with an Answer to such Reasons as are commonly alledged for such a Toleration (London, 1641). For more on Edwards and his contribution to the polarization of views in the 1640s, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ezekiel Charke, A pretended voice from heaven (London, 1659), p. 72.

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it ‘makes him measure us by his principle, and think, that those whom wee admit to full communion, wee admit to exercise the power of the Keyes also …’.26 Whether they simply qualified the kind of democracy they were willing to embrace, or distanced Presbyterian government from democracy altogether, the Presbyterians were relieving themselves of one label of abuse only to render themselves susceptible to another. That this was the case was partly due to the fact that attitudes to democracy in England had started to change, especially following the regicide of 1649.

Democracy in England Post-​1649

In the aftermath of the execution of Charles i, the number of overtly positive references to democracy in English printed works increased considerably.27 One of the earliest examples of the term ‘democracy’ being used more positively appears in Albertus Warren’s pamphlet The Royalist reform’d of 1649. Warren insisted that a person’s salvation was not dependent on the particular form of government under which he or she lived. However, he did believe ‘That Heroical vertues will thrive, and may be exercis’d better in a Democraticall, then in a Monarchicall dispensation’. He went on: It will appear in reason, that men under a Democratick or Sanatory rule, shall not, will not be wholly at the Devotion of a Prince, or Tyrant, capacitated or impowred to throw them down causelessely from their deserved honourable trust at pleasure, so that in such places of publick imployment, men may (under Democracy) do justice more boldly, and discover to the world, upon every opportunity, their gifts of unawed nature.28 Even more striking is the sermon preached to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, Sheriffs and Companies of the City of London by Nathanael Homes in 1650, which presents an extremely positive account of democratic government. Homes was 26 Ibid., p. 78. 27 I have discussed this in more detail in an unpublished paper, ‘Democracy and the English Revolution’. Markku Peltonen has also explored this phenomenon in this volume:  see Markku Peltonen, ‘ “All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people”: Democracy in the English Revolution’, pp. 66–87. 28 Albertus Warren, The Royalist reform’d or Considerations of advice, to gentlemen, divines, lawyers. Digested into three chapters. Wherein their former mistakes are examined, and their duties of obedience, unto the present authority, succinctly held forth as rationall, and necessary (London, 1649), pp. 4–​5.

182 Hammersley not unaware of the negative connotations of the terminology, but he firmly distinguished negative ideas of democracy from his own more positive account: My heart trembles to think of a popular parity; a levelling Anarchie, to which these times, to my terrour, much incline among the multitude. Histories, and ancient examples, warn us of such, as an immediate precipitation to ruine. But a regular Democracie assisted with an occasional Aristocracie in Trust, is most safe; as some experience may be seen, in Switzerland, Venice, Low-​countries, and New-​England; and most anciently among the Jews, in the time of the Judges …29 The range of evidence used by Homes to reinforce his argument is also striking. First, he sought to create a native history of democracy in England, emphasising practices such as: the role of juries; the determining of matters by vote; the presence of representatives in Parliament; and the emphasis on popular consent within the coronation ceremony. Secondly he referred to scripture, insisting ‘there is a Divine reason, above all, that Nations should incline to a Democratical Government; because God did not onely create us people (not Kings) but also he hath setled his Decree against Monarchie, Dan. 2’.30 Ultimately, though, Homes appealed to reason: Democracie hath been sometimes despised, where and while it hath been eclipsed by the seeming-​splendor of Lord-​ensnaring and people-​ vassaling Royalty. But what it wants in Majesty, is richly made up in true Liberty, and secure Safety. The people loving the Government of the People (as before described) love themselves. But Kings loving themselves, and their Court-​creatures, they drained and suck’d out the life, and blood, and spirits of the State. The Peoples misery and poverty (as was their Maxime) was their security to do what they list.31 Positive accounts of democracy continued to appear throughout the Interregnum. Despite writing in 1659, when almost ten years of rule without a monarch had failed to produce a workable and durable settlement, and in the midst of 29

Nathanael Homes, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable, Thomas Foote, Lord Maior, and the Right Worshipfull the Aldermen, Sheriffs, and severall Companies of the City of London. Upon the Generall day of Thanksgiving, October the 8.  1650 at Christ-​Church, London (London, 1650), p. 32. 30 Ibid., p. 33. 31 Ibid., p. 34.

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intense political crisis, the author and printer John Streater had not lost his faith in democratic government: Democracy is a Government, where the Governours are Elected by the People out of themselves; sometimes called Free-​State, or Popular State, or Common-​wealth: This kind of Government by the People is the most Natural and the best sort of all Governments.32 Moreover, Streater offered some indication as to why he viewed democratic government as the best form: ‘because that the persons do not continue long in Trust: the which is the onely means to keep them from Corruption or Oppression’.33 Consequently, under the government of the commonwealth and Protectorate, and in a climate that was more inclined towards popular government than had been the case in the 1570s, the Presbyterians now began to find themselves under fire for their critique of democracy rather than for their purported association with it.

Democratic Republicans

Significantly, it was some of those republican authors who were most inclined towards democracy themselves, who were at the forefront of the anti-​ democratic attack on the Presbyterians. Marchamont Nedham has long been deemed one of the most democratic republican writers of the 1650s, on account of his insistence on the supremacy of ‘popular power’ and the importance of a unicameral assembly.34 James Harrington’s association with democratic ideas has taken longer to be recognised, but several recent articles have demonstrated his commitment both to the label ‘democracy’ and to the substance of democratic government.35 32

33 34 35

J. S., Government Described: Viz. What Monarchie, Aristocracie, Oligarchie, And Democracie, is. Together with a Brief Model of the Government of the Common-​Wealth, or, Free-​State of RAGOUSE. Fit for View at this present Juncture of Settlement (London, 1659), p.  4. On Streater’s combination of republicanism and ancient constitutionalism see Ashley Walsh, ‘John Streater and the Saxon Republic’, History of Political Thought, 49:1 (2018), pp. 57–​82. J. S., Government Described, p. 4. See, for example, Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles:  Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 136–​9. Rachel Foxley, ‘Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (Woodbridge: Boydel

184 Hammersley Of course, that label remained controversial and both Nedham and Harrington were keen to distinguish their own understanding of democratic or popular government from other views circulating at the time. Nedham, as Rachel Foxley has pointed out, sought to distinguish the kind of free state he favoured from ‘a meer popular state (or Levelling popularity)’.36 To this end he dismissed the Leveller ‘Agreement of the People’ as: ‘Such a Democratick, or Popular Forme, that puts the whole multitude into an equal exercise of the Supreme Authority, under pretence of maintaining Liberty’.37 Similarly, as Markku Peltonen has shown, Nedham recognised and condemned the fact that implementing the proposals set out in the Army’s Remonstrance of November 1648 (which he believed had been derived from Leveller ideas) would result in the establishment of popular democracy.38 Yet, as Peltonen has argued, by 1651 Nedham was displaying a more positive attitude towards popular government, emphasising the need for magistrates to be accountable to the people. This could be achieved, he insisted, by holding frequent elections, and allowing the people to question those who govern them –​ and even to ostracise them if necessary. These ideas were, of course, grounded in the assumption that sovereignty lay ultimately with the people. Harrington offered his own idiosyncratic definition of democracy in The Commonwealth of Oceana. In his speech to the Council of Legislators on the procedures of the senate, the Lord Archon deems it odd that Athens is called a democracy while Lacedaemon (Sparta) is held to be an aristocracy. The main difference between them, he notes, was that in Athens the people could both debate and vote on legislation, whereas in Sparta, they had no right of debate but could simply accept or reject the proposals introduced by the senate. The Lord Archon continues: But for my part, where the people have the election of the senate, not bound unto a distinct order, and the result, which is the sovereign power, and Brewer, 2013), pp. 175–​96; Rachel Hammersley, ‘Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy’, History of European Ideas, 39:3 (2013), pp. 354–​70; and Rachel Hammersley, ‘James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a Revolution in the Language of Politics’, in Rachel Hammersley (ed.), Revolutionary Moments:  Reading Revolutionary Texts (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 19–​26. 36 Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 210. For Nedham’s quote see: Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 101. 37 Ibid., p. 99. 38 Peltonen, ‘Democracy in the English Revolution’, p. 79

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I hold them to have that share in the government (the senate being not for life) whereof, with the safety of the commonwealth, they are capable in nature, and such a government for that cause to be democracy.39 Harrington therefore understood (or perhaps redefined) democracy here as a form of government in which the senate was elected and the popular assembly had (at least) the right of veto over the propositions of the senate. In The Prerogative of Popular Government he explored this notion further. In Book i, in the midst of a detailed discussion of the organisation of the commonwealth of Athens, Harrington again noted that the main distinction between the Athenian and Lacedaemonian systems was that in the former the people had the power to debate legislation, but in the latter they had only the power of result, and he again insisted that this led the former to be called a democracy and the latter an aristocracy or oligarchy. However, ‘according to my principles’, he went on, ‘debate in the people maketh anarchy, and where they have the result and no more, the rest being managed by a good aristocracy, it maketh that which is properly and truly to be called democracy, or popular government’.40 By labelling Sparta’s government as democratic, Harrington was not only able to link democracy to the political stability and longevity of that state, but he was also seeking to sever the more conventional association of democracy with the politics of ancient Athens. The so-​called ‘democracy’ of Athens was, in Harrington’s eyes, really anarchy because it allowed popular debate. Like Thomas Hobbes, Harrington believed that allowing the popular assembly to debate political issues would result in chaos.41 He thus sought to redefine and revivify the concept of democracy by moving the emphasis away from popular debate and towards popular sovereignty in its simplest form of accepting or rejecting legislation.

Nedham’s Anti-​Presbyterianism

Though consistent in little else, Nedham remained firm throughout his career in his hostility towards the Presbyterians.42 In The Case of the Commonwealth 39 40 41 42

James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John G.  A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 263. Ibid., p. 479. For Hobbes’s position on this see Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 102–​3. Blair Worden, ‘Introduction’, in Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-​State, Or, The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth, ed. Blair Worden (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011), pp. xxi-​xxii.

186 Hammersley of England, Stated he addressed his opposition to them explicitly. He appears to have been aware of the association that had been drawn between Presbyterianism and republicanism. He insists that the Presbyterians will bring no satisfaction to the royalists since their position is inherently destructive of regal dignity.43 They would have ‘no more but the name of king, a scarecrow of royalty’; they would ‘pretend to maintain the monarchical form, yet actually destroy the very fundamentals of monarchy’.44 This is perhaps also the basis on which Nedham suggests that as soon as the Scots are defeated by the English they will quickly be turned to republicanism, having done well operating without a king in Scotland under the authority of the grandees and the Kirk. Yet, Nedham also stresses that despite their innate hostility to monarchy, the Presbyterians were no friends of the commonwealth’s men.45 He therefore ends his account of them by presenting his audience with a stark choice: urging them to take the side of the commonwealth rather than that of this ‘unreasonable party’.46 The reason for republican hostility towards the Presbyterians, Nedham insists, is that they pose a direct threat to liberty owing to their tendency to seek political power. Their priests are raised up, he argues, and enact the ‘popish trick’ of ‘drawing all secular affairs “within the compass of their spiritual jurisdiction” ’.47 They claim to hold the consciences of both magistrates and people within their power and can subject them to suspensions and excommunications or expose them as miserable sinners. Moreover, their ultimate aim, Nedham believes, is to establish an ecclesiastical power distinct from the civil, just like the Church of Rome, and ‘[i]t will be impossible to keep such a church discipline within its limits in any commonwealth which makes the same persons civil subjects and ecclesiastical superiors’.48 Though Nedham was primarily concerned with the future, should the Presbyterian party gain the power it desired, he was able to identify several past examples of its encroachment on political power. He noted the power wielded by the General Assembly of the Kirk in Scotland; and the fact that, as soon as the episcopal form was abolished in England, Presbyterian MPs immediately began to try to influence politics.49 Nedham repeated and developed his anticlerical attack on

43 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 92. 44 Ibid., p. 93. 45 Ibid., p. 90. 46 Ibid., p. 95. 47 Ibid., p. 94. 48 Ibid., p. 95. 49 Ibid., p. 93 and p. 88.

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the Presbyterians in his final editorial in Mercurius Politicus, which appeared in the issue for 5–​12 August 1652.50 As well as denouncing their political ambitions, Nedham also denied the Presbyterian claim that the foundations and justification of their system could be found in the early church: ‘they were as little able as the bishops to show their pedigree from the Apostles or to derive the lineaments of their form from the body of the Scripture’.51

Harrington, the Presbyterians and the History of Ordination

Though they did not always agree on political matters, Harrington shared many of Nedham’s concerns about Presbyterianism. He too was deeply troubled by the tendency of religious figures to meddle in political affairs and so shared Nedham’s distrust of the Presbyterians on this issue. The focus of his attack, however, lay less on the Presbyterians’ political aspirations and more on Nedham’s last point quoted above. It was the kind of church government the Presbyterians favoured, and their endorsing of that system by way of their interpretation of scripture, that particularly troubled Harrington. While the debate regarding ordination and election in the early church had been alive since the late sixteenth century, here too –​by the 1650s –​the Presbyterians appear to have been associated with a rather different position from that for which Richard Cosin had attacked them in the 1580s. While Harrington touched, briefly, on ordination in both Oceana and Pian Piano, it was in The Prerogative of Popular Government that he explored the issue in detail and made a very deliberate, but somewhat surprising, move.52 Harrington set his defence of the democratic system of ordination that he claimed had operated in the early church (and which he used to justify the democratic appointment of ministers in Oceana) not just against the system of church government that operated within the Catholic and Anglican churches, but also against that of the Presbyterians. He did so, explicitly, by setting up the second part of The Prerogative as a response to two works. The first was A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres, Of Present Use in the Church of England, which had been published in 1652/​3 by the Anglican cleric Henry Hammond. The fifth quaere of this pamphlet focused on ordination and responded directly to the 50 Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-​State, pp. 183–​8. 51 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 88. 52 Harrington’s involvement in the debate surrounding ordination is discussed in greater detail, and in the context of his wider religious views, in Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

188 Hammersley arguments of Hobbes among others.53 But Harrington also asserted his claims for democratic ordination within the early church against The Diatribe Proved to be a Paradiatribe, or a Vindication of the Judgment of the Reformed Churches, and Protestant Divines, from misrepresentations concerning Ordination, and the Laying on of Hands.54 This work was a protracted response to Sidrach Simpson’s pamphlet of 1647: Diatribe. Wherein the judgement of the reformed churches and Protestant divines is shewed concerning ordination.55 The response to Simpson, which also appeared in 1647, was the work of the Presbyterian minister Lazarus Seaman.56 At the heart of the second part of The Prerogative was the distinction between two methods of ordination: chirotonia and chirothesia. The former denoted the holding up of hands, the latter the laying on of hands. Harrington attributed the term chirotonia to Suidas who used it to refer to the election of magistrates or acceptance of laws by the many.57 By contrast chriothesia had tended to be used by the Jews and by ancient authors to refer to ordination by one or a few. With regard to both terms, Harrington insisted, the crucial fact was the numbers involved rather than whether hands were actually raised or laid on.58 In justifying the popular election of ministers that he had advocated in Oceana, Harrington sought to demonstrate that chirotonia was both the older practice and the one that had been dominant in both the commonwealth of Israel and the early Christian church. Hammond, not surprisingly, stressed instead the importance of chirothesia. He argued that, within the church, ordination could only occur via the chirothesia of the bishops, who had taken on the power of communicating offices within the church to particular individuals direct from the apostles.59 While

53

Henry Hammond, A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres, of Present Use in the Church of England (London, 1652/​3), the response to Hobbes can be found at pp.  384–​408. For Hobbes’s original arguments see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 338–​402. 54 Lazarus Seaman, The Diatribe proved to be a Paradiatribe. Or, A vindication of the judgement of the reformed churches, and Protestant divines, from misrepresentations concerning ordination, and laying on of hands. Together with a brief answer to the pretences of Edmond Chillenden, for the lawfulness of preaching without ordination (London, 1647). 55 [Sidrach Simpson], Diatribe. Wherein the judgement of the reformed churches and Protestant divines, is shewed, concerning ordination. Laying on of hands in ordination of ministers: and, preaching by those who are not ordained ministers (London, 1647). 56 On Seaman see Tai Liu, ‘Seaman, Lazarus (d. 1675)’, ODNB. 57 Harrington, Political Works, pp. 502–​3 and 516. 58 Ibid., pp. 502–​3 and 518. 59 Hammond, A Letter of Resolution, pp. 338, 341, 361.

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effectively defending Hobbes against Hammond’s attack, Harrington also very deliberately associated Seaman and the Presbyterians with the same position. Seaman’s main concern was to counter the tendency among gathered congregations of allowing individuals who had not been ordained to preach. He therefore sought to demonstrate that ordination, performed by ministers and elders via the laying on of hands, was essential to the creation of a minister. He provided both scriptural testimony and evidence to prove that this was the view of protestant divines and the reformed churches.60 Both Hammond and Seaman insisted on separating election from ordination.61 Seaman presented election as the act by which one is chosen to be a minister, whereas ordination was the act by which one is made so.62 Harrington presented Seaman’s distinction as akin to Hammond’s contrast between electing and constituting, thereby emphasising the similarity of the positions of these two clerics. Against them both, Harrington insisted that ordination and election are not distinct, but one and the same thing.63 As well as presenting election and ordination as two separate acts, Seaman, like Hammond, also insisted on the importance of the latter over the former.64 It was ordination, not election, Seaman stressed that was essential to the creation of a minister. Hammond, Seaman and Harrington all used examples from the Book of Acts to support their claims. Of particular relevance was Judas’s replacement as an apostle by Matthias, since this occurred via election and lot rather than as a result of the laying on of hands. Two candidates were selected by the church at Jerusalem, with the choice between them being determined by lot in Matthias’s favour. Seaman insisted that this was an exceptional case, but also that it actually proved election alone to be insufficient, since lot was also deployed.65 Harrington, on the other hand –​in line with Hobbes –​placed emphasis on the fact that the two candidates had initially been selected by the church at Jerusalem and therefore used the example to prove the necessity of popular election.66 Seaman also insisted that any ‘election’ that had taken place in this context was conducted among the apostles alone rather than the church as a whole. This reinforced Seaman’s claim that within the Reformed churches

60 Seaman, The diatribe proved to be a paradiatribe, ‘To the Reader’. 61 Ibid., p. 16. 62 Ibid., p. 22. 63 Harrington, Political Works, p.  545. Harrington also used the same technique in the Introduction/​Book i to confound Seaman’s arguments from Four Propositions. 64 Seaman, The diatribe proved to be a paradiatribe, p. 17. 65 Ibid., pp. 34, 40, 68. 66 Harrington, Political Works, pp. 544 and 650.

190 Hammersley election was undertaken by ministers and elders acting on behalf of the whole church, rather than by the entire congregation (the latter position being associated by him with Anabaptists and Brownists).67 There was a distinction, Seaman insisted, between the consent of the people and their power: ‘Be it granted, as it is by Protestants generally, that Paul and Barnabas made elders with the consent of the people; their consent is one thing and their power another’.68 Against this, Harrington argued that Seaman had misunderstood the particularities of the case. These people, he pointed out, were living under popular government, and therefore whatever was done by their consent was done by their power –​in this context, at least, there was no difference between the two.69 Throughout most of The Prerogative Harrington does not need to refer to Seaman in order to make his points, since the same issues had been explored in depth by Hobbes and Hammond. Most of the polemical work in the second part of the pamphlet is done by Hammond, whom Harrington quotes at length. Seaman is only directly cited a handful of times, and in most cases this is simply to reinforce the similarity between his position and that of Hammond. Ultimately, Harrington sought to narrow any distinction between bishops and presbyters: ‘God may propose as the electors do to the great council of Venice, but the power of council, that is to resolve or ordain, is in the bishop, saith Dr Hammond, and in the presbytery, saith Dr Seaman’.70 Thus it would seem that Harrington’s use of Seaman in the second part of The Prerogative is not about any new material that Seaman offered to the debate, but rather about associating the Presbyterian position on ordination with that of the Anglicans. In addition to pairing Seaman’s work with that of Hammond, Harrington also employed a second tactic to tarnish the Presbyterians. He repeatedly used the terminology of presbyters, and even referred to a Presbyterian party, when describing the corruption of the commonwealth of Israel and the early church. Against Hammond, Harrington insisted that the Sanhedrim was instituted according to chirotonia, not chirothesia and that Moses deployed the latter only once, on the occasion of conferring some of his power on Joshua. Yet ever since, he noted, ambitious elders and divines had sought to claim for themselves ‘this same oligarchical invention of the chirothesia pretended to be derived from Moses’.71 When chirothesia was introduced more extensively into 67 Seaman, The diatribe proved to be a paradiatribe, p. 19. 68 Harrington, Political Works, p.  541. Seaman, The diatribe proved to be a paradiatribe, p. 13. 69 Harrington, Political Works, p. 560. 70 Ibid., p. 540. 71 Ibid., p. 531.

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the commonwealth of Israel, it was the work, he insisted, of ‘the presbyterian party, which must have taken date some time after the captivity or the restitution of the commonwealth by Ezra’.72 On this basis he insisted: ‘that a presbyterian party may bring a popular government into oligarchy, and deface even the work of God himself, so that it shall not be known to after ages’.73 It was not only the commonwealth of Israel that had suffered the corruption wrought by a Presbyterian party. Harrington insisted that the same process could be detected in the history of the papacy: ‘The second presbytery, which is now attained unto a well-​balanced empire in the papacy, hath infinitely excelled the pattern’.74 Associating Presbyterianism with the papacy was a sharp move in the context of the time and Harrington made this connection very deliberately. It was also one made by some of his contemporaries, albeit on less technical grounds. In his final editorial for Mercurius Politicus, Nedham cited Peter Sterry’s sermon England’s Deliverance from the Northern Presbytery suggesting that men would see ‘that the same spirit which lay in the polluted Bed of Papacy, may meet them in the perfumed bed of Presbytery’.75 Once again, Nedham’s concern here was with Presbyterianism’s tendency to assume ‘a Spirituall and Civill power to itself’.76 And he continued by elucidating the similarities between ‘Scotch-​Presbytery’ and the ‘Romish Papacy’.77 Thus from the perspective of Harrington, Nedham –​and Sterry –​the danger of Presbyterianism lay not in its reputation for populism and democracy, but rather in its association with the authoritarian and intolerant imposition of power from above.

Conclusion

Though the issues explored here constitute only one element of a much broader debate, it is clear just on this basis that considerable development occurred in the use of the term ‘democracy’ between 1574 and the period of the Protectorate. Moreover, this discussion reveals a number of other points regarding attitudes towards democracy during this period. In the first place, it is clear that, at least until the 1650s, ‘democracy’ was, almost without exception, employed

72 Ibid., p. 534. 73 Ibid., p. 534. 74 Ibid., p. 537. 75 Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State, p. 184. Citing Peter Sterry, England’s Deliverance from the Northern Presbytery (London, 1652). 76 Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State, p. 184. 77 Ibid., p. 185.

192 Hammersley as a term of abuse rather than as something to be endorsed or embraced.78 But this, nevertheless, served to promote the use of this terminology. Not only does Whitgift’s rhetorical attack on the Presbyterians stick, but it sparks both increased usage of the vocabulary of democracy and further exploration and analysis of the meaning of the term. Moreover, there is even some evidence to suggest that the negative usage ends up contributing directly to the development of more positive understandings of the concept in the late 1640s and 50s. At the same time, it is important to note that throughout this period there remained considerable flexibility over exactly how the terminology of democracy was understood and employed, and who or what it was associated with. The language of democracy was still in an early phase of development, so that conflicting understandings were possible. It had not yet taken on the firm association with elements such as voting and parliamentary elections that would characterise later understandings. It is also very clear that, throughout this period, the language of democracy remained closely bound up with religious issues; in fact, it is almost impossible to separate the two. This point has already been made very effectively by Peter Lake, but it is worth reinforcing given the resolutely secular nature of most accounts of the history of democracy. Finally, this discussion also challenges conventional accounts of the history of democracy in another way: by bringing the focus back to the seventeenth century. While it is certainly true that debates over the theory and practice of democracy continued well into the eighteenth century and, as a result, the flexibility and fluidity of the terminology seen here remained for some time –​it is also evident that the period described by R. R. Palmer as ‘the age of the democratic revolution’ did not have a monopoly on those ideas. The terminology of democracy was already being discussed and debated more than a century earlier. A comprehensive understanding of the history of democracy, therefore, can only be achieved if attention is paid to these earlier debates and controversies.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources

Hammond, Henry, A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres, of Present Use in the Church of England (London, 1652/​3). Harrington, James, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. John G.  A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 78

For a more comprehensive treatment of the important topic of anti-​democratic ideas in early-​modern England see Cuttica, ‘The Spectre’, pp. 132–51.

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Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991). Nedham, Marchamont, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1969). Seaman, Lazarus, The Diatribe proved to be a Paradiatribe […] (London, 1647). Whitgift, John, The defense of the aunswere to the Admonition against the replie of T. C. (London, 1574).



Secondary Sources

Foxley, Rachel, ‘Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 175–​96. Foxley, Rachel, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Hammersley, Rachel, ‘Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy’, History of European Ideas, 39:3 (2013), pp. 354–​70. Lake, Peter, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Antipuritanism, and the “Invention” of Popularity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:3 (2010), pp. 463–​90. Scott, Jonathan, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Tuck, Richard, The Sleeping Sovereign:  The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

­c hapter 9

Poetry, the Passions, and Anti-​democracy in Later Stuart England John West The posthumous work of the seventeenth-​century philosopher and mathematician John Smith contains a curious usage of the word democracy. Smith’s Select Discourses, printed in 1660, nearly a decade after his death, covers a wealth of topics including his discussions of the passions. Whereas good men were, Smith claimed, governed by reason, ‘[i]‌n wicked men’, he wrote, ‘there is a Democracy of wild Lusts and Passions, which violently hurry the Soul up and down with restless motions’.1 The dichotomy of reason and passion is predictable, as is the accompanying moral psychology. The insertion of democracy into the mix, however, is more novel. Smith seems to use it as a collective noun, in the same manner as one would talk about a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows. The ‘wild Lusts and Passions’ thus seem transformed into a herd of untamed animals and the soul that succumbs to passion figuratively becomes a wilderness suitable only for beasts. Working out how to describe passions that lead humanity from civility to violence and moral degeneration, Smith landed on democracy as his mot juste. Some readings of the origins of modern democracy focus on how rational debate was fostered in seventeenth-​century politics, especially through print.2 Yet most early modern understandings of democracy linked it not with reason but, often negatively, with the passions. This strand of anti-​democratic thought goes back to parts of Aristotle’s Politics where he claimed that it was a risk in democracies where ‘all share alike’ that ‘the constitution becomes disorderly, and the notables grow excited and impatient of the democracy’ leading to insurrection.3 Early modern opponents of democracy typically damned it for allowing what they perceived to be the irrational multitude into processes of 1 John Smith, Select Discourses (London, 1660), p. 388. 2 David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​ Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Zaret’s work is indebted to Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the bourgeois public sphere, although he argues that it was more popular than Habermas suggested. 3 See Aristotle, Politics ed. Stephen Everson, transl. Benjamin Jowett and revised by Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 158–​9.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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political decision-​making. Some Royalist pamphlets after 1642, for example, twin democracy with passion to claim that those who fought against the King were bringing about moral as well as political chaos.4 But these negative assessments of the role of the passions in politics coexist with another dimension of classical and early modern political thought that emphasised how winning the people’s love was a way of securing strong leadership. This idea had classical origins which were revived in sixteenth-​century humanist writing. Nicholas Grimald’s 1556 translation of Cicero’s De Officiis outlined how the people’s love is stirred by the perception of a leader’s virtue, which includes fame and liberality, great bounty, justice, and faithfulness.5 Erasmus argues likewise that the prince must ‘make every kind of effort to gain the affection of the people’.6 These are resoundingly not varieties of pro-​ democratic argument. Indeed, I  will be arguing that Restoration poets used images of popular affection for a king as an anti-​democratic rhetoric. But even as democracy was beyond the pale for some writers because it empowered a multitude led only by their passions, there clearly remained a belief that popular feeling needed to be attended to, not just so it could be controlled but also because it was essential in ensuring political stability. The emotions occupied a paradoxical place in early modern political thought, one that this essay will focus on with reference to poetic representations of the relationship between the people and the monarchy.7 The boundary between popular love that was often described in Royalist panegyrics and the kind of passions linked negatively with, among other things, democracy was highly unstable. To the end of demonstrating this, I want to outline how a poetics of anti-​democracy functioned at two key political moments in later Stuart England  –​the Restoration and the succession crisis  –​when the fragile authority of the monarchy was both buttressed and challenged by popular emotion. My focus will be on the image of the ‘people’s hearts’. The culture of the heart has been analysed in relation to language and gender, but the image 4 One Royalist pamphlet numbered among the groups working against the King ‘[a]‌ll popular and plebeian Humorists who doe affect and desire Democracy’ (Questions Resolved (London, 1642), p. 15). 5 [Nicholas Grimald], Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties ([London], 1556). 6 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, transl. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 66. The examples of Erasmus and Grimald are cited in Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 5–6. 7 The classic study of emotions in early modern writing, which looks closely at the problem of how passions were brought under control, is Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-​Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

196 West of the people’s hearts is also central to seventeenth-​century political culture.8 It had varied associations. From the frontispiece of Thomas Scott’s Vox Regis (1624), which depicted the people holding flaming hearts towards James I, to Queen Anne’s coronation medal of 1702, which was emblazoned with a single heart, the heart was often a symbol of affection for monarchy.9 Frequently it harks back to Old Testament texts about the relationship between God and the people: the image in Scott’s text is surrounded by quotes from, among others, Ecclesiastes 10:2 (‘A wise man’s heart is at his right hand’) and Judges 5:9 (‘My heart is towards ye governors of Israel, who offered themselves willingly among the people’). Kevin Sharpe has argued that the English monarchy survived a century of political upheaval (which, as this volume shows, included discussions of the value of democracy) because it forged strong affective bonds with the people.10 But the image of the people’s hearts in literature also disclosed controversial political ideas. Shakespeare uses it in plays such as Richard ii and Titus Andronicus that depict the confrontation between hereditary and elective forms of government.11 As we will see in the work of Dryden, the threat of demagoguery was manifested in the ability of malicious politicians to manipulate popular emotions. Crucially, the image of the heart makes what goes on inside the body, and the difficulty of policing it, of inescapable relevance to the public realm. As such, it brings to the fore one of the main anxieties about democracy in late seventeenth-​century England, namely the problems that were thought to arise from having too many people involved in government. Like the many-​headed hydra, which was a powerful way of imagining democracy not only as monstrous but also as consisting of a mess of subjectivities, the people’s hearts in Restoration poetry, as well as celebrating popular affection for political 8 9 10

11

Robert A.  Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750 (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). However, in Scott’s case it was more an outcome of the monarch’s response to popular complaint than a sign of the people’s unconditional adoration per se. See Sharpe’s two volumes on seventeenth-​century images of monarchy: Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010) and Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–​1714 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). On the image of the heart in the Bible see Erickson, Language, Ch. 1. Richard II, i.iv. 23–​5 and Titus Andronicus i.i, ll. 206–​7 and 210–​11 (references from William Shakespeare:  The Complete Works, ii edn, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)). For discussion of such issues see Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).

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authority, also reveal the threats that subjective feelings were thought to pose to those same established forms of authority and the objective certainties on which their power was based. The way in which these feelings became linked with democracy is the subject of this essay.

