The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History)

The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England

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A booke of Christian prayers, collected out of the auncie[n]t authors, and best learned in our tyme, worthy to be read … in these daungerous and troublesome dayes … , compiled by Richard Day, STC 6429 (London, 1578), fol. 48r. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson

Edited by

JOHN F. MCDIARMID New College of Florida

© John F. McDiarmid 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. John F. McDiarmid has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401–4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The monarchical republic of early modern England : essays in response to Patrick Collinson. – (St Andrews studies in Reformation history) 1. Collinson, Patrick – Influence 2. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1558–1603 3. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1603-1625 4. Great Britain – History – Elizabeth I, 1558–1603 – Historiography I. McDiarmid, John F. 942’.055 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The monarchical republic of early Modern England : essays in response to Patrick Collinson / edited by John F. McDiarmid. p. cm. – (St. Andrews studies in Reformation history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5434-6 (alk. paper) 1. Monarchy–Great Britain–History. 2. Republicanism–Great Britain–History. 3. Great Britain–Politics and government–1485–1603. I. McDiarmid, John F., 1947– II. Collinson, Patrick. JN338.M66 2007 320.94209’031–dc22 2007007387 ISBN 978 0 7546 5434 6 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd. Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents Notes on Contributors

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Editor’s Acknowledgements

x

Abbreviations

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Introduction John F. McDiarmid

1

1

2

3

The Two Republics: Conflicting Views of Participatory Local Government in Early Tudor England Ethan H. Shagan

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Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Monarchical Republic of Tudor England Dale Hoak

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Common Consent, Latinitas, and the ‘Monarchical Republic’ in mid-Tudor Humanism John F. McDiarmid

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The Political Creed of William Cecil Stephen Alford

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‘Let none such office take, save he that can for right his prince forsake’: A Mirror for Magistrates, Resistance Theory and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic Scott Lucas

6

7

75

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Rhetoric and Citizenship in the Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I Markku Peltonen

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‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited Peter Lake

129

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CONTENTS

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The Political Significance of the First Tetralogy Andrew Hadfield

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Challenging the Monarchical Republic: James I’s Articulation of Kingship Anne McLaren

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10 Reading for Magistracy: The Mental World of Sir John Newdigate Richard Cust

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11 English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England Johann P. Sommerville

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12 American Corruption Andrew Fitzmaurice

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13 The Monarchical Republic Enthroned Quentin Skinner

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Afterword Patrick Collinson

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Bibliography

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Stephen Alford is University Lecturer in History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998) and Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002). Patrick Collinson is Regius Professor of Modern History, Emeritus, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his many works are The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), The Reformation (London, 2003) and From Cranmer to Sancroft: English Religion in the Age of Reformation (London, 2005). Along with other honours and distinctions, he has been the recipient of three festschrifts. Richard Cust is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham. His publications include The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, edited with Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake (Cambridge, 2002), and Charles I: A Political Life (London, 2005). Andrew Fitzmaurice is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003), as well as other studies of early modern rhetoric and the ideology of colonization. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author or editor of numerous books on early modern English and Irish literature, including Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl (Oxford, 1997) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005). Dale Hoak is Chancellor Professor of History at The College of William and Mary and Associate Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Among his

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principal publications are The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976), Tudor Political Culture (editor; Cambridge, 1995) and The World of William & Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, edited with Mordechai Feingold (Stanford, 1996). Peter Lake is Professor of History at Princeton University. His publications on Elizabethan and early Stuart religion, politics and culture include Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, edited with Kevin Sharpe (Stanford, 1993) and The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001). Scott Lucas is Associate Professor of English at The Citadel. He has published articles on Tudor and Stuart literature in journals and in books including Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bruce (Newark, DE, 2005). He has recently completed a book-length study of A Mirror for Magistrates. John F. McDiarmid is Associate Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at New College of Florida. His articles on the mid-Tudor Cambridge Humanists and other phases of Tudor and Stuart history and literature have appeared in journals and reference collections. He is currently writing a biography of Sir John Cheke. Anne McLaren is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Political and Cultural History at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558– 1585 (Cambridge, 1999), and of articles in journals and essay collections on the intersections of religion, politics, culture and gender in the early modern period. Markku Peltonen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995) and The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, 2003), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996). Ethan H. Shagan is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. In addition to articles in journals and collections, he has written the multiple-prize-winning Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003) and edited Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’:

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). Quentin Skinner is the Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. His publications include The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978), Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002) and Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, edited with Martin van Gelderen (2 vols, Cambridge, 2002). Johann P. Sommerville is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has written numerous articles, and his books include Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1992), King James VI and I: Political Writings (editor; Cambridge, 1994) and Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (2nd edn, London, 1999).

Editor’s Acknowledgements This volume was conceived in the course of several conference panels in which I participated along with Dale Hoak, and he has nurtured it from the outset with wise counsel and constant support; it would not exist without him. All the contributors to the volume have collaborated in it not only through their scholarly work, but also with suggestions and encouragement. Patrick Collinson has not only supplied the volume’s starting point and its conclusion, but also given me the benefit of his knowledge, understanding and experience as the volume has developed. I am grateful to other scholars who have generously responded to queries and offered their ideas and advice. These include Andrew Pettegree, Diarmaid MacCulloch, John Guy, Thomas S. Freeman, Elizabeth Evenden, Steve Hindle, Germaine Warkentin, Elizabeth Goldring and Ronald Hoffman. Kenneth H. Reigner has provided me with indispensable guidance at all stages in the preparation of the manuscript, and many other kinds of help and support as well. I am grateful for the editorial advice and patience of Thomas Gray and Emily Ruskell, and also to Anthea Lockley, Anne Keirby, Ann Newell, and others at Ashgate. Erin Blake, Heather Wolfe and Georgianna Ziegler of the Folger Shakespeare Library have provided valuable suggestions and the benefit of their expertise. Finally, the Reading Room staff of the Folger, led by Elizabeth Walsh, have given their superlative help with this as with all my scholarly projects over many years.

Abbreviations BL

The British Library

CSP Dom. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI 1547–1553, revised edn, ed. C.S. Knighton DRA

Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar

LP

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, ed. J.S. Brewer et al.

ODNB

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison

STC

A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, first compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave; 2nd edn, ed. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer

TNA

The National Archives [United Kingdom]

WRO

Warwickshire Record Office

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Introduction John F. McDiarmid Patrick Collinson’s essay ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ was first printed in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester in 1987,1 and reprinted in Collinson’s Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994).2 The essay’s essential contention, like its title, was phrased paradoxically: ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which happened also to be a monarchy: or vice versa’ (p. 43). In the first of the essay’s two central sections, Collinson argued that Elizabethans thought of England not as a personal despotism where all power belonged to the monarch, but as ‘a species of republic’: ‘a state which enjoyed [a] measure of selfdirection … but with a constitution which also provided for the rule of a single person by hereditary right’ (p. 36). In his second central section, Collinson gave evidence that this ‘dichotomy’ (p. 43) was a matter not just of thought but of practice, pointing to an interplay among Queen, council and parliament in policy making, suggesting in particular ‘that the privy council … was in a position to contemplate the world and its affairs with some independent detachment, by means of its own collective wisdom and with the queen absent: headless conciliar government’, and again, ‘that at times there were two governments uneasily coexisting in Elizabethan England: the queen and her council’ (p. 42). Collinson framed his two central sections with two sets of ‘sketches’ of republican aspects of Elizabethan England’s politics: first of local communities governing themselves with little reference to the ‘“far off”’ monarchy (pp. 32–4); second of radical expedients devised by Protestant leaders to secure the realm against the menace embodied by Mary Queen of Scots (pp. 43–57). These included the 1584 Bond of Association, whose signers pledged to pursue anyone who brought harm to Queen Elizabeth and exclude from the throne anyone on whose behalf such harm might be undertaken. The Bond committed signers to these courses of action ‘without reference to any laws or rights of succession’, and so presumably they would be carried Vol. 69: 394–424. Pp. 31–57; for the convenience of readers, all references to Collinson’s ‘Monarchical Republic’ throughout the volume cite this text. The essay also appeared in another edition of Elizabethan Essays entitled Elizabethans (London, 2003), and in The Tudor Monarchy, ed. John Guy (London, 1997), pp. 110–34. A related but distinct text is Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Tudor England’, Douglas Southall Freeman Historical Review (Spring 1999): 42–81. 1 2

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out ‘by no other authority than that residing in the body politic’ (p. 50). Another ‘quasi-republican’ measure was the parliamentary bill proposed by William Cecil, Lord Burghley in 1585, whereby, if Elizabeth suddenly died, England should remain for a time without a monarch: parliament and a great council would temporarily rule the realm and eventually choose the Queen’s successor (pp. 51–5). Collinson’s ‘splendidly challenging’3 account of the ‘monarchical republic’ involved disagreement not only with any revived notion of a ‘Tudor despotism’, but also with J.G.A. Pocock’s account of Elizabethan political thought. Collinson noted that for Pocock, ‘[i]n no way was Tudor England a polis or its inhabitants citizens’. Indeed, Pocock had asserted that the conception of ‘civic society as a balance of virtues in a polis or republic’, of a ‘republic of equal citizens’, was ‘something not to be found in England and as yet scarcely imagined there’ prior to 1642.4 Collinson’s argument involved a different perception than Pocock’s of the reception in England of classical republican and humanist ideas. Collinson saw ‘Elizabethan political ideology’ as infected by ‘an anti-monarchical virus which was part of the legacy of early sixteenth-century humanism’. Pocock, on the other hand, believed that what humanist influence generated in early sixteenth-century England was a discourse about counselling the prince, and he saw humanist counsellors as the century went on either dwindling into courtiers or amalgamating with the ‘home-grown’, and non-republican, ideology of the Ancient Constitution.5 In his ‘Afterword’ to the present volume, Professor Collinson describes the genesis of his essay, and then goes on to list subsequent historiographical developments related to the quasi-republican theme. In fact, of course, the essay itself significantly encouraged a number of these developments. ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ has had a notable, ongoing and manifold impact on historical writing about early modern England. Stephen Alford’s work has been particularly closely related to Collinson’s essay in spirit and subject matter. In The Early Elizabethan Polity: 3 Kevin Sharpe reviewing Elizabethan Essays in History Today, 45/7 (July 1995): 53–4 at 54. 4 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 38; Pocock, ‘Chapter IV: England’, in National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1975), pp. 98–117, at 113, and cf. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; reissued with a new afterword, Princeton, 2003), pp. 333–60, especially 354, 360. 5 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 44; Pocock, ‘England’, pp. 103–5, and The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 340–41, 350. Pocock found ‘fragments’ of Machiavellian thought (descended from the Italian republican context) appearing in the ‘Tacitism’ of some Jacobean courtiers, but argued even so that, ‘[t]o the subjects of James I … reconstitution of the realm [as a republic] was as good as inconceivable’ (The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 351, 354).

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William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), Alford found patterns and projects in the politics of Cecil and his colleagues in the 1560s similar to the proposals of 1584–85 that Collinson described, and he traced the story back further in Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002). Alford strongly shares Collinson’s sense of paradox, referring in Kingship and Politics to ‘the constitutional doublethink that lay at the heart of Tudor politics – the … sovereign power of the king governing a polity best ruled by consensus’.6 The issue of the strength of humanism as a factor in Elizabethan and early Stuart political discourse was taken up in Markku Peltonen’s Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). Peltonen explicitly opposed Pocock’s account of humanism’s fortunes in England. While conceding that ‘with the passage of time, the [classical humanist and republican] tradition lost some of its force’, he believed it had much more ongoing vigour through the period of his study than Pocock had allowed, and he invoked Collinson’s ‘Monarchical Republic’ as a precedent for this view.7 Peltonen also challenged another influential analysis of early modern political development, Michael Walzer’s identification of Calvinism as the source for a new sense of the individual’s duty to undertake civic and political action. Peltonen found humanism in Jacobean writings where others had seen Puritanism.8 In his epilogue Peltonen asserted that republican thinkers under Cromwell in the 1650s ‘were, to some extent, direct followers of the earlier generations of humanist and republican writers’.9 Collinson had been more conservative on this juncture, ending his essay by disclaiming any notion that Burghley’s 1585 proposal ‘foreshadowed proleptically’ or was identical with the republicanism of the Civil War and Cromwell eras.10 Blair Worden has sought to differentiate Peltonen’s over-all understanding of the place of republican concepts in ‘the intellectual landscape of precivil-war England’ from Collinson’s. Worden reads Collinson as quite conservative in ‘his intention’, and Peltonen and others as going well past him to ‘reach for the term “republicanism” too readily’.11 Lively P. 71. Pp. 4–7, 311. For Pocock’s response to Peltonen (and, to a lesser extent, Collinson), see The Machiavellian Moment, 2003 afterword, pp. 564–5. 8 Peltonen, pp. 12–14, 231–2. Cf. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: a Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1965), e.g. pp. 1–4. 9 P. 311. 10 ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 55. 11 Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), vol. I, pp. 307–27, quoting 308, 313. 6 7

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disagreement about the work of Peltonen and others seen as aligned with him persists in the present volume. Beyond such debates, Collinson’s concepts in ‘The Monarchical Republic’ have become an important point of reference throughout current study of Tudor and Stuart political history. In a paper read in 1996, C.S.L. Davies discussed the deployment in the 1530s of a doctrine of ‘popular consent expressed through Parliament’ as legitimating the establishment of the Royal Supremacy, and saw this foreshadowing Elizabethan political discourse that Collinson described.12 Citing Collinson, John Guy has characterized Burghley’s plan for a conciliar/parliamentary interregnum as ‘aristocratic republicanism par excellence’ and, venturing upon the uneasy topic of precedents for events post-1642, likened the plan to the proceedings of privy councillors who formed a provisional government after the flight of James II in 1688.13 Guy applied the label ‘the second reign of Elizabeth I’ to a changed politics which he and others saw supervening from the late 1580s onwards.14 Guy spoke of ‘the idiom of “mixed polity”’, and Peter Lake of a shared ‘vision of the regime as some sort of “monarchical republic”’, as characteristic of the political leadership (at least apart from the Queen herself) earlier in the reign, whereas by the 1590s ‘a swing to the right’ had occurred and authoritarian attitudes were shaping policy in both church and state.15 For the early Stuart period, post-revisionist scholars who have refined and developed the definition of a ‘country’ ideology as an important political force have seen ‘the collective, participatory, “republican” elements in the Elizabethan political culture’ highlighted by Collinson as an important source for it.16 These scholars, including Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, also have seen Calvinist influence not as an alternative to that of classical humanism but as complementing it, with 12 ‘The Cromwellian Decade: Authority and Consent’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth ser., 7 (1997): 177–95, at 188 and n. 49. 13 ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310, at 302 and n. 33; ‘Elizabeth I: The Queen and Politics’, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 2: Where Are We Now in Shakespearean Studies?, ed. W.R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 183–202, at 189–90 and nn. 47, 49, 51. 14 Guy, ‘The 1590s: the Second Reign of Elizabeth I?’, in Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–19. 15 Guy, ‘Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State’, in Collinson (ed.), The Sixteenth Century 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 113–37, at 136; Lake, ‘The “Anglican Moment”? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s’, in Stephen Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion (Norwich, 2003), pp. 90–121, at 106. 16 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn (New York, 1998), p. 86, cf. 80; see also Richard Cust, ‘“Patriots” and “Popular Spirits”: Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics’, unpublished paper, pp. 15–17.

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both promoting conscientious, active participation by Protestant patriots in safeguarding and promoting the well-being of the commonwealth.17 Besides its impact on the study of different periods in general political history, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ has been a stimulus for the development of some particular scholarly topics and sub-fields. Its influence has operated in tandem with that of another of Collinson’s works from the late 1980s, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1989.18 ‘De Republica Anglorum’ described and promoted a ‘new political history’ that Collinson saw coming into being in the 1980s, ‘an account of political processes which is also social’. This history would embed politics in, and depict it as an aspect of, the life of the community at large, seeking ‘to explore the social depth of politics, to find signs of political life at levels where it was not previously thought to have existed’ (p. 11). ‘De Republica Anglorum’ shared ‘The Monarchical Republic’’s sense of the paradoxical or dual nature of the Elizabethan polity, for instance describing its denizens as ‘citizens … concealed within subjects’ (p. 19).19 But in this essay Collinson drew special attention to ‘quasi-republican modes of political reflection and action’ (p. 18) beyond the court, council, or parliament, in the activities of lawyers, publicists, preachers, gentry elites, and rural churchwardens, and thus portrayed ‘self-governing’ as a practice permeating the society. Steve Hindle has called ‘De Republica Anglorum’ a ‘clarion call’ evoking, among other things, heightened attention to the politics of local communities, including self-governing processes within them. Hindle has edited the documents of the 1596 Swallowfield ‘town meeting’ which Collinson had ‘sketched’ in both ‘The Monarchical Republic’ and ‘De Republica Anglorum’.20 A Collinsonian perspective has shaped and energized the re-examination of

17 Hughes, pp. 82–5; Cust, ‘“Patriots’’’, pp. 17–19, cf. Cust, ‘Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Cust and Hughes (London, 1989), pp. 134–67, especially 161; see also, in the same collection, pp. 72–106, Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, at 89. 18 The text cited in this ‘Introduction’ is that in Elizabethan Essays, pp. 1–29. 19 ‘De Republica Anglorum’ also reiterates ‘The Monarchical Republic’’s critique of Pocock; see pp. 17–18. 20 ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: the Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 835–51 (the reference to the ‘clarion call’ is at 836; for Collinson’s references to Swallowfield, see ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 32–3, ‘De Republica Anglorum’, pp. 23–5). For Hindle’s reception of Collinson, see also Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (New York, 2000).

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local governance by other recent scholars as well, such as Mark Goldie and Phil Withington.21 While Collinson usually referred in ‘De Republica Anglorum’ to the reintegration of political with ‘social’ history, he expanded the phrase at one point to ‘social and cultural’ and throughout the essay repeatedly referred to ‘cultures’, ‘political culture’, or ‘those webs of significance which … make up … human culture’.22 John Guy and Natalie Mears have rightly emphasized the cultural dimension of the ‘new political history’ for which ‘De Republica Anglorum’ ‘became a manifesto’.23 The 1990s saw the publication of important collections of essays on Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake)24 and Tudor Political Culture (ed. Dale Hoak),25 as well as major monographs such as Anne McLaren’s Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I.26 ‘Political culture’ in these works usually encompassed the ideological underpinnings of political action and often ideology’s manifestations in literature, material objects including works of visual art, and various modes of performance.27 As Sharpe and Lake noted, historians’ apprehension of culture as an aspect of politics coincided with New Historicist literary scholars’ apprehension of the literary as political, the interpretation of literary texts as shaped by (and also reshaping) power relationships of the society from which they come.28 Theoretical constructs applied by some New Historicists tended to emphasize the power of ‘hegemonic’ forces in the culture to dominate or contain all opposition, and in the early modern English context encouraged accounts that portrayed the monarchy as overwhelmingly powerful. Some politically oriented literary scholars, especially recently, have resisted this model, appealing to historical evidence that the polity was more pluralistic and that quasi-republican thought and practice were viable. Collinson’s 21 Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94, especially 176ff; Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: Urban Political Culture in Post-Reformation England Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001): 239–67, especially 247–55, and The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). 22 ‘De Republica Anglorum’, pp. 7, 9, 11. 23 Guy, ‘Introduction’ to Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy, pp. 1–7, at 6; Mears, ‘Courts, Courtiers and Culture in Tudor England’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003): 703–22, at 703–4, 710–11. 24 Stanford, 1993. 25 See n. 13 above. 26 Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999). 27 See e.g. Guy, Tudor Monarchy, pp. 3–4, 7; Sharpe and Lake, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–20, at 3, 6, 8–9; Mears, 713–15. 28 Sharpe and Lake, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–5; cf. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley, 1988), pp. vii–xiii, at vii–viii.

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work, and also Peltonen’s, have served as important support for these scholars, who include David Norbrook and Andrew Hadfield.29 Literary and historical scholarship have also intersected in the tremendous expansion in the last thirty years of attention to the roles of women and to gender in general in the early modern period. ‘De Republica Anglorum’’s agenda of reintegrating the social and the political and finding ‘signs of political life at levels where it was not previously thought to have existed’ was compatible with the emerging study of women’s political participation and the new assessments of the significance of Elizabeth I’s gender for the history of her reign.30 On the other hand, ‘The Monarchical Republic’’s interpretation of the Elizabethan council’s degree of independence in terms of quasi-republican attitudes stands in some contrast with the more gendered-oriented interpretation of Anne McLaren, who saw the ‘[p]erceived monarchical incapacities’ of the minor Edward VI and the women Mary and Elizabeth as the sine qua non for ‘the “mixed monarchy” enacted in Elizabeth’s reign’.31 Differing views of the impact of gender and ideology in the dealings of Queen and council continue to be put forward.32 Energizing study and debate about quasi-republican aspects of Tudor and Stuart political life and contributing to reassessments of different periods and the development of new topics, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen 29 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 10, 12; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Shakespeare and Republicanism: History and Cultural Materialism’, Textual Practice, 17 (2003): 461–83, at 462–6; see also Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005). 30 ‘De Republica Anglorum’, p. 11; Collinson refers at pp. 6–7 to studies of women as part of the new social history he hopes political history will rejoin. To mention just a few instances, recent studies of the political roles of women include Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), and James Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, 2004); among studies of Elizabeth and women rulers are Constance Jordan, ‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987): 421–52, Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994), and Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1995). 31 McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 911–39, at 912, and Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I, p. 134. Collinson mentions the sequence of the reigns of a child and of two women in ‘The Monarchical Republic’ (p. 56) but does not give it the explanatory weight McLaren does. In the ‘Afterword’ to this volume, Collinson suggests ‘we might be talking about a monarchical republic even if Elizabeth had been a man’; see p. 253 below. 32 See Guy, ‘Elizabeth I: The Queen and Politics’, 191, 193; McLaren, ‘The Quest for a King: Gender, Marriage, and Succession in Elizabethan England’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002): 259–90, especially 270; Mears, 716–17.

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Elizabeth I’ has been a significant source and resource of historiography about early modern England in the last twenty years. The essay and the debate about English republicanism it encouraged have also been part of the growing study of republicanism in early modern Europe as a whole. Since the appearance of Hans Baron’s thesis that a ‘socially engaged, historicallyminded’ ‘civic humanism’, arising in defence of the Florentine republic in the early 1400s, was the essential point of origin of modern Western republican thought,33 early modern republicanism, as Keith Thomas noted, ‘has become an increasingly popular theme’ in historical writing.34 Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975) had a major role in suggesting the theme’s possible dimensions, laying out a republican trajectory that went from Italian origins to a mid-seventeenth-century development in England and then on to the America of the Revolution and the Constitution. Pocock’s belief that ‘civic society’ as ‘a polis or republic’ was ‘scarcely imagined’ in England earlier than 1642 was as has been said part of the occasion for Collinson’s essay. Elizabethan England is not the only site that, according to some scholars, was improperly left out of Pocock’s account; Jonathan Scott with others has argued that the republican ‘express … locomotive’ surely also made a ‘stop’ in the early modern Netherlands.35 Quentin Skinner further explored Italian sources of modern republicanism, as well as Italian humanism’s legacy, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978). Since then, Skinner has continued to develop his own views about the meaning of liberty and the impact of Roman thought in the early modern period, and also played a major role in the field in other ways, including as coeditor of large collective works such as Machiavelli and Republicanism36 and Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage.37 In the latter, essays presenting varying views on England were set into the context of interpretation of European republicanism as a whole.38 An essay by Peltonen on ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, which quoted Collinson’s formula of ‘citizens …

33 Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), p. 461, quoted in Albert Rabil, Jr., ‘The Significance of “Civic Humanism” in the Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance’, in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, ed. Rabil (Philadelphia, 1988), vol. I, Humanism in Italy, pp. 141–74, at 151. 34 Thomas, ‘Politics: Looking for Liberty’, The New York Review of Books, 52/9 (26 May 2005): 47–53, at 48. 35 Scott, ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-Century England and the Netherlands’, in van Gelderen and Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. I, pp. 61–81, at 62–3, 65, 76–80. 36 Ed. Gisela Bok et al. (Cambridge, 1990). 37 See above, n. 11. 38 E.g. the essays of Worden and Scott (see nn. 11 and 35), and of Skinner (‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, vol. II, pp. 9–28).

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concealed within subjects’, was juxtaposed with other scholars’ work on citizenship in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland.39 Skinner in his introduction to Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage points to the question of whether ‘in discussions of our republican heritage … we are confronting a usable past’.40 It is certainly the case that the current lively investigation of republicanism in the early modern past is to some degree actuated by, and being carried out with an eye to, present concerns. Collinson has observed that ‘the entire enterprise of social history’ with which he sought to reconnect political history in ‘De Republica Anglorum’ ‘is certainly the offspring of radical/liberal politics in the twentieth century’.41 Concerns of today in Europe, the United States and elsewhere all resonate with the questions about self-governing, liberties and the political involvement of citizens that historians of the early modern era are asking. The influence of the present on historical scholarship can lead to misconstructions, including the ‘whiggishness’ that sees the past as an upward path to the present or a ‘presentism’ that ignores the past’s difference. Critical awareness, scrutiny and debate are requisite as checks against such dangers. But it is inescapable that changing historical circumstances should raise new questions in historians’ minds, which may lead to new genuine perceptions of the past. In an address upon receiving an honorary degree at the University of Essex, Collinson said ‘History is both the voices of the past and our engagement with those voices: a strenuous and continuing dialogue between then and now’.42 The extensive, diverse, and significant scholarship that has drawn on ‘De Republica Anglorum’ and ‘The Monarchical Republic’ exemplifies this continuously evolving historical exchange. ••••• The purposes of this volume are to examine from different points of view the idea that early modern English political practice and political culture had quasi-republican elements and to bring the nature and dimensions of such ‘monarchical republicanism’ into sharper focus, to explore its conceptual content and practical manifestations in different areas of political life, its development through the Tudor and early Stuart period, and its interaction with other elements in early modern English ideology, politics, and social and cultural life. The contributors to the volume are scholars who have been engaged in some of the main kinds of research and 39 Peltonen’s essay is in vol. I, pp. 85–106, quotation at 87, cf. 105; the other essays alluded to are on pp. 107–66. 40 ‘Introduction’, vol. I, pp. 1–6, at 6. 41 Fax message to the editor, 19 May 2005. 42 ‘Response by Professor Patrick Collinson’, delivered 13 April 2000, available at http://www.essex.ac.uk/vc/orate2000/Collinson%20Response.rtf.

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also some of the debates affected by Collinson’s essay. There was no desire to produce a volume that would hew to any kind of ‘party line’. Further, we have aimed for a volume that would not simply present the existing ‘state of the question’ in different areas, but embody new research and suggest directions for future work. On the twentieth anniversary of ‘The Monarchical Republic’’s publication, we hope the volume will further the burgeoning study of quasi-republican aspects of the Tudor/Stuart polity that Collinson helped stimulate. While the concept of the volume clearly entailed including essays on the core political phenomena and interpretative questions Collinson addressed in ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, we also wanted the kind of breadth and context for political history that he called for in ‘De Republica Anglorum’. Thus we welcomed contributions on thought and practice not only at the political ‘centre’ but also in localities and the American colonies, on poetic and dramatic texts, and on such topics as education, reading practices and humanist philology. The most striking difference between the subject matter of our volume and of Collinson’s original essay has to do with chronological range. In ‘The Monarchical Republic’, Collinson was concerned with the reign of Elizabeth, although he alluded there and elsewhere to the importance of other periods, particularly the reign of Edward VI, for the development of the patterns he was discussing.43 Subsequent scholars have found the ‘monarchical republic’ a useful term to bring to bear on politics through a longer span of time, and we continue this tendency by including essays on topics from the 1530s up to the era of the Civil War, as well as Quentin Skinner’s coda on the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The usual constraints, such as prior commitments that prevented some scholars from joining us and the need to keep the volume to a manageable length, have forced us to forego some topics we would gladly have included. Ethan Shagan’s and Richard Cust’s essays deal with towns and with the ‘gentry republic’ in Warwickshire respectively, but as Professor Collinson notes in his ‘Afterword’ we lack coverage of ‘the urban dimension of the English monarchical republic’.44 Anne McLaren brings the category of gender into the volume in her discussion of ‘James I’s Articulation of Kingship’, and Elizabeth I of course figures in several essays, but the political lives of other Englishwomen could well have received attention. Studies of visual arts and material culture would have complemented Scott Lucas’s and Andrew Hadfield’s contributions on literature. All our contributions deal with England (or, in one case, its colonies), but it certainly should 43 ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 51, 56; cf. ‘De Republica Anglorum’, pp. 14– 17, 20; Collinson, ‘Conclusion’ to Collinson (ed.), The Sixteenth Century 1485– 1603, pp. 217–41, at 232–6. 44 See below p. 258.

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not be inferred that we think relations to or comparisons with the other British realms and continental Europe are unimportant. Richly productive work could be done on all these and other topics that it was not possible to include here. In the ‘Afterword’ Collinson responds to all the essays in the volume; I will try to make some different general and specific comments on them here. Blair Worden has observed that ‘[t]erms of ideological description are useful only if there is a common perception of their meaning or meanings’, and suggested that such common ground is lacking among recent scholars who have applied ‘republic’, ‘republicanism’ and related terms to early modern England.45 In this volume, where the subject is explicitly quasi-republican thought and practice, most contributors seem to have in mind something like what Collinson had in mind in his original essay: thought and practice grounded in the sense that a power inhered in the English body politic to sustain and rule itself, and that if need be this power might be exercised without a monarch’s sanction, or even against a monarch’s will. Several contributors hark back to Collinson’s prime example, Burghley’s plan that council and parliament could rule England for a time without a monarch in the event of Elizabeth’s sudden death. Stephen Alford refers to Burghley’s willingness as a public man acting for the safety of the commonwealth to transmit the warrant for Mary Queen of Scots’ execution without Queen Elizabeth’s knowledge. For McLaren, ‘the monarchical republic recrudesced’ in the seventeenth century at times when ‘godly English men’ felt called upon ‘to disallow the claims to absolute entitlement … of a blood-right king’.46 About half the essays in the volume show how quasi-republicanism of this kind appears in various texts or phases of early modern English history, including ones where it has not been discerned previously. Most of the examples in ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ came from the 1570s and 80s (Swallowfield from 1596). Alford in The Early Elizabethan Polity found ‘monarchical republicanism’ in Cecil’s policies in the 1560s. The essays in this volume by Dale Hoak, the editor and Alford follow Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith and colleagues of theirs further back up the road, to the time of their earliest political power under Edward VI. Hoak argues that very early in Edward’s reign Smith and Cecil had already formed a conception of parliament as having an ‘indispensable role in exercising the royal supremacy’.47 It was evident in their work in managing the enactment of the Edwardian Reformation and in the propaganda campaign in support of Anglo-Scottish union. The editor outlines the republican ideological content of writings from the 1540s through the 1560s by Smith and 45 46 47

Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic’, p. 307. See below, p. 168. Quoting p. 52 below.

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other members of the Cambridge humanistic circle to which he and Cecil belonged. Alford’s essay is an overview of Cecil’s long career from Cambridge in the 1530s to his valedictory letter to his son Robert in 1596. As in his previous work Alford brings out paradox, ambiguity and tension, this time primarily in Cecil’s concept and practice of counsel. Lucas’s reading of A Mirror for Magistrates revises two different previous scholarly conclusions at once. Lucas shows that the Mirror poems written early in Mary’s reign teach not an unqualified doctrine of obedience, as previous interpreters have thought, but on the contrary the need for magistrates actively to resist princes who behave tyrannically. The Mirror was reprinted over and over through Elizabeth’s reign and beyond; on Lucas’s reading of it, then, much more ‘resistance theory’ in textual form was being published in Elizabethan times than previous scholars (including Collinson) have recognized. Hadfield also rereads a muchstudied text, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays. It is not new to suggest these plays were meant to warn Elizabethans about the evils of civil war; but Hadfield recasts this interpretation in quasi-republican terms, noting overtones in the plays from Lucan’s account of the debacle of the Roman republic. Lucas, Hadfield and also Cust all show early modern Englishmen attending to England’s history with the humanistic expectation that it should supply examples relevant to the commonwealth’s current situation and needs. Sir John Newdigate, the figure Cust studies, clearly was the kind of ‘magisterial reader’ the Mirror poets hoped to address, and while the Mirror Lucas discusses, the original compilation begun by William Baldwin, does not appear in Cust’s lists of Newdigate’s reading, one of the later texts imitative of it, Whetstone’s Mirour for Magestrates of Cyties, does. Cust’s essay, another in the growing number of illuminating studies of early modern reading practices, shows that the Mirrors’ writers’ professed expectation that their work might guide readers engaged in governance was at least sometimes actually fulfilled. The essay also shows that by 1600 humanist and quasi-republican concepts were informing the practice not just of royal counsellors like Burghley but of members of provincial elites. Fitzmaurice, whose Humanism in America described the writings promoting and justifying colonization of America as permeated by the rhetoric of civic humanism, goes on in his essay for this volume to discuss texts that analysed the new colonies’ problems. He finds civic humanism pervading these too, in that they used humanist categories of corruption and faction in diagnosing the dysfunctional colonial societies. Fitzmaurice also deals with the issue of Tacitism, suggesting that its relation to humanist republicanism not only is variously interpreted in current scholarship but was variously understood in early modern times.

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The contributions to the volume discussed so far expand our sense of the sites, levels and forms in which quasi-republican thought and practice appeared in early modern England. On the other hand, Johann P. Sommerville and Peter Lake emphasize limits on quasi-republicanism as a factor in the period and suggest that previous scholars have overestimated it. (Both Sommerville and Lake also have other points to make, which will be dealt with later.) Like Blair Worden, Sommerville and Lake say their disagreement is not with Collinson, whom they, like Worden, portray as relatively modest in his claims. Others have gone too far: Peltonen, Norbrook and Skinner appear on both Sommerville’s and Lake’s lists. Sommerville argues that common places of early Stuart political discourse labelled republican by Peltonen, Norbrook or others (such as the ideal of a life of virtuous public action) were in fact just as likely to occur in monarchist texts. Lake’s stress on limitations can perhaps be read as a shift of emphasis in his account of the ‘monarchical republic’’s Elizabethan trajectory. In an essay printed in 2003 (and partly quoted earlier) Lake said that a ‘vision’ of ‘some sort of “monarchical republic”’ predominated in the ‘political establishment or elite’ until the late 1580s, after which ‘the regime … increasingly took on a distinctly “absolutist” colouring’. In that essay Lake cited Whitgift’s polemic against Cartwright in the 1570s as a kind of foretaste of the later absolutism.48 Now in his essay for this volume, Lake stresses the ‘structural logic’ that linked Whitgift’s attack, and Grindal’s fall, to the ‘outcome’ in the 1590s. The ‘monarchical republic’ now is portrayed not so much as prevalent (if not unchallenged) up to the reign’s later years, but rather as under a building siege from the late 1560s onwards. Lake refers to Burghley’s employment of print and other media to build popular support for royal policies, or sometimes to put pressure on the Queen to accept policies she disliked. The issue of the engagement of the populace in politics connects Lake’s essay to Peltonen’s. Peltonen documents more comprehensively than he had previously the tension in English humanism between an aristocratic and a more democratic vision of the republic.49 The tension is cast in terms of opposing views of rhetoric: as a tool of citizenship that should be in the hands of all, or one that should be reserved to the aristocracy, who would use it in debate among themselves and to bring the populace to order when necessary. Relating politics to language and to rhetorical education, Peltonen’s essay has links to the editor’s and to Cust’s. McLaren analyses a hitherto little noticed but remarkably substantial and systematic argument for absolute monarchy from the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Sir Thomas Craig’s defence of James of Scotland’s Right of Succession See n. 15 above. Compare Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, pp. 95–6. 48 49

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to the Kingdom of England. As in McLaren’s Elizabethan studies, gender is an important factor here, this time in that monarchy for Craig was part of the divinely-decreed order of patriarchy, and in that he used ideas about patrilineal descent to define James as actually an Englishman, not a foreign interloper. Craig’s work was meant as a forceful rebuttal of ‘monarchical republicanism’; however, McLaren also says the latter remained a potential or actual competitor throughout the seventeenth century with the Stuart concept of kingship that Craig articulated. Besides presenting and analysing instances of quasi-republicanism, and arguing for limits and describing opposition to it, one further kind of work done by several of the contributors to the volume will be discussed here – not that these are the only categories one could use in thinking about this array of scholarship. Several contributors refer to different ideologies and traditions that have been cited as encouraging and informing political participation in early modern England, and seek to emend our sense of their roles and relative significances. It was mentioned earlier that Sommerville and Lake both have other points to make besides the ones about quasirepublicanism’s limits. Sommerville’s other main aim is to show that in the early Stuart parliaments, resistance to royal pretensions and defences of the liberties of Englishmen were not couched in the neo-Roman discourse identified by Skinner. Talk about freedom and bondage was based on the English common law tradition, not on Roman concepts. Lake faults some accounts of ‘monarchical republicanism’ not only as overstated but also as ‘too resolutely secular’. Not classical humanism by itself, but a ‘meld’ of humanist and Protestant influences promoted active citizenship in early modern England.50 According to Shagan, Henrician townsmen’s sense of entitlement to a degree of local self-governance was grounded in custom and tradition, not humanistic ideals. There was not just contrast but conflict; humanists like Starkey were actively hostile to the ‘vastly heterogeneous’ multitude of modes of local self-rule that had grown up over the centuries, as they were to ‘the precedent-based system of the English common law’.51 Collinson linked the practices of Elizabethan counsellors like Burghley and villages like Swallowfield as both instances of a capacity for political ‘selfdirection’. Shagan stresses that his very different emphasis on disparate and conflicting local and national ‘republics’ is based on evidence from the Henrician period; the situation might have changed by the 1580s; indeed, Cust’s essay suggests that by 1600 at least members of the gentry were seeing local politics in humanistic ways. But Shagan certainly complicates 50 Quotations from pp. 135 below. Cf. Jonathan Scott’s criticism of ‘the greatest shortcoming of the existing literature on English republicanism: the relative neglect of its religious dimension’ (‘Classical Republicanism’, p. 61). 51 Quoting pp. 20, 26 below.

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our sense of the grounds of quasi-republican practices, and, as he says, his essay points to the need for much further research. Thus a dozen essays in the volume explore manifestations, limits, and different grounds of quasi-republicanism in England from the reign of Henry VIII up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Skinner’s contribution takes us into an era when the politics Collinson described, of ‘a republic which happened also to be a monarchy: or vice versa’, was seen by some as no longer viable and the Rump Parliament cut through the paradox, declaring England no longer a monarchy but instead a ‘free state’. But Skinner shows that what proved to be a more enduring model for the English state had appeared in the formulation of Henry Parker in 1642, of the monarchical republic as a polity ‘monarchical in form [but] republican in character’, with the monarch having no discretionary powers. This was to be a staple understanding of the polity in whig political discourse from the Glorious Revolution on. Of course it was noticeably different from the political conceptions Collinson wanted to capture (and this volume has sought to examine). The ‘monarchical republic of early modern England’ certainly featured a monarch possessed of discretionary powers. But some of its leaders thought that the commonwealth had the power to survive for a time without one, and the much-reprinted Mirror for Magistrates taught that the monarch’s powers should be overridden if ill used. The historical processes that led from this complex situation to Parker’s comparatively clear cut and explicit constitutional vision remain open to study and debate. ••••• Where does the volume leave us? Of course with questions, about topics which were not dealt with, but also questions that the essays included provoke, such as those just mentioned arising from Shagan’s and Skinner’s work. What follows are a few observations, certainly not comprehensive, on patterns and issues that the volume on balance seems to present. First the volume certainly strengthens the impression that quasirepublican elements appeared in English political thought and practice throughout the early modern period. But the volume leaves the question of just how strong these elements were. Lucas, Peltonen, Hadfield and Cust taken together portray quasi-republican conceptions and an ‘ideological capacity for resistance’52 as substantial components of Elizabethan political culture. But Lake argues that, at a time when quasi-republican tendencies have been seen as shaping actual Elizabethan governance most strongly, they were already being countered by strong opposition. His essay and Alford’s contribute to renewed scrutiny of the Queen’s dealings 52

Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 44.

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with her council, which is also exemplified in the work of Natalie Mears (and in Collinson’s responses to both Lake and Mears in his ‘Afterword’ here).53 With regard to the early Stuart period, Cust describes a Jacobean gentleman who was imbued with quasi-republican ideals, but contrasts him with the ‘generation which … came to political prominence in the 1630s and 40s’, which had absorbed a ‘profoundly sceptical attitude to politics’ from Tacitus.54 Fitzmaurice identifies civic humanist aspects of discourse about the colonies and sees Tacitism as ambiguous in its significance. Sommerville decries excessive claims about republicanism in early Stuart discourse. McLaren asserts that the ‘the political dynamics of the Stuart century … involved debating and contesting the [monarchical republican] conception of English kingship’.55 These views may not all be mutually exclusive, but they do not seem to reflect a consensus. Collinson’s contention that Elizabethans could think of England as ‘a species of republic’ has clearly made a difference in the analysis of early modern English politics in general, and helped us see things we did not see before; now there is debate about what Lake calls ‘maximum and minimum versions of the monarchical republic’.56 The other pattern that comes through most strongly in the volume (for this reader at least) is reference to a multiplicity of kinds of discourse or ideology as involved in early modern English quasi-republicanism. The impact of civic humanism is clearly apparent. However, a majority of contributors also connect quasi-republican politics to religious backgrounds and bases, mainly Reformed Protestant (but Lake and McLaren point out that Catholics could also make quasi-republican arguments). Shagan and Sommerville, in different ways, reassert the importance of native English traditions including the common law tradition, and this point comes up more incidentally in other essays (see for instance Lucas on the Mirror poet Ferrers’s evocation of Magna Carta). There would seem to be much room for further study of the roles and interactions of these various shaping influences. Conceptual relations and differences between the Reformed and humanist traditions could be further explored, as could the influence not only of Calvin but of other Reformed leaders such as Vermigli.57 Not all English humanists showed such antipathy to England’s law as Starkey; Sir Thomas Smith devoted much of his De Republica Anglorum to describing 53 Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005); for Collinson on Lake and Mears, see pp. 256, 258–9 below. 54 Quoting p. 184 below. 55 Quoting p. 168 below. 56 See below, p. 147. 57 See Giulio Orazio Bravi, ‘Über die intellektuellen Wurzeln des Republikanismus von Peter Martyr Vermigli’, in Emidio Campi et al. (eds), Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation (Geneva, 2002), pp. 119–41.

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and praising it. Intersections, contrasts, and (as Shagan suggests) possible changes over time in the relationship between humanism and distinctive English traditions need further attention. The volume points to these and other interpretative issues about the ‘monarchical republic’’s dimensions and complexities. And finally, such essays as Cust’s on Newdigate’s papers, McLaren’s on Craig’s treatise, and Peltonen’s on the history of the ‘Raellyans’59 suggest there are likely to be other unexplored or underexplored texts that could illuminate the volume’s topics. Patrick Collinson’s ‘splendidly challenging’ essay provoked the questions we have tried to answer and the further questions we have raised about the commonwealth of early modern England. We hope the volume itself will be a resource and stimulus for others who join the ‘strenuous and continuing dialogue between then and now’. 58

58 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 88–144. 59 See below, pp. 122–6

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ESSAY 1

The Two Republics: Conflicting Views of Participatory Local Government in Early Tudor England Ethan H. Shagan Patrick Collinson’s seminal essay ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ actually described two republics rather than one. One was the ‘republic’ of Privy Councillors and members of parliament, steeped in the civic republicanism of Renaissance Europe, who imagined themselves as citizens contributing to a commonwealth. This humanist ideology of ‘citizens … concealed within subjects’1 not only created an ethos of active public service among the educated elite, but also enabled them, in the succession crisis of the 1580s, to imagine England as a potentially ‘acephalous’ body politic. The other ‘republic’ described by Collinson, epitomized by the town-meeting-style administration of Swallowfield, Wiltshire, in the 1590s, was the practice of participatory local self-government. In a polity where the royal government was scarcely able to raise taxes from its subjects and had no paid bureaucrats in the countryside, ‘self-government at the king’s command’ was inescapable. Especially in the thousands of English villages like Swallowfield with no resident gentlemen, governance devolved to members of the communities themselves. Hence countless English subjects, even those with modest incomes and no knowledge of Cicero, spoke in public meetings, voted on local issues, and believed they had a prerogative to do so. Collinson’s brilliant discussion of these two republics has spawned a cottage industry of subsequent research, and it is thanks to Collinson’s pioneering efforts that we now understand how cracks and interstices in monarchical ideology – structural cracks like the monarch’s disability due to age or gender, and religious cracks after the tectonic shift of the Protestant Reformation – allowed competing ideas to penetrate English 1 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57; Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, also in Elizabethan Essays, pp. 1–29, quotation on p. 19.

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political consciousness. Yet, one unnoticed consequence of Collinson’s article has been that by analysing these two republics together, and representing them under the heading of ‘The Monarchical Republic’, Collinson produced the impression that the two republics were compatible and mutually reinforcing. More recently, Mark Goldie – in an article that deserves to be set alongside Collinson’s as a seminal contribution to our field – explicitly combined the two republics through the ideal of officeholding: just as Privy Councillors imagined themselves living the virtuous vita activa through service to the commonwealth, so did the vast numbers of men (and sometimes women) who served in local offices and actually made government work.2 It would seem, then, that Swallowfield was in some sense the Privy Council writ small, and the Privy Council was in some sense Swallowfield writ large. Yet before we decide that the two republics were really one, it is worth reflecting upon countervailing forces that were working to prise them apart. This essay will suggest that one such force was the tension between, on the one hand, the centralizing impulse of humanist ideology, and on the other hand, what we might call the ‘federal’ impulse of traditionally heterogeneous localities. By federalism, I mean the very idea that Collinson identified at Swallowfield: that the commonwealth was the sum of semiindependent localities, unified but not uniform. This federalism could be expressed at the level of the province, for instance in the palatinate of Cheshire, where governance remained quasi-autonomous and fiercely proud of its unique institutions through much of the Tudor period.3 But more often federalism involved structures of local governance and the idea, enshrined in the common law, that the commonwealth was best maintained if each community were governed according to its own customs and traditions.4 These customs were, in practice, vastly heterogeneous. If we take a snapshot of England at any time during the sixteenth century, we find some villages run by manor courts, others run by open vestries, and others run by select vestries, each choosing its officers according to local, customary rules.5 We find economic activity regulated by local communities rather than national policy, from the ‘barmote courts’ that regulated the mining industry in Derbyshire to the Cappers guild that set the hours of the

2 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 3 Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000). 4 See Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999); E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991). 5 Steve Hindle, ‘The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c. 1550–1700’, in Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, pp. 125–52.

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workday in Coventry. We find cities and towns choosing their officials according to local customs of rotation or election, including many where livery companies rather than more overtly governmental bodies controlled enfranchisement and access to office.7 In other words, we find ten thousand Swallowfields, each as structurally unique as a snowflake. Now, as Steve Hindle and Michael Braddick have argued, this heterogeneity did not necessarily limit the power of ‘the state’; federalism could embody the strength as well as the weakness of early modern government, since central and local authorities depended upon one another for the implementation of their wills.8 Moreover, the federal model of the commonwealth presumed, in theory if not always in practice, that local officials governed on behalf of the crown; this was still monarchical republicanism. But nonetheless, the model of governance by custom and local participation was quite different from the model of governance according to classical virtue and reason. This essay is a preliminary attempt to explore this difference and to suggest that the outward similarities between Collinson’s two republics may have masked considerable friction. It considers the reign of Henry VIII – a period considerably prior to Collinson’s own – because it was then that humanist, civic republican conceptions of the commonwealth first emerged in English politics. I want to suggest, first, that this civic republicanism, as both an intellectual ideal and a political programme, was largely antagonistic to the heterogeneity of English governance and was committed to the rationalization of local administration. Early Tudor political thought has almost always been studied for its views of monarchy, aristocracy and parliament, but this chapter will suggest that we also need to think about civic humanism’s views of local government. Second, on the opposite side of the ledger, I want to suggest that local customs of political participation were often trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with central power. The Henrician courts and State Papers are filled with reports of confrontations between town meetings like the one at Swallowfield and the agents of the royal government, and in many cases factions in local communities fought in those public meetings precisely over the limits of their own autonomy. This is not to argue, of course, that local communities were any less concerned than the Privy Council about the maintenance of order. But as Keith Wrightson famously observed, there were ‘two concepts of order’ in early modern England, one according to the needs of the central 6

6 Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), p. 81. 7 Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 159–61. 8 Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (New York, 2000); Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550– 1700 (Cambridge, 2000); see also Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State, and Provincial Conflict (Stanford, 1998).

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government and the other according to the needs of local communities.9 As long as they remained distinct, the two republics so brilliantly analysed by Patrick Collinson would likely fail to converge. ••••• There was no occasion in Henry VIII’s reign equivalent to the Elizabethan Bond of Association, no moment when politicians were forced to consider how they themselves might constitute the commonwealth without the king. Yet ever since Gordon Zeeveld analysed the Foundations of Tudor Policy and Arthur Ferguson analysed The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance, historians have had no doubt that humanists at the Henrician Court saw themselves as citizens within subjects.10 Educated men felt both a right and a duty to offer counsel and participate in government, because, as John Guy has noted, ‘Whether expressed in Court, Council, or Parliament, it was counsel that made the exercise of royal power legitimate.’11 Thus, when early English humanists presumed to criticize their government and offer solutions, they were enacting the sentiment, epitomized by Richard Morison, that ‘love and duty bind all Englishmen both to say and do all that they judge to be for noble England’s honor, wealth, and safety’.12 Humanist intellectuals from the 1510s onwards, then, sought to answer the same question that Elizabethan Privy Councillors asked in the 1580s: how could republican ideals of citizenship be put to the service of the monarchical English state? I want to suggest that one answer to this question in Henry VIII’s reign – not the only answer, to be sure, but one which has been largely ignored by historians – was that humanist reforms and initiatives required the remodelling of local administration according to a unified rather than federated model of governance. That is, if intellectuals at court were really 9 Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 21–46. 10 See for example W. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1948); Arthur Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965); Whitney Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London, 1970); Alistair Fox and John Guy (eds), Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, 1500– 1550 (Oxford, 1986); Maria Dowling, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London, 1986); Thomas Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989); Paul Fideler and Thomas Mayer (eds), Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse, and Disguise (London, 1992). 11 John Guy, ‘Tudor Monarchy and Its Critiques’, in Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997), pp. 78–109. 12 Richard Morison, An Exhortation to Styrre All Englyshe Men to the Defence of Theyr Countreye (London, 1539), sig. A2r.

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to make a difference in public life, there had to be mechanisms available for the implementation of their wise counsel in the provinces. And as long as cities, towns and villages all had quasi-independent administrations with their own customs of participation and decision-making, reform from the centre was nearly impossible. We can begin briefly with Sir Thomas More, whose brand of humanism predated other centralizing impulses in the English polity that Geoffrey Elton famously associated with Thomas Cromwell and the Royal Supremacy over the Church.13 As Mark Goldie has noted, More’s Utopia not only embodied the ‘monarchical republic’ of active counsel, but it also provided a sophisticated blueprint for representative local government that seemed to meld local and national systems into a seamless web of political participation.14 In other words, Utopia at first glance appears to imply that the ‘two republics’ were indeed compatible. Among the Utopians imagined by More, local administration functioned through elected officials: each group of 30 households elected a representative called a ‘Phylarche’, and then for every ten Phylarches there was a ‘Chief Phylarche’. Each town’s 200 Phylarches were responsible for electing the mayor of the town, called a ‘prince’, who served for life ‘unless he be deposed or put down for suspicion of tyranny’. But to balance the town-prince’s authority, he was to meet at least once every three days with all the Chief Phylarches and two of the Phylarches ‘concerning the commonwealth’, and all major issues were debated in the assembly of Phylarches after consultation with their constituents.15 This was a model of local, elective government contributing to the administration of the commonwealth. But we need to notice that Utopian elected officials did not enjoy the autonomy of their distant English cousins; Utopian towns were not ‘miniature republics’ in a federal sense, but only in the sense that they were part of the apparatus of the republic, the central state. Most importantly, Utopian towns were all identical and hence could not deviate from the norm according to any local sense of propriety: ‘There be in the island [of Utopia] 54 large and fair cities or shire towns, agreeing all together in one tongue, in like manners, institutions, and laws. They be all set and situate alike, and in all points fashioned alike, as far forth as the place or plot suffereth.’16 This invocation of diverse cities with identical ‘manners, institutions, and laws’ was precisely utopian in the modern sense 13 See especially Geoffrey Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1953); Geoffrey Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972). 14 Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, p. 178. 15 Thomas More, A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia [trans. Ralph Robinson] (London, 1551), sigs H4v–H6r. 16 Ibid., sig. G6v.

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of the word; it was a humanist pipedream that bore little relationship to the ungainly patchwork of prerogatives, precedents, charters, customs and institutions that actually governed life in English communities. This dream of uniformity, moreover, was a leitmotif of English republican thought. Two decades later, for instance, Richard Morison defined a commonwealth as ‘nothing else but a certain number of cities, towns, shires that all agree upon one law and one head, united and knitted together by the observation of those laws’.17 It might not be immediately obvious to modern readers that this was precisely not a description of contemporary England but a lightly encoded plea for centralization. In More’s vision, this rationalization of the commonwealth had been achieved in Utopia through a civilizing process in which a sort of Platonic Philosopher-King ran roughshod over all obstacles in the path of reason. This mythical founder of the republic, Utopos, conquered the island and instituted all his policies by fiat, bringing ‘the rude and wild people to that excellent perfection, in all good fashions, humanity, and civil gentleness, wherein they now go beyond all the people of the world’.18 Thereafter, a virtuous central administration ensured that all of Utopia’s policies – from the elimination of private property, to more detailed arrangements like the siphoning of urban labour to the countryside at harvest time – were promulgated and enforced. Utopia thus presents a form of representative local government which was republican in its stress on active participation and election of representatives, but which was designed to disrupt, rationalize, and ultimately replace the messier and more autonomous versions of selfgovernment which were actually practised in Tudor England. This was, from the perspective of More and his fellow-travellers, entirely necessary. The humanist ideal of the vita activa suggested that intellectuals could cure the ills of the commonwealth through the judicious application of reason and classical wisdom, but there was no way that the royal government, when confronting England’s many quasi-independent jurisdictions, could implement any sort of ‘republican’ reform of civic life. Thus humanist writers about the English commonwealth, unlike earlier social critics, were willing and even eager to toss out English custom and precedent, usually in favour of classical wisdom deemed to be closer to reason and the law of nature. This mode of criticism, in which five hundred years of English law was suddenly regarded as an impediment to progress, was not only potentially at odds with the customary prerogatives of the monarchy and nobility; it was also antithetical to the web of customs that structured local government. Let us look in more detail, then, at the ideas of Thomas Starkey. Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset is most famous for its explicit 17 18

Morison, A Remedy for Sedition (London, 1536), sigs B2v–B3r. More, Vtopia, sig. G6r.

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calls for conciliar government and its argument that ‘here in our country, the authority of the prince must be tempered and brought to order’.19 As such, it is a nearly perfect antecedent to the sort of conciliar government imagined in Collinson’s ‘monarchical republic’ of the 1580s. But Starkey also had much to say about local administration, and he explicitly endorsed the idea that local problems required central solutions: Even like as the sickness of the parts for the most springeth of some misorder of the whole body, so the cure of the same must be taken out of the cure of the whole … These general things well remedied should shortly bring in good order in the parts.20

So, for instance, Starkey attributed many problems of local society to a crisis of under-population, and he thus suggested practical social engineering to increase marriage rates. But what is notable about these schemes was not only their radicalism but their one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to public planning. For example, he suggested that men with five children or more should not be required to go to war and should receive a tax rebate, while bachelors should ‘lack all such honor and estimation as is given to married men, and never to bear office in their city or town’.21 This was proposed as a national plan, regardless of the demographic status of individual communities, and regardless of how these laws (like banning bachelors from public office) violated local customs of office-holding or the charters of incorporated towns. For our purpose, perhaps the most important ‘sickness’ of the English commonwealth diagnosed by Starkey was its ‘lack of certain officers’ to administer the realm on behalf of the king and his council, especially in towns and cities. In particular, Starkey lamented the lack of royal officers stationed throughout England who could ensure that local officers did their ‘duty appointed by the order of our country’. In other words, he wanted more efficient central governance of the provinces. Hence Starkey recommended the creation of new officers called ‘conservators of the commonwealth’, equivalent to the Roman censors, who would ‘have cure over all other officers’ and ‘judge the manners of all other’ in their communities. It was presumably these officers whom Starkey had in mind elsewhere in the Dialogue when he called for new courts to punish people for ‘negligence’ in their trades and make sure they ‘occupied no vain and unprofitable craft’.22 Urban areas would also have new royal officers called ‘overseers of the city’, charged with the maintenance of the city’s ‘health, wealth, and ornaments’; once again, these royal officers would effectively 19 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. Thomas Mayer (London, 1989), pp. 120ff. 20 Ibid., p. 107. 21 Ibid., p. 100. 22 Ibid., pp. 103, 113 and 136.

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supersede local structures, since ‘no officer of city nor town [would] be exempt from their authority’.23 Behind Starkey’s dislike of local administration was a more general antipathy to the precedent-based system of the English common law. The common law, he wrote, is ‘over confuse[d], it is infinite and without order or end, there is no stable ground therein nor sure stay, but everyone that can colour reason maketh a stop to the best law that is before time devised’. In other words, people simply chose the precedents that best served their purposes and ignored the rest. To cure this sickness of the commonwealth, Starkey argued that English law should be reduced to a very small number of written laws. This process would involve the wilful abrogation of a great deal of statute and precedent, what Starkey dismissively referred to as ‘barbarous customs and ordinance’. Ideally, these would be replaced by the Roman Civil Law, which Starkey called undoubtedly the most ancient and noble monument of the Romans’ prudence and policy, the which be so writ with such gravity that if nature should herself prescribe particular means whereby mankind should observe her laws, I think she would admit the same, especially if they were by a little more wisdom brought to a little better order and frame, which might be soon done and put in effect.24

What is remarkable here is not only Starkey’s claim that he and his fellow intellectuals could improve upon the noble laws of the Romans through their own reason, but that this process might be foisted upon England by crown, parliament and Privy Council without regard for five centuries of law, precedent and tradition. The implication of all of this is that, while humanist civic reformers may have understood the need to work through local government to implement their agendas, they believed that their agendas could not be implemented without the reform of local government. Hence humanists like Starkey called for structures of local administration that were amenable to their fantasies of participatory government at the centre, but in doing so they paradoxically demanded the elimination of a very different sort of participatory government in the localities. Political participation was the core of the civic humanist programme, but only insofar as it served the needs of a wise and powerful central government. Local initiative, and especially local autonomy, was the antithesis of humanist order. ••••• If we now turn to the second ‘monarchical republic’, the republic of participatory local government, it is worth reflecting upon the discrepancy 23 24

Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., pp. 128–9.

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between the sorts of critiques of the English Commonwealth allowable for elite intellectuals and the sorts of critiques allowable out-of-doors. In 1536, for instance, Thomas Starkey wrote that since his recent return from Italy he had been so appalled by ‘your manners here at home’ that he was ready to despair, ‘for such blindness I have observed to reign among you, such division, such discord of minds, that folly it were for me, among such troubled hearts, to conceive opinion to enjoy this most desired of all men, that is, quietness and tranquility’.25 For writing this tract, Starkey received the bountiful gratitude of the Tudor government. Five years later, the parson of Over Yeldham, Essex, announced in the guildhall of nearby Clare, Suffolk, ‘I have been in diverse realms, and yet I know none so evil ordered as this realm of England.’ For speaking these words, almost precisely the same as Starkey’s in import, the parson was dragged before the Earl of Oxford and subsequently before the Star Chamber.26 Thus participants in community governance did not have the luxury of expressing their broader beliefs and desires about the commonwealth; local politicians always had to veil their considerable de facto autonomy within the language of deference and loyalty. Nonetheless, when the government’s intrusions into the locality violated local norms, communities used the same structures of participatory politics against the government that the government itself depended upon to maintain order in those communities. One context where this can be seen is the collection of taxes, when localities had to decide corporately how to divvy-up their share of the burden. These meetings of local communities were supposed to represent the obedience of the realm to the king’s will, but in many cases they became instead flashpoints of conflict between local sentiment and the expectations of royal officials (who were also themselves sometimes players in local politics). Some examples of this phenomenon are well known, for instance the Amicable Grant in 1525, when the commons ‘banded and promised amongst themselves that none of them should pay’.27 Less well known but more commonplace, however, were examples of divided communities in which some members tried to assert local custom in the face of outside interference. Let us look, for example, at how local, participatory selfgovernment functioned in Burford, Oxfordshire, in 1540.28 Here, in response to parliament’s vote of the ‘Tenth and Fifteenth’, the tax farmer for the region, John Jones, and the bailiffs of the town, Richard Hannes and John Lambert, called ‘all the inhabitants … to be assembled together in their common hall’ to assess the tax. At the assessment meeting, 25 Thomas Starkey, An exhortation to the people, instructynge theym to unitie and obedience (London, 1536), sig. D3v. 26 TNA STAC 2/1, fols 46r–47r. 27 BL Cotton MS Cleopatra F.VI, fol. 279r. 28 This case is in TNA STAC 2/7, fols 51–71.

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attended by at least ‘a hundred persons being householders’, the bailiffs of the town wrote out a parchment listing all of the townspeople and the amount that they were supposed to pay, and this list was then handed over to the two constables of the town, Simon Winchester and Robert Alflete, for subsequent collection. This was precisely how local government was supposed to manage the business of taxation in lieu of a royal bureaucracy: elite local gentlemen (bailiffs) called a meeting to make sure assessment was equitable and had the consent of the populace; somewhat less prosperous petty officials (constables) handled the messy business of collection; and a non-local tax farmer acted as intermediary between the locality and the crown. The problem was that in Burford there was no agreement about what constituted equitable taxation, and the meeting, as well as the subsequent process of collection, descended into bickering and animosity. The dispute was so divisive that the case ended up before the Star Chamber, and there is little agreement about the actual course of events, but both versions are informative about the nature of local self-governance. According to the bailiffs, three rabble-rousing community leaders – the gentleman John Barker, along with the mercer Edmund Sylvester and a man named Thomas Barton – utterly refused to pay and ‘unlawfully confederate[d] together’ with other inhabitants to prevent the constables from collecting money in Burford. Instead, they allegedly set up their own, parallel collection process: on 4 May 1540, these men ‘went throughout the said town’ and ‘procured [and] moved’ the inhabitants ‘to be ready with their money and to take part with them, saying at some times, in the hearing of credible persons, that they would make a commonwealth’. This word ‘commonwealth’ appears in many depositions in the case, although occasionally it is rendered as ‘common purse’ or ‘common box’. It is significant that this crucial word in Tudor political and economic theory, here seen bubbling up out of local politics, seems to have had a double meaning: both a collection plate and a sense of community. The other version of events – reported by Sylvester, Barker, Barton and their allies – was that they had merely demanded at the meeting that the book of assessment ‘be cast in the sight and presence’ of the assembled townspeople so that ‘according to the custom and ancient usage of the said town’ they could all ‘perceive and perfectly know’ the equity of the reckoning. This demand for local custom and administrative transparency, however, was allegedly refused by the bailiffs. Later, when the tax had all been collected, Sylvester and company added up the sums and discovered that the bailiffs had collected more than £4 more than they should have; the implication is that they had pocketed the difference. Sylvester attempted to complain to Justices of the Peace, but the bailiffs simply told the JPs that Sylvester and his adherents were ‘lewd and naughty fellows’, and the case

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went nowhere. Having run out of local options, Sylvester and five other men filed suit in Star Chamber. In one version, then, we have a localist faction trying to shield the community from government taxation, or at least from the official, authorized collection process; in the other version, we have the same faction trying to shield the community from the predations of unscrupulous petty officials. In either case, we seem to have an example of ‘self-government’ that was not at all consistent with the claims of central authorities. We can see this antipathy between local and national conceptions of the ‘commonwealth’ more clearly, furthermore, if we unravel the various depositions in the case and reconstruct, as best we can, what actually happened. The dispute seems to have been between the burgesses of the town on one side, and the majority of the inhabitants (including some elites like the gentleman John Barker) on the other side; because some of the burgesses were also the king’s officers for the tax, however, the case came to resemble a localist outburst against central government interference. At issue was the nature of the tax assessment. Most importantly, many witnesses reported that at the meeting they had agreed that burgesses of the town would be assessed at 2d per shilling of rent, while the rest of the people would be assessed at 1d per shilling of rent. Most of the community seems to have believed that this graduated tax structure was most equitable and most consistent with town custom. However, sometime during the meeting this decision was altered – whether by general consent or not was heavily disputed – and in practice all the people, including burgesses, were assessed equally at 1d per shilling regardless of their status. This failure of the meeting to enact a graduated tax structure was the cause of much of the hostility that followed. Also significant was the decision of the town bailiffs, again allegedly contrary to local custom, to assess the tax based on rents rather than goods, a practice which aided urban capitalists at the expense of farmers. All of this was perfectly legal – the bailiffs were royal officers and needed no consent from the community to collect taxes any way they saw fit – but it utterly defeated the idea of the locality as a miniature, participatory commonwealth of householders. That miniature commonwealth thus attempted to re-form on its own, parallel to the official structures of the crown’s collection agents. This process was accompanied by some rather immoderate rhetoric against the governors of Burford. As the inhabitants went from house to house collecting money for their ‘commonwealth’, one of them allegedly said that ‘they would make them as free as the bailiffs of the said town by Christmas Day’ and that they would ‘buy and sell as freely as any burgess of the town’; clearly there was a history of economic conflict, of which this example of constructing a ‘commonwealth’ was only one iteration. Another man,

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a baker named William Hyatt, looked forward to an overthrow of the political structure of the town: ‘I trust once to be bailiff of the town and see some of the burgesses hanged and to sit upon them myself.’ But despite the anger of this rhetoric, the inhabitants nonetheless proceeded through the most legalistic processes that they knew. The wealthier inhabitants, despite acting expressly against the will of royal officials, claimed that they had offered to pay extra money to help the poor, as was their patriarchal duty. Like the bailiffs, they wrote out an official book listing how much each person was assessed in their ‘commonwealth’. And when Sylvester was questioned by government officials and claimed that ‘[what] they did was for a commonwealth’, his colleague William Hyatt ‘then standing by said, “yea, and for the king’s advantage”’. The point here, then, was by no means to rebel against royal taxation; the point was to preserve the community’s voice in its own governance. But it was not to be. The real weight in the dispute lay with the constables who were charged with collecting the tax, and these constables answered to the bailiffs and burgesses, the official government of Burford, rather than to the inhabitants en masse. The tax strike thus failed to maintain its coherence: some of the resisters found that their wives had ‘paid against their husbands’ wills’, while others found that their goods were seized ‘by distress’ while they were absent. All of them eventually paid, and by the time the case reached the Star Chamber, ‘John Barker, Edmund Sylvester, and other of the inhabitants of the town of Burford’ found themselves answering interrogatories from the cramped confines of the Fleet prison. Some meetings of participatory local government were thus official, authorized meetings; even if they got out of hand, as was the case at Burford, such meetings were standard mechanisms of the king’s business. Other meetings, however, were more improvised, and they reach our ears five centuries later only because they resulted in accusations of riot. We must remember that, as Mark Kishlansky has shown, there was always a frighteningly thin line between local politics and disturbance of the peace.29 Any occasion on which crowds gathered to conduct public business was potentially dangerous to a government with no police force or standing army, because the implementation of that assembly’s will could not easily be prevented. At the most basic level, then, the royal government had a love–hate relationship with local politics: they loved the usual result (the maintenance of order in the countryside with little or no investment from the centre) but they hated the process, and they were more than willing to put their own views of order above the wills of individual communities.

29 Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986).

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One such case occurred in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1536. According to the Boston priest Steven Heythnes, on 7 June a group of Boston weavers, smiths, brewers and other artisans ‘did ring the great common bell of the church of Boston aforesaid to the intent and purpose to assemble the people’. The crowd of over 100 people who gathered, according to Heythnes, then came to his house and threatened to kill him. Other local men ‘of policy’ intervened and saved Heythnes’s life, but only by placating the crowd and agreeing to imprison him. When Justices of the Peace eventually arrived in town, they attempted to free Heythnes, but the keeper of the town prison, George Browne, told them that ‘the commons had commanded him to keep him in prison’ and thus he ‘would not deliver the Justices the key’ until they agreed to bind Heythnes over to appear at the next Quarter Sessions. Later, according to Heythnes, at least one of the men involved in the altercation, a merchant named John Copley, threatened armed action against the JPs. From the perspective of Steven Heythnes, then, this event looked like riotous disorder. From the perspective of the members of the assembly that day, however, the whole event was an example of community selfgovernance carried out by lawfully constituted authorities. Numerous witnesses described a ‘meeting’ in Boston church in which ‘diverse of the inhabitants of Boston’, including the town constables, invited two Justices of the Peace from the neighbouring town of Holland to help them put a stop to a serious breach in local tranquillity. According to these witnesses, Steven Heythnes had spoken ‘diverse slanderous words … touching diverse honest and credible persons, as well men as women of the town of Boston’, as a result of which ‘great rumor and grudge was risen within the same town’. The details of Heythnes’s slanders are vague, but one witness described them as ‘opprobrious words of all the whole inhabitants of the said town of Boston, in effect concerning the manner of living of the wives in the said town, as also concerning the ability and substance of the merchants of the same’. It appears, then, that Heythnes was an outsider to the community who severely upset the local establishment. Moreover, many witnesses reported that there was ‘a bill cast in the street’ intended to ‘slander the wives of the said town’; none of them could prove that the bill was written by Steven Heythnes, but given his reputation he was widely suspected. The church bells of Boston were thus rung to gather witnesses rather than rioters, and Heythnes was arrested and imprisoned later that evening by common consent. Unfortunately for the harmony of Boston, however, local opinion and the opinion of the Justices of the Peace did not long remain in tandem. The local community, not surprisingly, wanted Heythnes not only punished but severely shamed. One witness reported that ‘diverse men, women, and 30

30

This case is in TNA STAC 2/32/38.

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children came to the prison to gaze upon him because he had made such a slander’, and it was commonly said that ‘he should be driven out of the town with as much shame as he brought up upon the town’. However, one of the Justices of the Peace, the gentleman Nicholas Robertson, allegedly bore ‘great favour’ to Heythnes and arranged for his release from prison after only two days. It was in this context, then, that the prison keeper George Browne attempted to deny the JPs access to his prisoner: Browne was accused of saying ‘that he would not deliver the key of that new lock to the Justices except he were commanded by the men of the town which commanded him to set it on there’, although he himself claimed that he had refused to deliver the key only temporarily ‘because it was then so late in the evening, and forasmuch as [he] did not know the pleasure of the said Justices’. It was also in this context that the merchant John Copley told the Justice of the Peace Nicholas Robertson that ‘if the same Nicholas had been good master to the said town’ then he would have more severely punished Heythnes. This was the beginning of recriminations back and forth between the inhabitants of Boston and the Justices of the Peace from Holland. John Copley lobbied hard to have Steven Heythnes indicted and tried locally. Instead, the JPs took the side of Heythnes and attempted to have the inhabitants of Boston indicted for riot. It was later alleged that a grand jury twice refused to find a billa vera against the people of Boston, and it was only when the JPs met with the grand jury in secret and threatened to ‘declare the demeanour of the same jury before the king’s council’ that they finally produced an indictment. The whole confusing mess eventually landed before Star Chamber, and as usual we have no idea what was decided. What is clear, however, is that the commonwealth of the town of Boston had acted corporately to discipline a man with powerful connections outside the town, with the result that the local ‘commonwealth’ and the ‘commonwealth’ represented by Justices of the Peace found themselves dangerously at odds. The Boston case was an example of a meeting of local government that was improvised and somewhat out of step with official notions of order, but at least the citizens of Boston attempted to use the structures of royal law-enforcement; this was still self-government for the king, if not quite ‘self-government at the king’s command’. There were other cases, however, in which local self-government directly contravened royal authority: it is significant that rebels commonly expressed their disaffection through elections, votes, and other public displays of administrative independence. At the beginning of the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, for instance, elite Lincolnshire rebels read their articles of grievance aloud to the assembled people and asked, ‘“How like you these articles? If they please you say yea, if not ye shall have them amended.” And then the

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commons held up their hands with a loud voice, saying, “We like them very well.”’31 The rebel council at York, convened six weeks later, boasted over 800 representatives.32 When the rebels called a council at Pontefract in December, delegates included not only ‘worshipful men’ but also eight commoners from Cumberland, six commoners from the city of York, six commoners from Ainsty, and so on, with many of these delegates ‘chosen by election’.33 At that conference, issues were decided by parliamentary process: ‘After the said articles [were] read and agreed upon amongst the lords, knights, and gentlemen, on every article agreed upon was set on the head “fiat”. And after[wards] the said articles were read and declared to the commons, who wholly condescended to every article.’34 It is no surprise, then, that one of the main demands of the rebels was that the next parliament should be held at York; the revolt was very much a reaction to the central government’s disdain for local and regional privileges. Even outside major rebellions, however, I want to suggest that participation in local government could be self-consciously subversive of the structures of royal authority. Early in the 1530s, for instance, the parish priest of Mendlesham, Suffolk, sent word to the lord of the manor, Edmund Knyvett, that tenants in Mendlesham were holding unauthorized meetings which constituted ‘such disorder’ that he ‘feared lest shortly should succeed further mischief’.35 When Knyvett arrived on the scene, he first questioned one of his chief tenants, William Donkons, to try to discern what was happening in the community, but Donkons claimed that ‘for fear of them’ he ‘durst not declare his knowledge’. It soon became clear, moreover, that practically the whole community were involved in malfeasance: when Knyvett tried to interview men who were ‘none of their adherents’ he found ‘but few’. Mendlesham’s ‘great riots and unlawful assemblies’, as the priest referred to them, were in fact mass meetings of the community, consisting of up to 100 people at a time at their largest but often involving 60 or 80 people, which occurred repeatedly at ‘sundry houses in this town’. The 31 TNA E 36/119, fols 15v–16r (this MS is calendared in J.S. Brewer et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47 [hereafter cited as LP; London, 1862–1932], vol. 12, i, 70). Another witness reported that Staines read the articles ‘openly in the field, saying to the people holding up his hands, “Sirs, how like you these articles, doth they please you or no?” And to that the people held up their staves, saying, “yea, yea, yea”.’ (TNA E 36/119, fol. 9v [LP, vol. 12, i, 70]). 32 TNA E 36/119, fol. 69r [LP, vol. 12, i, 466]. 33 TNA SP 1/111, fols 237r–239r [LP, vol. 11, 1155 (2)]. 34 Mary Bateson, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’, English Historical Review, 5 (1890): 330–45, at 340. 35 This story is recounted in a letter from Knyvett to the Duke of Norfolk, TNA SP 1/65, fols 202–3 [LP, vol. 5, 186]. Diarmaid MacCulloch dates these events to sometime between 1531 and 1536, and he notes other evidence for religious heterodoxy in the community: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 178–9.

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meetings, Knyvett discovered, had three main purposes. One purpose was ‘gatherings of money’ for the community, which Knyvett described as ‘against the laws and common peace’. Here, it seems, we see echoes of the case from Burford, Oxfordshire: as at Burford, the town collected its own ‘commonwealth’, but this time the local community’s purposes were entirely disconnected from the concerns of the royal government. A second, more significant purpose of the Mendlesham meetings was described by one participant as follows: ‘Our meeting is for a ghostly purpose to be done by Christian brothers and sisters.’ Knyvett tried to pry from his deponents ‘what conclusions they have determined’ at these religious meetings, but he could learn nothing. However, Knyvett did manage to arrest one young man in the community for religious offences: claiming that he did not need to confess to a priest because he had already confessed to God, and threatening the priest with violence. If this young man was associated with the unlawful assemblies, then it appears the ‘ghostly purpose’ of the Mendlesham assemblies may have been the practice of Lollardy. Here, then, we can begin to see how selfgovernance in the community of Mendlesham was capable of overflowing its bounds and becoming considerably more than ‘self-government at the king’s command’. But most importantly, the third purpose of the Mendlesham meetings was described as follows: ‘This they have confessed, that at such meetings they have named a mayor, a sheriff, a lord, a bailiff, and other officers.’ Knyvett again tried to pry from the men who held these titles the nature of their so-called offices, but he could learn nothing of value. The men all claimed that their elections were simply a joke: ‘They allege to me that this election [of] officers was but for pastime.’ However, Knyvett viewed the unauthorized election of officers as far more dangerous, and he wrote ominously to the Duke of Norfolk, ‘But what pastime … may succeed of it your grace knoweth better than I do.’ Unfortunately, we cannot succeed any better than Knyvett in discovering the true nature of these local ‘elections’. What emerges forcefully from Knyvett’s letter, however, is that these public assemblies were not merely manifestations of traditional, Rabelaisian misrule; they were rather manifestations of traditional, quasirepublican rule. Even if the ‘elected’ officials of Mendlesham wielded no actual authority, they were nonetheless men of substance in the community, and the meetings where they were elected served very serious purposes in representing the will of the community. Moreover, despite investigating the affair thoroughly, the real lord of the manor was unable to break through the code of silence in the community and get to the bottom of local affairs. Something was going on in Mendlesham, in other words, and that something not only occurred through public business in assembly, but

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also forcibly excluded outsiders, even outsiders representing public order and authority. ••••• There are several problems with trying to draw a direct line between the evidence presented in this essay and the two republics identified by Patrick Collinson in his 1987 essay. To begin with, just because humanists opposed semi-autonomous local government in their theoretical writings in Henry VIII’s reign, that does not mean that very different sorts of humanists still opposed autonomous local government in their political negotiations in Elizabeth I’s reign. Not only was there a half-century between the Dialogue between Pole and Lupset and the Bond of Association, but the former was an exercise of the mind while the latter was an exercise in political power. Clearly more research is needed to determine how closely the two were related, research that might begin with a more sustained look at how later Tudor intellectuals thought about local government. Nonetheless, I would suggest that there are very real connections that make the comparison, if not precise, then at least suggestive. After all, a more-or-less direct chain of influence can be drawn from More, Starkey and other Henrician humanists to William Cecil and the framers of the Bond of Association, a chain that ran through the ‘commonwealthsmen’ of Edward VI’s reign, Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum and John Aylmer’s Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes, among others. The second and more pressing question about the evidence presented here and its relationship to Patrick Collinson’s two republics concerns local politics and the issue of change over time. In a nutshell, the evidence here suggests considerable friction between local administrative independence and the needs of the royal government. The question, then, is whether this friction waned between the 1530s and the 1580s. One possibility is that there was not significant change over time, but rather that the apparent symbiosis between Swallowfield and the Privy Council in the Elizabethan period was an optical illusion, created perhaps by the sources (Swallowfield, after all, had an interest in trying to appear unified and loyal), or perhaps by the desire of historians to see multiple rivers all flowing into the same modernity. This possibility is strengthened by the tendency of many historians to see in Renaissance republicanism a kind of benign public-spiritedness, a genuine and uncontested commitment to the common good; after all, Collinson specifically introduced the concept of the ‘monarchical republic’ to counteract the idea of ‘Tudor despotism’.36 It may be that some historians have chosen to discount the more aggressive and authoritarian aspects of republicanism, notably its 36

Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 36–8.

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centralizing tendencies, while at the same time discounting the devotion of communities to their own local political institutions. The second possibility is that there was change over time. Here we might posit that Privy Councillors came to see the advantage of supporting communities who committed themselves to the agenda of the state – especially as the state took on more explicitly ideological agendas after 1547 – and that local communities came to see the advantage of supporting government officials who worked for the ‘state’ rather than for their own enrichment. This would fit with valuable work by Michael Braddick and Tom Cogswell on local involvement in ‘state formation’. Just as importantly, social historians like Steve Hindle and Keith Wrightson (as well as Patrick Collinson himself) have argued that between the 1530s and the 1580s, English society became increasingly polarized, and that local elites gradually ceased to imagine themselves as part of their communities and instead imagined themselves as part of a national governing class. Meetings of semi-autonomous local government might thus have become progressively less concerned with local customs and independence and more aligned with the central government’s overarching sense of ‘order’. Both of these possibilities are plausible, and yet both have their problems; more research on the matter is clearly needed, and most likely the answer is some sticky and non-linear process that involves aspects of both. This essay has tried to suggest only that the question is worth asking. I have argued that in the reign of Henry VIII, when humanist civic republicanism first came to England, it was largely antithetical to the structures of local self-governance and political participation that were actually in place in English communities, while those structures were themselves in many ways resistant to the sorts of interference by the central government that humanists desired. This tension, I would suggest, has a history that must be traced forward if we are to understand more deeply the nature of the ‘monarchical republic’ in early modern England.

ESSAY 2

Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Monarchical Republic of Tudor England Dale Hoak i In ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Patrick Collinson called attention to the readiness of the Elizabethan political nation, including its leading statesman, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to contemplate a future not only without Queen Elizabeth but also without monarchy, at least for a short time. In a draft addendum to the ‘Bill for the Queen’s Safety’ in 1584/5, Cecil imagined that, in the event of the Queen’s untimely death, the powers of ‘the Imperiall Crown of England’ might be exercised by an extraordinary ‘great council’ until such time as parliament named a Protestant successor.1 The radical notion that the powers of the Tudor crown imperial could be separated from the person of the monarch and, in the absence of the monarch, could be wielded cooperatively by parliament and a specially constituted council did not spring anew from Cecil’s brain in the mid-1580s. In fact, as Stephen Alford first demonstrated in 1998, Cecil sketched out virtually the same scheme in 1563 when he and others first came to grips with the possibility that an unwed queen might die childless.2 At the same time in 1563 that Cecil and others in England were contemplating the possibility of a conciliar/parliamentary interregnum – that is during the first session of Elizabeth I’s second parliament (11 January to 10 April 1563) – Sir Thomas Smith began composing De Republica Anglorum in Paris. Smith was in Paris as the Queen’s ambassador to 1 ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, first published in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69/2 (1987): 394–424, as reprinted in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1994), pp. 31–57, quotations from 53, 43. See also Collinson, ‘The Elizabeth Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92. 2 Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 115–16. Alford discusses Cecil’s plan on pp. 109–19; the text of the plan is printed on pp. 225–8. See also Alford’s essay in this volume.

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the Valois court, and from there he corresponded with Cecil on various political issues, including the problem of the succession and England’s religious settlement. It is no accident that Smith addressed both subjects in De Republica Anglorum; in the first chapter of the second book he wrote that parliament’s authority comprehended ‘formes of religion’ and the ‘ … succession to the crowne’.3 It is true that Smith also subscribed to a theory of personal monarchy, but for him it remained nothing more than a theory, or what Collinson, quoting Ernst Kantorowicz, called ‘an abstract physiological fiction’.4 Smith shared Cecil’s view of the mixed nature of the English polity: in practice the Queen’s imperium was limited by the advice given to her by the men in her council and parliament. In this sense, as Alford has put it, De Republica Anglorum actually provides a ‘snapshot’ view of Cecil’s political creed, a ‘mirror’ reflecting the political and constitutional implications of the heated debates on the Queen’s marriage and the succession in the parliamentary session of 1563.5 The issue of the succession, inextricably linked to the settlement of religion, had bred a new type of court politics, the politics of men who believed that a young, unwed Queen must follow the counsel of her godly advisers. Elizabeth I witnessed the earliest public statement of this issue in one of her coronation pageants on 14 January 1559, a tableau vivant designed by Richard Grafton with a script by Richard Mulcaster featuring the Biblical figure of Deborah ‘with her estates, consulting for the good government of Israel’. But as Israel had come to England now, Mulcaster’s ‘Debora’ wore Elizabeth’s ‘parliament robes’, and the ‘personages’ on stage representing her three estates were the nobility, clergy and commonalty of the Tudor parliament.6 In his eyewitness account of this spectacle, published only nine days later, Mulcaster made no mention of Elizabeth’s reaction to the scene. There certainly is no evidence that she accepted the view of monarchy 3 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum [first published London, 1583], ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 78. 4 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), p. 4, quoted in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, p. 36. 5 Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 7, 37, 99, 101; Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, p. 36. 6 The Quenes maiesties passage through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion was published in London on 23 January 1559 by Grafton’s son-inlaw, Richard Tottel (STC 7985.5). I have used the reprint in Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I, ed. A.F. Kinney (Hamden, CT, 1975), pp. 15–39. Germaine Warkentin’s modernized edition includes transcriptions and translations of important contemporary materials and a scholarly bibliography: The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage & Related Documents (Toronto, 2004). See Dale Hoak, ‘The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, and the Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy’, in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540–1640, ed. C.S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2003), pp. 114–51.

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that it represented. But Mulcaster left no doubt how she was meant to interpret it: ‘The ground of this last pageant was, that … she might by this be put in remembrance to consult for the worthie government of her people … and it behooveth both men and women so ruling to use advise of good counsell.’7 Mulcaster’s description of the Fleet Street tableau might also be read as a brief for the views of Cecil and Smith on parliamentary monarchy, not to mention the views of those who commissioned Mulcaster to write it, the Protestant merchants of the City. The link between Cecil and the City in this regard was direct: Cecil was involved in virtually every aspect of the preparations for Elizabeth’s coronation, preparations which included working with Grafton, the man charged by the City with devising the themes of the pageants. On the eve of Elizabeth’s coronation others connected to Cecil or who had been connected to him in Edward VI’s reign were urging the Queen to embrace the notion of a parliamentary monarchy. Among them were three Marian exiles, John Hales, John Foxe and John Aylmer. It is no coincidence that in January 1559 all three believed that Elizabeth I would find inspiration in the model of a godly Deborah. Hales, a member of Edward VI’s first parliament, had been Cecil’s overseas agent during the time when Cecil was Edward VI’s secretary of state (1550–53). When Hales returned to England from Frankfurt on 3 January 1559, he addressed a strongly worded ‘Oration’ to the Queen. He told Elizabeth I that God had chosen her ‘to be our debora’ in order to deliver England from Queen Mary I’s ‘pestylent Tyrannye’.8 Hales’s heated condemnation of Mary’s allegedly tyrannical treatment of parliament may have drawn upon John Ponet’s argument, that parliament existed to check a Queen’s arbitrary action; there are striking similarities between some passages in Hales’s ‘Oration’ and Ponet’s A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (Strasbourg, 1556).9 But Hales was far more detailed and explicit than Ponet on the relations of crown and parliament. Hales thought Mary I’s rule and handling of parliament had been illegal for two reasons. First, she had refused to acknowledge the superior authority of parliamentary statute. Second, she had misunderstood – or been led deliberately to ignore – the essential nature of the royal supremacy. Hales thought that ‘Thys title & stile [of supreme head of the Church] more touched the common welthe & Realme of England, than the kyng’ and that in exercising the powers of

The Quenes maiesties passage, pp. 32–3. BL, Harleian MS 419, fols 143–8, quotations on 147v and 144v. 9 Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago, 1942), pp. 190–91 and 219–20. I wish to thank Scott Lucas for drawing this to my attention, and Glen Bowman for sharing with me a draft of his current work on Ponet’s thought. 7 8

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the royal supremacy the ‘libertye’ of members of the House of Commons trumped the sovereign’s prerogative.10 Foxe printed Hales’s ‘Oration’ in the third (1576) edition of his Acts and Monuments, saying that the original had been ‘delivered to her Majesty by a certain Nobleman, at her first Entrance to her Reign’.11 Like Hales, Foxe believed that Queen Mary’s death marked the end of a dark age of tyranny in England, and from Basel in January 1559 he sent Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio [Germany’s Congratulations to England] ‘on the restoration of the light of the Gospel’ at Elizabeth’s accession. But Elizabeth I, he asserted, could only fulfil God’s promise to the English people if she sought the counsel of godly advisers. On this point Foxe was adamant: since no prince is surrounded by such great wisdom … that he alone suffices to deal with all issues, of necessity the Queen must associate with her certain men to administer counsel, but of such a kind that she choose the most wise from the pious and the most pious from the wise. For to undertake any important business without consulting anyone is the action of a tyrant, yet when [a prince] has listened to all his counsellors, that in the end is admirable and truly royal, if he himself has an adviser in his heart.12

Foxe and Aylmer were at Basel on the day of Mary I’s death, and when they received news of her demise they and other exiles there agreed that Aylmer should pen a tract on their behalf addressing the question of Elizabeth’s accession.13 The result was Aylmer’s An Harborowe for faithfull and trewe subiectes (STC 1005), published at Strasbourg or London in April 1559. Since Aylmer thought Elizabeth ‘weake’ and ‘feable’ and ‘softe in courage’, he needed to be able to explain God’s choice of a woman to govern England, and his explanation was so good that four years later, when Foxe published the first edition of The Acts and Monuments (1563), he lifted 10 BL, Harleian MS 419, fol. 146v. For more of Hales’s comments, see Hoak, ‘A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule’, in John Foxe and His World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2002), pp. 73–88, at 80–81. 11 Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. G. Townsend and S.R. Cattley (8 vols, Oxford, 1837–41), viii, pp. 673–9. 12 ‘… quum nullus tanta septus prudentia princeps sit, … ut unus omnibus sufficiat obeundis: necesse Regina habeat quosdam sibi consilii administros adiungere, sed eiusmodi, quos ex sanctis prudentissimos, ex prudentibus sanctissimos deligat. Nemine enim consulto, quicquam aggredi quod magni sit negocii, tyrannicum est: atqui quum omnes audierit consiliarios, id demum praeclarum est, uereque Regium, ipse si habeat consultorem in pectore’ (emphasis added; John S. Wade, ‘Thanksgiving from Germany in 1559: An Analysis of the Content, Sources and Style of John Foxe’s Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio’, in John Foxe at Home and Abroad, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 157–222, quotations on 185, 206. Dr Wade very kindly shared his translation and transcription of Foxe’s Gratulatio with me in advance of publication. 13 John Strype, Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer, Lord Bishop of London in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1821; repr. New York, 1974), pp. 10–11.

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most of his material on Elizabeth word-for-word from An Harborowe.14 But Aylmer’s Harborowe was not primarily a defence of a woman’s right to rule. Fundamentally it was an argument for parliamentary monarchy, and for this purpose, Aylmer, like Grafton and Mulcaster, Anglicized the biblical figure of Deborah.15 Indeed, Aylmer’s Harborowe comes as close as anything does in 1559 to providing a blueprint of the mixed polity, or monarchical republic, that Cecil contemplated in 1563 and that Smith spelled out in 1565 in De Republica Anglorum. As it happens, Cecil and Smith had developed their vision of a monarchical republic more than a decade earlier. It remains to be seen how and in what circumstances. ii On the question of kingship and godly Reformation, Smith and Cecil, like Aylmer, Foxe and Hales, had been decisively influenced by the coming of Protestantism during ‘the acephalous conditions’ of Edward VI’s minority (to borrow Collinson’s phrase16). Those conditions, as Anne McLaren has noted, prompted Smith in particular to ‘address the problem of kingship’ in ways that anticipated how he would describe the Elizabethan polity in De Republica Anglorum, as ‘simultaneously, and uniquely, a monarchy and an aristocratic republic’. McLaren thought that Smith first revealed his views in this regard in September 1549 in the course of a series of verbal exchanges with Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, over the council’s role in wielding the powers of the royal supremacy during King Edward’s minority. (Smith was a member of a royal commission whose proceedings eventually led to Bonner’s deprivation.)17 But even before McLaren’s essay appeared in print, Jonathan McMahon, an unheralded research student working in America, was able to situate the Edwardian origins of Smith’s monarchical republicanism in an earlier, very different context. McMahon traced Smith’s views on the relations of king and parliament in a godly commonwealth to Smith’s work as head of a team of specialists appointed by Protector Somerset in 1548 to gather evidence justifying the union of the crowns of England and Scotland.18 Although Smith’s biographer, Mary Dewar, had earlier

14 Aylmer, An Harborowe, sig. B2v; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 27–55, at 33. 15 I have discussed Aylmer’s views on this subject in ‘A Tudor Deborah?’. 16 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, pp. 39, 43. 17 Anne McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic’, The Historical Journal, 42/4 (1999): 911–39, at 915, 921. 18 Jonathan McMahon, ‘The Humanism of Sir Thomas Smith’, unpublished MA thesis, College of William & Mary, 1999, especially ch. 1, ‘De Republica Britannica’. On 1 May

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noticed the existence of this group,19 McMahon was the first to tie Smith’s contributions to it to the ideas articulated in De Republica Anglorum and specifically to the ‘monarchical republicanism’ of the 1560s and after. Cecil was an equally important member of Smith’s shadowy team, and what we know of his contributions to the group suggests that by 1548 he too had developed a powerful new conception of the nature of Tudor kingship, one fundamentally at odds with Henry VIII’s assertion of an imperial jurisdiction over church and realm. What this conception was and how it was generated in cooperation with Smith needs to be seen not only against the background of their well-known Cambridge connection20 but also their entry into Protector Somerset’s household in early 1547. The joint, almost simultaneous entry of Smith and Cecil into what was effectively the King’s service in 1547 had probably been arranged by their well-placed friends and kinsmen in Henry VIII’s household and council. Cecil’s father, Richard, embodied one such connection: he was a groom of the king’s robes, and when he introduced his son to Henry VIII the old King made William a keeper of the writs and rolls in the court of common pleas, an office Cecil retained under Edward VI. In the super-heated, religiously charged atmosphere of politics at court during Henry’s last years, Cecil’s and Smith’s connections to Cambridge-trained evangelicals also mattered greatly, connections to men in the King’s privy chamber and in a council led by Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford. Smith’s ties to such men explain how he entered Hertford’s household in February 1547. By March he was serving informally there as a master of requests, receiving poor men’s suits. When Hertford, already the dominant member of the King’s regency council, became duke of Somerset and England’s Lord Protector in March 1547, Smith effectively entered royal service as an unpaid fourth clerk of the council. (Contrary to much that has been written, Smith was never officially a clerk of Edward VI’s privy council.) The diplomatic of the manuscript council register shows that Smith acted informally as the Protector’s personal agent in the management of council business until Smith became, on 17 April 1548, one of the King’s two principal secretaries of state, a post he held until 13 October 1549 when he was removed from office in the council’s coup against Somerset.21 1999 McMahon summarized his thesis in a paper presented at an international colloquium at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 19 Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London, 1964), p. 48. Dewar erroneously thought that Smith’s headship of the group dated from 1549. 20 On Smith’s and Cecil’s ties at Cambridge, see Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980), pp. 49–56, 69–77, 83. 21 Dale Hoak, The King’s Council in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 1976), appendix 2 (‘Clerks of the Privy Council’), pp. 271–2.

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By May 1547 Cecil had also become a member of Somerset’s household, possibly on the recommendation of his father-in-law, Anthony Cooke, whom Somerset esteemed.22 Later that year or early in 1548 Cecil succeeded Smith as the Protector’s ‘Master of the requestes’. By May 1548 Cecil had become Somerset’s private secretary, and in this capacity, either through Smith or William Honyngs (another member of the duke’s household who was also a clerk of the privy council) Cecil clearly enjoyed direct (if informal) access to the business and papers of the king’s council.23 Indeed, some of those papers, the extant ‘State Papers, Domestic’ (SP 10/2), show that in July 1547 Cecil was already involved in the organization of the army royal that would invade Scotland under Somerset’s command the following month,24 and when Somerset marched northwards in August, Cecil accompanied him as one of the two judges of the Marshalsea Court, officially charged with enforcing discipline among the king’s troops.25 In August 1547 Smith also went northwards with Somerset, but he got only as far as York where a fever detained him; he rejoined Cecil in London in November in the wake of Somerset’s victory at Pinkie. From then until early 1549 they were deeply engaged in Somerset’s unionist propaganda campaign, lending their pens and expertise to the carefully orchestrated production of a series of tracts designed to persuade an international audience of the merits of Anglo-Scots union. In the course of this campaign, six such tracts were published in London in 1547 and 1548, all of them by the king’s printer, Richard Grafton. Several have become familiar enough, thanks to the authors’ inventive use of a unionist rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’. But all six need to be viewed together, in chronological sequence, for what they reveal of another, hidden history – the development of Cecil’s and Smith’s conception of a British polity that was at once both empire and monarchical republic. It is a history to be read in tandem with Somerset’s use of parliament to further his Reformation in England, for his military policy in Scotland and his religious policy in England became fatefully intertwined.

22 S.T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons 1509–1558, The History of Parliament (3 vols, London, 1982), vol. I, p. 604. 23 Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1955), pp. 41–2; Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 80–81; Hoak, King’s Council, p. 271. 24 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI 1547–1553, rev. edn, ed. C.S. Knighton (London, 1992) [hereinafter CSP Dom.], no. 47 (TNA, SP 10/2, no. 4) and no. 48 (SP 10/2, no. 5). 25 Read, Mr Secretary Cecil, pp. 38–9 and 471, n. 2.

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iii Somerset’s aim, like that of Henry VIII, was to force the Scots to live up to the terms of the treaty of Greenwich (1543), terms envisioning the marriage of Edward VI and Mary Stuart, and hence the union of their crowns. Militarily, Somerset sought to create a permanent English military presence in Scotland by building fortified garrisons at key sites within an English Pale in the lowlands. He assumed that ‘assured’ Scots within the Pale would support him because of the divine imperative of AngloScots cooperation – the furtherance of a ‘godly’ Reformation in both realms.26 And what of those Scots who were not ‘assured’? Intimidation and persuasion, he thought, would win them over, intimidation in the form of an army of occupation, persuasion in the form of broadsheets and pamphlets asserting the English king’s title to sovereignty in Scotland. The old, wholly bogus English claim to overlordship in Scotland had become a Tudor obsession; in 1513 Henry VIII, ignoring medieval evidence to the contrary, had baldly asserted that ‘I am the very owner of Scotland’, a claim restated most fully in A Declaration to the Scots on the eve of his invasion of Scotland in November 1542.27 During the assault on Edinburgh in 1544, a Scottish merchant of that city, James Henrisoun, presented himself to Henry’s commander, the earl of Hertford, asking to be taken into the King’s service in London as an adviser on Scottish affairs. And he was: by 1545–46 Henrisoun had become a royal pensioner, and during the first year of Edward VI’s reign he was back in Scotland as Somerset’s spy, surveying Scottish troop strength and military preparedness. For this ‘speciall’ espionage, Edward’s council paid him the considerable sum of £75 on his return to London in February 1548.28 In the summer of 1547, when Protector Somerset was preparing to invade Scotland again, Henrisoun dedicated to him the first piece of propaganda in the duke’s unionist literary campaign, An Exhortacion 26 M.L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal, 1975), p. 19; Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544– 1604 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 34–5; Gervase Phillips, The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513–1550: A Military History (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 178–99, 255, 259. 27 A Declaration, conteynyng the iust cavses and consyderations, of this present warre with the Scottis, wherein alsoo appereth the trewe & right title, that the kinges most royall maiesty hath to the souerayntie of Scotlande (STC 9179), reprinted in The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. James A.H. Murray (London: Early English Text Society, extra series, no. 17, 1872) [hereinafter Complaynt], pp. 191–206. For a discussion, see Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 161– 86, at 168–9; Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551 (East Linton, 2000), pp. 11, 48, 62–4, 266–7. 28 Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J.R. Dasent (32 vols, London, 1890–1907), vol. ii, pp. 22–3; John N. King, ‘Protector Somerset, Patron of the English Renaissance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 70 (1976): 307–31, at 313–14.

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to the Scottes to conforme themselfes to the honorable, Expedient, & godly Union betweene the two Realmes of Englande & Scotland.29 To the arguments of the 1542 Declaration, which Henrisoun followed closely, the Exhortacion added two important new elements. The first was that union now bore the sanction of evangelical Protestantism, ‘the same … pure, syncere & incorrupt religion of Christ’. The second was Henrisoun’s expanded definition of the ‘empire’ recognized in the Act in Restraint of Appeals. Where the statute of 1533 had described England alone as an imperial realm, the Exhortacion envisioned an empire encompassing all of the British Isles. (Henrisoun cited the unitary nature of ‘Britain’ more than 100 times.) On this point the author simply extended the Constantinian arguments of earlier Tudor imperialists: because Emperor Constantine, who was thought to have been English, ‘had al Britayn in [his] possession’, Edward VI’s imperial inheritance comprehended Scotland as well.30 The 12,000-word Exhortacion was aimed at an elite, if hostile, audience of Scottish readers. Grafton printed the tract during July 1547 for distribution in September. At the end of July he also prepared a broadsheet Proclamation in Somerset’s name distilling the essence of Henrisoun’s text into about 900 words.31 It was addressed to the nobles, gentlemen and ‘common people’ of Scotland. Hundreds of copies were nailed onto the doors of toll booths and churches all over Scotland both before and during the invasion; Somerset even tried to distribute copies to the Scottish army at Pinkie on the morning of the battle. The duke justified his invasion in terms of Reformation and national union. He sought to unite Scottish and English under ‘the name of Britons’ in order to advance ‘bothe the glory of God and his woorde’ and abolish ‘the bishop of Romes vsurped iurisdiccion’. The syntax and diction suggest that the writer was English, not Scottish. Doubtless Somerset had delegated the task of drafting the Proclamation to someone like Smith or Cecil prior to the march northwards. Somerset’s third appeal to the Scottish nation, An Epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie & peace of February 1548,32 was commissioned in response to a vastly changed set of political and military circumstances, for the 29 STC 12857, reprinted in Complaynt, pp. 207–36. For Henrisoun’s career, see Marcus Merriman, ‘Henrisoun, James (d. before 1570)’, ODNB; Marcus Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and “Great Britain”: British Union and Scottish Commonweal’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 85–112. 30 Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, pp. 171–4. 31 See Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 12, 272, 274, and 275, where in a photographic reproduction of the entire broadsheet (fig. 11.3) one can see that a date of ‘1547. July 31.’ appears at the bottom in a modern hand. 32 An Epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie & peace, sent from the Lorde Protector, & others the kynges moste honorable counsaill of England: to the Nobilitie, Gentlemen, and Commons, and al others the inhabitauntes of the Realme of Scotlande (STC 22268), reprinted in Complaynt, pp. 237–46. For recent discussions, see Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 274, 276–8, and Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, pp. 174–6.

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Scots, so far from embracing the prospect of enforced union, had not only repudiated the marriage of their Queen to Edward VI but were also preparing to counter-attack by every means available, diplomatic, military, and political: they had invited Henry II of France to send an expeditionary force to Scotland in return for the hand of Mary Queen of Scots in marriage to his son, the dauphin. French intervention in Scotland was precisely the nightmare that Somerset had sought to avoid; the French, as much as the pope, were among the agents of ‘the prince of darknesse’ so much vilified by Somerset’s propagandists. If the argument of the Epistle was by now familiar – resisting the providentially ordained union of the two crowns would only bring down God’s wrath in the form of an English conquest – the tone conveyed more than a whiff of apocalyptic desperation. As Roger Mason has so aptly phrased it, ‘If the Scots wished to save themselves from imminent destruction, they had at once to seize the opportunity of union in an imperial realm strong enough to resist even the powerful forces of Antichrist.’33 In the Epistle, the name ‘great Britayn’ appeared in print for the first time. Officially, the Epistle was said to have come from Somerset himself. In fact, authorship of it can be assigned with near certainty to Smith, thanks to the remarkable researches of the eighteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Martin.34 Somerset considered Smith’s Epistle to be of such urgency and importance that in addition to Grafton’s English edition – hundreds of copies of which were slated for immediate circulation in Scotland – he commissioned for quick continental distribution a Latin edition from Reyner Wolf, the king’s printer of Latin, Greek and Hebrew works, who printed it on 5 March 1548 under the title Epistola exhortatoria ad pacem.35 When Smith was sent on embassy to the court of the emperor in Brussels in July and August 1548, he presented his Epistola to Charles V, who, when he read it, is said not to have been pleased! Johann Sleidan included a reprint of Smith’s Epistola in his Commentaries on the reign of Charles V (Strasbourg, 1555), the first general history of the Reformation era. A German translation of the Epistola was also published at Erfurt in 1549.36 33 Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Mason, pp. 60–84, at p. 71. 34 C.H. Cooper and T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858–61), I, 373. Martin left a holograph note identifying Smith as the author of the Epistle. On Martin and his (now-dispersed) papers, see David Stoker, ‘Martin, Thomas (1697–1771)’, ODNB. 35 STC 22269. On Wolf, see E. Gordon Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade (London, 1905), pp. 171–2. 36 Sleidan dedicated two volumes of his Latin translation of Philippe de Commynes to Edward VI and Protector Somerset in 1548. On Sleidan’s dedications, his Ioanni Sleidani de statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo V Caesare commentarii, and later sixteenth-century

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In Paris Henry II utterly rejected the Epistle’s assertion that Scottish resistance to the marriage of Edward VI and Mary would guarantee union by conquest, and he began preparations for the dispatch of 12,000 armed men to Leith. Prospects of the dreaded confrontation with France tested Somerset’s resolve. On 6 May he asked Cranmer to have every priest in England lead parishioners in A praier for victorie and peace in the King’s name on Sundays and holy days, and he ordered Grafton to print it on 10 May 1548 for distribution to the bishops.37 If Cecil did not actually compose A praier, he certainly had a hand in its production, for a draft in manuscript is bound up with the ‘State Papers, Domestic’ in sequence with letters addressed to him on Scottish affairs.38 The praier borrows the argument and some of the phrases of earlier unionist tracts. God is asked to ‘haue an iye to this Isle of Britaigne’, so ‘that the Scottish menne and wee’ might be ‘knit into one nacion’ through the marriage of Edward VI and ‘the yong quene of Scotlande’. But the tone turns militant and defiant when the author addresses the terrible fate that awaits ‘those that woorketh against’ the marriage, for ‘if we be driuen’ to ‘warre’ to defend the cause of union, God will (we trust) lay His ‘sworde of punishment upon them’. Grafton shared this expression of faith and militancy; he thought that by commanding A praier ‘to be sayde in all the Churches of England’, the cause of union must be ‘the more prosperous’.39 Marcus Merriman has shown how the publication dates of Somerset’s unionist tracts were timed to coincide with impending English military manoeuvres in Scotland and how the contents of each reflected changed editions of Smith’s Epistle, see John Tonkin, ‘Sleidanus, Johannes’, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler et al. (New York, 1999), vol. vi, pp. 42–3; Ingeborg Berlin Vogelstein, ‘Sleidanus, Johannes’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand et al. (New York and Oxford, 1996), vol. iv, pp. 68–9; Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun’, pp. 108–9 n. 73; Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 277–8. 37 STC 16503. The only extant copy is: Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, 1976 (2). I wish to thank Dr C.S. Knighton for showing me this unique copy and very graciously sending me his typescript transcription of it, from which the quotations in this paragraph are taken. 38 TNA, SP 10/2, no. 6 (CSP Dom., no. 49), which immediately follows two letters of 25 July 1547 to Cecil for the raising of troops for the invasion of Scotland (CSP Dom., nos. 47 and 48: SP 10/2, nos. 4 and 5, respectively). Dr Knighton, editor of the revised edition of the CSP Dom., questioned the presumed date of July 1547 for the MS copy by indicating it as ‘?July’ (CSP Dom., no. 49, p. 17). The date of the draft must be close to 10 May 1548, the date of Grafton’s printing. It would not be unusual to find such a MS out of chronological order in the bound volume of manuscripts in the National Archives (SP 10/2), as Somerset, at the time of his fall in October 1549, ordered the king’s secretary, William Petre, to destroy many papers relating to the conduct of government business during the Protectorate. Cecil obviously saved some letters and papers, and they got bound up with others during the nineteenth century in what is now SP 10/2. 39 Quoted in Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 278–9, citing Grafton’s Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1809), vol. ii, p. 501.

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political and military circumstances.40 This is an important observation, for it explains why the last two tracts of Somerset’s propaganda campaign adopted a new, uncompromising line on the necessity of an English conquest of Scotland. The first, published by Grafton on 30 June 1548, was William Patten’s account of Somerset’s Expedicion into Scotlande.41 Patten, a sometime student at Gonville Hall, Cambridge, and (after 1533) parish clerk of St Mary-at-Hill, Billingsgate, London, was with Cecil at the battle of Pinkie as a second Marshalsea judge. Both men kept diaries of what they saw there, and when Patten returned to London in early 1548, he confessed that in composing the Expedicion, he had relied substantially on Cecil’s ‘notes’, which he said Cecil had given him. He also absorbed the anti-papalism of Smith’s Epistle and Henrisoun’s Exhortacion, with the difference that Patten’s attack on ‘that hydeous monster, that venemous Aspis …’, that ‘Antichrist the Bisshop of Rome’, was now far more strident and insistent than anything found in the earlier tracts.42 Patten’s tract so impressed Somerset that the Protector appointed him a collector of customs in London in July. But events in July and August 1548 overtook Somerset’s propaganda: the French had landed at Leith and Mary Queen of Scots had embarked for France as the betrothed of the dauphin. As the treaty of Greenwich was now a dead letter, Somerset decided simply to reassert Henry VIII’s ‘title’ to the crown of Scotland, the claim articulated in the royal Declaration of 1542. But with the French in Scotland, mere assertions were no longer sufficient; it would be necessary to ‘prove’ the validity of Edward VI’s title to the Scottish crown, and to present such proof to the King of France and a sceptical international audience. This work preoccupied Smith and Cecil during the last three months of 1548. It resulted in a diplomatic initiative in Paris in January 1549 and, in October or November 1548, the publication in London of An Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande.43 An Epitome constitutes the best single piece of evidence for the origins of Smith’s and Cecil’s thinking about a new British polity, an empire of Great Britain that was also a parliamentary monarchy. The Epitome grew out of research for the diplomatic initiative. Who conducted that research, what were the results, who wrote the Epitome, and what was the revolutionary argument of the tract?

Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 274, 278, 283. STC 19476.5: The expedicion into Scotlande of the most woorthely fortunate prince Edward, duke of Soomerset … set out by way of diarie, printed by Grafton in London on 30 June 1548; reprinted in An English Garner, ed. E. Arber (London, 1877–96), vol. iii, pp. 51–155, and Tudor Tracts, ed. A.F. Pollard (London, n.d.), pp. 53–157. 42 The quotations from Patten’s Expedicion are given in Mason, ‘Scottish Reformation’, p. 177. 43 STC 3196; reprinted in abridged form in Complaynt, pp. 247–56. 40 41

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iv Writing from London on 18 October 1548, the French ambassador, Odet de Selve, reported to Henry II that Smith and ‘six or seven others’ [VI ou VII aultres] had begun to gather legal and historical precedents establishing Edward VI’s ‘pretended rights’ to the Scottish kingdom [les droictz que ce roy prétend au royaulme d’Escosse].44 We can identify with certainty three of the ‘six or seven’ mentioned by de Selve: Cecil, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham and privy councillor, and Sir John Mason, clerk of the Parliament and the king’s French secretary. In October 1542 Henry VIII’s council had asked Tunstall and the Archbishop of York to search their episcopal ‘registers …, auncient chartres and monuments’ for evidence of the King’s ‘title to the realme of Scotland’.45 Their search unearthed the sources cited in the Declaration of 1542. Now, six years later, Edward VI’s council asked Tunstall to produce those papers again, ignoring his warning that the earlier research had revealed documentary proof of Edward II’s renunciation of his claim ‘of superorytie’ in Scotland!46 No matter; by October 1548 Mason had assumed oversight of what might be called an ‘archive’ of all of the documents, charters and registers found. The archive included a ‘book of notes’ based on the records searched, a book apparently containing lengthy verbatim transcriptions of original documents, for among the papers at Hatfield House is a collection of extracts relating to Scottish affairs which Cecil ‘copied out of the book of notes’ that on 20 December 1548 was in Mason’s keeping.47 During October Smith and his colleagues recast the historical ‘precedents’ and legal claims that the documents in Tunstall’s collection allegedly supported. Mason’s ‘book of notes’ distilled the essence of this work: essentially it formed the basis of the case that Somerset presented to de Selve in London in December 1548. When Edward VI’s envoy, Dr Nicholas Wotton, argued that case before Henry II and his council in Paris

44 De Selve to Henry II, from Stratham, 18 October 1548, Correspondence politique de Odet de Selve, ambassadeur de France en Angleterre (1546–1549), ed. G. Lefèvre-Pontalis (Paris, 1888), p. 461. 45 The privy council to the Archbishop of York, 3 October 1542; State Papers … [of] Henry VIII. vol. V: Correspondence relative to Scotland and the Borders, 1534–1546 (London, 1836), no. 396 (pp. 212–13). 46 Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 66, 266, 287. 47 On 11 October 1548 the council authorized payment of £20 from the exchequer to Mason ‘and others for theyr paynes in serching registres for recordes of mattiers of Scotland’; Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent, vol. ii, 225. Cecil’s reference to Mason’s ‘book of notes’ is in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (vol. I, London, 1883), p. 56.

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in January 1549, he supplied the French with copies of the ‘precedents’ and documents that Somerset had given de Selve.48 The author of the Epitome clearly had access to Mason’s ‘archive’, for in ‘proving’ Edward VI’s title to Scotland – the tract is dedicated to the boy king – he makes the same case that the author of the Declaration had made using the same sources, ‘the auncient histories of this great Britaigne’, ‘instrumentes of homage made by the kynges of Scotlande’, and various ‘recordes and regestres’ confirming Scottish and foreign recognition of the king’s ‘superiorite’.49 True to the title of his tract – ‘I am restrained by promise of an Epitome’ – he not only summarizes the arguments of 1542 but refers the King back to them point by point: ‘This haue I declared & proued vnto you …’ or ‘I haue also proued vnto you …’, etc.50 Who was this person? In a dedicatory preface the author styled himself ‘Nicholas Bodrugan otherwise Adams’. He was Nicholas Adams alias Bodrugan (b. by 1521), a young lawyer from Dartmouth who had been a commissioner for chantries in Devon in 1546. His membership of the Middle Temple may have given him access to John Lord Russell, Lord Privy Seal, and others around the Queen Dowager, Katherine Parr. Adams almost certainly knew Smith and Cecil, for like them, he sat in the parliament of 1547. Although nothing has been found to connect him to Smith’s team, his letter to Cecil about collegiate lands in May 1553 may hint at an earlier professional relationship between the two.51 A contemporary described Adams as ‘well learned in the law’, and since the author of the Epitome stated that ‘I haue studied a great while the lawes of this realme, & be it sayd without arrogancie, haue red theim all bothe old and new …’,52 one might suppose Adams qualified to write the tract, but we know nothing of his schooling

48 There survives a draft of Somerset’s letter to Wotton in the hand of Sir William Petre, the king’s secretary, describing the Protector’s meeting with de Selve and enclosing for Wotton a list of the sources and copies of documents to be presented to Henry II; Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547–1553, ed. W.B. Turnbull (London, 1861), no. 112 (p. 27). Jean de St Mauris, the Imperial ambassador in France, reported to Emperor Charles V on 26 January 1549 from Poissy that ‘during the last few days’ Wotton had presented the copies and the list to Henry II; Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to the negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the archives at Vienna, Simancas, and elsewhere, vol. ix, ed. M.A.S. Hume and R. Tyler (London, 1912), 330–31. A fair-copy of the precedents in the form of a manuscript book bearing a date of 1549 is: BL, Add. MS 6128; Merriman (Rough Wooings, p. 288 n 46) cites related MSS. 49 In Complaynt, the sources for the Declaration are given on pp. 198 and 202–3; for the Epitome, pp. 248 and 252. 50 Complaynt, pp. 249, 251, 252. 51 CSP Dom., no. 821 (TNA, SP 10/2, no. 19). On Adams’s official career and possible connections, see Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, vol. I, pp. 294–5. 52 Complaynt, p. 253.

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or education. The author of An Epitome clearly had read a wide range of ‘indifferent writers’, English and foreign, classical and contemporary. Mary Dewar thought that Smith ‘had something to do with’ writing an Epitome, but her suggestion was based on her misreading of Thomas Martin’s attribution; Martin had ascribed to Smith not An Epitome, but An Epistle.53 Dewar’s error aside, it remains likely that Smith wrote An Epitome and that Adams lent his name to it in order to mask Smith’s role, for Smith is the only person known to satisfy all of the criteria for authorship: he possessed the most distinguished legal mind of the realm; his learning encompassed the widest imaginable range of historical and literary sources; he had seen all of the documents in Mason’s ‘archive’; he had personally helped direct the unionist propaganda campaign. Perhaps the classical learning that lay beneath the tract provides the best evidence of Smith’s hand, for his own library would have held all of the works informing both An Epitome54 and ‘the fine flowers of Rethorike’ which the author said he possessed (but which ‘it was not my mynde to trifle with’ now). And who but Smith (of known ‘arrogancie’) could have resisted this slap at his Scottish readers: ‘where is your reason, where is ye loue that Plato & Cicero require in you to be borne to’ England?55 The author’s appeal to reason to support ‘my persuasion of this vnion’ rested on the twin pillars of history and godliness. Neither was new in the service of Somerset’s unionist propaganda. But in the Epitome Smith – if we may identify him as the author – used ‘the auncient histories of this great Britaigne’ to a new end. Where the Declaration had cited chronicles etc. in support of Henry VIII’s feudal claim to Scotland, An Epitome harnessed history and myth together in order to show that because of shared blood, language and law, England and Scotland had always been members of ‘the whole Empire’ of Great Britain, and that because God had willed that union, only ‘godly condicions of peace’ – read English evangelical Christianity – could secure it against its enemies. Each of these points contained elements that had appeared separately in previous tracts. Where Smith departs from previous writers is in his assertion of the nature of imperial authority. It consisted not merely of the superiority of the Tudor crown but also of the precedence of English law within the new union. Smith is explicit about this: ‘I dare affirme that the moost wicked lawe that euer was geuen in this realme, conteigneth not halfe somuche iniquitie as the best’ Scottish law. Since ‘the generall iurisdiccion 53 Dewar, Smith, p. 48; Cooper and Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses, vol. I, p. 373; and see n. 34 above. 54 Smith’s extraordinary library counted 406 volumes, including 104 works of history in Greek, Latin, French, English and Italian (McMahon, p. 28). For the titles, see John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820; repr. New York, 1974), pp. 274–81. 55 Complaynt, pp. 249, 255.

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ecclesiastical of Scotland’ historically fell subject to the ‘dioses and rule of tharchebishoppe of Yorke in Englande’, the royal supremacy of the Tudor crown imperial would supersede the authority of Scottish prelates (who were in any case a vicious, profane ‘popishe Clergie’ given ‘to thinges counterfeicte’). Smith insisted on the primacy of ‘this realme now called Englande the onely supreme seat of thempire of greate Briteigne’,56 which suggests that he thought that at London the ‘empire’ would be subject to the rule of an ‘emperor’. But no: Smith abandoned Edward VI’s ‘imperial’ jurisdiction in favour of one that recognized parliament’s indispensable role in exercising the royal supremacy. Indeed, sovereignty in the godly empire of Great Britain would ultimately rest in the king’s parliament of England. Nowhere in An Epitome does Smith state this directly, but the conclusion, as McMahon demonstrated, emerges suggestively from the author’s subtle, selective manipulation of his sources, principally Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (written c. 1135–39).57 It is the story of British origins with a Smithian twist. Brutus, the mythical grandson of Aeneas, gave his name to the empire that he established in ‘this whole Isle of greate Briteigne’. Within this empire ‘synce the beginnyng the Scottes receiued and obeyed the olde lawes and customes’ of England, just as their kings, descended from one of Brutus’s younger sons, had always given homage to English kings, descendants of Brutus’s oldest son. The English claim to superiority in Scotland, however, derived not only from the performance of ‘their kynges homages’,58 but from the inheritance of the laws of that earlier empire, and because English sovereigns had traditionally consulted assemblies of nobles, clergy, and commons, it could therefore be said that such assemblies, or parliaments, had always participated in the government of the empire: in Smith’s hands, this was the ‘hidden message’ of the Historia.59 v Smith’s conviction that parliament was not merely indispensable but sovereign in governing church and realm was born of his own parliamentary experience in 1547–48. As senior member for the Wiltshire borough of Marlborough, a seat he owed to the Protector’s patronage, he served as Somerset’s spokesman and manager in the Commons during the first session of Edward VI’s first parliament (4 November–24 December 1547). He had 56 The quotations from An Epitome in this paragraph appear successively in Complaynt, pp. 253, 252, 254, 250. 57 McMahon, pp. 23–30. 58 Complaynt, pp. 250, 252. 59 McMahon, p. 27.

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a hand in the Act of Repeal and probably in the act for the dissolution of the chantries. More significant was his role in the second session (which began on 24 November 1548) in securing legislation authorizing the first Book of Common Prayer. In the Commons, Somerset entrusted to him the draft of the Book after the bill to which it was attached had been read. Politically, the resulting Act of Uniformity (of 21 January 1549) was anticlimactic, for Somerset had needed first to gain the conservative bishops’ support for the bill, which he did in a rigged, if still-stormy, debate in the Lords on 15–19 December 1548. Doctrinally, the results of this ‘disputation’, the most important of the English Reformation era, stripped the Mass of its mysterious reality. Smith and Somerset presided over the debate.60 Cecil’s career in the Commons in 1547–48 remains murky; two private bills for his constituency at Stamford may have been his.61 But like Smith he was deeply involved in the advancement of Somerset’s godly Reformation, and like Smith he knew that at the outset of the reign the Protector had intended to achieve that Reformation by use of the royal prerogative, the chief instrument of the king’s ‘imperial’ authority.62 Stephen Gardiner’s stinging attack on the government’s use of that authority to issue Cranmer’s Injunctions of 31 July 1547 forced Somerset to abandon that strategy. By the time parliament had convened on 4 November 1547 he had decided that in future, fundamental religious reform would require parliamentary consent. Gardiner’s attack had revealed a chink in the armour of Edward VI’s supremacy; the King, after all, was only nine at the time. Could the Real Presence of Christ be denied by act of parliament during the King’s minority? If not, the royal supremacy, as expressed by the king-inparliament, was suspect. Somerset tried to force Gardiner’s hand on the question in a sermon he ordered the Bishop to deliver at court on St Peter’s Day, 29 June 1548. When Gardiner, refusing to be trapped, waffled on the ‘articles’ put to him beforehand, Somerset threw him into the Tower. Cecil had interviewed Gardiner only a few days earlier; it is clear from Foxe’s account of the interview that ‘transubstantiation’ was the sticking point.63 60 On Smith’s parliamentary career, see Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, vol. III, pp. 338–40. For the bishops’ disputation in the Lords, see F.A. Gasquet and E. Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, rev. edn (London, 1928), pp. 158–60, 163–5, 178– 80, 172–3, where a contemporary reporter’s notes of the disputation (BL, Royal MS 17. B. xxxix) are also printed as appendix V, pp. 395–443. 61 Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, vol. I, p. 604. 62 Sir William Paget revealed this in a confidential memorandum of 25 December 1548 to Somerset: Northamptonshire Record Office, Fitzwilliam (Milton) MS C. 21, cited and quoted in Hoak, King’s Council, p. 176. 63 Cecil’s interview with Gardiner, based on Foxe’s account, is narrated in Read, Mr Secretary Cecil, pp. 46–8.

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Gardiner’s sermon of 29 June 1548 is said to have marked ‘a defining moment’ in the life of Somerset’s regime.64 It was also, I think, a turning point in Smith’s and Cecil’s thinking about the necessity of parliamentary backing for a royal Reformation. Cecil drafted the letter Somerset sent to Gardiner the day before the sermon, and he and Smith together composed the articles on which Gardiner was asked to preach. In August 1549 Smith drafted the council’s letter to the bishops ordering use of the Prayer Book; in it he defended the new, ‘godly order’ of worship on the grounds that it rested on parliamentary statute. This became the official line: in The hurt of sedicion, the government’s public response to rebels who had rejected the Book in the summer of 1549, John Cheke wrote that the recovery of True Religion was only possible with ‘the hole consent of parliament’.65 Cheke had been Cecil’s tutor and Smith’s closest friend and colleague at Cambridge. He was deeply immersed in the rhetoric of Somerset’s unionist campaign; some passages in The hurt of sedicion echo those in An Epitome. Cheke worried that Kett’s rebels would cost the King a victory in Scotland and so thwart the union of the two realms.66 The author of An Epitome knew that England’s game in Scotland was up: as the King’s marriage to the Scottish queen would ‘take not effecte’, union by that means was dead. It remained for His Majesty’s honour to be upheld against the Scots’ ‘wilfull rebellion’.67 The argument for Edward VI’s ‘title’ to ‘the souereigntie of Scotlande’ became little more than a cover for Smith’s real subject, the place of the English parliament in ‘thempire of greate Briteigne’. Although An Epitome drew upon an existing vocabulary of British unity, the author’s vision of the parliamentary basis of that unity under the crown imperial was unprecedented. If the ‘Edwardian Moment’ of 1548 witnessed an illfated attempt to forge in war a ‘godly’ union of England and Scotland, it also produced a new conception of English monarchy, one to which, after the alleged ‘tyranny’ of 1553–58, Smith and Cecil would return.

Alford, Kingship and Politics, p. 59. Smith’s draft of the letter to the bishops of 16 August 1549 (TNA, SP 10/8, no. 43; CSP Dom., no. 340) and the passage from Cheke’s Hurt of sedicion (STC 5109), sig. Avir, are quoted in Alford, Kingship and Politics, p. 61. 66 Cheke, Hurt of sedicion (London, 1549), sigs Giiv –Givv. 67 Complaynt, p. 249. 64 65

ESSAY 3

Common Consent, Latinitas, and the ‘Monarchical Republic’ in mid-Tudor Humanism1 John F. McDiarmid In ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Patrick Collinson referred to the Elizabethan elite’s having ‘cut its political teeth in the acephalous conditions of Edward VI’s minority’.2 Indeed, essential figures in Collinson’s account of ‘monarchical republicanism’, notably Sir William Cecil and Sir Thomas Smith, might accurately if not very gracefully be called ‘Edwardo-Elizabethans’. Smith reached a height of political influence under Somerset, Edward VI’s uncle and Protector, lost it when Somerset fell, regained office though not his earlier pre-eminence under Elizabeth; Cecil served both Somerset and Northumberland, as well as Elizabeth later. John Aylmer, also cited by Collinson, achieved an archdeaconry under Edward, was restored to it under Elizabeth and ended his life as her bishop of London.3 These men were members of a group that emerged at Cambridge in the 1530s, and that is notable especially as the first prominent Protestant humanist circle in England.4 One of them, Roger Ascham, described the model that informed their careers: that of the ‘scholer, that might becum … a good minister in Religion, or a Ciuill Ientleman in service of his Prince 1 The author is grateful to Patrick Collinson and Markku Peltonen for comments on an earlier version of this essay. 2 Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, quoting 39. 3 Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London, 1964); Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), and Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002); Gerald L. Bray, ‘John Aylmer’, in Tudor England: An Encyclopedia, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, David W. Swain et al. (New York, 2001), p. 50. For Collinson on these figures, see ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 35–9, 49–55; ‘De Republica Anglorum, Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, Elizabethan Essays, pp. 1–29, at 14–20. 4 On the group see Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980); Alford, Kingship, pp. 125ff, 139–51, 199–203; McDiarmid, ‘Classical Epitaphs for Heroes of Faith: Mid-Tudor Neo-Latin Memorial Volumes and their Protestant Humanist Context’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3 (1996): 23–47.

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and contrie’.5 Study of classical grammar and rhetoric for them led on into public occupations where rhetorical skill could be put to use in guiding the affairs of church and commonwealth. Not all of them survived to serve Elizabeth. Sir John Cheke, the first to gain a post at court (as Prince Edward’s tutor in 1544), died under Queen Mary,6 as did John Ponet, a bishop under Edward and the author of one of the most important Marian works of ‘resistance theory’, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556).7 Members of this Cambridge circle left important writings on politics. Along with Ponet’s, the most impressive are Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal and De Republica Anglorum (written in 1549 and 1562–65 respectively), but there are also significant texts by Cheke, Aylmer and others. Scholars have cited various influences on their writings, including native English political traditions and their Protestant beliefs.8 Without denying these other elements, this chapter aims to reinforce the sense that the political conceptions of Smith and the others were significantly informed by classical republican thought, especially Cicero’s.9 The most obviously republican feature in the Cambridge humanists’ works are references to the consent of the community as the foundation of political life. But this conception had at least two important corollaries. A particular community may have its own distinctive traits. The Cambridge humanists saw England as a community with governing structures peculiarly appropriate to its character. Also integral to their thought was the perception that a community and its structures may change. Change could be for the better, and the Cambridge humanists often saw themselves in the role of reformers, capable of guiding the English polity as to ways in which it might improve. All these elements had Ciceronian precedents. Also (and as for Cicero also) the political ideas of the Cambridge humanists were connected with another major area of concern for them that has been mentioned: language

5 The Scholemaster [1570], in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904), p. 287. 6 On Cheke, see Paul Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’, diss. Harvard 1971; McDiarmid, ‘John Cheke’s Preface to De superstitione’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997): 100–119; Alan Bryson, ‘Sir John Cheke’, ODNB. 7 On Ponet, see Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556), Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago, 1942). 8 E.g. John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310, esp. 303–4; Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 117–19; Anne McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 911–39. 9 On classical republicanism, see Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995).

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and rhetoric. These connections can be illuminating, and will be exploited further on in the chapter. ••••• Collinson launches his argument for a quasi-republican element in Elizabethan political thinking by quoting Smith’s well-known definition of ‘a common wealth’ in De Republica Anglorum.10 It occurs in the first book of Smith’s work, as part of a discussion of the nature of ‘common wealthes or governement’ in general before he gets down to the work’s announced topic, ‘The Maner of Governement or Policie of the Realme of Englande’.11 The definition comes at the beginning of a ‘division of the common wealth by the partes thereof’. The definition names, as the most basic ‘partes’ of the common wealth, the individual men who taken together compose it: A common wealth is called a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by a common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre.12

Government for Smith derives from mutual agreement among a group of people. Smith’s definition, like many other points in Book I of De Republica Anglorum, can be related to Aristotle’s Politics, which begins from the perception of the state as at root a ‘community … established with a view to some good’.13 The same point appears in a Ciceronian text well known to the Cambridge humanists, De officiis, which speaks of citystates originating from ‘the association of men’ [hominum coetu].14 A ‘society’, ‘community’ or an ‘association of men’ is capable of changing the terms of its ‘common accord’ as time goes on. As a society grows or accumulates experience, different forms of government may succeed one another. In De officiis, Cicero suggests that the ‘masses’ [multitudo] first set up the Roman monarchy, hoping a strong ruler would defend them from oppression by the more powerful classes in society. When kings proved to be oppressive themselves, ‘laws were invented’ [leges sunt inventae].15 Smith offers a story of a generic commonwealth’s growth out of an extended family, and its corresponding political evolution. At an Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 36. De Republica Anglorum [printed 1583], ed. Dewar (Cambridge, 1982) (hereafter DRA), p. 49. 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), 1252a 1–2. References to Aristotle occur on DRA, pp. 54–5 and 58–9; cf. Politics 1285b 20–28, 1253a 2–18. 14 De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London, 1913), II iv 15. On De officiis’ influence, see Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 116, Kingship, pp. 44–6. 15 II xii 41–2. 10 11

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early stage, when ‘the great grandfather was alive’, the family ‘by their common and mutuall consent’ recognized him as their single ruler. When he died, ‘the sonnes of him’ shared power as an oligarchy; when they were gone, the members of the proliferating family/society agreed that ‘ech man in turne … might … beare rule’, which ‘I take for the source’ of democracy. ‘Mutations and changes of fashions of governement of common wealthes are naturall’, Smith says.16 Different nations, he goes on, require different kinds of government: according to the nature of the people, so the commonwealth is to it fit and proper. … [W]hen to ech … kinde of the people that is geaven which agreeth[,] as ye would putt … a shoe fyt to a man’s foot, so the bodie politique is in quiet, and findeth ease, pleasure and profit thereby.

A ‘free people of nature’ may not tolerate being ‘ruled by one … were he never so good’. ‘[A]nother sort’ of nation will submit to a strong ruler and dissolve into anarchy without one.17 Here at the end of Smith’s section on commonwealths in general, the ‘people’ remain the essential point of reference: from the basic perception of the polity as a ‘common doing of … free men’, Smith has extrapolated the possibilities of political change and diversity. Outside of De Republica Anglorum, the most extensive treatment of the general nature of commonwealths by a Cambridge humanist occurs in Ponet’s Shorte Treatise of Politike Power. Protestant beliefs frame Ponet’s thought: God, not man’s ‘corrupt’ ‘reason’, is the real founder of commonwealths, and ‘the state of the policies and common wealthes haue been disposed and ordained bi’ ‘the wonderfull prouidence of God’.18 Within this frame, however, is a set of humanist conceptions resembling Smith’s. What God is responsible for bringing about is ‘that men furst assembled together in companies, that common wealthes were made’.19 As in Smith, ‘the people’ organize their governments in various ways: ‘whether this authoritie to make lawes, or the power to execute the same, shal be and remayne in one person alone, or in manie … is … lefte to the discrecion of the people … .’ Ponet commends the ‘mixte state’, ‘wher all

16 DRA, pp. 59–62, quoting 59, 60, 62. Cf. David Harris Sacks, ‘The Prudence of Thrasymachus: Sir Thomas Smith and the Commonwealth of England’, in Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, ed. Anthony Grafton and J.H.M. Salmon (Rochester, NY, 2001), pp. 89–122, at 99–101. 17 Ibid., pp. 62–3. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1285a 18–23, Cicero, De officiis II vii 24. 18 A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (facsimile; Amsterdam, 1972), sigs Aiir–v, Avir. 19 Ibid., Aiir.

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together … a king, the nobilitie, and commones’ rule; Smith had noted that de facto most governments were mixtures of the three classic types.20 From the popular basis of all governments Ponet derives the possibility of political change: ‘Kinges, Princes and gouernours haue their autoritie of the people, as all lawes, vsages and policies doo declare’, and ‘All lawes doo agree, that men maie reuoke their proxies and lettres of Attournaie, whan it pleaseth them.’ He is particularly concerned with one ‘iuste occasion’ for change: when the people ‘see their proctours and attournaies abuse’ the power they have been given. From the possibility of political change Ponet develops his famous justification of deposing unjust rulers, by violence if necessary, and killing tyrants.21 This most explosive potential of republicanism is touched on by Smith in De Republica Anglorum very cautiously. He says ‘the learned’ judge the actions of tyrannicides such as Brutus and Cassius ‘according to the purpose of the doers, and the estate of the time then present’, and concludes that ‘it is alwayes a doubtfull and hasardous matter to meddle with the chaunging of lawes and governement’.22 But Smith as well as Ponet could have read in De officiis that overthrowing tyrants was not merely justifiable, but a duty.23 ••••• The understanding of the polity as established through the agreement of ‘companies’ of men, who frame the polity to suit their particular natures and alter it as they need, appears in the Cambridge humanists’ writings not only about commonwealths in general but about England in particular. Before the latter are taken up, however, it may be enlightening to make a short detour through the Cambridge humanists’ work on language. They produced texts on both classical philology and their own vernacular. Their main linguistic conceptions like their political ones fit within the Ciceronian tradition. In that tradition language and politics are strongly linked, and the Cambridge humanists’ linguistic work can alert one to recognize humanistic patterns in their political thought. The link between language and the polity in the Ciceronian tradition is that both arise from the people; a language and a res publica are each the work of a community. In De officiis the ‘laws and customs … and … definite social system’ [leges moresque … certaque vivendi disciplina] of a city are generated by the group of men which basically constitutes

20 Ibid., Aivv–Avr; DRA, p. 52. On Ponet, see Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University, AL, 1985), pp. 47–8. 21 Shorte Treatise, Gvv– Gvir. 22 DRA, p. 52. 23 III vi 32, cf. III iv 19.