1660

The account of Charles ii’s procession to London in John Evelyn’s diary entry for 29 May 1660 records the celebratory mood that greeted the arrival of the new king. There were ‘above 20000 horse and foote’ accompanying Charles into the city; the ‘Mayor, Aldermen, all the Companies’ turned out; ‘Lords and nobles’ watched alongside ‘people flocking the streetes’.12 The period’s other great diarist, Samuel Pepys, recounts how maypoles adorned with the king’s flag were set up, and describes the bonfires and bells that celebrated Charles’ return and how people toasted his health on their knees in London streets. The latter, Pepys claimed, was ‘a little too much’.13 But his tone of mild censure speaks to a sense of surprise at just how clear and overwhelming was the enthusiasm for the Restoration. The popularity of the monarchy in these accounts is not simply a matter of numbers; it is also about social breadth. Support for Charles is seen emanating from many corners of society and is on display in public spaces. The poetry of 1660 represents the new monarchy attracting broad popular support. As well as describing thousands of noblemen on horseback riding to Dover, one balladeer reminded their audience that the ‘Citizens of London’ had also shown their loyalty by travelling to greet the king.14 Poetic form in this case was itself a measure of political popularity. The number of broadside ballads celebrating the Restoration, which would have been sold cheaply and sung in public, shows how important it was for the new regime in its uncertain early days to reach and communicate itself to as broad an audience as p ­ ossible.15 Yet, on the surface at least, the authors of these ballads and poems rarely represent

12 13 14 15

The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956; 5 vols), i, p. 145. The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Harper Collins, 1970–​83; 11 vols), i, p. 122. On the popular celebrations, see Neil H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 40–​6. The King and Kingdoms Joyful Day of Triumph (London, 1660). On the ballads see especially Angela McShane, Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-​ Century England: A Critical Bibliography (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

198 West popular support as something that had to be won. John Ogilby gets close to such a suggestion in the poem ‘Portrait of his Majesty Charles ii’. Printed alongside an engraving of Charles by William Faithorne, the poem enumerates the features of majesty that appear in the new king’s physical appearance. It shewes him King over himself, as well As over others, nor does he less excell In civill vertues, which adorn no less The Royal Throne, as mildness, gentelness, Ravishing sweetnesse, debonarity, Obligingnesse, and affability, That more dos conquer with a gentle word, Then ever any Conquer’d by the Sword, Acquiring absolute Dominion And Soverign sway o’r hearts of every one.16 Charles’ ‘gentle word’ might be the means of conquest but is only a minor detail to Ogilby’s description of self-​governance and benevolence made transparent in the face and looks of a king. Rather than being persuaded by rhetoric, the people’s allegiances emerge more powerfully as a spontaneous and natural emotional response to the appearance of majesty. Such innate power was precisely what many poets saw as the reason why the people’s affections had swayed so decisively in Charles’ favour. The image of the people’s hearts was central to poetic attempts at representing this emotional support for the monarchy. Many poets returned to the trope of the Restoration as a love story. The people’s hearts are typically depicted as burning with desire for the new king. Whilst appearing indebted to secular genres of romance, this vocabulary dovetailed in many instances with biblical sources. Rachel Jevon, for example, used the image of the constancy of the turtle dove common from Renaissance love poetry to figure the love of the people –​with their ‘Hearts by joy being knit like Turtle-​Doves’ –​for the king. But this image metamorphoses a few lines later into a sequence drawn from the description of the Church as the Bride of Christ in the Song of Songs: Who doth not stand amazed thus to see The spotless Turtle Dove Espous’d to be

16

[John Ogilby], The Portrait of his Majesty Charles the Second. Faithfully taken to the Life (London, 1660), sig. A3v.

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Unto a Bride whose Robes with blood are foul; Loe Lovely CHARLES with Dove-​like Galless Soul, (Coming to th’Ark of His blood delug’d Land, With peaceful Olive in His Sacred Hand) Espoused is to Albion dy’d in gore, And to her Princely Beauty doth restore[.]‌17 Charles’ constancy to his people is emphasised as he becomes the turtle dove, but Jevon layers love poetry with several biblical allusions, to the dove in Genesis 8:11 and to the metaphor of the Holy Spirit as a dove in the gospels. Charles’ love, like that of Christ, typologically links Old and New dispensations and Restoration England becomes both the promised land after the deluge and a place of salvation for all believers. Indeed, what is also of interest here is the emphasis on blood-​guilt. The image of the bride is superimposed onto the figure of Albion and each is doused in blood and gore. A similar motif is found in Arthur Brett’s poem on the Restoration where an echo of Ezekiel 36:26 (‘I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh’) helps to describe the people’s guilt as the dead king, Charles i, looks down from heaven to see: That English hearts at last should yield, That the remembrance of their Guilt And of his Blood which they had spilt Should melt their flints (for bloud is known To mollifie the hardest stone:)18 Both Jevon and Brett’s focus on the people’s guilt is a re-​orientation of the attack made on Charles i in 1649 as a man of blood. Yet whereas the charge against Charles i was that he had spilt the people’s blood and therefore must die, the argument here turns on the benevolence of the son: the people spilled his father’s blood and yet that blood becomes a metaphor for the softening of the heart. The recognition of guilt establishes the conditions where Charles’ forgiveness is highlighted and the people’s love for monarchy can grow. For John Milton, displays of adoration to the king of the kind that characterises much of the year’s panegyrics were a sign of the people’s irrationality; that they were being conned by regal artifice and a monarch who was going to 17 18

Rachel Jevon, Exultationis Carmen:  To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty Upon His Most Desired Return (London, 1660), p. 6. Arthur Brett, The Restauration (London, 1660), p. 6.

200 West ‘pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing don that can deserve it’.19 Milton’s question in 1660 was: how are the people to be trusted to exercise their hard-​won liberty?20 But from the other side, a not dissimilar question was being asked. Brett and Jevon were not the only Royalist writers who acknowledged that the nation whose love was fired by the mere presence of Charles was the same nation whose turbulent and unregulated passions had, so it was thought, led them to wage a war against his father. The strength of popular affection for the monarchy, as it is presented in the writing of 1660, was not simply a way of illustrating the moral excellence of a prince; it was also a cultural attempt to control those passions that simultaneously posed a threat to the new regime’s stability. There was, therefore, a complex tension in the way the year’s literature assessed the relationship between emotion, politics, and the people. This is exposed in several sermons which focused on the lines ‘And he bowed the heart of all the men of Judah, even as the heart of one man’ from 2 Samuel 19:14 (maybe Milton’s mocking image of the people’s ‘perpetual bowings’ owes something to the popularity of this passage in Spring 1660).21 These sermons discussed three interrelated areas. Firstly, they criticise the rigidity of the people’s hearts (that is, their insufficient affection for a king) in evidence during the previous decade. Secondly, they address the question of how those hearts could be bowed (that is, made to feel affective loyalty to the king), concluding that the power of a virtuous leader could attract and stabilise popular affection. And thirdly, they ask how the hearts of the people could join in unity of affection and obedience, arguing that when a truly virtuous leader appears the people’s response will be as one. This final idea informs much of the year’s anti-​democratic rhetoric. Poets take up this theme in the way their depictions of the Restoration as a love story frequently yield to assertions of the necessity of obedience. The heart is almost always passive in these poems. It has things done to it rather than feeling for itself; it yields and it is burnt, ravished, bent, bowed, and melted. The hearts of the people are remade by the irresistible force of something

19

John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (London, 1660; ii edn), p. 31. 20 See Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 189–​215. 21 See John Bradshaw, Anastasis Britannica & Hibernica, Great Britain and Irelands Resurrection (London, 1660), Francis Walsall, The Bowing the Heart of Subjects to their Sovereign (London, 1660) and Joseph Swetnam, Davids Devotions Upon his Deliverances (London, 1660).

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stronger and become compliant and obedient to it in turn. The loving heart is indeed collocated with the bended knee by one poet: ‘O ’tis the famous City come to see | With open hands, large heart, and bended knee | Their long-​mist Soveraign’.22 Once more we see the stress on uniformity of feeling. The people occupy one body where the external (the knee) and the internal (the heart) act in unison. The same stress is found in poetic depictions of popular voice. The people typically speak with a single voice that expresses their single affection. In James Shirley’s panegyric for the king, for example, the figure of the crowd is sublimated into a single heart with a single language: ‘Then take it from the language of a heart, | Whose crowd of wishes break into a voice; | And thus do upward fly’.23 Royalist poetry in 1660 represents a complete accordance between internal feelings and external appearances, between the heart and the body, between affective loyalty and the outward manifestation of obedience. Such a stress on uniformity of feeling and action may be a commonplace of Royalist panegyric and its espousals of loyalty to the monarch. In 1660, however, it was given new urgency specifically due to the threats that were perceived as being posed by ideas of democratic government. Recent research has begun to emphasise how the Stuart monarchy rebuilt its authority after 1660 in the shadow of what had happened in the previous two decades.24 This entailed not only the experiences of republican and protectoral government but also the emergence in the mid-​century of several positive theorisations of democracy. Arguments in favour of democracy and about what constituted a democratic state were circulating in pamphlets and treatises during the year and a half running up to the Restoration.25 In 1659 the republican pamphleteer John Streater argued that democracy was the most natural form of government.26 Although he does not really specify why this is the case, this is nonetheless an important statement.

22 23

24 25 26

Anglia Rediviva:  A Poem on his Majesties Most joyfull Reception into England (London, 1660), p. 5. James Shirley, An Ode Upon the Happy Return of King Charles II (London, 1660), sig. A2v. On depictions of voice in Restoration panegyric, see Andrew McRae, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’, in Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae (eds), Stuart Succession Literature:  Moments and Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For example, Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660:  Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013). Rachel Foxley, ‘Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 175–​96. John Streater, Government Described (London, 1659), p. 4.

202 West It is a reminder that the representation of the English monarchy in 1660 as possessing an innate power was a rhetoric that needed to be crafted to compete with similar arguments for the ‘naturalness’ of alternative political frameworks that, like democracy, could well be non-​monarchical. The role of popular affection in successful governance was an important dimension of the intellectual and rhetorical contest between ideas of democracy and monarchy. The pamphlets of 1659 characterise a democracy as a state where the power that originated in the people was handed to elected representatives who were expected to act in the people’s interests. Contrary to the celebrations of 1660, where the people’s love for the monarchy responded to its innate moral excellence, these defences of democracy presented popular affection arising from a sense that government acted to defend and protect the people’s interests. As one anonymous pamphleteer thus put it, if an elected government ‘slight the Cause of God, and the peoples good; the affections of your friends will soon decay’.27 The people’s love in a democracy is important but it is so because it is actively engaged in government. It is not a sign of obedience paid to a benevolent authority. Rather, it is the condition on which government operates and under which it may fall if the people feel that it is failing to act for their good. Affection is part and parcel of right political judgement. The circulation of arguments about democracy or popular government during 1659 and early 1660 were, I  am arguing, a context against which we should see the celebrations of the restored monarchy. The poet who especially brings this into focus is Henry Oxinden. Oxinden was a writer and poet from Kent who, having initially served with the Parliamentarian army, spent most of the 1640s taking up a position of neutrality in the conflict. His friendships with both Royalists and Parliamentarians as evidenced in his letters suggests this position was genuinely held.28 Yet his Latin poetry of the later 1640s and early 1650s reveals a committed royalism. Religionis funus et hypocritae finis (1647) includes praise of Charles i in the face of what Oxinden saw to be Puritan hypocrisy, whilst Jobus triumphans (1651) discussed the importance of forbearance in the aftermath of the regicide. Around 1658 Oxinden also wrote a short Latin manuscript poem that is dedicated to Prince Charles.29 His Royalism carries through to 1660 when two more English poems, Eikon Basilike, a poem on the marriage of Sir Basil Dixwell, the uncle of the regicide John Dixwell who was one of Oxinden’s correspondents, and Charls Triumphant, a panegyric on 27 28 29

The Unbiased Statesman (London, 1659), p. 5. The Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 1642–​1670, ed. Dorothy Gardener (London:  Sheldon Press, 1937). See Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.300, fol. 3.

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the Restoration, were printed. Whilst the latter’s lengthy hyperbolic praise for a God-​like Charles is an important poem not least for its epic pretensions, it is the former that especially reveals how Royalist attitudes to the people’s emotional condition were forged in response to arguments about democracy. The date 25 March 1660 is printed on the title page of Oxinden’s Eikon Basilike. This poem seems to have been published in an uncertain political moment where the restoration of Charles Stuart was increasingly likely though not yet guaranteed. As the title’s allusion to Charles i’s purported meditations on the eve of his execution makes clear, Oxinden sets out not only to celebrate Basil Dixwell’s marriage but to defend monarchy as a system of government. Indeed, Dixwell’s constancy is the basis of the poem’s discussion of the value of loyalty to society and monarch. This emphasis on loyalty, seemingly crafted in response to the possibility of the monarchy’s return, may well show Oxinden trying to position himself favourably in the midst of a shifting political context. What is particularly interesting about this poem’s positioning, however, is that it proceeds by taking democracy as its specific focus of attack. This is seen in the poem’s presentation of the people who are, pace the pamphlets of the late 1650s, a multitude who never have a sense of what is good for them. No matter ’tis which way the vulgar go, Alas, poor Souls, they know not what they do! What Chaff’s more light, what Sea to swell more apt Then they? who when the weathers calm are rapt Ev’n up t’Heav’n in fancy, and in hope, When foul, a sunder cut the Cable Rope: Before the Ship’s in danger, (Lord defend All thine from those who thus to ruine tend.)30 Blown like chaff or swelling like the sea, the people are figured here and throughout the poem with images of unpredictability and vacillation. Oxinden takes the commonplace metaphor of the ship of state and imagines it being piloted by the people. The people’s wrong reading of the weather reveals their inadequate political leadership. Yet when Oxinden shows them cutting the cable rope (the anchor), he is also presenting their deliberate subversion of the state. Elsewhere in the poem Oxinden describes Basil resisting the ‘scurrilous humor of such frantick brains’,31 and Eikon Basilike diagnoses the people’s

30 Henry Oxinden, Eikon Basilike or An Image Royal (London, 1660), p. 3. 31 Ibid., p. 4.

204 West desire for political power as a kind of psychological imbalance. There is a medicalisation of democracy here, and when Oxinden writes of the people ‘rapt up t’Heav’n in fancy’ he overlays the trope of madness with a suggestion that they mistakenly believe themselves to be inspired. One of the abiding concerns of Oxinden’s poem was the protection of ‘true religion’, by which he seems to have meant a unified Church of England. The appeal he makes to Basil to ‘stand to the profession | Of true Religion’32 is thus made in contrast to a triumvirate of popular government, religious enthusiasm, and madness that only leads to danger and chaos. Oxinden returns to the ship of state metaphor in a lengthy passage that explicitly reveals what he believes to be the flaws in democratic government. What is Democracy but a toss’d ship, Void both of Pole, and Pilot in the deep, A Senate fram’d of many a head-​strong Clown, Where number weighs the most judicious down; Where they whose eyes are in their head propose, And they who are most blinde of all dispose, A stinking Olio, poysoning the air, Infecting most that unto it repair, A gally maufry of brains so possest As still the vilest is accounted best, Where who’s most bold, busie, and void of wit, And speaks least sence, is thought the nail to hit. It is a Fair exposing things to sale, And pest’red with strange beast sway’d by the tayl, It is a Forge upon whose Anvils wrought Ugly confusion, and the fire is brought From Hell which heateth the affection Of those who in it cause distraction; The sparkles of this fire about do flye, Visible, and known to every eye.33

32 Ibid., p. 4. 33 Ibid., pp. 4–​5. The opening two lines of this quotation are almost identical to a passage in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas’ Divine Weekes and Workes and other aspects of this quotation also derive from the same. See Du Bartas his devine weekes and workes translated and dedicated to the Kings most excellent Majestie by Josuah Sylvester (London, 1611), p. 505. The image of the olio and the gallimaufry appear to be Oxinden’s. I am grateful to Cesare Cuttica for drawing my attention to this passage.

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The rudderless ship of state; government led by the blind; the link between democracy and the classical world in the reference to a senate; hostility to political engagement by the lower classes; the levelling of value as well as status that comes through in Oxinden’s likening of democracy to a marketplace: this passage reads almost as a taxonomy of early modern anti-​democratic rhetoric. Two things are especially important to note however. Firstly, when Oxinden gets to the metaphor of the anvil he focuses on democracy raising the people’s affections. As we have seen, some pamphlet arguments for democracy suggested that such affections were a sound way of judging the quality of a government. For Oxinden popular affection is clearly a far more dangerous thing. But this does raise a question: how does this hostility relate to popular affection for the monarchy, that which Oxinden assumes in Eikon Basilike when he says nature ‘Graves in brave hearts the rule of Royalty’34 and that which he celebrated in Charls Triumphant later in the year? This leads to the second point about this description. Oxinden’s depiction of democracy stresses its multiplicity. It is the sheer number of voices and opinions in a democracy that Oxinden claims will lead to the subversion of political judgement. A ‘gally maufry’ and an olio are both miscellaneous collections or muddles of things, but an olio is also a meat stew. The image of a ‘stinking Olio’ gets to numerousness through a culinary metaphor and makes democracy something popularly consumed. Government thus serves, or is served up to, the people rather than the people obeying government. The sparkles that fly from the anvil are dangerous not simply for their heat but also their number. The linkage of democracy and numerousness is juxtaposed in the poem to the way loyalty is always associated with singularity. Oxinden urges Basil to defend religion from ‘the Scepter sway’d by any | Plurality’.35 The people are at one point described as heathens because they adore many gods whilst loyalists worship only one God and one King.36 Popular affection, in Oxinden’s estimation, becomes dangerous when it is fragmented across a multiplicity of perspectives. His anxiety, therefore, is that democracy dissolves objective political truth and promotes the subjectivity of individual passion. Monarchy, on the contrary, unites popular feeling with divinely-​ordained and true political form. It has been argued that the grandiose style of Restoration panegyric obscured the complex ideological divisions of the 1660 settlement.37 As I have suggested, this is one aim of the poetry of 1660. Its poetics of affective loyalty, which 34 Ibid., p. 3. 35 Ibid., p. 4. 36 Ibid., pp. 2–​3. 37 Nicholas Jose, Ideas of Restoration in English Literature 1660–​71 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), p. 32.

206 West stressed singularity of feeling and the union of emotion and the body, should, however, be considered a form of anti-​democratic discourse. It emerged when arguments for a democratic state were becoming more visible and it argued that such a state would be afflicted by a disruptive numerousness that encouraged the uncontrolled passions of the multitude. Still, that Royalist writers continued to stress how the people’s love was an important illustration of innate monarchical power means that poets in 1660 were engaged in a precarious balancing act between celebrating affective loyalty on the one hand and worrying about the democratising potential of popular passions on the other. It is this tension that accounts for some of the fissures in Restoration poetry that have too often been unacknowledged by critics. The balladeer who warned against those who pay mere ‘Lip love’ to the king recognised that feigned affection remained a possibility in such an uncertain political climate.38 There are also hints that the people’s affections may take a more active role in the political settlement. This is something more commonly found in some loyal addresses from the period, especially those from non-​conformist communities.39 But it also finds its way into the poetry. In his poem on Charles’ return, Thomas Higgons followed the common pattern of claiming that the new king’s greatness was illustrated in his virtue and ability to fire the people’s love. But the next line acknowledges that this power alone was not enough: ‘’Tis your own Subjects [who] have done the thing’.40 The people, in this instance, are active partners in the restoration not passive bystanders. Samuel Pordage goes a step further, imagining: ‘By Heav’n enthron’d thus, in his peoples hearts, | He shall withstand all Machivilian Arts’.41 The structure of these lines suggests that Charles’ ability to withstand potential threats to his authority is conditional on being ‘enthron’d … in his peoples hearts’. Loyal affection is the source of the new regime’s strength and Pordage’s implication is that without it, the restored monarchy would run into trouble. Yet whether such affection is necessarily a stable source of authority is another matter. ‘Machivilian’ in this context might merely be a generic way of talking about ill-​will and at least shows that not 38 39

40 41

The Loyal Subjects hearty Wishes (London, 1660). See the Quaker Edward Burrough’s address to Charles ii: ‘your safety is in the uniting of Peoples hearts to you and one to another in Love and Liberty, and not in the Divisions and Distractions of people’ (Edward Burrough, A Just and Righteous Plea (London, 1660), p. 3). On loyal addresses and popular affection later in the century see Edward Vallance, ‘ “From the Hearts of the People”:  Loyalty, Addresses, and the Public Sphere’, in Tony Claydon and Thomas N.  Corns (eds), Religion, Culture, and National Community in the 1670s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), ch. 6. Thomas Higgons, A Panegyrick to the King (London, 1660), p. 2. S[amuel] P[ordage], Poems Upon Several Occasions (London, 1660), sig. B5v.

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everyone in 1660 imagined the political landscape to be completely benign. But given Machiavelli’s idea that the prince attracts affection by appearing and not necessarily being virtuous, there is a sense here that Charles must rely on the people’s love even at the same time as it is recognised that such love can be feigned. The allusion to Machiavelli gently hints that the dissimulation of loyal affection could have been a specific cause of political anxiety in 1660. Two understandings of the politics of popular affection emerge in 1660. One saw the inherent unruliness of the people salved by providence and monarchical benevolence which, combined, produced an image of Charles Stuart as innately worthy of adoration and loyalty. The other view presented affection for the restored monarchy as genuine but also foundational to the monarchy’s authority or even as conditional on the king continuing to rule demonstrably in the popular interest. Nobody speaks of the people actively choosing to remove their loyalty or their allegiance:  1660 does not see any such proto-​Whiggery. But writers clearly understood that popular feeling was a crucial dimension of royal authority in particular and of politics in general. The politics of popular feeling are seen, though, either as a process of shaping and redirecting unruly passion or a necessary guarantee of political security. Through all this there is a tacit acknowledgement that imaginative writing, whilst seeming to present itself as only needing to reflect the glories of monarchy, had to work hard to structure the terms and tropes on which Charles’ legitimacy would be built.42 The images of the Restoration as a love story, new biblical dispensation, or testament to the forgiveness of old sins were artifices attempting to naturalise monarchical authority against a backdrop of political experiment that carried over from the late 1650s into 1660 where the spectre of democracy was particularly important. Indeed, one of the ironies of the outpouring of material on the Restoration is that its existence was thanks to a print marketplace that, having been radically opened up during the Civil Wars, had arguably led to a democratisation of reading by allowing a greater number of people access to a wider volume of political information.43 In this sense, what I have argued to be an anti-​democratic rhetoric in the printed poems of 1660 that sought to flatten the people’s political participation into predictable and uniform patterns was an attempt to control popular passions that had been made varied and unpredictable by 42 43

See Gerald Maclean, ‘1660’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 45. Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Reading: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

208 West the very commercial contexts in which these poems existed. One thing the slight variations on common metaphors in Higgons and Pordage disclose is a concern that to celebrate the people’s affective loyalty after the Civil Wars was, in a sense, playing with fire. I want to push forward with this theme for the remainder of the chapter by briefly moving to the early 1680s to examine how two poets who had both written in 1660, Dryden and Pordage, represented the people’s love in an age of partisan dispute when the promise of the Restoration seemed close to evaporating into a new civil war.

1681–​2

In Astraea Redux (1660) John Dryden figured the people’s return to a loving monarch as the resolution of a row between ‘early Lovers’: ‘When once they find their Jealousies were vain | With double heat renew their fires again’ (213–​14).44 A gentle irony undercuts the earnestness found in many panegyrics in 1660 as Dryden transforms their take on the Restoration as Christ-​like loving deliverance into a domestic squabble. Dryden is not mocking the King, but he is self-​ aware enough to see the hyperbole of some of the tropes used to support him. A similar tactic appears in the opening lines of Absalom and Achitophel in 1681. Faced with the task of defending a king whose reputation had descended into a fug of sexual licentiousness, Dryden adopted a libertine idiom for the purposes of Royalist panegyric and turned Charles’ sexuality into a sign of divinely ordained power: Then Israel’s monarch, after heaven’s own heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves; and wide as his command Scatter’d his maker’s image through the land. (7–​10) These opening lines are a semi-​ironic sexualising of the affection between monarch and subject. But they are also an attempt to unify divine, monarchical, and popular affection. The first heart in this poem, after all, is not the people’s but the heart of heaven. Dryden uses it to make a direct link between God’s love for the king and the king’s love of the people but in the process sublimates popular affection into a providential framework.

44

All quotations from Dryden come from Dryden: Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Harlow: Longman, 2007) with line numbers given in parentheses.

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Absalom and Achitophel is of course deeply suspicious of the people’s ability to exercise political power. The most obvious place where this comes through is in the poem’s digression into political theory. The speaker begins with the concession that the people need to be safeguarded from the threat of monarchical absolutism. But the speaker proceeds to question Whig ideas that the people can resume power originally handed over to a monarch and that it is a threat to property for sovereignty to be invested in one person. The ‘people’ in this section of the poem are variously designated by pejorative labels linked to mob violence. In several instances they become a ‘crowd’ and eventually, the narrator wonders: ‘What standard is there in a fickle rout | Which flowing to the mark runs faster out?’ (785–​6). This comes as part of an argument that the political judgement of the many might err just as much as that of the few. Democracy is not explicitly mentioned. But the way the people are represented as unreliable and vacillating lifts common tropes of anti-​democratic rhetoric suggesting that democracy may not be far from Dryden’s mind. That possibility is enhanced by comparing the passages on government to the earlier description of Achitophel setting Absalom up as a future leader: Not that he wished his greatness to create (For politicians neither love nor hate) But for he knew his title not allowed Would keep him still depending on the crowd, That kingly power, thus ebbing out, might be Drawn to the dregs of a democracy. (222–​7) In these lines there is a similar image of flowing liquid that will recur in the later passage except here Dryden is not describing the people but the diminishing power of kings. In each instance, though, he is figuring a reduction of monarchical authority in a common image of instability and change. The metaphor for democracy comes from brewing: a dreg in this context is left-​over sediment at the bottom of a liquid. The point Dryden makes is not only that as kingly power decreases, the power of the people is all that is left over but also that democracy, associated here with gluttonous consumption and drunkenness, is linked with the people’s appetites. He is using common anti-​democratic rhetoric to attack the Whigs. Whigs rarely advanced explicit cases for the Duke of Monmouth to be made king.45 The way Absalom and Achitophel collapses Whig theories of contract 45

On one case for Monmouth’s right, see Mark Goldie, ‘Contextualising Dryden’s Absalom: William Lawrence, The Law of Marriage, and the Case for King Monmouth’, in Donna

210 West with tropes drawn from anti-​democratic rhetoric is a polemical decision made by Dryden. If Whig political theory was trying to understand what role the people had in government, then democracy was, for a Tory like Dryden, a useful term with which he could tar his opponents with what was no doubt a more radical political position than the one they in fact held. The challenge for Whigs, in this case, was to untangle their beliefs from the charge that they were democrats. This is the challenge taken up by Samuel Pordage in Azaria and Hushai, his response to Dryden’s poem, printed in early 1682. Azaria and Hushai is one of several responses to Dryden’s poem that challenge his interpretation of the ongoing succession crisis. Pordage’s poem mimics Dryden’s mock-​biblical structure and is a close reading of the politics of Absalom and Achitophel. He quotes from, paraphrases, and re-​appropriates many of Dryden’s lines and re-​writes most of the earlier poem’s key episodes. Monmouth becomes Azaria, the dutiful and obedient son, whilst Shaftesbury becomes Hushai, the wise and loyal counsellor. In tracing the moments that Pordage chose to re-​write, it is possible to see which parts of Dryden’s poem were thought to be particularly in need of a response. Pordage’s depiction of the people is one such area and, indeed, differs markedly from Dryden’s.46 Pordage’s version of the passages on political theory, for example, emphasises ideas of consent.47 Kings possess power according to the consent of both heaven and men. Men choose their leaders. Azaria, indeed, is described elsewhere in the poem as ‘the people’s choice’. If a monarch breaks the law, then the people have a right to refuse obedience. There is a caveat, however. Pordage stresses that even if Monmouth is the people’s choice, this does not legitimise deposition of a sitting monarch, only that the people have a right to seek redress of grievances. If Dryden collapsed popularity into democracy, then Pordage’s response was to define legitimate popular power and distinguish it from more radical political motivations. In my previous work on the responses to Dryden, I have argued that Whig poets threw the charge of fanaticism levelled at Exclusionists in Absalom and Achitophel back at Dryden by claiming that his portrayal of radical plots against the monarchy and use of biblical source texts revealed his own irrationality. In so doing, they claimed to be reasoned and moderate.48 I want to nuance that argument in

46 47 48

Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds), Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-​Reformation England, 1540–​1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 208–​30. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1678–​1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See Samuel Pordage, Azaria and Hushai: A Poem (London, 1682), pp. 30–​1. John West, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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the final stages of this chapter by looking at Pordage’s positive approach to the politics of the passions. Where Dryden portrayed Achitophel practising ‘subtle Arts’ to manipulate both Absalom and the people, Pordage claims that the ‘subtil Arts’ of Catholic priests alienate King Charles (here recast as Amazia) from the people’s hearts.49 Popular feeling matters in Azaria and Hushai as a way of ensuring the right relationship between monarch and the people. The relevant scene from Dryden’s poem to which Pordage returns, though, is Absalom’s progress to the West of England. For Dryden, the progress is a study in the making of a demagogue. Achitophel looks on, studying the people’s adoring reactions as Absalom flatters them. Pordage’s first echo of this scene closely follows Dryden’s claim that Shaftesbury’s covert aim in sending Monmouth out on progress was to set him up as an alternative king. However, he puts those words in the mouths of the advisors of the king who warn Amazia: That little subtle Instrument of Hell, Worse than to David was Achitophel, The young Man tutors, sends him through the Land, That he the Peoples Minds may understand; That he, with winning Charms might court the Jew, And draw your fickle Subjects Hearts from you.50 Pordage’s description of the people being courted is a deliberate echo of Dryden (‘This moving court that caught the people’s eyes’) as is the reference to the hearts of the people. Tory polemic is re-​written as corrupt counsel. Appealing to the people is not the problem here. Rather, it is the claim to be rationally cautioning against popular appeal that is the true threat. Even though Whig poets presented themselves as ‘moderate’ commentators in contrast to Dryden, Pordage also takes aim at the way a veneer of reason is used to conceal threats to the state. Riffing elsewhere in the poem on Dryden’s progress scene, Pordage insists that the people’s hearts remain a valid measure of affective loyalty. According to Pordage, Azaria: did not court the Peoples Love, Nor us’d their Pow’r his Rival to remove. From’s Father he sought not their Hearts to steal, Nor head a Faction mov’d by blinding Zeal;

49 Pordage, Azaria and Hushai, p. 4. 50 Ibid., p. 15.

212 West But like a vertuous and a pious Son, Sought all occasions of Offence to shun.51 Pordage’s re-​write of Dryden has Monmouth not seducing weak hearts but talking round a sensible population. The point here is that Azaria is doing the job that Amazia is no longer capable of:  persuading the people to offer their loyal affections. For Pordage, the health of the polity rests on a father-​son bond, between himself and the king and, figuratively, between the king and the people, that has been compromised. But the poem concludes with Amazia admitting his errors. Nature is mov’d, and sues for a Reprieve, They are my Children, and I must forgive. My many jealous fears I shan’t repeat, My Heart with a strong pulse of Love doth beat, Nature I feel has made a sudden start, And a fresh source springs from the Father’s heart.52 Unlike David’s thunderous entry at the end of Dryden’s poem, this is an admission of culpability. The subsequent rejuvenation of the kingly heart –​its strong pulse, the sudden start and springing of a new source –​reiterates the opening of Dryden’s poem. Rather than see the health of the nation dependent on the sexuality of the king, Pordage presents monarchical humility ensuring the health of the body politic. Pordage’s Azaria and Hushai attempts to show how the people’s affections could be what kept the monarch out of trouble. In this sense, he was developing the point he had made two decades earlier in his Restoration panegyric as well as responding to Dryden’s depiction of the people as a mob led by uncontrollable passions. His depiction of the people was particularly responsive to the way Dryden had used anti-​democracy to attack the people. Yet it is worth concluding, in this case, with a question: in a poem full of echoes of Dryden’s language, why does Pordage not attempt to turn the lines on democracy specifically? It may be that there is no easy way to re-​imagine those lines from Pordage’s perspective beyond some general cautions against tyranny. However, one danger of echoing a political enemy is to draw attention to their work rather than to discredit it. Could it be possible that Pordage wanted to avoid

51 Ibid., p. 22. 52 Ibid., p. 37.

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drawing attention to those lines in particular? If so, then we can perhaps conclude that anti-​democratic rhetoric in 1681, even though it drew on ubiquitous images and especially the link between popularity and the passions, remained powerful.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Dryden, John, Absalom and Achitophel. A Poem, in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (eds) Dryden: Selected Poems (Harlow: Longman, 2007). Oxinden, Henry, Eikon Basilike: An Image Royal (London, 1660). Pordage, Samuel, Azaria and Hushai: A Poem (London, 1682). Smith, John, Select Discourses (London, 1660). Streater, John, Government Described (London, 1659).