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it.24 The structure of a language, says Quintilian in the Institutio oratoria, emerges from the practice of men. It was not ‘sent down from heaven’ [demissa caelo], ‘but was discovered after [men] began to speak and to note the terminations of words used in speech’ [sed inventa est postquam loquebantur {homines}, et notatum in sermone quid quomodo caderet]. Laws and political arrangements arise from a community’s purposive action. Linguistic forms arise from a community’s behaviour; the rules of a language are simply norms, based on ‘observation’ [observatio] of the way most people speak.25 Through their decisions or their practices, it is people that create polities and languages. The same ramifications follow from the basic nature of language as do from the similar basic nature of the polity. The languages of different communities differ. Cicero not only notes the ‘particular accent peculiar to the Roman race’ [certa vox Romani generis … propria], but calls on Romans to maintain it,26 and deprecates unneeded borrowings from Greek which were fashionable in his time.27 Cicero also knows that language changes, saying that orators should keep up with current usage.28 He believes that change can mean improvement. The words of Cato the elder sound uncouth [horridiora] to him; Cato could not help it; ‘that was how they spoke in his day’ [ita enim tum loquebantur].29 The account of the growing refinement of the Latin language and Roman oratory in Cicero’s Brutus is interspersed with references to the parallel development of the Roman state.30 Cicero was prepared to help along Latin’s further improvement, as he was to do his best for the republic politically. While he shunned unneeded Greek borrowings, he recognized that there were as yet no Latin equivalents for certain Greek philosophical terms. He offered, among other solutions, new coinages of his own from Latin roots. Cicero did this cautiously, aware that the new words were not part of the existing Latin usage which he generally held to be the standard for correctness. Through careful explanation of his meaning when he used a new word, he sought to win understanding and acceptance for it. His aim was not to

II iv 15. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H.E. Butler (London, 1920), I vi 16; cf. I vi 3. See also Cicero, De oratore, Books I and II, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (London, 1942), I iii 12; Cicero, Brutus, trans. G.L. Hendrickson, and Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell (London, 1939), Orator xlviii 159. 26 De oratore, Book III, trans. Rackham (London, 1942), xii 44. 27 De officiis I xxxi 111; Orator xlix 164. 28 De oratore III x 39. 29 Brutus xvii 68; cf. xx 78, xxi 83. 30 E.g. xiv 53–7, xxvii 103–4, xxxiii 125. 24 25

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reject Latin custom, latinitas, as a standard, but to promote the alteration of custom in ways that he thought were necessary.31 All of these approaches are replicated in the linguistic writings of the Cambridge humanists. The basic sense that the forms of language are created by its speakers is emphasized in Smith’s ‘Dialogue on the Correct and Improved Writing of English’ [De recta et emendata linguae anglicae scriptione, dialogus]. In the dialogue’s opening section Smith makes a preliminary distinction: plants and animals, he says, ‘have their own eternal and unchangeable nature’ [habent suam naturam aeternam … & semper sui similiem futurum]. By contrast, the meanings of words and the rules of grammar and orthography are not part of ‘this eternal and immutable order of things’ [haec aeterno & immutabili rerum ordine] but instead derive from ‘a sort of mutual covenant and consent among men’ [hominum inter se quodam quasi pacto & consensu]. The distinction recalls Quintilian’s statement that linguistic forms did not come down from heaven but emerged from the practice of men. Smith incidentally cites some other things besides the meanings and spellings of words that are matters of consensus: Whence are derived laws, coins, weights, measures, rights of contract, and many other things … . [Vnde leges, numismata, pondera, mensuraeque, contractuum iura, plurimaque pendent alia]32

The inclusion of laws in this list is striking; it links the basing of language on consensus with Smith’s conception that political and legal structures arise from the ‘common doing of … men’. There will be occasion to refer back to the whole list below. In De … scriptione, Smith notes that different nations have distinct linguistic conventions, and attends to the ‘characteristic and special sounds’ [proprios & peculiares sonos] of spoken English. Smith sees much of the inconsistency in English spelling as due to the fact that the English have indiscriminately borrowed the Latin alphabet, which does not entirely suit their speech.33 Similarly (and following Cicero), Cheke and Ascham and the rhetorician Thomas Wilson opposed fashionable borrowings of words from other languages, the influx into English of ‘straunge ynkhorne

31 Academica I vi 24–vii 26, De Natura Deorum I xvii 45, xxxiv 95, xxxix 109, II xi 29 (in Academica and De natura deorum, trans. Rackham [London, 1933]); De oratore I xxxiv 155; De finibus bonorum et malorum III iv 15, v 17, vi 20, 21 etc. 32 Smith, De recta et emendata linguae anglicae scriptione, dialogus [1568], in Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works, Part III, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm, 1983), pp. 38–41. On De … Scriptione, see Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 143–54. 33 De … scriptione, pp. 46/7; cf. 32/3.

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termes’.34 Concern for the distinctive identity of English merged into concern for maintaining the identity of Englishmen. Wilson’s scorn for ‘Italienated’ English speech has its counterpart in the vilification of the ‘Englese Italianato’ in Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570); there Italy as a nation is a demonized Other capable of infiltrating the English character, overcoming traits of plainness, honesty and virility which are found in Englishmen at home.35 The Cambridge humanists knew that ‘time and the space of yeares bringeth a chaunge’ not only in political forms but also ‘to the tongue’.36 They shared Cicero’s belief that languages could improve. Extended treatments of the process of improvement appear in Latin letters Cheke and Smith wrote in 1542, while they were still at Cambridge, defending the pronunciation of Greek that they wished to bring into studies at the University. Cheke and Smith argued that the pronunciation of the age of Demosthenes represented the culmination of a long process of improvement in the language. Earlier Greek speech had been characterized by ‘horriditas’, roughness (as Cicero had found Cato’s Latin ‘horridiora’), but by Demosthenes’ time Greek had attained ‘perfection and finish’ [absolutionem perfectionemque], as Latin reached its height in Cicero’s age. Subsequent forms of both tongues represented a decadence; Cheke and Smith saw their task as recovering for Cambridge the best form Greek had ever reached.37 The best ages of Greek and Latin were also political high points of the commonwealths in which they were spoken.38 This was not mere coincidence; the Greek pronunciation of Demosthenes’ age was for Cheke outstandingly clear and impressive, an effective medium for eloquent speech in a flourishing civic culture.39 Cheke and Smith believed English was at a stage where it still needed improvement, but that it could achieve its own perfection as Greek and Latin had theirs. Cheke joined in the project of improving English spelling.40 While he opposed unnecessary borrowings, Cheke saw the 34 Cheke, letter to Thomas Hoby [written 1557], in Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Hoby [1561], (London, 1928), pp. 7–8; Ascham, Toxophilus [1545], in English Works, p. xiv; Wilson, The arte of rhetorique [1560], ed. G.H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), pp. 162–5. 35 Scholemaster, pp. 225, 229, 233–7. 36 DRA, p. 89. 37 Cheke, De pronuntiatione graecae linguae [1555] (facsimile; Menston, 1968), pp. 48–52, 241–6, quotations at 49; Smith, De recta et emendata linguae graecae pronuntiatione [1568], in Literary and Linguistic Works, Part II, ed. Danielsson (Stockholm, 1978), pp. 40–51. Cf. Cicero, Brutus xliii 161; Ascham, Scholemaster, pp. 286, 294. 38 Cheke, De pronuntiatione, pp. 49, 244. 39 Ibid., pp. 62–96. 40 See Cheke (trans.), The Gospel according to St Matthew and the first chapter of the Gospel according to St Mark [c. 1549], ed. James Goodwin (Cambridge,

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English lexicon as ‘unperfight’, approved of needed borrowings, and also coined new words from native roots, as Cicero had in Latin.41 As was the case with Cicero, Cheke and Smith in their reforming efforts seem not to have parted company with the essential notion that the normal practice of the speech community constituted the standard of linguistic correctness. They understood their task as one of inducing the community to alter its practice so that the language could better convey meaning and support eloquence. Jennifer Richards has pointed to Smith’s use of dialogue, modelling an ‘organic process of correction’, in which change is brought about through persuasion and a conversational give-and-take.42 Smith in his letter on Greek describes the cautious, gradual process by which he and Cheke sought to introduce the ancient pronunciation at Cambridge.43 They were reformers seeking to win assent to change. ••••• The Cambridge humanists understood languages to be generated by speech communities, they paid attention to different languages’ distinctive characteristics, and they saw that languages could change and believed they could improve, including with help from linguistic reformers. Their linguistic conceptions were congruent with their general conceptions of commonwealths. The same patterns also appear in their considerable work on the English polity. Here Smith’s De Republica Anglorum once again makes a good starting point. Following his opening general chapters, Smith spends the remaining four fifths of De Republica Anglorum on the ‘common wealth’ of England.44 This is the most broad-ranging textual treatment of the English polity that any Cambridge humanist produced. An understanding of English governance as essentially the work of the English community appears very strongly in the famous chapter ‘Of the Parliament and the Authoritie thereof’ at the start of Book II. Parliament, the chapter begins, has the ‘most high and absolute power of the realme of England’. It has this power as the surrogate for the community. As in war the whole nation, ‘the force and power of Englande’, is embodied in the king’s army, so in peace ‘the parliament of Englande … representeth and

1843). On the translation’s date, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a Life (New Haven, 1996), pp. 426–7. 41 Hoby (trans.), The Courtier, pp. 7–8. 42 Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 82–3. 43 Smith, De … pronuntiatione, pp. 171–89; cf. Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 79– 82. 44 DRA, quoting p. 144.

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hath the power of the whole realme’. Acts of parliament are understood to be ‘the whole realmes deed’.45 There are striking parallels in the chapter on parliament with Smith’s treatise on spelling. Smith was working on both texts during his service as Elizabeth’s ambassador to France in the early-to-mid-1560s.46 The list in De … scriptione of other matters besides words that are determined by ‘a sort of mutual covenant and consent among men’ included ‘laws, coins, weights, measures, rights of contract’. All of these except coins (to which we shall return) appear in De Republica Anglorum’s list of parliament’s functions (emphasis is added to make the point): The Parliament abrogateth olde lawes, maketh newe, giveth orders for thinges past, and for thinges hereafter to be followed, changeth rightes, and possessions of private men, legittimateth bastards, establisheth formes of religion, altereth weightes and measures, giveth formes of succession to the crowne, defineth of doubtfull rightes, whereof is no lawe alreadie made, appointeth subsidies, tailes, taxes, and impositions, giveth most free pardons and absolutions, restoreth in bloud and name as the highest court, condemneth or absolveth them whom the Prince will put to that triall … .47

The list is surrounded by references to ‘consent’ that resemble phrases about consensus in De … scriptione. Thus parliament ‘hath the power of the whole realme … and the consent of Parliament is taken to be everie mans consent’; in De … scriptione laws, weights and so forth, as well as language, ‘have their source in the common consent of many in nationwide agreement’ [originemque primam accipere ex illo communi consensu multorum, nationisque concordia].48 In De Republica Anglorum, a bill consented to in Parliament ‘is called firme, stable, and sanctum, and is taken for lawe’ ‘whereupon justlie no man can complaine, but must accommodate himselfe to finde it good and obey it’. In De … scriptione the consensually-determined rules of speaking and writing ‘should be certain and settled’ [certum debet esse & constitutum], and are not to be deviated from ‘at will’ by an individual, but ‘must be fairly and honestly received’ [non pro cuiusque arbitrio … mutari: sed ex aequo et bono debere accipi].49 The parallels reinforce the sense that parliament with its ‘most high and absolute’ political power was for Smith the embodiment of Ibid., pp. 78–9. Ibid., pp. 1, 144; Smith, De … scriptione, pp. 24/5. 47 DRA, p. 78. Interpretations of this list include G.R. Elton, ‘Parliament in the Sixteenth Century: Functions and Fortunes’, in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, vol. III (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 156–82, at 159; Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 37; Donald R. Kelley, ‘Elizabethan Political Thought’, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, ed. J.G.A. Pocock et al. (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 48–79, at 76. 48 DRA, p. 79; De … scriptione, pp. 40/41. 49 DRA, p. 78; De … scriptione, pp. 34/5, 40/41. 45 46

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community consent, the same consent that underlay the structures of the English language. It needs to be pointed out now that the parliament was obviously not purely and simply a gathering of the community’s elected representatives. Along with the Commons, elected by some members of the community, it included ‘the Baronie’ and ‘the bishoppes’, and last and first ‘the Prince’, the king or queen, who ‘is to give life’ to parliament by summoning it, and whose ‘last and highest commaundement’ or assent must be added to the ‘consent’ of Lords and Commons before a bill becomes law.50 Smith was quite clear, indeed, that ‘the prince’ was ‘the life, the head, and the authoritie of all thinges that be doone in the realme of England’, and soon after the chapter on ‘Parliament and the Authoritie thereof’ comes one detailing the extensive prerogatives ‘of the Monarch … of Englande’.51 Monarchy is not ultimately incompatible with the humanistic notion that community generates government. One thing the people can do with their power is hand it to a monarch. Smith had mentioned this in Book I: at first, ‘by common and mutuall consent’, the society/family was ‘ruled by that one and first father’, and this was the ‘first and naturall beginning of a kingdome’.52 There is an indication that for Smith the power of the monarch of England, specifically, had a consensual basis. Among the royal prerogatives in the chapter ‘of the monarch … of England’ is the exclusive right to regulate the ‘monies of the realm’. Smith explains why this should be so: ‘For whom should the people trust more in that matter than their prince, for the coine is only to certifie the goodnes of the mettall and the weight, which is affirmed by the princes image and marke?’53 Power over the currency, a crucial matter that had taken up most of Smith’s attention in the Discourse of the Commonweal, apparently belongs to the prince because the people have entrusted him (or her) with it. ‘Coins’ were the one item in De … scriptione’s list of matters determined by consensus not included in De Republica Anglorum’s list of parliament’s competences. Consensus apparently has given it to the prince instead. So the English consensus has produced a state that has a monarchical component, and also an oligarchical one in the form of the House of Lords. Still, parliament does after all have an elective component as well. Smith describes how ‘the knightes of the shyre [are] chosen by all the gentlemen and yeomen of the shyre … ; likewise by the pluralitie of the voyces of the citizens and burgesses be the burgesses elected’. Elsewhere he asserts that England ‘is governed, administred and manied by three sortes of persons, the Prince, … [t]he gentlemen [and] … the yeomanrie’. Even a ‘fourth 50 51 52 53

DRA, p. 78. The chapter is on pp. 85–8, quotation (‘the life, the head’ etc.) on 88. DRA, p. 59. Ibid., p. 86.

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sort or classe’, including ‘day labourers’ and others, who Smith says ‘do not rule’, ‘be not altogether neglected’, serving as jurymen, churchwardens and constables.54 Different ‘sortes’ have radically different roles in Smith’s commonwealth, but none is utterly excluded from its business. Clearly England belongs in the category of the ‘mixt’ state which Smith had referred to in Book I, the state whose government does not entirely match any one of the classical triad of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy but instead has features of two or all three of them.55 This is the kind of state the community has generated in England. Community consent has entrusted powers to the prince, but also to the other ‘sortes of persons’. ‘Consent’ is exercised above all through parliament, where the prince collaborates with others in formulating laws that will be ‘the whole realmes deede’. This English form of government is congruent with distinctive traits that the English community has. In the introductory section of De Republica Anglorum, Smith discussed the need for governments to fit ‘the nature of the people’, giving as an instance that a ‘free people of nature’ may not accept being ‘ruled by one’.56 In Book III, Smith characterizes the English as such a people: ‘The nature of our nation is free, stout, haultaine.’ That the English prince rules with others is suitable to the fact that the English by ‘nature’ are ‘free’ and not ‘servile’.57 In and around a chapter in Book I on ‘chaunges in the maner of governement’, there are references to the ‘perfect estate’ of a ‘politique bodie’, which recall the linguistic ‘perfection’ Smith and Cheke saw Greek as having reached in the age of Demosthenes. Here, however, political improvement seems at best transient. ‘[T]he nature of man’, Smith says ‘is … to grow from the lesse to the more, and so to decay from the more againe to the lesse, … seldome standing in a perfect health.’58 Nevertheless, De Republica Anglorum ends on the note of reform. On the work’s last page, Smith states that his aim has been to portray ‘the governement of Englande’ ‘as Englande standeth and is governed at this day the xxviij of March Anno 1565’. This is to differentiate his text from portrayals of ‘feigned’ commonwealths such as More’s Utopia. But it also seems to be a forward-looking statement. Smith’s very last thought is that seeing things as they really are may be the first step towards improving them. Let us now compare, he says, England as he has shown it to be with other ‘common Ibid., pp. 79, 76–7. Ibid., p. 52. To say Smith sees England as a mixed state is not incompatible with his affirmation (DRA, p. 56) that England is a ‘Monarchie’: see McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558– 1585 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 207–9. 56 See above, p. 58. 57 DRA, pp. 117–18; cf. Sacks, ‘Prudence’, p. 105. 58 DRA, pp. 50, 52, 51. 54 55

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wealthes’, ‘to see who hath taken the righter, truer and more commodious way to governe the people’. This should be not ‘unprofitable for him who … hath good will to serve the Prince and the common wealth in giving counsell for the better administration thereof’.59 Knowledge, comparison and counsel may help the English ‘common wealth’ make itself better. Smith’s account of English governance in De Republica Anglorum is deservedly the most studied Cambridge humanist work on the subject.60 Limitations of space make it impossible to discuss every other Cambridge humanist comment about England here, and interesting texts, including some by Smith, must be omitted.61 Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal, Cheke’s The hurt of sedicion (1549), Ponet’s Shorte Treatise of Politike Power and John Aylmer’s Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Svbiectes (1559) will be considered. These writings were closely related to the actual politics of the times in which they were written; indeed, they were themselves political interventions, intended to further efforts or support positions being currently contested in the political arena. The first two texts, Smith’s Discourse and Cheke’s Hurt of sedicion, reflect the period of reform in the first two years of Edward VI’s reign, the years of Somerset’s protectorate. As was mentioned earlier, Cambridge humanists acceded to considerable influence at court under Somerset, Smith becoming by 1548 a principal secretary of state. In several ways the conduct of government under Somerset seems to have been consonant with Cambridge humanist ideas.62 A facet of the Edwardian Reformation emphasized by Diarmaid MacCulloch was that it was implemented gradually: MacCulloch speaks of an effort ‘to get grudging consent to a step-by-step reformation’.63 It seems reasonable to compare this with the gradual approaches Cambridge humanists used in trying to bring the community around to linguistic changes they favoured; Ibid., p. 144. See nn. 8, 16, 47, 55; also, e.g. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965), pp. 386–91; Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 166–75. 61 E.g. A Dialogue of the mariage of Q. Elizabeth compiled by Sir Thomas Smith [c. 1561], Folger MS V.b.317, fols 53r–77r (and in other MSS; on this and other works by Smith, see Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 159–65, 175–81); Walter Haddon, letter to Osorius [1563], in Lucubrationes (London 1567) (esp. pp. 231–2, 263–4); Wilson (trans.), The three Orations of Demosthenes … [1570] (facsimile; Amsterdam, 1968). There are of course other mid-Tudor political texts related to the Cambridge group’s, e.g. Christopher Goodman, How superior powers oght to be obeyd of their subiects (Geneva, 1558). 62 Hoak, ‘Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Monarchical Republic of Tudor England’, in this volume; Alford, Kingship, pp. 139–51. 63 MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Berkeley, 1999), p. 61. 59 60

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the almost stealthy process Smith describes by which he and Cheke brought their Greek pronunciation into use at Cambridge in the 1530s may have been a good dry run for their work for religious change under Edward. As Dale Hoak has pointed out, the role of parliament in the Edwardian Reformation was consonant with Smith’s later portrayal of parliament in De Republica Anglorum.64 Hoak sees in Edward’s early years a turn away from reliance on royal prerogative as the ground on which measures of religious reform would be legitimized, and towards parliamentary consent.65 Reformation would be undertaken on the basis of a mixed government, in Stephen Alford’s words the ‘collaborative … act of a king supported by his subjects’.66 The regime may have embarked on a collaborative politics in other ways. Ethan Shagan has argued that Protector Somerset’s ‘rhetoric’ in dealing with the rebels of 1549 ‘came dangerously close to envisaging a political partnership between government and commons’.67 The major rebellions of 1549 were both related to Somerset’s reforms, the Devon and Cornwall rebellion a reaction against religious changes, the Norfolk rebellion due at least in part to rising expectations encouraged by Somerset’s steps to address economic grievances.68 Smith’s Discourse and The hurt of sedicion were written against the backdrop of this crisis for reform. Apparently written in the later summer of 1549, when Smith had been sidelined from work at court,69 the Discourse may be a brief for reforms he wished he were in a position to help implement. It lays out the socio-economic, fiscal and religious ‘griefs’ of England, and a comprehensive set of ‘remedies’, of which the most important would be restoring the value of the debased currency.70 The Discourse, like De … scriptione and other works by Smith, is a dialogue. Smith’s spokesman, the learned Doctor, is a humanist reformer. He is trained in moral philosophy, and able to cite ‘that politic Senator

64 Hoak, ‘A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule’, in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 73–88, at 86. 65 Hoak, ‘The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, and the Transformation of Tudor Monarchy’, in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540– 1640, ed. C.S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 114–51, at 148–9. 66 Alford, Kingship, p. 62, cf. 61. 67 ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives’, English Historical Review, 114 (1999): 34–64, quoting 36. 68 MacCulloch, Boy King, pp. 121–6. 69 A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England [printed 1581], ed. Dewar (Charlottesville, 1969), pp. xix, xxiii. On the Discourse, see Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, pp. 355–62; Richards, Rhetoric, pp. 87–90, 101–6; Shrank, Writing the Nation, pp. 154–9. 70 Smith, Discourse, e.g. pp. 37, 95–6, 119.

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Tully’. Another speaker, the Knight, links the Doctor’s role to that of a physician prescribing sometimes unpalatable remedies; this comparison for the reformer occurs in other Cambridge humanist works both on the polity and on language.72 Along with conceptions of reform and the reformer, the Discourse also involves basic ideas about English government. The Knight offers a view resembling De Republica Anglorum’s fundamental sense of any ‘common wealth’ as ‘a multitude of … men’, cast in an analogy appropriate to the Discourse’s monetary preoccupation: ‘As a great mass of treasure consists of many pence and one penny added to another … so does each man added to another make up the whole body of a Commonweal.’ ‘Every man’, the Knight goes on, ‘is a member of the Commonweal.’73 In the Discourse’s preface, Smith says he will address the commonwealth’s problems because he is a member of it, and also because he is a member of parliament: 71

albeit I am not of the King’s Council to whom the consideration and reformation of the [‘decay of this Commonweal’] does chiefly belong, yet, knowing myself to be a member of the same Commonweal and called to be one of the Common House, where such things ought to be treated of, I cannot reckon myself a mere stranger to this matter … .

Smith understands his political participation as based on his being one part of England’s ‘whole body’, and also on his having a position in England’s mixed government.74 The Discourse sets forth Cambridge humanist themes more obtrusively than does The hurt of sedicion. Cheke clearly wrote The hurt in August 1549 at Cambridge, within striking distance of the Norfolk rebels who had just defeated the first force sent against them.75 Much of the text portrays the violence of rebellion and its disastrous consequences for the country.76 Surrounding Cheke’s denunciations, however, can be seen by now familiar Cambridge humanist ideas. Cheke seems to share Smith’s basic sense of a political society. A ‘Cytye and a prouince’, he says, ‘be not the faire houses, and the stronge walles, … but the liuinge bodies of men, being hable in nombre & strength to

Ibid., pp. 29, 116. Ibid., pp. 117–18; cf. Cheke, De pronuntiatione, pp. 278–9; Smith, De … pronuntiatione, pp. 190/91; see below p. 71. 73 Smith, Discourse, p. 51; cf. Sacks, ‘Prudence’, p. 99. 74 Smith, Discourse, p. 11. 75 Cheke, The hurt of sedicion (facsimile; Menston, 1971), refers to the rebels’ repulse of the ‘Lord Marques’ of Northampton at the end of July, 1549 (sig. Diir), but was clearly written before their defeat later in August. On the rebellions see Julian Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (London, 1977), including p. 175. 76 On Cheke on the consequences of rebellion, see Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, pp. 274–8. 71 72

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mayntayne them selues by good order of iustice.’ Each ‘mans body’ is ‘a part of the whole commune welth’.77 The rule of the king over England is established ‘by law’.78 Cheke also repeatedly stresses that royal authority is ordained by God. God has set the king over the English people as ‘their hed’ and ‘sheperd’.79 However, as Alford has noted, Cheke also (recurrently) refers to governmental actions as taken or ‘entended’ by ‘The kinges maiestie etc’ (emphasis added), implying that government includes more than the king alone.80 That Cheke thinks in terms of a composite English government appears most explicitly when he reminds the ‘religion rebelles’ of the west that the new Prayer Book had been ‘confirmed’ by ‘the hole consent of the parliament’, as well as ‘set forth’ by ‘the kynges Mayestie’. He admonishes the rebels ‘Ye were wont to iudge your parliamente wysest.’81 ‘Your’ is not used to modify the other authorities cited, including ‘the chosen Byshoppes’ and ‘the king’; one is left with the sense of parliament as distinctively pertaining to the people, a component through which they take a part in governance. England has a mixed government, headed by the king but also including a parliament that represents the people. The government has been committed to a comprehensive agenda of ‘reformation’. So far ‘The kinges maiestie etc. hath godli reformed an vncleane parte of religion, and brought it to the true forme of the first churche that folowed Christe.’82 But in addressing the Norfolk rebels Cheke stresses that there has also been an effort to address economic grievances: The kynges maiestie by thadvise etc. entended a iuste reformation of all such thynges as poore men coulde truelie shewe them selues oppressed with … Which was not onlie entended … but also set on wyth spede, and so entred into a due consideringe of all states, that none shoulde haue iust cause to grudge against thother, when as every thing rightfully had, nothing coulde be but unrightfullye grudged at … .83

The government has worked for improvement in both the religious and the secular spheres. In both spheres, Cheke seems to understand the goal as restoring or bringing about a ‘perfect estate’ of things: religion is to be brought back to ‘the true forme of the first churche’; English society is to arrive at a condition where ‘every thing [is] rightfully had’.

Cheke, Hurt, sig. Cvr–v. Ibid., Aviir. 79 Ibid., Bvir–v. There is constant reference to God in The hurt; see, e.g. Aiiv– Aiiiv, Aviiiv–Biiiv, Hivr. 80 Alford, Kingship, p. 62; Hurt, sig. Eviiir, two references on Fiiir. 81 Cheke, Hurt, sig. Avir. 82 Ibid., Fiiir. 83 Ibid., Eviiir–v; cf. Bviv. 77

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Along with inveighing against the rebels’ destructiveness, Cheke places both sets of them that he addresses in terms of their relationship to reform. The western rebels ignorantly reject religious reform; they cling to existing ways, too blind to recognize recovered truth when it is offered.84 The Norfolk rebels on the other hand were not opponents of reform. In Cheke’s view they are instead would-be reformers who have gone about it in the wrong way. At one point Cheke likens them to a ‘person’ who ‘doth a good thing after an yl sort’. Using the medical comparison, he says ‘ye amende fautes as yll surgions heale sores’.85 Even though those who rebelled belong to the class who do not rule in the commonwealth,86 still, Cheke claims, they had ‘waies to redresse’, they could have appealed to ‘magistrates’ ‘which soughte to amende matters’. But ‘ye haue orderly sought no redres’.87 Instead of using available, sanctioned procedures, they have sought to force change by using violence. Good reformers, like Cheke or Smith or Cicero working on their languages, set forth ‘reasonable cause of the doinge … afore euery doers eies’; the Norfolk rebels have not.88 By acting as they have the rebels have disrupted and may have jeopardized the orderly process of reform ‘the kinges maiestie etc’ had undertaken: ‘What state leaue ye vs in now? … hindred from amendmentes, by our owne deuelyshe haste … .’89 Cheke was of course right on this score; the rebellions led to the downfall of Somerset’s regime.90 Do Cheke’s reproaches that the Norfolk rebels should not have risen since they had orderly ‘waies to redresse’ open to them bear the inference that, had the polity been so constituted that no such ‘waies’ were available, their rising might have been justified? This was the prospect opened up by Ponet in A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power, written under what he regarded as the irreligious tyranny of Mary. (Cheke himself was hesitant about this step, as we have seen was also the case with Smith.91) Ponet’s basic understanding of ‘common wealthes’ as ‘made’ by ‘men … assembled together in companies’ was cited much earlier in the paper. Ponet refers to the ‘Realme’ of England specifically as ‘being a bodi of free men and not of bondemen’.92 He further understands this realm as Ibid., Aivv–Aviv. Ibid., Fiiiv, Fiir. 86 Ibid., Aviir. 87 Ibid., Hiiir, Aviir. 88 Ibid., Fiiiv. 89 Ibid., Hiiiv; cf. Eviiir. 90 MacCulloch, Boy King, p. 149. 91 See Cheke, De ecclesia [1554–5], BL MS Harleian 417, fols 180r, 189v. On De ecclesia, see Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke’, p. 378 and n., and McDiarmid, ‘Sir John Cheke’s De ecclesia and the Dilemma of Marian Protestants’, unpublished paper. 92 Ponet, Shorte Treatise, sig. Eiiir, and see above, p. 58–9. On Ponet, see Donald R. Kelley, ‘Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth’, in The Historical 84

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a ‘mixte state’ where the monarch’s power is checked by ‘parliamentes, wherin ther mette and assembled of all sortes of people, and nothing could be done without the knowlage and consent of all’.93 But this right order of things had been overtaken by ‘tyrannye’ when Ponet wrote the Shorte Treatise in 1556. Ponet’s very strong interrelating of Protestant belief with humanist concepts was also mentioned earlier. As, for Ponet, well ordered ‘common wealthes haue been disposed and ordained bi God’, so ‘wher the people … haue begonne to be weary of’ ‘God and his worde’, God ‘by litel and litel hath suffred [‘Tyrannes’] to crepe in’.94 With the accession of Catholic Mary, power has passed to deceitful, pernicious tyrants such as Gardiner and Bonner.95 God’s word and its concommitant, consensually based rightful governance, have been undermined or corrupted. It is under these circumstances that the people’s right to ‘take awaie’ the power they gave may have to be exercised through violence: ‘it is lawfull’, as Ponet starkly says, ‘to kill a tiranne’, and to depose ‘an euil gouernour’.96 This is the most extreme outcome of republican principles to be found in any of the Cambridge humanists’ writings. The last text to be discussed, Aylmer’s An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes, deploys humanist themes in arguments defending the rule over England of a woman, the very new Queen Elizabeth. The basic concept that the consent of the community is the foundation for all government appears in Aylmer’s reference to a ‘right in chusing’ a ruler which originally resides with the people. In a hereditary monarchy like England, this right has been ‘gyuen ouer … by common consent vnto God’, who forms the next heir ‘in the wombe of the mother’. The accession of a female monarch must be accepted because God ‘shapeth’ in the womb either a ‘male or female’ heir ‘as he pleaseth’.97 Aylmer makes much more use of the notion that each nation may have a form of government distinctive to it. He asserts that a woman may reigne ‘[b]etter in England, then anywhere’ if one considers ‘the kinde of regiment’ England has. This is, once again, ‘a rule mixte’. The point for Aylmer’s main purpose is that in such a state the monarch is strictly circumscribed, Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988), pp. 48–76, and ‘Elizabethan Political Thought’, pp. 59–60. 93 Ponet, Shorte Treatise, sig. Aviv, cf. Eiiir. 94 Ibid., Avivff. 95 Ibid., Dviiv–Eiiv, Fiiv–Fiiir, Iivr–Iviv. 96 Ibid., Gvir, Giv. 97 Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Svbiectes, agaynst the late blowne Blaste, concerninge the Gouernment of Wemen [1559], (facsimile; Amsterdam, 1972), sig. I1r. On Aylmer, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 48– 51; McLaren, Political Culture, pp. 59–69; Hoak, ‘Tudor Deborah?’, pp. 74–80.

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so should the monarch happen to be a woman, ‘that is not so daungerous a matter … as men take it to be’. The English monarch’s power is as limited as that of the kings of Sparta, who could not ‘make or breake lawes, order for warre or peax … the king nothinge without the Senate and commons’. Aylmer’s English monarch, oligarchs and commons meet of course ‘in the parliament hous’.98 Aylmer is notable for his patriotism about English governance. Like Smith he is ready to ‘conferre ours with other’, and he immediately goes on to say ‘I can fynde none either so good or so indifferent’. His enthusiasm extends to England’s fertility – ‘England is the paradise and not Italy’ – and to the English character, which he contrasts to ‘effeminate Frenchmen’.99 A common image of the manly, forthright Englishman appears in Aylmer, Smith and Ascham; it is in many ways similar to Cicero’s image of republican Romans.100 ••••• Neither all the texts nor all the aspects of Cambridge political thought have been discussed here. The effort has been to show basic humanist concepts that their political writings involved and applied to England: the idea that ‘politike power’ derives from the community, and its corollaries, that political structures, like communities, can differ from one another, and that they can change and improve. These ideas were indeed integrally related to one another for the Cambridge humanists as they had been for Cicero, and they were matched as in Cicero by parallel linguistic concepts. Re-entering the Cambridge humanists’ mental world involves putting politics and language back together again, as scholars such as Arthur Ferguson, Lawrence Manley and, more recently, Jennifer Richards and Cathy Shrank have very effectively done in different ways.101 The Cambridge humanists’ texts not only reflect the Ciceronian and humanist grounding of politics in the community, but were meant to have an impact on the community’s political life. These Edwardo-Elizabethans’ ideas do seem to have found expression in action in the reform era of Edward VI and again in the ‘monarchical republican’ political practice of Cecil and others under Elizabeth that Collinson described. The group and its work, both linguistic and political, still remained a potent example for Milton a century later. In sonnet xi (?1646), he Harborowe, H2v–H4r. Ibid., H2v, P4r, Q1v. 100 See above, pp. 62 and 66; Smith, Discourse, p. 93; for Cicero see, e.g. De officiis I xviii 61, III xxxii 114. 101 See nn. 32, 42; Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, NC, 1979); Manley, Convention 1500–1750 (Cambridge, MA, 1980). 98

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invoked the ‘Soul of Sir John Cheke, … [who] taught’st Cambridge and King Edward Greek’.102 Milton also remembered Cheke and his colleagues as active participants ‘in the time of King Edward VI’, when ‘the whole assembl’d authority of England’, embodied in the ‘full vote of Parlament’, advanced ‘the reformation of this Iland’. This was work that Milton called on his contemporaries to resume.103

102 Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 143. 103 Tetrachordon [1645], ed. Chilton Latham Powell, in Milton, Works, vol. IV (New York, 1931), p. 231.

ESSAY 4

The Political Creed of William Cecil Stephen Alford At the heart of William Cecil’s political creed was a paradox. He was a loyal servant of the crown who knew that government was too important to be left to kings and queens, a republican who believed passionately and forcefully in the survival of Elizabethan monarchy. Bound up with the survival of monarchy and government was the defence of religion, for what Cecil wanted above all other things was for England to be Protestant. Monarchy guaranteed law, order and the execution of justice; by extension it protected the ‘true religion’ in England, which was grounded on prerogative and statute. Throughout his career in Elizabeth’s reign, Cecil had to make reason out of unreason; he had to face the plain fact that, in his view, the Queen did not always do what was best for her kingdom. He thought he lived in a time of emergency: right from the beginning of the reign he believed that enemies were plotting Elizabeth’s downfall. So though he mastered the conventional vocabularies of counsel and humble service, he gave them an urgency that to royal ears sounded too much like instruction. Or so I hope to suggest in this chapter. ••••• The title of my essay may have, for some readers, Eltonian resonances. In ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’, Sir Geoffrey Elton systematically demolished the then prevailing view that Henry VIII’s minister believed in absolute monarchy and wanted to establish it in England. Elton’s interpretation was that in fact the political creed of Thomas Cromwell ‘centred on the legal supremacy of the king in Parliament and included no ambitions for a purely royal despotism’. That notion of ‘king-inparliament’ is something I will return to.1 Like Thomas Cromwell, William Cecil was a man of both action and reputation. In the literature we find three William Cecils. We have, first of all, the bureaucrat of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the voice of dull moderation, always at Elizabeth’s side to calm and restrain. I think here of Martin Hume, with his Great Lord Burghley of 1906, 1 G.R. Elton, ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (4 vols, Cambridge, 1974–92), vol. 2, pp. 215–35, quotation at 215.

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and of the two-volume biography of Conyers Read.2 But it should be said from the beginning that this notion of the calm and steady statesman, the honourable servant, is exactly what Cecil himself wanted us to believe. In his letters to Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s, where he crafted words for Robert to speak in audience with the Queen; through the ‘Anonymous Life’, written soon after his death by a former servant; and in his careful deployment of the language of service, Cecil showed himself to be a master of the art of political spin.3 He shaped his own reputation. He was the Queen’s servant before all other things, for which, as he told Sir Nicholas Bacon in 1563, he had ‘forborne wife, children, kin, friends, house, yea all mine own to serve, which I know not that any other hath done in this time’.4 All of this was a crafted response to a quite different reputation. In 1585 Cecil denounced as ‘rash and malicious mockery’ the charge heard ‘openly and everywhere’ that England ‘was become Regnum Cecilianum’.5 In English Catholic polemic he was Haman of the Book of Esther, the malicious counsellor who sought the destruction of the Jews.6 In A Treatise of Treasons, of 1572, Cecil was cast as Sinon, the Greek spy of the Aeneid who worked his way into the counsels of the Trojans: one who had ‘a deep wit, a smooth tongue, an aspiring mind, a shameless face, no honour, little honesty and less conscience … a sly and subtle shifter to compass whatsoever he would’.7 The third Cecil we come across in the literature is the tough and clever politician driven by the ‘true religion’ to fight Antichrist at home and abroad, able to give very robust counsel to Elizabeth, and possessed of a vision of ‘British’ politics. Starting from the 1980s, we find this Cecil, or fragments of him, in the work of Jane Dawson and Malcolm Thorp, and 2 The Great Lord Burghley (William Cecil): A Study in Elizabethan Statecraft (London, 1906); Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1955) and Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1960); cf. Michael A.R. Graves, Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (London and New York, 1998). 3 Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.56; The ‘Anonymous Life’ of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, ed. A.G.R. Smith (Lewiston, 1990). See also Patrick Collinson, ‘William Camden and the Anti-Myth of Elizabeth: Setting the Mould?’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 79–98. 4 21 July 1563, BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 70v. 5 William Herle to Burghley, 11 Aug. 1585, TNA, SP 12/181, fol. 133v; Burghley to Herle, 14 Aug. 1585, ibid., fols 157v–158v. See also Natalie Mears, ‘Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian Perspective of the Court’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 46–64. 6 [Richard Verstegan, alias Rowlands,] An advertisement written to a secretarie of my L. Treasurers of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1592), STC 19885, p. 17. 7 A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth, and the Croune of England … (Louvain, 1572), STC 7601, sigs e4v–e5r.

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in my own writings. John Guy has thought along these lines, and Patrick Collinson’s ideas have helped shape this recent image as well.8 What then were the man’s political beliefs? One should begin by saying that, surely like Thomas Cromwell, William Cecil was above all a very practical politician. His reflections on the political life, which we read from time to time in his letters to close friends and colleagues, are robustly expressed, plainly written and often very subtle. But beneath all of this were the powers of a scholar. The firm foundations for Cecil’s life in the hard politics of the sixteenth century were put down in the 1530s and 1540s at Cambridge, where he studied classical literature, history and rhetoric, and at Gray’s Inn, where he was shown the theory and practice of the English common law. His academic training – the skills of the rhetorician combined with the sharp eye of the lawyer – never left him. Cecil had none of Raphael Hythlodaeus’s doubts about the usefulness of a life of counsel.9 He moved effortlessly and naturally from study to service. Cecil’s political lives in the reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth gave him something like a systematic understanding of how Tudor monarchy worked. Two shaping influences stand out. The first is Reformation. At the College of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge, where he studied between 1535 and 1540, Cecil saw at first hand the effect of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. The college’s great patron, Bishop John Fisher, lost his head weeks after Cecil arrived at St John’s. The tomb Fisher had built for himself in the small college chapel was defaced with a political purpose.10 Months after Cecil came to St John’s, Henry VIII issued his Injunctions for Cambridge and appointed Thomas Cromwell the visitor of the university.11 So even as a teenager, Cecil surely understood the powerful reach of the Tudor 8 J.E.A. Dawson, ‘William Cecil and the British Dimension of Early Elizabethan Foreign Policy’, History, 74 (1989): 196–216; Malcolm R. Thorp, ‘William Cecil and the Antichrist: A Study in Anti-Catholic Ideology’, in Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (eds), Politics, Religion, and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 27 (Kirksville, MO, 1994), pp. 289–304; Stephen Alford, ‘Reassessing William Cecil in the 1560s’, in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997), pp. 233–53; Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998); John Guy, ‘My Heart is my Own’: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004), esp. pp. 509–11; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1994), pp. 31–57; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92. 9 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J.H. Hexter (New Haven, 1965), p. 57. 10 Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, City of Cambridge, 2 vols (London, 1959), vol. 1, plate 31; vol. 2, p. 192. 11 Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. I, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 332–41.

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state, and the complicated politics of religion. By the time he was at last in government, in Edward VI’s reign, the authority of the Tudor crown and the power of the evangelical Reformation being done in the King’s name were impossible to separate as strands of thought and action. It was in Edward’s reign that Cecil served his political apprenticeship, and the experience of that particular Tudor Reformation, spun so effectively by propagandists and printers, was formative. The second shaping influence on Cecil’s life and thought was security. This was his great obsession in Elizabeth’s reign. As the Queen’s Secretary, he sought to know everything about what was going on in the kingdom.12 By 1569 and the Northern Rising, Cecil had an alphabetical list of the men he called ‘gentlemen of service’: the trustworthy Protestant élite Elizabeth could rely on when everyone else had fallen away.13 The security of Elizabeth’s realm was bound up with religion. Security also had to do with the preservation of the Tudor line. Only once, in 1553, did Cecil have the chance to choose another family, the Greys, to secure the true religion. From 1558 it was clear that Elizabeth had to be protected from foreign threats and the danger of Mary Stuart’s claim to her throne. For Cecil, to defend Elizabeth was to defend government and religion. It may be as well to sketch William Cecil’s early career in a little more detail. His rise was a remarkable one. He was born near Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1520 (or perhaps 1521) to Richard Cecil, a page in the Chamber, and later yeoman of the Wardrobe of the Robes, at the court of Henry VIII. Richard’s father, David, had served Henry VII, and through one of David Cecil’s kinsmen, Sir David Philip, the family was close to Lady Margaret Beaufort.14 William was taught in two small chantry schools in Grantham and Stamford before going to St John’s College.15 We can get a sense of what he studied at St John’s from Fisher’s College Statutes of 1530 and from the recorded practice of his teachers John Cheke and Roger Ascham at Cambridge and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, he would have studied the best Latin and Greek authors.16 He became a talented classical scholar, and indeed rhetorical method shaped his approach to political 12 See, for example, ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary’ (1592), in Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, (3 vols, Oxford, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 423–43. 13 TNA, SP 12/59, fols 95r–97v. 14 Oswald Barron, Northamptonshire Families, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (2 pts, London, 1906), pp. 21–5; Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), p. 281. 15 B.L. Deed, A History of Stamford School (Stamford, 1982), pp. 10–17, 103–6; A History of the County of Lincoln, 2, ed. William Page, The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London, 1906), pp. 474–5, 479–80. 16 J.E.B. Mayor, Early Statutes of St John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1859); P.S. Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’, 2 vols, PhD

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topics in the form of questions in two parts pro and contra. He began to write policy papers like this in the 1550s with Edward VI, and the habit remained with him into Elizabeth’s reign.18 From Cambridge Cecil moved to Gray’s Inn in about 1540. Whether he or his father ever imagined that he would go on to become a professional barrister is another matter. In 1541 he married Mary Cheke, the sister of his teacher and mentor John. Mary died in 1543, but William remarried in December 1545, and his second wife, Mildred Cooke, the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke of Essex, had impeccable connections at court. By 1545 Cecil had a foot in the door at court, through the Cookes to Queen Katherine Parr, through John Cheke to Prince Edward (by this time Cheke was one of Edward’s tutors), and through his father to the royal Chamber. By 1547, Cecil had a job in the household of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Duke of Somerset. Cecil later wrote of Gray’s Inn as ‘the place where myself came forth unto service’.19 How Gray’s Inn shaped his mind is harder to fathom; there was little by way of formal curriculum. The best we can say, perhaps, is that Cecil’s study of the common law gave him the mental attitude of a professional group that had had much to do with Henry VIII’s break with Rome. The authority early Tudor lawyers knew as Henry of Bracton did influence Cecil’s thinking because, as John Cheke wrote in 1556, Cecil had started to write a book ‘setting forth of Bracton the lawyer, that he might be seen and read of all men’.20 This would have made Cecil one of the early popularizers of Bracton, and it may be an indication that Cecil was interested in the Roman law as well as in English common law.21 For anyone who thought about the exercise of kingly power and the moral dimensions of rule, Bracton’s De Legibus was a rich and compelling text. This is the judgement of a modern writer on Bracton’s theory of kingship: ‘The Bractonian king was a God-fearing and law-abiding man whose unique and characteristic powers rendered him nevertheless insusceptible to correction by his earthly inferiors …’.22 Bracton was a fascinating writer for Cecil to have dealt with in the light of everything that he saw in the 17

dissertation, Harvard University (1971), vol. 1, chs 2 and 3. See also Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, CA, and Oxford, 1963), ch. 2. 17 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 1. 18 Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 16–21. 19 Reginald J. Fletcher (ed.), The Pension Book of Gray’s Inn 1569–1669 (London, 1901), p. 48. I owe this reference to the kindness of Brett Usher. 20 Cheke to Cecil, 18 Feb. 1556, BL, Lansdowne MS 3, fol. 131r. 21 D.E.C. Yale, ‘“Of No Mean Authority”: Some Later Uses of Bracton’, in Morris S. Arnold, Thomas A. Green, Sally A. Scully and Stephen D. White (eds), On the Laws and Customs of England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 383–96. 22 Cary J. Nederman, ‘Bracton on Kingship Revisited’, History of Political Thought, 5 (1984): 61–77, quotation at 63.

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reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The same is true of Christopher St German’s Doctor and Student, which Cecil may well have read as a young lawyer. One of the lines that stands out from St German’s text (from his solution to the thorny problem of a schism in the papacy) states that ‘the king in his parliament as the high sovereign over the people’ had ‘not only charge on the bodies, but also on the souls of his subjects’.23 Behind St German lay the writings of Sir John Fortescue, Jean Gerson and Marsiglio of Padua, and there is something to be said for the idea that by the 1540s Tudor common lawyers had appropriated the ideas of European conciliarism in a significant way.24 St German’s work captured the tension, never quite resolved, between the claims of imperial monarchy and the notion of rule by king-in-parliament.25 Precisely this tension was exposed in the reign of Edward VI. The boy king was cast as a godly monarch in the mould of the young Josiah in the Old Testament.26 Early on Cecil was close to Protector Somerset, for whom he acted as a kind of confidential agent in Somerset’s complicated dealings with Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Later, Cecil worked closely with John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, and with young Edward. Cecil learned the techniques of politics in the ‘acephalous conditions’ of royal minority, as Professor Collinson has pointed out, and the experience stayed with him.27 But Edward’s kingdom was not quite headless. The men round the boy king put a huge amount of time and effort into giving Edward the kind of education Cecil had been given at St John’s College in the 1530s. They wanted him to be a clever, powerful, discriminating and godly king. Edward’s royal supremacy held; he was God’s lieutenant, Christ’s weapon against Antichrist, as much a king at the age of ten as he would be at twenty-one.28 And yet this was imperial monarchy counselled, and apparently a supremacy-in-parliament.

23 Christopher St German, Doctor and Student, ed. T.F.T. Plucknett and J.L. Barton, Selden Society, 91 (London, 1974), p. 327. 24 John Guy, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Intellectual Origins of the Henrician Revolution’, in Alistair Fox and John Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform 1500–1550 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 168–9; Christopher St German, Christopher St German on Chancery and Statute, ed. John Guy, Selden Society, supplementary ser., 6 (London, 1985). 25 John Guy, ‘Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques’, in Guy, (ed.), Tudor Monarchy, pp. 78–109, at 82–9. 26 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), esp. ch. 2. 27 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 39. 28 Needham, ‘Cheke’, vol. 1, pp. 172–230; Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 44–6, 55–6.

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Significantly, John Cheke, Edward’s tutor and Cecil’s brother-in-law, wrote in 1549 of the rule and Reformation of ‘the King’s Majesty etc.’.29 The subtlety of Cheke’s construction may tell us something about his brother-in-law’s position on Elizabeth’s governorship of the Church. It is hard to know what Cecil believed, but a few things are suggestive. There is his statement, in 1559 to the Lords of the Congregation in Scotland: I like no spoil, but I allow to have good things put to good uses, as to the enriching of the Crown, to the help of the youth of the nobility, to the maintenance of the ministry of the Church, of learning in schools, and to relieve the poor members of Christ, being in body and limbs impotent.30

Brett Usher has argued that instead of powerful prelates Cecil wanted bishops to be like the superintendents of the reformed churches of Europe.31 When Archbishop Parker asked Cecil in 1563 for a couple of bucks ‘to avoid the shame of my table’, and added that ‘I would offer my suit, marry, because I doubt in these days neither bishops or ministers may be thought worth to eat venison’, he may not have been entirely joking.32 Cecil believed in the royal supremacy, for which he worked very hard in Elizabeth’s first Parliament. He did not accept the counsel of moderation offered by his friend Richard Goodrich, who in late 1558 advised that it would be better to do nothing in Parliament to break with Rome again.33 Cecil believed in the Prayer Book of 1552. He also believed, so far as we can tell, in a preaching Reformation. Perhaps he looked back here to his years at St John’s College, which was given by Bishop Fisher a preaching ministry.34 But above all Cecil looked back to the reign of Edward VI, where the Tudor supremacy had been used as an instrument of reform and Reformation. At Elizabeth’s coronation in Westminster Abbey, moments before Bishop Oglethorpe administered the coronation oath to the Queen, Cecil came up on to the stage and ‘delivered’ the text of the oath to the bishop. Dale Hoak has shown that this was in all likelihood the oath Archbishop Cranmer had revised for Edward VI. There were new words added: the sovereign was to act ‘according to the Laws of God, [and] the

29 John Cheke, The hurt of sedicion, howe greveous it is to a Commune welth (London, 1549), STC 5109, sig. F3r; Alford, Kingship and Politics, pp. 62–3. 30 28 July 1559, TNA, SP 52/1, fol. 147v; Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, p. 219. 31 Brett Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559–1577 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2003). 32 4 June 1563, BL, Lansdowne MS 6, fol. 131r. 33 ‘Divers points of religion’, TNA, SP 12/1, fols 156r–158r; Henry Gee, The Elizabethan Prayer-Book & Ornaments (London, 1902), pp. 202–6. 34 Mayor, Early Statutes, pp. 96, 98, 100, 102 (cap. 20 of the Statutes of 1530).

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true profession of the Gospel first established in this Kingdom’.35 In all of this, Cecil was probably not very unusual: his views were perhaps pretty much those of many of his friends and colleagues, from the Marquess of Northampton and the Earl of Bedford to Sir Francis Knollys and Sir Walter Mildmay.36 At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign there was nothing strange, at least for men of Cecil’s experience, in believing that godly reform and the interests of the true religion could sit comfortably with the Tudor supremacy. Cecil’s understanding of the history of the English Church can be pieced together from three manuscripts he wrote, probably in the 1580s, as ‘England Triumphant’, a first-person narrative defence of Elizabeth in the voice of England.37 It is precisely what we would expect a friend of both Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker to believe.38 Cecil wrote about King Lucius and about Constantine the Great, who ‘enjoyed jointly the crown imperial and my crown as a king’, and so all English kings ‘successively in all ages have had the honour to wear a crown close as no other king doth’.39 Constantine gave ‘the true copy of the holy bible’ to all the provinces of the Empire.40 The councils of the early church, Cecil believed, were evidence of ‘the supreme authority of the emperors and disproof of the usurped authority of the bishops of Rome’.41 This account of English church history gives a broad context to his formal pronouncements on Elizabeth’s authority in matters temporal and spiritual. Cecil believed that the English Church was properly established 35 Dale Hoak, ‘The Coronations of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, and the Transformation of the Tudor Monarchy’, in C.S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (eds), Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540–1640 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2003), pp. 114–51, esp. 149–50. 36 Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980), esp. chs 3, 6. 37 Burghley’s text (TNA, SP 12/75, fols 124r–132v) runs first of all to the birth of Constantine and then, after a missing section, from the general councils of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries to the Saxon Heptarchy (BL, Cotton MS Caligula B. IV, fols 236r–237v). Henry Maynard’s fair copy of Burghley’s text (TNA, SP 12/75, fols 134r–145v), which Burghley edited, covers everything except Burghley’s own missing section. See also Conyers Read, ‘William Cecil and Elizabethan Public Relations’, in S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield and C.H. Williams (eds), Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961), pp. 32–3, 42–3. 38 Graham Nicholson, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, in Claire Cross, David Loades and J.J. Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 19–30; Felicity Heal, ‘What can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005): 593–614. 39 TNA, SP 12/75, fol. 142r; cf. the similar wording of Richard Grafton, A chronicle at large … (London, 1569), STC 12147, p. 89. 40 TNA, SP 12/75, fol. 142v. 41 BL, Cotton MS Caligula B. IV, fol. 236r.

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in law and that the Queen rightly exercised temporal authority and had care of her subjects’ souls: this was the reasonable Church settlement of The Execution of Justice (1583 and 1584) against which traitors, not martyrs, stirred rebellion.42 Cecil wrote in 1569 that no other monarchy in Christendom was so well established ‘by laws in good policy to remain in freedom from the tyranny of Rome’.43 Months later, in a proclamation that was never issued, Cecil contrasted ‘the ancient ecclesiastical policy used in the realm’ with the rule of ‘pagan princes … whom when they do best take only a worldly care of their subjects’ bodies and earthly lives without respect to the salvation of their souls’.44 Elizabeth’s spiritual authority as Governor had long been shown by ‘laws, records and stories’, especially in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and it was ‘more clearly recognised to the imperial crown of this realm by all the estates of the same in parliaments’. Originally the sentence had run ‘by all the estates of the realm’, but Cecil always did his best to nail an ambiguity and make his point plain.45 This was, we might say, Elizabeth’s imperial queenshipin-parliament. ••••• We can get some sense of the complicated relationship between William Cecil and Elizabeth I from his letters and policy papers. Often he was guarded: he once wrote that letters were ‘casual to be lost and … permanent to be kept’.46 Sometimes he could be astonishingly frank, though for someone as clever as Cecil even frankness had both a purpose and a rhetorical subtlety. His personal relations with Queen and colleagues were marked, often, by deep frustration and a terrible, gnawing anxiety about security; and this anxiety often soured the great policy debates of Elizabeth’s reign. In 1586, to the Earl of Leicester, Cecil reflected on the ‘obstacles’ he always found in Elizabeth. The first was that she was ‘somewhat too scrupulous’ to send her subjects to war. The second was that she did not want to spend money.47 In 1572 he had written a long paper of ‘Certain matters wherein the Queen’s Majesty’s forbearing and delays hath produced, not only inconveniences and increase of expenses, but also dangers’. These had 42 STC 4902 (17 Dec. 1583) and STC 4903 (Jan. 1584), edited, with William Allen’s response, by Robert Kingdon, The Execution of Justice in England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen (Ithaca, NY, 1965). 43 TNA, SP 12/51, fol. 10r. 44 TNA, SP 12/66, fol. 150v. 45 Ibid., fol. 150r. For the first draft of this proclamation see Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Cecil Papers 157, fols 9r–12r. 46 Cecil to Nicholas White, 6 June 1569, BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 143r–v. 47 Burghley to the Earl of Leicester, 20 June 1586, BL, Cotton MS Galba C. IX, fol. 274r.

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to do with Elizabeth’s reluctance to marry, her soft policy on the Queen of Scots, her tolerance of enemies of religion, and her unwillingness to grant noble titles.48 To the Earl of Leicester, to Sir Francis Walsingham, to Sir Thomas Smith, and to others, Cecil could be blunt. To Leicester in November 1572, on the subject of Scotland, he wrote: If Her Majesty will continue her delays in providing for her own surety, by just means given to her by God, she and we all shall vainly call upon God when calamity shall fall upon us. God send Her Majesty strength of spirit to preserve God’s cause, her own life, and the lives of millions of good subjects, all which are most manifestly in danger, and that only by her delays and so consequently she shall be the cause of the overthrow of a noble crown and realm, which shall be a prey to all that can invade it. God be merciful to us.49

There was more to this than the frustrations that bubbled up in the suffocating court politics of Elizabethan emergency. Cecil cast himself as England’s rock. This made attacks by his enemies galling and offensive. He fumed at A Treatise of Treasons, though Parker comforted him with the thought that ‘Your conscience shall be your testimony to Almighty God: it is no new matter for such as take pains for the good government of the commonwealth to be reviled on.’50 Cecil believed he generally knew what was best for the kingdom. And he was God’s councillor first. In 1563 he told William Maitland of Lethington, Mary Stuart’s Secretary, that two things came before everything else: the Protestant amity of England and Scotland and the great stand against the soldiers of Antichrist ‘being professedly gathered to destroy the Gospel of Christ’.51 The word he clung to in Elizabeth’s reign was the same word he had used to justify his actions in the last days of Edward’s: conscience. In 1564 he protested his ‘disposition to deal with all men plainly, and indeed my inability, or as I may say of myself my dullness to invent crafts’. He knew that his office of Secretary had ‘been of years not long passed, adjudged a shop for cunning men’.52 But at least once Cecil made a very telling slip. In 1565 he asked Matthew Parker to comment on the first draft of a letter that would be sent from the Queen to the archbishop. Perhaps that alone is significant. But Cecil really let the cat out of the bag when he complained to Parker that Elizabeth looked likely to alter the text of her own letter and to ‘have more added than I shall allow’.53 BL, Cotton MS Caligula C. III, fols 457r–459r, 460v. BL, Cotton MS Caligula C. III, fols 408r, 409v. 50 William Murdin, (ed.), A Collection of State Papers … Left by William Cecil Lord Burghley (London, 1759), p. 259. 51 20 Aug. 1563, BL, Additional MS 32091, fols 199r–200r, quotation at fol. 199r. 52 Cecil to Sir Thomas Smith, 11 Jan. 1564, BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 55r. 53 15 Jan. 1565, Inner Temple Library, Petyt MS 538, vol. 47, fol. 65r. 48

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‘Serve God by serving of the Queen, for all other service is indeed bondage to the Devil’, Cecil wrote to his son Robert in the month before he died.54 Service had been the Cecils’ trademark since the 1490s, and Cecil knew this; it is why he spent so much time and money on his house of Theobalds, built for Robert and decorated to make all kinds of important statements about family and royal service.55 On the face of it it is hard to reconcile claims of humble service with that throwaway line to Archbishop Parker. The solution to this conundrum, if there is one, lies in Cecil’s idea of what it was to advise God’s anointed, in his notion of counsel. Counsel was like oxygen to Cecil: cut off from it, he found it hard to breathe. When Elizabeth, apoplectic with rage at Mary Stuart’s execution, refused to see him in February 1587 he tried to send her a note by Christopher Hatton. ‘I know not with what manner of words to direct my writing to your Majesty; to utter anything like a counsellor as I was wont to do, I find myself barred so to do by your Majesty’s displeasure.’ Instead he had to speak ‘like a common subject’.56 This was about the gravity and special privileges of being a counsellor, one of the élite, one of the chosen. It was frankly also about political standing and reputation. Here Cecil made a telling comment a month or so later. ‘I cannot imagine that any person is my enemy for any private act of mine own, but only in respect of my services for her Majesty, wherein I have certainly felt of long time many sharp effects for doing my duty.’57 If Gladstone addressed Queen Victoria like a public meeting, then we might say that Cecil spoke with like gravity and sense of self to Elizabeth’s office, to her duty and to her political body. He was, or at least he thought himself to be, a public person, able to shape and direct royal authority. One of Cecil’s familiar sayings, so we are told in the ‘Anonymous Life’, was ‘That nation was happy where the king would take counsel and follow it’.58 This has an echo of a verse from Proverbs (11:14) he had quoted many years before, in 1552, to Northumberland: ubi non sunt consilia cadit populus, ‘Where no good counsel is, there the people decay.’59 Tudor theorists believed that the giving of good advice moderated the absolute authority of the monarch, God’s lieutenant, and shaped those powers, ensuring good governance for all.60 There were certain ground rules. 10 July 1598, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.56, no. 138. James M. Sutton, ‘The Decorative Program at Elizabethan Theobalds: Educating an Heir and Promoting a Dynasty’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 7 (1999–2000): 33–64. 56 BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 6r. 57 BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 10r. 58 Smith, ed., ‘Anonymous Life’, p. 142. 59 Alford, Kingship and Politics, p. 136. 60 John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Dale Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310. 54 55

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Counsel was to be kept confidential between monarch and counsellor. The Council oath, which Cecil wrote in 1558, was not really a corporate oath: rather it suggested a very personal relationship between the Queen and any one of her councillors she asked to speak his mind.61 If counsel was confidential, it was also frank, a convention Cecil took seriously. But counsel left royal power intact, because Elizabeth was in theory free to accept or to reject it. This was a convention she took seriously.62 It was hard to compel the Queen to do anything she did not want to do. But this is where Cecil’s deepest political assumptions were exposed. One of the earliest, and one of the best examples of this was Cecil’s determination to help the Lords of the Congregation in Scotland in their fight against Mary of Guise. By December 1559 the whole Council had decided that the Queen had to send men and money to Scotland, but Elizabeth blocked the policy. So Cecil wrote a letter to Elizabeth. The text we have may be a copy or merely a draft; there is no way to tell whether Cecil sent his letter. But still his words are significant: I will never be a minister in any your Majesty’s service, whereunto your own mind shall not be agreeable. For thereunto I am sworn, to be a minister of your Majesty’s determinations and not of mine own, or of others though they be never so many. And on the other part to serve your Majesty in anything that myself cannot allow, must needs be an unprofitable service [emphasis added], and so untoward as therein I would be loathe your Majesty should be deceived.63

This passage has a wonderful double edge to it. In a sense it looks like a submissive declaration of obedience. But it gives to the counsellor the freedom to disengage from any course of action not conformable to judgement or conscience, and in it Cecil uses that hard word ‘allow’. This was the freedom of the Council oath, or so Cecil believed. Cecil cast himself as a grave counsellor who spoke his mind out of conscience. Time after time he pressed the Queen to do things she did not want to do and gave her advice she did not want to hear. In strict theory the giving of counsel should have been the end of the matter. Elizabeth’s duty merely lay in listening to the advice of her advisers: she had no obligation to follow it. But another of Cecil’s sayings, again according to the author of his ‘Anonymous Life’, was ‘That counsel without resolution and execution was pure wind’.64 This has a ring of great authenticity about it. At so many times, from the late 1550s all the way through to the 1580s, counsel came 61 TNA, SP 12/1, fol. 3v. See also J.R. Tanner (ed.), Tudor Constitutional Documents (Cambridge, 1948), p. 225; for the oath of 1570, TNA, SP 12/83, fol. 72r. 62 Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 3. 63 BL, Lansdowne MS 102, fol. 1r. 64 Smith, (ed.), ‘Anonymous Life’, p. 142.

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near to being turned to compulsion. Cecil stood, above all, for what had to be done. The finest, and also the most disturbing example of this must be the Council’s dispatch of Mary Stuart’s death warrant on 3 February 1587, orchestrated by Cecil, and kept very secret, even from Elizabeth.65 Perhaps here there are shades of John Aylmer, who wrote in 1559 that ‘it is not in England so dangerous a matter to have a woman ruler as men take it to be’ because the Queen in fact did very little: men governed for her.66 But the context of this great dysfunction in Elizabethan government had much to do with the politics of emergency, and the Council’s terrible anxieties about religion, invasion, law and order, military capacity, and of course the Queen of Scots, who became the great container of all fears and dangers. Here we come to the Elizabethan exclusion or succession crisis. Without a settled succession, and apparently alone in a world of enemies and soldiers of Antichrist, Protestant England looked doomed. Cecil was compelled to think terrible thoughts about what might happen if their Queen died, and he was pretty sure, like Eubulus in Gorboduc, a play performed at court in 1562, that without a sure succession there would be ‘the woeful wrack / And utter ruin’ of a noble realm.67 (Was it an accident that Eubulus was King Gorboduc’s Secretary?) In 1565 Cecil wrote that Mary Stuart knew ‘the state of this crown to depend only upon the breath of one person, our sovereign lady’.68 He knew, like every other councillor, that Elizabeth had to marry and produce an heir. Only by a legitimate successor would monarchy continue and, in a world of persecution, government survive. Each time Elizabeth fell ill (in October 1562 with smallpox, then again seriously in December 1564, and so throughout the reign) the whole of government held its breath: first the fear of disaster, then the new resolution to do something about the succession. Cecil’s response in 1563 was breathtaking. He wrote a clause for a bill on the succession that was being debated in Parliament, whether the Queen liked it or not.69 In it Cecil set out a plan for the interregnum that would certainly come about as a result of Elizabeth’s death without an heir.70 The first thing to establish was the authority of ‘a council of estate, 65 Mark Taviner, ‘Robert Beale and the Elizabethan Polity’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews (2000), ch. 8. 66 John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes … (London, 1559), STC 1005, sig. H3v; Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 38. 67 Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, The Tragedie of Gorboduc (London, 1565), STC 18684, sig. E2v. 68 24 Sept. 1565, BL, Cotton MS Caligula B. X, fol. 350v. 69 John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), p. 270; Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 103–19. 70 TNA, SP 12/28, fols. 68r–69v, printed in Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 225–8.

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usually named a privy council, to consider and direct the public affairs of the realm’. On the Queen’s death her Privy Council would continue to sit in its usual way. It would govern the kingdom as an executive board. The intricate ceremony of the royal funeral, at which the monarch’s old officers broke their staffs and cast them into the grave, was symbolic of nothing in this situation: rule was carried on, not by a monarch, but by the royal bureaucracy. Most stunning of all was Cecil’s idea that, if these terrible events came to pass, he and his colleagues would ‘continue as councillors of estate only until the day that by proclamation to be made by the authority of Parliament it shall be declared to whom of right the imperial crown of this realm of England ought to belong’. Parliament would choose Elizabeth’s successor, and so make the kingdom an elected hereditary monarchy. All of this was to be locked away in an act of Parliament and in Elizabeth’s will, probably on the model of the Succession Act of 1544. The new act would have confirmed the exclusion of Mary, Queen of Scots from the English throne. In 1563 the best Protestant contender for the throne would have been Lady Katherine Grey, for whose claim some in and near Parliament were busily and secretly scribbling. It is little wonder that Elizabeth seems to have killed this bill. It was in so many ways subversive of her authority. Anyone who has read the work of Ernst Kantorowicz, Ralph Giesey or David Starkey knows that there was something of deep mystery about the perfect conjoining of the body politic and the body natural in the person of the monarch.71 Cecil’s clause stripped away the mystery. It exposed the power of kings and queens for what it was: with neither heir nor known successor, government was something mortal and functional, which could be seen in the operation of the officers of the law or the provisioning of garrisons, above all in the daily business meetings of the Council. And it had to survive. The House of Lords reminded Elizabeth in 1563 that she was the ‘living law’. When she died, the law died.72 But in the febrile politics of Elizabethan security that could never be allowed to happen. Cecil’s idea of a government that could survive beyond the death of a monarch meant the severing of the body politic, the power of government,

71 E.H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1997), chs 1, 2, 7; Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, Travaux D’Humanisme et Renaissance, 37 (Geneva, 1960), esp. chs 2, 7; David Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy: A Study in the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early Modern England’, in Guy (ed.), Tudor Monarchy, pp. 42–78. 72 T.H. Hartley, (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (3 vols, Leicester, 1981–95), vol. 1, pp. 60–61; Alford, Early Elizabethan Polity, pp. 108–9.