Erickson, Robert A., The Language of the Heart, 1600–​1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Foxley, Rachel, ‘Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 175–​96. Sharpe, Kevin, Rebranding Rule:  The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–​1714 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). West, John, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

pa rt 3 Democracy and the Other: Slaves, Natives and Women

∵

­c hapter 10

Democracy and Anti-​democracy: the Roger Williams and John Cotton Debate Revisited Camilla Boisen Introduction* ‘As the same Sun shines on the Wildernesse that doth on a Garden! So the same faithfull and all sufficient God, can comfort feed and safely guide even through a desolate howling Wildernesse’.1 So proclaimed Roger Williams (ca. 1606–​1683), America’s earliest pioneer for religious liberties, in his remarkable study on the language and customs of the Narragansett Indians in 1643. He knew them well, having sought refuge with them after being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ‘driven to the woods’2 in the cold winter months of 1636. In A Key into the Language of America, Williams implicitly expressed what he would later make explicit in his 1644 work A Bloudy Tenent of Persecution: namely, that religious uniformity was not a prerequisite for peaceful and commodious living. He argued that our universal, common morality imprinted on our hearts is the foundational starting point for any stable and flourishing human society.3 Williams’s fellow New England Puritans resisted his insistence on a common shared moral community and its practical implications for religious tolerance. One such critic was Williams’s intellectual adversary John Cotton (1585–​1652). Cotton represented the puritan belief that refused any form of ecclesiastical or political representation to ‘unbelievers’, let alone the American Indians. Such religious dissent and ‘democratic’ indulgence risked yielding the wrong answers about what constituted righteous living, the consequence of * Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Lucius Lambert for his research support in writing this chapter, and Johan Olsthoorn and Matthew C.  Murray for providing invaluable comments on an earlier draft. 1 Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, with an introduction by Howard M. Chapin (Bedford MA: Applewood Books, 1997), p. 78. 2 Williams cited in William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 154. 3 James Calvin Davis, ‘Roger Williams and the Birth of an American Ideal’, in James Calvin Davis (ed.), On Religious Liberty –​Selections from the Works of Roger Williams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008), pp. 1–​45, p. 11.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

218 Boisen which meant eternal damnation for the individual unbeliever and, potentially, the entire community. For most New England Puritans, the only moral deliberation that mattered was the right one: that which ensured salvation, and for this, scriptural instruction was needed. Roger Williams’s and John Cotton’s intellectual duel in the 1640s about religious toleration provides important insights into the democratic and anti-​ democratic sentiments of early modern New England. That is, on the one hand, Williams’s uncompromising insistence on the strict separation between church and state as a perquisite for personal liberty and, on the other, Cotton’s preference for religious uniformity as a rudiment for social order and civil peace. But, at the core of the Williams-​Cotton debate is an important question about who qualifies for membership of the moral community, the answer to which still drives contemporary debates about democracy and political representation.4 Here, Williams and Cotton offer us two different approaches; both, I  argue, draw on the principles of natural law for their argumentation. Williams’s approach can be called inclusive, which stipulates the fraternity of man; Cotton’s exclusive, where membership is ‘qualified’ and inevitably excludes sinners and heathens. This division is particularly evident if we pay attention to their remarks on the American Indians. Issues surrounding the American Indians and their title to land and capacity to alienate it were pertinent to many different ideological contexts. Scripture and the concept of natural law were invoked both in justifications of inclusive and exclusive conception of the moral community; and in the latter American Indians invariably failed to 4 The question (and justification) of moral inclusion/​exclusion as integral to American colonial democratic thought is my focus here. In doing so, I realise, I, to a certain extent, approach ‘democracy’ more as ‘a way of life’ rather than more formally as a ‘system of rule’ to use Jason S. Maloy’s distinction. The former is seen as ‘necessarily predicated on a liberal or inclusive conception of membership’. The latter ‘as a way of institutionally structuring relations of authority’. Maloy’s focus is on the latter, and his excavation of democratic theory centres on the principle of accountability and the various forms by which it was challenged. Here, he aptly demonstrates how Roger Williams’s Rhode Island, along with Connecticut, developed into a modern democratic state, applying democratic accountability to representative, constitutional government (Jason S. Maloy, The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 5, 6–​7). While there is great merit and value to Maloy’s approach, I am less concerned with the historical inquiry into the more procedural aspects of democratic systems. Arguably, systemic procedures require philosophical justifications that have to originate from all members subject to the power of the institutional system itself. Democracy is not just a kind of systemic account of law. We also need to establish who would be obligated to make those procedures in a certain way or to do certain things. (While it is important for the historian of political thought to establish what things were, it is equally important to try to understand what past generations wanted things to embody).

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qualify for membership. This chapter shows that the dispute between Williams and Cotton is illustrative of how universal natural law offered a shared framework and set of ideas employed differently by each and invoked to support both sides –​‘democratic’ and ‘anti-​democratic’. Williams’s argument for inclusivity is the far more original of the two. Williams’s reliance on the concept of natural law as a normative standard for social and civil cooperation enabled him to make a specific argument about the natural equity of the American Indians, that is, representing them as free and equal under natural law. By invoking a natural law that seeks to draw common obligations for every individual, Williams’s approach at this time is distinct given his New England audience, who sought to ground such obligations in Scripture alone. He was uncompromising in criticising contemporary approaches to governance that rooted their authority in theocratic readings of Scripture. The natural law approach that he employed intended to utilise the ever-​revealing truths of natural design to create rules that establish the just and right conduct of individuals and governments. It moves democratisation from beyond the faithful to all those capable of revealing moral truths, including the American Indians. Here, Williams becomes a distinct critic of ‘righteous’ governance and the forms of representation that must be extended to plural communities. Although Williams did not defend the idea that the New England settlers and the American Indians shared some kind of political community, the allusion to democracy comes rather from an extrapolation to modern debates on inclusion. It is thus that Williams’s political thought exposed the dominant anti-​democratic paradigm of the early modern period.

Roger Williams

Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the 9th of October 1635 on account of his separatist views. The sentence the Massachusetts General Court pronounced against him was that he had ‘broached & dyvulged dyvers newe & dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates’.5 He was subsequently ordered to leave their jurisdiction within six weeks. During his period of banishment, Williams and Cotton continued to exchange views on the issue of toleration, which eventually led to their Bloody Tenent writings.

5 Decree of Roger Williams’ banishment cited in Henry S. Burrage, ‘Why Was Roger Williams Banished?’, The American Journal of Theology, 5:1 (1901), pp. 1–​17, p. 3.

220 Boisen It was through these writings that Williams would refine his ideas of a civil policy for religious liberty. In a letter to Roger Williams in early 1636, Cotton writes that although Williams’s banishment ‘was neither done by my counsel nor content […] I dare not deny the sentence passed to be righteous in the eyes of God’.6 This letter called in to Williams’s mind ‘of my distressed wanderings amongst the Barbarians [… .] exposed to the mercy of an howling Wildernesse in Frost and Snow’.7 As an outcast and victim of persecution, it seemed only appropriate that Williams should go on to emphatically argue that religion was neither a solid foundation for social cohesion nor a necessary one. In both of his now famous tracts, Williams stipulated that social cooperation and good government did not require religious orthodoxy for its peace and stability. That civil magistrates had the authority to punish religious deviants was, to varying degrees, a view favoured by most of his contemporary Puritans, including John Cotton. Recently, Jessica R. Stern has convincingly argued that Williams’s plea for religious and cultural toleration owed much more to his experience of living and dealing with the American Indians than to his experience of confessional strife and religious intolerance in his native England.8 It was among the American Indians he found ‘integrity, dignity and goodness outside the parameters of orthodoxy’ as Martha C.  Nussbaum notes, which took him down an alternative route to dealing with the uncertainties and anxieties that characterised New England living.9 These cultural encounters with the Indians convinced Williams that peaceful cohabitation with them was not only feasible, but also justifiable as part of God’s order. How did he reach this conclusion? In the first place, he relied upon his first-​rate classical education, during which he was exposed to a wide range of standard texts and arguments regarding natural law,10 which enabled him to argue that there

6

Sargent Bush Jr. (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), letter: ‘John Cotton to Roger Williams –​early 1636’, pp. 211–​25, p. 213. 7 Roger Williams, ‘To the Impartiall Reader’, in Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London, 1644), p.  31, ed. Reuben Aldridge Guild and James Hammond Trumbull, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963; reprint), vol. i, p. 315. See also ibid., p. 211. 8 Jessica R Stern, ‘A Key into the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution: Roger Williams, the Pequot War, and the Origins of Toleration in America’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9:3 (2011), pp. 576–​616. 9 Martha C. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience –​In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Liberty (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 47. 10 Ibid., p. 44.

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was an alternative to strictly scriptural (sectarian) justifications for social cooperation. Williams relied on certain central natural law precepts: that of man’s natural equality as well as his moral capacity and sociability. In this way, he attempted to cement a universal moral order independent of religious convictions. The American literary historian, Vernon Louis Parrington, in his 1928 Pulitzer Prize-​winning and hugely influential three volume Main Currents in American Thought, cogently describes Williams as the ‘Puritan intellectual who became a Christian freethinker, more concerned with social commonwealth than with theological dogmas’.11 At the outset let me just say that I do not consider Williams a natural law theorist per se, but, as we shall see, natural law theory plays a foundational role in his claim for liberty of conscience, and the modern ‘democratic’ idea that we can ground a plural society on a secure moral and non-​sectarian footing. To this, let me offer another caveat: we are not considering any form of ‘secularisation’ of the natural law tradition. That is, we shall not consider that so-​called freestanding moral principles were not anchored in theological reasoning. For natural law thinkers such as Hugo Grotius (1583–​ 1645) and John Locke (1632–​1704), the theological element is still undeniably prominent in their natural law theories. Here it is perhaps prudent to speak a little of the natural law tradition and the Calvinist relationship to it.

Natural Law and Calvinism

The medieval natural law tradition was resuscitated and redesigned in the seventeenth century by natural jurists such as Grotius, Locke and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–​1694), to account for the origins of political authority amid religious and confessional strife, where old models of explanation no longer held political or theological purchase. The goal was to develop a new moral framework to ­promote peaceful living in a deeply divided and traumatised Europe. And what better way to find moral consensus than to invoke a set of universal immutable principles with which we can (and must) act in conformity and uniformity? Grotius’s political theory certainly sought to offer his readership such irenic comfort; but here the doctrine of predestination, or election, proved a towering obstacle.12 11 12

Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought –​The Colonial Mind 1620–​ 1800 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987; 3 vols), vol. 1, p. 64. See Camilla Boisen, ‘Hugo Grotius and Predestination’, in Randall Lesaffer and Janne Nijman (eds), Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).

222 Boisen Calvin was no friend of natural law, and it played no (or very little) part in his instruction on legal and social circumstances.13 He recognised it as a moral standard, but it was of subordinate value to divine law. Calvin shared a general belief in a natural knowledge of God, but this knowledge did not disclose God’s saving action in ‘the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ’.14 Instructions on ethical living could only be comprehended through revelation of the divine will in Scripture.15 Following the principal Calvinist theological doctrines, most Puritans were sceptical of using the natural law as a universal moral framework.16 On the one hand, they acknowledged its existence and recognised that human reason retained some form of capacity to access this universal moral framework needed for the development of civil law. On the other, as Calvinists, they inevitably believed in the corruption of human nature through sin; that is, sin had compromised the reliability of human reason, and without it how could they be certain of God’s plan, let alone act upon His will? In the introductory chapters of The Institutes, Calvin acknowledged that God implanted a natural knowledge in the human spirit, but he was very clear that this knowledge was entirely corrupted and suppressed by original sin.17 That is not to say that no attempts were made to reconcile natural law theory with Scriptural authority by asserting the authority of man’s capacity for reason. For someone like Richard Hooker (1554–​1600), we only attain legislative certainty when Scripture and reason work in unison. Assurance of the authority of the Word is insufficient; its authenticity must be tested against human reason. In other words, reason is needed as it can clarify that which is hidden in Revelation. Although human beings have a basic knowledge of their moral obligations without the assistance of Revelation, Hooker emphasises that ‘[t]‌he law of nature as the natural light of reason does not, it is true, embrace all necessary laws; above all, it cannot be kept without the continual help and corporation of God’.18 13 14 15 16 17 18

However, there is some debate about this:  see David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms –​A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans Publishing Company, 2010). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, transl. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1953; 2 vols), 1.2.1, p. 33. See August Lang, ‘Reformation and Natural Law’, in Émile Doumergue, August Lang, Herman Bavinck and Benjamin B. Warfield (eds), Calvin and the Reformation: Four Studies (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1909), pp. 56–​98, p. 70. There is some contention on this point:  see VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms. Lang, ‘Reformation and Natural Law’, p. 69. Hooker cited in ibid, p. 79.

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This concern over the corruptibility of natural reason, either through sin, inability or sheer ignorance, was shared by most natural law theorists. Grotius, for instance, was acutely aware that our moral reasoning cannot be as certain as mathematical demonstrations because the situation in which we weigh what is right is frequently clouded by circumstantial issues.19 It is often difficult to ascertain the right course of action. For the Puritans, the solution to this conundrum was simple: Scripture would ‘fill the moral gaps’, so to speak, and reveal the right course of action. The perceived corruptibility of the human condition was inextricably tied to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The doctrine of predestination, or predetermined election, had divided Christians for centuries. When the British monk Pelagius rejected the Augustinian conception of grace by asserting that humankind was not inherently depraved, he exposed a fundamental tension in Christian thought between divine will and human freedom. The reconstitution of natural law theory in Protestant political thought –​and here Grotius was on the vanguard –​required reconciling the idea of a predestinarian system with the universal moral principles of human natural goodness and autonomous agency. Grotius’s solution, in keeping with his Arminianism, was a denouncement of unqualified predestination and the affirmation of free human will, which made predestination conditional, not absolute. God chose to give each individual self-​determining free will through prevenient grace. Each person has a choice of either accepting or rejecting God’s offer of salvation, and hence God, as remunerator, allows each person a choice to determine his or her salvation. Grotius’s Arminian proclivities made him one of the most prominent defenders of religious toleration of the early modern period as it liberated him from the constraints of orthodox Calvinism. He was thus able to espouse central natural law precepts about man’s natural equity, inherent moral capacity, autonomy, political freedom, and sociability in order to cement a universal moral order independent of religious convictions.20 In the strict Calvinist doctrinal insistence on human depravity, a question always lingered: if only some have access to God’s plan and true ethical living, where does that leave the ‘non-​elect’, the reprobates, including the American Indians, in the moral community? For the more dogmatic Puritans, who 19 20

Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. R. Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005; 3 vols), bk ii, ch. xxiii, vol. 2 pp. 1115–​16. See Boisen, ‘Grotius and Predestination’. See also Hugo Grotius, Meletius –​or Letter on the Points of Agreement between Christians, ed. and transl. G.  H. M.  Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

224 Boisen subscribed to absolute notions of predestination the answer is troubling: nowhere or, rather, damnation. Only God gets to stand in judgement, but the question was really when and how, and the Cotton-​Williams debate demonstrated a fundamental eschatological disagreement about what exactly the preparation for the second advent of Christ entailed. As we shall see, Cotton was of the view that the congregation might have to root out evil on God’s behalf. Civil magistrates had certain religious responsibilities, which sometimes entailed that they would have to wield the ‘civil sword’ to speed godly rule along. On the issue of predestination, Cotton moved, polemically at least, to set a conciliatory tone for the fierce theological debate that engulfed early Stuart England by conceding to the validity of Jacob Arminius’s (1560–​1609) most penetrating reproach that Calvinist double predestination –​of the elect and the reprobate  –​for sinners made God the author of evil. He sought to demonstrate that God had intended salvation for the reprobates, without undermining the coherence of his own position. There is some scholarly debate on whether he succeeded in this endeavour. David Como argues that despite re-​emphasising the utter freedom and gratuitousness of God in saving the elect [and] without any reference to good or evil in man […] Cotton […] fell back in a long linage of absolute predestinarian thought, which held that the elect were chosen from before the beginning of time, without any respect for either their own sins or Adam’s.21 Although absolute predestinarian thought would remain a central vessel for the persecution and moral exclusion of the indigenous populations,22 the dispossession of the American Indians’ titles to land was not grounded on their 21

22

David Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-​Century England’, in Peter Lake and Michael McGiffert (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–​1660 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 64–​87, p. 78. Como gives an excellent account of Cotton’s revised version of reprobation. For instance, in the 1960s in Apartheid South Africa it was common for nationalist Afrikaners to appeal to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to justify racial segregation. This was based on the idea that God had preordained salvation for some and eternal damnation for others:  see Susan Rennie Ritner, ‘The Dutch Reformed Church and Apartheid’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2:4 (1967), pp. 17–​37, p. 24. André du Toit has convincingly shown how ‘the Calvinism paradigm’ –​the view that the Afrikaner religio-​ political convictions of the mid-​twentieth century have their roots in Calvinism  –​is a political construct of the 1920s and 1930s (see André du Toit, ‘No Chosen People:  The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of the Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology’, The American Historical Review, 88:4 (1983), pp. 920–​52).

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fall from grace. Here we might wonder if such doctrinal certainty was not a missed opportunity on the part of the Puritans to justify claims to land. But the white man had also fallen, making the natural right to claim land inoperative in both cases.23 We shall return to Cotton’s moral justification for dispossessing the American Indians and taking up the land further below. In his early years, Williams was rather orthodox in following the principal Calvinist theological doctrines such as predestination. He rejected, along with fellow ‘Antinomian’ Anne Hutchinson (1591–​1643), any attempt by human beings to identify who was saved and who was not, leaving open even the possibility that some or all Native Americans might be saved.24 Reflecting this later denouncement of double predestination, Williams subscribed to an eschatology where the kingdom of Christ would be radically different from what humans could envisage. Although Williams believed in the certainty of his own religious convictions, that is, developing a pure church, for precautionary measures, it would be better not to persecute other denominations, as they might be godly men. Williams’s eschatological interpretation of the parable of the wheat and tares is unambiguous: ‘[the] civil state […] may not justly tolerate civil offenders yet may most justly tolerate spiritual offenders, of whose delinquency it has no proper cognizance …’.25 Another pragmatic proviso to Williams’s plea for religious toleration is its enforcement. He cautions that ‘good assurance [is] taken according to the wisdom of the civil state for uniformity of civil obedience from all sorts’.26 In fact, Williams’s political theory is noticeable for not formulating a theory of resistance, and he remains ambiguously silent on the civil censure of magistrates who persecute.27 Undoubtedly, Williams saw religious persecution as a warlike condition, which 23

Charles E.  Eisinger, ‘The Puritans’ Justification for Taking the Land’, Essex Institute Historical Collections, 84:2 (1948), pp. 131–​43, p. 134. 24 I am grateful to Alan E.  Johnson’s insights on this point:  see Alan E.  Johnson, The First American Founder  –​Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience (Pittsburgh, PA:  Philosophical Publications, 2015). The Antinomian doctrinal dispute that Williams was embroiled in before his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony paralleled the Arminian controversy a decade earlier, and sought to settle another central predestinarian question, that of visible election, ‘visible saint’ or one of God’s elect. For a superb study that situates the Antinomian Controversy in broader American Colonial Puritan public discourse see Patricia Roberts-​Miller, Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 25 Roger Williams, ‘The Bloody Tenent Yet more Bloody’, in Davis (ed.), On Religious Liberty, pp. 167–226, p. 188 26 Williams, ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience’, in Selections from the Works of Roger Williams, pp. 85–​156, p. 87; Maloy, The Colonial American Origins, p. 166. 27 Maloy, The Colonial American Origins, p. 166.

226 Boisen fundamentally disrupted civil and spiritual peace. That is not to say that sometimes it might become ‘necessary, honorable, and godly with civil and earthly weapons to defend the innocent and to rescue the oppressed from the violent paws and jaws of oppressing persecuting Nimrods’.28 Nonetheless, his seemingly preferred form of resistance is that of faith, fought ‘with religious and spiritual artillery’.29 The absence of a theory of resistance to civil government in Williams’s writings is consistent with the political intellectual mindset of the Anglo-​American colonies. First, as Jason S. Maloy astutely points out, the sheer precariousness of life in the new world produced a certain affectability about rebellion, and second, there was an avenue for the early New Englanders to resist authority ‘in ways outside the scope of classic resistance theory’ and without having to ‘develop a theoretic justification for doing so’. They could, as Thomas Hooker (1586–​1647) had done, ‘simply pick up and leave’.30 Let me return to the issue of how and why Williams reconciled natural law precepts in his political theology. Williams asserted that there was a universal moral fellowship between people of different creeds, Christian denominations, and other religions: Turks, Jews and apostates. He found proof of this moral fellowship in the culture and habits of the American Indians. He made his case through three main assertions:  first, he asserted the monogenesis of all human races, including that of the American Indians,31 which placed him in the prevalent public intellectual discourse on the origins of the human races. Although by the 1640s most Europeans had overcome their doubts about the American Indians’ membership of the human race, their origins still had to be settled to maintain the integrity of the word in the Bible. The Jewish heritage had been advanced as a plausible theory to explain their origins since at least the 1540s. Although professing his uncertainty in answering this question, Williams subscribed to the notion that the American Indians were one of the lost tribes of Israel, and in A Key, he is at pains to note how much of their customs, language and rites have close affinity with ‘the Hebrew’.32 He also considers that they may have descended from the north after conversation with the Dutch governor who drew ‘their Line from Iceland’.33 Incidentally, the year before A Key was published, another 28 Williams, ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution’, pp. 92, 166. 29 Ibid., p. 92. 30 Maloy, The Colonial American Origins, p. 166. 31 Williams, A Key, p. 53. 32 Ibid., ‘Preface’. 33 Ibid., ‘Preface’.

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Dutchman, Hugo Grotius, had written a widely circulated tract, De origine gentium americanarum, claiming that the Norsemen from Iceland had populated the Americas.34 Second, Williams remarked that the American Indians were morally decent members of humankind. He praised the Indians for their moderation, and testified that they were far less likely to commit the sins of robbery and gluttony compared to the English even though they had never been instructed in nor had knowledge of God and the laws of Europeans.35 Williams took this claim of natural equity between Europeans and the American Indians even further and contended that they held the original titles to all land. Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood, Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good. Of one blood God made Him, and Thee & All, As wise, as faire, as strong, as personall. By nature wrath’s his portion, thine no more, store Till Grace his soule and thine in Christ restore, Make sure thy second birth, else thou shalt see, Heaven open to Indians wild, but shut to thee.36 Stipulating the equitable relationship between Europeans and Indians, Williams denounced the validity of the Massachusetts Bay Company Royal charter on the grounds that the King of England had no right to grant them patent to the American Indians’ lands.37 In a treatise written in early 1632 before his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams had called into question the King’s charters on which the English colonies were founded on as legitimate title to land. According to former Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, this was another issue that the judicious ministers who presided over Williams’s trial took particular offence to:  ‘1, for that he chargeth King James to have told a solemn public lie, because in his patent he blessed God that he was the first Christian prince that had discovered this land; 2, for that he chargeth him and others with blasphemy for calling Europe Christendom, or the Christian world; 3, for that he did personally apply to our present king, Charles, these three places in the Revelations, [viz], [blank]’.38

34

Hugo Grotius, On the Origins of the Native Races of America, transl. Edmund Goldsmith (Edinburgh, 1884). 35 Williams, A Key, p. 143. 36 Ibid., p. 53 (Williams’s italics). 37 Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution, p. 155. 38 John Winthrop’s Journal, History of New England, 1630–​1649, ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908; 2 vols), vol. 1, pp. 116–​17.

228 Boisen Williams might have thought that the King’s grant of land to the New England settlers was about as spurious a title to land as the papal bull of donation. As he would later clarify in a letter to Captain John Mason, deputy governor of Connecticut and infamous hero of the Mystic Massacre in 1637, concerning disputed territory east of the Narragansett River, ‘for patents, grants and charters, and such like royal favours, are not laws of England, and acts of Parliament, nor matters of propriety and meum and tuum between the King and his subjects […]’.39 For Williams, the transfer of title to land was only valid if purchased.40 Third, Williams had to alter the description of ‘conscience’ from a constituent of Christian piety to a moral faculty common to all human beings, including the American Indians.41 Individual human conscience is, for Williams, precious, and an integral part of human dignity. Williams defines conscience as ‘holy light’ –​‘a persuasion fixed in the mind and heart of man, which enforceth him to judge, and to do so and so with respect to God, His worship’.42 Although it is deployed for the purpose of religious devotion, it is the source of man’s very identity. We all have something precious inside us, that is ‘the soul, mind and conscience of man, that is, indeed, the man, [which] ought to be left free’.43 And so, Williams fittingly announces the enforcement of religious conformity as ‘soule rape’.44 Thus, when it comes to establishing peaceful and commodious living, we all qualify, by the virtue of our shared humanity. Our religious views, whether true or false (although they must be religious and not atheistic views), should not determine our social capabilities such as trust, honesty or being good members of society. He argued that we possess certain moral faculties by nature, which we all share: there is a moral virtue, a moral fidelity, ability, and honesty which other men (beside church members) are, by good nature and education, by good laws and good examples, nourished and trained up in  –​[so] that civil places of trust and credit need not be monopolized into the hands of church members (who sometimes are not fitted for them), and

39

‘Letter to Major Mason’, Providence, June 22, 1670, in The Letters of Roger Williams, ed. John Russell Bartlet (Providence, 1874), pp. 348–​9. 40 Williams had purchased land from the Narragansett Indians outside Salem. 41 Davis, ‘Roger Williams and the Birth of an American Ideal’, p. 23. 42 Cited in Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, pp. 51–​2. 43 Williams, ‘The Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody’, p. 216. 44 Ibid., p. 205.

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all others deprived and despoiled of their natural and civil rights and ­liberties.45 To undermine Cotton’s claim that false worship disturbs civil peace, Williams drew strict lines between religious righteousness and civil and moral virtues. God created ‘diverse sorts of goodness’, a ‘natural goodness’, as Williams notes, including civil and moral goodness, which was quite distinct from ‘spiritual goodness’.46 As such, unbelievers were perfectly capable of creating peaceful and flourishing cities. He wrote that even the very Americans and wildest pagans keep the peace of their towns or cities, though neither in one nor the other can any man prove a true church of God in those places, and consequently no spiritual and heavenly peace. The peace spiritual (whether true or false) is of a higher and far different nature from the peace of the place or people, being merely and essentially civil and humane.47

John Cotton

While Roger Williams invoked the natural law principle of natural equity to make very specific arguments about the moral justification of civic plurality and the respect owed to the America Indians’ land rights, Cotton appealed to the natural law, or as he sometimes termed it ‘moral equity’ or ‘light of nature’, in two rival ways, both of which opposed Williams’s justification and can be characterised as exclusionary. First, Cotton uses the natural law by way of asserting the legality of settler colonial projects, and second, to bolster his claim that civil magistrates have a duty to safeguard religious purity. David VanDrunen has convincingly argued that while Cotton’s natural law scepticism seems unquestionable, he nevertheless felt ‘comfortable enough to citing natural law […] and viewed it as at least one normative standard for civil law’.48

45 Ibid., pp. 206–​7. 46 Williams, ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution’, p. 131. 47 Ibid., p. 98. 48 VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, p. 230. VanDrunen offers an excellent discussion of Cotton’s view of Mosaic judicial law and its relation to natural law. Mosaic judicial law means seeing the typology of ‘the social arrangement of Old Testament Israel’, where the kings played a key role in guarding true religion as justification for ‘the New England ways’ (ibid., p. 231).

230 Boisen Being a sceptic of reformed natural law, Cotton’s appeal to it to justify settlers’ titles to land suggests the enormous political purchase of natural law ideas at the time, which he viewed as a potential asset to colonial interests.49 Cotton was unexceptional in arguing that ‘unhabited’ land was available for just appropriation as evident in Old Testament scripture. The Bible clearly imposes a duty on mankind to labour and cultivate the soil. In the Garden of Eden, Adam is placed there to ‘till it and tend it’ (Genesis, 3). This biblical injunction, ingrained in natural law, commanded and deployed development as a universal principle, against which savages and barbarians were found wanting. This was a dominant moralistic trope in colonial North America. Locke famously validated this moral imperative to colonise and cultivate in his celebrated work Second Treatise of Government, which was invoked profusely in connection with justifications of colonialism in centuries to come. In God’s Promise to his Plantation (1630) and in his 1647 reply to Williams, The Bloudy Tenent Washed and made White with the Blood of Lamb, Cotton advanced arguments that the English settlers could justly appropriate vacant land, and drew on natural law and law of nations language. As a ‘Principle in Nature’, Cotton preached, in his famous farewell sermon when Winthrop’s company departed for New England in 1630, ‘[t]‌hat in a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is […] Gen.1. 28. Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’.50 ‘Where there is vacant place’, Cotton explains, there is liberty for the ‘sonnes of Adam or Noah to come and inhabite, though they neither buy it, nor aske their leaves’.51 The idea of ‘empty land’, or ‘waste land’ was a useful conceptual device for European expansion because it provided the link between property rights and the moral obligation to prosper. The general assertion was that natives too were potential holders of private property rights under the universal natural law. Nevertheless, they failed to exercise these rights, by falling short in various ways. For John Winthrop, although the Indians had a natural right to use the land, their ‘civil right’, that is, their property right proper was negated, because ‘they enclose noe land neither have any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by, 49

An example of this set of ideas can be found in John Donne’s sermon preached in 1622 before the Virginia Company: ‘In the Law of Nature and Nations, A Land never inhabited, by any, or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former Inhabitants, become theirs that will possesse it. So also is it, if the Inhabitants doe not in some measure fill the Land, so as the Land may bring foorth her increased for the use of men’ (The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959; 10 vols), vol. 4, p. 274). 50 John Cotton, God’s Promise to his Plantation (London, 1634), p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 4.

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& soe have no other but a natural right to those countries’.52 Title to property, then, depends exclusively on cultivation, and the act of cultivating or tilling the earth is presented as a moral duty. This is the Lockean agricultural argument.53 Against Williams, and in agreement with Winthrop and Locke, Cotton is adamant that title to land depends on labour: ‘we [do] not conceive that it is a just Title to so vast a Continent, to make no further improvement of millions of Acres in it, but only to burn it up for pastime’.54 By appealing to the natural law as an instrument of colonisation, Cotton invoked 150 years of Catholic natural law reasoning that sought to justify Spanish colonial enterprises in the new world and come to terms with its original inhabitants. The natural law injunction to cultivate land was framed as ‘exclusionary’ because universal natural law set particular standards and criteria that had to be met. They entailed obligations, which the Europeans claimed against non-​Europeans, such as the moral obligation to making the land productive, which also entailed establishing civil societies and good government to provide protection of man’s industriousness.55 Both Alberico Gentili (1552–​ 1608), Grotius and much later Emer de Vattel (1714–​1767) had stipulated that everyone has a natural right to possess and inhabit uncultivated land. Denying Europeans their rights to an empty, or vacant, land violates the law of nature and gave a just cause for war to avenge such injuries.56 We find this just war reasoning present in Cotton’s sermon: when the sonne of Adam come and finde a place empty, he hath liberty to come, and fill, and subdue the earth there […] no Nation is to drive out another without special Commission from heaven, such as the Israelites had, unlesse the Natives do unjustly wrong them, and will not 52 53 54 55 56

‘Winthrop’s Conclusions for the Plantation in New England’, reprint in Old South Leaflets (Old South Association in Boston, 1917), vol. ii, no. 50, pp. 1–​12, p. 7. David Boucher, ‘The Law of Nations and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius’, in Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder (eds), War, the State and International Law in Seventeenth-​Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 63–​82. John Cotton, The Bloody Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, printed by Mathew Symmons (London, 1647; reprint Quinta Press, 2009), p. 240. See David Boucher, The Limits of Ethics in International Relations  –​Natural Law, Natural Rights and Human Rights in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 127–​9. Alberico Gentili, Three Books on the Law of War, transl. John C. Rolfe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933 [1612]), bk i, ch. i, §11; Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, bk ii, ch. ii, xvii, p. 448; Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, ed. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), bk i, ch. xviii, §§ 207–​9, pp. 214–​7.

232 Boisen recompence the wrongs done in peaceable sort, & then they may right themselves by lawfull war, and subdue the Country unto themselves.57 In this way, the idea of ‘empty land’ was more a justification of the right of conquest, should occupiers be impeded, than a theory of occupation.58 The driving force of justification, that is, the ideas that informed colonial and imperialist adventurism, remained one of fulfilling obligations to God under the natural law and the law of nations, even though such ideas were operationalised in very different ways contingent upon the context in which they were applied.59 If anything, here we see that John Cotton uses natural law to buttress divine will. The historian Alicia Mayer has persuasively traced the intellectual links between the famous Valladolid dispute between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–​ 1573) and Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–​1566) in 1550–​51 on the morality of colonisation and the Cotton-​Williams debate.60 Although Mayer makes a good analysis of similarities of opinions between Cotton and Williams and Sepúlveda and Las Casas respectively, she offers no proof of direct connection between their views beyond Williams’s occasional allusion to Las Casas’s Brevísima.61 Nevertheless what is significant is how the Spanish debates impacted debates on colonisation in La Nouvelle France and New England. The Valladolid debate was made known principally through the writings of Richard Hakluyt (1553–​ 1616), one of the most influential promoters of English colonial effort in the Americas, and, above all, by the historical work of Samuel Purchas (1577–​1626), whose book Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) offered a 57 58 59

60 61

Cotton, ‘God’s Promise to his Plantation’, pp. 5–​6. See Camilla Boisen, ‘From Land Dispossession to Land Restitution: European Land Rights in South Africa’, Settler Colonial Studies, 7:3 (2017), pp. 321–​39. See Camilla Boisen and David Boucher, ‘Colonialism and Imperialism Core and Operative Principles’ (unpublished paper, 2018). By only focusing on the theological and philosophical ideas, we sometimes overlook or unintentionally disregard the legal, cultural and administrative complexity in colonial property relations. However, whether these ideas reflected practical realities or not, the fact remains that they were invoked, that is they had legal, theological and cultural purchase –​and there was intentionality behind their invocation even if we might not be able to establish this intentionality or determine whether it was genuine or not. Alicia Mayer, ‘El Pensamiento De Bartolomé De Las Casas En El Discurso Sobre El Indígena. Una Perspectiva Comparada En Las Colonias Americanas’, Historia Mexicana, 63:3 (2014), pp. 1121–​79. In his pioneering work, Juan A. Ortega y Medina pointed out that Las Casas was the most quoted, admired, and even imitated personality amongst the Anglo-​American evangelists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Juan A.  Ortega y Medina, La Evangelización Puritana en Norteamérica: Delendi Sunt Indi (México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976). See also Mayer, ‘El Pensamiento’.

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detailed account of the debate in the chapter ‘The Summe of the Disputation betweene Fryer Bartholomew de Las Cases of Casaus and Doctor Sepulveda’.62 Debates over defining the ‘naturalness’ of the indigenous populations gave rise to a revival of the old Spanish polemic, polarising the English colonial world into two extreme opinions, occupied by Cotton and Williams. Cotton’s position was closer to that of Sepúlveda in several respects: he viewed the indigenous populations, as most Puritans did, as fickle, inferior, and possessing an inherent inclination to viciousness and, like Sepúlveda, believed that barbarity was based in the politico-​urban incompetence of the natives.63 For Cotton, God had assisted the New England settlers in their colonising endeavours having ‘by pestilence, and other contagious diseases, swept away many thousands of the Natives who had inhabited the Bay of Massachusets […]’. The few that ‘survived were glad of the coming of the English, who might preserve them from the oppression of the Nahargansets’. ‘For it is the manner of the Natives’, Cotton exclaims, that ‘the stronger Nations […] oppress the weaker’.64 Such benevolent assistance demanded acknowledgement in the ‘pagan world of the Indians’ as the New England settlers ‘hath prevented the danger either of their dissolution or servitude’.65 On the thorny issue of forced conversion of the American Indians, someone like Sepúlveda felt he had been misunderstood by Las Casas and the Valladolid Junta, and his Apology meticulously sought to refute that he justified war on such a pretext. But, for the sake of their salvation a certain degree of force could be employed ‘not to force them to believe, but to remove obstacles that can obstruct the preaching of the faith and its propagation’.66 Cotton is very clear that ‘[w]‌hat the Indians do, that not under the English Government, the English have no warrant from God, or Law of Nations to restrain them; nor is it in the power of the English to restrain private Worship, which some of the Indians under the English Government may possibly adhere unto to this day’.67 62

Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes  –​Containing a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travells by Englishmen and Others (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1906; 20 vols), vol. 18, pp. 176–​80. 63 Mayer, ‘El Pensamiento’, p. 1148. 64 Cotton, Washed, pp. 239–​40; see also John Cotton ‘The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, 1648’, in Larzer Ziff (ed.), John Cotton on the Churches of New England (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press, 1968), pp. 167–​364, p. 200. 65 Ibid., p. 200. 66 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Apology for the Book on the Just Causes of War: Dedicated to the Most Learned and Distinguished President, Antonio Ramirez, Bishop of Segovia, transl. Lewis D. Epstein (unpublished PhD Thesis: Bowdoin College, 1973), p. 18. 67 Cotton, Washed, p. 160 (Cotton’s italics).

234 Boisen To this, Cotton refused to explicate the means undertaken to ‘bring them on to Civility, and to the knowledge of our Religion’, but stipulates that these have been done fairly.68 However, as we shall see, he denied that a consciousness without God could lead to good citizenship of a civil state. Cotton further draws on natural law narratives when he argues that magistrates have certain religious responsibilities including punishing religious deviants, idolaters and apostates. Here he employs natural law reasoning to stipulate the commonality across religions. He finds that among Catholics and Muslims, civil magistrates ought to maintain the public practice of orthodox religion. Even ‘Indians that Worship the Devil’, Cotton confirms, ‘will not be under the Government of any Sagamores, but such as joyn with them in Observance of their Pawawes and Idolatries: That it seems to be a Principle imprinted in the mindes and hearts of all men in the equity of it’.69 Cotton is careful to qualify that he intends not to sanction Pagan nations’ zeal in maintaining ‘false gods’; rather, he emphasises that it is by natural instinct that civil magistrates are instrumental in the maintenance of religion.70 ‘What a shame’, Cotton laments, ‘that Pagan Magistrates should be more careful and zealous of the honour of their Idols, then Christians of the Honour of the Known true God, the Lord our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier?’71 Like so many of his Reformed contemporaries, for Cotton membership of a moral community entailed visible signs of ‘election’. Proof of unconditional election required participation and instruction in Christian communal life, and here there were certain obstacles which had to be overcome before the American Indians could be welcomed into the Christian fold. That is to say, certain qualifications needed to be met. Cotton advises that ‘[t]‌he winning of Natives’, that is, their eventual conversation, must be down ‘first to civility and then to Christianity’.72 Cotton acknowledges that it is from ‘the law of Naturall

68 69

Ibid, pp. 160–​1. John Cotton, A discourse about civil government in a new plantation whose design is religion. Written many years since, by that Reverend and worthy Minister of the Gospel, John Cotton, B.D.; And now published by some undertakers of a new plantation, for general direction and information (Cambridge, MA, 1663), p. 24. A Discourse was erroneously attributed to John Davenport by Cotton Mather and American bibliographer Charles Evans. For a discussion of authorship see Isabel M.  Calder, ‘The Authorship of a Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design is Religion’, The American Historical Review, 37:2 (1932), pp.  267–​9. See also Cotton, Washed, p.  118. Christians prefer being judged by other Christians and not by unbelievers (see Cotton, A Discourse, pp. 9–​10). 70 Cotton, Washed, pp. 117–​18. 71 Ibid., p. 118. 72 Ibid., p. 239.

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æquity, Not to Compell any to any Religion: but to permit them eyther to Believe willingly, or not to Believe at all [to] permit the Indians to continue in their vnbeliefie’. Nonetheless, he continues, ‘[i]t will not therefore be lawfull openly to tolerate the worship of Devills, or Idolls, or the seduction of from the Trueth’.73 As such, although Cotton is adamant the colony is always reticent to let the Indians practice their ‘unbelief’ in private, false idolatry and worship done in public, or seduction to apostasy, were considered to compromise civil peace, meriting punishment by the magistrates.74 The Second Coming clearly needed some prompting: The judgement of God, whether of his mouth or of his hands, do both of them go forth as light. From when the Judgements of God are upon the earth, (and he speaketh of the judgements of his hands,) the Inhabitants of the world shall learn righteousness, Isaiah 26:9.75 Although Cotton affirms Williams’s contention that the avoidance and prevention of the ‘infection of heresy’ is down to Christ’s provision, such provision ‘hindreth not the lawful and necessary use of the civil sword for the punishment of some such offences as a subject to Church censure’.76 Cotton is especially worried about the spreading of the ‘noisome leprosy in private Conventicles’,77 which escapes Church censorship. Here he draws on Scripture (Deuteronomy 13:9, 10) for authority, but imbues its application with the universal mandate of the natural law to argue: ‘[…] it is of moral, that is, of universal and perpetual equity to put to death any Apostate seducing Idolater, or Heretic, who seeketh to thrust away the souls of God’s people, from the Lord their God’.78 Anticipating Williams’s rebuke that religious deviance is ‘evil only to inner man, not to the civil state’, Cotton reminds his reader that ‘if a man imagine evil against the Lord, it is a destructive evil to a whole city, yea to a Pagan City’ and warns that ‘God will visit such an evil with such an affliction, as shall be no less than utter destruction to such a City’.79 Such transgressions of God’s word constitute a distinct form of criminal liability that is punishable, as Cotton stresses, for 73

‘Letter John Cotton to John Hall, Late 1634–​Early 1635’, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush Jr. (Williamsburg, VA:  The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 192–​203, p. 198. 74 Cotton, Washed, p. 24. 75 Ibid., p. 25. 76 Ibid., pp. 72–​3. 77 Ibid., p. 73. 78 Ibid., p. 73. See also pp. 122–​3. 79 Ibid., pp. 73–​4 (italics added).

236 Boisen ‘offences to the Order and peace of the Church […] tend likewise to provoke wrath against a Civil State’.80

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I now wish to reflect on a series of themes that may warrant further consideration. The intellectual exchange between Williams and Cotton offers historians of political thought a unique insight into early American debates about religious toleration. However, one feature of Williams’s thought, namely, the emphasis of a strict separation between church and state, is one likely to resonate with modern liberal audiences. Yet, in many ways, we are confounded by the early American settlers’ insistence on religious orthodoxy given their own harrowing experience of persecution in England. But as Nussbaum lucidly points out, the Puritans ‘who had suffered from one another’s violence did not conclude that they needed to find ways to live together on terms of mutual respect’.81 The Williams-​Cotton controversy is a useful and powerful resource in understanding the intra-​denominational aims and desires in Colonial America. However, for this present study, the debate also offers an important lens to the extent and scope of the moral community and the qualifications necessary for inclusion in it. Many of Williams’s and Cotton’s arguments that related to the development of the political order and social cooperation can be observed through the disentanglement of natural law vocabulary from scriptural sources. In one such observation, I have claimed that Cotton invokes natural law in an exclusionary sense, that is, not as a device to expand the moral community, but one in which the American Indians forfeited their title to land. Here, we also need to carefully consider the extent to which Cotton uses natural law to give Scripture universal applicability. Cotton was determined to defend the New England way of civil enforcement of religious purity and in so doing, he utilised the entire conceptual arsenal at his disposal. In contrast to Cotton, as I have shown, Williams contended that Cotton’s insistence that social peace required religious uniformity caused unjust harms to individual liberties, such as freedom of worship. Instead, Williams’s religious heterodoxy takes seriously what plural civic and religious inclusion might mean for the ultimate ‘other’ –​the American Indians. Here, natural law, not Scripture, is the guarantor of such social inclusion.

80 Ibid., p. 77. 81 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, p. 35.

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Williams’s fervent commitment to social inclusion leads to another observation, and one that exposes an important but subtle divide that arguably goes to the core of democratic and anti-​democratic sentiment today:  the division of an ethical community from a moral community. As is apparent from this study, the core issues of Cotton and Williams’s intellectual altercation was not so much on the conception of the good (pious) life. On this matter, there is little disagreement. Rather, it was a matter of demarcating and establishing boundaries between co-​existent and different religious groups, both of which aimed to pursue a good life. Williams takes seriously the ethical implications of conventionalising a moral community, that is of forcing shared beliefs about morality and behaviour that might be unable to innovate and adapt to religious plurality, the consequences of which he experienced first-​hand. A political community where there is more than one account of the good life ethically requires a more non-​exclusive social space to authenticate those individual comprehensive goods. Although Williams pronounces his own conception of the good life, for the sake of civil peace, he wants to establish mutual and peaceful co-​existence for different religious groups, who might pursue different forms of moral awakenings from his own. In seeking the “right” path to the “good” life and the inherent disagreements therein, the political philosophies of Williams and Cotton differ in the kind of pluralism that can be tolerated or even accepted in a just society. This makes Williams’s approach to political order more ‘democratic’ as people have more responsibility to actuate their choices and free will, whereas for Cotton such ‘democratic’ lenience would yield little benefit to their metaphysical souls. To put it simply, we might say that Cotton’s ‘anti-​ democratic’ sentiments come out of his more comprehensive role for the moral in seeking religious orthodoxy, whereas Williams’s ‘democratic’ sentiments come out of his greater respect for the ethical treatment of the moral agency of the other person. In Western democracies today, Williams’s plea for expanding the scope of toleration and for establishing governments sensitive to recurrent moral plurality, that is, the willingness to accept forms of behaviour or beliefs of which one disapproves (such as practices of religious minorities, categories of sexual preferences, or various forms of extreme speech), remains the ultimate, yet elusive, goal. More often than not, we see Cotton’s request for a moral consensus for behaving in certain ways and to have certain coercive structures of government that yield political support and obligatory authority. The question remains: are these coercive, anti-​democratic arrangements the only viable alternative to what can lead us safely out of the desolate and howling wilderness?

238 Boisen

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources



Secondary Sources

Bush Jr., Sargent (ed.), The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Cotton, John, God’s Promise to his Plantation (London, 1634). Cotton, John, The Bloody Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb (London, 1647; reprint Quinta Press, 2009). Williams, Roger, A Key into the Language of America, with an introduction by Howard M. Chapin (Bedford MA: Applewood Books, 1997). Williams, Roger, ‘To the Impartiall Reader’, in Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London, 1644), ed. Reuben Aldridge Guild and James Hammond Trumbull, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963; reprint), vol. i. Williams, Roger, ‘The Bloody Tenent Yet more Bloody’ in James Calvin Davis (ed.) On Religious Liberty –​Selections from the Works of Roger Williams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008), pp. 167–​226.

Como, David, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-​Century England’, in Peter Lake and Michael McGiffert (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–​1660 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press 2000), pp. 64–​87. Davis, James Calvin, ‘Roger Williams and the Birth of an American Ideal’, in James Calvin Davis (ed.), On Religious Liberty –​Selections from the Works of Roger Williams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2008). Lang, August, ‘Reformation and Natural Law’, in Émile Doumergue, August Lang, Herman Bavinck and Benjamin B. Warfield (eds), Calvin and the Reformation: Four Studies (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1909), pp. 56–​98. Maloy, Jason S., The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nussbaum, Martha C., Liberty of Conscience –​In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Liberty (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Stern, Jessica R., ‘A Key into the Bloudy Tenent of Persecution:  Roger Williams, the Pequot War, and the Origins of Toleration in America’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9:3 (2011), pp. 576–​616.

­c hapter 11

‘The vulgar only scap’d who stood without’: Milton and the Politics of Exclusion Martin Dzelzainis Towards the end of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), a messenger reports how Samson pulled down the pillars of the temple of Dagon on the heads of the assembled Philistines: He tugg’d, he shook, till down they came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sate beneath, Lords, Ladies, Captains, Councellors, or Priests, Thir choice nobility and flower, not only Of this but each Philistian City round Met from all parts to solemnize this Feast. Samson with these immixt, inevitably Pulld down the same destruction on himself; The vulgar only scap’d who stood without.1 According to Christopher Hill, from the fact that ‘the [last] line is a Miltonic addition for which there is no scriptural authority’ we should infer that ‘Milton’s animosity was directed against the rulers and clergy of post-​Restoration England, not its deluded people’.2 Milton is here displaying the class solidarity to be expected of someone who Hill saw as being ‘in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English Revolution’.3 However, this is getting things completely back to front. The point the messenger is making, and which is a matter of no small consolation to Samson’s father, Manoa, and to the Chorus, is that Samson has successfully killed absolutely everyone who needed to be killed; only those who did not matter anyway –​and therefore did not

1 John Milton, Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes (London, 1671), pp. 95–​6 (ll. 1650–​59) (Wing M2152). 2 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 439. 3 Ibid., p. 5.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

240 Dzelzainis need to be killed –​did not die. In other words, to place the harshest possible construction that we can on the line, nobody escaped the massacre apart from the nobodies. While commentators have noted Milton’s “aristocratic” tendencies, the astonishing contempt for the lower orders of the kind that he displays here has received less theoretical analysis than it warrants.4 My aim in this essay accordingly is to examine not only the anti-​democratic tenor of Milton’s fear and loathing of the people –​his ochlophobia –​but also the ways in which it factors into a politics of exclusion that is evident everywhere in his writings. We should remember that while Milton may resoundingly declare in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) that ‘No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men were naturally borne free’ (my emphasis), he at once goes on to make clear how depressingly short-​lived this state of affairs proved to be –​at which point the free necessarily started becoming the unfree.5

i

Milton almost invariably uses the word ‘vulgar’  –​whether as a noun or an adjective –​with pejorative intent.6 He is at his most contemptuous in Eikonoklastes (1649), remarking of the many readers who had been convinced by the flattering portrait of Charles i in Eikon Basilike, ‘what a miserable, credulous, deluded thing that creature is, which is call’d the Vulgar’.7 But twenty years later, in Paradise Regain’d, his hostility to the people is still undiminished, if not actually intensified. Satan’s inducement of ‘popular praise’ is dismissed out of hand by the Son: And what the people but a herd confus’d, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 4 See, for example, Perez Zagorin, Milton, Aristocrat and Rebel: The Poet and his Politics (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 1992). For Milton’s lexicon of contempt, see Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and, for its deployment in Milton’s Colasterion (1645), see Thomas H. Luxon, ‘Rough Trade: Milton as Ajax in “the place of punishment” ’, Prose Studies, 19:3 (1996), pp. 282–​91. 5 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649), p. 8 (Wing M2181). 6 See Hammond, Milton and the People, pp. 7–​9 and, for an exception that proves the rule, ibid., p. 45. While Hammond is exceptionally alert to nuances of meaning, he does not read the line from Samson Agonistes in the same way that I do here; see ibid., pp. 246–​7. 7 John Milton, Eikonoklastes (London, 1649), p. 68 (Wing M2112).

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Things vulgar, & well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise, … . Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise?8 With views of the people like this, it is hardly surprising that while Milton was a republican he was no democrat, consistently favouring regimes of an oligarchical cast instead.9 A more theoretically-​grounded expression of this hostility to the people and hence to the very idea of their governing can be seen in the revised and expanded second edition of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), where Milton silently appropriates material from Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 1.5 –​the chapter in which (in the words of Edward Dacres’ 1636 English translation) Machiavelli addresses the question of ‘Whether the People or the Nobility are the better Guardians of liberty; and which have greater occasions of being tumultuous; either they that strive to enlarge the State, or they that endeavour to maintain it’.10 Machiavelli frames his analysis in the form of a debate in utramque partem, first drawing on the example of the Roman republic to suggest that the people are the more reliable guardians in view of their inherently modest and conservative attitude to liberty compared to that of the grandi: without doubt, considering the designs of the Nobility and of the People, we must needs confess they are very ambitious of Rule, these only desire not to be oppress’d, and consequently affect the continuance of their freedom, having less hope to usurp it, than the Nobility; so that the people being set as Guardians of the common liberty, it is probable, they are more carefull of it, and being themselves out of hope of it, will never suffer that it fall into others hands.11 The counterargument, advanced with the Spartan and Venetian republics principally in mind, is that one of the main advantages of trusting the grandi as guardians of liberty is precisely that it relieves the people of what would

8 Milton, Paradise Regain’d, pp. 56–​7 (3:49–​51, 6). 9 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Harrington and the Oligarchs: Milton, Vane and Stubbe’, in Dirk Wiemann and Gaby Mahlberg (eds), Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 15–​33. 10 Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavel’s Discourses upon the First Decade of T. Livius, Translated out of the Italian, transl. Edward Dacres (London, 1674), p. 21. 11 Ibid., pp. 21–​2.

242 Dzelzainis otherwise prove an insupportable and dangerous burden to them. That is to say, the grandi thereby free the peoples unquiet minds from such a kinde of Authority which is the occasion of infinite discords and offences in the Common-​weath, and like enough to bring the Nobility to some desperation, which in time may do much mischief: and they give us Rome it self for an example hereof, that when the Tribunes of the people had this Authority in their hands, they were not content to have one Consul to be a Plebeian, but would have both, and thereupon they would have the Censor and the Pretour [sic], and all other Dignities in the rule of the City; nor was this enough, but led on still with the same rage, they began in after times to adore those men whom they saw fit to curb the Nobility, whereupon grew the power of Marius and the ruine of Rome.12 Machiavelli does not show his own hand at this point so as not to alienate the two young nobles to whom the work is addressed (Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobio Buondelmonti), but the logic of his position overall is such that he must side with the Roman viewpoint.13 Milton, however, rides roughshod over the scholarly proprieties, manipulating these materials to ensure that the oligarchic viewpoint of the Spartans and the Venetians is the one that is seen to prevail. At this point in his treatise he is intent on defending the idea of a standing senate against its populist detractors (mainly in the person of James Harrington), and therefore anticipates that it will be objected, that in those places where they had perpetual Senats, they had also popular remedies against thir growing too imperious: as in Athens, besides Areopagus, another Senat of four or five hunderd; in Sparta, the Ephors; in Rome, the Tribunes of the people. But the event tels us, that these remedies either little availd the people, or brought them to such a licentious and unbridl’d democratie, as in fine ruind themselves with thir own excessive power. So that the main reason urg’d why popular assemblies

12 Ibid., p. 22. 13 See John P.  McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 46–​52. However, to use the terminology of Bernard Williams in his essay on ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, Rucellai and Buondelmonti are Machiavelli’s “listeners” as distinct from his actual –​and much larger –​intended audience; see Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 52–​61.

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are to be trusted with the peoples libertie, rather then a Senat of principal men, because great men will be still endeavouring to inlarge thir power, but the common sort will be contented to maintain thir own libertie, is by experience found false; none being more immoderat and ambitious to amplifie thir power, then such popularities; which was seen in the people of Rome; who at first contented to have thir Tribunes, at length contended with the Senat that one Consul, then both; soon after, that the Censors and Praetors also should be created Plebeian, and the whole empire put into their hands; adoring lastly those, who most were advers to the Senat, till Marius by fulfilling thir inordinat desires, quite lost them all the power for which they had so long bin striving, and left them under the tyrannie of Sylla.14 Despite the appearance Milton gives of writing to the moment, these objections are taken not from any current Harringtonian pamphlet (although Milton and Harrington were in dialogue at the time) but directly from the Discorsi. Unlike the even-​handed Machiavelli, however, Milton falls into lockstep with the spokesmen of the grandi, underscoring their salient claims, for the most part in their own words:  that liberty is ultimately dangerous to the people themselves and that it is they rather than the grandi (‘great men’) who immoderately seek to increase their powers. And his outline of the dialectical process by which the political ambition of the people ultimately led to powerlessness and tyranny in ancient Rome again reproduces more or less verbatim the self-​ interested arguments of Machiavelli’s Spartan-​and Venetian-​inclined nobles. Milton’s divergences from the original Italian text are minor but significant. Machiavelli nowhere mentions democracy as such, so it is striking that Milton should go out of his way to denounce ‘a licentious and unbridl’d democratie’ (which begs the question of whether he thinks there is any other kind). Furthermore, whereas Machiavelli highlights the ‘furore’ of the people (‘rage’ in Dacres’ translation), Milton speaks of their ‘inordinat desires’.15 At the same time, this substitution is defensible as an authentically Machiavellian usage, ‘inordinate’ being, in this context, an English rendition of one of Machiavelli’s favourite words, ‘straordinari’; that is, outside or beyond the ordini or normal social and political ‘orders’.16 For Milton, there was an axiomatic relationship between such 14 15 16

John Milton, The readie and easie way to establish a free Commonwealth (London, 1660), pp. 55–​7 (Wing M2174). For the Italian, see Discorsi di Nicolo Machiavelli, Firentino, sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Venice, 1540), p. 10a. John M. Najemy has recently drawn attention to the significance of the term ordini and its cognates which are ‘the central and most frequent element of Machiavelli’s political

244 Dzelzainis inordinate passion and the loss of liberty. In Book 12 of Paradise Lost, having been informed by the Archangel Michael that in the course of time the tyrant Nimrod ‘Will arrogate Dominion undeserv’d/​Over his brethren’, the horrified Adam responds that this manifestly contradicts God’s intentions for mankind:            Man over men He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free. (12:27–28, 69–71)17 But Michael sternly reminds Adam that he is overlooking the fact that Since thy original lapse, true Libertie Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyd, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. (12:83–​90)18 Michael’s ultimately Platonic argument to the effect that outward political realities are merely the counterpart of inward ones is nevertheless couched in the same terms as the ochlophobic disparagement of the ‘common sort’ in The Ready and Easy Way: the inner tumult that ultimately results in servitude is entirely the fault of the passions that break free of their ordini and seize

17 18

vocabulary, with no fewer than 1,700 occurrences throughout his works, and over 600 in the Discourses alone’: as he puts it, ‘ “Straordinari” are measures literally “outside” (Latin extra = vernacular [e]stra) the “ordini,” which is Machiavelli’s term for the public institutions, laws, and customs that sustain healthy states (whether republican or monarchical). Ambitions pursued in violation of the ordini, whether by individuals or groups, are, in Machiavelli’s lexicon, either a negation of the ordini (hence producing disordine or plural disordini) or methods and ways “outside” the ordini: modi straordinari, vie straordinarie, or simply lo straordinario –​a degeneration of the ordini that he also calls “corruption” ’: John M. Najemy, ‘Society, Class, and State in the Discourses on Livy’, in John M. Najemy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 100–​1. John Milton, Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books (London, 1674), p. 316 (Wing M2144). Ibid., p. 316. See the episode in Book 4 where Satan squats ‘like a Toad’ at the sleeping Eve’s ear, seeking to insinuate ‘discontented thoughts,/​Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires/​Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride’ (4:800, 807–​9); Milton, Paradise Lost, pp. 108–​9.

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power. The Fall can thus be understood analogically as the collapse of the well-​ ordered republic of the mind in which the rule of ‘right Reason’ has given way to that of the passions. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that this extreme hostility to the “vulgar” somehow bars Milton from the republican pantheon. On the contrary, at least according to John P. McCormick, it is actually –​and only –​Machiavelli who is an ‘outlier’ from what he calls the whole ‘largely conservative tradition of republican political theory’. McCormick’s dissent from what he calls ‘Cambridge School “Republicanism” ’ is based on the failure of its proponents like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit to take due account of the importance of class conflict in Machiavelli’s political thought and their tendency in consequence ‘to remain largely silent on the kind of domestic domination of the people by socioeconomic and political elites that was fully consonant with republican theory and very often perpetrated in republican practice’.19 The Cambridge School version of republicanism, he says, is in fact much more closely attuned to the governo stretto favoured by Francesco Guicciardini than it is to the governo largo advocated by Machiavelli. But it has to be said that, in seeking to reconfigure the republican tradition in this way, McCormick is sometimes led to elide differences between thinkers who are usually seen as disagreeing strongly with each other. What could possibly have been at stake in the quarrel between Harrington and his opponents, Sir Henry Vane the Younger, Henry Stubbe, and John Milton, we might ask, if all of them were in fact uniformly exponents of Guicciardinian aristocratic republicanism? If even someone like James Harrington is ‘ochlophobic’, as McCormick alleges, then what does that make Milton?20 Hyper-​ochlophobic? Nevertheless, one does not have to agree fully with this account of Machiavelli’s exceptionalism, to take the point that most republicans were deeply sceptical about the direct participation of the people in government. What Nadia Urbinati describes as the ‘nondemocratic core of republicanism’ was precisely what Milton was seeking to uphold.21

ii

If Milton’s prescription for the tottering English republic was, in effect, for it to become a governo stretto in which an elite dominated a people largely excluded 19 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, pp. 8, 10. 20 Ibid., p. 6. 21 Nadia Urbinati, ‘Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy’, American Political Science Review, 106:3 (2012), pp. 607–​21, p. 608.

246 Dzelzainis from participation, who else apart from the “vulgar” might fall foul of this exclusionary politics? The gendering of early-​modern politics certainly meant that it was virtually impossible for women to break the male monopoly on public office-​holding, but not all men were deemed capable of citizenship either, as demonstrated by the debates at Putney in 1647 over whether the franchise extended to servants and apprentices.22 Milton for one was keenly aware that unfreedom was relative.23 Thus Samson, for example, describes himself as being ‘debas’t/​Lower then bondslave’ (37–​8) by virtue of being blinded, fettered, and sent ‘Into the common Prison, there to grind/​Among the Slaves and Asses’ (1162–​3).24 The salient difference between the two conditions is that whereas the bondslave is unfree for a specified time, only death can release Samson from servitude.25 And when Samson complains to the Chorus that he is ‘In power of others, never in my own’ (78), he is again speaking with forensic precision.26 According to the Roman law of persons, slavery is wholly a matter of status. Title 1.8 of the Institutes, ‘De his qui sui vel alieni iuris sunt’ (‘On those who are independent and dependent’), for example, distinguishes between those who are capable of managing their own affairs (‘sui iuris’) and those who are not and are therefore subject to another (‘alieni iuri subiectae’). Accordingly, the children of Roman citizens were always ‘in potestate parentum’ (‘in the power of their parent’), while slaves were always ‘in potestate dominorum’ (‘in the power of their masters’).27 Samson’s self-​description, we can now see, is a neo-​Roman distillation of the relevant legal terminology: in potestate, alieni iuris, and sui iuris.

22

See Margaret R.  Sommerville, Sex and Subjection:  Attitudes to Women in Early-​Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995) and, for a recent conspectus on Putney, Philip Baker, ‘The Franchise Debate Revisited:  The Levellers and the Army’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited:  Essays in Honour of John Morrill (Woodbridge: Boydel and Brewer), pp. 103–​22. 23 See the discussion of the Sabbath in De Doctrina Christiana where Milton, who opposes its observance, contrasts the heavy workload of Jewish slaves and slave-​girls (servi and ancillae) with the lighter one of servants or hired hands (famuli) in seventeenth-​ century England: see John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. John K. Hale and J. Donald Cunningham, in The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 8, part 2: 1042–​3. His point is that English famuli are so well off by comparison with Jewish servi that they do not need a day off on the Sabbath. 24 Milton, Paradise Regain’d, pp. 11, 70 (second pagination). 25 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘ “In power of others, never in my own”: the Meaning of Slavery in Samson Agonistes’, in Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (eds), Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 284–​301. 26 Milton, Paradise Regain’d, p. 13 (second pagination). 27 The Institutes of Justinian: Text, Translation and Commentary, ed. and transl. J. A. C. Thomas (Amsterdam and Oxford: North-​Holland Publishing Company, 1975), p. 24.

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Drawing on a range of classical Roman sources, Milton summons up in compelling detail an image of the physical realities of slavery: Samson is fettered, shorn, tattoed, and clothed in rags. But to Samson himself these humiliations are not the essence of his slavery which instead consists in his self-​subjection to Dalilah –​an instance yet again of reason yielding to inordinate desires:             servil mind Rewarded well with servil punishment! These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base As was my former servitude, ignoble, Unmanly, ignominious, infamous, True slavery, and that blindness worse then this, That saw not how degeneratly I serv’d. (413–​19)28 Actual, physical enslavement is for Samson much less demeaning than what is usually thought of as merely its analogue: moral slavery. Indeed Milton to all intents and purposes inverts the relationship between the two: which slavery is real and which the analogue now? A similar question –​writ large –​about actual and analogical slavery currently looms over the historiography of the revolutionary upheavals of the mid-​ seventeenth century. As Karen Ordahl Kupperman has pointed out, Slavery was a potent rhetorical conceit in England during the years of Charles i’s personal rule and the Civil War, but the English were capable of perfect compartmentalization in their thinking. Lifelong servitude horrifying for one of themselves, was acceptable for people whom God had set apart physically and psychologically.29 What would an English parliamentarian of the 1640s or a republican of the 1650s, someone whose political identity might be supposed to rest on the conviction that he was a free man as distinct from a slave, have to say about slavery as an institution, especially when he was a participant in and beneficiary from the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade? As a slaveowner (albeit mostly at a distance), would he be aware that there was a contradiction to be addressed or 28 Milton, Paradise Regain’d, p. 31 (second pagination). 29 Karen Ordhal Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–​ 1641:  The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 178; see also Karen Ordhal Kupperman, ‘Definitions of Liberty on the Eve of Civil War: Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and the American Puritan Colonies’, Historical Journal, 32:1 (1989), pp. 17–​33.