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from the body natural of the Queen. This was not the end of monarchy, because above all Cecil wanted monarchy to survive. But government came first, and with government order, defence and peace. This was not the modern state as we know it, though perhaps it was closer than we think. Even today in Britain it is possible to say that there is a permanent government that goes on in spite of the vagaries of party politics, and this government of officials and departments still uses the language of the crown and crown office.74 Cecil failed to get his way in 1563. But in 1585, in the Act for the Surety of the Queen’s Person, he once again imagined a realm governed in a time of emergency by a great or grand council.75 There is no sense, in 1563 or 1585 or at any other time, that he wanted to think so unnatural a thought: in all likelihood Cecil believed that in the politics of Elizabethan emergency certain things just had to be done, even if this meant saddling Elizabeth with a successor she did not want, imagining a future without her, and forcing a parliamentary settlement of what she believed to be a prerogative matter. In 1596, in a letter to his son Robert, Cecil distilled his political creed into a wonderfully elusive formula. Naturally it put service to the Queen ahead of everything except service to God: 73

As long as I may be allowed to give advice I will not change my opinion by affirming the contrary, for that were to offend God to whom I am sworn first; but as a servant I will obey her Majesty’s commandment, and no wise contrary the same; presuming that she being God’s chief minister here it shall be God’s will to have her commandments obeyed after that I have performed my duty as a counsellor. And shall in my heart wish her commandments to have such good successes as I am sure she intendeth. You see I am in a mixture of divinity and policy, preferring in policy her Majesty afore all others on the earth, and in divinity the King of Heaven above all, betwixt alpha and omega.76

Had he ever believed in Bracton’s king, all-powerful and unbridled? I doubt it. The two bridles Cecil believed in were counsel, offered frankly, and the adherence of any monarch to the will of God, interpreted in a decidedly godly kind of way. These were not so much bridles as contexts of good rule. Perhaps the ideal was Edward VI, the king receptive to counsel, mindful of true religion and imperial in his bearing; perhaps Cecil was a good old Edwardian right to the very end. Elizabeth, then, must have 73 Stephen Alford, ‘From Estate to State, Subject to Citizen? Some Later Tudor Vocabularies’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 15 (2002): 86–8. 74 C.H. Sisson, The Spirit of British Administration and Some European Comparisons (London, 1959), ch. 12; and his ‘A Note on the Monarchy’, in English Perspectives: Essays on Liberty and Government (Manchester, 1992), pp. 167–76. 75 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 51–5. 76 13 Mar. 1596, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.3.56, no. 85.

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been something of a disappointment. There is no better, or more carefully guarded expression of the creative tension of William Cecil’s political career than that letter to Robert. Counsel and service, God and Queen: everything had to be made to balance by a man who was, after all things, merely a servant, a humble official.

ESSAY 5

‘Let none such office take, save he that can for right his prince forsake’: A Mirror for Magistrates, Resistance Theory and the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic Scott Lucas In ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Patrick Collinson argues that Elizabeth and her Privy Councillors constituted two distinct loci of political power, ‘two governments uneasily coexisting in Elizabethan England’. Far from acting merely as servants or advisers to the Queen, Collinson notes, Elizabeth’s chief officers often pursued courses of action independent from their monarch (with hopes of winning Elizabeth eventually to their side) and even offered varying degrees of resistance to Elizabeth’s own desires. It was just such independence from royal direction – an independence which Collinson discerns in the actions of officials at all levels of English political life – that led Collinson to conclude that ‘Elizabethan England was a republic which happened also to be a monarchy’.1 In seeking to recover the intellectual convictions that enabled the creation of the monarchical republic, Collinson lists several ‘resistant’ beliefs upon which magistrates could justify pursuing political action separate from and even in defiance of their Queen’s will. Among them are the conviction that monarchy is a ministry exercised under God and on his behalf; that it is no more and no less than a public office; that as a public officer the monarch is accountable, certainly to God and perhaps to others exercising, under God, other public offices of magistracy or respecting an overriding and transcendent duty to God himself; and that there is a difference between monarchy and tyranny.2

In asserting the importance of such ideas to Elizabethan political practice, however, Collinson leaves open the question of how such ‘resistant’ beliefs 1 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, at 42, 43. 2 Ibid., p. 44.

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ever came to circulate widely enough to exercise the key influence they did. In identifying sources for the convictions he lists, Collinson looks chiefly not to the writings of the Elizabethan period but rather to those of the pre-Elizabethan past, noting the presence of such beliefs in the works of early sixteenth-century humanists and in the polemics of Marian Protestant authors. Collinson cites only three texts published in Elizabeth’s reign that conveyed the convictions he describes: a paragraph on the duties of popular officials in Calvin’s Institutes, a passage in Peter Martyr’s commentary on Romans, and some of the paratext of the Geneva Bible. Collinson indicates the seemingly small number of allowed Elizabethan texts displaying ‘resistant’ convictions by speaking of their content as a ‘virus’ existing within the body of Elizabethan political thought, that is, as a strain of political belief alive in Elizabethan thinking but miniscule in comparison to the predominant celebrations of royal authority.3 In fact, resistance theory formed a key part of the literature of political counsel in Elizabeth’s reign, conveyed to generations of officers through perhaps the most widely read and longest-lived work of political literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, A Mirror for Magistrates. For over six decades, A Mirror for Magistrates remained before the public, appearing in new, ever-expanding editions in 1559, 1563, 1571, 1574, 1578, 1587 and 1610, and in the form of reissues of earlier editions in 1575, 1619, 1620 and 1621. Over the course of its long life, the numerous historical verse exempla of this collection kept each of the ‘resistant’ convictions Collinson notes (and some even more radical than these) prominently before the eyes of officers. The work that would become known as A Mirror for Magistrates began its life in the tumultuous first year of Queen Mary I’s reign (July 1553–July 1554), when it was composed and at least partially printed as A Memorial of suche Princes, as since the tyme of kyng Richard the seconde, haue been unfortunate in the Realme of Englande. The printer who conceived of the Memorial project, John Wayland, originally intended the Memorial to be a purely literary endeavour, a continuation of the poet John Lydgate’s well-known fifteenth-century collection of de casibus tragedies The Fall of Princes. Following Lydgate, the Memorial would present exemplary narratives of famous historical figures who suffered untimely deaths. Unlike Lydgate, however, its subjects would be specifically British in birth, and each historical figure would relate in his own ghostly voice the details and lessons of his tragic fall. Wayland planned to append the Memorial to a new printing of Lydgate’s Fall, and he assigned the task of compiling and editing the collection to his print-shop employee William Baldwin, an accomplished poet and printer whose services Wayland had inherited upon

3

Ibid., p. 45.

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purchasing the shop of Baldwin’s former employer, Edward Whitchurch.4 Baldwin gathered seven other men to assist him in composing tragedies spanning from Richard II’s reign to that of Edward IV. Of the authors who took part in the Memorial project, only three are certainly known, Baldwin himself, George Ferrers and Sir Thomas Chaloner. At the time of the Memorial, William Baldwin was a literary leading light. Under Edward VI, Baldwin had become well known for his best-selling compendium of sayings culled from ancient philosophers, The Treatise of Morall Phylosophie (1548), and for his verse translation of the Song of Songs, The Canticles or Balades of Salomon (1549). In the two years before undertaking the Memorial project, the strongly evangelical Baldwin also covertly turned his hand to works of religious controversy, releasing in Edward’s reign an anonymous translation of Matthias Flacius Illyricus’ ferociously anti-papal satire Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paul the Third (1552) and composing under Mary both the anti-Catholic prose satire Beware the Cat (1553) and the strongly evangelical poetic lament The Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt (1553), two works that could not be brought into print until Elizabeth’s reign. Baldwin’s chief assistant in the Memorial project was George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer, legal historian and long-time Parliamentarian. He too was no stranger to controversy, suffering arrest in 1550 at the hands of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, upon suspicion of writing bills against the Dudley-led Council, and later causing scandal among many through his burlesque of the veneration of the host in a Christmastime performance before King Edward. Sir Thomas Chaloner, finally, was a crown officer and Parliamentarian well known for his humanist learning. In Edward’s government, Chaloner played important roles first as a clerk of the Privy Council and later as ambassador to France. All three known authors were evangelical Protestants, and all three were men who had suffered materially and/or mentally under the rule of Mary I.5 Printing of the Fall of Princes and A Memorial of suche Princes began in the summer of 1554. Wayland, who was a scrivener by trade, probably had little hand in the printing of the Fall-Memorial volume; he thus had no idea that his employee Baldwin had decided to turn this planned work of literary imitation into a text seeking in large measure to intervene in the 4 For the complex printing history of the Memorial, see Scott Lucas, ‘Tragic Poetry as Political Resistance: A Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1563’ (diss., Duke University, 1997), pp. 30–43; and Lucas, ‘The Suppressed Edition and the Creation of the “Orthodox” A Mirror for Magistrates’, Renaissance Papers 1994 (1995): 31–54. 5 For Ferrers’s biography, see S.T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons, 1509–1558, The History of Parliament (3 vols, London, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 129–31; Lucas, ‘Tragic Poetry,’ pp. 66–127. For Chaloner, see Clarence Miller’s article in ODNB.

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current political behaviour of Mary’s chief officers.6 Like many evangelical Protestants, the Mirror authors looked with great apprehension upon the uncertain future awaiting England under the rule of Mary and her new husband, Philip of Spain. In the troubled wake of Wyatt’s rebellion, in the face of rumours of incipient tyranny under Mary and Philip, and in the midst of what many saw as repeated, ongoing bids by some of the Queen’s chief officers to extend the power of their monarch beyond that established by English law, several Memorial authors boldly turned their contributions to Wayland’s collection into topically applicable political exempla, constructing artfully shaped, fictionally altered historical ‘mirrors’, in which Marian officers and others might see and seek to prevent what the authors presented as the historically proven tragic consequences awaiting those who would assist their monarch in the debilitation of justice, the harm of innocents, or in the augmentation of monarchical power above its traditional legal limits.7 The Memorial authors’ bid to influence Mary’s chief officers was not destined to succeed. Baldwin had printed all of the Fall of Princes and some or all of the Memorial when Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner,

6 The Memorial authors pursued two distinct projects in their topically applicable exempla. The first was an attempt to provide models for interpreting and coming to terms with the numerous political tragedies of Edward VI’s reign. The second was to shape the political behaviour of current, Marian officers. For the first of these projects, see Scott Lucas, ‘The Consolation of Tragedy: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Fall of the “Good” Duke of Somerset’, Studies in Philology, 100/1 (2003): 44–70. For the second, see Lucas, ‘Tragic Poetry’, pp. 128–73, 236–48. 7 On the fears of this time, particularly among the evangelical and Parliamentary communities to which the Memorial authors belonged, see Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), pp. 545–74; Jennifer Loach, Parliament and the Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1986), pp. 91–104, 182–92; J.D. Alsop, ‘The Act for the Queen’s Royal Power, 1554’, Parliamentary History, 13/3 (1994): 261–76. Baldwin’s strong evangelical commitments had likely made him an opponent of Marian policies from early on in Mary’s reign. Ferrers and Chaloner seem to have been moved to offer their poems of protest and admonition by events following the collapse of Wyatt’s rising. In Ferrers’s case, it appears to have been the unjust actions of Mary’s chief legal men on their Queen’s behalf in the notorious treason trial of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton; in Chaloner’s case, it was the execution of Lady Jane Grey. For Ferrers’s use of the MemorialMirror poem ‘Robert Tresilian’ to indict Mary and her judges for the irregularities of Throckmorton’s trial, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago, 1994), p. 160; Lucas, ‘Tragic Poetry,’ pp. 140–54. For Chaloner’s bitter rage at Mary for Jane’s execution, see Chaloner’s elegy ‘Deploratio acerbae necis heroidis praestantissimae D. Janae Grayae’, printed in the posthumous compilation of Chaloner’s Latin poetry De Republica Anglorum Instauranda Libri Decem (London, 1579), sigs T4v–T6r.

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received word of the collection and ordered production stopped. While he eventually allowed Wayland to publish Lydgate’s Fall, Gardiner prohibited publication of Baldwin’s Memorial. The poems of the Memorial were never allowed to appear before the public during Mary’s reign. They were published only in the first year of Queen Elizabeth, when Baldwin lightly revised the Memorial and bestowed upon it the new title A Mirror for Magistrates.9 In releasing his collection under Elizabeth, Baldwin dropped the Marian pretence of offering his work merely as a literary continuation of Lydgate’s Fall. Instead, he presented A Mirror for Magistrates specifically as a volume of urgent political counsel, and he directed its poems specifically to the officers of Elizabeth’s new reign. What these magistrates found in the pages of Baldwin’s Mirror was a body of political expression born from the fears of growing misrule and even tyranny that gripped evangelical Protestants at the time of the poems’ composition (1554). Though not univocal, the 19 poems and 21 prose passages in the 1559 Mirror generally counsel magistrates to constitute themselves as a strong, independent force in the governance of the nation and to consider service not to the monarch but to the people to be their first duty as officers. In the face of royally sanctioned injustice, the poems of the Mirror counsel magistrates and, more generally, men of the magisterial classes to adopt varying degrees of opposition to the prince, ranging from vocal protest, to passive disobedience, and even to armed, violent resistance. Through its often bold exemplary narratives, A Mirror for Magistrates provided a key repository of pre-Elizabethan resistance thought for later Tudor readers; it thus stood as an important aid to maintaining what Collinson calls the ‘ideological capacity for resistance’ central to the establishment and persistence of the monarchical republic well into Elizabeth’s reign and beyond.10 8

••••• The first two of the ‘resistant’ convictions that Collinson lists, namely the belief that the ‘monarchy is a ministry exercised under God and on his behalf’ and that it ‘is no more and no less than a public office,’ provide the very conceptual bases for William Baldwin’s discussion of magisterial duties in his 1559 dedication to the Mirror. In his dedicatory epistle, addressed ‘to 8 A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), p. 66. All further page citations to William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates will be to Campbell’s edition and will be cited in the body of the text. All passages from this edition are reprinted with the permission of the Henry E. Huntington Library. 9 Baldwin served as editor of the 1554 Memorial and of the two editions of the Mirror issued during his lifetime, those dated 1559 and 1563 (STC 1247 and 1248). 10 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 44.

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the nobylitie and all other in office’, Baldwin seeks to persuade Elizabeth’s officers to see themselves first and foremost as servants of the Lord, and, further, to accept that each of them bears a sacred charge to make the wellbeing of the people his overriding concern. God himself was the original ‘ordeyner of Offices’, Baldwin asserts, and the Lord created such positions solely to the end that virtuous men might have a greater opportunity to ‘helpe other[s]’ in their land (p. 64). The principal means by which an officer fulfils this sacred duty is by ensuring justice for all in the realm. ‘For as Iustice is the chief vertue’, Baldwin explains, so is the ministracion therof, the chiefest office: & therefore hath God established it with the chiefest name, honoring & calling Kinges, & all officers under them by his owne name, Gods. Ye be all Gods, as many as have in your charge any ministracion of Iustice. What a fowle shame wer it for any now to take upon them the name and office of God, and in their doinges to shew them selves divyls? God cannot of Iustice, but plage such shameles presumption and hipocrisy, and that with shamefull death, diseases, or infamy. (p. 65)

God enjoins all those who hold office to ensure the proper distribution of justice. Among those ‘officers’ so enjoined, Baldwin’s phrasing makes clear, are ‘Kinges’ themselves, men (and women) who, in Baldwin’s formulation, occupy ‘Gods owne office’ just as much as does any inferior magistrate (p. 65). Asserting that monarchy is an office exercised under God and one properly devoted to the public weal, Baldwin’s dedication presents monarchs as bound to labour on behalf of all those placed under them. If they refuse to perform this duty, Baldwin warns, the grim consequence will be divine vengeance in the form of ‘infamy’, suffering, or even death. A life of ‘payneful toyles’ tirelessly expended upon behalf of all members of the commonwealth may be Baldwin’s ideal of monarchical behaviour (as it is his ideal for all officers); however, the focus of so many Mirror tragedies upon the disastrous reigns of England’s most corrupt and ineffectual recent rulers (including Richard II, Henry VI and Richard III) necessarily reminds readers how often English princes fall short of this ideal (p. 63). The tragedies of the Mirror repeatedly teach that the ‘officer’ with the greatest potential to debilitate justice and to bring harm to the realm is none other than the monarch him- or herself. To move magistrates to take upon themselves the task of preventing monarchical misrule, several Mirror authors compose exempla designed to convince English officers not only to challenge their monarch whenever he or she entertains harmful desires but even to disobey all unjust royal commands, no matter what the personal consequences of such disobedience might be. It is to this last purpose that the anonymous author of ‘The infamous ende of Lord Iohn Tiptoft Earle of Wurcester, for cruelly executing his princes butcherly commaundementes’ devotes his tragedy. In this poem, the ghost of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (d. 1470), returns from the grave to execrate his decision to fulfil even King Edward IV’s most reprehensible

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orders. During his lifetime, Worcester confesses to Baldwin, the people of England came to call him ‘Butcher’.11 ‘There [was] cause to call me as they did’, Worcester’s spirit continues, For I enforst by meane of gouernaunce, Did execute what euer my king did byd. From blame herein my selfe I can not ryd, But fye vpon the wretched state, that must Defame it selfe, to serue the princes lust. (p. 199)

‘The chiefest crime wherewith men do me charge’, Worcester continues, Is death of the Earle of Desmundes noble sonnes, Of which the kinges charge doth me clere discharge, By strayt commaundement and Iniunctions: Theffect whereof so rigorously runnes, That eyther I must procure to se them dead, Or for contempt as a traytour lose my head. What would mine enemies do in such a case, Obey the king, or proper death procure? They may wel say their fancy for a face, But life is swete, and love hard to recure. They would haue doen as I did I am sure: For seldome wil a welthy man at ease For others cause his prince in ought displease. (pp. 199–200)

In these lines, the ‘Worcester’ poet seeks to impress upon readers the terrible ethical dilemma through which Worcester struggled in bringing himself to execute his King’s command. After confessing his act of royally ordained slaughter, Worcester’s anguished ghost almost reflexively seeks to offer a defence of his crime, protesting that ‘the kinges charge doth me clere discharge’ of responsibility for the deed. Worcester then offers yet another defence of his decision, protesting that had he not obeyed King Edward’s direct order, he himself would have suffered execution for disobedience. ‘What would mine enemies do in such a case, / Obey the king or proper death procure?’ Worcester asks, spurring each reader of this tragedy to look into his own heart and to acknowledge how easily he too might choose to act precisely as Worcester did. After leading magisterial readers to confront how tempting it is to commit evil when so ordered by the prince, the ‘Worcester’ poet devotes the remainder of his poem to an attempt to dissuade officers from ever adopting such a course. To this end, the poet has Worcester’s ghost forcefully assert that it is not to the prince that a magistrate owes his first duty but rather to the Lord. God’s law holds a higher claim upon an officer’s obedience than the prince’s will, and thus

11 All but one of the ghostly speakers in the 1559 Mirror address their complaints to Baldwin.

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who for love or dread of any man, Consentes to accomplish any wicked thing, Although the chiefe fault therof from other spring, Shall not eskape Gods vengeaunce for his dede, Who skuseth none that dare do yl for drede. (p. 200)

The prince is but a man (or, in the case of the poet’s contemporary England, a woman), and any officer who commits a sinful act on behalf of the monarch proves himself to hold the will of man above the will of God. Such an action is akin to apostasy, the poem implies, and it is thus far more terrible than any act of disobedience to royal command ever could be. Those who seek to escape suffering at the hands of the monarch by obeying unjust commands will find no refuge from affliction, the poem further asserts, for if the prince will not punish sin committed in the king’s name, God certainly will. To confirm this lesson, Worcester leads readers to construe the tragedies that shortly awaited him and his cruel monarch not as mere instances of misfortune but as acts of divine vengeance, and he ends his monologue by urging Baldwin to dissuade any from taking high office who lacks the strength to risk personal well-being in the name of furthering ‘right’. After describing the infamy to which his actions had condemned him, Worcester exclaims, Warne therefore all men, wisely to beware, What offices they enterprise to beare: The hyest alway most maligned are, Of peoples grudge, and princes hate in feare. For princes faultes his faultors all men teare. Which to auoyde, let none such office take, Save he that can for right his prince forsake. (p. 202)

Worcester’s last stanza stands as a plea to any who would hold a position of secular authority to possess the courage not merely to challenge immoral royal commands but even boldly to disobey them. The ability to disobey the prince in the name of ‘right’, the poem asks readers to believe, must be understood as the single most important qualification for any who would hold office. In his poem, the ‘Worcester’ poet confronts the difficult question of how officers properly should respond to isolated acts of royal injustice. Other Mirror contributors tackle the even more troubling question of the proper response to persistent monarchical misbehaviour. In the face of a monarch who persists in harm and injustice, or even in the face of one whose crime is simply the refusal to correct pernicious inferior officers, several poems of the Mirror counsel nothing less than armed resistance to royal authority. It is to this end that William Baldwin shapes the initial episode of his tragedy ‘Howe the Lorde Mowbray promoted by Kyng Richarde the seconde, was by hym banyshed the Realme, and dyed miserably in exyle’. In the

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early stanzas of Baldwin’s poem, the ghost of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk (d. 1399), recalls his leading role in the Lords Appellant’s rising of 1387. At the time of this rising, Mowbray held the office of ‘Marshall of the realme.’ It was specifically in his ‘estate’ of Earl Marshal, Mowbray declares, that The Piers and people ioyntly to me came, with sore complaynt against them that of late Made offycers, had brought the king in hate By makynge sale of Iustice, ryght and lawe, And lyuyng nought, without all dreede and awe. I gaue them ayde these euyls to redresse, And went to London with an army strong, And caused the king against his wyll oppresse By cruell death, all suche as led him wrong … These wicked men from thus the king remoued, who best vs pleased, succeded in theyr place: For whiche both kyng and commons muche vs loued But chiefly I with all stoode high in grace, The kyng ensued my rede in euery case. (pp. 102–103)12

With remarkable boldness, Baldwin seeks to guide readers to construe Mowbray’s rising not as an act of wicked rebellion but as the work of a virtuous officer acting solely out of a sense of duty. Baldwin stresses that Mowbray undertook his revolt not as a private individual but in his official capacity as ‘Marshall of the realme’ and that his motive was solely the laudable desire to protect ‘Iustice, right and law’ from the royally sanctioned assaults against them by Richard’s corrupt officers. Baldwin crafts his portrait of Mowbray’s rising, in other words, as an exemplary fulfilment of the ideal of magisterial service to the people that he would later assert in explicit form in his dedication to the Mirror. It was the anguished joint appeal of the ‘Piers and the people’, Baldwin stresses, that spurred Mowbray to take up arms, and Mowbray acted in defiance of his monarch’s authority solely to compel his King to fulfil his neglected duty by punishing those officers who debilitated justice (p. 102). Baldwin confirms to readers the rectitude of Mowbray’s action not only by refusing to condemn Mowbray but also by asserting that even Richard himself, once he had been returned to his senses, ‘loued’ his defiant Marshal for guiding him back to proper behaviour (p. 103). Through his remarkably sympathetic portrait of Mowbray’s armed resistance, Baldwin seeks to persuade officers that undutiful monarchs can and should be opposed when they persist in irresponsible behaviour. Further, he seeks to suggest to officers that their primary duty is always 12 In constructing this exemplum, Baldwin takes extensive liberties with his historical source, Fabyan’s chronicle. See Robert Fabyan, The Chronicle of Fabyan (London, 1542), sig. 3B5r.

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to the preservation of justice and the well-being of their countrymen. As officers ‘of the realme’ (the term Baldwin significantly appends to Mowbray’s title of ‘Marshall’), English officers must hold as an essential part of their duty the adoption of any means necessary to restrain harm done to justice and to the people by a persistently undutiful monarch. In advancing such a radical reconception of an English officer’s allegiances and duties, Baldwin draws upon Calvin’s words concerning popular magistrates in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, one of the very ‘resistant’ passages Collinson cites in ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’.13 In his Institutes (1536), Calvin insists that private citizens may never resist an unjust ruler. However, Calvin continues, in forbidding resistance by subjects, I am speaking all the while of private individuals. For if there are now any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings (as in ancient times the ephors were set against the Spartan kings, or the tribunes of the people against the Roman consuls, or the demarchs against the senate of the Athenians; and perhaps, as things now are, such power as the three estates exercise in every realm when they hold their chief assemblies), I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.14

The importance of Calvinist thought to A Mirror for Magistrates has been long noted, though the extent of its influence has often been overstated.15 In 1938, Lily B. Campbell was the first to apply Calvin’s teachings to the Mirror, construing Baldwin’s use of the phrase ‘ye be all Gods’ in his dedicatory epistle to suggest that the Mirror seeks to exalt English magistrates and to teach a Calvinist doctrine of strict obedience to political officers. In 1993, Andrew Hadfield offered an important correction to Campbell, drawing the attention of Mirror scholars to Calvin’s words on the right of resistance by certain magistrates (quoted above) in order to show that Calvin did not always teach a doctrine of strict obedience.16 Based partly upon the application of the above-quoted passage to the text, Hadfield argued perceptively for the presence of resistant thought in A Mirror for Magistrates, declaring that the 1559 Mirror could be read as a

Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic, pp. 44–5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Battles, ed. John McNeill (2 vols, Philadelphia, 1960), vol. 2, p. 1519. 15 It is actually Baldwin alone of all the original Mirror authors who seems directly to draw upon Calvin for his poems and prose passages in the collection. 16 Mirror, pp. 52–3; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity (Cambridge, 1993), p. 99. 13 14

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‘militantly Calvinist work’ in its call for English magistrates to withstand the depredations of erring monarchs.17 Hadfield’s return of critical attention to Calvin’s passage on magisterial resistance provided a valuable counter to decades of facile equations in Mirror criticism of Calvinism with a sort of proto-Stuart divine-right theory of monarchical power.18 However, Hadfield’s relatively brief analysis of the Mirror in Literature, Politics and National Identity did not allow him to confront the chief impediment to his assertion that ‘the political message of the Institution [i.e. Calvin’s Institutes] is identical to that of the Mirror’, namely that Calvin’s words on magisterial resistance apply only to popularly elected magistrates (populares magistratus), officers such as the tribunes of Rome and the demarchs of Athens who were selected by the people specifically to represent their rights. As Campbell herself noted, Calvin’s words concerning the right of resistance to the monarch could apply under the English political system at best only to members of Parliament and not to the crown officers whom the Mirror authors portray in their exemplary tragedies.19 If Hadfield’s assertion that the 1559 Mirror can be read as a ‘militantly Calvinist work’ is thus something of an overstatement, given both the heterogeneous nature of the political thought of the collection and the inappropriateness of Calvin’s words on resistance to the English magistracy, the passage in Calvin’s Institutes both Hadfield and Collinson cite nevertheless offers important insight into Baldwin’s revolutionary project in the early stanzas of ‘Mowbray’. Baldwin’s ‘Mowbray’ is not a Calvinist poem; it is, however, Calvinistic. It stands as nothing less than an attempt to move high English officers to understand their true loyalties and responsibilities in terms of Calvin’s words on elected popular magistrates. Rejecting the traditional conception of English magistrates as crown servants and royal officers, Baldwin asks magisterial readers to take Mowbray’s role in the Appellant Lords’ rising as their own exemplary model and to come to see themselves, in the manner of the ancient elected officers Calvin describes, as the servants first of the people and only secondarily of the monarch. It is to this end that Baldwin casts Mowbray as a protector of the people, one permitted and even expected to lead resistance to King Richard when the monarch refuses to perform his duty. Like the ancient magistrates Calvin names, Mowbray’s goal is only to ‘withstand’ his monarch’s permitting of depredations against his Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, p. 98. See Mirror, p. 52. 19 Ibid., p. 53. Collinson also correctly notes that Calvin’s words would be understood in England to be applicable only to the English ‘parliamentary estates’ (‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 45). For Calvin’s purpose in this passage, see John McNeill’s lengthy note in Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, pp. 1518–19. 17 18

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people; Baldwin does not counsel overthrow of an erring king but only the monarch’s correction and restraint. Reworking Calvin’s teachings, Baldwin shapes ‘Mowbray’ as a call to English magistrates to understand themselves as a permanently standing, independent force of protection for the people, one licensed to take resistant action whenever the monarch falls into harmful irresponsibility or misrule. George Ferrers also sanctions armed opposition to an erring monarch in A Mirror for Magistrates; however, Ferrers’s prescription for resistance is even more radical than Baldwin’s. In ‘The fall of Robert Tresilian chiefe Iustice of Englande, and other his felowes, for misconstruyng the lawes, and expounding them to serue the Princes affections’, the ghost of Robert Tresilian (d. 1388) relates how he and other members of Richard II’s judiciary wilfully misinterpreted English statutes on behalf of their King, wresting the meaning of written laws so that they appeared to legitimate even Richard’s most unjust actions. With Richard’s judges falsely arguing away all statutory limits upon royal authority, Tresilian recalls, England’s ‘raging’ monarch soon found himself free to act upon his every corrupt desire (p. 78). The result, Tresilian declares, was tyranny. So wurkyng lawe lyke waxe, the subiecte was not sure, Of lyfe, lande, nor goods, but at the princes wyll: Which caused his kingdome the shorter tyme to dure, For clayming power absolute both to saue and spyll, The prince therby presumed his people for to pyll: And set his lustes for lawe, and will had reasons place, No more but hang and drawe, there was no better grace. (p. 77)

Under such conditions, ‘all went to wracke, vnlyke of remedie’ (p. 78). Ferrers makes Richard’s assaults upon the people the occasion of the Lords Appellant’s uprising and, in the wake of its success, of Tresilian’s execution. Ferrers knew from his historical source for ‘Robert Tresilian’, the records preserved in the rolls of Parliament, that the Lords Appellant were five powerful magnates who did not accuse Richard II himself of crimes but ‘appealed’ Richard’s favourite officers to Richard for alleged acts of treason.20 Ferrers alters his source radically, casting the Appellants’ rising not as a revolt of five magnates but as the corporate action of the English ‘Baronye’ as a whole. Further, he portrays it as a response to the misdeeds not of pernicious royal favourites but of the monarch himself. According to the poem, when faced by their prince’s assaults and denied their traditional rights and protections, the nobility, supported by the ‘commons’, simply rose up in resistance. The Baroyne of Englande not bearyng this abuse, Conspyring with the commons assembled by assent, And seyinge neyther reason, nor treaty, coulde induce 20

See Rotuli Parliamentorum (6 vols, London 1767–77), vol. 3, pp. 229–33.

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The king in any thing his Rygor to relent, Mawgree all his might they called a parliament Francke and free for all men without checke to debate As well for weale publyke, as for the princes state. In whiche parliament muche thinges was proponed Concerning the regaly and ryghtes of the crowne, By reason kynge Richarde, whiche was to be moned, Full lytell regardynge his honour and renowne, By sinister aduyse, had tourned all vpsodowne. For surety of whose state, them thought it dyd behooue His corrupt counsaylours, from him to remooue. (p. 78–9)

Ferrers in no way condemns this rising by Richard’s subjects, despite the fact that it goes against all traditional sense of due obedience to the monarch. Indeed, Ferrers makes it clear that the nobles who opposed Richard were neither ambitious climbers nor rank rebels; rather, they were unjustly abused men who had taken up arms only after their tyrannical prince had rejected all peaceful overtures of ‘reason’ and ‘treaty’. In a similar manner, Ferrers leads readers to celebrate the Lords’ highly irregular Parliament, despite the fact that this assembly was convoked by the Appellants themselves rather than by the constitutional means of royal command. The Lords’ Parliament, Ferrers’s poem asserts, was one that laudably returned to English political affairs the ‘reason’ and the concern for the ‘weale publyke’ long lost under Richard’s tyranny (p. 77). Freed from the threat posed by a prince who claimed ‘power absolute both to saue and spyll’, England’s legislators made their Parliament a place to debate in a ‘frank and free’ manner, and they exercised their authority as lawmakers over the royal prerogative to redefine the ‘ryghtes of the crowne’ in order to limit any future harm the prince might inflict upon them (p. 78). As he does in presenting the Lords’ rising, Ferrers seeks to move readers to see this Parliament as an unusual but necessary means to return England to its normative constitutional structure. Indeed, to strengthen readers’ sense of the rectitude of the Lords’ rising, Ferrers even insists that the nobles’ action increased rather than decreased the ‘surety’ of the King’s state. The restraints the Lords’ Parliament placed upon the erring prince, the poem implies, lessened the danger that Richard’s continued acts of injustice might produce a rising whose end would not be mere restraint of the monarch but instead Richard’s overthrow. If the ruler allows the persistent oppression of his people, and if he or she will hear neither ‘reason’ nor ‘treaty’, Ferrers’s exemplum suggests, subjects need not simply suffer in passive acceptance but can and even should resist their abusive prince, drawing upon any means necessary to return justice to the state, safety to all the people, and the disinterested rule of law to its rightful place of authority over both prince and subjects alike.

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In coming to endorse the idea of a noble-led rising as the proper response to monarchical assaults on justice and the people, Ferrers draws not upon continental political thought but upon English political history. Ferrers crafts his description of the Lords Appellant’s rising to suggest to readers not primarily the historical 1387 action against Richard II but an earlier, even more famous English rising against unjust royal power, the baronial revolt that occasioned England’s most revered political document, Magna Carta. George Ferrers knew well Magna Carta and the events that brought it into existence, for Ferrers himself composed one the earliest printed translations of this work.21 Unlike the historical Lords Appellant’s revolt, Ferrers’s magisterial readers could recall, the rising against King John in 1215 was (at least as it was presented in sixteenth-century accounts) a rising of the whole nobility against a king who refused to abide by English law, precisely the sort of action Ferrers portrays in ‘Robert Tresilian’. Indeed, to signal the connection between the rising he portrays and that against King John, Ferrers employs a term for the English nobility, the ‘Baronye’, found nowhere else in the earliest Mirror poems. It is, however, precisely the term Robert Fabyan (upon whose work Ferrers draws elsewhere in the Mirror for events of Richard II’s reign) employs for the noblemen who compelled the abusive King John to limit his royal power (p. 78).22 By evoking this rising and the declaration of rights independent from monarchical control it produced, Ferrers tacitly moves readers to accept just this sort of ameliorative armed action as a model for response to any English monarch who, in the manner of Ferrers’s King Richard, unjustly seeks to transcend ‘the lymittes of his lawe’ (p. 78). The boldest exemplary endorsement of political resistance in the Mirror, however, comes in the anonymous tragedy ‘How sir Richard Nevell Earle of Warwike, and his brother Iohn Lord Marquise Mountacute through their to-much boldness wer slayne at Barnet field’. Elsewhere in Tudor literature, the career of the side-switching ‘Kingmaker’ Richard Earl of Warwick might provide prime material for a negative exemplum warning readers to eschew acts of treason, rebellion and disloyalty to friends. In the Mirror, however, the dubious Warwick becomes an exemplary embodiment of moral rectitude and protection of the people. Far from condemning Warwick for his key part in deposing two successive English monarchs, the ‘Warwick’ poet asks readers to admire Warwick’s actions and to entertain the idea that even a private individual (at least one of the upper classes) may oppose and even overthrow an erring ruler if he does so in the service of the people or God’s law.

21 See George Ferrers, The Boke of Magna Carta with diuers other statutes … translated into Englyshe (London, 1534). 22 Fabyan, Chronicle, sig. 2C5r.

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In the poem, the bluff warrior Warwick recalls how he deposed two successive monarchs, Henry VI and Edward IV. While he acknowledges his family ties to the leaders of the Yorkist party and, later, his personal anger at King Edward for undermining the French marriage that Warwick had arranged for him, Warwick nevertheless declares that it was not personal reasons that spurred him to oppose his princes but rather a principled devotion to the people and to virtue. It was only after ‘the realme decayede, / By such as good king Henry sore abused’, Warwick insists, that ‘To mende the state I gave [Henry’s] enmies ayde’ (p. 209). King Henry, according to Warwick, was a good man but an ineffectual ruler. Henry’s refusal to discipline pernicious officers brought harm to the commonwealth, and this was why Warwick drove Henry from power. Similarly, Warwick continues, his decision to depose Edward IV came not from personal animosity but from moral outrage at Edward’s sinful behaviour, particularly Edward’s lust for Elizabeth Woodville and his brazen perfidy in breaking his French marriage contract. ‘Whan I sawe my king so bent to lust’, an angry Warwick explains, That with his fayth he past not to dispence, Which is a princes honors chiefe defence, I could not rest til I had found a meane, To mende his misse, or els to marre him cleane. (p. 207)

Edward’s ‘sinful prankes’ proved to Warwick that the weak yet morally virtuous Henry VI was a better ruler for England; it was for this reason, Warwick declares, that he ousted Edward and placed King Henry once more upon the throne (p. 209). The implications of Warwick’s breathtaking rehearsal of his multiple acts of deposition contradict decades of Tudor propaganda. In this poem, there is no presentation of the King as ‘God’s anointed’, no condemnation of rebellion and no sense that Warwick ever experienced any divine disfavour for his acts of resistance to the prince. Far from casting Warwick’s death as God’s judgement against a rebel, the poem in fact devotes most of its account of Warwick’s death in battle to a celebratory account of Warwick’s martial prowess, and it blames only the overwhelming odds Warwick faced and an unmotivated twist of ill ‘lucke’ for Warwick’s demise (p. 208). Instead of focusing attention on the manner of Warwick’s death, the poem guides its readers to dwell upon the manner of Warwick’s life, in particular, upon the power he wielded for so long over even his monarchs themselves. After relating the manner of his death, Warwick suddenly exclaims, Now tell me Baldwin hast thou heard or read, Of any man that did as I have done? … Hast thou ever heard of subiect vnder sonne,

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That plaaste and baaste his soveraynes so oft, By enterchaunge, now low, and than aloft? (p. 208)

Warwick then reveals the ‘truth of all’ concerning his power: he owed his ability to unseat English kings solely to his practice of making the protection of the people his overriding concern. ‘The common weale was still my chiefest care’, Warwick explains, ‘To priuate gayne or glory I was not bent’. I heard olde soldiers, and poore wurkemen whine Because their dutyes wer not duly payd. Agayne I sawe howe people dyd repine, At those through whom their paimentes wer delayd: And proofe did oft assure (as scripture sayd) That god doth wreke the wretched peoples griefes, I sawe the polles cut of fro polling theves. This made me always iustly for to deale. Which whan the people plainly vnderstoode, Bycause they sawe me mind the common weale They still endeuoured how to do me good, Ready to spend their substaunce, life, and blud, In any cause wherto I did them move For suer they wer it was for their behove. And so it was. (p. 209)

Warwick owed his power to the unfailing devotion of the people, who knew that he acted only for ‘their behove’. Unlike Henry VI’s pernicious officers, Warwick always heard and responded to the complaints of the people, seeking in all his actions to improve the common weal. In response, the grateful people of England were willing to sacrifice their very ‘substaunce, life, and blud’ in his cause, even if his purpose was defiance of the prince himself. The ‘Warwick’ poem suggests that a private individual may lead opposition to and even depose a pernicious monarch, if he does so on behalf of right or popular well-being. If the ‘Warwick’ poet’s bold assertions differ from the other, less extreme endorsements of opposition to the prince in the collection, it is a difference only in degree. On the most general level, all the poems of the Mirror ground their support or condemnation for resistance to the monarch ultimately upon the intentions of him who would rise in opposition. Nowhere in the collection do the poets endorse revolt against royal authority for the purposes of ambition, greed or private grudge. When a man’s cause is the protection of the people or the prevention of injustice, however, the Mirror authors are always sympathetic to those who seek to ‘helpe other’, even when the means they employ include violent resistance to the prince (p. 64). While many of the poems of A Mirror for Magistrates offer exemplary sanction for active political resistance, the Mirror itself is not a call to revolution. Instead, it presents such actions as the proper response only

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in the worst of cases, when a monarch allows injustice and immorality persistently to rule in his or her realm. In its address to English officers (a body that includes, of course, she who holds the ‘office’ of the queenship herself), the Mirror holds out as its ideal a balance between virtuous officers and a virtuous prince. The ideal monarch is one with the probity to labour on behalf of those below him or her and the strength to keep corrupt officers in check. The ideal magistracy is one similarly devoted to the people, one composed of men both virtuous and strong enough to offer frank counsel to the monarch and, when necessary, to restrain him or her whenever he or she errs. In its general political message, the Mirror thus provides strong support for the tacit system of ‘two governments’ that made up the governance of Elizabethan England. Both through its exemplary sanction of resistance and in its ideal of cooperative but fundamentally independent action by monarch and magistrates, it helped to preserve what Collinson calls ‘the ideological capacity for resistance’ in Elizabethan England, and it presented to decades of readers a compelling intellectual endorsement of monarchical-republic governance.

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ESSAY 6

Rhetoric and Citizenship in the Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I1 Markku Peltonen i On 10 May 1579 John Stockwood, the schoolmaster of Tonbridge school, told his listeners at St Paul’s Cross that in matters concerning the common wealth, hee is neuer taken for a good Citizen, which is touched with no loue of the common wealth, which beareth no friendly, louing, nor fauourable goodwill to his fellowe Citizens, and their affayres, which in all thinges seeketh himselfe, without anie regarde of others.2

But if Stockwood was ready to explain the citizen’s duties, he was equally prepared to explain his own duties as a preacher. ‘For as touching the Preacher’, he further told his audience, let him consider that he preacheth the doctrine of the kingdome, not of man, but of GOD; the force whereof is suche against all the potentates, and mightie Tyrantes, of the worlde, that it will plucke vp and roote oute, destroy and throwe downe, whatsoeuer lifteth vp it selfe against the same.3

The potential explosiveness of such statements as Stockwood’s exposition of the preacher’s duties has always been at the centre of the historiography of Elizabethan politics and political thought, but his account of the citizen’s duties would have been easy to ignore as more or less meaningless, especially by the scholarly standards prevalent in the 1970s and early 1980s. That they now appear highly significant is in large part due to Patrick Collinson’s ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ and the other essays he published between 1987 and 1993 arguing that the political culture of Elizabethan England had important elements which

1 The author is grateful to David Colclough and Quentin Skinner for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 2 John Stockwood, A very fruiteful sermon preched at Paules Crosse the tenth of May last … (London, 1579), fols 27v–28r. 3 Ibid., fol. 43r.

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could be described as republican rather than monarchical.4 Perhaps the most central of these republican elements was the idea of active citizenship – that in Elizabethan England ‘citizens were concealed within subjects’.5 It follows that, when Stockwood elucidated his theory of citizenship, many of his listeners must have found it familiar. Indeed, a similar theory was expounded throughout the latter part of the sixteenth century.6 As the translation of the Dutch humanist Cornelius Valerius’s The Casket of Iewels (1571) put it immediately after its discussion of Cicero’s preference for a mixed state: ‘he is to be named a good Citizen of his countrie, who being trimmed with ciuill vertues … may be able to perfourme very well not only Domestical and familier offices, but also Publike both at home, and in warre’.7 Collinson briefly pointed out that much of the theoretical underpinning of the Elizabethan monarchical republic came from ‘the legacy of early sixteenth-century humanism’.8 Such a suggestion had often been made before, but it has since been examined in a number of studies. Most importantly, Quentin Skinner has demonstrated that it was mainly the educational programme of humanism which accounts for the Elizabethan theory of citizenship. This education, he has emphasized, was overwhelmingly linguistic in character – concentrating on ‘the two linguistic elements in the studia humanitatis, the ars grammatica and the ars rhetorica’. There was thus a particularly close ‘connection between a mastery of rhetoric and a capacity for good citizenship’.9 Building on Collinson’s and Skinner’s works, the present article examines the centrality of eloquence in the Elizabethan notion of citizenship. It seeks to argue that, whilst it was widely agreed that rhetoric was central to active citizenship, there was much less unanimity about its social depth 4 ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57; De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990); ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92. 5 Collinson, De Republica Anglorum, p. 24. 6 Markku Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (2 vols, Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 85–106, at 94–5. More generally Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640, chs 1 and 2. 7 Cornelius Valerius, The Casket of Iewels, trans. J[ohn] C[harlton] (London, 1571), sigs Evv–[vi]r. For the importance of officeholding see Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 8 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 44. 9 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), citations pp. 28, 87.

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and thus about its precise nature. At one end of the spectrum was the conviction, upheld by many humanist scholars and schoolmasters, that active citizenship should be socially relatively wide and inclusive – that the duties of the citizen in general and his oratorical power in particular concerned a large body of the people. At the other end of the spectrum was a body of literature which maintained that these duties and the usage of the powers of the ars rhetorica in particular should be limited to a more exclusive body of councillors and nobles. According to this aristocratic interpretation of citizenship, nothing put the commonwealth in graver danger than the mighty weapon of eloquence in popular hands. This essay concludes that the Elizabethans were cognizant of the tensions between these different notions of eloquence and citizenship, and that some of them explored their potential explosiveness. ii In his account of the monarchical republic, Collinson argued that active citizenship in late sixteenth-century England was socially inclusive. Although men like Burghley and Leicester played important roles in his account, Collinson also insisted that the ‘extent and social depth’ of ‘the Elizabethan republic’ was greater and deeper than the mere political elite.10 There was much in the humanist educational programme to corroborate Collinson’s argument. Adopted to a great extent from continental sources, this educational programme had been quickly embraced by major grammar schools during the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and by the Elizabethan decades it exerted a far-reaching influence on humbler grammar schools as well. It thus formed a relatively uniform national system in the course of the sixteenth century.11 At the heart of this programme was the ars rhetorica. Education in classical rhetoric, in other words, was thought to be the best education for citizenship. As Skinner has shown, ‘the point or purpose of studying the ars rhetorica was civic and political in character’.12 From Richard Rainolde’s adaptation of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata, the Elizabethan reader could learn that it was before everything else ‘Eloquence, by the which the florishyng state of commonweales doe consiste: [and] kyngdomes vniuersally are 10 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 48. See also Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000). 11 For recent excellent accounts of grammar school education see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 19–40; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 11–47. 12 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 67, 87.

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gouerned’.13 John Rainolds commenced his lecture course on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Oxford in the 1570s with the testimony of Juan Luis Vives that the work is of ‘immense utility for the understanding and prudent conduct of communal life’.14 It is a striking fact, not always sufficiently appreciated by those scholars who find monarchical government somehow incompatible with citizenship, that one of the most central ends of schooling in Tudor England was taken to be an education in citizenship. The humanist schoolmaster, in other words, played a key role in turning Elizabethan subjects into citizens. Irrespective of whether the schoolmaster taught in London, Tonbridge or Plymouth, he emphasized that even the elementary school was there for bringing up future citizens and statesmen. The aim of elementary school education was, the first master of Merchant Taylors’ School, Richard Mulcaster, insisted, that the boys may become ‘profitable in publik, and proue so in the end, theie chefelie consider the principall and subaltern magistrates’.15 The headmaster of Plymouth grammar school concurred and noted that his school would produce both ‘wise Councellers’ and ‘Rulers in the Common wealth’.16 When the first town clerk of Tewkesbury expounded the ways in which his urban commonwealth could flourish, he likewise maintained that founding a school was ‘the Pilote of policies’ because it would produce ‘the ready meanes to vnite learning and gouernement togither’.17 If the Plymouth schoolmaster was convinced that his school would produce both councillors and rulers, he was no less convinced that these included merchants and other common people. He had therefore avoided directing his ‘little pamphlet’ to the learned and attempted to ‘make the argument more popular’ to which end he had ‘prefixed a necessarie exhortation for all other sort of people’.18 The early seventeenth-century schoolmaster of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, John Brinsley, wrote A consolation for ovr grammar schooles (1622), giving directions how to organize such schools ‘for all those of the inferiour sort, and all ruder countries and places’, which included ‘Ireland, Wales, Virginia, with the Sommer

13 Richard Rainolde, A booke called the foundacion of rhetorike (London, 1564), fol. jr. 14 ‘Ingentis quoque vtilitatis ad sensum & prudentiam vitae communis’, John Rainolds’s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Lawrence D. Green (Newark, DE, 1986), p. 94. 15 Richard Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung (London, 1582), p. 13. 16 William Kempe, The education of children in learning (London, 1588), sig. E2r. 17 John Barston, Safegarde of societie (London, 1576), fol. 105v. 18 Kempe, The education of children, sig. A3r; for the importance of merchants see sig. E2v.

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Ilands’. Brinsley thus had in mind ‘the weakest, & for the common countrye Schooles’ or ‘our meaner & ruder schooles’, yet he was convinced that such schools produced active citizens. Hence, he asserted that ‘all the flower of our Nation, and those who become the leaders of all the rest, are committed to our education, and instruction’.20 If Elizabethan schoolmasters took it for granted that they were teaching the ars rhetorica and thus the qualities and duties of citizenship to every schoolboy, a similar aim guided those who produced vernacular treatises introducing the ars rhetorica to a new and broader audience.21 Leonard Cox published his adaptation of Philip Melanchthon’s Institutiones rhetoricae with the title The arte or crafte of rhetoryke in c. 1530 and thereby produced the earliest treatise on rhetoric in English. One of the areas where rhetoric was necessary was counselling the prince, whilst another was ‘to speke afore any companye what someuer they be’. One of Cox’s examples of ‘narracion’ was ‘what office or rule he bare among his citizens, or in his contrey, what actes he dyd, howe he gouerned suche as were vnder him’.22 According to Thomas Wilson’s The arte of rhetorique (1554), one who learned the principles of eloquence could use them for leading ‘a whole multitude … which waye him liketh best to haue them’. Indeed, the treatise was meant for those who ‘either shall beare rule ouer manye, or muste haue to do wyth matters of a Realme’.23 So great was the potency of rhetoric, Henry Peacham declared, that it made the orator nothing less than ‘the emperour of mens minds & affections’. It followed that he was fully equipped ‘to rule the world with counsell, prouinces with lawes, cities with pollicy, & multitudes with persuasion’.24 When Peacham detailed the area of this mighty power he noted that ‘by force of his speech’ Cicero ‘disputes much of religion, of dutyes, of the common safety of Cittizens, of liberty’.25 The most widely used rhetoric textbook of the early Stuart period – the London schoolmaster Thomas Farnaby’s Index rhetoricus (1625) – followed closely both Cicero and Quintilian and asserted that the boys of a tender age (under 15 according to his definition) should be able to persuade or dissuade in the deliberative genus about topics which are ‘in our power’, such as ‘public wealth, that is subsidies, 19

19 John Brinsley, A consolation for ovr grammar schooles (London, 1622), title page. 20 Ibid., pp. 22, 26, 45. 21 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 51. 22 [Leonard Cox], The arte or crafte of rhetoryke (London, [1532]), sigs Aiiv, Bviir. 23 Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique ([London], 1553), sigs Aiiiiv, Aiv. 24 Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence (London, 1593), sig. A.B.iijv. 25 Henry Peacham, The garden of eloquence (London, 1577), sig. Niijv.

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peace and war, the defence of borders, what is exported or imported, laws’.26 Those who argued for a wide dissemination of the ars rhetorica and the concomitant notion of active citizenship found strong support for their views in their classical authorities. Both Cicero and Quintilian had emphasized the importance of popular assemblies at least insofar as deliberative rhetoric was concerned. In De oratore Antonius famously pointed out that ‘the popular assembly’ allowed the speaker to use ‘all the power and vehemence of oratory’.27 In De officiis Cicero reiterated the same point. As Nicholas Grimalde’s translation put it, ‘the oration, which is made amonge the multitude, with vehemence, oftentimes raiseth an vniuersall glorie. For great is the wonderment at him, that plentifullie, & wiselie speaketh.’28 Rhetoric thus had close ties with the more popular forms of political participation.29 Success in any attempt to persuade the people required that the speech had to be geared towards that very purpose. Most importantly, the language had to be such that the common people understood it. Cicero had insisted at the very beginning of De oratore that because the art of oratory ‘deals to some extent with common practice, custom and speech of men … the worst mistake in speaking is therefore to abhor the common style and the common custom’.30 Thomas Wilson declared that it was better to speak ‘plainly & nakedly after the common sort of men’ than to use ‘large veyne and vehement maner of eloquence’. In this, Wilson said, he was following John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge. Cheke 26 Thomas Farnaby, Index rhetoricus (Londini, 1629), p. 4: ‘in nostra potestate: Publicae verß, Pecuniae ceu vestigalia, Pax & Bellum, regionum Presidia, Que exportantur aut importantur, Leges’. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford, 1991), 1359b; Cicero, De oratore, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (2 vols, London, 1942), I xiii 58; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H.E. Butler (4 vols, London, 1963–5), III viii 14. 27 Cicero, De oratore, II lxxxii 334: ‘contio capit omnem vim orationis et gravitatem, varietatemque desiderat’; Quintilian, Institutio, III viii 14. 28 Cicero, Three bokes of duties, trans. Nicholas Grimalde (London, 1556), sig. Lijv. 29 Cary J. Nederman, ‘Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanisms – Ancient, Medieval and Modern’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 247–69, at 250–53. See also Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY, 1995), pp. 103–5, 110–17; Gary Remer, ‘ Political Oratory and Conversation: Cicero versus Deliberative Democracy’, Political Theory, 27 (1999): 39–64. 30 Cicero, De oratore, I iii 12: ‘[dicendi omnis ratio] communi quodam in usu, atque in hominum more et sermone versatur … in dicendo autem vitium vel maximam sit a vulgari genere orationis, atque a consuetudine communis sensus abhorrere.’ See also Quintilian, Institutio, VIII pr. 25, where he refers approvingly to this passage.

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had claimed, so Wilson asserted, that Demosthenes was the best orator because he had applied ‘himselfe to the sense and vnderstanding of the common people’, which in the English context suited both the ‘Pulpit’ and ‘Parlament’. These considerations and Cheke’s lectures on Demosthenes, which Wilson had attended at Padua, had prompted Wilson to translate Demosthenes’ Olynthiacs and Philippics in 1570. Wilson spared no effort in following Demosthenes’ style and rendering him in such English that is ‘vttered daily in our common speach’. But it was not only because of Demosthenes’ plain style that Wilson translated his orations. Demosthenes, Wilson claimed, was also ‘so necessarie a writer for all those that loue their Countries libertie, and welfare’. Such a consideration was highly topical in England in 1570, and it was possible to ‘compare his time, with this time. Countrie with Countrie: neighbours with neighbours: and King with King’.31 It was of course foreign policy which mainly accounted for the topicality of Demosthenes’ orations in 1570. Yet they also had other important lessons to teach. According to Wilson, Demosthenes’ third Olynthiac ‘setteth forth a patterne or shape of a good gouerned common weale, shewing what the people should do abrode, what at home, and how euery man should priuately vse himselfe’. The pattern of ‘a good gouerned common weale’ was thus, as Wilson translated Demosthenes, that ‘the Commons both had the stomacke to go a warfare themselues: and were also themselues maysters ouer the Maiestrates’; that ‘euerye one [was] contented to take office and aucthoritie of the Commons’. But the contrary state of affairs had come to prevail in Athens by Demosthenes’ time, as Wilson’s translation went on to explain: ‘Where as nowe it is cleane contrarie, for the Maiestrates and gouernours haue all in their owne handes, and through them, all things are done: and you that be the Commons like men soken to the verie bottome’.32 In his account of the figure of parrhesia, Wilson closely followed Demosthenes and Cicero and argued that ‘freenesse of speache’ occurred ‘when wee speake boldely, & without feare, euen to the proudest of them, whatsoeuer we please’.33 In the third Olynthiac Demosthenes had 31 Demosthenes, The three orations of Demosthenes, trans. Thomas Wilson (London, 1570), sigs [*iiijv], *.jv, *.ijr, **.jr. For plain style see also Wilson’s discussion in The arte of rhetorique, fols 86r–88r. 32 Demosthenes, Three orations, pp. 20, 29. Cf. Edward Walshe, The office and duety in fightyng for our countrey (London, 1545), sigs B6r–7r, where Walshe first pointed out that ‘Demosthenes extolleth with high praise, the order taken for soche in the common weale of Democratia’ and immediately expressed a wish to see him ‘transphrased into our mother tonge’. 33 Wilson, The arte of rhetorique, fol. 106v. See the excellent discussion in David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 47–50.

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similarly declared, as Wilson rendered it, that ‘the part of a good Citizen’ was to ‘say his minde’.34 When Wilson established his ethos in A discovrse vppon vsurye, he employed the same figure and, calling himself a ‘medler in matters of the worlde’, noted: ‘I knowe in deede that playnenesse of speache, and freedome of tongue, in decypheryng sinne, and aduancing vertue, are not the best waies to thriue by.’35 Many took such teachings seriously. A good example of how the image of orator was employed to defend political participation is a 1548 pamphlet by Robert Crowley against ‘the oppressours of the poore commons’. The aim was to persuade parliament to add this problem to the list of ‘the manifolde & moste weyghtie matters … to be debated and communed’. Addressing both Lords and Commons, Crowley called himself ‘theyr moste humble and dayly Oratour’, thereby justifying his outspokenness.36 Such arguments were often rehearsed in an urban context, as shown by the chamberlain of Exeter, John Vowell, alias Hooker, and the townclerk of Tewkesbury, John Barston. One of the qualities the urban citizen of ‘all free Cities’ had, according to Barston, was ‘to speake boldy … to vtter the conscience freely withoute dissembling of feare, as it was the iust commendation of Cato, to be praised for his sharp confutation of Caesar’.37 The Discourse of the commonweal of this realm of England, first published in 1581 but probably written in 1549 by Thomas Smith, argued that the task of counselling should not be limited to the nobles nor even to the learned. It was highly desirable that ‘also Marchauntmen, Husbandmen, & Artificers: which in their callings are taken wise: [be] freely suffered, yea, & prouoked to tel their aduises’.38 John Stubbs’s political activism has recently been cited as an important example of the social breadth of Elizabethan citizenship.39 The thoroughly rhetorical character of the activism of Stubbs (a Cambridge graduate) is highlighted already by the opening words of his famous pamphlet: ‘In all 34 35

ÀÀiijr.

Demosthenes, Three orations, p. 26; see also pp. 21–2, 29. Thomas Wilson, A discourse vppon vsurye (London, 1572), sigs ÀÀijv,

36 Robert Crowley, An informacion and peticion agaynst the oppressours of the poore commons of thys realme (London, [1548]), sig. Aiir. 37 John Barston, Safegarde of societie, fols 96v, 83v; John Vowell, alias Hooker, Orders enacted for orphans and for their portions within the citie of Excester (London, [1575]), sig. F3v. See in general Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism’, pp. 87–93. For an important recent account see Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 66–78. 38 W.S., A compendious or briefe examination of certayne ordinary complaints (London, 1581), sig. Av. 39 Natalie Mears, ‘Courts, Courtiers, and Culture in Tudor England’, The Historical Journal, 46/3 (2003): 703–22, at 719; see also Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005).

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deliberations of moste priuate actions, the very heathen are wont, first to consider honesty, and then profit.’40 These Ciceronian goals of deliberative rhetoric form the central points of reference throughout the tract. Stubbs’s professed task is to persuade that the Anjou match is neither the honest nor the profitable course of action. Furthermore, as a perfect orator Stubbs was not content to rely on the powers of reasons but constantly employed emotional arguments both for establishing his own ethos and heaping abuses on his adversaries. Whereas they were mere ‘flatterers’ using ‘smooth delicate words’ and ‘a stealing insinuation or flattery and creping perswasion’, he placed himself among ‘playne honest speakers’ who were telling nothing but the ‘playne rough truth’.41 iii Of course, by no means all accepted the kind of activism exhibited by John Stubbs. Nor was the inclusive concept of citizenship and its underlying notion of popular eloquence universally embraced. Archbishop John Whitgift teased an entirely different conclusion out of Demosthenes. One of the ‘causes of troubles in kingdomes’, he told the Parliament in 1584, was ‘many orators’.42 Some humanists treated popular rhetoric as a potential threat to monarchy. In Roger Ascham’s criticism of contemporary Italy in The scholemaster (1570), republicanism played a significant part. Those who were ‘brought vp in Italie, in some free Citie, as all Cities be there’ quickly learned that ‘man may freelie discourse against what he will, against whom he lust: against any Prince, agaynst any gouernement, yea against God him selfe’. Such an education would prove highly problematic for an English gentleman who was not only expected ‘to be an honest man’ but ‘a quiet subiect to his Prince’.43 A similar discrepancy between the ars rhetorica and monarchical government was detected by Mulcaster. In ancient Athens and Rome the power of eloquence had been intimately linked to their ‘popular gouernements’. These governments ‘did yeald so much vnto eloquence, as one mans perswasion might make the whole assembly to sway with him’, so that ‘the toungue’ was nothing less than ‘imperiall’. Mulcaster thus agreed with Peacham about the imperial powers of eloquence, but he insisted that this was the case only in democracies. Far otherwise were

[John Stubbs], The discoverie of a gaping gvlf (n.p., 1579), sig. A2r. Ibid., sigs B6v–7r, B2r. See also Colclough, Freedom of Speech, pp. 84–5. 42 Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. II, 1584–1589, ed. T.E. Hartley (London, 1995), pp. 20–21. 43 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster (London, 1570), sig. Kiir. 40 41

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things in Elizabethan England, where, rather than being ‘imperiall’, the tongue had to ‘obey, bycause it deales with a prince’.44 Although some humanist scholars and schoolmasters argued that the formidable powers of eloquence could be employed by anyone who had received a training in the ars rhetorica, many of them emphasized simultaneously that active citizenship was in fact the particular province of the aristocracy and gentry.45 When Nicholas Grimalde published his translation of Cicero’s De officiis, he exhorted the potential reader to adopt the active life ‘to the gouernaunce bothe of his housholde priuatlie, and of the holle commons openly’. But one’s duty depended on one’s place in the social hierarchy. Grimalde explained this hierarchy in Platonist terms: Whereas ‘the meanest sorte’ should ‘bee occupied aboute the moste seruile, and needfull workes’, those in the ‘middle degree … shall attend to affaires, and science more liberall’. It was only ‘the nobilitie’ which must look after ‘the common gouernment’.46 Although Mulcaster held that the education of the commons and of gentlemen should be essentially the same, he nevertheless argued that the gentlemen’s education should be specifically geared to the fact that ‘they be to gouerne vnder their prince in principall places’.47 Many humanists directed their accounts of citizenship and eloquence exclusively to the nobility and the gentry. This was true of the most famous early Tudor exposition of humanist political argument – Thomas Elyot’s The boke named the gouernour, first published in 1531 and reprinted at least eight times before the end of the century. A similar principle guided the German humanist Johann Sturm’s treatise on nobility, published in English in 1570, and his friend Ascham’s tract on the education of the nobility and gentry – The scholemaster, published in the same year. Humphrey Gilbert mapped out his plan for an aristocratic academy around the same time based on an analogous conviction.48 44 Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherin those primitive circvmstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training vp of children (London, 1581), pp. 242–3; see also pp. 193, 203, 151–2; First part, sigs Biiiiv, Ggiiiiv, Hhiiv–iiir. 45 For the late sixteenth-century notion of aristocratic citizenship see Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism’, pp. 95–9, and the important article by Richard Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (forthcoming, Manchester, 2007). I am grateful to Richard Cust for showing me his work prior to its publication. 46 Cicero, Three bokes of duties, sigs [Âviiiv], ÂÂjr-v. 47 Mulcaster, Positions, p. 193. See also Rainolde, The foundacion of rhetorike, fol. ixr. 48 Johann Sturm, A ritch storehouse or treasurie for nobilitye and gentlemen, trans. Thomas Browne (London, 1570); Ascham, The scholemaster, sig. Hiiir; Humphrey Gilbert, ‘Queene Elizabethes Achademy’, Early English Text Society, extra series, no. 8 (1869), pt I, pp. 1–12, at 2–3.

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According to these humanists, the nobles’ place between queen and people meant that they needed eloquence in order to discharge the duties of speaking in public assemblies and of counselling the queen. As Elyot put it, reading Demosthenes and Cicero would enable a ‘gouernour’ to bestow his words ‘aptly’ when ‘he shall happe to reason in counsaile, or shall speake in a great audience’.49 Many Elizabethan humanists emphasized both these duties. Sturm argued that one central purpose of his treatise on gentlemanly education was to demonstrate ‘what maner of Gentleman I would traine vp, that may be meete to be a counceller of Emprerors and Kings, and to haue gouernment in the common welth’.50 Gilbert agreed, pointing out in particular that teaching rhetoric in the noble academy would enable the students later in life to give ‘wise cownsell in dowbtfull matters of warre and state’.51 A strongly aristocratic interpretation of rhetoric was expounded in many translations of continental treatises on nobility and aristocratic republicanism. Perhaps the earliest of these was the English version of the Aragonese humanist Fadrique Furio Ceriol’s El consejo i consejeros del principe, translated from Italian by Thomas Blundeville and published in 1570. It was followed in 1576 by Richard Robinson’s abbreviated translation of Francesco Patrizi’s De institutione reipublicae and by William Blandy’s translation of the Portuguese humanist Jerónimo Osório’s De nobilitate civili et christiana. A very similar view of rhetoric was also presented in Justus Lipsius’s Six bookes of politickes or civil doctrine (1594), in the Polish humanist Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius’s The covnsellor (1598) and in Gasparo Contarini’s The commonwealth and gouernment of Venice (1599). These aristocratic treatises presented a familiar image of the duties that eloquence helped the nobility to perform. On the one hand, eloquence enabled them to counsel the prince with success. This, as Lipsius argued, demanded the use of ‘libertie of speech’ so that the counsellors ‘may with a stout courage, & without feare, vtter their opinion: & not frame their speech, rather with the fortune of the Prince, then with the Prince him selfe’.52 On the other hand, the ars rhetorica helped the aristocracy in their task of ruling the people. The advantage of all humankind demanded, according to Osório, that ‘the people … be gouerned by the will and auctority of noble men’. ‘The study of Oratorie’ was of crucial importance to the nobility in discharging this duty and, echoing the second book of Thomas Elyot, The boke named the gouernour (London, 1531), sig. Eiiijv. Sturm, A ritch storehouse, sig. Diijv. See also John Ferne, The blazon of gentrie (London, 1586), pt I, pp. 45–6. 51 Gilbert, ‘Queene Elizabethes Achademy’, p. 3. 52 Justus Lipsius, Six bookes of politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), p. 47. 49

50

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Cicero’s De officiis, Osório reminded his readers how many noblemen had attained ‘wonderfull fame and glorye’ by ‘the excellencye of eloquence’.53 In this aristocratic understanding, eloquence was therefore a means of conducting political debate amongst the nobility, but when directed towards the people it was above all a way of exercising power. The aristocrat was a ruler who governed and controlled his audience – the people – who were thus subjects rather than active citizens.54 Many of the advocates of this aristocratic notion of eloquence argued that, since the common people were inherently unruly, it was a principal task of the noble citizen to use his power of eloquence to suppress them. Patrizi wrote that the nobility could by ‘the force of eloquence’ govern and ‘brydle the raginge and furyous common people’.55 An even more blunt way of putting this was to insist that the nobility needed eloquence before everything else for quelling tumults and seditions. ‘In time of tumults and commotions’, Furio Ceriol asserted, ‘the eloquent counseler with his authority & good perswasion, maye cause much quietnesse, and profite the common wealth dyuers wayes.’56 Lipsius noted that there were two moments when rhetoric could be used in suppressing a sedition. At an early stage, the prince could send someone who had ‘an abilitie of eloquence, and the arte and authoritie, to winne the common people’ to ‘admonish’ and ‘perswade’ them away from rebellion. If however the rebellion had developed further the prince needed to apply sterner measures. But even then ‘faire speach is of much force with’ the common people.57 According to this aristocratic notion, the ars rhetorica was thus highly beneficial in the hands of the noble orator. At the same time, however, it was urged in a Tacitean manner that in the hands of the common people eloquence would become a highly destructive weapon. There was nothing more dangerous than the power of eloquence being wielded by or even for the common people. The most potent example of this in Osório’s treatise was rebellion in ancient Rome. This had occurred when the common people had been charmed into a rebellion ‘agaynste their rulers and princes’ by the powers of eloquence – ‘when the vnstaiable desire of 53 Jerónimo Osório, The five bookes of the famous, learned, and eloquent man, Hieronimus Osorius, contayninge a discourse of ciuill, and christian nobilitie, trans. William Blandy (London, 1576), fols 16v, 2v, 27v. 54 Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, pp. 14–15, 23–79; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), p. 48. 55 Francesco Patrizi, A moral methode of ciuile policie, trans. Richard Robinson (London, 1576), fol. 15r. 56 Fadrique Furio Ceriol, A very briefe and profitable treatise declaring howe many counsells, trans., from Italian, Thomas Blundeville (London, 1570), sig. E2v. 57 Lipsius, Sixe bookes, pp. 196–7.

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the frentike people waxed so extreme & outragious, that it coulde be kept vnder by no lawful gouernment and pollitike counsel & was geuen in hope of pray to vprores through the seditious orations of people pleasers’.58 Lipsius gave three reasons why the common people were so easily misled by the powers of an orator. They were ‘subiect to passions’, ‘voyde of reason’, and ‘light of credit’. Therefore the common people were ‘by the persuasions of seditious persons stirred vp, like violent tempests’.59 The royal proclamation and the Earl of Northampton’s tract against Stubbs’s A gaping gulf provided a rhetorical response to it, appealing to honesty and profit, but their chief response was to accuse Stubbs of ‘seditiously and rebelliously stirring up all estates’, as the proclamation had it.60 The beneficial nature of eloquence in the hands of the nobility and its equally destructive nature in the hands of the common people were amply demonstrated by Gasparo Contarini’s account of the Venetian commonwealth. The longevity and internal harmony of the Venetian commonwealth was of course a commonplace in the early modern period. Contarini portrayed Venice as a commonwealth that had been free ‘this thousand and two hundred yeares’ both from foreign invasion and ‘from all ciuile and intestine sedition’.61 The fact that eloquence was an exclusive privilege of the aristocracy contributed significantly to this ‘peaceableness’ and to the absence of tumults and seditions. In the Senate, the senators used ‘libertie to speake’ and thus ‘thoroughly debated the matter of each side’, but yet they did this ‘modestly, and with grauity, as it beseemeth a senate’. Furthermore, Contarini pointed out a significant difference between Venice and ancient Rome. ‘Aunciently in Rome’, he wrote, ‘any citizen whatsoeuer might impleade another, and with all bitternesse accuse him before the Iudges’. In Venice, however, ‘no priuate men may performe such office’ but it was left to ‘the Aduocators’. The far-reaching consequence of thus restricting the use of eloquence was, as Contarini put it, that the Venetians were able ‘to maintain the citizens in agreement’ and that they had ‘notably auoyded’ all kinds of ‘sedition’.62 58 Osório, The five bookes, fol. 18v; Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus, trans. W. Peterson, rev. M. Winterbottom, in Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus (London, 1970), 40 2. Ascham praised Osório’s treatise precisely on these grounds: see Letters of Roger Ascham, ed. Alvin Vos, trans. Maurice Hatch and Alvin Vos (New York, 1989), pp. 252, 256. 59 Lipsius, Sixe bookes, pp. 68–70, 195. See also Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius, The covnsellor. Exactly pourtraited in tow bookes, trans. [anon] (London, 1598), p. 76. 60 John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Charlottesville, 1968), p. 148. 61 Gasparo Contarini, The commonwealth and gouernment of Venice, trans. Lewes Lewkenor (London, 1599), p. 146, sig. A2v. 62 Ibid., pp. 74–5, 88–9. Cf. Tacitus, Dialogus, 40 4.

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iv These competing views of eloquence and its political role provide an important context for understanding a tract published in late 1576. On the fifth of October 1576 Richard Jones received licence to print a book entitled The woorthie historie of the Raellians. When the book was finally printed a couple of months later it bore a somewhat catchier title – A knowledge for kings, and a warning for subiects. The title page stated that the tract had originally been written in Latin by a German named James Glaucus. This possible Latin original has not been traced. The English version was dedicated to Griffith Hampden, a strict Calvinist local gentleman, who was sheriff and MP for Buckinghamshire in 1584–85 as well as, incidentally, John Hampden’s grandfather. It was the work of a local schoolmaster, William Clever from Amersham, Buckinghamshire, who had perhaps been a student at Queens’ College Cambridge in the mid-1560s.63 The work thus emanated from a humanist school context similar to, although more humble than, that of many other works we have been considering. Since space does not allow me to discuss the whole tract here, I shall focus on those aspects which are most relevant to my argument. The epistle to the reader, ostensibly by Glaucus, told a fanciful story of a humanist returning ad fontes. Allegedly, he had found the tract ‘in the chiefe Library’ of Constantinople, had ‘trafyckted it home into my owne country’ and had translated it into Latin, at which point ‘the vniuersityes did imbrace it’.64 The tract is a narrative of a people called ‘the Raellyans’ and of their ‘worthy history … peruerted state, and gouernment’, as the title page put it. They were of Scythian origins and hence ‘a plaine people’. But unlike the rest of the Scythians, the Raellyans were ‘obstinate and vnruly people’, who were not content to lead a simple life. For this they were banished to ‘a certaine wyldernesse’ in Assyria and they thus became ‘tributaries to the Assyrians’. By prosperous commerce, however, they grew ‘to great wealth’ and could ‘buye and freelye purchase the priuiledge of their countrie and lande of the Assyrians’.65 Some time after the purchase of their freedom, the Raellyans, ‘with one consent and agreement’, wanted to make their estate more secure. It was suggested by ‘the counsell and aduise of the chiefest and wysest men’ that they should ‘choose a King’. The nobles cited several reasons for this suggestion. With a king to lead them, the Raellyans would be ‘happyer’, 63 John Venn and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922), pt I, vol. I, p. 353. For Griffith Hampden see Conrad Russell, ‘John Hampden’, ODNB. 64 James Glaucus, A knowledge for kings, and a warning for subiects, trans. William Clever (London, 1576), sig. Aivr. 65 Ibid., sigs Bir–iir.

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and they would ‘be dreaded’ by other nations. But the chief reason the nobles gave was that by ‘throwing themselues vnder the obedience, & scepter of one man’ they should attain harmony and unity – they ‘shoulde become one’. In an acephalous state, on the other hand, ‘euery mans opinion bearing swaye, there was many factions, treasons, conspiracies’.66 The suggestion to reduce the ‘popular estate’67 into a monarchy did not win unanimous support. On the contrary, ‘great grudging arose, most part of them, thought it vnnecessarie to throwe theyr neckes vnder the gouernaunce of one man’. Rule by a monarch, even if chosen amongst themselves, was said to be tantamount to the external rule of the Scythians and Assyrians. Many, especially amongst ‘the common people’, asked: ‘why shoulde we so greatly abandone our great libertie?’ The Raellyans’s traditions, as it transpires at this stage of the story, were entirely republican. Even the name of their holy place – ‘Alsephon’ – signified in their own language ‘a place of lybertie’. And it was in ‘this religious place of lybertie’ that the ‘wounded controversie’ between ‘the commen people and the prudent elders’ was decided to be resolved. The solution was sought from the powers of the ars rhetorica. It was agreed that both sides would choose an ‘Orator’ to present their case, and they would then make the final decision in front of their holy image.68 The two ensuing orations depicted as the crux of their arguments the competing models of citizenship I have been considering. Whereas the speech by Harmannus, the advocate of the republican form of government, strongly defended liberty and self-government, the speech by Alectros, the advocate of monarchy, identified, as the nobles had already suggested, popular eloquence as the chief problem of the republican form of government. Harmannus spoke first. In his attempt to establish ethos, he distanced his speech from flattery and insisted that he had both ‘a good hart, and a holy intention to all goodnesse’. At the same time, he identified himself with the people, emphasizing how their ‘feruent zeal’ had chosen him to his task ‘to bee an Orator in their defence’.69 Harmannus portrayed himself as defending ‘the profite of a common wealth’, ‘the continuance of the manners of our fathers’ and thus the republican form of self-government. To renounce liberty and to embrace monarchy would amount to ignoring the Raellyans’s inheritance. ‘Why’, Harmannus posed the rhetorical question with great vehemence, ‘shoulde Ibid., sig. Biir–v. While it is made clear that at the beginning the Raellyans formed some kind of a self-governing republic, we are told next to nothing about its actual political and constitutional arrangements. I have been unable to trace any clear classical precedents for the story. I am grateful to Antti Arjava for his help. 68 Glaucus, A knowledge for kings, sigs Biiv–vr; cf. Cvir–viir. 69 Ibid., sig. Bvr–v. 66

67

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wee thus fall at variaunce then within our selues for a Kinge?’ Their forefathers had paid the Assyrians so that ‘they would freely at theyr owne lybertie enioye theyr owne goodes without controlement’. The forefathers had thus made today’s Raellyans ‘freemen’. A monarchy would mean nothing less than that ‘our goodes and our possessions are not our owne’, that ‘we shall be oppressed with taxes as our forefathers were vnto the Assirians’.70 Harmannus reminded the ‘prudent Senators’ of the testimony of their neighbouring countries – ‘the Hircans and Trebonians’ – and ‘what pleasure’ these countries had obtained ‘in lyuing at their owne lybertie? and what mischiefe and destruction they fell vnto, when as they gaue consent to thrust their neckes vnder the yoake of obedience to be ruled: wheras before, euery man did rule at his owne pleasure’. It followed that ‘an alteration of this our estate’ would result in ‘diuers sundrie vexations’ and that the common people ‘thorowe this lyttle stryfe, are readie to holde vp the sworde’. Harmannus issued a prophetic warning that the final outcome could therefore be an ‘vtter destruction’.71 Alectros’s riposte focused on two themes: the defence of kingship and a critique of popular eloquence. He acknowledged that the Raellyans had not been a monarchy but insisted that two factors necessitated its establishment. First, in a hostile world, a headless commonwealth living ‘without a King’ would be an easy prey for its neighbours, who ‘might inuade our lande’.72 Second, the internal well-being of their commonwealth also required a monarch. ‘If we haue a King’, Alectros told the Raellyans, ‘wee shall be the happyer assured of our owne goodes and possessions.’ The monarch would look after justice, and, although he could exact taxes from them, at the same time he would ‘defende and maintaine vs his subiectes’.73 Whereas Harmannus had presented the two neighbouring peoples as examples of the advantages of a republican form of government, Alectros now reminded the Raellyans of ‘the miserable penurie’ their neighbours had ‘brought vnto their lande, in lyuing at their owne lybertie’. There was an important lesson here for the Raellyans about kingship and subjecthood: if the remembrance of their rebellions, worke in our harts obedience and duety: if their ignoraunce, worke in vs knowledge: if they for disobeying, and rebelling against their King, came to ruine: let vs with obeying, duetifullie acknowledge our Soueraigntie, and maie be long and euermore made happie and prosperous subiectes.74

70 71 72 73 74

Ibid., sigs Bvir–viir. Ibid., sig. Bviir–v. Ibid., sigs Ciiir–v. Ibid., sigs Ciiiv–iiiir. Ibid., sig. Cvv.

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Alectros laid the blame for rebellions and civil wars squarely at the popular orator’s door. His own speech was, of course, highly rhetorical, as the consummate use of anaphora in the preceding citation demonstrates. Yet, addressing the ‘prudent Senatours of the Raellyans’, he claimed that he himself spoke ‘vnfaynedlie, and purelie’. By contrast Alectros described Harmannus not only as one amongst ‘flattering Oratours’ but also repeatedly as ‘a lewde Oratour’ or ‘a faithlesse Oratour’.75 Ignoring ‘the commoditie of a common wealth’, Harmannus had sought to promote merely ‘his owne gaine, and the breache of the knot of concorde’ by advocating ‘so vile a cause’. As Alectros depicted Harmannus and his faction, ‘such is their craftie pollicie, to pretende a concorde to the people, for a defence of their countrie, when as altogether they woulde be contented, that by such wylie sacke and siege, to deliuer them vp to be ransacked of their lyues, goodes, and Countrye’. Alectros’s account of Harmannus was thus a typical negative image of a popular orator whose aim was nothing less than causing tumults and civil war. ‘Such greedie Oratours’ as Harmannus ‘doo blowe in the eares of the common people’ in order to raise ‘tumults’ and ‘to set vs one against another, at ciuile dissentions’.76 The main thrust of Alectros’s speech was therefore not only to defend a monarchy but to denigrate a self-governing republic by associating it closely with popular demagoguery and its most dangerous consequences. According to Alectros, Harmannus had been chosen by the common people to promote their vicious cause by his unctuous rhetoric. They had chosen ‘a golden sheathe for a wodden knife: a lewde Oratour in so cauilling a cause’. The Raellyans, Alectros told them, had to make a stark choice between ‘the golden counsaile of the wysest of this Realme’ and ‘the lewde Oratours, which are the refuse of the people’.77 Which side – Harmannus’s defence of a self-governing republic, or Alectros’s defence of a monarchy and his vilification of popular rhetoric – was stronger? The result was far from clear; after the two orations there was a ‘great discention and hurlie burlie’. The people were so divided that they referred the case to their holy image, who after a long while told them they should elect a king. When they eventually did so, Hellepatrus, ‘a riche Gentleman’, won the competition by a clever trick. Quickly, however, Hellepatrus became a tyrant and ‘fell at discorde with his subiects’. They sought help from the king of the Hircans, who then invaded the country. Hellepatrus escaped to Trebonia where he stayed for five years. In the meantime, although the king of the Hircans governed the Raellyans, they retained their liberty and ‘lyued as they lysted them selues’ and consequently became again ‘verie riche and welthie’. Nevertheless, 75 76 77

Ibid., sigs Ciiiiv, Bviiiv, Cir. Ibid., sigs Bviiiv, Ciiv. Ibid., sigs Bviiir, Cir, Ciiv.

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with the help of the Trebonians, Hellepatrus regained his power and authority, but soon he was ‘geuen to excessiue dronkenness: and therefore he could not rule them with such puissancie’. Quickly, the Raellyans poisoned him. He was succeeded by his son Hellydorus who immediately told his subjects that he would be even ‘more extreame’ than his father. He was determined to avenge his father’s death, first imprisoning ‘the chiefest the Elders’ and then executing those guilty of his father’s death. By the time Hellydorus had killed ‘two thousande men and women’, his subjects had been brought to ‘such obedience & awe, that of all Princes that were then lyuing, Hellidorus was of his people most feared’. The story of the Raellyans as an independent commonwealth was brought to a bitter end when Hellydorus married ‘a harlotte’ and was rapidly ‘turned to an Asse’. This gave the Assyrian king an opportunity to invade ‘the Lande of Raellyans’. When Hellydorus acknowledged that ‘my tyranny is turned to myserie’,78 Harmannus’s warning was proved to have been prophetic. v This is a remarkable story to have been published in 1576, or at any time in Elizabeth’s reign. It would be possible to argue that by calling the story ‘no lesse rare, then strange and wonderfull’ the title page emphasized the distance between the Raellyans and Elizabethan England.79 Yet strangeness and rarity served the rhetorical purpose of catching the audience’s attention.80 When the title was changed from The woorthie historie of the Raellians to A knowledge for kings, and a warning for subiects, one of the aims was perhaps to highlight the tract’s topicality. Indeed, the title page also boldly claimed that the tract was highly relevant and was thus ‘most meete to be published for a speciall example, in these perylous and daungerous dayes’. In his dedication Clever further emphasized the tract’s relevance and importance, telling Hampden that ‘the matter is both ciuil and necessarye in the politycall gouernment of mans life’.81 At the centre of the story were the two competing conceptions of the role which rhetoric was expected to play in a commonwealth. Harmannus was a common citizen who used his power of eloquence to defend a republican form of government. Underlying it was the more democratic conception of rhetoric, according to which the duties of citizenship in general and the ars eloquentiae in particular should be widely disseminated for the common Quotations ibid., sigs Diiiv, Eiir, Eiiiiv, Fiir, Fviiv, Giiiir, Hiiv, Iiiiv, Iiiiir. See also ibid., sig. Aivr. 80 See Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 122–6; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 129. 81 Glaucus, A knowledge for kings, sig. Aiiir. 78 79

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good to be advanced. Alectros, on the other hand, put forward the negative image of the power of eloquence in the hands of the common people. According to him, active citizenship and eloquence should be restricted to a few, because the powers of rhetoric were highly dangerous in the hands of the common people. Neither view earned a clear-cut victory in their war of words, and the rest of the story offered no simple answer to these competing claims. This reflects in a particularly dramatic fashion the actual situation in the Elizabethan monarchical republic. Although the aristocratic and monarchic view seemed to have an upper hand in Elizabethan England, Glaucus’s tract reminds us that it was at least possible to imagine that the more democratic view of eloquence and citizenship would provide a better safeguard for liberty and the common good.

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ESSAY 7

‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited Peter Lake i In this essay I want to bring together two problems drawn from the recent history of Elizabethan politics and religion. The first is centred on the notion of the ‘monarchical republic’. At the outset, I am taking that concept in its most minimal sense, as the serial attempts of an inner core of councillors to induce the Queen to address a number of central issues in ways which they thought would secure ‘the Protestant regime’ – that is to say, an amalgam of the Protestant cause, the commonweal and their own political futures. The second is the ‘politics of popularity’, that is to say, the means used by some of those same councillors or, more frequently, by their clients, agents, and actual and wannabe allies and hangers on to mobilize a variety of publics to put pressure back on the Queen to do what they deemed to be the right thing. The two notions are conceptually and empirically distinct; you could certainly have one without the other. They were, however, very frequently to be found operating in tandem; the first – attempts in-house to induce various forms of action or non-action in the Queen – leading to the second, whereby the issues concerned were canvassed in ‘public’ before a variety of more or less ‘popular’ audiences, the better to exert leverage on an unpersuaded or recalcitrant Queen. Some of the prime examples of this latter mechanism occurred almost as soon as the reign began with the agitations, in parliament and out, over the Queen’s marriage and the succession. Here the full range of available media were employed – the drama, circulating manuscript, print, the pulpit and parliamentary agitation. By the early 1570s, under the impact of popish rebellion in the north, the politics of officially-sponsored popularity reached their apogee in the campaigns to consign both Mary Stuart and the Duke of Norfolk to the block. In those instances – and this was to remain a central feature of this political mode – the point at which official propaganda and expressions of loyalty and obedience in the face of rebellion and popery became, instead, subversive

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interference in the operations of the arcana imperii, and even opposition to the royal will, was often very difficult to identify.1 The degree of ‘popularity’, the breadth and depth of the publics being appealed to or mobilized, could, of course, vary considerably. But even the invocation of merely parliamentary opinion greatly widened the range of counsel-giving participants in the political system, while the appeal to the promiscuously unlimited publics involved in recourse to the other media – the pulpit, rumour, circulating manuscript and print – scarcely needs explication. As Natalie Mears has pointed out, Burghley himself claimed that as a councillor he was obliged to give his prince free and frank advice on the issues of the day. But he was equally obliged to do so only in private, and once the Queen had listened to her councillors and made up her mind, his and their duty was simply to shut up and see that the royal will was put into effect.2 That certainly was the theory, but in practice it is not entirely clear that this was the course either he or other members of the inner circle always pursued. Indeed, on some accounts of the period, Burghley emerges as a past master of recourse to the politics of popularity, using an array of third parties, agents or free-lancing allies to go ‘public’ and mobilize a variety of bodies of opinion to get Elizabeth to do the right thing.3 Perhaps the best evidence for this propensity is to be found in the very close links established by Michael Graves, Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman between Burghley and not only Thomas Norton but also the printer John Day.4 It is here that we might identify some of the origins of Puritanism, as a number of the regime’s erstwhile allies and clients started, with increasing intensity and sometimes no little irritation and acrimony, to free-lance in the cause of further reformation, turning against, even as they continued to rely upon, their erstwhile establishment patrons. The paradigmatic example is Edward Dering’s sudden explosion, in 1570, into both public 1 Peter Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: the “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (forthcoming; Manchester, 2007). 2 Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate and Queenship: John Stubbs’s The discoverie of a gaping gulf’, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001): 629–50. 3 Conyers Read, ‘William Cecil and Elizabethan Public Relations’, in S.T. Bindoff, Joel Hurstfield and C.H. Williams (eds), Elizabethan Government and Society (London, 1961), pp. 21–55. 4 Michael Graves, ‘Thomas Norton the Parliament Man: An Elizabethan MP’, The Historical Journal, 23 (1980): 17–35; Graves, ‘The Management of the Elizabethan House of Commons: the Council’s “Men of business”’, Parliamentary History, 2 (1982): 11–38; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“The reformation of the church in this parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997): 132–47; Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Print, Profit and Propaganda: the Elizabethan Privy Council and the 1570 Edition of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004): 1288–1307.

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and private protest at what he took to be the foot dragging at the centre of the regime.5 The process of change in play here was both cumulative and dialectical, as moves beyond what elements in the establishment deemed advisable or acceptable elicited attempts at control, which in turn elicited increasingly shrill protest, which in turn elicited still more draconian attempts at control. This is precisely the dynamic which produced first the Vestiarian controversy – itself a response to an attempt by Parker and Burghley to bring Puritan non-conformity under control – and then the recourse by some of the godly to presbyterianism. In these exchanges we see the full range of modes of communication and publicity that had been typical of earlier attempts to push the Queen into action on, say, the succession or Mary Stuart, being employed by the godly against the establishment. The discomfort caused to councillors like Burghley and Leicester by the consequent pressure to choose between, on the one hand, their erstwhile or actual clients in the Puritan movement and the demands of an increasingly embattled and shrill conformist authority, on the other, are too well known to need rehearsal here.6 But if the politics of ‘popularity’ could take more or less popular forms, so too can the notion of the ‘monarchical republic’ be glossed in more than one sense. Of course, the first person to reconfigure our sense of the high politics of the reign, not in ‘factional’ terms, but rather as a struggle between a more or less coherent conciliar inner core and the Queen, was Simon Adams, and Adams did so without any recourse to the notion of the monarchical republic.7 The term was famously introduced into historiographical usage by Patrick Collinson in his 1987 article ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’.8 In the version of the notion propounded in that piece the core assumptions, the vision of the polity central to the ‘republic’, were only dragged into the light of day, forced into formal articulation, by moments of real crisis, points at which the clique at the centre of the regime found themselves staring down the barrel of a popish succession. With that dreadful prospect before them, they had recourse to constitutional experiments, arguably illegal or at least unprecedented, that revealed a vision of the English monarchical polity as, in effect, elective, and capable, at least in the short term, of sustaining itself 5 Patrick Collinson, ‘A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: the Life and Letters of “Godly Master Dering”’, in Collinson, Godly People (London, 1983), pp. 289–324. 6 John H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy: an Historical Study of the Earliest Tensions within the Church of England in the Reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth (Kampen, 1960); Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pt 2. 7 Simon Adams, ‘Eliza Enthroned? The Court and its Politics’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 1984), pp. 55–77. 8 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, and ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92.

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without a monarch at all. During the interregnum caused by an allegedly disputed succession, government would revert to an expanded version of the privy council, which, together with a recalled parliament, could then settle the succession, in effect thereby electing the next monarch. Here were the aristocratic and democratic elements within a mixed polity combining together to reconstitute the monarchical element and thus to perpetuate the mixed, Protestant monarchy that, on this view at least, was the Elizabethan state. In his first rendition of the argument Collinson was very cautious, picturing Burghley and his allies as not in any real sense ‘republicans’ at all, but rather as men pushed by circumstance into measures and claims the full implications of which they would normally never have publicly avowed. As Collinson’s account also makes clear these were expedients that were never in fact adopted; for in order to put these schemes into practice, Burghley and his accomplices would have needed the royal assent, and this was something that, even on the brink of dynastic disaster, they were never going to get. This means that even at moments of the most extreme crisis the ‘monarchical republic of Elizabeth I’ was not, in fact, ‘republican’ enough even to attempt in public to articulate itself as such. And that, of course, speaks to a further paradox at the centre of Collinson’s account: the very succession crisis the prospect of which called forth the most coherent account of England as a monarchical republic, was based on the presumption that England was the sort of free hereditary monarchy in which it would be extraordinarily difficult to avert the succession of the next legitimate successor even if she was a foreign papist. For as Collinson has shown, it was only the prospect of Mary Stuart as the next successor that rendered the legal shenanigans of the ‘monarchical republic’ necessary in the first place. That, then, is the minimum view of the monarchical republic first adumbrated by Collinson in 1987. Since then other scholars have appropriated, developed and applied the concept to wider purposes. They have done so in the context of the resuscitation of the r-word, which occurred throughout the 1990s as part of a broader reaction to revisionism, and in particular to the revisionists’ calamitous narrowing of the ideological spectrum of early modern England. Here the central figures have been David Norbrook and Quentin Skinner.9 In the process texts which had been traditionally glossed as containing notions of mixed rather than absolute monarchy have been re-described as ‘republican’, and what Skinner has dubbed strains of ‘neo-Roman’ thought and speech have been recuperated from a variety of texts and institutional and social locales. Those insights and claims have been extended back 9 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627– 1660 (Cambridge, 1999); Quentin R.D. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998).

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into the Elizabethan period by Markku Peltonen, Anne McLaren, and, melding together the classical civic republicanism discussed by Peltonen with the more traditional counsel talk analysed by John Guy, by Stephen Alford.10 This move has now reached its highest point of development in Andrew Hadfield’s recent book on Shakespeare and republicanism.11 Concentrating on classically inflected, ‘neo-Roman’ notions of political virtue and service, and consequently of active participation in the myriad processes of counsel-giving whereby the commonwealth identified and pursued the common good, Alford and Peltonen have identified not only an emergent notion of citizenship but a distinctly ‘republican’ strand in the political thought and feeling of Elizabethan England. These classicizing impulses have been combined with a renewed stress on the de facto decentralization of early modern English government. This was a move prefigured by Collinson himself in his 1987 article in the section on the self-governing articles of the village of Swallowfield.12 The implication there was that not only could Elizabethan England be seen at the high political level as a monarchical republic, but that the polity as a whole could be figured as but a concatenation of selfgoverning local republics, political societies animated not so much by the exercise of delegated royal authority as by the autonomous activities of myriad active citizens and public men. Here a distinctly anti-revisionist, ‘republican’ mode of interpretation meets one of the central aspects of the revisionist analysis of the period – localism. Thus the revisionists’ vision of England as a union of self-governing county communities could simply be appropriated as a union of gentry and corporate, even village- and parish-based ‘republics’.13 Such a move did bring with it certain distinct advantages, for the revisionist sense of the localism of the provincial ruling class as a pre-ideological, unmediated response to or product of the unchanging structures of English government and social life had never been very convincing. Critics of the county community school had always cited against it the various elements in the life of the gentry – the increasing exposure to national institutions and ideological currents in the 10 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999); Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998). 11 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005). 12 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’; also see Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: the Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 835–51. 13 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94.

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universities, in London and in the law courts, both national and local, which served to integrate the local with the national and vice versa.14 The republican re-appropriation of localism allows these factors to be taken into account, as elements forming the self-image of an emergent political nation, the members of which were dedicated to proving their status as ‘public men’ through the exercise and demonstration of political virtue, in the service of ‘country’, ‘commonwealth’ and ‘queen’. The result, then, is a non-, indeed, an anti-localist account of many of the central factors that made up localism; an account that builds on a good deal of the postrevisionist writing of the past 20 or 30 years to produce a sense of how the ordinary functioning of the polity, at both the central and local levels, served to create a political nation or public, or perhaps better yet a series of overlapping publics, that was very far from straightforwardly localist in its or their political vision or priorities. The issue, of course, remains whether the language of ‘republicanism’ provides us with the best or most appropriate terms with which to talk about or conceptualize the resulting formations. Certainly, in the maximum rather than the minimum version of the ‘monarchical republic’, it is claimed that it does. Monarchical republicanism emerges in this account as both a fully fledged ideology and a functioning mode of government, solidly based both in the realities of everyday political life and in the dominant sources of cultural authority and intellectual clout of the period. These last are located in the neo-Roman classical and rhetorical culture to be found in the texts of Cicero, Quintilian, Livy, Sallust, Seneca and their translators and popularizers.15 Here was a culture in which the entire grammar-school-educated public was immersed, and in terms of which the ruling classes were increasingly coming to envisage both the polity and their own role within it. Such a version of the monarchical republic is attached to claims about the centrality of certain classical and therefore entirely secular values in the 14 For the localist position see Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966); John S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County, Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974); and Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630–1650 (London, 1976). For early critiques of localism see Ann Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the Eve of the Civil War: a County Community?’, Midland History, 7 (1982): 42–72; Clive Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, Journal of British Studies, 18 (1980): 54–73; Victor Morgan, ‘The Cartographic Image of the Country in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth ser., 29 (1979): 129–54; Morgan, ‘Cambridge University and “The Country”’ in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society (2 vols, Princeton, 1974), vol. I, pp. 183–245; Richard P. Cust and Peter G. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1981): 40–53. 15 Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism; David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005).

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political culture of the period. For Skinner, in particular, these provide us with a ground for the emergence of certain (neo-Roman) notions of liberty, political virtue and active citizenship distinct from and alternative to the concept of liberty to be found at the centre of classical liberalism.16 This, of course, is seen as a good thing. Ironically, for all Skinner’s determination to distinguish this neo-Roman strand from ‘liberalism’, Elizabethan monarchical republicanism has been subjected to a local variant of the more general feminist critique of liberalism launched most famously by Carole Pateman in the 1980s.17 This saw the classic liberal definitions of liberty, toleration and citizenship as based on a series of exclusions, in particular on the exclusion of women, from the political and public domains. Thus, Anne McLaren has seen the structures of thought and practice that constitute the monarchical republic as reactions against female rule and attempts to limit the exercise of female agency attendant upon a regnant queen in full possession of the levers of power in a free hereditary monarchy.18 Like the Skinnerian view it is designed to critique, this, too, is a relentlessly secular approach. For on McLaren’s account anti-popery was not about religion, a response to the perceived threat of false religion, spiritual tyranny or foreign rule. Rather it was produced by a visceral reaction against, indeed provided a code for talking about, the threat of female rule.19 In effect, then, in certain quarters, whether coded good or bad, monarchical republicanism is seen as the dominant ideology of Elizabethan England, animating the workings of the polity at both the local and national level. This, I take it, was not Collinson’s original, or even his second opinion. It is also, on my view, over-stated. Firstly, it is too resolutely secular. The origins of the notions of the public man and active political participation are conceived as entirely classical and thus as inherently secular. Such a view is a product of a misguided impulse to disassociate and weigh against one another the religious and the political, the secular and the spiritual elements in the political culture of the day, when in fact the key to a proper understanding of the period lies in an accurate description and assessment of the meld between religion and politics, or, in this instance, between the classical and the Protestant elements at play. The impact of the Protestant doctrine of callings on classical notions of active citizenship; the infusion of the central notion of the commonweal, of the public interest to be defended, with explicitly 16 17

Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract: Aspects of Patriarchal Liberalism (Stanford,

1988). McLaren, Political Culture. Anne McLaren, ‘Gender, Religion and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and the Genesis of English Anti-Catholicism’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002): 739–67. 18 19

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Protestant values; with the need to defend true religion against sin and irreligion; the consequent duty to pursue, both locally and nationally, the cause of further reformation – all these need to included in the account. One thinks here of Collinson’s seminal articles on the dynamic coupling of magistrate and minister in the cause of order and reformation or of Richard Cust’s more recent work on the rise of the public man and the nature of the godly magistrate.20 To these should be added a full recuperation of the political and religious meanings contained in the notion of popery. (Antipopery was not a code for fear of female rule; Mary Stuart was not feared because of her gender but because she was a papist.21) But this view of the monarchical republic is not only too determinedly secular; it is also too remorselessly ‘republican.’ To begin with, there was nothing necessarily ‘republican’ about the meld of Protestant and classical values. The anti-popery within which these diverse elements were so often mixed and matched might, in certain largely early Stuart contexts, prompt critiques of court corruption and evil counsel. Anti-popery could also prompt arguments about the need to recover the liberty of the gospel from popish tyranny and superstition. In certain contexts and in certain hands, anti-popery had a distinctly populist, emancipatory edge to it. But under Elizabeth, the popish threat was conceived as operating from without, rather than from within, the court or the establishment. Confronted with the jurisdictional claims of the papacy, the anti-popish impulse prompted absolutist defences of the godly prince or Christian emperor against the tyrannical pretensions of the pope and his supporters in France and Spain, monarchs whose religio-political aspirations to ‘universal monarchy’ were best met, not by a republican critique of all such pretensions, but rather through a strident counter-assertion of the claims of the English crown to imperial authority and autonomy, the assertion of England’s status as a free hereditary monarchy.22 But the (admittedly ambivalent) political valences of anti-popery are not the only reason the maximum version of monarchical republicanism is mistaken. The political values inscribed in an emergent anti-Puritanism have also to be taken into account. For, in the course of Elizabeth’s reign, the nexus of attitudes, concerns and practices now habitually organized under the sign of the ‘monarchical republic’ generated a monarchical reaction, which reached increasingly self-conscious and aggressive 20 Collinson, ‘Ministry and Magistracy: a Suffolk Miniature’, in his Godly People, pp. 445–66; and Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4; Cust and Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor’; Richard Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in late Tudor and early Stuart England’, in Lake and Pincus, The Public Sphere. 21 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–106; Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word (Manchester, 2002), ch. 2. 22 Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’.

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articulation as the reign went on. Crucial here was the growth of antiPuritanism as a carrier of core political values deeply antipathetic to the central tenets and assumptions of ‘monarchical republicanism’. As we have seen, as a political style or movement, Puritanism was in many ways an outgrowth of the modes of communication and mobilization central to the ‘monarchical republic’. I have already sketched the dialectical processes of reaction and counter-reaction that stretched through the Vestiarian controversy to the first adumbration of presbyterianism in lecture hall, pulpit and press. That first chain of reactions reached its apogee in the polemical exchanges between John Whitgift and Thomas Cartwright that constituted the Admonition Controversy of the early 1570s. Buried somewhere near the centre of that controversy were discussions of ‘the monarchical republic’ and ‘the politics of popularity’. This was true at a number of levels. First, the exchange featured a discussion of the nature of the English polity. On Cartwright’s account it was a mixed polity, with the Queen providing the monarchical element, the Privy Council the aristocratic and the parliament the democratic elements. This dispensation, Cartwright claimed, paralleled exactly that of the presbyterian platform which was also that a mixed polity, with Christ providing the monarchical element, the elders and ministers the aristocratic, and the people the democratic. According to Cartwright, this happy accident meant that the two systems – the English monarchical state and the presbyterian platform – were totally compatible and mutually reinforcing. Whitgift, of course, was having none of it. For him England was no sort of mixed but rather a ‘right and true monarchy’.23 Certainly the monarch was bound to take counsel and act through the existing legal and institutional channels, but she was still the sovereign. Here Whitgift provided a parallel account of the workings of the Royal Supremacy. The Queen should take advice from her clergy – after all, the great Christian emperors had done that, calling and sometimes personally presiding over church councils – just as she should take advice from her lawyers and judges in secular affairs. But the process of taking advice did not reduce the fact of sovereignty. The power to decide remained the Queen’s and the Queen’s alone.24 Whitgift went on to claim that Cartwright’s account of the Royal Supremacy stripped the Queen of authority over spiritual affairs and was, in fact, the functional equivalent of the popish account of the

23 John Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift (3 vols, Cambridge, 1851–3; hereafter cited as Whitgift, Works), vol. I, pp. 390, 393, 467; vol. III, 197. Also see Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 53–64. 24 Whitgift, Works, vol. III, pp. 306–11. ‘The meetings of king’s and bishops doth not take away any authority from godly emperors in matters of the church.’

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same question, which similarly deprived the Queen of all authority over the church and transferred it instead to the pope.25 This formal discussion of the nature and structure of the English polity was accompanied by an assault on Puritan political theory and practice as excessively ‘popular’. On the theoretical level, presbyterianism transferred power in the church, and therefore, on Whitgift’s account, also in the state, to ‘the people’. The result of this would be disorder, even anarchy, as the people elected their own pastors and elders, in effect either disciplining themselves or erecting a pope in every parish.26 In fact, the rights of the people to elect their own ministers, or of the clergy to elect their own bishops, had been quite legitimately regulated and repressed by the crown, whose God-imposed duty it was to preserve not the ‘liberty’ of the ‘people’ but rather order in church and state. To label such incremental and monarchically sponsored change as tyranny, as Cartwright tended to do, was both misguided and likely to mislead the people – with potentially disastrous results.27 The ‘popularity’ of the Puritans was not limited to their theories; their practice was also excessively popular. They tended to defame the governors of church and state to the people in an attempt to coerce the Queen. Whitgift’s reference points here were the recent populist preaching, the petitioning and popular demonstrations, that had attended the Vestiarian controversy in London, as well as the disorders over the disputed vestments and ceremonies in Cambridge University.28 In that last venue, Whitgift himself had just presided over a change in the statutes that shifted university governance from a mixture of democratic and aristocratic forms in a more explicitly monarchical and oligarchic direction, all in the name of order, unity and obedience.29 The point here is that by the early 1570s there was established in the public domain an explicitly, indeed stridently, monarchical reading of the Elizabethan regime in church and state; a reading asserted against a populist Puritan threat. The referent for Whitgift’s assault was ostensibly Field, Wilcox and Cartwright’s presbyterianism. And yet Cartwright’s version of the English polity as mixed, together with his account of the constituent parts of the mixture, was more or less identical to that espoused by Burghley, at least in his devices to handle an interregnum crisis.30 By Ibid., vol. I, p. 261; vol. III, pp. 190, 211, 213–14, 265, 302, 313. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 302–3, 372, 467. Cartwright ‘would make the government of the church popular, which is the worst kind of government that can be’. 27 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 402, 408. ‘Liberty and tyranny be too common in your mouth. It is no tyranny to restrain the people from that liberty that is hurtful to themselves.’ 28 Ibid., vol. II, p. 2; vol. III, pp. 5–6. 29 Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II, 1546–1750 (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 2. 30 Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions (University, AL, 1985), p. 59. 25 26

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implication at least, therefore, Whitgift’s attack on Cartwright was also an attack on Burghley. Moreover, the modes of political communication and mobilization that Whitgift was concerned to denounce as popular were by no means exclusively the preserve of non-conformist and presbyterian critics of the ecclesiastical status quo. Rather such methods and modes had been on display not only in the Vestiarian controversy but in the campaigns over the succession, Mary Stuart and Norfolk in the 1560s and early 1570s. Thus, contained within Whitgift’s attack on Puritan popularity, and within his rendition of the establishment in church and state as a monarchy plain and simple, was an implicit, but also a comprehensive, critique of some of the core assumptions and political modes and methods of ‘the monarchical republic’. If not from the moment of the ‘monarchical republic’’s inception, then certainly from the early 1570s, there was available, generated from within the establishment, a fully fledged, ‘royalist’ or monarchical construal of the polity and an excoriating account of a whole range of political modes and methods as subversively popular and Puritan. That this critique was organized around Puritanism was hardly an accident. Indeed, since Puritanism was, in its origins, merely the continuation of the ends and values of the ‘monarchical republic’ by the appropriation and extension of the means and methods of political communication and mobilization used by the ‘republic’ to defend itself against ‘popery’, all this is both no more than we might expect and a sign that, from its very inception, anti-Puritanism should be regarded as the bearer of political meanings and messages of the first significance.31 ii Having reached a relatively high level of coherence and articulation in Whitgift’s assaults on Cartwright of the early 1570s, the anti-Puritan, antipopular, intensely monarchical ideology was available for deployment by a variety of political actors, from the Queen on down. In the second half of this paper I want to consider the mid-1570s affair of the prophesyings, and the subsequent stand-off between Archbishop Grindal and his sovereign, as an example of the use of anti-Puritanism to disrupt the smooth working, and to challenge the operating assumptions, of ‘the monarchical republic’. The assault on the prophesyings is a case study in applied anti-Puritanism. The exercises were accused of being centres of Puritan nonconformity and disobedience. Secondly, they were accused of stirring up discussion, and therefore division, amongst both the clergy and, still worse, the people. 31 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’; and Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: the Structure of a Prejudice’ in Lake and Kenneth Fincham (eds), Religious Politics in Post Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 80–97.

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Thirdly, they were accused of allowing the laity, even the relatively humble laity – artisans, it was claimed – actively to participate in proceedings. In short, the prophesyings were being denounced as a Puritan and popular threat to order, unity and obedience. These charges can be reconstructed from the replies of various bishops to the round robin disseminated by Grindal as he prepared his defence of the exercises. The nature of the case against was confirmed by the Queen, in letters to the bishops, written after Grindal’s suspension, ordering the suppression of the prophesyings.32 The primary level of dispute occasioned by the prophesyings concerned religion. On the one hand, we have the Queen’s insistence that ‘three or four preachers may suffice for a shire’; her preference for the Homilies over many of the sermons currently being preached in her church; her insistence on what she termed the maintenance of the ‘common order’, which she equated with a parish-based religion centred on the Prayer Book. Her basic tendency was to see Puritans as the major cause of division and to base her pursuit of unity and order on the desires of her ‘other quiet subjects’ who wanted only to serve God according to ‘the uniform orders established’. For Elizabeth the bishops were primarily instruments of the royal will and agents of ecclesiastical order as she defined and required it to be enforced.33 All this can be contrasted with Grindal’s intensely word-based version of true religion and religious practice. His vision both of the church and of true religion was based upon the urgent Scriptural imperative to preach the word in season and out. Throughout his famous letter to the Queen he held up both her opinions and the current state of the church against the yardstick provided by the Bible and found both sadly wanting. For him the word preached provided not only the ordinary means of salvation but also the surest way to secure order, civility and obedience. He cited Paul’s instructions that preachers be placed in every town against the Queen’s opinion that three or four were adequate for an entire shire, and grounded the practice of prophesying on the direct warrant of the Bible. For Grindal ‘the bishops and other divines of your realm’ were not mere agents of the royal will but bearers of authority and sources of spiritual wisdom to whom the Queen was obliged to listen and who had their own autonomous role in the definition and maintenance of orthodoxy and order in the church. 32 For the replies to Grindal’s round robin see Lambeth Palace Library [LPL] MS 2003. There is a somewhat inaccurate edition of these documents by Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Archbishop Grindal and the Prophesyings’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XXXIV (1965): 87–145. For the Queen’s letter to Whitgift, one of a series to the bishops, denouncing the prophesyings and ordering their suppression, see LPL MS 2003, fol. 40r–v. 33 See LPL MS 2003, fol. 40r–v, Elizabeth to Whitgift, 7 May 1577, and Grindal’s letter to the Queen, The Remains of Edmund Grindal, ed. William Nicholson (Cambridge, 1843; hereafter cited as Grindal, Remains), pp. 376–90.

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As for the critics of the prophesyings, they were not the ‘quiet subjects’ of Elizabeth’s imaginings. Some there be also, that be mislikers of the godly reformation in religion now established; wishing indeed that there were no preachers at all; and so by depraving of ministers, impugn religion, non aperto marte, sed cuniculis [not by open attacks but surreptitiously]: much like to the popish bishops in your father’s time, who would have had the English translation of the bible called in, as evil translated: and the new translating thereof to have been committed to themselves; which they never intended to perform.34

This was to get very close indeed to calling the critics of the prophesyings papists. Clearly for Grindal the fate of the prophesyings was part of an ongoing struggle between Christ and Antichrist. His, therefore, was a dynamic, open-ended view of further reformation, a reformation that had started in ‘your father’s time’ and was still going on; a reformation that only the word preached, set free among the people and obeyed by their governors, could complete. As for the prophesyings, they were central to that process and their suppression ‘would breed triumph to the adversaries, and great sorrow and grief unto the favourers of religion; contrary to the counsel of Ezekiel, who saith, “cor justi non est contristandum [the righteous should not be disheartened]”’.35 But as that last appeal to the court of godly opinion shows, clashing religious priorities and world views were not the only things at stake in Grindal’s showdown with the Queen. Anti-Puritanism, particularly in its sharp critique of Puritan popularity, had, from its inception, been a carrier of political, as well as of religious, claims and values. And here what the Queen saw as dangerously popular appeals to the people, deeply threatening to order and obedience, were being characterized by Grindal as necessary evangelical functions of the church, crucial to the campaign to defend ‘order’ against ‘popery’. The quarrel over the prophesyings turned still more ‘political’ in the exchange which it provoked between the Queen and Archbishop about the proper relations between royal authority and counsel. This turned a dispute over the religious pros and cons of the prophesyings into a debate about some of the central assumptions of the ‘monarchical republic’. At the highest level of generality Grindal’s case for the prophesyings was based on Scripture. He clearly felt that they enjoyed Scriptural warrant, both in the form of the general injunction to preach the word in season and out and on the basis of precedents for this form of exercise to be found throughout the Scriptures. There was nothing intrinsically controversial here; no contemporary – certainly not Elizabeth Tudor – would have disputed that the godly prince was obliged to follow the dictates of 34 35

Grindal, Remains, pp. 376–90, quotation at 381. Ibid., p. 386. See Ezekiel 13:22.

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Scripture. Even Thomas Cartwright hailed the Queen’s authority as ‘the greatest in the earth’, only limited, he added, ‘by the word of God’.36 The whole controversy between Whitgift and Cartwright was about just what that claim, upon the self-evident truth of which all agreed, might entail in practice. And that in turn raised the always already unresolved question of whose job it was to decide what Scripture meant or enjoined. Thus was an uncontroversial claim about the interdependence and mutual compatibility of Scriptural and royal authority transmuted into an altogether more contentious claim about ‘counsel’. Grindal clearly felt that deciding what Scripture meant and applying that meaning to the current circumstances was a job for ‘the bishops and divines of your realm’, and that taking counsel here meant the Queen asking them what they thought and then acting in accordance with their advice. In their first interview on the subject Elizabeth had not, in her Archbishop’s opinion, made herself available for ‘counsel’. ‘It was not your majesty’s pleasure then, the time not serving thereto, to hear me at any length concerning the said two matters then propounded.’37 It was this first refusal that led to Grindal’s fatal attempt to give counsel on paper. In his letter to the Queen he expatiated on his theory of counsel, expressing the hope that in future you would refer all these ecclesiastical matters which touch religion, or the doctrine and discipline of the church, unto the bishops and divines of your realm; according to the example of all godly Christian emperors and princes of all ages. For indeed they are things to be judged, (as an ancient father writeth), ‘in ecclesia, seu synodo, non in palatio’. When your majesty hath questions of the laws of your realm, you do not decide the same in your court, but send them to your judges to be determined. Likewise for doubts in matters of doctrine or discipline of the church, the ordinary way is to refer the decision of the same to the bishops, and other head ministers of the church.38

As a theory of counsel, a disquisition on the workings of the Royal Supremacy, this operated within the parameters of Whitgift’s account, except that where Whitgift’s emphasis in his reply to Cartwright had been on the Queen’s sovereign power, her role as the ultimate ‘decider’, Grindal emphasized her obligation not merely to solicit or listen to, but to follow, the counsel not only of the bishops but of ‘the divines’ or the ‘other head ministers’. When this is combined with his claim (cited above) that in deciding such matters the magistrate was obliged not to offend or alienate godly opinion and his view that those upset by the prophesyings were not good and quiet subjects at all but malcontents disaffected from the cause of true religion, we can see just how constricted he took the Queen’s room for 36 37 38

Whitgift, Works, vol. III, pp. 295–6. Grindal, Remains, p. 376. Ibid., p. 387.

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manoeuvre to be. We have here the Queen’s duty not merely to take but to follow counsel, to conduct herself not only according to the dictates of Scripture but also to the interests of the Protestant cause and the impulses of godly opinion. We have a view of the world stretched tight between the proponents and favourers of true religion and the ill affected, between, in effect, the soi disant godly and papists and crypto-papists. It is a world in which what is good for one group is bad for the other and in which the Queen is pictured as having no real choice as to which side she is on. And in the prophesyings themselves we have fully articulated, given concrete institutional and social form, the decentralized, localist structures of power, and the Scripturalist, dialogic and populist forms of worship and communication that, between them, were constituting the Protestant nation, the new model Protestant subjects or citizens, the ‘publics’, that at least some in the inner circle, and more of their clients and hangers on, had invoked, and would continue to invoke, in order to constrain the Queen’s room for manoeuvre on some of the crucial issues of the day. Here, then, we can watch the Queen confront the underlying principles and signature practices of both ‘the monarchical republic’ and ‘the Protestant nation or state’. Normally, those assumptions remained unstated; animating the practice and perhaps the internal discussions of many of her councillors and bishops, they were very seldom spelled out in as many words to the Queen herself. Now, in the midst of the crisis over the prophesyings, Grindal wrote them down and sent them to his sovereign. The consequences, of course, were disastrous. For confronted with Grindal’s claims the Queen dismissed them out of hand. The prophesyings were things indifferent; as such they fell entirely within her sphere of competence as a godly prince and supreme governor of the church. Moreover, she had taken counsel; indeed she had acted on the information of a series of public men – judges, bishops and justices of the peace – in order to save the commonweal from the prophesyings’ deleterious effects. If any one was at fault it was Grindal, not merely for refusing to obey his Queen and to discharge his office as the loyal instrument of her will, but for remaining recalcitrant, even after the error of his ways had been explained to him by both the Queen herself and her council.39 Not only were his theoretical musings on the proper exercise of royal authority and the correct relation between royal power and episcopal counsel thus dismissed; in practical terms, Grindal’s little exercise in monarchical republican counsel-giving was almost entirely counter-productive. Not only did he find himself suspended from office, and threatened with the sack; the Queen stepped into the power vacuum thus created and saw 39 The official response to Grindal’s defiance can be reconstructed from Sir Walter Mildmay’s papers. This paragraph is based upon Northamptonshire Record Office, F.(M.) P.70 B and F.(M.) P.70 C.

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to the suppression of the prophesyings herself. The leadership of the episcopate passed first to Aylmer and then to Whitgift, men more than happy to prosecute the Queen’s distinctly un-Grindalian, indeed frankly anti-Puritan and anti-populist, agenda. Not only did Grindal’s defiance render his many allies on the council incapable of coming effectively to his rescue; as Patrick Collinson has argued, the whole debacle almost certainly made their attempts to persuade the Queen to intervene actively in the Low Countries that much more difficult, and ensured that, when death finally removed him from the scene, Grindal would be replaced at Canterbury by that arch anti-Puritan and Queen’s man, John Whitgift.40 iii At the very least, therefore, the Grindal affair stands as a reminder of just why Elizabethan ‘monarchical republicanism’, insofar as it ever achieved the status of a fully fledged ideology, remained an ideology that very seldom dared to speak its name. For, as the fate of Grindal showed, when the assumptions of the monarchical republic were coherently formulated and presented for the Queen’s inspection or approval, the consequences tended to be counter-productive – counter-productive, because, since the whole point of ‘the monarchical republic’ was to induce the Queen to do things that, left to her own devices, she had no wish to do, and since she herself was allergic to many of the founding assumptions of ‘monarchical republicanism’, the overt articulation of those assumptions had no very useful role to play in the processes of cajoling the Queen that were so often the main event in the high politics of the day. Of course, on the one hand, the spat over the prophesyings can be seen as a one-off; a confrontation between Queen and Archbishop, predicated on the workings of the Archbishop’s evangelical conscience, that served no one’s interests. But at such moments of confrontation and crisis it is not so much that people say things that they do not mean, but rather that they let slip things that they mean only too well but under normal circumstances do not allow themselves to say. And on that basis these events might be thought to take on a heightened significance precisely because they were so atypical. On the other hand, we can also see the showdown between Queen and Archbishop as part of a continuing dialectical exchange between very different views of the polity, a series of exchanges to which the Queen and many of her own councillors and most assiduously loyal servants were major parties. For the affair can surely be seen as the adoption, by the 40 Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979) chs 13 and 14, and Collinson, ‘The Downfall of Archbishop Grindal and its Place in Elizabethan Political and Ecclesiastical History’, in Godly People, pp. 371–97.

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Queen and others, of the anti-Puritan and anti-popular ideology (developed to the highest pitch of coherence and aggression by Whitgift in reaction against presbyterianism) in order to disrupt the otherwise smooth internal workings of the monarchical republic, workings which, left to their own devices, were producing a church very much not to the Queen’s liking. Here it is worth remembering that two of the most consistently contentious areas of royal policy during the entire reign – those concerning the reformation and polity of the church, on the one hand, and the succession, on the other – had at their centre the question of just what sort of monarchical state Elizabethan England was. Was it the free hereditary monarchy that Elizabeth and Whitgift took it to be, or was it the mixed, and in some ways and under certain circumstances, elective monarchy assumed or asserted by the likes of Burghley, Sir Thomas Smith or indeed Thomas Cartwright? Historians have given us long and compelling lists of reasons why Elizabeth might have remained recalcitrant on the issues of further reformation or the succession: she disliked Puritans, and the religious style of the godly; having settled the outward face of religion in 1559, she equated all demands for further reformation with disobedience; she was anxious to avert the creation of a reversionary interest or to be seen encouraging rebellion or queen-killing. She did not want to alienate more than was absolutely necessary either her Catholic or cryptoCatholic subjects or foreign Catholic powers. Hers might be thought to have been a quintessentially monarchical, and, thus, an intensely personal and necessarily short-term, view of politics, a view in which the supreme values were the maximization of her own room for manoeuvre and control over events. But at bottom what was at stake was a clash between two different views of the English polity, and one reason why we should not, and contemporaries could not, regard Elizabethan England as, in any unproblematic or straightforward sense, a ‘monarchical republic’ was because the Queen herself, and an emergent body of (anti-Puritan) theorists and polemicists, did not think that it was such a polity and, on a series of crucial issues, refused to act or to talk as though it were. Here it is worth reminding ourselves that on these two issues, at least, over the long haul, the Queen ‘won’; that is to say, the church remained unreformed and the succession unsettled. Mary Stuart may have been executed, but her son, James VI, succeeded to the English crown not because he had been chosen by parliament or willed the throne by the Queen but rather as the next successor to the true hereditary monarchy that James himself clearly took England to be. The death of Mary prompted a renversement d’alliances that all but destroyed the ideological and political conjuncture that had called the monarchical republic into being in the first place. After the failure of Spanish arms to win them all the marbles, some Catholics, like Robert Parsons, who had previously been staunch Stuart

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legitimists, now played the elective monarchy card for all it was worth. They did so in an attempt to avoid their worst nightmare – the unopposed succession to the English crown of a male Protestant. Reacting against Parsons’s tract The conference about the next succession, both proponents of a Protestant succession and enthusiasts for the Stuarts were more or less forced to embrace the principle of indefeasible hereditary right as the best means to ensure the (for them) entirely happy event of James’s accession.41 These dynastic pressures coalesced with the final triumph of Whitgiftian (and now Bancroftian) anti-Puritanism in the anti-presbyterian reaction of the early 1590s, out of which, as John Guy has shown, emerged more and more authoritarian, indeed frankly absolutist, readings of the powers of the English crown and the Royal Supremacy.42 But if the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I was definitively laid to rest in the 1590s by a peculiarly potent, albeit contingent, intensely situationally specific coalescence between the forces of Stuart legitimism, anti-Puritanism and anti-popery, it has been the purpose of this chapter to show that there was a structural logic to that outcome; a logic that can be traced back through the reign until at least the later 1560s. What underlay many of the divergences of opinion over this or that policy that separated the Queen from many of her councillors were two very different visions or versions of how the polity either worked or ought to work. We have here – if the central issues and crucial questions were ever allowed to reach the highest level of abstract definition or statement – at least the potential for an outbreak of non-negotiable ideological conflict. Practical politics – the running and defence, from both foreign and domestic threat, of regimes as precarious as that of Elizabethan England – cannot be conducted in and through the prosecution of abstract debate about such non-negotiable ideological differences, and it is hardly surprising that, for the most part, the Queen and the leading members of both the clerical and secular establishments managed to avoid such exchanges. The significance of the Grindal affair is that through the consciencedriven intransigence of the Archbishop an argument about something like first principles broke out, enabling us to see things that, for the most part, most of the major players went to considerable lengths to hide from one another (and, therefore, by accident, as it were, from us too). But if the quarrel over the prophesyings throws into high relief many of the practical and theoretical limitations that prevented the explicit articulation 41 Peter Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True law of free monarchies in Context/s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth ser., 14 (2004): 243–66. 42 John Guy, ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity’ in Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 126–49; Johann Sommerville, ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia and the Advent of the Divine Right of Kings’, History of Political Thought, 4 (1983): 229–45; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, pp. 197–293.

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of monarchical republicanism, it also highlights just how, as a series of political practises, a set of un- or only partially-stated assumptions and rules of thumb, a series of expedients, responses to actual or anticipated crisis, the ‘monarchical republic’ lasted for quite as long as it did. For the series of political manoeuvres, the fudges and compromises, through which the usual suspects – Burghley, Mildmay, Leicester, Walsingham and Bacon, but also Hatton and indeed Aylmer – all tried to save Grindal from the consequences of his own intransigence represent a perfect example, if not of the ‘monarchical republic’, then certainly of the Elizabethan political establishment rallying round to stop the Queen doing just what she wanted – in this instance, removing Grindal from office once and for all.43 It seems entirely appropriate that, in a book dedicated to the abiding importance of Patrick Collinson’s 1987 essay, and in an essay intended to put two disparate elements in the Collinsonian oeuvre into constructive dialogue with one another, all this should lead to the conclusion that, in choosing between the maximum and minimum versions of the monarchical republic, outlined at the start of this essay as so often, it was Patrick himself who got it right the first time.

43

Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, ch. 14, esp. pp. 263–4.

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ESSAY 8

The Political Significance of the First Tetralogy Andrew Hadfield It has long been acknowledged that Shakespeare’s first tetralogy (the three Henry VI plays and Richard III) was a great popular success on the Elizabethan stage and helped to cement his reputation as a player among playwrights. However, given the plays’ rather less successful stage history, it has not always been asked why they had the impact that they had.1 I want to argue in this essay that the four plays were a shrewd intervention into a political culture, Shakespeare and his co-authors realizing that they had chosen a topic which was of great dramatic, topical and political significance.2 The three Henry VI plays and Richard III show the disintegration of a political nation. We see England begin as a healthy and powerful country at the funeral of Henry V, descend into ever more destructive conflict as a series of pretenders claim the crown, and end with a usurping tyrant ruling whose last words are an attempt to trade his kingdom for a horse, a sign of how small the political nation has become in the eyes of its rulers, as well as how they feel they can treat what they own. We witness the wholesale slaughter of ordinary citizens – the most well known example being the case of the father who kills his son and the son who kills his father in Henry VI, Part Three, witnessed by the helpless King – the abuse and destruction of the nation’s institutions, and the deaths of the political classes until no one is left to make up the political nation that the King discards in desperation at the end of Richard III. This major collaborative project needs to be read in terms of the prevailing notion of a ‘monarchical republic’. What we witness is the weak authority of the monarch and the irresponsible behaviour of the ruling class bringing a nation to its knees, much as the over-mighty subjects of republican Rome destroyed that body politic and paved the way for the rule of tyrants, a political lesson that was not lost on many Elizabethan intellectuals. The plays serve as a clear warning that the twin problems of 1 William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford, 2003), introduction, pp. 1–39. 2 On issues of authorship, see Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part One, ed. Edward Burns (London, 2000), introduction, p. 75.

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autocratic rule and a contested succession invariably lead to civil war, a lesson that English history – like Roman history – provides, and which, in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, had a potent topical charge that the theatre was ready to exploit.3 These history plays emerged out of a new and unstable theatrical culture which placed great emphasis on spectacle and transgression, opening ways for dramatists to explore complex and difficult political issues.4 Some of the most successful plays of the late 1580s had been works which represented dangerous and alluring heroes who defied a stable order and sought to challenge their social superiors, notably Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587) and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589). There were also numerous plays which warned of the dangers of civil war, most notably, Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War, which may have been performed as early as 1586.5 In short, the theatre was not simply a public space which had political significance during the ‘second reign’ of Elizabeth I, but one which appears to have attracted an audience precisely because it dealt with political issues and problems that may not have been addressed elsewhere.6 We do not know how much of the three Henry VI plays Shakespeare actually wrote; we do not know whether they were conceived as a trilogy, which would make them unique in this period of theatre history (although, given the experimental nature of the Elizabethan stage, this is not a reason to dismiss the possibility out of hand), or as a pair, with Henry VI, Part One, appearing as a ‘prequel’ to cash in on the success of the Contention and True Tragedie (the early versions of Parts Two and Three); we do not know the precise textual relationship between the different versions of Parts Two and Three; and we cannot be sure of the dates of any of them. What we can be sure of is that Shakespeare, near the start of his career, was heavily involved in a dramatic project that sought to bring the history of the English civil war to public attention, either realizing its commercial potential, or that it was a venture designed to mould public opinion, and, quite probably, both.7

3

Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 2,

passim. See Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London, 2003). For discussion, see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. 66–73. 6 See John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995). 7 In this essay I will refer to the early versions of King Henry VI, Part Two, The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster (London, 1594), and King Henry VI, Part Three, The true tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke (1595), in parentheses in the text, as well as referring to the later versions revised in the folio of 1623 when necessary. 4 5

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In the opening scene of Henry VI, Part One the Duke of Bedford attempts to sum up the feelings of the realm and his hopes for the future as his elder brother’s coffin proceeds on its last journey: Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate: Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils, Combat with adverse planets in the heavens. A far more glorious star thy soul will make Than Julius Caesar or bright – Enter a Messenger8

The speech is, of course, a moment of heavy dramatic irony, as even the least historically literate of playgoers would have been aware that the events of Henry VI’s reign were a catalogue of ‘civil broils’, suggesting that ‘adverse planets’ had a more than usual interest in the lives of the inhabitants of the British Isles. Indeed, the Messenger informs the assembled nobles that the crown’s lands in France, obtained during Henry V’s reign, are under threat. As they divide up to perform different roles vital to the organization of the realm – proclaiming the new boy king, preparing military reinforcements – it becomes clear that the death of Henry has exposed the unstable nature of their temporary union. With a power vacuum at the centre, unscrupulous and ambitious aristocrats will seize their chance to dominate public affairs. Gloucester’s praise of the dead Henry, ‘England ne’er had a king until his time. / Virtue he had, deserving to command’ (8–9), implies not only that Henry was a fortunate aberration, but also that loyalty to the monarch is conditional on the king ‘deserving to command’. Henry V achieved this in France, his military virtue binding together an otherwise disparate army assembled from the four nations of the British Isles. The comparison to Julius Caesar implies that the English King was a military ruler whose death would inevitably leave the country with more problems than opportunities. Faction, conquest and violence, as any account of his life available to an English Renaissance reader emphasized, defined Caesar’s career.9 Caesar rose to prominence through his successes in the Mithridatic Wars, in Spain, in Gaul and England; came to power through his victory in the civil war with Pompey; subsequently defeated the remains of the senatorial party led by Cato in Africa, and, in his last campaign, the sons of Pompey in Spain; he was then assassinated a year later.10 The result was a further civil war and the establishment of imperial Rome. No monarch

8 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Taylor, I, i, 52–6. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text. 9 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London, 1998), introduction, pp. 79–95. 10 J.A. Crook, Andrew Lintott and Elizabeth Rawson (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History: vol. IX, The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B. C. (Cambridge, 1994), chs 10–12.

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could have felt proud of his legacy if all he had achieved were the triumphs of Caesar. Furthermore, Bedford’s words appear to be an echo of the opening lines of Lucan’s Pharsalia – an approximate but nevertheless distinct reference.11 Having castigated Rome for the disasters it has heaped upon itself through the late republic’s indulgence in extensive civil wars, Lucan appears to change tack and he heaps extravagant praise on Nero who has become emperor as a result of this extensive civil conflict. Christopher Marlowe renders the lines as Yet Rome is much bound to these civil arms, Which made thee emperor, thee (seeing thou, being old, Must shine a star) shall heaven (who thou lovest) Receive with shouts, where thou wilt reign as king, Or mount the sun’s flame-bearing chariot, And with bright restless fire compass the earth[.]12

Lucan’s lines, whether intentionally or not, opened themselves out to be read ironically, when Nero became universally known as a deranged tyrant, and Lucan was forced to commit suicide after taking part in Piso’s failed conspiracy. The degeneration of the Roman republic from a thriving and egalitarian body politic of citizens into a fractious and unstable world in which the strongest and most ambitious fight for control serves as a model for England during the bloody civil wars of the fifteenth century. The three Henry VI plays – as well as Richard III – are, I would suggest, Shakespeare’s Pharsalia. The extensive representation of Henry VI’s troubled reign as the English civil war adapts the work of the Roman poet onto the English stage to suit the fractious climate of Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’, in which criticism of the English monarchy flourished. If Spenser was the English Vergil, Marlowe the English Ovid, then perhaps we should see the early Shakespeare as the English Lucan, a republican poet who could write about troubled times that had a bearing on current political issues and which also represented one nightmarish vision of a potential future. The subsequent appearance of the spectacularly violent Titus Andronicus can only have strengthened the impression that Shakespeare had Lucan in mind when trying to forge a literary identity. Given the uncertainty of the succession in the 1590s, the anxiety induced by the range of candidates, the growing interest in alternative forms of government, classical and contemporary, the protracted war with Spain, and the fear of the French civil wars of religion being imported across the channel, it is easy to see why these plays were so popular and why they had such an impact on the development of the As noted by Edward Burns: King Henry VI, Part One, p. 119. Christopher Marlowe, The First Book of Lucan Translated into English, in Poems, ed. Millar McLure (London, 1968), pp. 219–54, lines 44–9. 11 12

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English theatre. Lucan’s narrative of the disastrous effects of the struggle between Caesar and Pompey on the people of Rome and its environs was an obvious vehicle for the expression of this combination of issues. Lucan was very much in vogue in the early 1590s.14 Marlowe’s translation of Book 1 probably circulated in manuscript before it was published in 1593. Arthur Gorges (1557–1625), a friend of Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, was at work on his translation of the Pharsalia.15 Samuel Daniel adapted the Pharsalia to English history in his long chronicle poem, The first fowre bookes of the civile wars between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke, published in 1595.16 There are many similarities between Lucan’s unfinished epic poem and the various versions of the Henry VI plays. Both show the dreadful effects of ruthless ambition on the principal historical actors, and, more to the point, those who have to serve them or get caught up in forces beyond their control. Both show the conflict of sides that are not quite evenly balanced and the triumph of the stronger and more brutal faction over the more sympathetic group: the mighty Caesar over the ineffectual Pompey, and the Yorkist faction led by Richard, Duke of York, and then his son, Richard III, whose fate might seem to mirror that of Julius Caesar (military triumph leading to rule, but without respite, before being betrayed – by Buckingham – and then murdered), over the hapless Henry VI. The destructive civil war in each work leads to the establishment of a dictatorship: Caesar, through a combination of strategy and good fortune, is able to eliminate all traces of Pompey’s faction, as well as to sweep aside the objections of the citizens of Rome and their republican institutions. Caesar triumphs through merit, what the republic was supposed to value and promote, but ends the republic in doing so, hurtling Rome into a brave new political world. The same can be said of the Yorkist faction who feel that they have a better right to the throne than Henry, a disparity that he acknowledges at the start of the True Tragedie, but, more importantly, that they are more regal in style and substance than he is. The plays also endorse this reading of history, but show that it only leads to the triumph 13

13 For discussion, see Paulina Kewes, ‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (eds), Companion to Shakespeare’s Works (3 vols, Malden, MA, 2003), vol. II, The Histories, pp. 170–93. 14 See Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), pp. 180–200. 15 Helen Estabrook Sandison, ‘Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s Alcyon and Ralegh’s Friend’, PMLA, 43 (1928): 645–74. 16 Gillian Wright, ‘What Daniel Really Did with the Pharsalia: The Civil Wars, Lucan, and King James’, Review of English Studies, new series, 55 (2004): 210–32. It should also be noted that both Barnaby Googe and George Turberville claimed that they had translations of Lucan ready for publication in the 1560s and 1570s (although neither version actually appeared): see James Shapiro, ‘“Metre meete to furnish Lucans style”: Reconsidering Marlowe’s Lucan’, in Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill and Constance B. Kuriyama (eds), ‘A Poet and a filthy play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York, 1988), pp. 315–26.