248 Dzelzainis that something might need to be said by way of explanation or extenuation, or is compartmentalisation something that is necessarily invisible to those doing the compartmentalising? In short, how can the neo-​Roman talk of freedom and slavery by the opponents of Charles i be squared with what Carla Gardina Pestana calls ‘the Atlantic praxis of unfreedom’?30 We do not have to look far for an example of precisely the combination of rhetorical usages and compartmentalised thinking highlighted by Kupperman. In May 1650, Barbados belatedly followed Bermuda, Virginia, and Maryland in declaring for Charles ii.31 The fullest account of the royalist rebellion in the colony was supplied by Nicholas Foster’s tract, A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbadas, in the West-​Indies. Wherein is contained, Their Inhumane Acts and Actions, in Fining and Banishing the Well-​ affected to the Parliament of England. Foster employs the familiar tropes of freedom and slavery throughout, for example complaining how the Cavaliers who staged the coup, ‘under the pretence of liberty doe most subtilly labour to insnare us in the greatest slavery that ever was exercised upon the Theater of the earth’.32 Their proposed oath of loyalty was a cunning ploy: ‘whosoever shall discover his strength to this Delilah, shall be sure to lose it, and have the Philistims come upon him, who will pull out his Eyes, and make him slave in the Mill of their pleasures’.33 But having made this resonant allusion, Foster, with what may seem to us like a staggering lack of self-​awareness, never once refers to the fact that the sugar mills under threat of appropriation by the royalists were being worked by slaves imported from Africa. Analogical slavery has seemingly trumped the actual version. Indeed, the only exception to the wholesale exclusion of Africans from the narrative is when Foster recounts how the insurgents disarmed the loyal troops and left them ‘to the cruelty of their slaves, who were of ability enough to destroy, and murther them, had not God in mercy restrayned their cruelty’.34 It was not until 1652 that a fleet 30

Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–​1661 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 183. For an account of the neo-​Roman theory of liberty, see Quentin Skinner’s most recent essay on the topic, ‘Rethinking Liberty in the English Revolution’, in Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 139–​61, esp. pp. 143–​51. 31 See Pestana, English Atlantic, pp. 86–​122. 32 Nicholas Foster, A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbadas, in the West-​Indies. Wherein is contained, Their Inhumane Acts and Actions, in Fining and Banishing the Well-​affected to the Parliament of England (London, 1650), p. 13 (Wing F1627; George Thomason’s copy, E.1358(3), is dated ‘7ber17’ [= 17 September]). 33 Ibid., p.16. 34 Ibid., p. 47.

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commanded by Sir George Ayscue returned what Foster had called ‘that flourishing Common-​wealth’ to the republican fold.35 Even before the outbreak of the Civil War, however, we find instances of what appears to be similar ‘racialized doublethink’.36 Many of the leading parliamentarians of the early 1640s, including John Pym, Oliver St John, Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke, were members of the Providence Island Company.37 While they were all involved in other colonial enterprises as well, the most striking aspect of the puritan colony they jointly founded on Providence Island off the Mosquito Coast in 1630 was that by the time it fell to the Spanish in 1641 its settlers were already outnumbered by slaves, ‘making enslaved Africans’, as Kupperman tells us, ‘a larger percentage of the total population than in any other English colony for decades to come’.38 Not even Barbados, with its sugar plantation-​based economy heavily reliant on slave labour, reached this tipping-​point until after the Restoration.39 Oliver St John (also a member of the Guinea and Virginia companies) first rose to prominence as counsel for John Hampden in the Ship Money Case of 1637. Although the bench found against Hampden, St John exacted his revenge when the judges were impeached by the Long Parliament. Early in January 1641, just four months before the collapse of the Providence Island colony, he delivered a speech at a conference with the Lords in which he denounced an ‘endeavour’ to enslave the English nation. Its not that Ship-​money hath been levyed upon us, but its that right whereby Ship-​money is claymed, which if it bee true, is such, as that it makes the payment of ship-​money the guift and earnest penny of all we have. Its not that our persons have bin imprisoned, for not payment of Ship-​ money, but that our persons, and as it is conceived, our lives too, are upon the same grounds of Law delivered up to bare will and pleasure.

35 Ibid., p. 4. 36 For this pungent phrase, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 4. 37 For a full list of Company members and their other interests, see Kupperman, Providence Island, pp. 357–​60. 38 Ibid., p. 172. 39 See now Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

250 Dzelzainis Its that our birth-​right, our ancestrall right, our condition of continuing free subjects is lost, that of late there hath bin an endeavour to reduce us to the State of Villanage, nay to a lower.40 Whereas the villein’s life at least was his own and secured by the law, St John explained, ‘as the Law stands now declared, its disputable, whether it doth so much for us’.41 But he repeatedly stressed that although subjects had been coerced into paying ship money this in itself was not what made them slaves. What reduced them to a state of servitude was that in consequence of the judges’ extra-​judicial rulings they were living at the ‘bare will and pleasure’ of another –​namely, on the judges’ reading of the law, the King (though, having been appointed Solicitor General by Charles, St John could hardly spell out this implication in public). In the neo-​Roman scheme of things, as we have seen, freedom is first and foremost a predicate of status –​specifically the status of not being dependent on or dominated by the will of another, irrespective of whether one is actually maltreated or not.42 On this view of the matter, it is understandable why St John might have regarded the predicament in which the English now found themselves as being one of actual and not merely analogical slavery. That being so, however, the question immediately arises of how this conviction was complicated –​or compromised –​by his own involvement in the praxis of slavery. It is true that when analysing what Pym, Henry Parker (a kinsman of Lord Saye), and other parliamentarians claimed about Charles i’s endeavour to enslave the English, Quentin Skinner concedes that they ‘often sound 40

41 42

Oliver St John, The Speech or Declaration of Mr. St-​John, Now His Maiesties Solicitor Generall. Delivered at a Conference of both Houses of Parlament, held 16o. Caroli, 1640. Concerning Ship-​Money. As it is revised, and allowed according to Order (London, 1641), p.  2 (Wing S329). This is the first official text of a much-​printed and widely-​read pamphlet; see also Wing S329A and, for another edition, S330. George Thomason’s copy of S330 (BL E.196[1]‌) has the date on the title-​page changed to 1640. For the three uncorrected editions of 1640 and their variants, all under the title Mr. S.-​John’s Speech to the Lords in the Vpper house of Parlament Ianuary 7. 1640. Concerning Ship-​Money, see the following copies reproduced by EEBO: STC215893, 215895, 21589 (= recte Wing S331B), Wing S331 and S331A; STC215897 and Wing S331C; and Wing S333. St John, Speech, p. 2. As Algernon Sidney later expressed the point: ‘The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labour, and other effects of a master’s cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another: but he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will’ (Algernon Sidney, Discourses upon Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianopolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), p. 377).

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hyperbolical’ and furthermore suggests that they ‘may have been rationalizing a political campaign they were pursuing for reasons of a different and less avowable kind’.43 However, ‘the question of whether they believed their own rhetoric’, he insists, is ‘historically of less significance’ than the undoubted utility of these neo-​Roman tenets as a means of ‘legitimising their attacks on the Crown’.44 Skinner’s instrumentalist view encourages us to think of the parliamentarians as uninvested in and detachable from the rhetoric of slavery, but this cannot have been true for the slaveowners among them in quite the same way that it was for the non-​slaveowning. For even if the former did not believe that Charles i was actually trying to enslave them, they could hardly avoid holding some beliefs on the subject –​including, at a minimum, why slavery was acceptable in the case of Africans or indigenous natives but not in that of freeborn Englishmen. Or so one might have thought. For, as a matter of fact, St John, Pym, Warwick and the rest were rarely if ever held to account on this score whether by others or by themselves. Where we might expect them to exhibit some symptoms of cognitive dissonance, there seem to be none whatsoever.45 43 Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, p. 150. 44 Ibid., p. 150. 45 The paradigm instance of the problem in the early-​modern period is John Locke, an opponent of Stuart absolutism who also espoused the neo-​Roman view of liberty. On the one hand, in The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Locke notoriously specified that ‘Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and Authority over his Negro slaves of what opinion or Religion soever’ (John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 180). On the other hand, he opens the Two Treatises of Government by proclaiming that ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t’ (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 141). This leads John Dunn to remark that ‘What we confront here is not an example of bland but deliberate moral rationalization on Locke’s part but merely one of immoral evasion’ (John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 175). Jeremy Waldron finds himself at a complete loss: ‘So what can I say? Two facts are clear: (1) There is nothing in Locke’s theory that lends an iota of legitimacy to the contemporary institution of slavery in the Americas; and (2) African slavery in the Americas was a reality and Locke himself was implicated with it, in the ways that I have described. I  prefer to leave these facts where they lie, sitting uncomfortably together, than to try and resolve a contradiction between them, a contradiction which exists only by virtue of our own late twentieth-​or early twenty-​first century ideas about the political integrity of an intellectual life’ (Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 206). To say that the contradiction is purely an artefact of our current ways of thinking

252 Dzelzainis A case in point is Lord Brooke, both a puritan grandee in the vanguard of the parliamentary opposition and a charter member of the Providence Island Company. In late 1639 or early 1640, Governor Nathaniel Bell corresponded with Brooke about the colony’s slaves, warning him that ‘The Negroes increase much upon over-​breed us’.46 Unfortunately, we only have Bell’s minute of his letter, and any reply by Brooke has not survived. But Brooke’s 1641 treatise on The Nature of Truth casts an interesting sidelight on the earlier episode. Chapter 14 is devoted to an attack on ‘Theorie’, exposing the ‘vanity of dividing knowledg into many Sciences’.47 While Brooke says he ‘could name many questions in Politickes, Oeconomickes, Ethickes, &c. the very subject whereof are in dispute’, the example he singles out for discussion in the margin is all those laws concerning slaves, whereas a slave indeed is non ens, for if any man have given away, with Esau, his birth-​right, yet he hath not lost it; because manhood and religion are not mei juris; they are talents which God hath intrusted me with, and are no more deputable, than places of judicature.48 The highly provocative suggestion is that the vast body of Roman law dealing with slaves, together with the voluminous commentary it had accrued over the centuries, can be dismissed tout court because based on a category error: there can be no science of the slave, according to Brooke, since there is no such thing as a slave. His explanation is that while it may be possible for someone to give away  –​or at least try to give away  –​his birthright (which is a conventional way of saying he is entering into slavery), he cannot actually lose it because the qualities in which it consists, ‘manhood and religion’, are not his to give but are only entrusted to him by God. Since one’s birthright is strictly speaking inalienable, it is logically impossible to make oneself a slave.49 Yet Brooke about political and intellectual integrity seems to me to beg the question under discussion here. The Lockean problem may be even more acute than Waldron thinks; see now David Armitage, ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political Theory, 32:5 (2004), pp. 602–​27, and Brad Hinshelwood, ‘The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery’, Political Theory, 41:4 (2013), pp. 562–​90. 46 Kupperman, Providence Island, p.  172 (I have slightly adjusted her presentation of the manuscript material). 47 Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, The Nature of Truth. Its Union and Unity with the Soule, Which is One in its Essence, Faculties, Acts; One with Truth (London, 1641), p.  123 (Wing B4913). 48 Ibid., p. 131. 49 The separate question of what would happen if a slave did become a Christian did not reach a crisis point until later in the century when plantation owners became increasingly

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manifestly knew that there were slaves and had personally invested very heavily in a slave-​owning enterprise, so what are we to make of his statements?50 The obvious answer is that his remarks apply exclusively to those who are possessed of ‘manhood and religion’; that is to say, adult male Christians. But to say this is at one and the same time to offer an explanation of why Africans can be enslaved since they already lack at least one of the qualities (‘religion’), and possibly the other (‘manhood’, depending on how it is defined), that make up one’s birthright, the possession of which is what alone precludes one’s enslavement. Although we cannot infer much from Brooke’s silence, it is highly likely that he was aware of this implicit rationale for slavery in view of the fact that when the puritan minister on Providence Island, Samuel Rishworth, began to question the grounds on which it was justified in 1635, the Company swiftly condemned him for voicing the ‘groundless opinion that Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude during their strangeness from Christianity’.51 Brooke did not need to spell out what the implications of his remarks were for godless Africans because they were both self-​evident and of no direct relevance to his exclusively Christian readership. Where should we locate Milton –​a great admirer of Brooke –​on this spectrum of attitudes?52 After all, in March 1649 he was appointed as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth’s Council of State, the body that was newly-​responsible for the Atlantic dominions of the former King. It is also possible that he prepared the Latin version of the declaration in which Cromwell retrospectively sought to justify the launching of the Western Design, the attack on Spanish possessions in the New World that had failed catstrophically

50

51 52

anxious about their slaves being baptised in light of the entrenched belief that for slaves baptism amounted to manumission: see Ruth Paley, Cristina Malcolmson, and Michael Hunter, ‘Parliament and Slavery, 1660–​c.1710’, Slavery & Abolition, 31:2 (2010), pp.  257–​ 81. The New Testament did offer some assurance, especially Paul’s epistle to Philemon in which he agreed to return to him his fugitive slave, Onesimus, whom Paul had converted (Philemon: 10–​18). The Pauline doctrine was that to Christ it made no difference whether an individual was a slave or free, meaning that any social arrangements already in place could stay in place. See Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 176–​80. In 1636, for example, Brooke offered to finance the whole of a new joint stock of £10,000 (the offer was declined by his colleagues though he did make up the shortfall of £6,000) and in 1638 subscribed a further £2,000: see Kupperman, Providence Island, pp. 302–​03, 309. Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen:  Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p.  217; see Kupperman, Providence Island, pp. 168–​9. See John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644), p. 35 (Wing M2092).

254 Dzelzainis but which nevertheless represented the moment at which the English republic took an imperial turn.53 In any event, there are signs in Milton’s own writings that he was receptive to the idea of slavery as a racialised phenomenon, even though this is usually considered to have been a later seventeenth-​century development. He ends Of Reformation (1641) in prophetic mode, imagining how the bishops shall be thrown downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of HELL, where under the despightful controule, the trample and spurne of all the other Damned, that in the anguish of their Torture shall have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestiall Tyranny over them as their Slaves and Negro’s, they shall remaine in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe-​trodden Vassals of Perdition.54 The casual hendiadys ‘Slaves and Negro’s’, which suggests that for Milton the two terms were already fungible, is very revealing.55 While the usage itself was far from unknown, it does point to an assumed homology between matter and spirit on Milton’s part.56 Indeed a hitherto unconsidered implication of Milton’s monism may be that it provided a philosophical substratum for just this 53 See A Declaration of His Highnes, By the Advice of His Council; Setting Forth, On the Behalf of this Commonwealth, the Justice of their Cause against Spain (London, 1655) (BL E1065[1]‌) and Scriptum Dom. Protectoris Reipublicae Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, &c. Ex consensu atque sententia Concilii Sui Editum, In quo hujus Reipublicae Causa contra Hispanos justa esse demonstrator (Londini, 1655)  (Wing C7165). On the attribution of the latter to Milton, see John T. Shawcross, ‘A Survey of Milton’s Prose Works’, in Michael Lieb and Michael Shawcross (eds), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1974), pp. 360–​3, and Robert T. Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 98–​100. On the Western Design, see now Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). 54 Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-​Discipline in England ([London], 1641), p.  90 (Wing M2134). 55 See Morgan Godwyn’s later comment on how ‘These two words, Negro and Slave’ have ‘by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible; even as Negro and Christian, Englishman and Heathen, are by the like corrupt Custom and Partiality made Opposites; thereby as it were implying, that the one could not be Christians, nor the other Infidels’:  Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church (London, 1680), p. 36 (Wing G971). 56 For a classic study, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–​1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 3–​98.

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kind of identification. Justin E. H. Smith has recently argued that ‘metaphysical dualism served as a bulwark against racism’ on the grounds that ‘so long as the human soul was thought to be something fundamentally independent of the body, physical differences between human beings could not be taken as markers of essential difference’.57 In Milton’s case, this particular intellectual barrier to racism had certainly melted away by the later 1650s when he was composing De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost, both works deeply informed by monist principles.58 Milton also had ready to hand a more direct scriptural warrant for this way of thinking in the form of the so-​called curse of Ham.59 When Ham (Cham) saw his father Noah naked, the latter’s curse –​at first sight unaccountably –​ fell on Ham’s son, Canaan, who was henceforth condemned to be the servant of servants (see Genesis 9:20–​27). In the hands of the Church Fathers, the enslavement of Canaan became a justification for slavery itself while another strand of exegesis forged the further association between slavery and blackness. On the evidence of Michael’s lecture on the origins of servitude in Book 12 of Paradise Lost, Milton was heir to both traditions: Yet somtimes Nations will decline so low From vertue, which is reason, that no wrong, But Justice, and some fatal curse annext Deprives them of thir outward libertie, Thir inward lost: Witness th’ irreverent Son Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Don to his Father, heard this heavie curse, Servant of Servants, on his vitious Race. (12:97–​104) Although Canaan’s enslavement was ordained by God, Milton follows earlier commentators in ascribing responsibility for this primarily to human failings. For example, explaining why it was that the Egyptians submitted so easily to 57 58

59

Justin E.  H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature & Human Difference:  Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 18. See Stephen M.  Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers:  Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-​Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and, for a contrasting view, Noel K. Sugimura, “Matter of Glorious Trial”: Spiritual and Material Substance in Paradise Lost (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2006). See the valuable discussion by Steven Jablonski, ‘Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John Milton’, Studies in English Literature, 37:1 (1997), 173–​90, and, more generally, David M.  Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham:  Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).

256 Dzelzainis bondage, Origen in his Homily on Genesis says that this was because they ‘are prone to a degenerate life and quickly sink to every slavery in vices’, a degeneracy that is in turn attributable to their descent from Ham; ‘Not without merit’, he adds grimly, ‘does the discloured posterity imitate the ignobility of the race’.60 Somewhat later, Basil of Caesarea argued that what happened to Canaan was entirely just ‘because his father Ham was void of understanding, unable to teach his son any virtue. That is why men become slaves’.61 The themes of degeneracy and the loss of virtue, with the latter operating as the cause of the former, are both invoked by Michael by way of reconciling Adam to the historical inevitability of slavery for the race of Ham. God’s curse was something simply ‘annext’ to –​an overdetermination of –​the process whereby their analogical slavery was actualised. While Milton discusses slavery at some length in the work that he prized above all others, his theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, he never once questions whether the practice itself is justified. Rather he takes it as a given, much as it had been in the republics and democracies of classical antiquity, where slavery was a background assumption (endoxon) that was not really open to discussion.62 But if Milton does not condemn slavery, does he actively endorse it? The answer is that he does so unequivocally, largely on the authority of Aristotle, who famously argued in the Politics that ‘the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master’.63 What made the difference was the level of rationality of which each was capable. A master ruled by virtue of his superior rationality, whereas what made a slave a slave was his limited capacity for reason − enough, that is, to carry out commands of others but not enough to formulate them for himself. And it was also Aristotle who made the notorious observation that ‘foreigners, being more servile in character than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government. Such kingships have the nature of tyrannies because the people are by nature slaves’.64 Accordingly, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton cites Aristotle and Cicero as authorities for the view that ‘generally the people of Asia, and with them the Jews also … are noted by wise authors much inclinable to

60 Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, p. 44. 61 Ibid., p. 45. 62 See Paul Cartledge, ‘Like a Worm i’ the Bud:  a Heterology of Classical Greek Slavery’, Greece & Rome, 40:2 (1993), pp. 163–​80. 63 Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 17 (1254b). 64 Ibid., p. 84 (1285a).

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slavery’.65 And, again recapitulating Aristotelian orthodoxy, Milton ends the penultimate chapter of Eikonoklastes by fulminating against those longing to restore the Stuarts and who thereby ‘shew themelves to be by nature slaves and arrant beasts; not fitt for that liberty which they cri’d out and bellow’d for, but fitter to be led back again into thir old bondage’.66 The Aristotelian principle of differential rationality –​as the soul is to the body so masters are to slaves and husbands to wives –​might plausibly be said to inform virtually all of Milton’s social and political thought.

iii

The unfree throng the pages of Milton’s prose and poetry:  the vulgar, women, slaves, ancillae (slave girls), bondmen, famuli (hired hands), servants, mechanics, tyrants, Asiatics, the Jews, the Irish, Catholics  –​all of them in one way or another barred from full participation in political life. Milton’s politics are nothing if not the politics of exclusion. But no-​one in particular does the excluding; rather the excluded do it to themselves, by virtue of who they are or what they have done (though, as the example of Canaan shows, the two categories bleed into each other –​they are who they are because of what they have done). Ultimately they are the ones to blame for the predicament in which they find themselves on account of their inordinate desires, loss of reason, natural inferiority or servile dispositions. The pivotal concept, however, the one that does most of the intellectual work for Milton and on which his arguments most often turn, is virtue. In Of Education (1644), Milton laid out a programme of instruction for a governing elite that was grounded in the Roman –​specifically Ciceronian –​virtues: wisdom, justice, temperance and fortitude.67 Only an education that imbued students with these cardinal virtues, Milton insisted, would ensure that they would ‘not in a dangerous fit of the Common-​wealth be such poor, shaken, uncertain Reeds, of such a tottering Conscience, as many of our great Counsellers have lately

65 Milton, Tenure, pp.  10–​ 11; see Achsah Guibbory, ‘England, Israel, and the Jews in Milton’s Prose, 1649–​60’, and Rachel Trubowitz, ‘ “The people of Asia and with them the Jews”: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Milton and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) pp. 13–​34, 151–​77, respectively. 66 Milton, Eikonoklastes, p. 224. 67 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–​24.

258 Dzelzainis shewn themselves, but stedfast pillars of the State’.68 Conversely, every aspect of political failure could be attributed to the absence of these qualities. Without them, no individual can even qualify for citizenship in the first place. Undoubtedly there is an element of circular reasoning here. If asked how slaves demonstrated their fitness for slavery, for example, Milton would probably have said that this was through their lack of virtue. However, the argument easily becomes tautological. What distinguishes slaves from freemen is their lack of virtue. But what, then, is virtue? Virtue is what distinguishes freemen from slaves. Nor is virtue itself the incontestable category that Milton offers it as being. Virtue, as Skinner and others have reminded us, is also virtus; a ­specifically masculine trait that by definition excluded women from the public arena.69 John M.  Najemy has shown how the Florentine elites in the later Trecento diminished the political influence of the guilds by exploiting the ideological resources of civic humanism. The guilds’ republican insistence that a citizen’s fitness for office derived wholly from being elected by their constituency was increasingly supplanted by the humanist view that such fitness for office was demonstrated by the individual’s possession of the civic virtues. As Najemy says, ‘the politics of virtue delegitimated and supplanted the politics of class and collective interest’.70 We can see the same ideological strategy being rolled out repeatedly by Milton, for whom virtue was also an instrument of deligitimation, whether of slaves, the vulgar, women, or democrats. The dark underside of Milton’s politics of virtue is the politics of exclusion.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources

Foster, Nicholas, A Briefe Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island Barbadas, in the West-​Indies […] (London, 1650). Greville, Robert, Lord Brooke, The Nature of Truth. Its Union and Unity with the Soule […] (London, 1641). Machiavelli, Niccolò, Machiavel’s Discourses upon the First Decade of T. Livius, Translated out of the Italian, transl. Edward Dacres (London, 1674). Milton, John, The readie and easie way to establish a free Commonwealth (London, 1660). 68 69 70

John Milton, Of Education. To Master Samuel Hartlib ([London, 1644]), p. 5 (Wing M2132). See Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, pp. 145–​6. John M.  Najemy, ‘Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism:  Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 75–104, pp. 92–​3.

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Milton, John, Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes (London, 1671). St John, Oliver, The Speech or Declaration of Mr. St-​John […] (London, 1641).



Secondary Sources

Hammond, Paul, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Jablonski, Steven, ‘Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John Milton’, Studies in English Literature, 37:1 (1997), pp. 173–​90. Kupperman, Karen Ordhal, Providence Island, 1630–​1641:  The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011). Pestana, Carla Gardina, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–​1661 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). Skinner, Quentin, From Humanism to Hobbes:  Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

­c hapter 12

A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England Edward Vallance The social reformer and women’s suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony wrote that as women in nineteenth-​century America could ‘neither take the ballot nor the bullet’ to settle political questions, the ‘right to petition is one sacred right which we ought not to neglect’.1 Women’s petitioning activity has often been linked to the suffrage movement:  Ellen McArthur, who undertook the first serious scholarly work on women’s petitioning in the seventeenth century was a suffragist.2 Both Susan Zaeske for the United States and Clare Midgley for Britain have argued that nineteenth-​century petitioning campaigns for the abolition of slavery provided women with opportunities to advance broader claims about their rights as citizens. As Zaeske puts it, By petitioning, women not only helped bring about an end to slavery, but they also made important strides towards securing their own rights and transforming the political identity of woman into that of active national citizen.3 Similar claims have been made for petitioning in the early modern period. The growth of mass printed petitions during the civil war has been seen by David Zaret as facilitating the emergence of a democratic political culture. In a bold 1 Quoted in Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 10. 2 Noted in Amanda Jane Whiting, Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-​Century Revolution: Deference, Difference and Dissent (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), p. 20. For other works on women’s petitioning in the Civil Wars see Andrea Button, ‘Royalist Women Petitioners in South-​West England, 1655–​1662’, The Seventeenth Century, 15:1 (2000), pp. 53–​66; Ann Marie McEntee, ‘The [un]civill-​sisterhood of oranges and lemons”: Female Petitioners and Demonstrators, 1642–​1653’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 92–​111 and the references to the work of Ann Hughes, Melissa Mowry and Hannah Worthen below. 3 Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, p.  175. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery. The British Campaigns 1780–​1870 (London: Routledge, 1992).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

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conclusion, Zaret argued that Leveller ideas, as articulated in John Lilburne’s England’s New Chains Discovered (1649), demonstrate a movement on the brink of a formal platform for a liberal-​democratic model of the political order as experience with political petitioning stimulated new ideas about the centrality of public opinion as the ultimate ground of legitimacy for a legislative agenda.4 If not directly connected to the franchise as in the modern period, women’s participation in subscriptional activity has often been viewed as an assertion of citizenship and the frequency of women’s involvement in petitioning and oath-​taking as evidence of an expanded early modern public sphere. John Walter has argued that the taking of oaths of loyalty by women during the civil war challenged one of the fundamental assumptions of early modern political culture that it was male, married, propertied householders who claimed a public political identity and that their household dependants were subsumed within that identity.5 For Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, women’s subscriptions to Parliamentarian oaths and covenants in the 1650s sometimes represented a ‘self-​ conscious assertion of covenantal citizenship’.6 In his recent book on the 1641 Protestation Walter has found evidence that the presence of women on subscription returns may be explained by their own political activism: Giles Randall, the minister of Eaton, Huntingdonshire recorded that the Protestation had been taken by women in his parish on account of ‘their neer & Equall interest (as they doe conceive) unto the cause being as free & voluntary in the same as ourselves’.7 Both Steven Pincus and Mark Knights have suggested that the immense number of subscriptions to the 1696 Association in defence of William iii are indicative of a much enlarged political nation. For Pincus, ‘the

4 David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-​ Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 265. 5 John Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, History Workshop Journal, 61:1 (2006), pp. 171–​82, p. 179. 6 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 399. 7 John Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 206.

262 Vallance number of subscriptions in 1696 suggests that most English men and some women assigned themselves a political role’.8 My own research on the 1723 oaths of allegiance to George I has suggested that the large numbers of women subscribers on these returns (typically between a quarter and a third of the names on each list) was partly a reflection of the increasing prominence of women in early Hanoverian politics.9 In this chapter, however, I want to challenge this perceived relationship between subscriptional activity, notions of citizenship and a more democratic political culture. Some historians, such as Ann Hughes, have struck an important note of caution regarding treating women’s petitioning ‘solely within a history of female or even proto-​feminist activism’.10 Hughes has noted how, even in the petitions of Leveller women in 1649 and 1653, traditional feminine roles as wives, mothers and homemakers were emphasised in advancing claims within these texts.11 Most recently, Amanda Whiting has urged historians to pay more attention to the constraining effect of petitioning as a form. Whiting argues that, viewed as a genre, all petitioning was ‘feminine’ in the sense of being typically conveyed through a language of deference and weakness.12 Whiting follows Lex Heerma van Voss in seeing petitioning as a form of political activity that, while it could be seen as conferring rights on the petitioners, also involved displays of political loyalty and obedience which provided legitimacy, in this case on the English parliament.13 As Milton wrote in An Apology for Smectymnuus (1642): the meanest artisans and labourers, at other times also women, and often the younger sort of servants assembling with their complaints, and that sometimes in a less humble guise then for petitioners, have gone with confidence, that neither their meanesse would be rejected, nor their simplicity contemn’d, nor yet their urgency distaste either by the dignity, 8

Steven Pincus, 1688:  The First Modern Revolution (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2009), p. 468; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: ­Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 154–​60. 9 Edward Vallance, ‘Women, Politics and 1723 Oaths of Allegiance to George I’, Historical Journal, 59:4 (2016), pp. 975–​99. 10 Ann Hughes, Gender in the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 54. 11 Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan D.  Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 162–​88. 12 Whiting, Women and Petitioning, p. 131. 13 Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘Introduction’, in Lex Heerma van Voss (ed.), Petitions in Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–​10.

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wisdome, or moderation of that supreme Senate; nor did they depart unsatisfi’d.14 Whiting concludes that even when a more assertive language of rights emerged in women’s petitions, as those from Leveller women, this had a paradoxically counter-​productive impact on feminine political agency. The ‘rights bearing’ citizen entailed a masculine subjectivity and as a consequence it was much harder for women to incorporate themselves into this discourse.15 Whiting’s conclusions offer a reminder that petitioning and democracy, when viewed from the perspective of contemporary history, have often been seen as enjoying an inverse relationship with each other: as mass democracy developed, so, it is argued, the value of petitioning diminished. The revival of petitioning in the 21st century with the e-​petition might, in turn, be regarded as a symptom of the failing health of liberal democracies.16 Indeed, Brodie Waddell has noted that petitioning was a form of political communication perfectly suited to societies which valued equity but not equality: submissive and supplicatory, the petitionary form could be used by men and women, citizen and non-​citizen alike.17 Even the unfree could petition: the earl of Warwick received a petition from America from ‘one of my Negroes … that his wife may live with him’, a request that the earl treated sympathetically, thinking it was ‘full of reason’.18 In this chapter, I will argue that we can best understand why women were or were not present on early modern subscriptional texts (petitions, addresses, oaths) by reading these sources not as vehicles for articulating claims to citizenship but as devices for political, military and economic mobilisation and as a media for expressing discourses of loyalty and disloyalty. Here I am following recent work by Michael Braddick and most importantly Tom Leng on mobilisation in the civil wars.19 Leng notes that subscriptional devices such as the Protestation of 1641 certainly endowed the subscribers with political 14 15 16 17 18 19

Quoted in Whiting, Women and Petitioning, p. 207. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Brodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life 1660–​ 1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), esp. pp. 128–​37. Quoted in Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p.  86. For later petitioning by slaves see Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, pp. 78–​9; Raymond C. Bailey, Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-​Century Virginia (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1979), pp. 44–​5. Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality:  Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–​1900 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 175–​98; Michael Braddick, ‘History, Liberty, Reformation and the Cause:  Parliamentarian Military and Ideological Escalation in 1643’, in Michael Braddick and David L.  Smith (eds), The Experience of

264 Vallance agency. This agency, however, was yoked not to a language of rights but to an emotionally laden discourse of political and religious difference, discriminating between the ‘well-​affected’ subscribers from the ‘malignants’ who refused the Protestation and subsequent oaths and covenants. Leng’s interpretation of political language in the 1640s chimes with broader historical and philosophical explorations of loyalty which have, in Judith Shklar’s words, identified it as a ‘deeply affective and not primarily rational’ quality.20 Subscribing to these loyalty tests carried obligations: to denounce those who opposed them; to take up arms against those who might threaten their success; and to be watchful for those in their community who were backsliders or fifth columnists opposed to their terms.21 This emphasis on surveillance was also sustained by the context of anti-​popish conspiracy theory which informed many of these devices from the Protestation to the 1696 Association. To return to the quotation from Giles Randall above, the women of Eaton were claiming an equal interest in a cause, not rights within a political community. The chapter will explore the omission of overt discussion of citizenship or rights in most women’s petitions. The paper will then move on to discuss the almost complete lack of women in another subscriptional form –​the loyal address, showing how this genre became a vehicle for anti-​democratic rhetoric in the 1680s –​before finishing by exploring the significance of women subscribing to oaths of allegiance, specifically the 1696 Association in defence of William iii.

…

Printed petitions from women are rare: Whiting has identified only 42 for the whole period 1642–​1660.22 It is worth stating that many of these petitions are ­satirical productions, including those published post-​Restoration which Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.  117–​34; Tom Leng, ‘Citizens at the Door:  Mobilising against Enemies in Civil-​War London’, in Journal of Historical Sociology Special Issue:  Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement, ed. Michael Braddick and Gary Rivett, 28:1 (2015), pp. 26–​48; Tom Leng, ‘The Meanings of “Malignancy”: The Language of Enmity and the Construction of the Parliamentarian Cause in the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 53:4 (2014), pp. 835–​58. 20 Judith N. Shklar, ‘Obligation, Loyalty and Exile’, in Judith N. Shklar. Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. S. Hoffman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), ch. 3, p. 41; and for a valuable historical perspective see Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking “Loyalty” in Eighteenth-​Century Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 35:3 (2012), pp. 407–​21. 21 Leng, ‘Citizens at the Door’, p. 42. 22 Whiting, Women and Petitioning, p. 14.

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connect to the Parliaments of women genre discussed in Gaby Mahlberg’s chapter. Take for example the ribald mass petition from ‘many thousand Country Mayds’ published in 1647 and subscribed by such apocryphal figures as ‘Abominable Besse, Butchers daughter’ and ‘Simpring Sara, the Sadlers daughter’.23 Or ‘The City Dames Petition’ supposedly signed by Mrs I Stradling, Ma. Lecher and D. Swivewell.24 The creation of mock lists of subscribers is in contrast to what Whiting notes is an almost complete absence of subscribers from more authentic productions. In the case of early modern English printed petitions, there is no clear evidence of the kind of subscriptional activity that Zaeske argued was important as an act of resistance in its own right and which, as an act of direct participation in the public sphere, emphasised women’s political autonomy and confidence.25 Texts also mocked the participation of women in popular political activity: ‘The petition of the Weamen of Middlesex’, a satire on ‘Root and Branch’ petitions, had women objecting to clerical surplices on the grounds that ‘they [the clergy] must have them starched, to the great prejudice of the Lilly-​white hands of good customed Landrasses’.26 Even in more authentic productions, explicit claims by women to political rights were rare. Only in the second women’s petition on behalf of John Lilburne (1653) can we see a direct assertion of women’s right to petition: ‘That we cannot but be much sadded to see our undoubted Right of Petitioning with-​held from us … We claim it as our right to have our Petitions heard’.27 Elizabeth Lilburne’s petition went further, arguing that her petition had to be heard on the grounds that the Parliament’s power was fiduciary –​‘the GREAT 23

To the Right Honourable the Ladies ordinary and extraordinary, assembled in parliament, now sitting in Spring Garden (1647). Unless otherwise stated, texts published pre-​1700 were printed in London. 24 The City-​dames Petition in the Behalfe of the long afflicted by well-​affected Cavaliers (1647), Thomason E. 409[12]. 25 Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, pp. 109–​11. Though the pamphlet version of the April 1649 Leveller women’s petition (see below) does include an instruction on p. 8 that ‘All those Women that are Approvers hereof are desired to subscribe it, and to deliver in their Subscriptions to the women which will be appointd in every Ward and Division to receive the same, and to meet at Westminster Hall upon Monday the 23 of this instant April 1649, betwixt 8 and 9 of clock in the fore noon’. 26 Thomason E. 180 [17] A2. The creation of mock catalogues of petitions, including those from women, also appears to have been a popular satirical genre, see A Catalogue of the Petitions, Ordered to be Drawn Up and Presented to the Honorable House at their next Session (London?,1693?), which includes such texts as ‘A Petition of the City Clergyman’s Daughters, that Increase and Multiply be made the Eleventh Commandment’, in A Collection of the Several late Petitions &c. to the Honourable House (1693), reprinted as The Petitioners Monitor (1693). 27 Thomason 669 f. 17(36).

266 Vallance TRUST reposed in you’.28 As Zaret has pointed out, however, the right to petition that was being asserted was not a ‘right in the modern sense’. Instead, male and female petitioners were claiming access to a ‘privileged communicative space, analogous to privileges that follow admission to the “freedom” of a municipal corporation’.29 In general, moreover, women’s petitions appear to have made their claims on the grounds of poverty, weakness and extremity of want. Even the strident statements regarding women’s share in the commonwealth contained in the April 1649 Leveller women’s petition were prefaced in the pamphlet rather than broadsheet edition with the statement that ‘We are so over-​prest, so over-​whelmed in affliction, that we are not able to keep in our compass, to be bounded in the custom of our sex: for indeed we confess it is not our custom to address ourselves to this House in the Publick behalf’.30 Despite the language of exception employed here, there can be no question, that women did petition Parliament and the Crown during the seventeenth century. An order from the Council of State issued on 4 August 1649 instructed the officers of the guard that ‘no women who clamour upon the Council upon pretence of debts due to them from Parliament, be permitted to come within the walls of this House’.31 This activity was not peculiar to the 1640s and 1650s, and we can find collective petitions from women to the Privy Council throughout the 1600s. Most common are those from the wives of sailors captured and held as slaves in North Africa, some even claiming to be on behalf of thousands of women.32 Petitions to the crown even included those from women inventors –​Amy Potter, widow, petitioned Charles ii in 1678 for a royal patent for her invention of making woollen flanders, (a sort of tape lace with characteristic scalloped borders), an invention which she claimed would encourage observance of the recent act for burying in wool. The king ordered either the Attorney or Solicitor General to investigate the matter and advise the council on whether such a patent could be granted.33 As the work of Philip 28

Thomason 669 f.  10 (86). Similar statements are made in the opening of Alice Rolph’s petition (1648), Thomason 669 f. 12 (73). 29 Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p. 88. 30 Thomason E551 [14] p. 4. 31 Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1649–​1650, ed. M. A. E. Green (London: hmso, 1875), p. 262. 32 The National Archives, Kew, hereafter tna, SP 16/​305 fo. 134 (undated but ca. 1635) ‘Petition of Clara Bowyer, Margaret Hall, Elizabeth Newland, with a thousand poor women more and upwards, to the King’. For these petitions see Nabil Matar, ‘Wives, Captive Husbands and Turks: The First Women Petitioners in Caroline England’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 23:1 (1997), pp. 111–​28. 33 tna SP 29/​406 fo. 85, ‘The humble petition of Amy Potter, widw’.

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Loft has demonstrated, the House of Lords continued to receive and respond to women’s petitions on economic matters into the late-​seventeenth and early-​eighteenth centuries.34 Neither was this kind of activity exceptional to Britain: women also petitioned in other European countries in the early modern period.35 This research suggests that we should see the tradition of satirical women’s petitions, not as an example of the ‘world turned upside down’, but as extracting comedy from the breadth and ubiquity of feminine petitioning activity. Women’s petitioning was therefore licit provided that it was appropriately couched and delivered, and addressed areas that it was deemed acceptable for women to petition on, for example when the matter of the petition was related to their roles as wives, mothers, housekeepers, and even as tradeswomen. When women’s petitions to Parliament met with a firm rebuke in 1643 and 1649, this was not on the grounds that they could not petition but that the matter of the petition did not concern them (as women). Even here, though, the prohibition on women engaging in overtly political petitioning was not hard and fast: as the quotation from Milton above suggests, political petitions from women were acceptable when they happened to conform to the prevailing political mood. Partisanship trumped citizenship. This is evident in the case of other subscriptional forms, notably oaths, covenants and associations (which were, in turn, frequently connected to petitioning and addressing activity).36 John Walter has noted that some women may have subscribed the 1641 Protestation, a promise to defend ‘the true Reformed Protestant Religion’ which became a ‘shibboleth’ for the Parliamentarian cause, because of the imprecision of the Parliamentary orders explaining who should take this test: as the minister Giles Randall put it, ‘from the indefinite words of the [Speaker’s] letter’.37 However, Walter also suggests that the lack of gender-​ specific language in the instructions given may have been intentional: in the original draft of the letter, the word ‘men’ was struck out. Walter conjectures 34

Philip Loft, ‘Involving the Public: Parliament, Petitioning and the Language of Interest, 1688–​1702’, Journal of British Studies, 55:1 (2016), pp. 1–​23. 35 Penny Roberts, ‘Huguenot Petitioning during the Wars of Religion’, in Raymond A.  Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–​ 1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 5, pp. 73–​4 though Roberts sees this petitioning activity as less overtly political than that initiated by women petitioners during the English civil wars. 36 See, for example, the connections between the Protestation, the Grand Remonstrance and the county petitions of 1641–​2 in Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, paperback edn with corrections, 1985), p. 208. 37 Walter, Covenanting Citizens, p. 206.

268 Vallance that the threat of a Royalist coup and the prominence of women as activists in the Scottish revolution, may have led some English parliamentarians to see harnessing women’s agency as vital to the cause.38 Similar reasoning, I  have suggested, may also explain the large numbers of women subscribers to the 1723 oaths of allegiance. In this case, women had been prominent in anti-​ Hanoverian rioting, and anti-​Jacobite legislation had targeted ‘disaffected persons’ (again, note the language of affect) of both genders. The oaths provided an opportunity to monitor the obedience of the Crown’s female subjects as well as offer a useful display of women’s public loyalty to the Hanoverian regime.39 Women, then, appear on these subscriptional texts when it appears that it was politically expedient to mobilise them. Including women in this activity did confer some (temporary) political agency upon them. However, though some male radicals in the 1640s (Lilburne, Winstanley) chose to interpret subscription to these tests as entering into a form of mutual political contract with Parliament, in which loyalty was given in return for the Parliament’s defence of individual liberties, and we can occasionally find similar arguments made by women petitioners, most of the discussion around these texts emphasised instead the role of these devices in distinguishing between the loyal and the disloyal, the ‘well-​affected’ against the disaffected or malignants.40

…

That it was partisanship that was the main driver of women’s involvement in subscriptional culture is further indicated by the almost complete absence of women from another type of subscriptional text: the loyal address. Addresses shared many features with petitions: they were subscribed texts from a particular community addressed to authority (in the 1650s the Protector, after the Restoration the crown). However, unlike petitions, they were ostensibly not requests for action or the redress of grievances but expressions of congratulations or thanks. They did include pledges of loyalty but as an expression of the

38

39 40

Ibid., p.  204. On the prominence of women, see Laura A.  M. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–​1651 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. pp. 97–​114. Activism by women was a feature of the post-​Restoration Covenanting movement in Scotland: see Alan J. McSeveney, ‘Non-​conforming Presbyterian Women in Restoration Scotland: 1660–​1679’ (University of Strathclyde PhD thesis, 2006). Vallance, ‘Women, Politics and the 1723 Oaths’, pp. 994–​6. For radical interpretations, see Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant:  State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–​1682 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), ch. 6.

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whole community rather than as a binding commitment on one individual.41 During the ‘Tory Reaction’ (1681–​1685), the texts of loyal addresses explicitly attacked ‘popular’ subscriptional forms such as mass petitions, oaths and covenants. Linking these devices to the upheaval of the civil wars, a number of the addresses issued in the wake of the 1683 Rye House Plot included direct attacks on democracy and popular government. The text issued by the borough of East Looe, Cornwall, prayed that they would ‘never feel again the intolerable Plague of a Democratical Tyranny’.42 The address produced by the Middle Temple identified the conspiracy as the work of men of ‘Fanatical, Atheistical and Republican Principles’.43 The address from the borough of Morpeth similarly described the plot as driven by ‘Democraticall, Seditious and Schismatical Spirits’.44 The Scots Corporation of London’s address, occasioned by the same plot, spoke of their abhorrence of all ‘Petitionings, Combinations, Leagues, Covenants, and Associations not Authorized by your Majesties Command’.45 The county of Cardigan, with the corporations of Cardigan and Aberystwyth, stated their detestation of all ‘Seditious and Democratical Tenents’ in their address.46 The address from Leicester promised to crush ‘Rebellion and Faction’ in whatever form it appeared whether in a ‘malitious Libel, or Seditious Petition’.47 Other addresses identified religious assemblies (dissenting ‘Conventicles’) as ‘fruitful Seminaries’ of ‘Sedition and Rebellion’.48 Some addresses latched upon English corporations as the ‘Nurseries of Sedition’ which had nurtured the plot: the address from Bury St Edmunds called for an inspection of English corporations to ‘hinder them from being any longer the Receptacles of bad Men, or Engines to play Republican Zealots upon us’. Another Suffolk address, from the corporation of Eye, supported the Crown’s quo warranto campaign, as the surrender of charters was necessary as boroughs

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

For the loyal address in England, see Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, esp. ch. 3 and see also Mark Knights, ‘Participation and Representation before Democracy:  Petitions and Addresses in Pre-​Modern Britain’, in Ian Shapiro, Susan C. Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and Alexander S. Kirshner (eds), Political Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 35–​57 and Edward Vallance, Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658–​1727 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2019). London Gazette, 17–​20 September, 1683, no. 1861. London Gazette, 5–​9 July, 1683, no. 1840. London Gazette, 27–​30 August, 1683, no. 1855. London Gazette, 9–​12 July, 1683, no. 1841. London Gazette, 27 September–​1 October, 1683, no. 1864. London Gazette, 16–​20 August, 1683, no. 1852. London Gazette, 26–​30 July, 1683, no. 1846 (corporation of Warwick’s address).

270 Vallance had been ‘contesting for men of Republican principles’.49 It is also notable that, in contrast to earlier addressing campaigns, those addresses issued in abhorrence of the Rye House Plot rarely advertised themselves as being subscribed by large numbers of people.50 The loyal addresses issued during the 1680s represent the paradoxical example of a popular political form deployed specifically to attack other popular ‘subscriptional texts’ and the idea of popular government in general. There nonetheless remained subversive elements within these displays of mass loyalty: celebrating the loyalty of London apprentices involved prizing partisanship over age or status.51 But the loyalty being celebrated was that of men, even if young men. Women, on the other hand, appeared to be almost completely excluded from addressing activity. Unlike oath returns, surviving subscribed manuscript addresses, with only one exception, do not feature the names or signatures of women. The largest surviving manuscript address that I  have identified, the 1658 address from Leicestershire to Richard Cromwell, contains around three thousand names. While a comparison of Hearth Tax records with the address suggests that large numbers of the subscribers came from the ranks of the ‘just about managing’ (those not poor enough to receive parish relief but too poor to be taxed), the inclusion of this significant but marginal strata of society was not accompanied by a similar inclusiveness with 49

50

51

London Gazette, 16–​20 August 1683, no. 1852; for the language of ‘Nurseries of Sedition’ see the address from Northampton, London Gazette, 3–​6 September, 1683, no. 1857. The connection between corporations and sedition became a general trope of Tory political writing in the 1680s (see Nathaniel Johnston, The Excellency of Monarchical Government, Especially of the English Monarchy (1686), p. 414). The exceptions in the 1683 addresses are the texts from the Grand Jury of Derbyshire, reputedly subscribed by 9175 individuals (London Gazette, 13–​17 December 1683, no. 1886) and that from the Stannery Courts of Cornwall, ‘signed by about ten thousand Tinners’ (London Gazette, 25–​29 October, 1683, no. 1872). Contrast this reticence with the reporting of the numbers of subscribers to the addresses in defence of Charles ii’s dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681: London Gazette, 30 June to 4 July 1681, no. 1630, Town and Port of Deal (362), Inhabitants of Great Marlow (222); London Gazette, 4–​7 July 1681, no. 1631, Officers of Militia, other gentlemen and loyal inhabitants of Canterbury (400); London Gazette, 7–​11 July 1681, no. 1632, Inhabitants of Westminster and its liberty (‘signed by some thousands’); London Gazette 11–​14 July 1681, no. 1633, Brecon, (2700), ‘Loyal Inhabitants’ of Aylesbury (270); London Gazette, 15–​18 July 1681, no. 1634, Nobility, gentry, clergy and other freeholders of N. Riding of Yorkshire (185). An issue acknowledged by publications such as Vox juvenilis: Or, the loyal apprentices vindication of the design and promoters of their late humble address to his majesty (1681 [2]‌) which attempted to counter Whig accusations that the apprentices’ subscriptions had been bought with bribes of food and drink.

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regards to gender. No women can be found on this return.52 The only women subscribers I have found on a surviving manuscript loyal address were the five women whose names feature on a 1696 loyal address to William iii from Lancashire.53 Their presence, however, may be explained by the unusual nature of this address. The return was clearly intended to deliver the county’s response to the demand that the public swear the Association to William iii. This Association, modelled on the 1584 Bond of Association to Elizabeth i, demanded that subscribers declare that William was rightful and lawful king and promise to exact revenge should any attempt on the king’s life prove successful.54 Yet, whereas in other areas the Association was separated from the loyal address congratulating the king on surviving the assassination plot which had prompted its drafting, in Lancashire subscribers signed the text of the loyal address which incorporated the acknowledgment that William was ‘rightfull & Lawfull King’.55 In general, however, women subscribers to the 1696 Association are rare. The largest county returns reported in the press, those for Suffolk, which were reputed to contain 70,000 names, feature only fourteen women subscribers.56 These were concentrated in just three of the twenty-​four Suffolk Association rolls, most organised by hundred.57 Given the numbers alleged to have 52

53

54

55 56 57

See Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson A61* fos 164–​186v., discussed in Vallance, Loyalty, ch. 5 and a brief summary in Edward Vallance ‘Cromwell’s Trunks’, The Historian, 137 (2018), pp. 34–​6. My comments regarding the Hearth Tax are informed by Catherine Ferguson, ‘The Hearth Tax and the Poor in Post-​Restoration Woking’, in Trevor Dean, Glyn Parry and Edward Vallance (eds), Faith, Place and People in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Margaret Spufford (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), ch. 6. Wallace Gandy ed, Lancashire Association Oath Rolls 1696 (London: Society of Genealogists reprint, 1985), p. 4 (Rebecca Riselton of Halewood); p. 60 (Frances Edmondson of Borwich); p. 90 (Elizabeth Readhead of Blawith); p. 101(Aliz Nowell and Frances Turner of Clitheroe). Unusually, there are further Association rolls for Lancashire held locally rather than in the National Archives, but these only feature the names of local male officeholders see Lancashire Record Office, QDV/​10. On the Association see Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant, pp.  201–​9; Pincus, 1688, pp.  463–​71; David Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation:  The Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696,’ in DeLloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (eds), Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from His American Friends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 217–​37. tna C213/​138/​1 for the Lancashire returns. tna C213/​264. For more detail on the Suffolk returns see David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 98–​105. tna C213/​264/​7, Babergh Hundred, (Melforde, Lawshall and Cavendish returns); C213/​ 264/​13, Thinge hundred, (Whepsted return:  ‘Mistris Min widow her marke’); C213/​264/​ 21, Stow hundred (Onehouse return). The exception to the organisation of returns by

272 Vallance subscribed and estimates of contemporary population, the subscribers must then have included the majority of males, both juvenile and adult within the county.58 Indeed, some returns suggest a certain amount of anxiety about the eligibility of some male subscribers: that for Theberton parish in Blything hundred discriminated amongst the list of male names by identifying those who were servants, lodgers, ‘Jornymen’ and ‘prentes’ (apprentices).59 Subscribers to the St. Andrews, Ilketshall return were divided into ‘Owners’, ‘Tenants’, ‘Single Persons’ and ‘Lodgers’.60 Similarly, in Ickworth in Thingoe Hundred, subscribers were divided between ‘houskeepers’ and ‘Sarvants & others’.61 Some parish constables clearly continued to hold to the view that only male householders should subscribe: the return for Great Wratting was headed ‘The names of the Howse Hould ers [sic]’.62 The organisation of returns in this fashion seems to have been a result in part of the direction of the county’s grand jury that constables should gather the subscriptions of all householders, lodgers and others within their parishes.63 Yet despite the direction from the grand jury to expand subscription beyond householders, it seems that this order was rarely interpreted to mean that adult women should also subscribe. The gendered assumption that women should not be included is also revealed on the return for the parish of Chelsworth which recorded that ‘There are noe Persons in the ye Parish of Chelsworth aforesaid yt have refused to subscribe this Declaration’, though the return only included the names of men.64 Similar statements appear regularly on the Suffolk parish Association returns, even in the hundred of Babergh which contained the largest number of women subscribers (eleven of the total

58

59 60 61 62 63 64

hundred is C213/​264/​24, a single sheet roll of Suffolk magistrates taken at Beccles Quarter Sessions. See Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation’, p. 231. The total population of the county in the 1670s has been estimated at only 125,000: John Patten, ‘Population Distribution in Norfolk and Suffolk during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 65 (1975), pp. 45–​65. tna C213/​264/​2. tna C213/​264/​10, Wangford hundred and see the return for St. Michaels in South Elom in the same hundred in which the all male subscribers are listed as either yeomen or ‘singell man’. tna C213/​264/​13. tna C213/​264/​11, Risbridge hundred. tna C213/​264/​20, Blackbourne hundred. A number of the parish returns here include the text with this direction and direction to include full details (name, address and occupation) of refusers. tna C213/​264/​3.

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fourteen).65 This suggests that the presence of women subscribers probably reflected the assumptions of particular constables or the presence of significant female property holders in a locality. This seems to have been the case in the small village of Onehouse in Stow Hundred, where the two women subscribers, Mary Self and Susan Burmin, were listed as ‘housekeepers’.66 We can observe similar assumptions at play in the administration of the Association elsewhere. Antony Riurs, the constable of Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire, wrote that he thought it convenient at shuch a Junctur of time as this to bring in ye names of Servants and Labourous as wel as householders to show our Royalty [sic] to King William. Let others hoalt be-​twixt too opinions I thinke it my dewty and inturist to be for the present gournment.67 In Great Yarmouth, the corporation put considerable effort into securing subscriptions from as many people as possible. The Association was placed on display in the Tolhouse for six days while constables were instructed to urge the inhabitants of their wards to subscribe. This effort resulted in a Yarmouth roll with 1117 names upon it, 28% of whom left marks rather than signed their names. However, no women were required or encouraged to subscribe.68 This suggests that if the fourteen female subscribers to the Suffolk Association rolls did assign themselves a political role, this was largely in the face of the view of local officialdom which continued to assume that only men would be required to give their hands. Indeed, as has been noted, some constables appear to have felt uneasy at the breadth of male subscription to the Association and carefully organised their returns to maintain social and economic distinctions between the subscribers. Two features of the 1696 Association explain the almost complete absence of women from the returns, 65 66 67 68

tna C213/​264/​7, Waldingfield Magna (‘none refuse’); Assington, (‘None refuse within o[u]‌r parish’). tna C213/​264/​21, Stow hundred, Onehouse return. Quoted in Wallace Gandy, ‘The Association Oath Rolls for Buckinghamshire, A. D. 1696’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 11: 3 (1921), pp. 109–​20, p. 115. Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–​1722 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.  190. Norfolk Record Office, Y/​C/​19/​9, Yarmouth Corporation Assembly Book, 1680–​1701, fos 273–​273v., 12 March 1696; the Oxfordshire returns also appear to have been all male (see Jeremy Gibson, Politics and Loyalty in Post-Revolution Oxfordshire: The ‘1690’ County Parliamentary Poll: An edited transcript: The Association Oath Rolls, 1695–6: Analysis (Oxford:  Oxfordshire Family History Society in Association with the Family History Partnership, 2011), p. 5).

274 Vallance despite the vast scale of subscription in some counties such as Suffolk: first, the legislation governing its administration targeted office-​holders; and second subscription to the Association was directly connected to the use of violence (the promise to ‘revenge’ within the text which also caused problems for some male subscribers, notably Quakers).69 It was this, as much as women’s political participation as a whole that Joseph Addison was satirising in his Freeholder articles on a ‘Female Association’ (his specific target here being the anti-​Jacobite volunteer associations).70 For Addison, the women’s ‘Arms’ were their ability to ‘Smile or Frown to any Purpose’. Their feminine charms were deployed to secure male volunteers, as the virgin who subscribed ‘fifteen Lovers, all of them good Men and true’ or the wife who ‘writ her own Name and one Vassal, meaning her Husband’.71 Addison was not simply making a mockery of the prominence of especially elite women in early eighteenth-​ century party politics, noted by Elaine Chalus amongst others, but drawing humour from the absurdity of women engaging in military service or acting as recruiting sergeants.72 If the connection to military service explains the limited appearance of women on the 1696 Association returns, the general absence of women from the list of subscribers to loyal addresses should be connected to their primary aim of representing public loyalty. So, whereas oaths and covenants bound subscribers to perform particular actions, addresses offered more generalised expressions of fidelity. As Mark Knights has noted, there was a tension in addressing activity between the desire to show addresses were authoritative, the production of official bodies such as grand juries, and that they were 69

‘William III, 1695–​96:  An Act for the better Security of His Maj[es]ties. Royal Person and Government. [Chapter XXVII. Rot. Parl. 7  & 8 Gul. III.p.6.n. 1.]’, in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 7, 1695–​1701, ed. John Raithby (s.l: Great Britain Record Commission, 1820), pp. 114–​18, British History Online, accessed March 5, 2018, http://​www.british-​history. ac.uk/​statutes-​realm/​vol7/​pp114-​118; tna C213/​264/​17, Hartsmere hundred, Westhorpe parish, two local Quakers refused the Association on the grounds that they could not promise to ‘revenge’. 70 Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 74–​5. (Jan 16, 1716). For more on these associations see Frank O’Gorman, ‘Origins and Trajectories of Loyalism in England, 1580–​1840’, in Allan Blackstock and Frank O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775–​1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), ch. 2. 71 Addison, The Freeholder, pp. 87–​90. 72 Elaine Chalus, ‘ “Women are often very good scaffoldings”: Women and Politics in the Age of Anne’, Parliamentary History, 28:1 (2009), pp. 150–​65; Eirwen Nicholson, ‘Sacheverell’s Harlots:  Non-​Resistance on Paper and in Practice’, Parliamentary History, 31:1 (2012), pp. 69–​79.

275

A Democratic Culture?

representative, enjoying widespread support, which could involve gathering subscriptions from non-​office holders and those not formally enfranchised.73 Paradoxically, as both popular petitioning and addressing resurfaced during the Exclusion Crisis, the language of status became more, not less important, especially for the Whig party which was keen to distance itself from accusations that it was simply reviving the practices of the civil war.74 I have argued elsewhere that the address came to replace the state oath as the main means of representing public loyalty in the eighteenth century. As Paul Langford observed, this was in part because nationwide campaigns to swear loyalty to the crown on pain of significant penalties for refusal did not sit well with the ‘revolution principle’ of voluntary association as the foundation of social and political life.75 The outcome of this theoretical emphasis upon government by consent was, ironically, to reduce the opportunities for women to formally participate in the political process, as they had often done in public oath-​taking.

…

This chapter has argued for a focus upon partisanship and political and military mobilisation, rather than citizenship and proto-​democratic politics, in understanding the presence of women on subscriptional texts in early modern England. Of course, military mobilisation has been seen by modern historians as a key driver of democratic change. Broader analyses of the development of democracy in Europe have argued that citizenship was part of the bargain that states struck with their peoples as changes in warfare and military technology necessitated mass armies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.76 The chronology here, however, is important: Zaret’s focus on communicative practices such as petitioning suggests that a democratic

73 Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, pp. 136–​42. Some addresses attempted to resolve this conundrum by effectively creating a hierarchy of subscribers, from local officials, the aristocracy and gentry, to freeholders and mere ‘inhabitants’. For an example, see London Gazette, 6–​9 August 183, no. 1849, address of Monmouth justices of peace and grand jury and ‘other Your Majesty’s Loving Subjects’. 74 Vallance, Loyalty, ch. 7. 75 Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–​1798 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1991), pp.  98–​114; Vallance, ‘Women, Politics and the 1723 Oaths’, pp. 997–​9. 76 See for example Charles Tilly, ‘Where Do Rights Come From?,’ in Theda Skocpol et  al. (eds), Democracy, Revolution and History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), ch. 3.

276 Vallance political culture developed in mid-​seventeenth-​century England and was sustained into the eighteenth century. Yet, the emergence of mass democracies has been a relatively recent phenomenon and their existence appears increasingly insecure.77 Moreover, the evidence of the Suffolk Association rolls suggests that arguments regarding the inter-​relationship between the growth of the state and the expansion of the political nation should be treated with caution in an early modern context as well. Steven Pincus has argued that there was a qualitative as well as quantitative difference between the Association of 1696 and its Elizabethan predecessor of 1584. For Pincus, the Williamite Association demonstrates that the kingdoms William iii governed were ‘very different both socially and politically from those governed by Elizabeth i’.78 The greater scale of the Williamite Association is undeniable. As we have seen, however, the idea that it was only the propertied male householder who exercised political rights proved highly resilient, even in the face of mass exercises in surveying public loyalty. Indeed, earlier loyalty tests, namely the Protestation, if narrower in scope than the Association, may nonetheless have seen greater female participation: Walter suggests that surviving records may even underestimate women’s involvement if, as in the case of the Scottish National Covenant, women swore but did not subscribe the Protestation.79 Neither has this chapter sought to deny that women did occasionally use these texts to advance political claims and assert their own right to petition. As Melissa Mowry has recently shown, Leveller women employed the group’s language of commonality and collectivity to assert their own agency.80 Such claims, however, were relatively rare. Some women’s petitioning activity certainly was highly transgressive, challenging class-​based and gendered assumptions about who should comment on matters of church and state. Laura Stewart has pointed out, though, that the participation of women in politically or religiously controversial activity (such as the Prayer Book riot at St. Giles Church, Edinburgh, 77

John Dunn, ‘Conclusion’, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy:  The Unfinished Journey:  508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 13, pp.  239–​40. In a British context see Robert Saunders, ‘Democracy’, in David Craig and James Thompson (eds), Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 142–​67. 78 Pincus, 1688, p. 464. 79 Walter, Covenanting Citizens, pp. 203–​7. I am grateful to John Walter for discussing these points with me. 80 Melissa Mowry, ‘ “Commoners Wives who stand for their Freedom and Liberty”: Leveller Women and the Hermeneutics of Collectivities’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77:3 (2014), pp. 305–​24.

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in 1637) might have been encouraged precisely so as to cover a rebellious and or revolutionary intent by having supposedly ‘simple’ women take the lead.81 In addition, the right of women to petition in general was not in question as the right to petition did not imply that the petitioner possessed the characteristics of a citizen. As both Whiting and Waddell have suggested, instead petitioning activity actually legitimated inequality through its emphasis on deference to and dependence upon authority. The enduring vitality of petitioning as a popular form might then be explained not by its subversive potential, nor by its capacity to act as a vehicle for democratic impulses, but because of the persistence of social and political inequality. As Peter Jones and Steven King have argued with reference to pauper petitions in the modern era: As long as the structural conditions of dominance and the socio-​economic hierarchy remained broadly analogous, the private petition would have (and indeed, always has had) its part to play as an intercessionary form.82 Women’s active participation in the political arena was not predominantly framed by rights-​based claims but by arguments grounded on their loyalty. This was true in petitioning activity as well as oath-​taking: women petitioners for relief during the civil wars and after needed to demonstrate political loyalty (of the appropriate kind) in order to secure concessions.83 Yet, it was not simply the practical needs of regimes in moments of crisis which provided women with opportunities for political engagement. As has already been noted, both historians and philosophers have recognised the affective and subjective quality of loyalty and its distinctiveness as a value from ‘rule-​governed’ forms of political obligation.84 The idea of loyalty could cut across distinctions of gender and social status, replacing them instead with a shifting boundary between the loyal and disloyal. The critical division in subscriptional texts was often then not between citizen and non-​citizen, male or female but between, the ‘well-​ affected’ and the ‘malignant’, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

81 Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution, p. 58. 82 Peter Jones and Steven King, ‘From Petition to Pauper Letter:  the Development of an Epistolary Form’, in Peter Jones and Steven King (eds), Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), ch. 3, p. 63. 83 See on this Hannah Worthen, ‘Supplicants and Guardians:  the Petitions of Royalist Widows during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–​1660’, Women’s History Review, 26:4 (2017), pp. 528–​40. 84 Shklar, ‘Obligation, Loyalty and Exile’, pp. 40–​1.