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of Richard III, who has no idea how to rule, only how to seize the throne, a failure that results in the triumph of the Tudors, a dynasty that was just about to end when the plays were first performed. It is inconceivable that many of the audience, given the plotting that was taking place to decide on the succession, would not have made a connection between the chaos that led to the advent of the Tudors and the chaos that could very well ensue after their rule ended.17 The decline and fall of the Roman republic into a cycle of civil war punctuated by the dictatorship of the powerful and unscrupulous, whose families then destroy the body politic as well as themselves, is shown to be uncomfortably close to the tragic history of England, past, present and future. The sequence of bloody battles in the True Tragedie, Wakefield, Towton, Barnet and Tewkesbury, give that particular play a sense of prolonged conflict, with huge forces moved over significant distances, a fraught series of tactical encounters that see the balance swing one way then another, before the inevitable victor triumphs, mirroring one key aspect of the appeal of Lucan’s poem to many seventeenth-century readers, absorbed by military issues.18 The slaughter and waste of human life that characterizes the English civil war plays is probably the most obvious link between the work of Shakespeare and Lucan. Each writer shows all levels of society drawn into the conflict and shows the dreadful effect that war has on ordinary citizens. Of course, there was nothing new in representing grisly forms of death in literary works.19 Placing emphasis on the destruction of ordinary people caused by the actions of their supposedly heroic superiors is, however, a radical departure in both Latin literature and English drama. The heroic duel to the death between Aeneas and Turnus in the final book of the Aeneid is a conspicuous attempt to transfer the glory of the epic conflicts of the Iliad to the newly founded imperial Rome, a key literary example of translatio imperii.20 Lucan’s poem, written after the cruel and destructive reigns of Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, is designed to expose the hollow foundations on which imperial Rome was built. David Quint suggests that the ‘republican ideal’ that Lucan promotes is oligarchic in character and he points to the ‘element of class conflict’ in the poem, one that pits ‘a warrior nobility at odds with a central monarchy determined to limit their

17 Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London, 2000), ch. 11. 18 See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 83–92, passim. 19 See Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997). 20 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993), ch. 2.

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power’. Of course, this is correct, but one might further suggest that the class conflict could be seen to range rather more widely, something that later readers recognized. In the English Civil War of the seventeenth century responses to the Pharsalia concentrated on the images of slaughter and destruction of ordinary people, as Nigel Smith has noted.22 The graphic description of the horrible death of Lycidas, a sailor on one of Caesar’s ships which is surrounded by Greek vessels during the sea campaigns in Book 3, is a case in point. The sheer length of the description of Lycidas’s death and the macabre fascination with anatomical detail indicate that Lucan is conspicuously parodying Vergil’s epic similes of military might: 21

As a grappling-iron was fastening its grasping hooks on to a ship, it pierced Lycidas. He would have been submerged in the deep but for his comrades, who held on to his legs as he swung. He was torn and split apart and blood did not spurt out as from a wound; slowly from his broken veins it falls everywhere, and as the stream of life passed into his separated limbs it was intercepted by the waters. From none in death has life departed by so wide a path. The lowest part of his torso handed over to death limbs empty of vitals; but where the swelling lung lies, where the organs are warm, the fates stuck for a long time and, after a long struggle with this portion of the man, took all his parts with difficulty.23

The image has a number of resonances. The demands it places on our attention force us to confront the squalid and tragic nature of an ordinary man’s death. The wealth of detail – the grappling iron piercing Lycidas, his comrades trying to save him and only succeeding in prolonging his agony, the blood seeping from his body into the sea rather than spurting out (a pointed contrast to the heroic wounds inflicted by the warriors in the Aeneid), and the slow process of necrotization passing upwards through the body – provides Lycidas with an importance and individuality that he did not possess in life. We are made aware of his significance even though he does not matter to the military leaders who are prepared to sacrifice him in their pursuit of glory. The death of Lycidas stands as a pointed – undoubtedly deliberate – contrast to the death of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid. The one leads to the establishment of a great empire, a heroic sacrifice in keeping with the ideal of imperial might; the other is part of the death of an ideal, that of the republic, Lycidas’s broken body representing the destruction of a Rome run for and by its citizens. Lucan’s mighty epic similes that describe Caesar as a thunderbolt (Book 1, lines 151–7), and 21 22

Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 9. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994),

p. 205. 23 Lucan, Civil War, trans. Susan H. Braund (Oxford, 1992), lines 635–46. All subsequent references to this edition in parentheses in the text.

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Pompey as an ancient oak (Book 1, lines 136–43), are here reduced to the agony of a single dying man of no real consequence, a democratic gesture reminding the reader what poetry can do and the political resonances that it has. In the world of the Pharsalia we are constantly made aware that it is the human titans, the mighty oak, and to a much greater extent, the thunderbolt, who determine the course of men’s fates. Caesar is described as ‘greedy for the fight’ (Book 6, line 28) before the battle of Pharsalia, and later, ‘satiated with the slaughter of Emathia’ (Book 9, line 950), in direct contrast to the detached figure of Cato who, when drawn into the conflict, ‘waged a civil war without desiring power / or fearing slavery’ (Book 9, lines 27–8). After his victory Caesar sees ‘the fields drenched sufficiently with Hesperian / blood’, and sees fit to grant life ‘to worthless souls, to columns / whose death would have had no point’ (Book 7, lines 728–31), acts of mercy which serve only to remind us of the power that Caesar has over the lives of those he leads as well as those he fights, and the carelessness with which he exercises it.24 Lucan addresses Caesar directly, further reminding him of his responsibility for the carnage, and making sure that no reader of the Pharsalia can have been in any doubt who caused all the death and destruction: ‘Drink these waters, Caesar, breathe this air, if you can, / But the rotting hordes rob you of Pharsalian / fields, they rout the conqueror and possess the plains’ (lines 822–4). The obvious precursors of the tetralogy, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Massacre at Paris and Edward II, as well as Lodge’s Wounds of Civil War, do, of course, show conflict and destruction. They do not, however, focus so clearly and explicitly on the relationship between the sins of the leaders and the suffering of the people, which is why the Henry VI plays appear to be more consciously influenced by the representation of civil war in the Pharsalia. There is little to compare with the scene at the battle of Towton (1461) in Henry VI, Part Three, by far the bloodiest battle of the war (some 28,000 men perished).25 The lone figure of Henry, isolated from the fighting, muses on the pains of high office. He states a desire to be ‘no better than a homely swain, / To sit upon a hill as I do now, / To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, / Thereby to see the minutes how they run’ (II, iii, 22–5).26 His reverie is rudely disturbed by the entry of ‘A Sonne that hath kill’d his Father, at one doore; and a Father that hath kill’d his Sonne

24 See also K.J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge, 2003), for a discussion of what such powers meant in Shakespeare’s lifetime. 25 Samuel Daniel saw the battle of Towton as the English Pharsalia: see Wright, ‘What Daniel Really Did with the Pharsalia’, 212–13, 226–30. 26 The speech in Henry VI, Part Three, considerably expands the short speech Henry makes in the True Tragedie, leading commentators to suggest that Shakespeare revised his play, which exists as a memorial reconstruction in the earlier version: see Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, ed. Randall Martin (Oxford, 2001), introduction, pp. 103–6.

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at another doore’. When the son, evidently a ‘homely swain’, searches the body of the man he has killed in a hand-to-hand fight to see if his victim has a store of coins that will at least yield some profit from the day’s slaughter, he discovers that he has killed his father. This shock is balanced by the discovery of the other combatant, who also plans to search his victim for gold, that he has killed his son. Although he is an ineffective king, Henry is an astute enough commentator to realize the correct moral to the story: ‘Whiles lions war and battle for their dens, / Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity’ (74–5). The failure of those who are supposed to govern is the key issue of the play, just as it was in the Pharsalia. Civil war infects the whole realm, as the squabbles over the body of Henry V had suggested. Henry VI may well envy the lives of those who are not born great but he is then shown what the effects of aristocratic conflict usually are, a blindness already thrown into relief by the previous scene which shows Clifford and Richard, Duke of York, pursuing their murderous feud, one that continues after their deaths. When Henry is finally defeated by the Yorkist forces led by Edward IV, Queen Margaret comments that England has become a ‘slaughterhouse’ (V, iv, 78), an appropriate conclusion for a play which owes so much to the Pharsalia. There are other links to Lucan too. When the King tries to unite the first warring factions, those of Winchester and Humphrey of Gloucester, he employs another arresting image, warning them that ‘Civil dissension is a viperous worm / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth’ (Part One, III, i, 72–3). The image has numerous precedents, but may be designed to recall a key passage in Lucan that came to have a major significance in the seventeenth century, ‘the extinction and literal evaporation of Cato’s army in the Libyan desert’.28 Some of Cato’s army are killed by the numerous venomous snakes that originate and flourish in the north African deserts, such as the unlucky Aules, ‘standard-bearer of Etruscan blood’, who steps on a ‘Dipsas’, which fatally wounds him. Lucan’s description makes it clear that there is more at stake here than the poisoning of a soldier: 27

Hardly was there pain or a sensation of a bite, and even death’s appearance is not malignant and the injury does not look threatening. Look – the silent venom creeps along, and devouring fire eats away the marrows and with hot decay it sets the guts ablaze. The poison drinks up moisture spread around the vital parts and starts to parch the tongue on his dry palate; there was no sweat to pass across the tired frame, the stream of tears reconciled from the eyes. Not the glory of the state, not the authority of saddened Cato 27 Direction given in the folio; the True Tragedie has ‘a Souldier with a dead man in his armes’ enter before his speech, and then ‘an other Souldier with a dead man’ enter after the first – the son – has finished his first speech. 28 Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 206.

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could stop the burning warrior from boldly scattering the standards and in his frenzy seeking far and wide the waters which the thirsty poison in his heart demanded. (Book 9, lines 739–50)

All that remains of Aules is his name and the manner of his death. Lucan demonstrates at great length – the description of the deaths of the soldiers from snake bite continues for over a hundred lines – how the army is consumed until nothing remains, a striking emblem of the effects of civil war, which destroys a society from within, no one being able to pinpoint exactly when the process of decay begins. This is, of course, true of the first Henriad, as it is of the history of republican Rome. As the last lines of this passage indicate, the slide cannot be halted by a return to ‘normal’ politics. No such intervention has a chance of saving the infected body politic, as Cato discovers. The future triumph of Caesar already has too much momentum to be prevented. In the same way, we know that the squabbles over the body of Henry V will lead to the brief glory of Richard III, who, like Caesar, knows more about reaching the throne than how to occupy it. Neither can Aules’s frantic, violent activity prevent his death, a fate that might be compared to the mighty, Marlovian feats of Talbot, which fail to revive the fractious English body politic. That Henry VI can identify what is happening to the kingdom he nominally rules does not give him the power to cure the deadly wound. The loyal choric figure, the Duke of Exeter, recognizes this inevitability at the end of the scene. He notes, sardonically, ‘we may march in England or in France / Not seeing what is likely to ensue’ (III, i, 190–91), which shows that the Anglo-French and the English civil war are inextricably linked. Exeter provides another Lucanesque image as a means of commenting on the fate of the English body politic: This late dissension grown betwixt the peers Burns under feignèd ashes of forged love, And will at last break out into a flame. As festered members rot but by degree Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away (192–6)

The disturbing image of flesh falling off bones so that the body disappears is one of the key motifs of Lucan’s description of the fate of Cato’s army. Poor ‘miserable Sabellus’, bitten by ‘a tiny Seps’, ceases to possess corporeal form: The membrane which binds the belly burst apart, and out melt the entrails; and not as much as there should be from an entire body melts into the ground, but the savage poison boils the limbs down; death shrinks the whole into a tiny pool of venom. All that makes a human being is uncovered by the unholy nature of the killer (lines 773–9)

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The social whole and the individuals who form it simply disappear. They can only be reconstructed and remembered through literature, a realization central to the work of both Lucan and Shakespeare. For all the emphasis made by the characters on their legitimate claims to the throne, the Contention and the True Tragedie show that kingship is a pragmatic office, earned most frequently by successful military victories not natural right. York tries to persuade Warwick and the other assembled nobles that he should be the legitimate ruler of England: ‘Let me reveale unto your honors here, / The right and title of the house of Yorke, / To Englands Crowne by lineall descent.’ Warwick positions himself as a neutral ready to be persuaded if York can mount a decent defence: ‘Then Yorke begin, and if thy claime be good, / The Nevills are thy subjects to commaund’ (Contention, sig. C4v). Warwick’s words are more a scarcely veiled threat than a protestation of loyalty. Warwick can be commanded as a subject if his sovereign can make a good enough case. In this fractious world unconditional loyalty is a sign of fatal weakness. York’s success is based on the fact that he is able to persuade others that he looks and acts like a king, until he over-reaches himself and is defeated. Throughout the three plays we are constantly reminded of the example of Julius Caesar, a malign ghostly presence who haunts the major historical figures, constantly reminding the audience that civil war is likely to produce a dictator. York emerges as a type of Lucan’s Caesar in the True Tragedie, resolving to ‘win the crowne or die’ (sig. B1v), not caring what horrors he foists on his native land in the process. One of the constant narrative motifs of the Pharsalia is a series of reminders of the cost of Caesar’s ambition: ‘added to these horrors [the battles fought], Caesar, be the famine of Perusia, / and the struggles of Mutina, the fleets overwhelmed / near rugged Leucas, and the slave wars under burning Etna’ (Book 1, lines 41–5). Caesar becomes dictator because his abilities enable him to triumph over his enemies. York’s success is built on the same principles. In the folio version of Henry VI, Part Two, he boasts in an aside when confronting the Duke of Buckingham that he is ‘better born than is the King, / More like a king, more kingly in my thoughts’ (V, i, 28–9) and is frustrated that he has to wait to seize the crown. York fails when his forces are defeated at the Battle of Wakefield. He is taunted when he is crowned with a paper crown by the triumphant Queen Margaret, the words echoing the earlier aside: ‘Yorke cannot speake, unlesse he weare a Crowne. / A Crowne for Yorke? and Lords bow low to him? / So: hold you his hands while I do set it on, / I, now lookes he like a King’ (Contention, sig. B3v). Margaret’s famous taunting of York, such a powerful stage image, serves as an emblem of the civil war, one that is developed as a structuring device in the play. It assumes an even greater importance in Richard III. In that play, Richard, I would suggest, is another figure cast as Julius Caesar

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in a key scene, the last one in which the two young princes, sons of Edward IV, appear before they are murdered in what was already understood to be the gravest crime committed by an English king.29 When Richard urges the two young princes to stay in the Tower of London for their safety, Prince Edward asks whether Julius Caesar was responsible for building it. Buckingham tells him that he was, and the prince presses him about the records: ‘say, my lord, it were not reigister’d, / Methinks the truth should live from age to age, / As ’twere retail’d to all posterity, / Even to the general all-ending day’ (III, i, 75–8), introducing an eschatological context. When the prince overhears Richard’s aside, ‘So wise so young, they say, do never live long’ (79), Richard is forced to equivocate, claiming that he was making a general historical point, ‘without characters [i.e., written records] fame lives long’ (81), boasting in a second aside that ‘like the formal Vice, Iniquity’, he moralizes ‘two meanings on one word’ (82–3).30 Richard’s reference to the stage figure of the Vice alerts us to the significance of this exchange as a metatheatrical moment.31 The prince concludes his comments on Julius Caesar who, he argues, using another popular rhetorical figure, antimetabole (‘where two or more words are repeated in inverse order’), ‘With what his valour did enrich his wit, / His wit set down to make his valour live’.32 Caesar, according to Prince Edward, has conquered death because he now ‘lives in fame, though not in life’ (88). He completes the scene with a pathetic dramatic irony: ‘if I live until I be a man, / I’ll win our ancient right in France again, / Or die a soldier, as I liv’d a king’ (91–3), which draws another pointed ironic comment from Richard, designed for the audience: ‘Short summers lightly have a forward spring’ (94). This is a complex and immensely important exchange which draws together most of the significant issues raised not just in Richard III, but also the Henry VI plays. It has no source, and has tended either to baffle commentators, or to be read as a comment on the vicissitudes of fame.33 However, the scene assumes a whole new range of meanings when read in the light of the republican analysis of civil war. Prince Edward does not appreciate the historical role(s) of Julius Caesar, seeing him simply as a military conqueror and a builder of empire, symbolized by his construction of the Tower of London. He has clearly based his understanding of Caesar 29 See Thomas More, The History of King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, 1976), pp. 84–9. 30 See Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Anthony Hammond (London, 1981, reprint, 1988), introduction, pp. 99–102. 31 On the figure of the ‘Vice’, see Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York, 1958), ch. 10. 32 Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), p. 492. 33 Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Hammond, pp. 214–15.

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on his reading of Caesar’s Commentaries on his conquests of Britain and Gaul, a popular work which was translated into English in 1565 (reprinted in 1590).34 Caesar’s commentaries were a central feature in humanist education systems practised in England in the sixteenth century.35 Lucan’s Pharsalia was also an integral part of a humanist education, although this work was studied rather later in the child’s schooling. One aspect of the pathos of Edward’s words is that he will never have the chance to read this work. He will not live to complete his education and so produce the more rounded judgements that his comments on the nature of history indicate he has the capacity to make, a fate that also befell a more recent prince who received a humanist education, Edward VI.36 Caesar was indeed famous and does live in fame as Edward recognizes. However, he was not simply famous for his imperial conquests, but also for destroying the republic and causing a bloody civil war. It is probably this historical narrative that has the greater value for Edward as the ruler who might govern after the English civil war, hence the importance of the discussion of historical record. Humanist reading practices demanded that a reader consider a variety of relevant passages and then choose the most appropriate one for the situation.37 Prince Edward’s desire to conquer France for the glory of his country follows directly from his praise of Caesar, indicating that the Roman warrior serves as his model for his own projected reign. He has the good of his nation at heart – unlike Richard – but not the means, as yet, to implement his empathy. History, however, as the discussion of records and reports demonstrates, delivers a more complex and less secure sense of truth than Edward realizes. Reading the account of Caesar in the Pharsalia would change Edward’s conviction. Edward’s fear of the Tower is a clear sign that his childish consciousness has already registered that all is not well, and his admiration for Caesar – for which there is no historical record – will be tempered when he learns more about him. Edward – like his Tudor namesake – reveals all the signs that he would be a good king if he were given the chance. Paradiastole, in which a particular form of words can be redescribed, recontextualized and so assigned a different meaning, is one of the chief rhetorical figures employed in arguments throughout the early modern 34 The eyght bookes of Caius Julius Caesar conteyning his martiall exploytes in the realme of Gallia … translated oute of latin into English by Arthur Goldinge (London, 1565). 35 Kristian Jensen, ‘The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 63–81, at 74. 36 Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 44–6, passim. 37 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000), pt 1.

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period in England. As John Roe has pointed out, ‘Paradiastole registers the ease with which virtue may be depicted as vice, and, contrarily, how vice may be made to look like virtue.’38 It is this element of reversibility which is so evident in Richard’s sly use of proverbs and his asides, especially the calculating line that ends the exchange, which will be read by the characters on stage to mean that the boy is precocious and will have much of value to say before long, but the bond between Richard and the audience means that we know that Edward has little time left to live. Richard revels in his self-appointed role as the ‘formal vice’. This wordplay further reveals the extent of the degeneration of England’s body politic, and the disappearance of a forum – a senate, a parliament – for proper argument on equal terms. Political language has become either the shrill lament uttered by the women characters, or the deceitful banter of the men. Richard’s quick wit and humour help to disguise and dilute the full impact of his tyrannical behaviour. One of the key effects of the development of tyranny was the decline of proper political debate, based largely on the model of Cicero’s extant writings. Arguments could be made for two opposing viewpoints before the audience would decide which was the most persuasive, carefully weighing up the merits of each case. Under tyranny, such reasonable forms of decision-making degenerated into flattery, debased and specious argument, and dictatorial command.39 Here we witness the talented young humanist prince, in the middle of an education that would equip him to rule benevolently and wisely, become the butt for the clever but pointless humour of those who will rule as badly as is conceivably possible. Edward is learning how to argue as a humanist prince should. He listens to counsel from his elders and is keen to weigh up the pros and cons of any argument, a laudable trait that Richard uses for his own amusement and as a means of flattering and seducing the audience into imagining that his crimes are roguish rather than wicked. Richard’s jokes are, after all, a prelude to murder. Moreover, Richard’s manic use of paradiastole, reducing anything virtuous to fodder for his own rise to power, is a criminal abuse of rhetoric, which marks him out as a vicious tyrant. It is no accident that it is Richard who seems like a naughty child in this scene, gleefully subverting the words of the young man he is about to have murdered, and showing that his own words are simply there to serve his purposes. There is no common language of politics under his tyrannous rule.40 In behaving as he does, he shows that he is like Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, the tyrants for whom Julius Caesar paved the way 38 39

John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge, 2002), p. 33. Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, (2 vols, Oxford, 2000), vol. I,

ch. 5. 40 Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1992), pt 1.

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– especially Nero, who had Lucan killed. As the histories of Suetonius and Tacitus revealed, silence rather than eloquence was the best policy under such regimes, even though the disappearance of the body politic led to the decline of Rome as resources were needlessly wasted and fear prevented innovation and proper management.41 The murder of Edward is the last slaughter of the English body politic, the good prince killed off by the evil usurper, the humanist republican king falling prey to the tyrant. After this, Richard has no one to teach him how to rule, an art he has neglected to learn, and the return to proper government can come only with the advent of the Tudors, who, at least, espoused the humanist ideal of the ‘mixed’ constitution, even if they did not always live up to it. The political relevance of the Henry VI plays and Richard III is easy to understand in the 1590s. There was neat – albeit frightening – symmetry in staging plays which recounted the bloody origins of the dynasty that was just about to end. Would the advent of the next regime lead to a disputed throne and a bloody civil war, as had happened after the death of Henry V? Or would the creeping tyranny that many felt had blighted Elizabeth’s last years be replaced by relative stability and better government? It is hardly surprising that writers sought to make comparisons between the destruction of the Roman Republic and their own times in the 1590s. The Republic was generally thought to have been a successful and stable system of government that had eventually decayed so that its checks and balances no longer worked to prevent the rise of dangerous, over-ambitious figures who were more interested in their own glory and power than the health of the body politic. Precisely the same fate had befallen England in the fifteenth century when the good will of the success of Henry V and the good will of his benign but weak son proved no match for the ruthless barons who were prepared to risk civil war to get what they wanted. Many also felt that the stability that had characterized the first half of Elizabeth’s reign was also unravelling and that bloody conflict and anarchy was all they had to look forward to when the old Queen died. Looking at England’s past with one eye on the events of ancient Rome was clearly an exercise that could bear fruitful analysis, whether one saw the Roman Republic as a model to copy, or an example to avoid at all costs.

41 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, 1957), pp. 226–31; Tacitus, On Imperial Rome (The Annals), trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth, 1956), ch. 12.

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ESSAY 9

Challenging the Monarchical Republic: James I’s Articulation of Kingship Anne McLaren

… if the man may not weare womans apparel, nor the woman mans, how much lesse may the one usurpe the others dignitie, or the other (to wit the husband) resigne or give over his soveraigntie unto his wife? but each must keepe their place, their order, and heavenly politie, whereto God hath called them. The husband is made the head, and the wife resembled to the bodie: May the head of a bodie (naturall) bee turned, downeward? can the whole person so continue, & live well in that state? how unseemly is it? no more can the bodie politique bee in peaceable or blessed condition, if order be inverted. A most monstrous thing it was that the Prophet Esay complained of when he said. Children are extortioners of my people, and women rule over them. – Counsel to the husband: to the wife instruction (1608)1

In ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ Patrick Collinson identified an ‘Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis’. On one level it ended in 1587 with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots – ‘the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth’, in the words of one MP.2 Once Mary fled into England, after her deposition from the Scottish throne in 1567, it began to seem both inevitable and, for men committed to the True Church, in equal measure intolerable that the English imperial crown would pass to Mary as blood-right heir, should the Virgin Queen die without issue. That predicament fuelled conviction that the translation would be, could only be, effected by violence. This would be directed in the first instance against Elizabeth herself, but it would inevitably lead to warfare waged against the people of God by the popish Antichrist, as Mary came into her own. Likely local allies were variously identified as the Scots (‘a people by custome & almost, nature our enymies, thursty of our blud, poure & miserable by their contre & enyouse of our welfare’) or indigenous backsliders, intent on returning ‘unto ther acustumid idolatrie & wonted crueltye, to wash ether hands in the bloode of the faithfulle’.3 1 Ste. B., Counsel to the husband: to the wife instruction (London, 1608), pp. 42–3. The Biblical reference is to Isaiah 3:12. 2 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, at 46. 3 Allegations Against the Surmisid Title of the Quine of Scotts and the favorers of the same (London, 1565), pp. 4, 26.

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Collinson’s seminal article showed how this understanding of their situation forced committed Protestant men – a cohort he elsewhere identified as the ‘Protestant ascendancy’ – to reconsider their status as subjects of an earthly king. Arguably it culminated in the series of documents containing provisions for an interregnum, edited and amended by Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, intended to be appended to the Act for the Surety of Queen’s Most Royal Person of 1584. In his concluding pages Collinson shows us Burghley attempting to think through not only how political authority might be exercised during that hiatus, but also how it might end: how Englishmen might (should it prove necessary) revert to the normative status quo ante as once again liege subjects of a king defined as ‘the life, the head and the authoritie of all thinges that be done in the realme of England’.4 On balance Burghley thought that monarchical authority would be restored, because ‘“it is likely and very probable that the state of both the Realms [sc. England and Ireland] cannot long endure without a person that by justice ought to be the successor of the Crown shall be known”’. When that day came, Parliament should consider all claimants’ cases and finally (I am following Collinson’s text here) accept and receive such a person to the Crown of the Realm as shall to them upon their peaceable deliberations and trials had of them [Burghley’s interpolation] appear to have best right to the same in blood by the royal lawes of the Realm and such a person so by the said Parliament allowed [Burghley’s hand again] they shall by a Proclamation warranted with the Great Seal of England in form of an Act of Parliament published to the people of the Realm to have the most right to the Crown.

‘In Burghley’s telling interpolations’, Collinson concludes, ‘Poland was not far away.’5 Overtly, Poland remained a foreign country. After Mary’s execution in 1587, the Elizabethan regime regrouped to make hegemonic a nowcanonical trinity of hierarchy, social order and divine right kingship. They did so by almost hysterically associating Protestantism with obedience, to absolute monarchical authority as much as to the person of the Queen, and assiduously ascribing alternative views and values to the Roman Antichrist, and (less insistently) to demonized ‘sectaries’.6 ‘A Prince is a 4 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 57, quoted in Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 36. 5 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 55. 6 Throughout what follows I am distinguishing between ‘absolute power’ and ‘arbitrary rule’. My ability to negotiate these semantic and conceptual shoals owes much to J.H. Burns, ‘The Idea of Absolutism’, in John Miller (ed.), Absolutism in Seventeenth Century Europe (London, 1990), pp. 21–42, esp. pp. 24–9; James Daly, ‘The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth Century England’, The Historical Journal 21/2 (1978): 227–50, esp. 231–5. Here it means unchallengeable discretion within a specified context, whether political or juridical.

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publike power, & in earth a certain image of the divine power’, preached Laurence Humphrey in the execution’s immediate aftermath. Glossing Romans 13 he explained that ‘as [he is] a double person [man and king], so is he … a double Image of God, for hee was made after the Image of God, and by office representeth God: nay: further, he is a God himselfe …’. Those who refuse to acknowledge God immediately through the king ‘fight … against God himselfe’.7 At Elizabeth’s death Privy Councillors added unquestioning support for the principle of dynastic succession to the mix and affixed it to their candidate of choice, James VI of Scotland. They did this in proclamations asserting that the body politic that they represented could do no more than recognize James’s indefeasible right to the English crown. At the same time they urgently highlighted the fainting condition of the nation and the imminent danger of social collapse, as they pleaded with James to take possession of his inheritance as soon as possible: … seeing … in what estate we remain, as body without a head, or rather without that spirit here amongst us, which from the head might give vigor to every member to exercise the duty to it belonging, thereby to keep the whole body from confusion, [we hope that] you will be pleased to enter into consideration how soon and in what manner it shall seem best to your Majesties excellent wisdome, to inspire a new life into this languishing body.8

The circumstances of that devoutly anticipated resurrection they left entirely at James’s discretion, ‘holding it enough for us humbly to acknowledge ourselves your true subjects, ready to obey all your commandments’.9 Despite their best efforts, however, the political movement that Collinson has so brilliantly anatomized as the ‘monarchical republic’ did not disappear, not after Mary’s execution, nor even after James’s accession to the English throne in 1603. Nor did it prove possible incontrovertibly to displace the political values that it represented onto militant Catholicism. Instead, it entered a period of dormancy. During the seventeenth century men mobilized under its colours when conditions were propitious – during the English Revolution, and again, as Collinson recognized, during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678 to 1681. In England (though not in America, where it informed the rebellion against Great Britain) it went on crusade 7 Laurence Humphrey, A View of the Romish Hydra and Monster (Oxford, 1588), pp. 35–6, 54. 8 Privy Councillors’ letter to James in Scotland, dated 24 March 1603, in John Spottiswood, The History of the Church of Scotland [London, 1655] (facsimile; Menston, 1972), pp. 473–5, quoting 473–4. The qualification (‘as body without a head, or rather without that spirit here amongst us, which from the head might give vigour to every member’) makes it clear that they regard James as already having been claimed by the kingship at the moment of Elizabeth’s death; see below, p. 172–3. 9 Ibid., p. 474.

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for the last time in 1689, during what its whig inheritors denominated the Glorious Revolution. As a movement the monarchical republic recrudesced whenever significant elements of the Protestant ascendancy once more came to believe that God called them, as godly English men and citizens of His kingdom, to disallow the claims to absolute entitlement (now read as arbitrary rule) of a blood-right king. The continuous existence of the monarchical republic as a pentimento from the 1570s onwards shaped political parameters, often in profound ways that remain hard to track within the confines of conventional political and intellectual histories. By 1600, for example, Thomas Wilson could take as a given not only that parliament immediately represented the whole body of the realm, but also that its consent constituted both law and king. In The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 – something in the nature of a position paper written for Burghley’s son and political heir Sir Robert Cecil – Wilson wrote that no fewer than 12 competitors ‘gape for the death of that good old Princess the now Queen’. He concluded his brief survey of their relative claims by asserting that, in England, election trumped even primogeniture: The Prince hath no authority to make lawes nor to dispose of the Crowne; that must be done by general consent of all in parliament; yea, the King’s eldest sonne, though the Kingdoms be hereditary, shall not be crowned without the consent of the parliament after the death of his father.10

Clearly he envisaged parliament as a body separable from the person and authority of the king, and assumed that his audience concurred. More generally, at every stage that alternative reality challenged Stuart kingship and powerfully informed Jacobean and Caroline political discourse. If we are to understand the political dynamics of the Stuart century, we need to learn to appreciate the extent to which they involved debating and contesting the conception of English kingship that was first articulated (if not enacted) during the Elizabethan monarchical republic. In this essay I want to explore that contest by focusing on a succession tract written by the Scottish lawyer and jurist Sir Thomas Craig, The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England. Craig, regarded by many as the pre-eminent Scottish lawyer of the age, studied at the University of Paris during the 1550s. He returned to Scotland in 1561, where he completed his education under the auspices of the minister John Craig, Protestant convert and close colleague of John Knox. Thomas Craig too converted to Protestantism, but at no point in his career did his ardent religious conviction challenge his equally passionate commitment to the Stuarts as Scotland’s royal family and kings in waiting of a British empire. This 10 Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600, Camden Miscellany, vol. 16 [Camden third ser., vol. 52] (London, 1936) pp. 1–46, quoting 2, 37.

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unusual and, from James’s point of view, invaluable stance, allied to his legal knowledge and talent for polemic, endeared Craig to the King. By the 1590s he was well established in James’s esteem, acting as counsel for the King along with the official king’s advocate. After Elizabeth’s death he was one of the few Scots who crossed the border at the King’s invitation, present both at James’s entry into London and at his subsequent coronation. In 1604 James named him as one of the Scottish commissioners summoned to meet with their English counterparts to consider the union project so close to his heart. Perhaps the most telling evidence of James’s regard concerns his honorific title. According to A.J.G. Mackay, James repeatedly offered Craig the honour of knighthood, which he as consistently refused. ‘He is only styled “Sir Thomas Craig”, in consequence of an order from the king, that every one should give him the title.’11 Between the 1590s and his death in 1608, Craig produced four major works, on subjects ranging from the feudal law to Scotland’s status as an autonomous realm.12 In all of them he also proselytized for a vision of British kingship that was intended to disallow the legitimacy of the monarchical republic, and simultaneously counter its appeal. The warm reciprocal regard that existed between James and Craig, and the demonstrable continuities between Craig’s views on monarchical authority and those to which James adhered throughout his maturity, suggest that we can regard Craig’s writings as a blueprint for James’s kingship of Great Britain. Craig’s succession tract deserves particular attention, not least because historians have generally ignored its significance, both in terms of political thought and as a key interjection in the late Elizabethan succession debate.13 11 Æ. M. [A.J.G. Mackay], ‘Craig, Sir Thomas (1538–1608)’, Dictionary of National Biography archive, via John W. Cairns, ‘Craig, Thomas’, ODNB online, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6580. See also Patrick Tytler, An Account of the Life and Writings of Sir Thomas Craig of Riccarton (Edinburgh, 1823). 12 Roughly in order of composition, these works were De Jure Successionis Regni Angliae, Libri Duo, edited, translated and published by James Gatherer as The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England in Two Books (London, 1703); Jus Feudale, trans. J.A. Clyde as The Jus Feudale (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1934); De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, 1605, ed. and trans. C. Sanford Terry, (Edinburgh, 1909); and De Hominio Disputatio Adversus eos qui Scotiam Feudum Ligium Angliae, Regemque Scotorum eo Nomine Hominium Anglo Debere Asserunt, trans. and published by George Ridpath as Scotland’s Soveraignty Asserted (London, 1695). 13 Surprisingly, none of the contributors to Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner’s two-volume exploration of Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge, 2002) considers Craig’s work. For valuable recent work on the succession crisis – that does not, however, discuss Craig’s tract – see J.C. Mayer (ed.), Breaking the Silence on the Succession: A Sourcebook of Manuscripts and Rare Elizabethan Texts (c. 1587–1603) (Montpellier, 2003) and J.C. Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier, 2004).

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Although not published until 1703, The Right of Succession was written around the turn of the seventeenth century – about the same time that Thomas Wilson asserted that only the general consent of all in parliament could make a king. Craig produced it, seemingly at the King’s behest, at a point when James’s chances of inheriting the English throne at all, let alone on terms compatible with his conception of a ‘free monarchy’, appeared to be rapidly receding. The final product (which circulated widely in manuscript) won his hearty approval.14 In The Right of Succession Craig explicitly attacked ‘Doleman’, the Jesuit Robert Persons, and the arguments he advanced in his notorious Conference about the next succession to the crown of England, published in 1594. According to Craig, Persons wrote on behalf of ‘Jesuites’ attempting to ‘exclude the True Successors from the Inheritances of their Ancestors’, in the interest of forwarding a universal empire ruled by the Pope and the king of Spain.15 Craig thus followed what was by this time the welltrodden road of attributing inflammatory views to Catholic outliers, in this case not simply Catholics, or even Jesuits tout court, but specifically a zealous subgroup that he depicted as intent on establishing what was, in the Anglo-Scottish context, the most egregious of tyrannies. In pursuit of this agenda (and to cover his tracks), Craig argues that Persons maliciously sought to seduce the people. Throughout the Conference he never fails to bestow the honourable Title of the Common-Wealth, upon the Multitude, affirming them to have the strength and sinews of the Government in themselves, and consequently a power, from which there lies no appeal, of judging their Kings, and the Children of their Kings; of Choosing Kings for themselves, or rejecting them, and of admitting or rejecting their Successors.

Persons thus sings the siren song of popular representative government and elective kingship, whilst advancing ‘those destructive Principles, which serve to render Kings themselves obnoxious to the judgment of the rash unthinking Mob … That it is Lawful for the People to Dethrone and Depose (to say no worse) even the Persons of Kings’.16 14 Helen Stafford, James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England (London, 1940), esp. pp. 190–98. Wallace MacCaffrey argues that Burghley’s interregnal arrangements were designed at least in part specifically to prevent James’s accession, in Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton, 1981), p. 479. For James’s positive response, see James Gatherer’s Preface to The Right of Succession, n. pag. 15 Craig, Right of Succession, Dedication, n. pag. 16 Ibid., n. pag. The meaning of ‘obnoxious’ is an obsolete one that was common both when Craig wrote and Gatherer translated: ‘Subject to the rule, power, or authority of another; answerable, amenable to some authority; dependent, subject; (hence) submissive, obsequious, deferential (to a person).’ The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1989), s.v. ‘obnoxious a.’ (OED Online, http://dictionary. oed.com/cgi/entry/00329286).

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The subsequent print careers of both Craig’s and Persons’s treatises suggest, however, that Craig’s target audience was actually those Protestant Englishmen who either shared or might be prepared to commit to those ‘destructive principles’, depending on political circumstance. In 1703 James Gatherer, the Scottish Jacobite apologist, translated and published Craig’s tract. He did so on the grounds that Craig’s critique was as immediately applicable to the Britain of his day as it had been at the time Craig wrote. Applicable, and if anything more pressingly necessary, Persons’s pernicious principles having been so copiously, variously, trenchantly – and even elegantly – disseminated from the 1640s onwards. Especially since the time of the Exclusion Crisis, Gatherer wrote: … [t]he Abetters of Doleman’s tenets, have not only taken care to have his Book printed and reprinted …, but many other Books which have the same tendency with Doleman’s have of late years had fine Editions; Such as Harrington’s Oceana; Milton who was the chief Advocate for the Murderers of King Charles I his Political Works; Ludlow, one of the Parricides, his Memoirs, and innumerable other Books written against the Monarchy, and which generally are so many virulent Libels against the Royal Family.17

The timing of Craig’s own original interjection in the debate also suggests that it was a matter of some urgency to deflect those who might invoke those principles in order to thwart James’s succession at the Queen’s death. How then did Craig attempt to persuade Englishmen to block their ears against Persons’s blandishments? How did he position James as the legitimate, and only, king in waiting to the English crown, blood-right heir to a British empire? I want to explore three aspects of his argument. I will begin by investigating his definition of true monarchy, before turning to his related attempt to disallow the legitimacy of non-monarchical forms of government. In conclusion I show how Craig uses the equation of monarchical with patriarchal authority as a means of nullifying what had come to be, as the monarchical republic took form, the two greatest impediments to James’s succession to the English throne: his Scottish identity and his status as Mary Queen of Scots’s son. Craig begins by arguing that, in the words of one early chapter title, ‘Monarchy is the most Ancient, and the Best of all Governments.’ It was instituted by God in conformity with the law of nature. True monarchy is hereditary, not elective, and God has given evident testimony of how greatly He ‘abhors and detests’ the exercise of collective sovereignty, whether ‘Aristocracy or Democracy’. (Throughout the text Craig uses 17 Gatherer, Preface to Craig, Right of Succession, n. pag. During the 1640s the Conference was partially reprinted at least twice as anti-royalist propaganda. The republican martyr Algernon Sidney reprinted it in its entirety in 1681 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, and the first book was republished separately in 1683.

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the pairing ‘aristocracy or democracy’ to denominate all governments other than true monarchies.18) According to Craig, kingly authority arose immediately from paternal authority, both among God’s people and among the gentiles. It was, and is, absolute (although, as he later makes clear, not unlimited):19 Now Families at first were a kind of small Monarchies, which increas’d and became … considerable … In those families, … Government by many, whether Aristocratical or Democratical was never seen or heard of, no footstep of any such thing in those days on Record. Yea nothing can be more contrary to reason, than that the Government of any, but that of their one Lord, shou’d have obtain’d in their Families. Nor is it otherwise in Families at this day, the Master of the Family commands, all the rest in their different Stations being oblig’d to Obey, the Wife lovingly, the Child with Reverence, and the Servants with Fear and Observance. No Seditions or Accusations against the Master of the Family, no Laws given him by his Family, for governing it; nor was he ever forc’d from his House and Possessions by his Family … They had then no positive Laws, to be the measure of their Obedience; ’twas only Nature, that Divinae Particula Aurae.

‘By the only Instinct of Nature’ men embraced monarchy for their own safety, for it is only through the person of the superior man, the king, that men can be ‘Incorporated into Bodies Politic … to enjoy by mutual help the Common advantages and benefits, which arise [therefrom]’.20 Natural law simply confirms God’s law. ‘[T]here never was any other form of Government among God’s People than Monarchy.’ Even before the establishment of kingship the children of Israel ‘had nothing to do with … a Government by many’, being governed by ‘only one Judge in Israel at once’.21 For Craig, the identity between families and monarchies, and the central role of the father in each, also demonstrates that true kingship is hereditary, not elective: Was ever Father chosen by his Children, or is there place for Election in Families? … None were sent to School to learn to Honour their Father, that being natural to Children, who have their Beings from him; for the same reason we are naturally oblig’d to pay Honour and Observance to our Prince as the Common Father of the Country, to whom we owe our well being in Civil Society.

And again, divine law corroborates natural law. ‘It is clear’, he announces, ‘that in instituting kings God ever preferred hereditary to elective Craig, Right of Succession, see e.g. pp. 5, 9, 16. For this distinction see n. 6 above. For varieties of absolutist thought in the seventeenth century see J.P. Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Royalism’, pp. 347–73 in J.H. Burns (ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991). 20 Craig, Right of Succession, pp. 14–15, 16. 21 Ibid., pp. 159, 16. 18 19

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succession.’ Elective monarchy, being both unnatural and ungodly, leaves its subjects prey to the lusts of a magistracy that can only be regarded as outlaw. One eighteenth-century reader, impressed by the range of examples that Craig offered to substantiate this proposition, drew the obvious conclusion. He noted in the margin ‘Hereditary Kings mostly good & Religious. Elected Kings cruel & Bloody.’23 By the same token, God’s ‘refusal to countenance’ any form of collective sovereignty is well attested, both negatively and positively.24 So far is God from approving these alternative arrangements that ‘there is no mention either of one or other of these Governments [aristocracies or democracies] in all the Sacred Scriptures’. Even before the children of Israel had kings, ‘there is no footstep of any Republican kind of Government among them’.25 Craig uses the Biblical story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram in this work and again, in more combative terms, in his De Unione, to show God’s categorical rejection of political egalitarianism, even that predicated on a common spiritual status. In the Old Testament account, Korah, Dathan and Abiram ‘gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron’. According to Craig these ringleaders, and their ‘two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown’ were envious of Moses’ authority and ‘aimed to establish aristocracy’. They charged Moses and Aaron with wrongly elevating themselves above the brethren: ‘Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?’. These words, says Craig ‘plainly manifest[ed] a desire to associate themselves with Moses and Aaron in the governance of the people’. God punished their presumption by having the earth open up to swallow the ringleaders, their followers, their households and all their possessions. Craig concludes approvingly that He thereby ‘miraculously testified for Moses and monarchy’.26 If, as Craig alleges, ‘Kings only are of Ancient date’, and if hereditary absolute monarchy enjoys the sanction of both divine and natural law, how then did alternative forms of government arrive on the scene and 22

22 Craig, De Unione, p. 228. I include references to De Unione in this section, since Craig covers the same ground in both texts. 23 Craig, Right of Succession, p. 103, in the edition in the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. 24 Craig, De Unione, p. 228. 25 Craig, Right of Succession, pp. 9, 16. In making this categorical assertion Craig may well have been responding to ‘resistance theory’ texts that argued otherwise, especially (at this point) Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos (anon., [Basel], 1579). For this interpretation see Anne McLaren, ‘Rethinking Republicanism: Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos in Context’, The Historical Journal 49/1 (2006): 23–52. 26 De Unione, p. 228; cf. Numbers 16:1–50, quotations from verses 2 and 3 (King James version).

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become established?27 Craig’s answer is simple: degeneration. Because, as contemporaries well knew, nothing is perfect under heaven, gentile kings began to abuse their power, ‘claiming to have it Absolute [by which he means unlimited] in all things’.28 It was the declination of kingly power into ‘Tyranny and Licentiousness’ that first ‘gave occasion to the framing of Republics’. The precedent that he cites is the Roman republic, founded in an act of rebellion against the despotic monarchical careers of the Tarquins, father and son, and bearing the ineradicable taint of its genesis in its subsequent bloody career. In contrast to true monarchy, republics ‘were not instituted from any Natural cause, for the safety of humane Society’. Instead, they resulted from violent attempts to reform errant monarchs; by implication those who became kings through election or through conquest, its analogue and concomitant. 29 Craig acknowledges that the historical record abounds with instances of these alternatives to hereditary monarchy; worse still, he finds that in his day they enjoy a succès d’estime that they should in no way inspire. He is at pains to prove that, whether ancient or modern, they are debased forms of government. Inevitably they betray their distance from the true monarchy that God has ordained as man’s fitting earthly habitation. At best ancient republics were inconsequential, like those that were current in Aristotle’s time. Established ‘only in a part of Greece’, they were insignificant, even in relation to Greece, not to mention the rest of the world. Nor did they amount to much. ‘Never any thing of consequence was perform’d by the Athenians after they came to be a Common-wealth’ – a wrong turning that occurred only once the ‘whole Posterity’ of their legitimate kings failed. At worst, like the Roman republic, they were steeped in blood. In modern times the different forms of non-monarchical government that have obtained in ‘Florence, Genoa and also in Venice … always took their Rise from the perpetual Butcheries of the Citizens’.30 Craig pleads with Englishmen not to embark on republican experiments, ‘as some restless Incendiaries, wou’d perswade them that they may and ought to do’, urging for their examples ‘the Ancient Athenians, Thebans Craig, Right of Succession, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. For the distinction see n. 6 above. 29 Ibid., pp. 15, 159. For the Tarquins see ‘Lucius Tarquinius Superbus’, The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th edn (New York, 2003), online, http://www. answers.com/topic/lucius-tarquinius-priscus. 30 Craig, Right of Succession, pp. 158–9. Craig does allow for elected monarchies, as the least-bad alternative when there is no blood-right successor: ‘[T]he right of election belongs to the people, when the whole royal progeny fails, to choose whom they think fittest to govern them, but otherwise they have no such privilege’ (ibid., p. 218). Given humanity’s relatedness and human ingenuity (as evidenced in French regnal sequences, for example), it is hard to know when this case might occur. He does not explain how it befell the Athenians. 27 28

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and Romans, and for Latter ages Venice, the Swiss Cantons and other Democracies’. They must not – indeed cannot – alter ‘the Fundamental Laws of the Kingdom’. These laws, ‘confirm’d by a constant Succession of Ages and men’, prescribe hereditary monarchy, and the right of inheritance to the blood heirs of William the Conqueror.31 Even to credit the Queen with the power to nominate or determine her successor – a project much in favour in the 1590s – is ‘the same thing with Election’. It flouts England’s fundamental laws and will, by ‘changing the Constitution of the Kingdom, … bring in a new Model of Government’.32 To entertain any of these alternatives threatens England with declension from her elect status: And if that be true which Polydore [Vergil] and some other writers have said, that the Kingdom of England is the Kingdom of God, care ought certainly to be taken by all means, that nothing be done, in respect of the Succession, that is either against God or contrary to his Laws.33

Using a rhetorical strategy that he adopts throughout the text, Craig advances a threat to pair with this flattering premise. Should any other than the true heir (that is, James) succeed to the crown, the English will experience sanguinary consequences familiar to them from their past history, specifically the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses. God will once again announce His displeasure through the medium of a conquering army: I do not pretend to be a Prophet, but yet we may reasonably suppose, that he who has the better Title, if he finds himself postponed, and slighted, will leave no stone unturn’d, for recovering his Right, and for being avenged of his Enemy: And in case he cannot depend upon the strength of his own Subjects, for attaining those ends, he will call in foreign Auxiliaries to his assistance; and some of them will find Stones and Rubbish in the Ruines of great Buildings, wherewith to erect stately Houses and Portico’s for themselves.34

In hereditary monarchies ‘there is no occasion for an Interrex or an Interregnum’, Craig states categorically – as though in immediate response to Burghley and his concilar colleagues’ ruminations on possible alternative configurations. In England, with its ‘fundamental laws’, the situation is exactly as it is in France. In England too ‘“the dead King gives life to the next Successor”, that is, puts him in Possession of the Kingdom’: he is ‘seized’ by the crown. In England too (and pace Persons), only ‘Birth-right makes a King’.35 Coronation rituals, including the conventional elements of election and acclamation, are ‘only Ceremonial’. Like the giving of the Ibid., pp. 5–6, 133. Ibid., p. 132. 33 Ibid., p. 137. 34 Ibid., 422–3. 35 Ibid., pp. 71, 252, 211. For French developments see Ralph E. Giesey, ‘The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to the French Throne’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser., 51/5 (1961), and Richard A. Jackson, 31 32

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ring in marriage, such ceremonies celebrate possession by right. In the case of kings, they put them in mind of their duty, ‘at their very receiving of the Kingdom, lest they should think, that they may do what they please’, as though God would not call them to account for their actions.36 (Presumably the same applies to husbands, at the point at which they take possession of their wives.37) Craig’s claims for the absolute entitlement of the bloodright king reach their logical terminus ad quem when he argues that by definition a true king cannot be a tyrant: With Livy I define a Tyrant to be one who brought no right to the Kingdom with him or had no other right to it, but only violence, and not him who rules Tyrannically. But if he did Succeed lawfully to his Predecessors, tho’ he rule unjustly, tho’ he oppresses the people, yet he is not a Tyrant. ’Tis one thing to be a Lawful King, and another to be a just man.38

How then does Craig position James as not only the fully empowered king of England (in succession to Elizabeth), but also as one from whose accession the English have nothing to fear, and everything to gain? This was not a simple matter, given his doubly ambiguous status as a Scot and the son of Mary Queen of Scots – and, on Craig’s reading, a conqueror in waiting, should his blood right be slighted. The answer lies in the gender politics that Craig employs. At one level, despite his equation of paternal and kingly power, Craig’s tract is genderblind. It credits Elizabeth with the same monarchical authority as any of her male predecessors. She, like them, came to the throne on the basis of blood right, and Deborah, just as much as Samuel, was a judge in Old Testament Israel.39 But Craig is also able to exploit the assumptions that underpin his patriarchal model of government to position James as a ‘natural’ king of England, the facts of his birth and breeding notwithstanding. He does so in terms that anchored royalist political discourse throughout James’s reign and beyond, from (to cite James’s own contributions) the 1603 Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984). 36 Craig, Right of Succession, p. 209. 37 See, for example, ibid., p. 207, where Craig turns Persons’s metaphors of allegiance against him: ‘And to use that example, so frequent in Doleman, The King is the Husband of the Commonwealth, and its head also, and the Faith of Husband and Wife is mutual; yet it does not follow, that the Wife is Superior or Equal to the Husband, tho’ he swore to be faithful to her. Neither is the man to be reckon’d inferior, because he plights his Faith to her, but with her Fidelity the Husband receives Power and Authority over his Wife, and all her goods, at the same time with an Oath. Now if he beats his Wife, or uses her ill, or wasts all her Estate prodigally, does he forfeit his Authority, and Command as a Husband? Or is he to be rejected by his Wife?’ 38 Ibid., p. 186. Craig’s use of ‘tyrant’ and ‘tyranny’ is not consistent throughout the text. 39 Ibid., pp. 402–3 for the explicit pairing of Elizabeth with Deborah.

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republication in England of Basilicon Doron and The True Law of Free Monarchies to the reissue of James’s Workes in 1620. Throughout the text Craig insists that James’s pedigree makes him English by nature. ‘He is an English man [and] the Son of an English man [Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley].’ Indeed, … if all things were weigh’d in a just balance, he is by more degrees in blood descended of the English than of the Scots Line. His Father, his Grandmother, his great Grandmother, all English: Again altho’ his Mother and Grandfather were Sovereigns of Scotland, yet he comes to be an English man again in his great Grand mother, so that were this whole affair examined by a Geometrical proportion, he would be found to be by one and a half English.40

Should the mathematics prove unpersuasive, Craig advances a supplementary argument. He invokes men’s natural and God-ordained superiority to women, that bedrock of social and political order made newly relevant with the popularity of Jean Bodin’s De republica libri sex.41 According to Craig, James’s father Darnley’s marriage to Mary Queen of Scots in 1566 did not compromise his English identity. Secure in his manhood Darnley ‘remain’d a Subject of the King of England’.42 It is for this reason that James is an English man, for lawful children follow the condition of the father in all matters.43 That same superiority means that Mary’s legacy, personal and/or political, cannot compromise James’s character, or disable him from the succession. Because the man possesses the woman when they marry, any woman, including a queen, is subsumed in the person of her husband. Neither her nationality nor her breeding can so taint the offspring as to render him incapable of entering into his patrimony. In support of this argument, Craig adduces the prophylactic effect of royal blood, which ‘cannot be tainted’: ‘[F]or such is the Prerogative and Dignity of Royal Blood, that it’s uncapable of legal stain, neither does it suffer it self to be contaminated with any … blemish whatsoever, but throws out all such impurities and even any infectious or venomous contacts.’ Thus the true heir lawfully claims the crown, even if convicted of treason in his own person.44

Ibid., p. 427. See also pp. 353, 357. Craig refers to Bodin frequently and enthusiastically in all his works. Here the reference is to Six Livres de la République [1576] (6 vols, Paris, 1986), bk I, ch. 6. 42 Ibid., p. 293. It would seem that Craig positions Elizabeth as an honorary male at this point, referring to her as ‘king’, since to make Darnley subject to a queen would at least undermine, if not invalidate, his argument. Note that in his sermons extolling monarchy and Elizabeth’s queenship Laurence Humphrey does the same. See p. 167 above. 43 ‘Patris conditionem in omnibus sequuntur’ (ibid., pp. 293–5; at 293). 44 Ibid., pp. 295–6. See Giesey, ‘Juristic Basis’, 13–17. 40 41

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For Craig, the child is the son of the father in every sense, biogenetically as much as legally.45 His reification of this patrilineal norm enables Craig to posit reciprocal bonds of kindness – that is, the natural affection arising from kinship – between James and the men who will become his English subjects at Elizabeth’s death:46 … to whom can he more safely entrust himself, and the safety of his person than to his own English and his Fathers Kindred? For it is common to all men, to entrust all their concerns rather to their Kinsmen by the Father side than to their Mothers Kindred, and to bear a far greater kindness to those who are of the race or line of the Father, than to those of the Mother.47

As English men, they, and he, share a common heritage and entitlement, as fathers, husbands and sons. Craig thus invokes a nation-specific manifestation of their status as men: made in God’s image, and endowed by Him with inalienable (albeit gender-specific) rights and responsibilities. That common identity will lead English men to recognize James as their own, as simultaneously one of the brethren, and their ‘common father’. The fruits of that recognition, communicated through English men’s loving embrace of their father king, will found a British empire of grace. Or, in Craig’s visionary terms, it will give the kingdoms of England and Scotland, now united in the person of their one king, ‘the true Form of a Man, or rather of a Virgin, [with] one only Head which may Govern the whole of it, … so that for Figure and Gracefull Comelyness, she may not be put to the Blush, when compared with the Neighbouring Provinces’.48 ‘[O]nly such as Succeed in the Kingdom by Nature and the Right of Blood or Birth [can be called] natural Princes.’49 Only the birthright king can be the common father of the country. James’s patriline – his true English manhood – means that his accession to the English throne, and only his accession, will finally restore the natural political and social order destabilized by minor and female rulers after the death of Henry VIII. The alternative, Craig warns, is not collective sovereignty and freedom, but

45 In making this move, Craig seems to follow the French jurist, Jean de Terre Rouge, who grounded legitimate succession, and justified absolute royal power, on the basis of the genetic propagation of kingly qualities via semen. In the early modern period semen was understood as a blood product. For Terre Rouge, see Giesey, ‘Juristic Basis’, esp. 13–17. Terre Rouge’s ideas had become ‘well-nigh universal’ by the late sixteenth century (17). 46 OED Online, s.v. ‘kindness, 1’; but see also the second obsolete definition, ‘Sc. Natural right or title derived from birth or descent’. http://dictionary.oed.com/ cgi/entry/50126741. 47 Craig, Right of Succession, p. 353. 48 Ibid, p. 415. ‘She’ is both Britain and the True Church. 49 Ibid, p. 134.

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ochlocracy and slavery – not a new model kingship, but despotism, figured as Spanish rule:50 … no English man will persuade himself that the yoke of Spain is so light and tolerable, nor that the Spaniards are gentle or merciful towards their Subjects. For as people live farther to the South, Lords and Masters are the more severe and passionate, and the Servants most obsequious and most laborious. But on the contrary in the Northern parts Servants are almost equal to their Masters, and the Masters are always kind and affable to them … And if the English … receive the Spaniards for their Lords and Masters, they … must make a body of meer common people, without any share of the Government, without authority or power, and without esteem.51

‘Precedents in the Time of Minors, of Tyrants, of Women, of simple Kings’ are ‘not to be credited’, James told his first parliament in 1604.52 With these words we can see him announcing the demise of the monarchical republic – optimistically, in the event. In the polarized political context of 1621 he attacked again, in a speech to parliament sufficiently incendiary that (contrary to usual practice) efforts were made to prevent its circulation.53 At the beginning of the last parliament of his reign he explicated once again to his recalcitrant South British subjects the relationship that must subsist between kings and their parliaments in order for them to present ‘the true form of a man’, insisting that his model figured the only permissible version of collective sovereignty. Parliaments ‘were invented by kings’, he told MPs. They are always correlative of the body politic – like it they are ‘composed of a head, the king, and a body, the lords and commons’ – but they do not represent it. The body does not and cannot exist without the head: parliament does not and never can represent the whole body of the realm. In a true monarchy – that is, one ruled by a fully empowered blood-right king – the king ‘is always present’ in parliament, immediately or representatively, through members of the Upper House. Thus the ability to make law derives from and remains with the person of the king. Parliament exists to express the king’s will. In free monarchies, 50 Craig here refers simultaneously to the candidacy for the English throne of the Spanish infanta, and more generally to the spectre of Spanish, Catholic conquest that had been developed and deployed by zealous Protestants from Elizabeth’s accession to mobilize support for the linked integers of her queenship and Protestantism. See Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999). 51 Ibid., p. 395. 52 ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 1: 29 March 1604 (2nd scribe)’, Journal of the House of Commons, vol. I 1547–1629 (1802), online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=9648. 53 So the Venetian ambassador Girolamo Lando reported on 26 Feb. 1621 in a covering letter accompanying a copy of the speech: Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts … in the Archives and Collections of Venice …, ed. Rawdon Brown et al. (38 vols, London, 1864–1947), vol. 16, 1619–21, p. 577. Quotations from the speech itself are on p. 582.

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where natural kings are fathers of the country, parliament attains its perfect form when both houses, and all members, bow to the king’s supremacy, determine his will, and communicate it, with one voice and to the best of their variable abilities, to all corners of the commonwealth; when, in the public realm, it acts as wife to the king’s husband. In every sense parliament is subject to and depends on the king. Failure to acknowledge the king’s primacy threatens social order, English fundamental law – and with it the existence of parliament itself. ‘A parliament man who affects popularity acts against the nature of parliament, because the free states of Germany, the Netherlands and where the king is elective, have no parliament.’ In this volatile context, unsurprisingly, rumours flew that anticipated a climacteric, whether the introduction of tyranny on the one hand, or the inauguration of a monarchical republic on the other. Within three months of this speech the Venetian ambassador reported that two books published in Paris were selling freely on the streets of London. ‘One states that the king here by proclamation has granted free exercise to the Catholics of these realms. The other that the parliament has deposed him, beheading the favourites and putting Prince Charles in his stead.’54

54

Another report by Lando, 21 May 1621 (ibid., vol. 18, p. 53).

ESSAY 10

Reading for Magistracy: The Mental World of Sir John Newdigate Richard Cust On 14 December 1606 Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamp’s Court, Warwickshire, was buried in the family vault of the parish church at Alcester. At the time of his death Greville was custos rotulorum of the county bench and much admired by his fellow justices as ‘a worthie patriot’ and paragon of godly magistracy. ‘In his time no man did beare a greater sway in the countie of Warwick then himselfe’, proclaimed the family’s self-appointed historian, Thomas Spencer, Calvinist minister at Budbrooke; ‘he was a gentleman full of affabilitie and courtesie, and much given to hospitalitie, which got the love of his whole countrie.’1 His passing was a notable local event, widely lamented, and among the principal mourners was his old friend and protégé, Sir John Newdigate of Arbury, who prepared an oration for the occasion. This was a sketch of the ideal godly magistrate, a role to which Greville, and indeed Newdigate himself, aspired. The deceased, Newdigate declared, was such a chosen man as Jethro advised Moses to chuse, for he feared God, was a man of courage, delte truly & hated covetousnes. Nether did he there rest but from one vertue proceded to an other. For he was, as Moses desired, a man of wisedome, knowledge and good reporte. Nether was he a respecter of persons in judgement, but there with Job was the feete to the lawe & eyes to the blinde … for he plucked the poore out of the teath of the mighty … His love was such to his cuntrey that it was truly said of him

1 ‘The Genealogie, Life and Death of the right Honourable Robert Lord Brooke’, ed. Philip Styles, in Miscellany I, ed. Robert Bearman, Dugdale Society, vol. xxxi (Oxford, 1977), pp. 159–96, at 168. I am greatly indebted to Dr Vivienne Larminie, whose work on the Newdigate papers first revealed their value for historians of early Stuart England. She has been most generous in sharing her knowledge of this collection. For an excellent account of Newdigate’s writings, see her paper on The Godly Magistrate: The Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate 1571–1610, Dugdale Society Occasional Paper, 28 (1982). I am also grateful to the staff at the Warwickshire Record Office for their helpfulness and courtesy.

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My children well I love, but of my harte My native soile by farre had greater parte.2

The quintessential virtues of wisdom, incorruptibility, courage, love of justice, love of country and, above all, love of God were held up by Newdigate as an example for all to follow. In particular he addressed Greville’s eldest son, calling on him to ‘imitate his father’, and expressing the hope that ‘his father’s vertues may with his living be hereditary to him’. The funeral was one of those set pieces which encapsulated many of the prime features of what Patrick Collinson has called ‘the Monarchical Republic of Elizabethan England’. The eldest son being addressed by Newdigate was none other than Fulke Greville, poet and friend of Sir Philip Sidney, whose biographical commentary on his hero Collinson describes as a ‘proto Whig manifesto’ which applied the ‘quasi republican’ modes of thinking of late sixteenth-century England. Greville outlined how Sidney had stood out against threats to English liberties and the Protestant regime, such as the Anjou marriage, and opposed himself to the ‘metamorphosing’ ‘our moderate form of monarchie into a precipitate absolutness’. Greville was not anti-monarchical. Collinson sums up his approach citing Blair Worden’s description of the English republicanism of this period as ‘first and foremost a criticism of tyrants rather than a rejection of kings’. But he did believe that monarchy was a public office. A monarch’s actions should therefore be limited by respect for laws and liberties and a sense of responsibility to the respublica, meaning literally ‘public thing’, but most commonly translated by contemporaries as ‘common weal’ or ‘country’.3 Sir Fulke Greville senior represented another side of the ‘Monarchical Republic’: the ideals of the numerous ‘gentry republics’ and parish meetings of the day in which systems of self-government were devised and acted on by groups of men who acknowledged each other as virtuous citizens. Locally, he was acclaimed as a model of those ‘fathers of the country’ or ‘good commonwealthmen’ who had the courage and integrity to lead and represent the concerned and active citizenry of the provinces. His funeral was one of those occasions on which the members of the Warwickshire ‘republic’ came together to affirm their common values. Then, thirdly, there is Newdigate himself, less prominent and less renowned, but a professed admirer of Sidney and an important figure on 2 Warwickshire Record Office [hereafter WRO], Newdigate collection, CR 136, B/701. 3 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92, at 61. For the ‘Monarchical Republic’ more generally, see Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, and ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 1–57.

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the Warwickshire county bench where, year after year, he delivered jury charges which summed up the ideals subscribed to by the local citizenry. Newdigate is the main focus of this essay, not just because of what he did or said, but because he wrote so much of it down, in pages and pages of notes, jottings, drafts and memoranda which taken together provide an unparalleled insight into the reading practices and thought processes of a late Elizabethan provincial magistrate. Through Newdigate it is possible to explore an aspect of the ‘Monarchical Republic’ which has hitherto largely escaped the attention of historians: how its core values were formed and transmitted at the level of the provincial magistracy. ••••• Many of the guiding principles of the ‘Monarchical Republic’ can be traced back to the classical authorities and their humanist interpreters who provided much of the basic reading for the educated classes in Elizabethan England. Key concepts, such as ‘public’ and ‘private’, service of ‘the country’ and active citizenship, derived ultimately from the group of Stoic authors with whom Elizabethans were most familiar: Quintilian, Plutarch, Seneca, Sallust and above all, Cicero, whose De Officiis was virtually a handbook for the conscientious Elizabethan magistrate. The works of these writers provided what Quentin Skinner calls ‘a normative vocabulary’ through which contemporaries sought to legitimate their actions and make sense of the political world around them. All this is relatively well known from the work of Skinner, Markku Peltonen, Margo Todd, Richard Tuck and, of course, Collinson.4 But less fully understood is the process by which this vocabulary, and the rhetorics and values associated with it, were absorbed and assimilated. It has long been recognized that most educated gentlemen by the late Tudor period had a thorough grounding in the main civil and moral texts of classical culture. What has been less readily appreciated, however, is the intensity with which many of them, especially those aspiring to public office, continued with a process of self-education long after they had left school or university. The best study we have of this is the work done by Stuart Clark and Kevin Sharpe on the classical reading and commonplacing of the Buckinghamshire MP, William Drake. They show that Drake pursued a carefully planned programme of reading throughout his life, working his way through classical texts and humanist commentaries, extracting 4 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, pp. xi–xiii; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), chs 1–3.