278 Vallance

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources

Manuscripts

The National Archives, Kew. C213/​138/​1, Lancashire Association Oath Rolls, West Derby and Lonsdale Hundreds. C213/​264, Suffolk Association Oath Rolls. SP 16/​305 fo. 134 (undated but ca. 1635) ‘Petition of Clara Bowyer, Margaret Hall, Elizabeth Newland, with a thousand poor women more and upwards, to the King’. SP 29/​406 fo. 85, ‘The humble petition of Amy Potter, widw’.

Periodicals

London Gazette, 4–​7 July 1681, no. 1631 to 13–​17 December 1683, no. 1886.



Printed Sources



Secondary Sources

Gandy, Wallace (ed.), Lancashire Association Oath Rolls 1696 (London: Society of Genealogists reprint, 1985). Gibson, Jeremy, Politics and Loyalty in Post-Revolution Oxfordshire: The ‘1690’ County Parliamentary Poll: An edited transcript: The Association Oath Rolls, 1695–6: Analysis (Oxford: Oxfordshire Family History Society in Association with the Family History Partnership, 2011).

Braddick, Michael, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds), Liberty, Authority, Formality:  Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–​1900 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 175–​98. Braddick, Michael, ‘History, Liberty, Reformation and the Cause: Parliamentarian Military and Ideological Escalation in 1643’, in Michael Braddick and David L. Smith (eds), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 117–​34. Leng, Tom, ‘The Meanings of “Malignancy”: The Language of Enmity and the Construction of the Parliamentarian Cause in the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 53:4 (2014), pp. 835–​58. Leng, Tom, ‘Citizens at the Door:  Mobilising against Enemies in Civil-​War London’, in Journal of Historical Sociology Special Issue: Activism, Mobilisation and Political E­ ngagement, ed. Michael Braddick and Gary Rivett, 28:1 (2015), pp. 26–​48. Vallance, Edward, Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658–​1727 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Whiting, Amanda Jane, Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-​Century Revolution: Deference, Difference and Dissent (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).

­c hapter 13

The Parliament of Women and the Restoration Crisis Gaby Mahlberg

Introduction

This chapter discusses the ‘parliament of women’ as an image of anarchy in later seventeenth-​century England. Democracy, as Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen have put it in the introduction to this volume, was ‘reputed to be the worst form of government’ in the early modern period. In later seventeenth-​ century England in particular, popular government evoked memories of the recent Civil War and was associated with a lack of order and mob rule.1 The only thing that could still be worse than democracy itself was its corrupted form: anarchy. To avoid any such excesses, popular rule had to be fought and suppressed to ensure the stability of the monarchy at a time when the conflict over legitimate power had reached another peak. Contemporary pamphlet literature was one channel through which anti-​democratic authors could respond to the threat of popular rule, and some did so by depicting parliament as an assembly of unruly women. For constitutional innovators in the 1640s, Parliament had provided the closest approximation of popular sovereignty available in England at a national level, with the House of Commons representing the democratic part of the classical mixed constitution (consisting of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy).2 While the monarchical and aristocratic elements had been abolished in 1649 through the regicide and the creation of a Commonwealth ‘without a King or House of Lords’, the democratic part of the mixed constitution had

1 See in this volume ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–17, p.  11. Note, however, that even republicans like John Milton, who defend the rule of the people, do so in ways that exclude the vulgar and mob rule. See Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp.  152–​3; Cesare Cuttica, ‘Popularity in Early Modern England (ca. 1570–​1642):  Looking Again at Thing and Concept’, Journal of British Studies, 58:1 (2019), pp. 1–​27. 2 John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 361–​400; and Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1985), esp. chs 3 and 4.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 7890

280 Mahlberg emerged the strongest.3 For opponents of popular sovereignty meanwhile, the victory of the Commons had been the result of a rebellion of subordinates. This rebellion frequently had been depicted in contemporary pamphlet literature as the rule of women. As Parliament was getting more vocal once again in the later seventeenth century earlier fears were revived and authors once more came to employ the image of female anarchy as a critique of male ­democracy. Several historians and literary scholars have observed that the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis of the 1670s and 80s replayed many of the constitutional debates of the 1640s, and that the political discourse likewise adopted a similar tone and style. Jonathan Scott has pointed out that ‘the crisis the government endured from 1678–​83 was largely a repeat screening of the crisis of the reign of Charles i. It was fundamentally the same in its causes, its issues, its structures and its course’.4 At the same time, as James Turner has shown, ‘[m]‌any commentators felt that the revolutionary puritanism of the 1640s and 1650s (radical in the religious or political sense) had much in common with the libertinism of the 1660s and 1670s (radical in its social attitude and contempt for conventional morality)’.5 It is therefore little surprising to find that Restoration pamphleteers were directly reviving Civil War genres, such as the ‘parliament-​of-​women’ literature. In fact, Turner observes, ‘[a]s the political conflict intensified, so did the vogue for sexually charged “parliaments of women” ’. The genre, which he sees ‘rising to a double peak in the 1640s and the 1680s’, clearly articulated ‘a fear of women’s loose tongues as well as a feeling that politics ha(d) been feminized by extending the franchise’.6 This chapter will discuss the association between gynocracy and anarchy by focusing on a lengthy popular pamphlet of 1684, entitled The Parliament of Women: Or, a Compleat History of the Proceedings and Debates, of a particular Junto, of Ladies and Gentlewomen, With a design to alter the Government of 3 Journals of the House of Commons, vi, p. 306; ‘Act abolishing the office of King’, and ‘An Act abolishing the House of Lords’, in Samuel Rawson Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–​1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906; 3rd edn), pp. 384–​6 and p. 387. 4 Jonathan Scott, ‘Radicalism and Restoration: the Shape of the Stuart Experience’, Historical Journal, 31:2 (1988), pp. 453–​67, p. 459; and Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–​1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On the issue of the succession, see also Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–​81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5 James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–​1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. x. 6 Ibid., p. 42.

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the World.7 As the title of this satirical piece indicates, the female assembly in question has in mind nothing less than to change the existing global order. Its starting point is ‘the Commonweal of Amazonia’, or rather England in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, some three years after Charles ii had dissolved the Oxford Parliament to end discussions over his succession, when the long-​ term survival of this institution was less than secure. (27) It will be argued that the image of an unruly female parliament was ideal to depict the absurdities of anything but a patriarchal monarchy and delegitimise any form of popular rule as an aberration or subversion of the ‘normal’ state of affairs. But it was also a warning of where parliamentary rule might lead, should the monarchy fail to keep the assembly under control.

The Parliament-​of-​Women Genre

By 1684, parliament-​of-​women literature had become an established genre in English popular culture. It had emerged in England during the debates over political authority on the eve of the Civil War more than 40 years earlier when the rebellion of Parliament against Charles i had created a world turned upside down, of which the rule of women was one unsettling, if largely imaginary, part.8 The origins of the parliament-​of-​women genre, like those of many other elements of seventeenth-​century political discourse, lie in an ancient Greek and Roman past. Yet, there is little historical literature on gynocracy, gynaecocracy, or matriarchy because the concept has primarily existed in the popular imagination  –​from the Amazons of Greek mythology to the ruling women 7 The Parliament of Women: Or, A Compleat History Of the Proceedings and Debates, Of a particular Junto, of Ladies and Gentlewomen, With a design to alter the Government of the World. By way of Satyr (London, 1684). Page references to this text are hereafter cited in brackets throughout. 8 Melissa M. Mowry, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–​1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 6, 37, 81–​82, 117; Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 129–​30, 140; Gaby Mahlberg, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture: Dreaming of Another Game (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2009), pp.  20, 83–​109; Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-​Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 83–​6, 107; Sharon Achinstein, ‘Introduction: Gender, Literature, and the English Revolution’, Women’s Studies, 24:1/​2 (1994), pp. 1–​13; and Sharon Achinstein, ‘Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution’, Women’s Studies, 24:1/​ 2 (1994), pp. 131–​63; Susan Wiseman, ‘ “Adam, the father of all flesh”, Porno-​Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 134–​57.

282 Mahlberg of the dystopian world of Angela Carter’s Passion of New Eve (1977).9 The female assemblies that begin to crop up in the pamphlet literature of the 1640s, meanwhile, have two more direct antecedents: The Assembly-​Women of Aristophanes’ fourth-​century bc Greek comedy of the same name, and the gathering of Roman matrons in Aulus Gellius’s story of the boy Papirius Praetextatus in his Attic Nights of the 2nd century ad.10 In Aristophanes’ play Assembly-​Women, the matrons of the city take over the government of Athens to rescue the city state from corruption as ‘the only thing/​Still left untried!’.11 The women acquire their power by stealth. One morning before dawn, they borrow their husbands’ cloaks and put on false beards to sneak to the assembly before dawn and vote for a handover of power. As soon as they are officially in charge they set up a community of goods in the city as well as a community of sexual partners, thus abolishing the traditional family –​as Plato had earlier proposed in his Republic.12 To secure sexual pleasure for all men and women alike the female assembly also legislates that men who want to have intercourse with a pretty woman first have to take a less good-​looking one, while women wanting to have intercourse with a handsome man first have to make do with a less attractive one, so everyone takes their turn. With their material and physical needs met, the citizens of Athens are happy and the gynocracy experiment is a success. The first pamphlet on a female assembly published in pre-​Civil War England, meanwhile, had an overall less happy outcome for the women attempting to take over power. The 1640 Parlament of Women, written by an anonymous royalist pamphleteer, is a direct adaptation and elaboration of Gellius’ story.13 9 10

11 12

13

On the latter work, see Ruth Charnock, ‘ “His Peremptory Prick”: The Failure of the Phallic in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)’, in Cesare Cuttica and Gaby Mahlberg (eds), Patriarchal Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 171–​7. Of course, Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata also uses the power reversal between men and women in Athens, as the women withhold sex from their husbands until they agree to a pan-​Hellenic peace. But the Assembly-​Women is the more direct influence (see Aristophanes, ‘Assembly-​Women’, in Aristophanes, Birds, Lysistrata, Assembly-​Women, Wealth, transl. Stephen Halliwell (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997), pp.  143–​97). See also Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927, repr. 1967–​70), i.23. Aristophanes, ‘Assembly-​Women’, p. 170. See Plato, The Republic, ed. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; 2nd edn). See Halliwell (ed.), Aristophanes, p. 148. Bernard Freydberg even goes as far as to suggest that the women are analogous to Plato’s guardians. See Bernard Freydberg, Philosophy & Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 115. The Assembly-​Women was written some ten years after The Republic. The parlament of women with the merry lawes by them newly enacted (London, 1640).

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In the original story from the Attic Nights, a young boy named Papirius Praetextatus accompanies his father to the senate. When he returns home, his mother demands to know what the senators had discussed. But since members are not allowed to reveal the senate’s business to anyone before an issue has been decided, Papirius tells a lie to quench her curiosity, saying that the senators had debated the question whether one husband should have two wives, or rather one wife two husbands. Upset by the news, the boy’s mother informs the other matrons in Rome, and the following day they march to the senators to beg that one woman should be allowed two husbands, whereupon the boy is forced to come clean about his lie to explain the commotion. Needless to say, this story makes the women look ridiculous, while the boy is praised for his cleverness. In the 1640 English royalist rendering, the story is further elaborated as Papirius’ mother sets up her own assembly. While she initially only sends for ‘the chiefe Matrons’, soon ‘a great many of Tradesmens wives’ demand access as ‘no Parlament could bee held, but there must be a lower House as well as a higher, and Speakers for both’.14 The lower orders forcing their way into the assembly reflect the fears of contemporary royalists and aristocrats that their privileged existence might be threatened by calls for equality and popular sovereignty. The largest part of the pamphlet is then taken up with details of the women’s discussions, stating their grievances concerning their useless and impotent husbands, revealing their secret desires as they weigh up the pros and cons of having multiple men by their side, and then making laws to ‘live in the more ease, pride, pompe, and liberty’.15 While the original story is about the Senate, which represents the aristocratic part of the Roman government, and the senators’ wives, the details added in the 1640 version help to anglicise the narrative, as does the new title ‘The Parlament of Women’. Since royalists saw Parliament as a subordinate advisory assembly to the monarch, the unruly females of the story engage in an act of outright rebellion. The pamphlet uses the subversive image of ‘women on top’ to illustrate the reversal of the established order, but the men regain the upper hand in the end when the women are ridiculed and dismissed and order is restored. This act of dismissal in the English context was most certainly intended to recall the dissolution of the Short Parliament by the King after only three weeks in session on 5 May 1640, and thus served as a suitable admonition to Parliamentarians to know their place and stop transgressing on matters that were none of their

14 Ibid., A2r. 15 Ibid., A4r.

284 Mahlberg business, such as the prerogative powers of the King.16 Thus, the ‘parliament of women’ became a loyalist weapon against the opposition to the monarchy, and the fictitious dismissal of rebellious MPs re-​established order.17 The gendered imagery of the ‘parliament of women’ draws both on the common law understanding of the body politic and on patriarchal political theory.18 In the common-​law imagination, the king is the head of the body politic ruling over its irrational members. Patriarchal political theory, meanwhile, adds the household-​state analogy, in which the father-​king rules over his family-​people. It comprises both the rule of fathers over children and of men over women.19 This order had been upset by the rebellion of the members against the head, and the dependants against their father and husband in the English Civil War. The ‘liberty’ demanded by the women, meanwhile, is primarily cast in sexual terms.20 They want liberty to take two husbands and satisfy their physical desire with multiple other men –​the analogy being that the Parliamentarian desire for political participation and access to civil liberties is illicit and verging on prostitution. Democratising tendencies and libertinism are of the same order.21 While the Parlament of Women sees an attempt at the subversion of traditional gender roles, however, in the end the natural order is restored and no greater harm has been done to established structures. The genre evolves from there with various borrowings from earlier literary gynocracies. But its key features remain constant over time: an assembly of bolshie, highly sexualised and irrational women attempt to wrest power from the ruling men –​in England usually King and aristocracy –​and in the process cause havoc, so that only the intervention of the legitimate rulers can restore order. 16

The Puritan ‘Root and Branch Petition’ of 11 December 1640 condemned the Parliament of Women alongside a number of other ‘lascivious, idle, and unprofitable books and pamphlets, play-​books and ballads …, which came out at the dissolving of the last Parliament’. It was published in Samuel Rawson Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 137–​44, p. 139. 17 Mowry, The Bawdy Politic, pp. 5–​6. 18 Ibid., pp. 28–​9. 19 The key proponent of patriarchalism in England at the time was Sir Robert Filmer. See Patriarcha and Other writings, ed. Johann P.  Sommerville (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991); Cesare Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer (1588–​1653) and the Patriotic Monarch:  Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-​ Century Political Thought (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Rachel Weil, Political Passions:  Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–​1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 20 Parlament of women, A4r. 21 Mowry, The Bawdy Politic, p. 33.

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The genre could be modified to suit a variety of political constellations and was later used by republicans against royalists and Cromwellians as well.22 But one thing always stays the same: that women in power are depicted as an aberration and subversion, a sign of disorder. As can be seen from the list below, numerous parliament-​of-​women pamphlets were published throughout the seventeenth century, with a large number appearing in the 1640s, slightly fewer in the 1650s, and then nothing up until the 1670s and 1680s (see Table 13.1, p. 286). A further edition of the pamphlet, The Parliament of Women (this time with the modern spelling of ‘parliament’), was published towards the end of the first Civil War in 1646, as the King was still clinging on to his power, even though his cause seemed very much lost.23 By this stage the re-​issue of the satire has something desperate about it, the clinging on to a power that was slowly slipping away. And it was not long before the parliamentary side adapted and subverted the image of the female assembly for its own use. In 1647, opposition authors took the image and turned the ‘parliament of women’ into a ‘parliament of ladies’ to lash out at the royalists, the House of Lords and the Presbyterians –​essentially all those ready to seek a peace agreement between the warring parties that would allow Charles i to return to power on terms that some radical republicans perceived as too lenient. An exact diurnall of the Parliament of Ladyes of May 1647 deals with a number of Ladies, sitting as a court at the King’s headquarters in Oxford, accusing royalist delinquents such as Prince Rupert, Lord Digby and Lord Capell of treason and cowardliness during the Civil War.24 In The Ladies’ Parliament, its second edition The Parliament of Ladies (1647), and The Ladies, a second time, assembled in Parliament (1647), the republican Henry Neville ridicules the love games between King and Parliament during the ongoing peace negotiations between the parties, and criticises in particular Presbyterian policies regarding the Army. In his later News from the New Exchange (1650), meanwhile, Neville directs some of his ire against corrupt members of the newly established Commonwealth, such as Henry Ireton and Cromwell himself, who were in his view no better than the previous ruling elite.25 Where The Parlament of Women (1640) had started as a faceless assembly, in which the characters are only identified as types, such as ‘Grace the gold-​smiths wife’ or ‘Sarah the Silkmans’, Neville’s pamphlets are more concrete and political, referring to specific named and identifiable individuals and political incidents and thus could be read not just as satires, but 22 Mahlberg, Henry Neville, pp. 89–​109. 23 The Parliament of women. With the merrie lawes of them newly enacted (London, 1646). 24 An exact diurnall of the Parliament of Ladyes (n.p., 1647). 25 News from the New Exchange (1650), p. 10; and Mahlberg, Henry Neville, pp. 20, 83–​109.

286 Mahlberg table 13.1 A list of parliament-​of-​women pamphlets published in seventeenth century England –​in chronological order

The parlament of women With the merry lawes by them newly enacted (1640). The Parliament of women. With the merrie lawes of them newly enacted (1646) (2nd ed. of 1640 pamphlet). [Henry Neville,] The Ladies Parliament (1647). [Henry Neville,] The Parliament of Ladies (1647). [Henry Neville,] The Ladies, a second time, assemble in Parliament (1647). An exact diurnall of the Parliament of Ladyes (1647). [Henry Neville,] Newes from the New Exchange (1650). The Parliament of women: with the merry laws by them newly enacted (1656) (3rd ed. of 1640 pamphlet). Now or Never: Or, A New Parliament of Women (1656). The Gossips meeting, or, The Merry market-​women of Taunton tune of The Parliament of women, or, Digby’s farewell (1674) (a ballad). A List of the parliament of women (1679). New Parliament of Women (1683). The Parliament of Women (1684). Great News from a Parliament of women, Now Sitting in Rosemary Lane, Mother Damnable the Labourers Wife being Chair-​Woman of this Assembly (1684). The cuckolds petition to the Parliament of women, setting forth their many grievances (1684). also as rather serious libels of the people in question.26 Only the anonymity of his publications might have saved him from serious repercussions. In 1656, Now or Never: Or, A New Parliament of Women was published around the time the second Protectorate Parliament gathered. Its protagonists reject the tyranny of men, claim their liberty and assert themselves as ‘free-​born women’.27 But besides these broad claims, there are no more specific political demands, and the aggressive tone of the Civil War pamphlets is gone. The genre was then not heard of again until the 1670s, while the Exclusion or Restoration Crisis saw a full-​blown revival of the ‘parliament-​of-​women’ image. In the 1640s, the women parliaments were still weak and easily dismissed. But

26 27

Parlament of Women (1640), A4r. Now or Never: or, A New Parliament of Women (1656), A2r.

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the fictional assemblies of women subsequently depicted in satires and libels were increasing in confidence over time as the real-​life English Parliament was becoming more assertive as the site of serious political debate and party strife.

The Parliament of Women and the Restoration Crisis of the 1670s and 1680s

As the Restoration Crisis of the late 1670s and 80s has been seen as a replay of the 1640s and 50s, it might not be an accident that the Civil War ‘parliament of women’ genre too made a comeback in the latter part of the century when the institution of Parliament was once again fighting for its survival. The opposition was pressing Charles ii to settle the succession as his wife Catherine of Braganza had remained childless and the King lacked a legitimate heir. Many proposals were brought forward to resolve this issue, involving among others a possible annulment of the King’s marriage, a divorce and re-​marriage or the legitimising of one of the King’s illegitimate sons to secure the future of Stuart rule.28 Naturally, the King’s childlessness also led to speculations over his barren marriage and rather unkind comments about his private life that writers felt free to publish after the breakdown of prepublication censorship. As James Turner has observed, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 allowed for a revival of pornographic literature, while ‘(s)editious murmuring focussed quite logically on the king’s sexuality, since the entire crisis derived from the lack of a legitimate son and the competing claim of the bastard Monmouth’.29 At least two parliament-​of-​women pamphlets were published during the sitting of the Cavalier Parliament in the early 1670s, with many more following between 1679 and the mid-​1680s. The first pamphlet to appear around the time of the First Exclusion Parliament (6 March–​12 July) was a simple one-​ page broadsheet, A List of the Parliament of Women (1679), giving the names of female MPs with their seats. It is clear that an assembly of women with names like ‘Mrs. Scold-​well’, ‘Mrs. Stink-​ill’, ‘Madam Quarrelsome’, ‘Mrs. Drink-​all’ and ‘Mrs. Impudent’ is seen as stroppy and hard to rein in. Besides, a short introductory text explains that the women have ‘resolved to congregate themselves, and to meddle with the Affairs of the Common-​wealth, and to place themselves at the Helm of Government, and to endeavour to regain their long lost Liberty’

28 Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, pp. 29–​39. 29 Turner, Libertines, pp. 252–​3.

288 Mahlberg because men had ‘tyrannically excluded them from both Arts and Arms’, ‘the Pulpit’ and ‘the Bar’.30 A further example of the genre is the New Parliament of Women (1683), published after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, which was Charles ii’s last elected assembly. It is fairly short, with all of the typical features of the genre –​bolshie women with alliterative telling names rising up against the tyranny of men and claiming their right to political participation and a promiscuous lifestyle equal to that of their husbands and fathers. Its anonymous author was evidently aware of its 1640 predecessor, calling the present assembly ‘new’, while using similar alliterative names such as ‘Jone Jezebel’, ‘Alice Allcock’ and ‘Mary Make-​horn’, and letting his women legislate for the enhancement of their own sexual pleasure.31 This time the focus is on the equal sharing out of men between virgins and widows, and the aim of the assembly is to give unmarried women liberty ‘to use what opportunities they can meet with to their best advantage’, whereas ‘Widows that had lived above Twenty years in Matrimony, and had surpassed the date of Fifty … should not be allow’d above one Husband, if he be young; or if he be older than her self, two friends, because one may be sometimes ill, and not in a condition to pleasure her’.32 As in 1640, the pamphlet has a list of laws attached that the parliament has agreed on. The most interesting example of the genre at the time meanwhile was The Parliament of Women (1684), which will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. What distinguishes this pamphlet from the others is not just that it is longer –​running into 140 pages –​but also that it is more explicitly political and engages with ideas of government in a way that goes beyond a satirical dismissal of the opposition. In fact, it reflects some of the debates conducted by more serious political authors and, in doing so, offers an insight into contemporary fears of mob rule and of the potential threat to the established order posed by political and religious dissenters. It is important to remember that there was no actual Parliament in session in 1684. In fact, there had not been a gathering of MPs and Lords since the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. It was a time of radical Whig and republican activity that had seen the discovery of the Rye House Plot, followed by the arrest and execution of several suspected plotters, including the Commonwealth hero Algernon Sidney. Thus, when the ‘parliament of women’ genre re-​emerges, it is full of its Civil War legacy, but the women depicted are also full of confidence –​an indicator 30 A List of the Parliament of Women (London, 1679). 31 New Parliament of Women, A1v. 32 Ibid., A4r.

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of parliamentary emancipation –​while their discussions at the same time carry the stamp of party politics. Recalling some of the criticism once levelled against the Rump or Cromwell’s Nominated Assembly, the parliament is introduced as an illegitimate assembly from the start, with the author warning that ‘You are not to imagine, that this Assembly was ever call’d together by Writs or Summons’. Rather ‘a certain Company of Select Ladies, and Female-​ Burgesses, ambitious of the Title of Patriotesses … had talk’d themselves into a numerous Society’ and ‘assum’d to themselves the Name of their Sexes Representatives’. (1–​2) There are further hints that the assembly is of a rebellious disposition as the women have ‘agreed to carry on their Designs under the gaudy Mantuaes (for the word Cloak is now to be cast off) of Religion and Property’. Besides, the women decide to gather at Merton Abbey, ‘which they found to be a place where their Husbands Ancestors had sat in former times, and made several Laws, which they resolved to repeal upon the same spot’. (2) The location is of historical significance as Merton Abbey was the gathering place of the thirteenth-​century Parliament of Merton, which passed the earliest legislation included in the official statute books.33 Also, the abbey had once housed parliamentarian troops, which had been garrisoned on the medieval priory site in 1648.34 This history suggests that the female assembly has revolutionary intentions. As in Aristophanes’ play, the women also meet in their husbands’ clothes, ‘For it was but reason, they said, that they should wear the Breeches’, and thus enact their world turned upside down in a visible way. (3) The House of Commons then sets up five committees ‘to draw up the heads of their Grievances against the Male Sex; and to consider of a speedy way of Redress, and of the fittest way to cast off the Yoke of Tyranny which they had so long groan’d under’, another ‘of due Elections, in case of the decease of any of their Members’, one for the ‘Alteration’ of the established religion, one for trade, and one for the repeal of laws and for adding new ones ‘for the advantage of the female Commonweal’. (16–​17) The interesting point here is that the women never even mention the King or any other monarch. The female Parliament of ‘Amazonia’ makes itself sovereign, the upper and the lower house mix together, and the assembly takes on both a legislative and an executive role as had been done by the Commonwealth 33 34

The Statutes of the Realm, ed. E.  T. Tomline, John Raithby, John Caley and W.  Ellitot (London: Eyre, 1810–​28). Daniel Lysons, ‘Merton’, in The Environs of London: Volume 1, County of Surrey (London, 1792), pp.  338–​49. British History Online http://​www.british-​history.ac.uk/​london-​ environs/​vol1/​pp338-​349 [accessed 13 May 2017].

290 Mahlberg government of the Interregnum. (27, 43, 40) While the monarch then had been disposed of through execution, now his son Charles ii had been put out of action by women, both fictitiously and –​to an extent –​in real life. Women’s power over Charles ii was well known. The earl of Rochester had famously quipped: ‘His scepter and his prick are of a length;/​And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other’.35 The royal court was associated with promiscuity and libertinism through which power was diverted away from Charles ii by his mistresses. He was depicted as being as incapable of controlling Parliament as he was of controlling his mistresses. He had failed as a patriarch; now the women are turning on him. They want to get rid of ‘Male Tyranny and Oppression’ and ‘throw off the insupportable Yoak of these Usurpers, and to cut the Gordian Knot of Male Dominion’. (40–​42) So, the women decide to take over ‘the Government of the World’ and resolve that ‘the men were no longer fit to Govern, and that the Government of all the states of the Habitable Earth be deliver’d up into the hands of the Femal Sex’. (57–​59, 66) To wrest power from the men they then decide on a ‘General Insurrection’. For they know: as women who have the courage to rebel in the home will get their victory, so women who rebel in the commonwealth are also set to win. (75–​76) And finally, they discuss ‘what form of Government they should make use of when they had got the power i’ their Clutches’. (77)

The Best Form of Government

One lady, the ‘Dutchess of Babylon’, quickly suggests that ‘Confusion’ should rule, as ‘the Chaos was before the Creation’, and because it was ‘as natural for a Woman to live in Confusion, as for a Salamander to live in the Fire, or an Eel i’ the Mud’. (77–​78) But another woman urges that it was best first to ‘consider, what forms of Government there are, or have been in the World, that we may choose which we like best’. (79) So the women consider all the known forms of 35

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Satyr on Charles II’, ed. Jack Lynch, https://​andromeda.rutgers.edu/​~jlynch/​Texts/​charles2.html, accessed on 28 May 2017. Compare the observation of one of the female MPs in the 1684 pamphlet: ‘But suppose that the Male Sex had all the reasons in their heads, I am sure they carry none i’ their Breeches, and there lies the chief Rudder of their Passions; there we stand at the Helm and can guide it as we please our selves’ (ibid., p.  68). On Rochester’s equation of absolutism with debauchery, see also Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, 1500–​1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Book, 1993), pp. 125–​53, p. 143.

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government, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and their respective excesses, tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy, which the ‘Lady Polyhimne’ claims she knows from the reading of Aristotle’s Politics, Margaret Cavendish’s Olio and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. (79–​80) The women agree that monarchy or male tyranny had so far been the most durable form of government, but they do not want to be ‘govern’d by one Single Person’, as the only positive example of a monarch they can recall is Queen Elizabeth, and it would be impossible to find anyone matching her in quality, as she was unique in the way she ‘clapper claw’d the Spaniards in 88 and rod up on a horse … at Tilbury Camp’. (80–​81, 87) But the women are unsure what type of government should replace it, as they weigh up the pros and cons of several models. The women consider aristocracy as the form of government in which ‘the Government is in the hands of these that are of the highest Rank and Quality in the Commonweal’, but they soon start arguing over their status and ancestry with one woman trying to outdo the other in a way that mocks the claims to lineage often found among the English aristocracy, not least royal claims of descent from Adam. (88) Thus the ‘Baroness of Tongue-​Castle’ claims that her ‘great, great, great, great Grandmothers Daughters great Grandmothers Daughters Daughter was Helen of Troy’s Sister, and came along with Brutes and the Trojans into England’. The ‘Lady Nimble Clack’, in contrast, claims to have derived ‘her Pedigree from the Queen of Sheba, who brought forth Queen Ester; who brought forth Judith of Bethulia, who brought forth Cleopatra, who brought forth Europa, whom Jupiter Ravish’d, from whence her Mother was descended in a direct line’, and so forth. (89–​90) In the end, the women come to realise that disputes about rank would only divide them as they ‘intended to go share and share like in the Government’, and that ‘there must be no Ladies and Commoners; for that would be as if some were better then other’. (91–​92) They also fear that an aristocracy might ‘degenerate into Tyranny’, in which case they had better continue as ‘slaves to men, then become slaves to one another’. (93) Yet, other forms of government do not appeal more. The ‘Countess of Whiggland’ proposes a Commonwealth in which social hierarchies are dissolved and ‘a Weavers wife and a Lady’ can walk together down the street, as she thought it ‘but reasonable that the People should make their own Laws, since they were to be Govern’d by them’. So far, however, this form of government had always been prevented by the ‘Countess of Toryland’. (82–​83) It is considered that, as ‘Women … love Liberty, and to lay themselves Common, certainly there can be no form of Government so natural to the Female Sex as that of a Common-​wealth which allow all the Liberty in the world’. (85) As the women then discuss what a Commonwealth might mean in practical terms, however, they begin to have their doubts. In particular, the women do

292 Mahlberg not want to see a complete breakdown of social hierarchies and a loss of their privileges: ‘if your Commonwealths won’t allow us our Titles, and our Dignities, and our Precedencies, they have lost a friend of the Lady Nimble-​Clack’, says she. (86) And the women cry out against a community of goods as well, demanding ‘all thing Common but Wealths’; and subsequently pass a vote ‘against all sorts of Common-​wealths, Ragusian, Venetian, Low Dutch, Swiss, Geneva, Genoa, but especially against English Common-​wealths for they, they said, were the wickededest Common-​wealths i’ the world’. (94) It might seem strange for the assembly to reject republican rule, as their rebellion is depicted in ways similar to the rebellion of Parliament during the Civil War. However, the republic was an exclusively male world, made up of active citizen soldiers that relegated women to an apolitical private sphere. As Carole Pateman has shown, the original contract establishing civil society among men had been preceded by a sexual or marriage contract, through which wives became the dependents of their husbands. Women’s rebellion therefore had to overturn both the rules of marriage and republican government as well.36 However, the women rather like the idea of anarchy, which they associate with Quakers and Anabaptists, as ‘a form of Government, where every Woman may do what she pleases’. (95) The sectarians had a reputation for teaching the spiritual equality of men and women and for rejecting traditional social hierarchies and outward shows of deference.37 The women in Parliament are thus associated with some of the most radical groupings from the Civil War period. They soon resolve ‘that Anarchee is the most proper form of Government, to preserve the Peace and Tranquility of the Female Common-​weal’ and threaten punishment to those who dare to oppose them, ordering ‘that who ever by Speaking, Writing, or Printing, shall utter or Publish any things to the prejudice or in Derogation of Anarchee, shall be adjudg’d and shall suffer as a Capital Enemy of the Female Sex’. (100) The women’s religious proclivities become further apparent in their disrespect for the Lord’s day reflected in their choice to sit on a Sunday to get on with their business. Besides, they are unwilling to go to Church because ‘they had neither a Marshal, nor a Nye, nor a Goodwin, nor a Sterry, to preach before them’ –​all independent ministers associated with the Westminster Assembly who were by now deceased.38 Other women excuse 36 37 38

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), ch. 6. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London:  Penguin, 1991), especially ch. 10. Stephen Marshall had died in 1655, Philip Nye and Peter Sterry in 1672, and Thomas Goodwin in 1680. See Tom Webster, ‘Marshall, Stephen (1594/​5?–​1655)’, ODNB; Barbara

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themselves from Church service for that day as they were ‘altogether unacquainted with matters of Religion’. (101) In fact, regarding their choice of religion, the women suspect they will have to make one up, having rejected both the Anglican High Church as well as Calvinism or Presbyterianism. (103) The women consider and dismiss Judaism and Islam as well as the Quakerism and Anabaptism they earlier seem to have endorsed, Ranterism and even Catholicism, but then eventually decide on the independent religion ‘for as Anarchee permits every body to do what they please in Temporals, so Independency implys the same liberty in Spirituals’. (109) They resolve ‘that so soon as we shall have set up Anarchee, we will cast off the name of Protestants; and go by the name of Independants’. (111) And with Independency there shall also be ‘a Toleration of all sorts of Religions, that ever were, or ever will be in the World … Papishes only excepted, because the Constitution of the Nation will never digest ‘em’. (111–​12) When the Grand Committee of both houses reassembles after a week, the women’s debate is interrupted by a noise at the door as a ‘leud Rabble’ of common courtesans demands entry to the chamber. (113–​15) The women initially break out into a fight in an attempt to keep the rabble out, but after a cessation of arms the courtesans are admitted into the chamber to vent their anger about seeing ‘such a considerable body of the Female Common-​wealth excluded from our Birth-​right; as if the general Consultations for the general good of the Female Sex were not of equal Importance to Us, as to yourselves’. (118) After this brief struggle, the courtesans are admitted to the assembly as equals and the impeachment of all men begins. (119–​21, 123) The women decide to make laws concerning Matrimony and Cuckoldry and agree that existing marriage laws are to lapse with the change of government. This move also conveniently removes the sins of adultery and fornication for Adultery can never be committed where no Property can be claimed; Nor can she be said to Commit Fornication that has her Body solely at her own dispose, and keeps her Maidenhead for no bodies satisfaction but her own, and when she parts with it, parts with it to please her self, not him that has it. (124–​26, 132)  The women also ban taverns and alehouses as alcohol hinders men’s performance and order a bill to be brought in for the prevention of hard studying and encouragement of idleness as well as a bill for the burning of books and Donagan, ‘Nye, Philip (bap. 1595, d. 1672)’, ODNB; T.  M. Lawrence, ‘Goodwin, Thomas (1600–​1680)’, ODNB; Nabil Matar, ‘Sterry, Peter (1613–​1672)’, ODNB.