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the most useful material, classifying it under analytical headings and finally committing it to memory. He aimed to acquire what Sharpe calls an ‘arsenal of prudence’ which would enable him to understand the ‘arcana vitae civilis’ and bring this knowledge to bear on his own life. Drake’s reading was intended to be of direct practical use. He was not looking for the veneer of classical learning which was taken to be one of the hallmarks of a gentleman. His studies were intended to yield a series of rules or maxims which could guide him in politics and all the other areas of his life.5 In this respect, Drake was not untypical. Advice to sons from the late Elizabethan period onwards often contain injunctions to devote at least part of each day to reading and study. Learning was essential, Sir Christopher Wandesford told his children, if they were to understand ‘how to assist in the government of [their] contry and, indeed, how to behave according to that degree God almighty [had] placed [them] in’. To this end, he and other fathers offered detailed guidance, down to lists of which authors to read and what lessons to draw from them.6 Where Drake was different from the gentry under consideration here was in his profoundly sceptical attitude to politics. His favourite classical author was Tacitus, and amongst sixteenth-century writers Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Sir Francis Bacon. Like all of them, he adopted a thoroughly cynical view of the world of politics, seeing it as dominated by self-interest and deceit. But Drake belonged to a generation which was educated in the 1620s and came to political prominence in the 1630s and 1640s. They had had time to absorb what Richard Tuck calls the ‘new humanism’ of the Tacitists.7 This was not the case for the late Elizabethan magistrates who went to university in the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s and provided the leaders of county society up to the 1620s. Their outlook was shaped much more by the Stoical belief in self-improvement and positive reform through active political engagement. Sir John Newdigate is perhaps the best-documented example of a gentleman-reader from this generation. He studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the late 1580s and served on the Warwickshire bench from 5 Stuart Clark, ‘Wisdom Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Guide to the Contents of the ‘‘Bacon–Tottel’’ Commonplace Books, part I’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1976): 291–305; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000), particularly chs 2–4. 6 A Book of Instructions, written by the right honourable Sir Christopher Wandesforde … to his son and heir, George Wandesforde, etc., ed. T. Comber (Cambridge, 1777), pp. 10–11, 18–19, 30; ‘The Institution of a Gentleman. In three parts. By William Higford esq. [c.1630]’, in The Harleian Miscellany, ed. T. Park (10 vols, London, 1808–13), vol. ix, p. 592. 7 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 40.

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1598 until his death in 1610. Like Drake, he pursued an exhaustive programme of reading and commonplacing designed to furnish him with practical guidance on his duties as a magistrate. But his favourite classical author was Plutarch, and amongst humanist authors he tended to concentrate on advice literature derived from the Stoics, such as Thomas North’s translation of Antonio De Guevara’s Dial of Princes, Pierre De La Primaudaye’s French Academy, and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor and The Image of Governance. From his reading he derived a much more optimistic view of politics. Newdigate’s surviving notebooks and study programmes reveal a remarkably sustained curriculum of reading and self-improvement. On 19 June 1604 he recorded a heroic determination to study for eight hours each day: ‘two howers daily to serve God; 2 howers of moral matters; 2 howers of histories; 2 of justis’. He managed this each day until 1 July, then broke off to visit his neighbour, Mr Chamberlain of Astley, for sheep shearing. Subsequent visits to Sir Fulke Greville and to supervise his coal pits interrupted his studies; but he still managed to meet the eight-hour target on 4 July, 20–22 July and 5 August. On other days when he was at home he generally managed between two and five hours; it is apparent from his notebooks that this was much closer to his norm.9 Nonetheless this was an impressive achievement, and one which his notes suggest was sustained for much of the decade. His studies were concentrated in the four broad categories referred to in his 1604 resolution. Priority was always given to what he called ‘serving God’, a daily round of prayer and contemplation based on the Bible and guides to practical divinity by authors such as John Dod, Richard Greenham and William Perkins. Newdigate was a prime example of the type of conscientious Puritan gentleman who tried to live his life according to God’s word. His lengthy meditations on the themes of ‘mortification’ and ‘that spoken to my sinne’, his assiduous attendance at and noting of sermons and his close relationship with the Calvinist minister of Nuneaton, William Butterton, were all testimony to his aspirations to godliness and the dominant role these played in his life and his studies.10 But closely coupled with this was his dedication to virtuous self-improvement. This was his second area of concern: ‘moral matters’, ‘proceeding in virtue’ and making ‘warre … with vice’. For Newdigate this meant, primarily, seeking to acquire the four cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, 8

8 Vivienne M. Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 9–10; TNA, C. 231, fol. 29. 9 WRO, CR 136, V/148, pp. 153–5. 10 For Newdigate’s Puritanism, see Vivienne M. Larminie, ‘The Lifestyle and Attitudes of the Seventeenth Century Gentleman, with Special Reference to the Newdigates of Arbury Hall Warwickshire’ (diss. Birmingham, 1980), pp. 363–5, 375–82.

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fortitude and wisdom and learning how to apply them to his own life. To this end he relied primarily on the Bible, supported by a wide range of broadly Christian humanist conduct literature which included the writings of Elyot, Guevara, De La Primaudaye and Thomas More, translations of foreign works such as Francois De Noue’s The Poleticke and Military Discourses and the latest homegrown manuals, such as William Vaughan’s The Golden Grove and Sir Willam Cornwallis’s Essayes which he was often reading within a few weeks of publication. His third principal area of study was ‘histories’ which he defined in some notes on Livy as a fund of stories and examples, ‘to see the good to follow and the evill to flee’.11 His favourite ancient historian was Plutarch, whose Lives, translated by Thomas North, he read and reread. But he also engaged in close readings of Livy’s Histories and, for medieval and early Tudor England, Holinshed’s Chronicles and Edward Halle’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families. As his definition indicated, this material overlapped in his mind with ‘moral matters’ and his fourth category of study: ‘justis matters’. The latter encompassed everything he regarded as relevant to his work as a justice of the peace, from narrowly technical guidance on the interpretation of statute – for which he relied on William Lambarde’s handbook for justices, Eirenarcha, and Willam Rastell’s Collection of all the Statutes – to broader moral instruction in what it meant to be a good magistrate – for which he drew on the entire range of his reading, but relied particularly on the Bible, Plutarch’s Lives, Guevara’s Dial of Princes and Elyot’s Governor, as well as more precisely targeted works, such as George Whetstone’s Mirror for Magistrates or Henry Smith’s 1590 sermon The Magistrate’s Scripture. On occasion he would also make notes on topics such as ‘husbandry’; but, for the most part, all the reading and study notes which have survived were concentrated in these four areas. In his approach to reading Newdigate was a product of Elizabethan grammar school education. Unfortunately we do not know where he pursued his early studies. Both his great-uncle and his father attended Eton, but there is no indication that Sir John followed them. However, it is clear that the techniques of study that he learned at school stayed with him. The basic purpose of the grammar school curriculum was to provide a grounding in Latin and instruct pupils in godliness and moral virtue. It involved an extensive training in the reading of texts with a view to extracting maxims and commonplaces which pupils were then instructed to reuse in letters, essays and orations, and commit to memory. They were taught to read texts in stages: first of all straight through, to pick up the general meaning; then more closely, to identify grammatical and stylistic examples; and finally with a view to extracting moral content. To this end they were trained to keep notebooks and commonplace books, organized 11

WRO, CR 136, B/698, p. 12.

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under topical headings such as ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’, in which they recorded gobbets of aphoristic wisdom.12 As Stuart Clark has observed this was the basis of a whole ‘notebook culture’ in Renaissance England in which contemporaries sought ‘to make ancient wisdom accessible by excerpting it, classifying it under headings and sub-headings, and memorizing it’.13 Newdigate followed these methods with considerable precision, reading, cataloguing and notetaking in three stages. The first involved reading a work from start to finish, taking copious notes on the content, but paying particular attention to themes which interested him. The best example of this is his reading of Plutarch over the period May–September 1601. In accordance with his resolution ‘to reade an hower of Plutarque and recorde in this diary what I dayly profit’, he worked his way through the lives of Numa Pompilius, Solon, Theseus, Romulus and Lycurgus, focusing in his notes on passages relating to personal virtue, justice and government. Hence, in his notes on Numa Pompilius he ignored much of Plutarch’s general discussion of Roman life and religion, concentrating instead on how Numa developed his virtue and political skills and then used these to reconcile the Romans and the Sabines and prevent idleness. Similiarly Newdigate’s notes on Phocion ignored Plutarch’s account of his career as an Athenian general and focused on the struggle exemplified in his life between virtue and fortune. It was the same with his reading of another favourite text, Guevara’s Dial of Princes, in which he concentrated on the wise sayings and stories attributed to Marcus Aurelius which particularly related to lawmaking and justice. However, even with this first read through, one can see Newdigate preparing material for later collation and extraction, with marginal notes to summarize the content, such as ‘Idleness punished’, or ‘the frute thes lawes brought’.14 The second level of Newdigate’s study was what can best be described as ‘themed reading’ in which, drawing on a range of works, he would pursue a particular topic, often over several days. One can follow the process in the dated notebooks in which he would summarize and extract from a particular day’s reading. For example, in his notebook covering 2 August 1600 he drew up a list of ‘Books treating of the vanitie of apparel’, beginning with Vaughan’s recently published Golden Grove, Gervase Babington’s expositions of Genesis and the Ten Commandments, Lycurgus’s laws (probably from Guevara’s Familiar Epistles), More’s Utopia and Livy; then on 11 August he took a series of notes from book 3 of The Golden Grove, Lycurgus’s laws and Babington on Genesis on the sinfulness of using apparel ‘to delight men’s appetites’. Similarly in late 12

Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002),

ch. 1. 13 14

Clark, ‘Wisdom Literature’, pp. 211–12. WRO, CR 136, V/148, p. 29 and passim; B/675, 670, 673, 698, 3475.

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August 1601 he was pursuing the theme of ‘Ambition’. On the 25th he read firstly from Babington, then later in the day from The Golden Grove, ch. 25, on ‘remedies against ambition’. On the 26th he spent two hours following this theme in Henry Smith’s sermons, then on the 27th another hour on The Golden Grove, ch. 26, before turning to what Elyot had to say about ‘the frutes of ambition’ in The Governor. On some occasions he was prompted in his choice of theme by a particular task, such as the preparation of a jury charge; on others by something he had read, perhaps in a newly acquired book. Thus, from 27 July 1601, when he started reading Cornwallis’s Essayes, he pursued the themes suggested by the first two, ‘Of resolution’ and ‘Of advise’.15 Throughout his notebooks one can see him combining first- and second-stage reading, with long passages of detailed note-taking mixed with the pursuit of particular themes which occurred to him as he went along. He returned to the same topics again and again, moving crabwise, back and forth, across a familiar repertoire of Erasmian topics such as ‘anger’, ‘idlenes’ and ‘lust’, or ‘justice’, ‘ambition’ and ‘patience’. The third level consisted of extracting maxims, sententiae and examples in a form in which they could be easily digested and memorized. To this end Newdigate kept a series of notebooks and loose sheets of paper organized topically, like the sheet of Biblical proverbs and quotations from Cicero and Marcus Aurelius which he collected under the headings ‘Of almes deedes’ and ‘Against idleness’. In May 1604 he jotted down a resolution ‘To lerne by way of alphabet the most thinges in the bible and others’, and made several entries, such as ‘Absence. Absence of a good magistrate from his government doth great harme … Moses. Ex. 32.1.’ This system appears to have been abandoned fairly quickly, but he persevered with his topical collections and marginal annotations, all of which seem to have been stored up in the homemade filing system ‘in my cubboarde’. The intention was to refine this down and commit the key sayings to memory so that they could be recalled for instant, practical use. He described one notebook as ‘an artificiall memory to benefite ourselves at all times and seasons and in all argumentes’; and next to a set of aphorisms collected together on 12 March 1600/1 he noted a resolution to ‘lerne daily’. ‘Thes sentences’, he reminded himself, ‘are [a] storehous alwaies to be had in hand; and well used doe defend the minde from the filthy fogge of wicked vices.’16 Newdigate’s principal means of acquiring this type of wisdom was through reading, but it was not the only one. In his Almanac for 1608 – which doubled as a diary – he jotted down aphorisms picked up in conversation. For instance, on a visit to Mr Adams on 6 June, he noted a 15 16

Ibid., B/698, pp. 13–14; V/148, pp. 53–5, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37. Ibid., B/664, 648, 698, p. 29.

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gobbet of advice from the Lord Chancellor that ‘Quietnes [in litigation] is a good thing: for by law many louse but none get. Therefore be wise by others harme.’17 He was also an assiduous taker of sermon notes, recording over forty sermons preached locally – mainly by Mr Butterton – during 1606 and early 1607. The content was very similar to his reading, focusing on means by which one acquired godly virtue and counteracted vice. This reflected both his own particular interests and the ways in which the teaching of Calvinist ministers frequently drew on a Christian humanist synthesis of the classical and the Biblical.18 For Newdigate, however, reading remained the principal guide to wisdom; and under a set of notes headed ‘Instructions out of the book of morall philosophie’ he noted approvingly the example of ‘good reading’ provided by Sir Philip Sidney: ‘Ponder well what thou readest. Consider to lerne. Heare much. Speak little. Ask many questions.’19 Recent work on the history of reading has emphasized the degree to which it was ‘goal-centred’, particularly in the late Elizabethan period. Readers were not passive. They engaged in a creative process of interrogating texts according to their own assumptions, and the needs and circumstances of the moment. Thus, when Gabriel Harvey read his Livy, on some occasions he looked for moral guidance, on others for instruction in politics and diplomacy, and on others still direction in military leadership and strategy.20 Newdigate’s approach was similarly purposive. As we have seen his reading programmes focused on moral self-improvement and guidance in his duties as a magistrate. This concentration was entirely deliberate. Under a set of notes on ‘How judges be chosen’, he posed the rhetorical question ‘the judge which never readeth, the judge which never studieth, the judge which never openeth book … how is it possible he executeth true justice?’ Reading, as far as he was concerned, was essential to acquiring the wisdom needed to dispense justice. It was also crucial for another magisterial role: stirring up his fellow citizens to action. Thus on a sheet headed ‘How to atain eloquence’, he noted, ‘First he must have a good natural witte … Then must he to his booke and be well stored with knowledge that he may be able to minister matter for all causes necessary, the which when he hath gotten plentifully he must use much exercise both in writing and speaking.’21 This was precisely the programme Newdigate set himself: first of all reading purposefully through a large corpus of Ibid., A/20, fol. 7v. Larminie, ‘Lifestyle and Attitudes’, pp. 381–2; Todd, Christian Humanism. 19 WRO, CR 136, B/661. 20 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990): 30–78. 21 WRO, CR 136, B/3475; B/677. 17 18

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material; then making systematic notes so that it was retrievable; and finally applying this knowledge in written drafts and speeches.22 In doing all this there was nothing particularly remarkable about Newdigate. His study programme was probably more intensive than most, but its technique and content were widely adhered to because they corresponded so closely to the grammar school training in rhetoric described by Peter Mack and others. There was often a strikingly close fit between Newdigate’s programme and the study skills taught at grammar school. A set of notes on ‘How to make a fitt oration’, for example, listed ‘5 thinges to be considered in an oration: invention of matter; disposition of the same; elocution; memory; utterance’ which corresponded precisely to the five-fold division of the basic skills of oratory taught at school. His draft speeches were often textbook illustrations of the impact of this training. His funeral oration for Sir Fulke Greville followed precisely the schema he noted as appropriate for demonstrative oratory: ‘The partes of an oration made in the praise of a man: the entrance; the narration; sometime the confutation; the conclusion.’ In this case the ‘entrance’ consisted of a characteristically elaborate comparison with the ancient Romans, for whom ‘it was the use … that at the decease of any worthy that summe true frende should deliver the virtues of him which Antonius performed so well after the death of Caesar’. The ‘narration’ was the rehearsal of Greville’s virtues, using the familiar techniques of amplification (elaborate colourful comparisons and patterned language) to create a more vivid impression. On this occasion the ‘confutation’ was inappropriate; so Newdigate proceeded straight to the ‘conclusion’ in which he urged Fulke Greville junior to emulate his father’s virtues.23 It was a similar story with his correspondence where, on occasion, he can be seen striving to put into practice the classical and humanist letter-writing techniques taught at grammar school.24 Peter Mack has shown that all this was very characteristic of the period, in which grammar school training in rhetoric shaped not only the forms of address used by contemporaries, but also their patterns of thinking. However, it is very unusual to be able to document this with such precision. One can well imagine Newdigate’s counterparts in other shires, men such as his friend Sir Thomas Beaumont, the Leicestershire justice, or the Cheshire magistrate Sir Richard Grosvenor, pursuing similar programmes of study and self-improvement. Both had reputations as men of learning, and both delivered jury charges and public speeches full of the sorts of classical 22 The majority of these drafts took the form of rough versions of the sessions charges which Newdigate appears to have been called on to deliver throughout the 1600s. The purpose of these was for a leading magistrate to instruct fellow justices and the county’s grand jurymen in points of law and exhort them to carry out their duties conscientiously. 23 WRO, B/677, 701. 24 For examples, see ibid., B/702, 326 a & c.

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and Biblical allusions deployed by Newdigate; but in neither case do we have more than a smattering of evidence about their reading.25 Newdigate represented a familiar type, but in his case we can gain an unusually clear insight into the catch phrases, role models and cultural resources out of which his identity was constructed. But how did this reading translate into political action? And what does all this tell us about the make-up of the ‘Monarchical Republic’? ••••• We can begin by looking at how Newdigate deployed his reading to construct the role of ‘good commonwealthman’, or ‘father of the country’, so central to the maintenance of the local ‘gentry republics’. This was grounded in the Ciceronian principle that man’s highest earthly duty was active service to the country.26 It was a principle Newdigate embraced wholeheartedly, summing it up in his notes on a Butterton sermon in September 1606: ‘He is borne in vaine that thinketh he is borne for himselfe … Doe what good you canste to thy contry.’27 Such service was closely linked in his mind with the traditional debate about whether the life of action (negotium) was more worthy of honour than the life of philosophical contemplation and learning (otium). Like Cicero, he firmly believed that it was. He certainly saw reading and study as essential for the magistrate; but he was equally emphatic that it must have a practical outcome. In his notes on Plutarch’s life of Numa Pompilius, he dwelt on the ways in which the subject had abandoned a solitary life in pursuit of wisdom to answer his country’s call, and applied this to himself and his fellow justices. In several of the draft charges he was at pains to remind them that their wealth and opportunities to acquire learning were not given so that they could ‘sitt highest att the table, nor to be only worshipped with cappe and knee’, but in order that they might be better equipped for public office. ‘Our travell’, he urged, ‘must be so continuall for the service of our country that we must be like to a candle that is first light itselfe and so lighteth others though it be to the consuming of itself. For we can no better grow olde than in the service of our country.’28 25 Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric; Richard P. Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v Hastings’, Past & Present, 149 (1995): 47–94, at 79–80; Cust (ed.), The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Bart. (1585– 1645), Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. cxxxiv (Stroud, 1996), pp. x–xxxiii. 26 For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Richard P. Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (forthcoming, Manchester, 2007). 27 WRO, CR 136, B/632, 14 Sept. 1606. 28 Ibid., V/148, pp. 20–2; B/698, p. 20.

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The principles which were expected to guide this exercise of office were summed up in the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’, which in the political vocabulary of the day stood for fundamentally opposed approaches to government and magistracy. ‘Private’ signified what was selfish, corrupt, even tyrannical, and was equated with vices such as ‘covetousness’, ‘ambition’, ‘pride’ and ‘anger’. ‘Public’ was its antithesis, a concept which embraced the common good of the country and the duty of every good citizen to serve it courageously, incorruptibly and unselfishly. For Newdigate this was encapsulated in the definition of the ‘good commonwealthsman’ which he copied from Whetstone’s Mirror for Magistrates, and later used in a jury charge. The ‘good commonwealthsman’ was one who aplieth all the partes of a well proportioned body whose handes are bounde behind him: his eyes are noe lesse occupied to prie into the doinges of the lewde then his eares atentive to heare the complaintes of the good; his tongue is mute neither for feare nor favor, and by his leagues he presenteth a continuall travel to doe his cuntrey service; his handes bounde behinde him sheweth him as well bounde to all these offices as free from bribes.29

‘On the bench,’ he was, ‘another from himselfe at home … all private respectes of blode, aliance, amitie are forgotten, and if his son come under trial he knows him not.’30 This was a range of qualities associated particularly in Newdigate’s mind with the cardinal virtues of wisdom and justice. Wisdom, above all, meant internalizing the Socratic principle ‘know thyself’ which, as he emphasized in his sessions charges, was all about acquiring the understanding to govern one’s passions. Justice meant learning how to ‘weigh causes’ and ‘strike the guilty’. It was the ‘soveraigne of all other vertues … because that without her none can live in safety, especially seing without it the commonwealth is like unto a body which being corupted with evill humors doth with languishing pine away’.31 The magistrate who displayed these virtues was entitled to the supreme accolade of ‘honest’. This was another key term in the lexicon of the ‘Monarchical Republic’ (as it was for Cicero), signifying for contemporaries not only the qualities of the ideal public servant, but also one who was truly deserving of honour. The seminal examples of the vir honestus for Newdigate were Cicero himself and Cato. Of the latter, he recorded that he embraced public service not ‘to enrich himself, as many did, nor for any glory or reputation … but that he had advisedly chosen to serve the commonwealth like a just and honest man’. Men like him were crucial to safeguarding the commonweal. Their courage in standing up to be counted

29 30 31

Ibid., B/700, 21 Oct. 1600, used in a draft jury charge of 31 Dec. 1600. Ibid., A 16(a), 17 Aug. 1608, also based on notes from Whetstone. Ibid., B/700, 17 Oct. 1600.

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and setting an example to others provided the surest means of preventing corruption and tyranny.32 Most of the basic components of this role could be traced back to classical sources; but, as a legacy of Christian humanism, they were taken up by English Calvinists and dressed in the language of Scripture. This added several distinctive elements which Newdigate incorporated into his own vision of the ‘good commonwealthman’. One of these was the idea of magistracy as a godly vocation. ‘God would have none idle’, he reminded his fellow justices, ‘but he that is a judge should do the work of a judge … he that is a magistrate the work of a magistrate.’ Another was to stress magistracy’s divine ordination and make the comparison with Jethro, chosen by God to assist Moses in the task of government: ‘You ar the champion of justis, the patron of peace, the father of thy cuntry and, as it were, another God on earth.’33 Throughout his charges Newdigate’s principal audience was his fellow Warwickshire magistrates. In the manner of a lay preacher, he was seeking to fill them with zeal to discharge their offices conscientiously and energetically. But he also recognized a need to draw on the involvement and enthusiasm of a much wider body of active citizens. Many of his remarks were, therefore, also directed to the county jurors, whom he referred to – in a characteristically laboured comparison with a Roman censor’s visitation of Nola in the time of Marcus Aurelius – as the ‘good men at Warwick’. They were the ‘eyes of the country’ and were expected to heed the counsel of Cato who said that ‘to acuse and pursue the wicked … was the best thinge an honest man and a good governor of the commonwealth could employ himselfe unto’.34 Their service was just as important as that of their social superiors. Newdigate, then, had a vision of a virtuous and godly commonwealth, secured from top to bottom by men of conscience and courage, committed to lives of active engagement and willing to stand up and be counted in the service of their country. This tells us much about the core values of a society in which Newdigate’s patron and hero, Sir Fulke Greville senior, was held up as a role model, and in which Sir John himself was repeatedly thrust forward as a principal spokesman. Against what threats were the energies of such men to be directed? Who were the enemies of the ‘Monarchical Republic’? At a local level their identity was clear enough. It was those vices which Newdigate sought out in his reading and notetaking – such as ‘greed’, ‘pride’, ambition’ and ‘idleness’ – combined with the besetting sin of popery. The charge he drew up on 2 October 1608, amidst widespread fears of dearth and depopulation 32 33 34

Ibid., B/674. Ibid., B/718, 711. Ibid., B/696, 659.

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in Warwickshire, was a classic example. ‘A great cause of these decaies’, he reminded his audience, ‘is covetousnes which neither with enough nor too much is satisfied.’ He then launched into a general tirade against those responsible for the decay of hospitality in the countryside which he blamed directly for dearth, poverty and the decay of tillage. ‘Let us profit by thes examples’, he urged, ‘and add to our best strength to suppress such catepillars as a number are in our commonwealth, among this number is the forestaller, ingater and ingrosser … he is a manifest oppresser of the poor, a public enemy of the countrey and whole commonwealth.’35 It was popery, however, which most alarmed Sir John, and in a charge to the first Warwickshire sessions following the Gunpowder Plot he delivered his most impassioned plea for political activism. Ther is a time when no man oughte to kepe silence, when ether ther religion, ther king or ther country was in any extreame hazarde, no good countrieman oughte then ether to witholde his tongue or hande according to his calling or facultie to repel the injurie, reproofe the violence and avenge the guilt uppon the authors therof; and now you shall have my whole strengthe to bringe one stone to helpe to defend our country … for since our religion, prince and cuntrey were shotte at we oughte to reedifie and strengthen the breach with our whole endeavors against our adversary that have sought the utter destruction of this body politicke.36

This striking use of the language of edification to highlight the zeal needed to defend the commonwealth was a measure of the urgency Newdigate attached to his fellow countrymen’s response. At a national level the enemy was often less clear. Most Calvinists, like Newdigate, could agree that the principal threat was again popery; and popery could do duty as the symbol for a whole range of vices and corruptions. But beyond this there were the murkier forces of ‘privacie’ which encapsulated all manner of other evils, many of which were associated with the royal court and those about the King. Sir John was not in any sense an oppositionist figure. He saw himself as a loyal servant of the crown and was a thoroughly conventional member of the provincial Protestant establishment. But his loyalty was not unquestioning. There were limits to his acceptance of royal authority, which were grounded in his vision of the relationship between the prince and lesser magistrates such as himself. Newdigate firmly believed that monarchy was the best form of government. Again and again in his charges he likened the political order to the human body:

35 36

Ibid., B/711. Ibid., B/722.

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The charge and office of the prince is the same to the commonwealth as the head is to the body: for as the body cannot live without government of the head noe more can the commonwealth without the prince.37

This was an office given to him directly by God who, knowing in his everlasting wisdom how good and necessary lawes and orders were, appointed rulers for the good of the commonwealth and gave power for the punishment of transgressors that vertu might be maintained and vice suppressed.38

Not only were princes divinely ordained. They were also essential for the preservation of order, according to a wide range of opinion recorded in his notes, from Elyot’s remarks on the need for ‘one soveraigne governor’ to uphold hierarchy and degree ‘in the publicke weale’ to Butterton’s sermon against rebellion on the first anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, pointing out how there was ‘the greatest wickednes when there was no king in Israel’. In spite of his wide reading, Newdigate showed little interest in the speculation about the relative merits of the other classic forms of government – aristocracy, republicanism and democracy – which was fashionable among his contemporaries. He certainly had no time for ‘democracy’, repeatedly alluding in his notes to the dangers of pandering to the multitude and comparing the people to a flock of sheep that must be forced to follow the lead of the magistrate if the commonwealth was to survive.39 However, the prince was not to rule alone. He was expected to seek the assistance of lesser magistrates. The basic justification for this Newdigate derived from the Old Testament account of Jethro, who ‘finding that Moses was overburthened advised him to divide his charge whereupon several magistrates were appointed’. This was supported by a variety of humanist arguments, which in Newdigate’s notes were best represented by Elyot’s remark ‘that in a publicke weale should be inferior governors called magistrates which shalbe apointed and chosen by the soveraigne governor to the intent his labors may be levigate [sic] and made more tollerable …’. Here it was envisaged that magistrates should be chosen by the ruler and derive their authority from him; but elsewhere, as we have seen, Newdigate was at pains to emphasize that lesser magistrates, down to the level of grand jurors, were also ordained by God.40 This was a conventional enough view: according to the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being every duly constituted authority was ordained by God to take its

Ibid., B/723. Ibid., B/714. 39 Ibid., B/700; B/632, 5 Nov. 1606; B/714. 40 Ibid., in folder B/683–700, but unnumbered; B/700, ‘collections out of Sir Thomas Eliot’; B/711. 37 38

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position within the hierarchy.41 But it did have important implications for the status of the prince because it could be used to reinforce the notion that monarchy, like other forms of magistracy, was a public office exercised under God. This was the view of Newdigate and, as a consequence, he saw the prince as subject to the same warnings about the need to avoid partiality and the pursuit of private interests that he applied to magistrates generally. This was spelt out in a series of Biblical quotations which he collected from Henry Smith’s 1590 sermon The Magistrate’s Scripture. ‘Doth partialitie become gods, doth bribes become gods’, he noted rhetorically; ‘shal such a one as I take bribes. God disgraceth them that dishonour their calling as he did Saul.’ His notes also included injunctions against tyranny. Again from The Magistrate’s Scripture, he noted that ‘God would have a wise, milde and just king like himself.’ And this concern was confirmed by his reading of Holinshed in which he highlighted acts of justice by kings like Henry V and Edward I, but also carefully noted events leading to the depositions of Edward II and Richard II.42 In all this Sir John attached great importance to the rule of law. He treated it, alongside the prince and lesser magistrate, as one of the three pillars of government. It provided both a means of settling the distribution of goods and property, and a guide for the magistrates and the people. It was like ‘bloode to the body’ or ‘a hedge for the garden of the commonwealth’, and without it the political order would collapse, a view summed up in his notes on Solon, who, ‘being asked when a commonwealth prospereth and flourisheth most answered when the people obey the magistrate, and the magistrate obeieth the law’.43 Of course, in this context ‘magistrate’ could be taken to mean the prince as much as the lesser magistrate. This was something Newdigate spelt out for his quarter sessions audience when he reminded them that ‘lest the wavering or passionate minde of the magistrate should by afections be drawne from justis, therfor is he ballased and weighed down by law’, and this law was made by parliament rather than the prince.44 Newdigate, then, set clear limits to the exercise of royal authority. He did not go as far as some Elizabethans in asserting the right of the lesser magistrate to depose a tyrannical ruler. The inference was that this was to be done by God alone. But he did clearly spell out the expectation that the monarch would abide by the rule of law and also recorded the fate of those 41 Conrad Russell, ‘Divine Rights in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 101–20, at 106. 42 WRO, CR 136, B/667; V/148, pp. 1–12, 124; B/690. 43 Ibid., B/ 698, 4 May 1600; B/632, 28 Sept. 1606, B/714, 718. 44 Ibid., B/724, 714.

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who descended into tyranny. In this sense, he displayed what Collinson has called an ‘ideological capacity for resistance’. Possible sources for this capacity are not hard to find. Newdigate read the Geneva Bible which, in Collinson’s words, ‘taught from sundry Old Testament examples that God takes vengeance on tyrants, even in this life’. He was also familiar with Holinshed’s accounts of the deposition of medieval kings who had failed to live up to the high ideals of their office. And, of course, he was steeped in the works of humanist writers, with their emphasis on placing virtue before hierarchy.45 However, Newdigate tended not to dwell on such matters. In all his drafts of public utterances he presumed that his own prince was sound and virtuous, and throughout he heavily stressed the ideal of unity. Again resorting to the natural analogy, Newdigate argued that ‘the worke that knitteth the body with the heade … is the love of the king and realme which make a commonwealth’. Without love, cooperation and unity between its various constituent parts, the body politic as a whole was incapable of functioning effectively. Hence in another charge Newdigate commended to his fellow governors the advice of Plutarch writing to Trajan the good emperor … that ther oughte to be such agreement betweene the prince and his people as is betweene the body and the members; that he shoulde rejoice to have such subjects; they rejoice to have such a lorde.46

But what if this unity failed to materialize? What if the prince, or more likely those around him, failed to abide by the rule of law and the values of the ‘public’? Here, like most of his contemporaries, Newdigate saw the principal remedy as resting with parliament. It had a dual responsibility, both as a counsellor (opening the monarch’s eyes to the dangers faced by the kingdom and his subjects) and as a lawmaker (legislating against specific abuses). In his surviving drafts, Sir John had little to say about parliament because sessions charges were not generally deemed the appropriate place to talk about it. However, there was one occasion on which he took upon himself directly the counselling role of a member of the Commons, and it reveals much about his notion of monarchy as a public office. On 23 April 1603 he drafted ‘A speech for exercise’ in which he addressed James I on behalf of the people of Warwickshire. The speech was prompted in part by his reading of James’s Basilicon Doron; but it also seems likely that he was rehearsing for the role of knight of the shire.47 Newdigate assumed 45 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, pp. 43–8; Larminie, Godly Magistrate, p. 18, n. 98. 46 WRO, CR 136, B/633; B/722. 47 Fulke Greville junior had occupied this position in the previous three parliaments, but stepped down after 1603. His father may have encouraged Newdigate to believe that he would receive his backing for the seat, although in the event another

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the guise of a ‘parliament man’, expounding the grievances of his fellow countrymen. Beginning with complaints about enclosure and hospitality which, already in 1603, had a considerable resonance in Warwickshire, he moved on to various problems which could be laid at the door of the central government, including the cost of transporting soldiers to Ireland and the inequities of subsidy assessment. The two main issues he emphasized were those which for many MPs appeared to be the most pressing local grievances of the late 1590s and early 1600s: the depredations of purveyors ‘who under couler of providing provitions for our soveraigne’s household hath bene a benefit to themselves’, and monopolists ‘who hath bene a great charge to our country’. The remedy lay with the King, and Newdigate expressed the fervent hope that James would display the Solomon-like wisdom and love of justice for which he was renowned. ‘If your Majesty pardons and will hear’, he entreated, ‘you shall knowe the abuses of our country … as wee were the first that proclaimed [his Majesty’s accession], so we beseech [we] may be one of the first to have reformation.’48 Newdigate’s ‘exercise’ was a thoroughly conventional performance, just the sort of speech that was delivered repeatedly by ‘country’ MPs on the floor of the Commons. But, given what we know of his wider views, it is not hard to see that there were conditions attached to his professions of loyalty and faith in his monarch. The King had a duty to listen to the advice being proffered by lesser magistrates such as himself, and then act on it to promote the welfare of the respublica. In the context, it would have seemed neither helpful nor appropriate for Newdigate to spell out what might happen if James failed to do this. But the implications from his reading and note-taking were clear. A monarch’s performance was to be assessed in the same way as any other magistrate’s, and if he failed to put the ‘public’ before the ‘private’, or abide by the rule of law, then it could be regarded as dereliction of his God-given duty and a short step from tyranny. ••••• What broader conclusions can be drawn from this study of one man’s reading and draft speeches? To start with, it provides a study in the formation of the political culture of the provincial magistracy, illustrating how some of the central themes of Renaissance political thought – discussed at a relatively rarefied level by historians such as Peltonen, Skinner and John Pocock – came to be applied on the ground. Ideas about civic humanism, Greville protégé, Richard Verney, appears to have been returned: P.W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons 1558–1603, The History of Parliament (3 vols, London, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 262–3; vol. 2, pp. 220–22; vol. 3, pp. 557–8. 48 WRO, V/148, pp. 115–16.

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virtue and the vita activa were absorbed and then disseminated among local elites to become part of their ‘normative vocabulary’. Newdigate may have been exceptional in the amount of time and energy he dedicated to his studies, but the mental world he inhabited was one which was thoroughly familiar to his contemporaries. This confirms the view that grammar school training in rhetoric played a central role in the formation of Elizabethan elite culture. Through Newdigate we can see how a common stock of aphorisms and examples, built up through his early schooling and exhaustive programme of continuing education, provided the basis for a shared language which cemented in place the values of the ‘gentry republics’. This study also enhances our understanding of another aspect of the ‘Monarchical republic’ highlighted by Collinson: the ‘quasi-republican’ ideals which encouraged Elizabethans to think as ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’. Newdigate and his fellow magistrates were loyal monarchists, perhaps never more so than in 1605 when the Gunpowder Plot threatened to bring their political world crashing down. But their loyalty was never unquestioning, and they were guided by their political education toward a view that monarchy was ultimately a public office, subject to the same presumptions about the rule of law, the need for wisdom and justice and the obligation to serve the respublica as any other form of magistracy. If there was a danger of these being overlooked, then it was the duty of lesser magistrates to speak out with courage and conscience. This would normally be done, of course, in parliament – and, for Sir John, the assumption seems to have been that this would be enough. There is no indication in his notes or writings that he felt a need to go any further. He was assured – not least by his reading of Basilicon Doron – that he was living in a realm governed by monarchs who were both godly and wise. However, should the point ever be reached where this might not appear to be the case, then – as his impassioned response to the Gunpowder Plot illustrated – it would be the duty of himself and his fellow countrymen to stand up and be counted.

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ESSAY 11

English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England Johann P. Sommerville In his much-cited article on the monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I, Patrick Collinson wittily remarked on the redundancy of ‘the Communist Manifesto at a Conservative Party Conference’.1 Since the 1980s, when those words were written, the redundancy has grown, spreading beyond the Conservatives and into or even beyond New Labour. While Marxism has been falling from fashion, republicanism and its history have been attracting increasing attention from scholars in general and from early modernists in particular – not least through the influence of Collinson’s article. Collinson argued that in important respects it makes sense to view Elizabethan England not as a pure monarchy but as a monarchy tempered with republican elements. For example, English counties were often largely self-governing and can in some ways be seen as ‘gentry republics’, while in towns it was not uncommon for people ‘of very humble status’ to be involved in government. The ‘vitality’ ‘of traditions of localized selfgovernment’ in turn allowed the growth of civic consciousness, Collinson contended, and he questioned J.G.A. Pocock’s notion that ‘In no way was Tudor England a polis or its inhabitants citizens’.2 Collinson was careful, however, not to press his thesis too far, and he circumspectly noted that England under Elizabeth I was also a monarchy, in which the Queen herself played a major role in the formulation of national policy, and in which she was keen to correct any misunderstandings ‘“of the absolutenes of her Majesties government”’, insisting that she could ‘“direct her pollicie”’ without the assent of her council – a body that in any case served

1 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, at 43. 2 Ibid., pp. 33 (local government), 38 (civic consciousness and Pocock). Collinson cites J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

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at her pleasure.3 Collinson stressed that his article did not argue ‘for the incipience in Elizabethan England of a kind of constitutional monarchy, still less of a headless republic or even of a continuous, coherent republican movement’.4 Since Collinson’s article first appeared, much work has been done on republican and quasi-republican thinking in the decades before the English Civil War. This work has implicitly or explicitly challenged the claim – made by Pocock, Blair Worden and others – that the history of English republicanism really begins only in 1649, when the country became a republic. It has also challenged the idea that the main or even only ideology used by members of the English parliament to question the high prerogative claims of the first two Stuart kings was rooted in the English common law. Pocock and Glenn Burgess asserted that the common law mind was dominant in early seventeenth-century England. By contrast, some recent scholars – and perhaps especially David Norbrook, Markku Peltonen and Quentin Skinner – have argued that certain important republican ideas survived and even flourished in early Stuart times, providing a key preliminary chapter in the story of English republicanism. Not all of these ideas, they claim, were strictly republican in the most literal sense, for they did not all absolutely entail a non-monarchical constitution. Quentin Skinner has labelled one group of such ideas – and especially of ideas about liberty – ‘neo-Roman’ rather than republican, but he sees republican and neo-Roman thinking as closely linked, and David Armitage similarly refers to ‘the republican and neo-Roman traditions’.5 Skinner and others have come to emphasize the importance of this neo-Roman republicanism in the years before 1649 and, indeed, in the period before the English Civil War. According to Skinner, one of the most potent sources of radical thinking about the English polity in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1642 was provided by classical and especially Roman ideas about freedom and servitude. Far more than has generally been recognized, the outbreak of the English revolution was legitimized in neo-Roman terms.6

3 The quotations are from a letter of Sir Francis Walsingham to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 30 July 1582, in Edmund Lodge (ed.), Illustrations of British History (3 vols, London, 1791), vol. 2, pp. 276–7; quoted in Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 57. 4 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 55. 5 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 11, 22– 3. David Armitage, ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (2 vols, Cambridge, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 29–46, at 42. 6 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, vol. 2, pp. 9–28, at 14.

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That the republican or neo-Roman roots of the English Civil War have not generally been recognized is something of an understatement, for virtually none of the many modern scholars who have written on the origins of the Civil War seems to have recognized the existence, let alone the crucial significance, of neo-Roman theory, whereas all have in varying degrees acknowledged the importance of ideas drawn from the common law. Some scholars remain sceptical that neo-Roman or republican ideas really were important in England before the Civil War. Perez Zagorin, for example, expresses the belief that ‘in the ideological conflicts that led to the English civil war’, the neo-Roman or classical republican ‘theory of liberty was insignificant compared to the prominence of other types of argument drawn from the English past which alleged that the exercise of various powers by the king was repugnant to law and such fundamental laws as Magna Charta’.7 Zagorin is not alone in advancing the suggestion that when English people in early Stuart times talked about liberty and about the dangers of servitude, the kind of servitude that they had in mind was derived not from ancient Roman ideas about slavery but from ‘old English law and the image, taken from the medieval law of villeinage, of the villein who had no rights and was subject to the will of his lord’.8 We have, then, something of a conundrum. Republican and neo-Roman ideas have often been seen as unimportant or non-existent in England in the period before the Civil War, while common law thinking has been regarded as highly influential or even dominant in those years. But recently the significance of neo-Roman thinking has been stressed. The paragraphs that follow suggest that just as Collinson was quite right to claim that some aspects of early modern English government can be seen as republican rather than monarchical, he was also right to be sceptical about the existence of any developed republican tradition, and to be wholly silent on neo-Roman ideas about liberty. The first section below outlines some of the claims made by those scholars who have recently detected quasi-republican thinking in pre-Civil War England. The ideas that they have viewed as republican include the notion that the purpose of government is to promote not the interests of the governor but those of the people as a whole, the principle that virtue consists in action not in contemplation, and the view that true nobility lies in virtue. The second section of this essay surveys some of these ideas, concluding that they were indeed expressed in early Stuart times but that there was nothing particularly republican about them. The third section discusses the so-called neo-Roman theory of liberty as it was 7 Perez Zagorin, ‘Republicanisms’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11 (2003): 701–14, at 712–13. 8 Ibid., 712. A similar point is made in J.P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (Harlow, 1999), p. 156 n. 50.

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expressed in books and pamphlets, and in parliamentary debates. It argues that it was in fact an English theory, rooted in common law ideas and in the detailed history of the early Stuart period. The most important early Stuart arguments about liberty were not derived from Roman republicanism. Republican and Quasi-Republican Ideas in Early Stuart England According to Markku Peltonen, there was no ‘coherent republican tradition’ in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but republican vocabulary and ideas did nevertheless circulate in that period.9 Peltonen notes that English writers sometimes voiced the claim that true nobility lies in virtue, and that virtue consists not in contemplation but in action. These claims, he contends, are characteristic of classical humanist and republican thinking. He takes issue with Pocock’s notion that civic consciousness did not come into being in England until the Civil War, arguing that it existed much earlier at the local level, in English towns. Peltonen also detects a more developed republicanism in the constitutional thinking of some English writers who advocated a ‘mixed state’ in which power was shared between ‘the one, the few and the many’. Perhaps the most radical and important of these theorists, he argues, was Richard Beacon, the author of Solon his Follie (1594).10 Like Peltonen, David Norbrook connects republicanism with a much wider set of principles than mere opposition to (absolute) monarchy. Republicanism, he tells us, aspires ‘to a politics of open speech and dialogue’, and he asserts that republicans were especially concerned with the public interest. Their emphasis ‘on the public interest’, he contends, ‘implied that power resided in “the people” in some form’.11 Michael Mendle similarly links a stress on the public good with republicanism, claiming that when people in the 1630s justified Ship Money on the grounds of necessity, they were adopting an essentially republican position: ‘the argument from necessity was justification of ship money in “republican” rather than “royalist” terms – in terms, that is, of the common good and safety rather than of the particular advantage of the king or the particular obligations inherently owing to him’.12 Quentin Skinner has likewise linked 9 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 11–12. 10 Ibid., pp. 10–11, 64, 109–10, 111, 134–5, 158–67 (virtue as true nobility); 2, 10, 20, 32–3, 119, 134–5, 137–8, 145, 243 (virtue is active not contemplative); 7, 56 (Pocock and civic consciousness); 76 (radicalism and importance of Beacon); 93 (Beacon and the mixed state). 11 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 20, 17. 12 Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge, 1995), p. 40.

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arguments from the common good or salus populi (the safety or welfare of the people) with republican or more strictly neo-Roman thinking. When the parliamentarians in 1642 attacked the King’s ‘Negative Voice’ – or power to veto legislation – says Skinner, they based their case squarely upon ‘the fundamental maxim that Cicero had cited from the Law of the Twelve Tables: that, in legislating for a free state, salus populi suprema lex esto, the safety of the people must be treated as the supreme law’. More generally, Skinner emphasizes the ‘neo-classical’ nature of parliamentarian arguments for taking up arms at the beginning of the Civil War.13 The neo-classical concept to which Skinner pays most attention is the idea of liberty. According to Skinner, neo-Roman thinkers in England included such republicans as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham and John Milton, but also a number of members of the House of Commons in the parliaments of the early Stuart period. Drawing on Roman Law and on the writings of Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, so his case goes, the neo-Romans revived a classical account of liberty and applied it to English politics. Skinner tells us that the neo-Romans placed great weight upon the contrast between liberty and slavery. Of especial importance to them was the text of Justinian’s Digest in which we learn that slavery can be defined as ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’.14 The neo-Roman theory of liberty, he claims, maintained that individuals are free only if they live in a free state, and that a free state is one where ‘the actions of the body politic are determined by the will of the members as a whole’, and where ‘each law must be enacted with the consent of those who will be subject to it’. The will of the members, the argument proceeds, meant the will of the majority, and neo-Romans maintained that ‘the government of a free state should ideally be such as to enable each individual citizen to exercise an equal right of participation in the making of laws’. A principle of key importance to the neo-Roman outlook, says Skinner, was the idea that public servitude may arise ‘when the internal constitution of a state allows for the exercise of any discretionary or prerogative powers on the part of those governing it’. Neo-Romans were particularly concerned to deny that Charles I had the power to veto legislation, and they held 13 Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation, and the English Civil War’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols, Cambridge, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 308–43, at pp. 326 (Negative Voice; salus populi), 342 (neo-classical justification). 14 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation’, p. 313. Page 313 n. 30 quotes the Latin original from Digest I. V. 4. 35: ‘Servitus est constitutio iuris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subicitur.’ The same passage is discussed in Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 39–41; Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, pp. 286–307, at 289; and Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, pp. 9–10.

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that this veto power, and other royal prerogatives which could be used to undermine people’s rights, reduced the English people to the status of slaves. In Roman thinking, Skinner contends, what made slaves unfree was not that they were coerced or oppressed by their masters – for masters might be benevolent or absent – but that they were ‘“subject to the jurisdiction of someone else” and consequently “within the power” of another person’.15 Neo-Romans, he argues, applied this analysis to the powers of the English monarchy, and claimed that if the crown possesses prerogative or discretionary authority, then the English people are not free but slaves. Whether or not the monarch in fact exercises the relevant powers, the people are in a state of servitude: ‘the very existence of such prerogative powers reduces us to a level below that of free subjects’.16 According to Skinner, it was in the early Stuart period that this neoRoman account of liberty gained currency in England. He notes that some common lawyers in parliament objected to the crown’s extra-parliamentary financial exactions on the grounds that if the king could take money from his subjects without their consent, their position was akin to that of villeins – the property-less serfs of the medieval English common law. But Skinner stresses that this kind of claim was very far from the neo-Roman theory of liberty. ‘A villein’, he emphasizes, ‘is not a slave, since it is only his property, not his person, which is sub potestate domini’ [under the power of his lord]. The ‘usual common law claim’ was that villeinage is crucially distinct from slavery, since the villein’s ‘personal liberty remains untouched’ though he lacks rights of property. While common lawyers were raising the spectre of villeinage in order to argue against prerogative taxation, says Skinner, some other people began to launch a much more far-reaching criticism of the royal prerogative on the grounds of its incompatibility with individual liberty. This further attack was grounded not on common law conceptions of villeinage but on classical and especially Roman law distinctions between free citizens and slaves.

He suggests that the spread of neo-Roman theory may have been connected with the fact that the writings of Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus ‘were made available in English for the first time’ in the later sixteenth century.17 In parliament, he shows, people argued that the crown’s use of prerogative powers outside the law threatened to bring the English into servitude and 15 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 23 (individuals and free state), 26 (will of members), 27 (legislation requires consent), 29 (majority), 30 (ideal of equal participation), 50–51 (internal constitution and discretionary power), 51 (Charles I’s veto), 41 (Roman Law on slavery; citing Digest I.6.1: ‘“alieno iuri subiectae sunt’”; ‘“in aliena potestate sunt”’). 16 Skinner, ‘John Milton’, p. 288. 17 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation’, pp. 309–10 (villein not a slave), 320 (usual common law claim), 312 (much more far-reaching neoRoman theory), 313 (translations).

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make them not freemen but slaves or bondmen. He notes, too, that a number of people linked freedom with prosperity. For example, the parliamentarian pamphleteer Henry Parker declared in 1642 that if the peasants of France were ‘more free’ they would also be ‘more rich and magnanimous’ and the French king would be more powerful. It was, says Skinner, Sallust and Tacitus who first explored ‘the social consequences of living in servitude’ and argued that liberty leads to wealth and power. Recently, like Skinner, David Colclough has also emphasized the importance of the advent of neo-Roman theory in parliament, especially in 1614.18 In summary, scholars have contended that a number of republican or quasi-republican ideas circulated in early Stuart England. The next section surveys some of these ideas and discusses the extent to which they can be described as specifically republican. The neo-Roman theory of liberty will receive fuller attention in the third section, below, leading to the conclusion that Patrick Collinson’s vision of Elizabethan England, as a monarchy which had some republican aspects but lacked any coherent republican movement, applies also to the England of the early Stuarts, at least until the Civil War. Classical Humanism and the Early Stuart Monarchy The wider the definition of republicanism we employ, the easier we will find it to discover early modern republicans. But there is a price to pay for this, since if we are too liberal in giving recognition to our republican forebears, we are in danger of granting undue acknowledgement to some rather dubious characters. There seems to be unanimous agreement that the French theorist Jean Bodin, King James VI and I, and Thomas Hobbes were not republicans, nor even quasi-republicans or neo-Romans. So if we find some political idea that such theorists heartily endorsed, it will be difficult to argue that it was in any sense an essentially republican or neoRoman principle. The idea that people in authority ought to promote the public good or the public interest was not a republican or neo-Roman notion, but a commonplace held by virtually everyone. The business of the commonwealth or state, said Hobbes on the opening page of the Introduction to Leviathan, is ‘Salus Populi (the peoples safety)’.19 James I instructed his son that ‘A 18 Skinner, ‘John Milton’, pp. 291–3 (slaves and bondmen), 294 (Parker; the passage is in Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses [London, 1642], p. 2); David Colclough, ‘“Better Becoming a Senate of Venice”? The “Addled Parliament” and Jacobean Debates on Freedom of Speech’, in Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies (eds), The Crisis of the Addled Parliament: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 51–79, at 56, 58. 19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 9 (1651 edn, p. 1).

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good King, thinking his highest honour to consist in the due discharge of his calling, emploieth all his studie and paines, to procure and maintaine’ ‘the well-fare and peace of his people’, ‘euer thinking the common interesse his chiefest particular’.20 On some of his Scottish gold coins he placed the inscription ‘SALVS POPVLI SVPREMA LEX’ – a legend also employed on some coins of Charles I in 1636, though with the slight variation ‘SALVS REIP’ (salus reipublicae; the safety of the commonwealth) for salus populi.21 Arguing in favour of the King in Hampden’s Case of 1637– 38, Sir Robert Berkeley similarly appealed to salus reipublicae, claiming that in order to preserve the commonwealth, the monarch could impose levies which would otherwise not be warranted by law.22 It is worth noting in passing that Berkeley’s argument was characteristic of appeals to salus reipublicae or salus populi in that it was intended to justify a discretionary, emergency power which in normal circumstances would have been invalid. If neo-Roman thinking ruled out all discretionary powers, then such appeals to salus populi cannot be neo-Roman. In his Six Bookes of a Commonweale, Jean Bodin contended that any law may be changed when necessity requires, and insisted that ‘the first and chiefe law of all Commonweales, is this, SALVS POPVLI SVPREMA LEX ESTO’.23 Bodin claimed that true nobility lay in virtue. He did not view this as in any sense a republican or neo-Roman idea, but rather saw it as a commonplace: ‘let vs measure true nobilitie by vertue, for that therein not onely Philosophers and Divines, but also Poets, Historiographers, and almost all Lawyers, do with one consent in mine opinion agree, denying any place to be left for nobilitie without honestie.’24 A commitment to a life of active virtue in the public interest is often linked to civic humanism or classical republicanism and contrasted with the ideas of thinkers like Bodin or James I. But Bodin held that ‘the first and principall end of euerie Commonweale ought to consist in vertue’, and he argued that kings ought 20 King James VI and I, Basilicon Doron, book 2, in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), p. 20. 21 Peter Seaby and P. Frank Purvey, Standard Catalogue of British Coins, Volume 2: Coins of Scotland, Ireland & the Islands (London, 1984), pp. 58 (nos. 5460, 5462; Gold Sword and sceptre piece and Half sword and sceptre piece of James VI, 1601–4), 73 (no. 5548; Charles I, Silver Forty pence, Briot’s hammered issue, 1636). 22 Sir Robert Berkeley, quoted in S.R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1906), p. 122; also available at http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur022.htm. 23 Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606; facsimile edn, ed. Kenneth McRae, Cambridge, MA, 1962), p. 471 (bk 4, ch. 3); Six Livres de la République (6 vols, Paris, 1986; rpt of Lyon, 1593 edn), vol. 4, p. 102 (Paris, 1583 edn, p. 576). 24 Bodin, Six Bookes, p. 394 (bk 3, ch. 8; this chapter – which is not in the French edition – is translated from the Latin version of Bodin’s book).

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to reward virtue by making it a key criterion for appointment to high office. In choosing people for positions of authority, he said, the ruler ought to have ‘more respect vnto the experience and virtue, than vnto the grace and fauour’ of candidates, and he commended the ancient Romans for rewarding virtuous actions in the public service with the highest honours.25 James I advised his son to set an example of ‘vertuous life’ in his own person and in his court, thus ‘alluring his Subiects to the loue of vertue, and hatred of vice’. He added that it was not enough merely to possess virtues, insisting that a king ought to employ virtues ‘and set them on worke, for the weale of them that are committed to your charge: Virtutis enim laus omnis in actione consistit’ [the whole merit of virtue consists in activity] – a phrase he quoted directly from Cicero’s De Officiis.26 If the idea that virtue consists in active public service were indeed a fundamentally republican one, we might expect that James would have encouraged his subjects to indulge in quiet contemplation and avoid participating in local affairs. But in fact he castigated as ‘idle Slowbellies’ those Justices of the Peace who ‘abide alwayes at home, giuen to a life of ease and delight’. Such people, he remarked, think it enough ‘to contemplate Iustice, when as Virtus in actione consistit’ [virtue consists in activity]. He concluded that ‘contemplatiue Iustice is no iustice, and contemplatiue Iustices are fit to be put out’. In James’s opinion, good Justices selflessly served the public – ‘the King and countrey’ – ‘for thanks only of the King, and loue to their countrey’.27 The non-republican Bishop Lancelot Andrewes took it as agreed that virtue is active: ‘Virtus in actione, we know’.28 Blair Worden has observed that in England the idea that true nobility consists in virtue was ‘a native commonplace’, as was the notion that people should act for the public good.29 Virtus vera nobilitas – virtue is the true nobility – is, of course, the motto of Trinity College, Cambridge, founded by Henry VIII. It was not a republican party slogan. Indeed, if anything it had anti-republican or at least anti-aristocratic connotations, suggesting that old noble families could not expect rewards or power except for service to king and country. 25 Bodin, Six Bookes, pp. 476 (bk 4, ch. 4; Six Livres, vol. 4, pp. 111–12: ‘le premier et principal but de toute Republique, doit estre la vertu’; 1583 edn, p. 582), 486 (bk 4, ch. 4; Six Livres, vol. 4, p. 127: ‘ayant plus d’esgard à l’experience et à la vertu, qu’à la faveur’; 1583 edn, p. 594), 596–7 (bk 5, ch. 4; Six Livres, vol. 5, pp. 101–4). 26 James I, Basilicon Doron, bk 2, in Political Writings, p. 34; the quotation is from Cicero, De Officiis, I vi 19. 27 James I, speech in Star Chamber, 1616, in Political Writings, pp. 222, 221. 28 Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons (London 1629), p. 961. 29 Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’ in van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, vol. 1, pp. 307–27, at 312.

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Classical humanist ideas about such things as the public good and active virtue were perfectly compatible with a commitment to monarchy. Early modern monarchs typically relied on the cooperation of locals to govern their countries, and classical humanist ideas were useful in encouraging this. James I had no intention of taking power from those who traditionally exercised it in the localities. He objected when these people – ‘Our principall Ministers for the government of the severall Counties of Our Kingdome’ – idly lounged about London instead of participating actively in running their regions.30 Collinson has tellingly drawn our attention to the town of Swallowfield, which in 1596 ‘constituted itself, in effect, a self-governing republic of the “chief inhabitants”’.31 James I showed little inclination to interfere in the affairs of the country’s Swallowfields, provided that they in turn did not trench on his prerogative to run the land as a whole. It is certainly illuminating to view Swallowfield as ‘a selfgoverning republic’, but there is, of course, a metaphorical aspect to this phrase. Queen Elizabeth and her council were doubtless happy enough to allow such towns to administer their own affairs in most circumstances. But they would probably not have been best pleased if Swallowfield had begun to exercise the powers of a sovereign state – which is what a republic literally is – for example by making a treaty with Spain, or declaring war on England. Arguably, the sense in which England was a monarchical republic was that sovereign power was held by the monarch, while in dayto-day administration there was a large degree of local autonomy, often involving people of quite humble social station. This distinction between sovereignty and administration (or government) featured in Richard Beacon’s Solon his Follie, which Peltonen sees as perhaps the most important quasi-republican writing to appear before the 1650s.32 Beacon insisted that there were just three types of commonwealth, namely monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that the correct way to distinguish between the three types was by the location of sovereignty, rather than by the nature of the day-to-day running of government: ‘Thus be common-weales properly distinguished by the soveraintie and commaundement, and not by the diversity which sometimes appeareth in the forme and government thereof.’ If a single person held sovereign authority, then you had a monarchy, whether or not the ruler in practice ordinarily chose to involve the populace or the nobility in the running of government. Beacon made it clear that he thought monarchy was normally best: ‘The institution no doubt of the Monarchie, is the most firme and 30 James I, proclamation of 1614, in James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I, Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603–1625 (Oxford, 1973), p. 323. 31 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 32. 32 Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, p. 76.

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durable, and freest from al dissention, mutinies, and sedition.’ But he also insisted that a mixed form of everyday government or administration was best, and cited France as the model of what he had in mind.33 These ideas are highly reminiscent of the thinking of Bodin, and it seems likely that Beacon borrowed them from the Frenchman. Bodin also argued that there are just three types of state, that they are distinguished by where sovereignty lies, that monarchy is usually best, and that the best monarchies are those in which the ruler involves the nobles and the people in government: ‘the Royall Monarchy is most excellent’ but for ‘the absolute perfection thereof it ought to be fast knit together by an Aristocratique and Popular kind of gouernment’.34 Bodin was no republican, for he placed sovereignty unequivocally in the monarch’s hands. He believed, however, that the monarch should in practice govern with the people and nobles. Arguably, the English monarchy was not far from his ideal. Values such as the public good and active virtue, and practices such as the participation of nobles and people in the administration of the realm, were not seen as specifically republican in the early modern period, but as quite compatible with the idea of monarchical sovereignty. That is one problem with the way some historians have constructed a neo-Roman or republican tradition for the early Stuart period. The other problem is that the defences of liberty that the English did undertake in that era were not really couched in neo-Roman terms. English and Roman liberty is the subject of the next and final section. Villeins and Slaves: English and Roman Liberty In the early Stuart parliaments, people often said that royal claims to extra-legal discretionary or emergency powers threatened to reduce the status of free English subjects to that of villeins. For example, Edward Alford stated in 1621 that as long as the king could imprison individuals for matters of state and not define such matters, the English people would effectively ‘be Villaines’, while in 1610 Thomas Hedley argued against extra-parliamentary royal levies on exports and imports on the grounds that ‘there is a great difference betwixt the king’s free subjects and his bondmen’ and that the king may ‘at his pleasure seize the lands and goods of his villani, but so can he not of his free subjects’.35 As we have seen, 33 Richard Beacon, Solon his Follie (Oxford, 1594), pp. 61 (types of commonwealth; monarchy best), 62–3 (mixed government; France). 34 Bodin, Six Bookes, 755 (bk 6, ch. 6; Six Livres, vol. 6, p. 251: ‘… et ne suffit pas encores de dire que l’estat Royal est le plus excellent, si on ne monstre aussi qu’il doit estre temperé par le gouvernement Aristocratique et Populaire’; 1583 edn, p. 1013). 35 Edward Alford, speech of 28 May 1621, in Wallace Notestein, Helen Relf and Hartley Simpson (eds), Commons Debates 1621 (7 vols, New Haven, 1935),

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some recent scholars argue that a much more powerful case was mounted against royal prerogatives by neo-Romans, who asserted that discretionary powers made people not merely villeins – who were personally free, though they lacked property – but slaves – who had neither personal freedom nor property. These neo-Romans, so the case goes, rejected all discretionary or prerogative powers, and stressed the link between freedom and prosperity, following such ancient Roman writers as Sallust. Proponents of the neo-Roman thesis do not themselves seem to be in full agreement on how precisely we may distinguish the common law vocabulary of villeinage from what they tell us is the very different neoRoman terminology that was used to talk about slavery. Colclough says ‘the distinction … between bondmen and free men’ was part of ‘the language of the common law’ while Skinner, by contrast, quotes talk about bondmen as though it was clearly neo-Roman.36 In fact, slaves, villeins and bondmen were all regularly linked in early modern thought and writing, and people rarely made much effort to distinguish them. All were contrasted with free men. According to John Cowell, ‘Villein (villanus) … signifieth in our common lawe a bondman, or as much as Servus among the Ciuilians’ (the Civilians are Roman lawyers, and servus is the Latin word for a slave).37 So villeins are bondmen and bondmen are slaves. Sir Thomas Smith, in his highly influential De Republica Anglorum, stated that the Romans had ‘two kindes of bondmen’ of which one ‘were called servi’ (slaves) and were bound to their master and his heirs, while the second were bound ‘to the mannor or place, and did followe him who had the manors’. The first type of these ‘bondmen’, he said, ‘be called in our lawe villens in grosse’ while the second ‘are called villaines regardantes’.38 Samuel Purchas spoke of ‘Villaines or Bond slaues’ in Russia, while Sir John Davies argued that vol. 3, p. 324. Thomas Hedley, speech of 28 June 1610, in Elizabeth Read Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610 (2 vols, New Haven, 1966), vol. 2, p. 192. Skinner, ‘John Milton’, p. 291, draws on this speech by Hedley to suggest that he subscribed to the neo-Roman theory of liberty since he contrasted ‘“a freeman and a bound slave”’; but Hedley also contrasted ‘the king’s free subjects and his bondmen’ or ‘villani’ and drew no contrast between villeins and slaves. Other examples of talk about villeins in the early Stuart parliaments are discussed in Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, pp. 137–8, 144, 149, 154, 156, 172–3. 36 Colclough, ‘“Better Becoming a Senate of Venice”?’, p. 56. Skinner, ‘John Milton’, pp. 291–2, 292–3. 37 John Cowell, The Interpreter: or Booke containing the Signification of Words (Cambridge, 1607), sig. 3Y3v. 38 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 135–6. Drawing on manuscripts, Dewar prints ‘regardantes’ for ‘in grosse’ (135) and ‘appendantes’ for ‘regardantes’ (136), but she records in the notes the readings as given in the text above, and these are the readings of the first and other printed editions; these readings also incorporate the usual terminology about villeins, according to which a villein in gross was bound to a person, while a villein regardant was bound to a manor.

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the powers of chieftains over their tenants in Ireland were so great that they made ‘the Lord an absolute Tyrant, and the Tennant a verie slaue and villain’.39 Villeinage, said Thomas Blount, signifies ‘a seruile kind of tenure’, and he asserted that a villein was a ‘Bondman; of which there were two sorts in England, one termed a Villain in gross, who was immediately bound to the person of his Lord and his heirs; the other a Villain regardant to a Mannor’.40 After Charles I’s execution, John Milton warned the English that if they restored monarchy they would ‘shew themselves to be by nature slaves’, unfit for liberty, and ‘ready to be stroak’d & tam’d again, into the wonted and well pleasing state of thir true Norman villenage’.41 These words make no sense if slavery and villeinage are radically different institutions. In English legal theory, then, villeins were bondmen. They were not personally free. Speaking in the parliament of 1628, the lawyer John Selden asserted that the key ‘difference in their persons’ between ‘villeins and freemen’ was that freemen ‘cannot be imprisoned at pleasure’ while villeins can. ‘In old time’, he asserted, ‘none but Jews and villeins could be imprisoned’ at the king’s will – and the ‘Jews were as the demesne villeins of the king’.42 Speaking against Ship Money in the Long Parliament, the lawyer Oliver St John declared that ‘the villaine had no property against the Lord’ and also that ‘hee had no liberty of person, the Lord might imprison him at his pleasure’.43 As we have seen, proponents of the neo-Roman thesis about liberty place great weight on the text of Justinian’s Digest in which slavery is defined as ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’.44 The most influential English medieval common law treatise, Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England, used precisely the same definition, but applied it to villeins. It employed the terms servus 39 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes … the first part (London, 1625), pp. 423, 432. Sir John Davies, A discouerie of the true causes why Ireland was neuer entirely subdued (London, 1612), p. 178. 40 Thomas Blount, Nomo-lexikon, a law-dictionary interpreting such difficult and obscure words and terms as are found either in our common or statute, ancient or modern lawes (London, 1670), sig. 3V2r (s.v. Villenage), 3V1v (s.v. Villain). 41 John Milton, ΕΙΚΟΝΟΚΛΑΣΤΗΣ In Answer To a Book Intitl’d ΕΙΚΩΝ ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΗ, The Portrature of his sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, 2nd edn (London 1650), p. 211. Skinner, ‘John Milton’, p. 305, discusses this passage, but omits the reference to villeinage. 42 John Selden, speech of 27 March 1628, in R.C. Johnson, M.F. Keeler et al. (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1628 (6 vols, New Haven, 1977–83), vol. 2, p. 151 (the first four volumes are entitled Commons Debates 1628). 43 Oliver St John, Mr. S.-John’s Speech to the Lords in the Vpper House of Parliament Ianuary 7. 1640. Concerning Ship-Money, ([London], 1640), p. 2. 44 See n. 14 above and Colclough, ‘“Better Becoming a Senate of Venice”?’, p. 56.

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[slave] and villanus [villein] interchangeably, declaring (for example) that a ‘free man is made bond (servus) by an acknowledgement made in the king’s court, as where, being in the court of the lord king, he acknowledges himself a villein (villanum)’.45 In the early Stuart parliaments, people often argued that in England the king could not tax or legislate without parliamentary consent, and claimed that he was not empowered to violate rights of property or of personal freedom. Supporters of the crown responded that the king ought ordinarily to respect English liberties, but that in a case of necessity, or for reason of state, or salus populi, the king could infringe them, and that it was the king alone who was authorized to decide whether or not an emergency existed. Such reasoning was employed to justify the Forced Loan of 1626– 27 and the imprisonment without cause shown of people who refused it. Earlier, the king’s right to imprison in emergencies without showing cause had been widely recognized, but in 1628 the House of Commons decided that the king had never in fact possessed any such right, and some argued that the king had no discretionary powers at all to rule outside the law in emergencies. The law of the land, they said, provided sufficiently for all possible emergencies, so no extra-legal powers were needed.46 In part, this position was developed as a response to Charles I’s use of emergency powers in what seemed to many to be no emergencies. Defenders of English liberties in the parliament of 1628 also drew extensively on the ideas of the fifteenth-century lawyer and judge Sir John Fortescue, who viewed England as a limited monarchy in which the king was required to rule under the law and with the consent of his subjects. Cicero and Livy were cited far less frequently, Tacitus more rarely still, and Sallust not at all.47 One possible reason why Roman writers were not much cited in support of English liberties – despite the fact that speakers in parliament were fond of parading their classical learning – was that Roman thinking diverged considerably from English ideas on a number of key points. Roman tribunes were authorized to veto legislation, so it is hard to see in what way English attacks on a veto power from 1642 are indebted to Roman thought. There was a tension in Roman thought between ‘the right of the citizen to a trial … and the right of the community to take every step to protect itself from destruction’. In the Roman republic, the latter 45 Henry de Bracton, Bracton On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. with notes by Samuel E. Thorne (4 vols, London, 1968–77), vol. 2, pp. 30–31; online at http://hlsl.law.harvard.edu/bracton/ Unframed/Latin/v2/30.htm, http://hlsl.law.harvard.edu/bracton/Unframed/Latin/ v2/31.htm, http://hlsl.law.harvard.edu/bracton/Unframed/English/v2/30.htm and http://hlsl.law.harvard.edu/bracton/Unframed/English/v2/31.htm. 46 Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, pp. 143, 148, 149, 157. 47 Johnson, Keeler et al., Proceedings in Parliament 1628, vol. 6, pp. 331, 393, 454, 555, 584.