294 Mahlberg for the suppression of universities, whereas erotica, such as Nicolas Chorier’s Aloysia Sigea (1660), L’Escole des filles (1655) and Pietro Aretino’s Postures, should be printed and taught in newly established boarding schools.39 (133–​37) The women then repeal statutes formerly made in men’s reign, and condemn Magna Charta –​in particular for its clause demanding the trial of all men by their peers, as men should clearly be tried by women. (137) Other measures carry similar sexual innuendo, such as the repeal of laws on weights and measures as ‘in those times a yard was to contain three Foot by the standard of the Exchequer’, whereas now ‘no such yards’ had been ‘seen or heard of for these many Yeares’. (138) In the end, the women even employ a doctor to help those who ‘had found out a way to make the men give Suck and so swell out their Brests and Nipples after the manner of Women which would be a great ease to the Women, and take a World of trouble off their Hands’. Thus, the women are about to emasculate men completely before the pamphlet ends with a foreboding: ‘The rest is to come’. (139–​40) The remaining question is to what extent the Parliament of Women is about real female power. James Turner has answered this question by describing ‘pornographic satire’ as ‘an unintended tribute to women’s achievement’.40 The image of the unruly woman works because real women were disobedient, they were strong, and men did feel threatened. The pamphlet meanwhile depicts an equality unacceptable to late seventeenth-​century society. In the Parliament of Women the matrons reject the marriage contract and overturn the government of men in favour of a radical equality between the sexes.41 They are no longer subject to their husbands or at their disposal for procreation. Instead, they demand men’s sexual attention as a right. Women’s way into the political sphere thus depends on the rejection of their husbands’ superiority in marriage and the rejection of the social order. The parliament-​of-​women pamphlets thus show that the personal is the political, and that the only thing worse than democratic rule by men is an anarchy ruled by women.

39

See Nicolas Chorier, Aloysia Sigaea Toletanae Satyra sotadica de arcanis amoris et veneris (Gratianopoli, 1660); [Michel Millot,] L’Escole des filles ou la Philosophie des dames (Paris, 1655), and Pietro Aretino/​Marcantonio Raimondi, I Modi (Roma, 1527). 40 Turner, Libertines, p. xiii. 41 However, Anna Becker has suggested that women were less unequal than usually assumed, as the contractual nature of marriage also made women political agents, even though they would always remain subject to men (see Anna Becker, ‘Gender in the History of Early Modern Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 60:4 (2017), pp. 843–​63).

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Conclusion

The 1684 Parliament of Women was intended as a warning for what might happen, if females, and by implication Lords and elected MPs, were given too much free rein. Numerous allusions to Civil War Independents and republicans show that they were still perceived as a threat in the mid-​1680s, even though they had come to be absorbed into the wider dissenting community and the Whig party. But there was a clear sense that a situation similar to that of the 1640s had emerged, and that another Civil War might be imminent if the unruly Parliamentarians would not be kept in check. The return of the parliament-​of-​ women genre demonstrates primarily two things: firstly, that Parliament as an institution had gained considerable power since the 1640s, as is reflected in the increasing confidence of the fictitious female assembly over time, which means that popular government had become a real threat to the patriarchal monarchy. Secondly, that the genre had become a location for the projection of loyalist fears. The rebellious female parliament shows what the real Parliament at Westminster might be capable of if it was not reined in: to take over government, overturn the monarchy and establish what then was understood as mob rule in the nation. While Parliament had already increased considerably in power over the decades, it might still be capable of achieving more. A desire for popular sovereignty and for strengthening the democratic element in the constitution was a real threat to monarchy and the established order. For this, and many other reasons, no Parliament was sitting from 1681. Charles ii would die in 1685 without having called another assembly, thus leaving it to his younger brother James ii to develop a new working relationship with the political nation. James’s failure to respond effectively to this challenge would eventually lead to his own deposition in the Glorious Revolution, though not quite to the anarchy the anxious pamphleteer had predicted in 1684.

Select Bibliography



Primary Sources

Aristophanes, ‘Assembly-​Women’, in Aristophanes, Birds, Lysistrata, Assembly-​Women, Wealth, transl. Stephen Halliwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 143–​97. Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Plato, The Republic, ed. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; 2nd edn). The parlament of women with the merry lawes by them newly enacted (London, 1640).

296 Mahlberg The Parliament of Women: Or, A Compleat History Of the Proceedings and Debates, Of a particular Junto, of Ladies and Gentlewomen, With a design to alter the Government of the World. By way of Satyr (London, 1684).



Secondary Sources

Hughes, Ann, Gender and the English Revolution (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). Mowry, Melissa M., The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–​1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Scott, Jonathan, ‘Radicalism and Restoration: the Shape of the Stuart Experience’, Historical Journal, 31:2 (1988), pp. 453–​67. Turner, James Grantham, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–​1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Weil, Rachel, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, 1500–​1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Book, 1993), pp. 125–​53.

Index Absalom 161, 209, 211 Absolutism 2, 15, 103, 113–​14, 117, 120–​1, 123–​4, 128, 130, 140, 167, 209 Accountability 6, 42, 68, 78, 80–​2, 86 Addison, Joseph 274 Admonition controversy 174, 176, 178 Agreement of the People 7, 25, 36, 41, 45, 69, 75, 148, 184 American Indians 16, 217–​20, 223–​8, 233–​4, 236 Anabaptism/​Anabaptists 15, 134, 147, 158, 190, 292–​3 Anarchy 75, 99, 139, 144, 147, 149, 172, 182, 185, 279–​80, 291–​5 Anaximander 125–​6 Andrewes, Lancelot 153 Anglican 187, 190, 293 Anne, Queen 196 Answer to the Nineteen Propositions 54, 66 Anthony, Susan B. 260 Arcana imperii 163 Aristocracy 47, 49, 52, 59, 62, 66, 69, 71, 74, 76–​7, 96–​7, 99, 113–​4, 121, 123–​4, 126, 141, 175, 179–​80, 182, 184–​5, 240, 245, 279, 283–​4, 291 Aristophanes 282, 289 Aristotelian 27, 33, 42, 69, 257 Aristotle 48–​50, 69, 75–​6, 80, 84, 94, 105, 194, 256, 291 The Armies Vindication 68, 74 Arminianism/​Arminians 138, 167, 223 Arminius, Jacob 224 Army’s Remonstrance 69, 79–​80, 82, 184 Athens 1, 3, 15, 49–​50, 62, 77, 80–​2, 84–​6, 90, 96–​7, 104, 135, 184–​5, 205, 242, 282 Augustine 50, 223 Ayscue, George 249 Baillie, Robert 146–​7 Baker, Phil 25–​6 Balcanqual, Walter 168 Barbados 248–​9 Barclay, John 113–​30 Barclay, William 114–​5, 127–​8 Barebone’s Parliament 46

Bastwick, John 161, 165, 168 Bell, Nathaniel 252 Beza, Theodore 137–​8, 167 Bible/​Scripture 143, 154, 156–​8, 166, 169, 175, 177, 182, 187, 218–​9, 222–​3, 226, 230, 235–​6 Blackwood, Adam 127 Blount, Charles 72 Bodin, Jean 4, 41, 84–​5, 114, 120–​4, 128 Bond of Association 271 Booth, George 61–​2 Boughen, Edward 156, 160 Braddick, Michael 263 Bramhall, John 143–​5 Brett, Arthur 199–​200 Browning, John 155 Brownists 134, 158, 190 Buchanan, George 127, 136–​7, 167 Buck, James 157 Buondelmonti, Zanobio 242 Burrough, Edward 206 Burton, Henry 161–​70 Calvin, Jean 138, 167, 222 Calvinism/​Calvinists 136, 138–​9, 153, 167, 222–​5, 293 Cambridge University 175 Carter, Angela 282 Cartledge, Paul 5 Cartwright, Thomas 136, 139, 175–​6, 180 Case, John 50 Catholic 15, 114–​5, 135, 159, 187, 211, 231, 234, 257, 293 Cavendish, Margaret 291 Cawdrey, Daniel 179 Censorship 15, 235, 287 Chalus, Elaine 274 Charke, Ezekiel 180 Charles i 16, 31, 36, 40, 45, 54–​5, 66, 81, 128–​9, 138–​40, 147–​8, 152, 168–​9, 171, 181, 199, 202, 227, 240, 247–​8, 250–​1, 280–​1, 285 Charles ii 16, 89–​90, 197–​200, 202–​3, 206–​8, 211, 248, 266, 281, 287–​8, 290, 295 Church of England 137, 164, 174–​5, 178, 187, 204

298 Index Dryden, John 12, 196, 208–​12 Du Bartas, Guillaume 204 Duke of Buckingham 139, 164 Duke of Monmouth 209–​12, 287 Dunn, John 5 Dutch Republic 2, 64, 88, 137–​8, 144, 150, 160, 182, 226, 292

Churchill, Winston 132 Cicero 31, 50, 195, 256 Citizenship 16, 19, 21–​2, 24–​7, 31–​3, 35, 37–​43, 78, 80, 82, 84, 106–​7, 142, 197, 234, 246, 258, 260–​4, 267, 275, 277, 282, 292 Civil War(s) 16, 31, 57, 63, 78, 107, 130, 142, 150, 178–​9, 207–​8, 247, 249, 260–​1, 263, 269, 275, 277, 279–​82, 284–​7, 289, 292, 295 Clifford, Martin 72 Cock, George Charles 71, 77–​8 Collinson, Patrick 172 Common people 8, 10, 134, 142–​3, 162–​3 Commonwealth 16, 38, 46–​7, 59–​60, 68, 71–​2, 75, 83, 88, 91–​2, 183, 253, 279, 285, 289–​90 Como, David 224 Conformism/​conformists 153, 174 Congregationalism 179 Conspiracy 162, 167–​8, 171–​2, 264, 269 Conventicles 14, 153, 156–​60, 170, 235, 269 Cosin, Richard 176–​7, 187 Cotton, John 217–​47 Covenanters 12, 140, 168–​9, 171–​2, 276 Crawford, Patricia 261 Cromwell, Oliver 46, 63, 80, 86, 147–​8, 253, 285, 289 Cromwell, Richard 270 Culpeper, Nicholas 71, 75 Cusacke, John 140–​1 Cuttica, Cesare 128, 152, 279

Edinburgh 169, 276 Education 24, 29–​30, 67, 73, 220, 228, 257 Edwards, Thomas 39, 179–​80 Election(s) 7, 9–​10, 25–​7, 42–​3, 46–​7, 50, 56–​7, 60, 81, 83, 86, 91, 97, 122, 126, 129, 153, 176–​7, 180, 184, 187–​90, 192, 221, 223, 234, 289 Elections by lot 10, 189 Elizabeth i 125, 153, 271, 276, 291 Eloquence 118, 126, 135, 161 Elyot, Thomas 52 Emotions 126, 195–​6 Engagement 69, 71, 75, 82 English Revolution 3, 7, 15, 45, 66–​7, 86, 239 Ephori 167, 242 Episcopacy 15–​6, 73, 134, 137, 167, 180, 186 Equality 4, 22–​3, 27–​8, 38, 41, 73, 77, 94, 145, 152, 221, 263, 277, 283, 292, 294 Erasmus of Rotterdam 195 Erbery, William 71, 82–​3 Evelyn, John 116, 197 Evil counsellors 162, 164 Exclusion Crisis 16, 88, 90, 275, 280–​1, 288

Dacres, Edward 241, 243 De las Casas, Bartolomé 232–​3 Demagogues/​demagoguery 11, 13, 49, 135, 139, 196, 211 Democratic government 11–​12, 139, 143, 150, 181, 183, 201, 204 Democratic practices 11, 139, 179 Democratic principles 2, 7, 11, 16, 90, 99, 137, 147–​8 Democratisation/​democratising 4–​5, 9, 15, 54, 59, 142, 152, 171–​2, 206–​7, 219, 284 Diggers 13, 135 Digges, Dudley 56–​7 Direct/​participatory democracy 1, 3–​4, 12, 77 Dixwell, Basil 202–​3 Dixwell, John 202 Dow, Christopher 161–​2, 164–​5, 167–​70

Factionalism 31, 66, 118, 125–​6, 136, 143, 147, 156–​7, 159, 168, 172, 211, 269 Fairfax, Thomas 80 Faithorne, William 198 Familism 146 Femia, Joseph V. 5 Fiennes, William (Viscount Saye and Sele) 249–​50 Fifth Monarchists 47 Filmer, Robert 90–​1, 103–​4, 127–​9 Fisher, Edward 143 Florence 144, 150 Floyd, John 137 Forced Loan 128, 139 Fortescue, John 51, 53 Foster, Nicholas 248–​9 France 36, 51, 64, 128, 136–​7

299

Index Franchise 7, 9, 25–​6, 146, 148, 246, 261, 275, 280 Freedom/​liberty 15–​6, 22–​4, 27, 29, 32–​4, 36–​40, 45–​9, 54–​5, 58–​60, 62–​3, 65, 70, 78, 82–​6, 93, 96, 101–​3, 107, 123, 125, 141, 144, 147–​9, 158, 162, 164, 178, 182, 184, 186, 200, 218, 220–​1, 223–​4, 230–​1, 236, 241, 243–​4, 246, 248, 250, 257, 266, 283–​4, 286–​8, 291, 293 Gellius, Aulus 282 Gender 11, 13, 16, 26, 29, 34, 37–​40, 94, 123, 128, 195, 246, 267–​8, 271–​2, 276–​7, 284 Genoa 97, 144, 292 Gentili, Alberico 231 George i 262 Germany 117, 175 Gillespie, George 180 Glorious Revolution 11, 16, 295 Glover, Samuel 22 Godly 153–​4, 163, 172, 176, 225–​6 Good Old Cause 61, 63 Goodman, John 137 Greece/​Greek 1, 5, 10, 49, 53, 80, 84–​6, 132, 134, 140, 281–​2 Greville, Robert (Baron Brooke) 249, 252–​3 Grimald, Nicholas 195 Grotius, Hugo 221, 223, 227, 231 Guicciardini, Francesco 245 Gunpowder Plot 115, 135 Habermas, Jürgen 9 Hakluyt, Richard 232 Hall, Edmund 67 Hamel, Christopher 37 Hammond, Henry 187–​90 Hammond, Paul 31 Hampden, John 249 Harrington, James 12, 21, 43, 48, 59, 61, 63, 92, 98, 183–​5, 187–​91, 242–​3, 245 Harrison, Edward 69, 75 Harrison, Thomas 69 Hassinger, Erich 117 Hayward, John 127 Henry iv (King of France) 136, 164 Henry viii 52 Heresy 159, 235 Herle, Charles 54, 56 Heylyn, Peter 162–​70, 179

Higgons, Thomas 206, 208 Hill, Christopher 8, 239 Hobbes, Thomas 41, 59, 86–​7, 91–​3, 105, 185, 188–​91 Homes, Nathanael 70, 75, 77, 181–​2 Hooker, Richard 153, 222 Hooker, Thomas 226 Hotman, François 137 House of Commons 47, 54–​6, 66, 69, 75–​6, 78–​80, 85, 101, 140–​3, 149, 279–​80, 289 House of Lords 54–​5, 66, 71, 75–​7, 91, 100, 161, 197, 249, 267, 279, 285, 288, 295 Hughes, Ann 37–​8, 262 Hutchinson, Anne 225 Idolatry 234–​5 IJsewijn, Jozef 120 Independents 134, 142, 144, 146, 150, 179, 292–​3, 295 Indirect democracy 4 Interregnum 21, 182, 290 Ireton, Henry 57, 148, 285 Israel 188, 190–​1, 196, 206, 226, 231 Italian city-​states 5–​6 Jablonski, Steven 33 James vi and i 11, 16, 114–​6, 128–​9, 135–​6, 138, 167, 178, 196, 227 James vii and ii 295 Jerusalem 189 Jesuits 12, 116, 134–​7 Jevon, Rachel 198–​200 Jones, Peter 277 Jonson, Ben 116 Kellet, Edward 155, 157–​8, 164, 170 King, Steven 277 Kloppenberg, James T. 4 Knights, Mark 261, 274 Knox, John 137 Kofmel, Erich 5 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl 247–​9 Kynaston, Francis 128, 140 Lake, Peter 174–​6, 178, 192 Langford, Paul 275 Laud, William 164 Laudian 15, 139, 152–​4, 156–​7, 159, 161, 168, 170–​2, 179

300 Index Laurence, Thomas 157 Le Grys, Robert 116, 128–​9 Leng, Tom 263–​4 Levellers 4, 6–​8, 12–​3, 15, 21–​43, 45, 48, 69, 75, 81, 134–​5, 142, 145–​6, 148, 150, 179, 184, 261–​3, 266, 276 Levelling 67, 75, 134, 140, 147, 154, 171, 182, 184, 205 Lhuyd of Lanforda, Edward 119 Libel 162, 168, 176, 269, 286–​7 Liberal/​modern democracy 2, 4, 7, 41, 102, 108, 194, 261, 263 Lilburne, Elizabeth 265 Lilburne, John 23, 26, 28, 30–​3, 36, 38–​40, 42, 147–​8, 261, 265, 268 Locke, John 12, 64, 88–​9, 91–​5, 98–​108, 127, 221, 230–​1 London 25, 115, 147, 181, 197, 270 Loyal addresses 15, 206, 264, 268–​71, 274 Loyalty 133, 155, 169, 197, 200–​1, 203, 205–​8, 211, 248, 261–​4, 268, 270, 274–​7 Lucca 59, 97 Lucretius 118 Luther, Martin 138 Macaulay, T. B. 149 Machiavelli/​Machiavellian 30, 84–​5, 103, 107, 207, 241–​3, 245 Macpherson, C. B. 25 Mahlberg, Gaby 265 Maloy, Jason S. 226 Malvezzi, Virgilio 85 Many-​headed multitude 8, 10, 137, 149, 196 Mary, Queen of Scots 114 Mason, John 228 Massachusetts 217, 219, 227, 233 Mayer, Alicia 232 Maynwaring, Roger 128, 130 McArthur, Ellen 260 McCormick, John P. 245 McDowell, Nicholas 34–​5 Mechanics 13, 134, 257 Mendelson, Sara 261 Mercurius Politicus 83, 187, 191 Middling sort 10, 28–​9, 134 Midgley, Clare 260 Midland Rising 145 Militia Ordinance 54 Mill, John Stuart 5

Milton, John 12, 15–​6, 21–​43, 47, 60–​1, 116, 127, 148, 199–​200, 239–​47, 253–​8, 262, 267 Mixed government/​constitution 53, 55, 66, 69, 75, 96–​7, 104, 141, 143, 176, 180, 279 Mob rule 21, 172, 279, 288, 295 Monarchical republic 174 Monarchy/​monarchical government 49, 51, 55, 62, 66–​8, 70–​7, 89, 91, 95, 97, 99, 104, 114, 120–​1, 124–​5, 129, 133, 136–​8, 141, 144, 146, 149, 164, 174–​5, 180–​1, 186, 195–​203, 205–​10, 212, 279, 281, 284, 291, 295 Montagu(e), Richard 139, 153 Montaigne, Michel 4 Montesquieu, Baron de 67 More, Thomas 120 Mowry, Melissa 276 Multitude 8, 10, 16, 21, 27–​8, 30–​2, 41, 43, 47–​8, 50–​1, 53, 75–​6, 85, 102, 105, 134–​5, 139, 143, 145–​6, 149–​50, 155, 169, 177, 182, 184, 194–​5, 203, 206 Münster 15, 134, 147 Najemy, John M. 258 Natives 122, 230–​1, 233–​4, 251 Natural law 16, 126, 128, 218–​23, 226, 229–​32, 234–​6 Nedham, Marchamont 12, 21, 43, 48, 57, 60–​1, 64, 79–​81, 83–​6, 183–​7, 191 Neville, Henry 88–​9, 91–​2, 95–​7, 100, 103–​8, 285 New England 2, 4, 76, 160, 179, 182, 217–​20, 226, 228, 230, 232–​3, 236 New Model Army 63, 72, 78, 80, 84, 145–​7 Newdigate, John 135 Nippel, Wilfried 5 Norman Conquest 34 Nussbaum, Martha C. 220 Nyquist, Mary 32 Oath of Allegiance 115 Oaths 92, 261–​4, 267–​9, 274 Obedience 52, 71, 92, 133, 138, 164–​7, 170, 172, 200–​2, 210, 225, 262, 268 Ochlocracy/​ochlocratic 145–​7, 150 Ogilby, John 198 Old Testament 196, 230 Oligarchy 48–​9, 59, 99, 172, 180, 185, 190–​1, 241–​2, 291

301

Index Opitz, Martin 117 Ostracism 10, 68, 80, 84–​6, 140, 184 Overton, Richard 23–​4, 28, 30–​1, 34–​5 Oxford 64, 285 Oxinden, Henry 202–​5 Palmer, R. R. 2, 6, 192 Papacy 191 Parity 38, 75, 134, 147–​8, 152–​3, 180, 182 Parker, Henry 55–​6, 70, 141, 143–​4, 250 Parker, John 66, 69–​70, 74 Parliament 11, 16, 26, 30–​2, 45–​7, 52, 54–​6, 58–​9, 61, 63, 67, 77–​8, 86, 98, 128–​9, 136, 140–​1, 143, 146–​8, 179, 182, 228, 248–​9, 262, 265–​8, 279–​81, 283, 285, 287–​92, 295 The parlament of women (1640) 282, 284–​6 The Parliament of Women (1646) 285–​6 The Parliament of Women (1684) 280, 286, 288, 294–​5 Parliamentarians 140, 143, 147, 202, 249–​51, 268, 283, 295 Parrington, Vernon Louis 221 Passions 30, 49, 149, 194–​5, 200, 206–​7, 211–​3, 244–​5 Pateman, Carole 292 Pattenson, Matthew 138 Peacey, Jason 9, 81 Peltonen, Markku 184, 279 People, the 8, 10, 14–​5, 25, 45, 47–​8, 52, 59–​62, 74, 83, 89, 93–​6, 98–​9, 101, 108, 141, 143, 145, 155, 210 People’s hearts 195–​6, 198, 200, 211 People’s love 195, 199, 202, 206–​8 Pepys, Samuel 197 Pericles 90 Personal Rule 152–​3, 161, 247 Petition of Right 139, 165 Petitioning/​petitions 9, 11, 16, 37–​9, 42, 145–​6, 260–​9, 275–​7 Pettit, Philip 245 Pincus, Steven 261, 276 Plato 5, 90 Poetry 15, 37, 194–​213, 257 Poland 64 Politeia 49, 69 Political agency 13, 263, 268 Popery 162, 167–​8 Popular consent 148, 176, 182

Popular government/​rule 2, 5–​6, 9–​11, 14–​5, 17, 47–​8, 69–​70, 74, 95, 104–​6, 113, 118, 120–​1, 132, 134, 139, 141, 144, 149, 176, 178–​9, 183–​5, 187, 190–​1, 202, 204, 269–​70, 279, 281, 295 Popular participation 9, 11 Popular politics 8, 14 Popular power 10, 41, 86, 142–​3, 179–​80, 183, 210 Popular sovereignty 4, 21, 95–​6, 102, 171, 185, 279–​80, 283, 295 Popular spirits 135, 161 Popular tumults 178 Popular will 90 Popularity/​ie 114, 120, 137–​8, 141, 150, 152–​3, 156, 168–​9, 178, 184, 197, 200, 210, 213, 243 Populism 17, 116, 174–​6, 191 Pordage, Samuel 206, 208, 210–​12 Postlethwait, Walter 180 Potter, Amy 266 Prayer Book 140, 159, 276 Preaching 14, 147, 153–​4, 156–​7, 159–​160, 169, 233 Predestinarian 153, 223–​4 Presbyterians 12, 15, 45–​6, 61–​3, 67, 72, 85, 134, 136, 139, 146, 153, 168, 174–​6, 178–​81, 183, 185–​92, 285, 293 Pride, Thomas 32 Pride’s Purge 32, 45, 67, 69, 147 Protectorate 46–​7, 183, 191, 286 Providence Island 249, 252–​3 Prynne, William 161–​2, 165, 168, 170 Public opinion 9, 17, 142, 261 Public sphere 12, 261, 265 Pufendorf, Samuel 221 Purchas, Samuel 232 Puritans 4, 12, 45–​6, 116, 134–​7, 139, 152–​72, 178–​9, 202, 217–​8, 220–​3, 225, 233, 236, 249, 252–​3, 280 Putney Debates 38, 57, 146, 246 Pym, John 33, 140, 249–​51 Quakers 274, 292–​3 Radicalism/​radicals 25, 147, 268 Rainborough, Thomas 26, 38 Randall, Giles 261, 264, 267 Ranters 293

302 Index Rebellion/​rebels 61, 127, 135, 140, 168, 170, 178, 226, 248, 256, 269, 277, 280–​1, 283–​4, 289–​90, 292, 295 Reformation 52, 178 Regicide 31, 45, 133, 136, 148, 181, 202, 279 Representative democracy 1, 3, 6, 15, 68, 76 Republicanism 14, 22, 24, 27, 42–​3, 68, 133, 150, 174, 186, 245 Resistance theory 79, 115–​7, 167, 226 Restoration 16, 26, 72, 88, 195–​201, 203, 205–​8, 212, 249, 268, 280, 286–​7 Reynolds, John 146 Rich, Robert (Earl of Warwick) 249, 251, 263 Richelieu, Cardinal 119 Rishworth, Samuel 253 Rome/​Roman 5, 36, 50, 52–​3, 55, 70, 82, 90, 103–​5, 107, 121, 125, 132, 141, 166, 241–​3, 246–​7, 252, 257, 281–​3 Rosanvallon, Pierre 6 Rotation 26, 81, 98 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 41, 100 Royalism/​royalists 45, 54–​5, 57, 67, 85, 119, 147, 186, 202, 248, 283, 285 Rucellai, Cosimo 242 Rump Parliament 46, 58, 86, 289 Rutherford, Samuel 179–​80 Rye House Plot 88, 269–​70, 288

Siegl-​Mocavini, Susanne 117, 130 Simpson, Sidrach 188 Skinner, Quentin 24, 32, 66, 101, 245, 250–​1, 258 Skinner, Robert 160, 163–​4 Slavery 15–​6, 32–​7, 246–​8, 250–​8, 260 Smith, John 194 Smith, Justin E. H. 255 Smith, Thomas 52–​3, 55 Solon 96 Spain 122, 125, 129, 231–​3, 249, 253, 291 Spanish Match 138 Sparta 62, 85, 167, 184–​5, 241–​3 Spelman, John 141–​2 Spry, Robert 69, 76, 81, 85 St John, Oliver 249–​51 Stern, Jessica R. 220 Sterry, Peter 191, 292 Stewart, Laura 276 Stoughton, William 176–​7 Streater, John 48, 58–​59, 61, 82–​3, 86, 183, 201 Stubbe, Henry 46, 48, 61–​2, 64–​5, 72, 245 Switzerland/​Swiss cantons 2–​3, 14–​5, 76, 82–​3, 121–​3, 127, 134, 136, 138, 150, 175, 182, 292 Sydenham, Humphrey 155, 158, 170

Salmasius, Claudius 40, 47 Satire 15, 113, 118, 120, 124, 265, 285, 287, 294 Schism 136, 159 Scotland 130, 134, 140, 168–​70, 172, 178, 186 Scott, Jonathan 280 Scott, Thomas 196 Seaman, Lazarus 188–​90 Seneca 119–​20 Separatism/​separatists 158, 219 Sepúlveda, Juan 232–​3 Sexby, Edward 63 Shaftesbury, Earl of 88, 210–​11 Shakespeare, William 196 Sharpe, Kevin 9, 196 Ship Money 140, 249–​50 Shirley, James 201 Shklar, Judith 264 Sibthorpe, Robert 128, 130 Sicily 125–​7 Sidney, Algernon 12, 88–​91, 95, 97, 100–​8, 124, 288

Tacitus 118, 120 Tarquin 105 Tedder, Richard 157 Themistocles 80 Toleration 10, 16, 46, 48, 61–​2, 64, 108, 145, 218–​20, 223, 225, 236–​7, 293 Tribunes of the people 30, 77, 163, 242–​3 Tuck, Richard 6, 41 Turner, James 280, 287, 294 Tyranny/​tyrants 21, 30–​1, 34–​6, 49, 52, 66, 69, 73–​5, 79–​80, 83, 96, 99, 125, 141–​2, 145, 156, 162, 165, 172, 179, 181, 212, 243–​4, 254, 256–​7, 269, 286, 288–​91 Universal suffrage 1, 10 Urbinati, Nadia 245 Urquhart, Thomas 179 VanDrunen, David 229 Vane, Henry the Younger 245 Vattel de, Emer 231

303

Index Venice 76, 97, 140, 144, 158, 167, 182, 241–​3, 292 Verstegan, Richard 137–​8 Virtue/​virtuous 22, 27, 30–​1, 40, 42–​3, 48–​9, 53, 58, 72–​4, 103, 118, 124, 126, 133, 195, 206, 228–​9, 246, 256–​8 Voss van, Lex Heerma 262 Waddell, Brodie 263, 277 Waldron, Jeremy 251 Walter, John 261, 267, 276 Walwyn, William 27–​8, 39 Warren, Albertus 71–​4, 82, 181 Whalley, Edmund 45 Whitgift, John 153, 174–​7, 192 Whiting, Amanda 262–​5, 277 Wilkes, William 146 William iii 261, 264, 271, 276

Williams, David 23 Williams, Griffith 178 Williams, Roger 217–​47 Winstanley, Gerrard 13, 268 Winthrop, John 227, 230–​1 Wither, George 86 Women/​female 11, 16–​7, 37–​40, 94–​5, 119, 123, 157–​9, 177, 246, 257–​8, 260–​77, 279–​95 Wootton, David 142 Xenophon 90, 104 Zaeske, Susan 260, 265 Zagorin, Perez 7 Zaret, David 9, 260–​1, 266, 275 Zuckert, Michael 41–​2 Zwicker, Steven 9