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right triumphed on a number of occasions, when magistrates took violent extra-legal action, sometimes armed with a senatus consultum ultimum, justifying such conduct. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 63 B.C., when Catiline allegedly conspired to seize power, and when five of his co-conspirators were executed without trial on the orders of the consul Cicero – an act which led some to denounce Cicero as a bloody tyrant.48 Cicero not only took ‘unconstitutional measures against Catiline’ but later supported ‘extra-legal moves against Antony’. He used salus populi to allow magistrates to override the law in emergencies.49 All of this looks much closer to the position of Charles I, and later of the Rump Parliament and Oliver Cromwell, than to that of members of parliament who defended English liberties before 1640. It has been suggested that the principles at issue in Cicero’s execution of Catiline’s supporters were individual liberties on the one hand and the ‘preservation of the current regime’ on the other.50 Arguably, opponents of the king’s policies in the pre-Civil war parliaments defended liberties, while Cicero was concerned above all with state security. Such Romans as Cicero had relatively little to say against discretionary or emergency powers. Nor did they criticize the institution of slavery. The ideal of a wholly free population, consisting largely of independent farmers, was English not Roman. Henry Parker’s notion that if the peasants in France were freer, the country would be more prosperous and powerful was derived not from the Romans but from Fortescue.51 Sallust did not want to emancipate the slaves and replace them with a free peasantry. He took Catiline and his supporters to task for encouraging slaves to rebel.52 His own conception of a free state was one in which citizens were free, but in which many people were enslaved. 48 T.P. Wiseman, ‘The Senate and the Populares, 69–60 B.C.’, in J.A. Crook, Andrew Lintott and Elizabeth Rawson (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. IX: The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B.C. (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 327–67, at 357. 49 E.M. Atkins, ‘Cicero’, in Christopher Rowe, Malcolm Schofield et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 477–516, at 501. 50 Andrew Drummond, Law, Politics and Power: Sallust and the Execution of the Catilinarian Conspirators (Stuttgart, 1995), p. 107. 51 Parker, Observations, p. 2 (see also n. 18 above). Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 43, 49–53 (In Praise of the Laws of England, chs 29, 35–6). The same argument is made, and Fortescue specifically cited in e.g. Johnson, Keeler, et al., Proceedings in Parliament 1628, vol. 2, pp. 124, 366, 370. 52 Sallust, trans. J.C. Rolfe (London, 1931), Bellum Catilinae xxiv, xlvi, l, pp. 43, 79, 87. William Walker, in ‘Sallust and Skinner on Civil Liberty’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006): 237–59, discusses other differences between Sallust’s views on liberty and the neo-Roman theory propounded by Skinner.

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The Roman conception of liberty granted most free citizens only ‘the minimum of political rights’ while reserving real power for the elite few whose standing gave them auctoritas and dignitas.53 The Roman model of governance, as understood in early-seventeenth-century England, of course involved a senate drawn from the highest ranks of the population, and popular assemblies representing the mass of the people. The popular assemblies could not initiate legislation, but had to vote on measures brought in to them from outside, by senior magistrates.54 This was close to the system of government that existed in the republic of Venice, and that the English republican James Harrington advocated in his Oceana (1656).55 By contrast, the early Stuart House of Commons could and did act on its own initiative – with results that included the Petition of Right, asserting English liberties. English liberties and the institutions that underpinned them in the early Stuart period do not in fact look very neo-Roman. Roman thinking, and Renaissance humanism, undoubtedly had an impact in early modern England. In some respects, too, we can argue that the early Stuart state was not a pure monarchy, since towns and counties enjoyed a considerable measure of self-government. But it is difficult to sustain the claim that there was any developed tradition of republican or neo-Roman thought before the Civil War. Collinson detected no such tradition in Elizabethan England, and it seems that it was likewise absent in the four decades following the Queen’s death. Collinson commented that he did not ‘see 1649 foreshadowed proleptically in 1572 or 1584’.56 The same goes for 1625 and indeed 1642. 53 C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 15, 14. Walker, ‘Sallust and Skinner’, argues at 255 that Cicero held a restrictive, aristocratic conception of liberty, while Sallust supported an anti-aristocratic one. 54 Thomas Godwyn, Romanae Historiae Anthologia. An English Exposition of the Romane Antiquities (Oxford, 1614), p. 100 (laws introduced only by senior magistrates). 55 Harrington and the Venetians went further than the Romans in that they not only forbade the popular assembly from introducing legislation, but also prohibited it from debating the measures proposed to it. Harrington argued that anyone who ‘shall go about to introduce debate into any popular assembly’ should ‘be executed’ ‘without appeal’, and he praised Venice for outlawing popular debate and criticized Rome for allowing it: James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 126 (execution for introducing debate in popular assemblies), 149 (Venice praised), 142 (Rome criticized); Jonathan Scott, ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-Century England and the Netherlands’, in van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, vol. 1, pp. 61–81, at 76 (Harrington, Venice, and the ban on debate). These points are perhaps worth emphasizing, given that nowadays classical republicanism is often seen as favouring political equality and open debate. 56 Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 55.

ESSAY 12

American Corruption1 Andrew Fitzmaurice Patrick Collinson’s revelation that early modern English subjects perceived themselves to be living in a monarchical republic has provoked a series of studies which have excavated the extraordinary degree of civic participation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society.2 It is now clear that community participation was extensive throughout the social orders, in the parish, the guild, the village and the city. Community ties were established through the performance of public offices. In the City of Exeter, for example, public offices included watchmen, wardens of the poor, porters, and scavengers, through to constables, serjeants, recorder, clerk, and councillors, alderman, and mayor.3 Importantly, it has also been established that participation was understood through the civic language of Renaissance humanism.4 Humanist values were not the preserve of a highly educated elite but were employed in all the diverse offices of civil society.

1 The author is grateful to Markku Peltonen, Conal Condren and Saliha Belmessous for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. 2 See especially Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57; and Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put back (Cambridge, 1990). For some of the numerous accounts of early modern participation influenced by Collinson’s thesis, see the introduction to this volume and also Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth Century England (Basingstoke, 1994); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003); and David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005). Cf. Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (2 vols, Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1, pp. 307–27. 3 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500– 1850 (London, 2001), pp. 153–94, at 161. See also Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991). 4 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, ch. 8; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Jennifer Richards (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke, 2003).

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It would be natural, therefore, to expect that English subjects took the monarchical republic with them when they transported their communities to America. But transplanting the civic communities of England proved to be far from straightforward. The first generations of all the English colonies established in the Americas were marked by crisis and disaster. Famine, disease, conflict with native populations, conflict with other European colonizers, internal conflict, and struggles with the natural world were just some of the pressures placed upon the colonists. The structures of English society collapsed under these conditions. Indeed, many colonies, from Roanoke in 1587 to Providence Island in 1640, failed under these pressures. The monarchical republic did, however, survive and in a certain way flourish in the English colonies. But it flourished in a perverse form that cannot be perceived if we maintain an historical focus on civic participation that has so far dominated our understanding of Collinson’s original insight. If we were to judge the success of the monarchical republic in the Americas simply from the tracts promoting the colonies we could rapidly and rightly conclude that civic values were employed to the point that they dominated what the undertakers understood themselves to be doing by colonizing.5 Colonizing was represented as a civic duty, exercising the civic virtues, which would realize the political ends of honour, glory and advantage. Colonies were understood to be new commonwealths. The colonist citizen, a bonus homo, was to employ his virtues in the foundation and maintenance of a new commonwealth. He would put aside selfish interests and pursue the common good. The London preacher Robert Gray, promoting the Virginian colony and paraphrasing Plato and Cicero, urged that: ‘We are not borne like beasts for ourselves, and the time present onely’, employing ‘the weariest of all political commonplaces’, as Collinson has recently described it.6 One of the remarkable features of these civic ideals in the tracts promoting the American colonies is the diversity of authors by which they were employed. These writers were concerned with recreating very diverse visions of English communities in America. The middling sort of Puritans of Plymouth and Massachusetts wrote about their communities in civic terms. Robert Cushman of Plymouth published an entire sermon on the topic ‘Let no man seeke his own wealth, but let every man seeke anothers wealth’.7 John Winthrop, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, pp. 20–101. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), sig. Dr. Patrick Collinson, ‘Conclusion’, in Collinson (ed.), The Sixteenth Century 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 217–41, at 233. 7 Robert Cushman, A sermon preached at Plimmoth in New England December 9. 1621 (London, 1622), p. 12. See also William Bradford and Edward 5 6

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colony, echoed this sentiment, urging in his Model of Christian charity ‘enlargement towards others, and less respect towards our selves and our own right’ because ‘the public must oversway all private respects’.8 Ferdinando Gorges promoted his aristocratic vision of the New England community also in civic terms, and he spent most of the 1620s and 1630s trying to impose that vision on the Puritan colonies.9 The aristocratic Puritan council of the Providence Island Company attempted to create a community different from all versions of New England, but they too expressed their ideals in civic terms. The Company’s Comission and Instructions to Governor Philip Bell in 1631 envisaged a colony ruled by virtue, love and duty in which all colonists worked for the common good and maintained unity.10 The gentry and merchant investors of the Virginia Company of London aimed at creating a different kind of community again, but they too adhered to civic language to describe their ambitions. The Puritan preacher William Crashaw delivered an entire sermon on duty before the assembled members of the Virginia Company in which he assured them that plantation was not ‘voluntary or left indifferently to a mans choice but (plainly) a necessarie duty’.11 Alexander Whitaker, the son of the Master of St John’s College Cambridge, wrote from the Chesapeake Winslow, A relation or journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation settled at Plimoth in New England (London, 1622), sig. B3v. 8 John Winthrop, A model of Christian charity, in Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, eds Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 4–5 and 8. 9 For Gorges see Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History. The Settlements vol. 1 (New Haven, 1934), pp. 320–43. 10 A comission unto Cap: Philip Bell (1631); Instructions to the Governour and Counsell (1631), Public Record Office C0124/1, in Karen Kupperman (ed.), Papers Relating to the Providence Island Company in the Public Record Office, British Library and Other Repositories [microform], British Records Relating to America (Wakefield, 2004); Karen Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 3. 11 William Crashaw, A sermon preached before the right honourable the Lord Lawarre (London, 1610), sig. C3r. Crashaw organized much of the promotional effort made by the Virginia Company. Although he was a man of middling status, his creation of the third largest library in England (after those of Thomas Bodley in Oxford and Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury) indicates how intimately linked were humanist learning and colonizing enterprise. His collection, upon which he expended his patrimony, exceeded four thousand printed books and manuscripts, surpassing that of more famous contemporaries such as Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. On Crashaw’s library, see P.J. Wallis, ‘The Library of William Crashaw’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 2/ part 3 (1956): 213–28; P.J. Wallis, William Crashaw: The Sheffield Puritan (no place, 1963); R.M. Fisher, ‘William Crashaw’s Library at the Temple’, The Library 30/2 (1975): 116–228; R.M. Fisher, ‘William Crashaw and the Middle Temple Globes’, The Geographical Journal 140/Part 1 (1974): 105–12. For a catalogue of two thousand of Crashaw’s books which became the foundation of the new library

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that only virtue would succeed in establishing the colony: ‘vertue is the only thing that makes us rich and honourable.’12 The attempts to establish new communities in America were not confined to the English part of the Atlantic archipelago. There were Welsh, Irish and Scottish attempts to colonize in America, all of which aimed to create distinctive communities, but all were articulated in civic terms. These efforts were again motivated by the opportunity of civic participation as Sir William Alexander, a Scot, declared of his Nova Scotia patent: ‘where ever had Vertue so large a field to reap the fruits of Glory’.13 Robert Gordon, a landholder by Alexander’s patent, urged his audience to ‘compare ourselves with citizens’ and to ‘imitate the foot-steppes of vertue in the Italians’.14 There was a very large gap between these ideals of the colonial leaders and promoters and the reality of everyday life in the early colonies. In April of 1625, Captain Nathaniel Butler, the former Governor of Bermuda, submitted a report on the state of Virginia to the Virginia Company’s Court, the King and the Privy Council. The report, entitled The unmasked face of our colony in Virginia as it was in the winter of 1622, was a damning account of the persistently disastrous condition of the Virginia colony, now in its sixteenth year. With Alderman Robert Johnson’s petition to the King that same April, Butler’s report was one of the factors that influenced King James finally to dissolve the bitterly feuding Virginia Company. Although Butler’s report was motivated by revenge for past injuries suffered from the Sandys faction in the Virginia Company, it nevertheless presented an image of the colony which in its appalling essentials was impossible to refute. According to Butler, the new people who were sent each year to the Chesapeake were not provided with any shelter, nor (tellingly) any charity from the resident colonists, and were accordingly ‘not onely seen dyinge under hedges and in the woods, but being dead ly some of them for many dayes unregarded and unburied’. The colony, he observed, was in a permanent state of starvation, it lacked proper fortifications, the houses were ‘the worst I ever saw’, and the outer settlements had been abandoned as a result of the Indian massacre of 1622. Finally the laws and customs of England which were guaranteed by the letters patent were ignored by the building of St John’s College, Cambridge (now the Old Library), see St John’s College Library, MS U.4. 12 Alexander Whitaker, Good newes from Virginia (London, 1613), p. 1. For an account of civic ideals in the promotion of the Virginia colony, see Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, especially ch. 3. 13 William Alexander, An encouragement to colonies (London, 1624), p. 42. 14 Robert Gordon, Encouragements for such as shall have intention to bee Under-takers in the new plantation of Cape Briton (Edinburgh, 1625), sig. Ev. For an account of civic ideals in the promotion of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia colonies, see Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, pp. 92–7.

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colony’s rulers. According to Butler, only two thousand people remained alive of the ten thousand who had been sent over the course of the plantation. He concluded that, barring divine intervention, the plantation would ‘shortly gett the name of a slaughter house and soe justly become both odious to our selvs & contemptible to all the world’.15 It was certainly no secret that Virginia was a disaster, but perhaps the most revealing aspect of Butler’s account was the scorn in which the ideals of the Virginia Company’s numerous promotional tracts were held in the colony. Writing of the promises ‘in their printed bookes’, Butler was scathing: ‘they were had in a generall derision even amongst themselvs [the colonists] & the Pamphlets that had published their beinge sent thither by hundreds were laughed to scorne and every base fellow boldly gave them the lye in divers particulers’.16 Butler’s report, even accounting for bias, leaves us in no doubt that the civic ideals of the Virginia Company literature were far from being realized in the ‘Salt Marishes’ and ‘infectious Boggs’ of the Chesapeake.17 Virginia was not the only colony to fall short of the civic ideals that colonial promoters had hoped to see realized. In New England the attempt to transplant communities was most successful. The New England town meetings were in many ways models of the monarchical republic.18 The New England colonies were nevertheless plagued by faction and other perceived corruptions.19 The Newfoundland colonies dwindled and failed, struggling not only against the elements but with religious conflict and tensions within the international community that visited those shores. George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, abandoned his Catholic St John’s colony in Newfoundland after one year. He had sought to escape persecution but had encountered persistent religious recriminations as well as physical hardship, writing of his ‘sufferance in this wofull country’.20 Providence Island was similarly plagued by faction and recrimination in addition to the usual problems with hunger and disease. It was because it had already failed as a community that it finally succumbed to Spanish attack.21 These problems were typical of the various attempts to transplant different understandings of English communities to the other side of the Atlantic. The physical problems – disease, hunger, cold – were accompanied 15 Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. S.M. Kingsbury (4 vols, Washington, 1906–35), vol. 2, pp. 374–6. 16 Ibid., p. 375. 17 Ibid., p. 374. 18 Collinson noted this point in ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 34. 19 See below, pp. 223–4. 20 George Calvert to [Sir Francis Cottington], 18 August 1629, in Gillian T. Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610–30, (London, 1982), p. 292. 21 Kupperman, Providence Island, pp. 336–9.

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by perceived social and political problems – faction, idleness, selfishness, the breakdown of civic values. Are we to conclude, therefore, that the American colonies were an extension of the monarchical republic in rhetoric only and that in reality it failed to be transplanted? This would certainly be the rapid conclusion of many early American historians. But such an understanding of the disaster and disharmony characteristic of the early colonies fails to account for one of the most important, if not the most important, ways in which early modern civic values were articulated: namely, through a vocabulary of corruption. The problems of faction, idleness and self-interest which were reported as a plague on the early colonies were humanistic diagnoses of the ills of civil society.22 It might even be said that the leaders of the colonial enterprises anticipated that the new commonwealths they were creating would be corrupt communities even before they had been established. Corruption was already a necessary humanist obsession in a society in which office played such a vital role, but the colonial promoters were also acutely conscious that conquest amplified the dangers of corruption. In 1601, five years before the creation of the Virginia Council, the merchant Robert Johnson published his first volume of essays in which he made the conventional humanist observation that empire had been the cause of the Asiatic corruption of the Romans: ‘comming to the height of felicitie, and flowing with the spoiles of the whol world, over-swaied with their owne grandeure, [they] began to quaile in the last act, and after a safe escape from the maine sea of forraine incumberances, to suffer shipwracke in the haven’.23 He concluded: Their valour made them quiet, & quiet wealthy: but according to the revolution of al things with a swift & violent return their wealth effeminated their valor with idleness, idleness occasioned disorder, disorder made ruine. So their greatnes nourished such vices as by little and little brought them to confusion, insomuch that a great time their state was maintained more by reputation of thinges done, then any other present foundation.24

Johnson later became one of the leaders of the Virginia Company, rising to Deputy Treasurer, and he also became deputy Governor of the Bermuda Company as well as a director of the Levant and East India Companies. In 1609, two years after Jamestown was established, he published Nova Britannia promoting the colony. In this work he echoed the earlier warning he had made about the corruption of the Romans: in time of their glory, flowing with the Conquests and spoiles of the world, and having gotten the Goddesse Victoria to Rome, they clipt her wings, and set 22 On humanism and corruption in England, see Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, pp. 224–8; and Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. 124–36. 23 Robert Johnson, Essaies (London, 1601), sig. D6r. 24 Ibid., sig. D6v.

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her up among their Gods, that shee might take her flight no more, as shee had formerly done from the Gretians and others, and so effeminating their valour with idleness and security, it brought confusion and ruine to their state.25

Johnson twisted this argument in favour of colonization, arguing that it was vital never to rest idle. But at the same time, he revealed the widely shared consciousness that overseas possessions and conquests could rapidly corrupt. In the early years of the Massachusetts Bay colony, Governor Winthrop also shared this consciousness of the corrupting power of wealth when he observed in his Journal that people who died of scurvy were excessively attached to the comforts of England.26 Scurvy was seen as a moral disease as well as a consequence of insufficient fruit and vegetables. Robert Cushman had similarly diagnosed the problems of the neighbouring Plymouth colony, in which half of the first colonists died in the first winter, as being due to an excess of ‘self-love’: ‘the bane of all these mischiefs which arise amongst you is, that men are too cleaving to themselves, and their own matters’.27 The problem according to Cushman was an excessive devotion to wealth which the Apostle Paul had condemned in the church of Corinth. Cushman was careful to give wealth the full sense of ‘utilitas’ in moral philosophy: ‘the word here translated wealth, is the same with that in Rom. 13.4. and may not be taken onely for riches, as Englishmen commonly understand it, but for all kind of benefits, favours, comforts, either for soule or body’.28 He argued that the colonists were consumed by ‘idleness’ and ‘ease’ and observed that ‘such idle drones are intolerable in a setled Commonwealth, much more in a Commonwealth which is but as it were in the bud’.29 William Bradford and Edward Winslow’s report on the Plymouth colony echoed Cushman’s sentiments as they too demanded ‘let every man represse in himselfe and the whole bodie in each person, as so many rebels against the common good, all private respects of mans selves, not sorting with the general convenience’.30 According to Bradford and Winslow, the cause of corruption was not only wealth but the factions into which the colony divided even before having set foot on shore: ‘some [were] not well affected to unitie and concord, but gave some appearance of faction’.31 This spirit of faction was the immediate cause for the Plymouth covenant which codified contemporary civic ideals. The reality of civic perceptions

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Johnson, Nova Britannia (London, 1609), sig. E2v. Winthrop, Journal, p. 35. Cushman, Sermon, p. 3. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 6. Bradford and Winslow, A relation, sig. B3v. Ibid., pp. 2–3.

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was reflected more in the cause for creating the covenant than in the ideals expressed in it. Faction also troubled the Massachusetts Bay colony. John Winthrop struggled with Thomas Dudley for control over the colony for its first decades. Much of the business of colonial government was consumed by dealing with problems of unity and dissenters. As late as 1646, William Vassal, a colonist originally of Massachusetts and later of Plymouth, complained to the Parliament that colonists in New England ‘were denied the liberty of subjects both in church and commonwealth’.32 Winthrop responded that Vassal was a ‘man of busy and factious spirit, and always opposite to the civil governments of this country’.33 It should, of course, be emphasized that just as the Puritans were particularly sensible of sin, so too was their sense of corruption finely tuned. Just as early modern Discipline Ordinances were complemented by the behaviour they prohibited, so the Puritans’ concern with sin was complemented by an increased perception of corruption.34 Indeed, the Puritan concern with civil order and its corruption did much to extend consciousness of civic values albeit more in the perverse form of corruption than in the observance of virtue. By no means did the Puritans of New England have a monopoly on the consciousness of corruption. In 1617 William Vaughan established a Welsh colony in America. It was situated in the harbour of Aquafort on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland and it moved, in 1618, to Renews under the direction of Captain Richard Whitbourne whom Vaughan sent in that year as Governor of the colony. Whitbourne was a veteran seaman with experience in Newfoundland from 1579. He was dismayed by the state of the Welsh colony. He identified the main problem to be chronic idleness which plagued all civic enterprises, reporting that ‘the desired Plantation can never bee made beneficiall by such idle persons’. He lamented at length that ‘they had not applied themselves to any commendable thing … I grew out of heart to behold such abuse to bee used by those that wee sent to plant’.35 William Vaughan granted land under his Newfoundland patent to Henry Cary, Lord Falkland, Lord Deputy of Ireland. In 1622/3 Falkland was vigorously promoting a new colony in Newfoundland apparently intended for the resettlement of the ‘Old English’ in Ireland. Whitbourne was once again central to the plans and acted as Cary’s close adviser and assistant. Winthrop, Journal, p. 296. Ibid., p. 296. 34 On Discipline Ordinances and flourishing indiscipline, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), pp. 147–61. 35 Richard Whitbourne, A discourse and discovery of New-found-land (London, 1622), reprinted in Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered, pp. 134–5. 32 33

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By 1626 he was writing again to complain that he had spent much time and money, attempting to impose ‘orders and government’ along the coast of the Avalon Peninsula but had to deal with a ‘multitude of disorderlie persons’ and ‘such a distraction amongst those which your Lordship had formerlie sent there to plant’.36 He had succeeded only in exhausting his means. In this context it was wholly appropriate that Robert Hayman, the Governor of the Bristol’s Hope colony under the 1617 patent of the Bristol merchants in the Newfoundland Company, should have employed his time in Newfoundland to make the first English translation of Rabelais’ works. Rabelais had provided some of the most powerful humanist satires of corruption and the decay of civic responsibility. Hayman, who had studied at the University of Poitiers, published his translations in Quodlibets, lately come over from new Britaniola, old Newfoundland in 1628. As the subject of his translation, Hayman selected two epistles by Rabelais, on corrupt and virtuous women. His portrayal of corruption was vivid, to say the least: ‘Thou stinking, with’red stale: thou past a whore … Thou whore, thou witch, thou bawd, crusted in evill … Thou Hag, from whose blaspheming wide mouth goes / Worse than ranke poyson to a fasting nose / Thy dugs by thine owne bastard brats defiled.’37 It has been suggested that Hayman’s literary efforts in Newfoundland reveal that his ‘attitude towards his duties’ was ‘cavalier’.38 On the contrary, Hayman was addressing what was regarded as the single greatest problem in transplanting English communities to America: namely, the ties of duty and responsibility, which were believed to bind the community, would unravel with the pressures of corruption, including addiction to luxury, idleness and faction. By writing of the corruption of women, Hayman was addressing bonds that were believed to be fundamental to holding the community together. This concern with corruption took a cynical turn in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period. The monarchical republic had adhered to the Ciceronian ideals of virtue employed in the vita activa. Tacitus’ account of corruption in the court of Tiberius was increasingly believed to be a truer mirror of post-Reformation Europe. In a courtly world, according to the Tacitean perspective, virtue was treason and civic participation would lead to ruin and even death.39 William Vaughan who sent the colony of 36 Richard Whitbourne to Lord Falkland, 27 Feb. 1625/6, in Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered, pp. 237–40. 37 Robert Hayman, Quodlibets. Lately come over from new Britaniola, old Newfoundland (London, 1628), Bk 2, pp. 50–51. 38 Gillian T. Cell, ‘Introduction’, in Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered, pp. 18–19. 39 On early modern Tacitism, see: Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State’, in J.H. Burns (ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 479–98;

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‘welch Fooles’ to Newfoundland was well versed in Tacitean cynicism.40 His first work of moral philosophy, The golden grove, published in 1600, repeatedly employed Tacitus and complained of the ‘corrupt nature of this age’.41 Vaughan’s experience of colonization in Newfoundland made him more determined in this opinion. In 1626, after the failure of Aquafort and Renews, Vaughan collaborated with John Florio and Thomas Scott in translating Trajano Bocallini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso. Bocallini’s Ragguagli was a powerful account of the decline of civic virtue in Europe. Tacitus was a hero of his narrative. When the Crier of Parnassus in Bocallini’s satire reads a ‘Proclamation concerning the Reformation of the World’, Bocallini dryly observes ‘the wisest sort smelt out the drise, and laughed in their sleeves to see the rascality and foolish Idiots to delight themselves with baubles, as babies with nuts. Men of understanding know, that vices will abound, as long as men live in the world.’42 Vaughan carried this concern with corruption into his Golden fleece, a work greatly motivated by colonization. The golden fleece was published in 1626 after the failure of his colonies and in the same year as his translation of Bocallini. So deep was the concern with corruption in this work that it reveals the beginning of a new attitude to the decay of the monarchical republic in America. The reality of New World corruption was not only accepted but perceived as something that could be exploited to establish colonies. Vaughan’s treatise was divided into three parts, the first concerned with religion, the second with the ‘Vices and Decayes of the Kingdome’ and the third with ‘wayes to get wealth, and to restore Trading’.43 The third part focused on colonization. The treatise explicitly takes the form of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso, using the court of Apollo to introduce various authorities into a dialogue on the questions examined. According to Vaughan, ‘I have resolved to use the name of the great Apollo, not Heathenish, but Christian, after the example of Trajano Bocallini, who under that Title brought forth most plausible Raggualioes, and by mee now late communicated to our English Readers.’44 Following this form, Vaughan introduced the numerous authorities of Tacitean and classical humanism (and many of Bocallini’s Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993); Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. 124–35. See also Tacitus, The annales, trans. Richard Greneway (London, 1598). 40 For Captain John Mason on the ‘welch Fooles’, see Cell, ‘Introduction’, in Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered, p. 13. 41 William Vaughan, The golden grove (London, 1600), Bk 1, ch. 21, ‘Of deceit’. 42 Trajano Boccalini, The new found politike, trans. William Vaughan (London, 1626), p. 234. 43 William Vaughan, The golden fleece (London, 1626), title page. 44 Ibid., pt 1, p. 13.

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characters), including Tacitus, Lipsius, Thomas Smith and the seven wise men of Greece. He created a unique text by bringing into this dialogue the central figures of contemporary Jacobean and Elizabethan colonization, including John Guy, Captain John Mason, Richard Whitbourne, Ferdinando Gorges, Francis Drake and Martin Frobisher. In Part 2, Chapter 16, Bocallini is the central character, complaining about the general state of decay and accusing the seven wise men of Greece of hypocrisy for having made proclamations on how to reform the world. In this chapter, as throughout the treatise, we find that Vaughan’s ideas were again deeply influenced by the cynicism of the new humanism and so by the conviction that interests are at the forefront of all moral considerations. Apollo was no virtuous Prince. It was not ‘his absolute will to root out the knowledge of Evill from the Christian World’. Accordingly, when Boccalini told him that all the councils of the seven wise men on how to reform the commonwealth were virtuous and hypocritical ‘frivolities’ and the real problems arose from corruption, Apollo knowing this to be true, which Boccallini with his too lavish tongue had blabbed abroad, and ashamed that every common Citizen of Parnassus began now to smell out the drift of his statesmen, and could readily descant of those secrets, which in ancient times as a divine mysterie they concealed from vulgar minds, he retired himselfe much discontented.

Apollo’s consort ‘laboured to mitigate his grief, telling him that the Sinne must raigne, as long as men beare sway in the World’.45 Vaughan’s persona, Orpheus Junior, explained that the Golden Fleece, the solution to the problems raised in the dialogue, was ‘the Plantation and Fishing in the Newfoundland’.46 Duty, virtue and honour held little place as motivations. Orpheus Junior concluded that ‘our Saviour makes use of our worldly desires to serve his divine intentions’. Indeed, he argued, ‘By which meditations of mine, I perceived, that nothing but gaine could move the careless minds of Ilanders to seeke abroad for new habitations.’47 It is clear from many accounts of colonial corruption that the monarchical republic survived plantation because even if civic participation had dramatically decayed it remained the standard by which social and political behaviour was judged through a broad cross-section of social orders. Vaughan’s frank admission that nothing but gain would motivate the colonists raises the question of whether the monarchical republic was surviving when what was perceived as corruption was being counselled as the principal motivation for plantation. Greater light can be shed on this question if we return to the most notorious example of early modern English colonial corruption: namely, the Virginia Company and its colony. 45 46 47

Ibid., pt 2, p. 85. Ibid., pt 3, p. 1. Ibid., pt 3, pp. 4–5.

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Captain Nathaniel Butler’s account of the state of Jamestown was by no means the only report depicting the colony in such disturbing terms. Even the Sandys faction in the Virginia Company, against whom Butler’s report was directed, did not attempt to deny that the colony had fallen far short of their ideals. They restricted themselves to representing Butler’s claims as exaggerated rather than disputing the reality of disaster, arguing, for example, that only three colonists had died for each who survived rather than Butler’s ratio of five to one.48 From the foundation of the colony in 1607 to the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624, idleness, faction and the relentless pursuit of self-interest were diagnosed as the principal causes of Virginia’s miseries. If the reality of the colony was far from the Virginia Company’s civic ideals, the behaviour of the Company itself was even further from them. Consistent with the humanistic approach to colonization of the time, the daily affairs of the Virginia Company were conducted in largely humanistic terms, but the talk was about corruption rather than virtue. Corruption, as we have seen, was understood to be any kind of self-seeking behaviour, particularly the pursuit of individual profit at the expense of the common good. Accordingly, when the Virginia Company split into violently opposed factions, each side made claims against the other in precisely these terms. Each side accused the other of being self-serving, of using their position for their own factional benefit and of pursuing personal profit. Thus when Sandys’s faction controlled the government of the Company and awarded Edwin Sandys the position of Director and John Ferrar the position of Treasurer of the tobacco monopoly with the exaggerated salaries of £500 and £400 respectively, the competing Smith faction, led by Samuel Wrote and Robert Johnson, accused Sandys of corrupting the common good of the enterprise.49 The Sandys faction responded in kind. Nicholas Ferrar, deputy treasurer from 1622 to 1624, compared Governor Argoll, appointed by the Smith faction, to Gaius Verres, the governor of Sicily, whose corruption was famously prosecuted by Cicero: ‘although the Subject [Virginia] he [Argoll] wrought upone was nothinge comparable in worth to that of Verres yett his skill and abillytie in matter of depredation seems nothing inferior if they had but such a pen to describe them as the others hadd.’50 That pen, of course, was Cicero’s and the source was his Verrine Orations.

48 Records of the Virginia Company, vol. 2, pp. 381–6; and Wesley Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company (New York, 1932), p. 257. 49 Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, pp. 236–7; Records of the Virginia Company, vol. 2, especially pp. 163–78. 50 Nicholas Ferrar, Sir Thomas Smith’s misgovernment of the Virginia Company (Cambridge, 1990), p. 9.

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Robert Johnson showed clearly in his Essaies and in his tracts promoting Virginia that he too was an admirer of Cicero. But like Vaughan, he was also an admirer of Tacitus. In his essay ‘Of histories’, Johnson evaluated which of the diverse historians he preferred and concluded: I prefer Tacitus as the best that any man can dwell upon: Hee sheweth the miseries of a torne and declining state, where it was a capital crime to bee virtuous, and nothing so unsafe as to bee securely innocent: where great mens gestures were particularly interpreted, their actions aggravated, and construed to proceed from an aspiring intent: and the Prince too suspitiously iealous touching points of concurancy, suppressed men of great desert, as competitors with them in that chiefest ground, the love of the people.51

Clearly, this perspective of Tacitean humanism partly motivated Johnson’s English translation of Giovanni Botero’s Relationi universali which was reproduced in seven London editions between 1601 and 1630.52 Botero’s work, too, was shaped by Tacitus. The Relationi universali was his most mature work representing the central role of interest, and commerce in particular, as the means by which states achieve greatness. The links between interest, commerce and greatness had direct significance for Johnson who was, above all, a merchant involved in England’s overseas enterprises and who argued that those enterprises were the means to England’s greatness. Johnson was also a director of the East India Company which gained its patent from Elizabeth, after some hesitation, in 1601, the year in which Johnson first published his translation of Botero. There has been some controversy among early modern intellectual historians about how Tacitus was understood in post-Reformation Europe. According to one view, Tacitism was an extension of civic ideals.53 The Tacitean analysis of corruption was nostalgia for civic virtue. But Tacitism has also been described in terms of the triumph of interest over virtue and the decline of Ciceronian ideals.54 Johnson indicated that a similar debate over the reading of Tacitus was being conducted in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: namely, did Tacitus expose corruption or teach corruption? ‘Some infere’, he observed, that the knowledge of evill doth induce and draw men to effect, that the imitation of evil doth always excel the president in height of mischiefe, but the following of vertue doth scarse aequalize the example in any degree of goodnesse, that the conversing in Tacitus doth deter men from doing worthily.

Johnson, Essaies, sig. D3r. Giovanni Botero, Relations, of the most famous kingdoms and commonweales thorowout the world, trans. Robert Johnson (London, 1611). Johnson’s editions of the Relations were published twice in 1601 and again in 1603, 1608, 1611, 1616 and 1630. 53 See, for example, Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. 124–35. 54 See, for example, Tuck, Philosophy and Government, chs 2 and 3. 51

52

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He conceded that this may indeed have been the case: ‘such corrupt mindes may also suck venome out of the most wholesome flowers’. But Johnson did not express nostalgia for Ciceronian virtues. Rather, he saw Tacitus’ actors as ‘governours of necessity, rather directing than obeying the vexatious’.55 These governors of necessity – not unlike colonial governors – made their calculations in terms of interest. They held office in a corrupt world, accepted that world as corrupt and tailored their judgement accordingly. But they nevertheless held office, they participated in a monarchical republic, albeit one that resembled the court of Tiberius, not a republic of virtue. Despite this vestige of participation, it is clear that the monarchical republic in America was distinguished by the degree to which it departed from civic ideals. It departed because corruption hindered most of the citizens cloaked as subjects from performing their offices. The colonies were republics largely in so far as they were perceived as corrupt. Since Patrick Collinson unearthed the monarchical republic, the numerous studies devoted to delineating its extent and depth have focused overwhelmingly upon civic participation and officeholding as the indicators of civic sentiment. Starting with Collinson, studies of the monarchical republic have examined the ways in which subjects acted as citizens and they have examined the language used to describe that citizenship. Several historians have demonstrated the extraordinary extent of early modern English officeholding.56 Other studies have examined the language of participation.57 The values of citizenship have been revealed in a number of more specialized studies, for example in the early Stuart parliaments.58 I have explored the importance of citizens cloaked as subjects in the pursuit of American colonization.59 None of these studies ignores corruption, but at the same time it is clear that the ways in which early modern subjects failed as citizens has not been their focus. To bring this focus on participation to the American colonies would wrongly lead us to conclude either that the monarchical republic was non-existent or that it was very limited in extent. The monarchical republic was active in America, but more in its breach than its observance. One factor contributing to the American republics of corruption was the disastrous character of early modern English colonization. What, Johnson, Essaies, sigs D3v–D4v. See, for example, Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); Conal Condren, Argument and Authority: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, 2006). 57 See, for example, Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism; Condren, Language of Politics. 58 Colclough, Freedom of Speech. 59 Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America. 55 56

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therefore, were the implications of the corrupt American monarchical republic for the monarchical republic in England? Were they limited by the exceptional colonial circumstances? The perception of corruption was also profound in England and to a large degree the perceptions of corruption in the colonies were projections of metropolitan concerns (as the examples of Vaughan and Johnson partly illustrate). Tacitism was only the most strongly articulated form of those perceptions. In ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Collinson argued that ‘too much attention has been paid to factional in-fighting as the main principle of politics, too little to the practical cooperation of leading members of the regime, its centripetal rather than centrifugal tendencies’.60 He was referring to Tudor England, but the observation has force for Stuart Britain. It would, however, be a mistake to see factional infighting and other forms of political corruption simply as antagonistic to the culture of practical cooperation and participation. Factional infighting was perceived to be the corrupt expression of participation and so it too was an important part of the monarchical republic. We must ask, therefore, whether the focus on civic participation has also distorted our understanding of the monarchical republic in England. If the monarchical republic was present as much or more in corruption, and the perception of corruption, as in virtue, it may have been far more extensive than has hitherto been supposed.

60

Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’, p. 40.

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ESSAY 13

The Monarchical Republic Enthroned Quentin Skinner On 17 March 1649, the English House of Commons passed an Act abolishing the monarchy, declaring that ‘the office of a King’ is ‘unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people’.1 Five days later, the Commons printed a Declaration ‘Expressing the Grounds of their late Proceedings’, in which they explained that they were in the process ‘of Setling the present Government in the way of A Free State’.2 By a ‘free state’, they in turn explained, they meant a republic: The Representatives of the People now Assembled in Parliament, have judged it necessary to change the Government of this Nation from the former Monarchy, (unto which by many injurious incroachments it had arrived) into a Republique, and not to have any more a King to tyrannize over them.3

As the Declaration went on to confirm, the House of Commons had succeeded in bringing about a joyous transformation ‘from Tyranny to a Free State’ by way of establishing ‘the present Government of a Republique’.4 The Declaration may thus be said to be grounded on a categorical distinction between republics and monarchies. We find the same contrast still more sharply drawn by a number of the propagandists employed in the early 1650s to write on behalf of the Rump Parliament. Among these the most prominent was Marchamont Nedham, the editor of the official government newspaper, Mercurius Politicus.5 Nedham issued a series of

1 The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S.R. Gardiner, third edn (Oxford, 1906), p. 385. 2 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 (London, 1649). 3 Ibid., p. 20. 4 Ibid., pp. 24, 25. 5 On Nedham as editor of Mercurius Politicus see Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–1776, ed. David Wootton (Stanford, 1994), pp. 45–81; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 221–5.

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44 weekly editorials between 1651 and 16526 in which he itemized the many benefits that, he claimed, cannot in principle be enjoyed under a monarchy, but only under a republic or free state. One way of expressing his commitment would thus be to say – adopting the vocabulary so influentially put into currency by Patrick Collinson – that Nedham was repudiating the idea of a monarchical republic: he was claiming that the idea of a monarchy embodying the values of a republic is an impossibility. Nedham published a revised version of his editorials in the form of a book entitled The Excellencie of a Free-State in 1656.7 By this stage his exposition was at least as much a warning to Oliver Cromwell not to undermine the commonwealth as it was a celebration of republican values. With these covert polemics, however, Nedham merely gave additional force to his enumeration of the distinctive ‘excellencies’ that stem from living in a free state instead of a monarchy. The first is said to be that, where the people are allowed to be ‘Keepers of their own Liberties’ they ‘never think of usurping over other mens Rights’.8 ‘The case is far otherwise’, Nedham goes on, ‘among Kings and Grandees’, who ‘naturally move within the circle of domination, as in their proper Centre; and count it no less Security than Wisdom and Policy, to brave it over the People’.9 A further disadvantage of monarchies is that ‘those persons onely have access to Government, who are apt to serve the lust and will of the Prince’. By contrast, ‘the door of Dignity stands open to all’ in republics, and everyone is able to ‘ascend thither by the steps of Worth and Vertue’.10 Each citizen gains a sense ‘of his own immediate share in the publick Interest’, and further advantages accrue that can never be looked for under the rule of kings. The chief is that ‘the People are ever indued with a more magnanimous, active, and noble temper of Spirit’, a temper enabling them to act in such a fashion as to garner glory for their communities as well as themselves.11 Some apologists for the Rump spoke with even greater feeling about a further benefit that is said to arise from living in a free state. The cost of government, they claimed, is never such as to impose an undue burden on the people. Francis Osborne repeatedly draws attention to this advantage in his Plea For A Free State Compared With Monarchy of 1652.12 Among 6 Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660 (Cambridge, MA, 1961), p. 208. 7 Worden, ‘Beginnings of English Republicanism’, p. 77. 8 [Marchamont Nedham], The Excellencie of a Free-State (London, 1656), p. 24. 9 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 10 Ibid., p. 40. 11 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 12 For the attribution see John M. Wallace, ‘The Engagement Controversy 1649–1652: An Annotated List of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 68 (1964): 384–405, at 405.

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the reasons why the United Provinces have risen to such prosperity in recent times, he maintains, is that they have not only ‘obtained their liberty’ but have thereby managed to avoid ‘being exhausted by the exorbitant and vast expences of a King’.13 Monarchs are bottomless pits, endlessly given to devouring their own people with their excessive luxuries and ‘the vast summes correspondent to the charge of a Court’.14 When you consider this form of corruption, ‘you cannot but conclude a Free State the thriftiest government for the people’, who are always in a position to limit and question any expenses incurred.15 As Osborne observes, these comparisons can be summarized by saying that republics ‘want not the blessings of the best of Monarchies, yet stand uncharged with their inconveniences’.16 While they were happy to emphasize these blessings, however, most protagonists of the English commonwealth recognized that the chief distinction to be drawn between monarchies and republics is obviously a constitutional one. What principally concerns them is accordingly the nature of the regime that needs to be established if the distinctive benefits of living in a free state are to be fully enjoyed. As the history of the English republic unfolded, becoming increasingly disfigured by a series of unsuccessful constitutional experiments, the question as to which ‘model’ of a free state ought to be imposed became correspondingly fraught. Among the political writers who addressed this issue, James Harrington offered perhaps the most influential answer in his Oceana of 1656. The two chapters of ‘Preliminaries’ prefacing his model of a perfect commonwealth contain one of the fullest expositions of the principles that any regime must embody, according to the republican writers of the 1650s, if it is to qualify as a free state.17 Harrington’s heroes, he tells us, are the classical writers on constitutions, especially Aristotle and Livy, and those who have recaptured their ancient prudence for the modern world, above all Machiavelli in his Discorsi.18 Basing himself on these authorities, Harrington declares that a commonwealth, like an individual, can be characterized as free if and only if it is governed by its own rational will, and is able in consequence 13 [Francis Osborne], A Perswasive to a Mutuall Compliance under the Present Government. Together with a Plea for a Free State compared with Monarchy (Oxford, 1652), p. 23. 14 Ibid., pp. 24, 26, 32. 15 Ibid., p. 32. 16 Ibid., p. 13. 17 For recent discussions of Harrington’s ‘model’ see Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 1997), pp. 69–90; Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writings of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 273–93. 18 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992), p. 9.

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to follow its own appropriate ends. Speaking of individuals, we can say that ‘whatever was reason in the contemplation of a man, being brought forth by his will into action, is virtue and the freedom of soul’.19 Speaking of commonwealths, we can describe them as free in precisely the same way. ‘If the liberty of a man consist in the empire of his reason, the absence whereof would betray him unto the bondage of his passions; then the liberty of a commonwealth consisteth in the empire of her laws, the absence whereof would betray her unto the lusts of tyrants.’20 To live in a free state, in other words, is to live in a state governed by a reasonable will, and hence by the rule of law. This requirement is taken by Harrington to place two constraints upon the political system of any genuinely free commonwealth. First of all, whatever laws are enacted must be imposed only with the consent of the whole body of the citizens. Like other republican theorists, Harrington concedes that the people cannot literally give their consent; they are ‘too unwieldy a body to be assembled’, and can only hope to act through the medium of elected representatives.21 But he insists that the laws must always be an expression at least of our represented will if we are to count as living in a free state. This is because, as he has explained, a state or commonwealth can only be described as free if it acts by its own will. But a political body can only be said to act by its own will if it acts according to the will of its members as a whole. As Harrington expresses the crucial implication, every citizen must therefore be controlled only ‘by the law; and that framed by every private man unto no other end (or they may thank themselves) than to protect the liberty of every private man, which by that means comes to be the liberty of the commonwealth’.22 The other and closely connected requirement is that the people should be compelled to yield obedience only to laws to which they have given their consent. To put the same point the other way round, there must be no arbitrary powers within the state. To live at the mercy of any such powers is to be subject to the will of someone else. But as Harrington has stressed, to be free is to be subject only to your own will. To say that you are under the will of someone else is to say that you are living as a slave. It follows that, for a community to qualify as living in a free state, there must be no discretionary or prerogative rights above or contrary to the laws enacted by the citizens themselves. It was on this second and negative rule that the defenders of the English republic generally placed their main emphasis. We already find Nedham expressing the principle in strong terms in his Excellencie of a Free State. 19 20 21 22

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 20.

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Kings, he declares, always act ‘according to their own Wills and Interests, in making, expounding, and executing of Laws to the prejudice of the Peoples Liberty and Security’.23 ‘The onely way to prevent Arbitrariness’, he goes on, must therefore be to ensure ‘that no Laws or Dominations whatsoever should be made, but by the peoples Consent.’24 Later the argument was underlined by those attempting to reanimate the cause of the republic at the end of the decade. One of the fullest of these restatements was that of William Sprigg in his Modest Plea, for An Equal Commonwealth, Against Monarchy, in which he lays out (in the words of his own subtitle) ‘the genuine Nature, and true Interest of a FREE-STATE’.25 What must be avoided at all costs, Sprigg insists, is the kind of arbitrary power ‘that wyndes up all the strings in the Instrument of Government to the Interest of a Single Person; that tunes Laws, Religion, and all things, to an harmony and complyance with the Monarchs single Will’.26 To establish such a power above law is the means by which kingship ‘ever lays an Iron yoke of slavery and oppression on the peoples necks’.27 Suppose, however, that we live under a regime in which the laws alone rule, and in which everyone gives their consent to the laws. We shall then be living free of any such enslaving forms of domination and arbitrariness. As Harrington likes to put it, we shall be free not merely ‘from the laws’ but also ‘by the laws’, since we shall be the legislators ourselves.28 This, then, is the essential model of a free commonwealth. As Harrington triumphantly concludes, this was the basis for Livy’s claim – on which Harrington likewise takes his stand – that a true commonwealth may be said to consist of ‘an empire of laws and not of men’.29 If, however, this is what it means to live under a republic or free state, then it begins to look as if it may be possible to speak of a monarchical republic after all. Suppose you live under a monarchy in which the prince possesses no discretionary and hence arbitrary powers, and in which the people are subject to no laws other than those enacted by their elected representatives. Surely you might be said to be living under a form of government that, although monarchical in form, is nevertheless republican in character?

[Nedham], Excellencie of a Free-State, p. 63. Ibid., pp. 63–4. 25 On Sprigg see Richard L. Greaves, ‘William Sprigg and the Cromwellian Revolution’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (1970–71): 99–113. 26 [William Sprigg], A Modest Plea, for An Equal Common-wealth, Against Monarchy. In which the genuine Nature, and true Interest of a FREE-STATE, is briefly stated (London, 1659), p. 5. 27 Ibid., p. 6. 28 Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, p. 20. 29 Ibid., p. 20. 23 24

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That we can hope to set up just such a monarchical republic was precisely the contention that many protagonists of parliament sought to impress upon Charles I in 1642. Perhaps the most influential statement of the case was that of Henry Parker in his Observations, first published in July of that climacteric year.30 Parker vehemently denies that, in opposing the government of Charles I, he has been speaking against the institution of kingship itself. As he declares at the end of his tract, ‘I speak not this in favour of any alteration in England’, for ‘I am as zealously addicted to Monarchy, as any man can, without dotage’. He merely wishes, he insists, to draw attention to the fact that, while ‘in some things I know tis dangerous to circumscribe Princes’, in others ‘there may be great danger in leaving them to their pleasure, and scarce any hope at all of benefit’ if they are left uncircumscribed.31 The danger to which Parker chiefly draws attention is the possession by the crown of discretionary and hence arbitrary powers. He particularly focuses on the prerogative of the Negative Voice, the right of the king to refuse his assent to Bills presented to him by the two Houses of Parliament. The existence of this power, Parker objects, leaves the body of the people and their representatives entirely dependent, in the last resort, on the will of the king. The Negative Voice, as he puts it, ‘at one blow confounds all Parliaments, and subjects us to as unbounded a regiment of the Kings meere will, as any Nation under Heaven ever suffered under’. For ‘what remains, but that all our lawes, rights, & liberties, be either no where at all determinable, or else onely in the Kings breast?’32 Parker’s objection to living in such a state of dependence is that it is equivalent to living in servitude. To say that the king has so much power is to say that the nation has been made ‘to resigne its owne interest to the will of one Lord, as that that Lord may destroy it without injury’. But to live at the mercy of such a lord is to live in slavery, and ‘it is not just nor possible for any nation so to inslave itself’.33 The possession of arbitrary power may therefore be described, Parker concludes, as ‘the sting of Monarchy’, and it is essential for this sting to be drawn if we are to live in a free state.34 Parker corroborates his conclusion by examining the situation of those communities, such as Venice, which can undoubtedly be said to be living 30 On Parker’s tract and its context see Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 85–9; Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil War’ in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 332–43. 31 [Henry Parker], Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642), p. 41. 32 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 33 Ibid., p. 8. 34 Ibid., p. 26.

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in liberty. ‘Let us look upon the Venetians, and such other free Nations’, he suggests, and ask ourselves ‘why are they so extreamly jealous over their Princes’. The answer is that ‘it is meerely for feare of this bondage, that their Princes will dote upon their owne wills, and despise publike Councels and Laws’.35 Recognizing the danger, the Venetians have circumvented it, ensuring that the people give their approbation to each of the laws by which they are ruled, and ensuring at the same time that the laws alone rule, without the addition of any discretionary powers at all.36 As long as the venom of arbitrary power is neutralized, Parker is willing to acknowledge that the resulting type of limited kingship will be the best form of government in the world. ‘Were not this the sting of Monarchy, of all formes it were the most exquisite, and to all Nations it would be the most desirable: Happy are those Monarchs which qualifie this sting, and happy are those people which are governed by such Monarchs.’37 What Parker wants, in short, is a form of kingship embodying the constitutional arrangements typical of free states. He is pleading, in other words, for a monarchical republic, a ‘free monarchy’. It was precisely this form of government, however, that Charles I and his advisers absolutely refused to contemplate in 1642. The fullest statement of their objections can be found in the king’s Answer to the XIX Propositions, his reaction to the constitutional settlement put to him by the two Houses of Parliament in June 1642.38 Asked to give up a number of his prerogatives, including that of the Negative Voice, he responded at first with incredulity and then with outright defiance, insisting that any such settlement would be blankly unacceptable. Charles’s initial complaint is that under such a system he would no longer be a true king. With bitter eloquence he imagines the transformation of his regal state: We may be waited on bare-headed; We may have Our hand kist; The Style of Majestie continued to Us; And the Kings Authoritie, declared by both Houses of Parliament, may be still the Style of your Commands; We may have Swords and Maces carried before Us, and please Our Self with the sight of a Crown and Scepter, … but as to true and reall Power We should remain but the outside, but the Picture, but the signe of a King.39

Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 40. 37 Ibid., p. 26. 38 For a classic discussion of the Answer, see Corinne Comstock Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords 1556–1832 (London, 1965), pp. 23–43. See also Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University, AL, 1985), pp. 5–20, and Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 127–8. 39 His Majesties Answer to the XIX. Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament (London, 1642), pp. 10–11. 35 36

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Later he adds a more positive objection, arguing that such a monarchy would in fact be a republic: We call God to witnesse, that as for Our Subjects sake these Rights are vested in Us, so for their sakes, as well as for Our own, We are resolved not to quit them, … nor to make Our Self of a King of England a Duke of Venice, and this of a Kingdom a Republique.40

What Charles is repudiating is the idea of a monarchical republic: such a constitution, he insists, would be no different from a genuine republic; it would not be monarchical at all. If we glance forward, however, from the impasse of 1642 to the settlement of 1688, we find that many of the crown’s supporters were positively eager to describe the Glorious Revolution as the creation of just such a monarchical republic. It is of course true that the first task of those who wrote in support of William and Mary was to demonstrate that their government was lawful, and that it deserved in conscience to be obeyed, a project that consumed most of their polemical energies in the early 1690s.41 By the end of the decade, however, a new strand of whig political discourse had begun to emerge, the basic concern of which was to draw a lurid contrast between the tyranny suffered under James II and the freedom established by the new regime.42 One of James II’s most conspicuously tyrannical acts, according to these propagandists, was his notorious decision to imprison the seven bishops. He punished them, according to the author of England’s Deliverance, ‘only because they Petitioned him to regard the Oath he had taken to maintain the Laws of the Kingdom’.43 As with his other illegal acts, however, this outrage was merely the surface manifestation of a deeper-rooted tyranny. As Richard Kingston explains in Tyranny Detected,44 James’s worst excesses took the form of suspending and even dispensing with the laws of the land, thereby ‘assuming an Arbitrary Authority, that should know no Bounds, but what his own Will should prescribe’.45 By arrogating to Ibid., p. 17. On the polemical literature of this period see J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 5–34; Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980): 473–564. 42 On this phase of whig propaganda see Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 35–60; Quentin Skinner, ‘Augustan Party Politics and Renaissance Constitutional Thought’ in Visions of Politics, vol. II: Renaissance Virtues, pp. 356–7. 43 England’s Deliverance from Popery and Slavery (London, 1695), singlesheet broadside. 44 On Kingston see P.A. Hopkins, ‘Sham plots and real plots in the 1690s’, in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 89–110. 45 Richard Kingston, Tyranny Detected and the Late Revolution Justify’d, by the Law of God, the Law of Nature, and the Practice of All Nations (London, 40 41

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himself a dispensing power, he ‘usurp’d the whole Legislative Authority into his own Hands, for to Dispense with Laws is as great a power as to make them; and by the exercise of it, invested himself with a power as great, if not greater, than that of King and Parliament together’.46 These abuses are now said to be a thing of the past. It is true that, among the whigs most anxious to insist on this point, many were clearly motivated by a desire to warn the people of England that the junto in power was beginning to undermine the settlement of 1688. But this only made them the more anxious to represent the settlement itself as a glorious work of liberation from tyranny. John Trenchard in his Argument provides the best example of the claims to which this commitment gave rise.47 Whereas James II had been able to confine the seven bishops at will, the situation under the new constitution is that ‘no Man can be imprisoned, unless he has transgressed a Law of his own making, nor be try’d but by his own Neighbours’.48 Whereas James II had been able to operate a dispensing power, this most dangerous prerogative has since been taken away. The three estates in Parliament now comprise the entire government, ‘for without all their Consents no Law can be made, nor a Penny of Money levied upon the Subjects’.49 To which the author of A Letter to his Most Excellent Majesty adds that the powers of the Executive are now ‘so limited, that the King cannot employ any man in Civil or Military Office under him, but such a one who is qualify’d by Laws of the Peoples making’.50 When we survey the reign of James II, Trenchard concludes, we can see that under his tyranny the people were ‘breathing out the last Gasp of their Liberty’.51 They were living, as the author of A Free Discourse agrees, in a period when ‘Popery and Arbitrary Power were favour’d, and cherish’d with all the Art and Industry, which Men of slavish Principles, and profligate Consciences, could devise’.52 The final outcome, in Kingston’s words, was 1699), p. 106. 46 Ibid., p. 109. 47 On Trenchard see Marie P. McMahon, The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon: Libertarian Loyalists to the new House of Hanover (London, 1990). 48 [John Trenchard], An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is inconsistent with A Free Government, and absolutely destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (London, 1697), p. 2. On Trenchard’s place in the standing army debate see Lois G. Schwoerer, No Standing Armies! The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 174–87. 49 [Trenchard], An Argument, p. 3. 50 A Letter To His most Excellent Majesty King William III (London, 1699), p. 13. 51 [Trenchard], An Argument, p. 14. 52 A Free Discourse Wherein the Doctrines Which make for Tyranny Are Display’d (London, 1697), p. 2.

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‘a Consummated Tyranny’, in which ‘nothing remain’d Entirely Free; but all was subjected to the good Pleasure’ of the king’s mere will, whose ‘Arbitrary Power influenc’d all in Authority’.53 If we shift our attention to the present government, as Richard Ames suggests in Liberty or Slavery, we cannot fail to recognize that an astonishing change has taken place. We are now living under ‘the most exact Laws that ever were made’, with ‘the Prerogative of the King not Dominaring over the Priviledges of the People’ and no tricks ‘made use of to Decoy us’ into servitude.54 ‘We have a Protection’, the author of A Free Discourse adds, ‘from certain and known Laws, not from uncertain and unknown Will and Power.’55 As a result, the ‘Lives, Liberties and Properties’ of the people are secure ‘under a Power limited by those Laws, which they themselves had a share in making’ for their own benefit.56 Kingston ends his treatise by reiterating the contrast in a still more highflown style. ‘Blessed be God, we have now a King that is a Defender of our Faith, a Sovereign to whom it hath so far approv’d it self, as he hath given the Nation all imaginable Security of our Religion, Laws and Properties, and that they shall never be again in danger of being depriv’d of them for the future.’57 But if all this is so, may it not be said that, although we are still living under a monarchy, we are nevertheless living in a free state? Have we not achieved a monarchical republic? Few of those writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1688 revolution had been willing even to confront such a paradox. Among the whig writers of the late 1690s, however, this was exactly the construction that they began to place upon events. The author of The Revolution Justified feels no doubts at all. Under the new settlement our condition is no different – his title page proclaims – from ‘The Nature of Government and Subjection in Free STATES’.58 John Trenchard’s Argument goes even further, invoking the arch-republican James Harrington by way of making the same point: Our constitution is a limited mix’d Monarchy, where the King enjoys all the Prerogatives necessary to the support of his Dignity, and Protection of his People, and is only abridged from the Power of Injuring his own Subjects: In short, the Man is loose, and the Beast only bound; and our Government may truly be called an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.59

Kingston, Tyranny Detected, p. 121. [Richard Ames], Chuse which you will, Liberty or Slavery (London, 1692), pp. 18–19. 55 A Free Discourse, p. 67 56 Ibid., p. 68. 57 Kingston, Tyranny Detected, pp. 273–4. 58 The Revolution Justified, from Principles of Reason and Scripture: Or, A New Discourse Concerning The Nature of Government and Subjection in Free STATES (London, 1697). 59 [Trenchard], An Argument, p. 2. 53

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The author of A Letter To His most Excellent Majesty arrives at the same conclusion, expressing it in yet more hyperbolical terms: There is no man who understands the political Structure of the English Monarchy, but will find it so agreeable to the Interest of a free People, that nothing can be added to it to render it more perfect: and it is particularly manifest, that all the Advantages which may be suppos’d to arise from a Commonwealth, may be as freely and fully deriv’d from the Temper of the English Monarchy.60

According to all these writers, the ideal imagined by Henry Parker half a century earlier had finally been realized. While England remained a monarchy, its new constitutional settlement allowed the people to enjoy all the blessings of republican government with none of its disadvantages. They were now living, in Trenchard’s words, under ‘a free Monarchy’.61 This image of the British constitution was of course widely challenged and even ridiculed. The young David Hume in his essay on Whether the British government inclines more to absolute monarchy, or to a republic was famously unconvinced.62 Hume concedes that we are apt to entertain ‘a magnificent idea of the BRITISH spirit and love of liberty’ and to suppose ‘that the byass of the BRITISH government leans towards a republic’.63 But his own impression, he ends by stressing, is that ‘the power of the crown, by means of its large revenue, is rather upon the encrease’. He concludes that, although ‘the tide has run long, and with some rapidity, to the side of popular government’, it is ‘just beginning to turn towards monarchy’.64 Despite such doubts, the image of England as a monarchical republic had by then become firmly entrenched in the whig canon, and in the works of such radical whigs as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon it was later to exercise a powerful influence in the American colonies.65 In their series of Cato’s Letters, published between 1720 and 1723, Trenchard and Gordon include a sketch of the British Constitution, in which they begin by noting that by ‘liberty’ people generally understand ‘a republican form of government’.66 They go on to insist, however, that ‘liberty may be better A Letter, p. 12. [Trenchard], An Argument, p. 11. 62 On Hume’s opposition to the whigs at this juncture see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 193–223. 63 David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 29, 30. 64 Ibid., p. 31. 65 The two classic studies of this influence are Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA, 1959) and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; reissued with a new afterword, Princeton, 2003). 66 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy (2 vols, Indianapolis, 1995), vol. II, p. 613. On the context of Cato’s Letters see Shelley 60 61

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preserved by a well poised monarchy, than by any popular government’. To which they add that, if we want an example of this general truth, we need look no further than ‘our own constitution, which if duly administered, provides excellently well for general liberty’.67 Unabashed by the scepticism of more conservatively-minded commentators, what the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen offer us is the spectacle of the monarchical republic finally enthroned.

Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 64–86. 67 Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, p. 616.

Afterword Patrick Collinson i Jesus told a parable about a grain of mustard seed, ‘which indeed is the least of all seeds’. But when it was grown it became a tree, ‘so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof’. A little mustard seed was sown when, in a seminar room in the University of Kent in 1983, I asked Quentin Skinner whether, with sixteenth-century England in mind, and specifically the reign of Elizabeth I, one could speak of a monarchical republic; and he said that he thought that one could. This collection of essays is evidence that out of that little seed a large tree has indeed sprung, with branches, and many perching birds. I cannot claim any great credit for that. With apologies to Winston Churchill, one could say that never in the field of historical scholarship was so much erected on so little. But it may well be the case that the formula was first publicly applied to early modern England, those two words, in my Sheffield inaugural lecture delivered on 16 October 1985, and repeated as the Neale Memorial Lecture in Manchester on 8 May 1986. The lecture was published a year later in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library as ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, and later reprinted in my Elizabethan Essays (1994, and, in an edition of 2003, Elizabethans). But in truth there were many seeds. Some of them were, if you will, negative seeds. In 1973 Joel Hurstfield republished, in his essays Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England, a paper read to the Royal Historical Society: ‘Was there a Tudor Despotism After All?’1 I thought that a question badly put; and a phrase which accompanied it, ‘minority government’, liable to mislead. Elizabethan government was a multilayered thing, and only at the very highest level could it be said to be government by a clique: which is still the case today. And then there was the reverent centre-staging of the Queen herself by my old teacher, Sir John Neale. The pendulum had swung a little too far against the negative judgement of the Victorian historian J.A. Froude, who had attributed all the achievements of the reign to Burghley, and who believed that it was the private opinion of her councillors that Elizabeth ‘had no ability at 1 Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973), pp. 23–9.

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all worth calling by the name’.2 And then there was Sir Geoffrey Elton, with his somewhat narrowly constitutional understanding of how the Tudor state was formed and functioned; for example, his insistence that Parliament was not a political event but a lawmaking machine.3 And, meanwhile, J.G.A. Pocock was telling us that English republicanism was not a native, or natural growth, but born out of the exotic and exceptional circumstances of the mid-seventeenth century. Elizabethans may have known about republicanism as a kind of origins myth (see, for example, Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum), and as something to read about in classical texts, and to enjoy in stage plays derived from those texts; but not otherwise.4 There are so many negative seeds here that one is in danger of rivalling the hubris of the sixteenth-century logician Peter Ramus, who declared that everything that Aristotle had ever said was false. So in searching the seed catalogue, let us find something more positive to say. In 1984 I was working in the Huntington Library in California. And there I made two discoveries which I exploited in that 1985/86 lecture. One was material, dating from 1584–85, and heavily corrected in William Cecil Lord Burghley’s own hand, in which he envisaged, in the event of the Queen’s death, an interregnum, with authority vested in a Great Council of the Realm, and Parliament to declare who the rightful successor was. (Later Stephen Alford would tell us that Cecil was thinking along similar lines as early as 1563.)5 The other unlikely discovery (what was it doing in the Ellesmere Papers?) was the record of a town meeting which might have been staged in seventeenth-century Massachusetts but which happened in the 1590s, in the obscure Berkshire village of Swallowfield. If Burghley and his colleagues faced a crisis at the national level in 1584, the men of Swallowfield in 1596 were liable to be overwhelmed by the problems visited upon their little community by some hard times. They were also without a local resident magistrate to sort out their problems for them. So they took charge of their own destiny in a manner which can only be called republican.6 Perhaps Swallowfield was unique, or at least unusual, 2

A.L. Rowse, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Historians’, History Today, 3 (1953): 630–41,

at 638. 3 G.R. Elton, ‘Parliament in the Sixteenth Century: Functions and Fortunes’, in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (4 vols, Cambridge, 1974–92), vol. 3, pp. 156–82. 4 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). 5 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 31–57, at pp. 51–5; Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 111–19. 6 Huntington Library, MS EL 6162, fols 34a–36a. The Swallowfield articles have been published and analysed by Steve Hindle: ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 835–51.

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only in articulating and placing on record how it proposed to conduct its own affairs; and perhaps we can extrapolate from Swallowfield to a more widespread grass roots republicanism, a republicanism of ‘the better sort’, who would tolerate no ‘malapertness’ from their poorer neighbours, Swallowfield a little Venice. In Elizabethan England there were circumstances favouring a kind of monarchical republicanism every bit as unusual as those which Pocock addressed in the seventeenth century. Elizabeth Tudor, the last of her direct line, remained, obstinately, unmarried, so that she threatened to be succeeded by a vacuum, which we all know nature abhors. But there were candidates for the succession, all too many, and the one with the strongest dynastic claim, Mary Queen of Scots, was unacceptable to many, Burghley included. Some parliamentary speeches which addressed this dilemma, and potential catastrophe, are the best evidence we have for a monarchical republican mindset. In the Parliament which convened in 1567, one man, ‘a poore member of this House and commonwealth’, said: ‘If God should take her Majestie, the succession being not established, I know not what shall become of my self, my wife, my children, landes, goodes, friendes or cuntrie, for in truth noe man doth know what.’ ‘I tell you, Mr Speaker, that I speake for all England.’ (Whether or not he was entitled so to do, that claim is something we cannot afford to ignore.) Here was republicanism, not in the sense that it excluded monarchy, which was a fact of life; but in the sense that in certain circumstances, monarchy was thought to be too important a matter to be left to ill-advised monarchs. This speaker had begun his oration with what had already become a weary Ciceronian cliché: ‘Mr Speaker, the heathen man Tully said that man is not borne for himself only, but partlie for his parentes, partlie for his children, and partlie for his cuntrie.’7 I addressed these immediate and unusual circumstances in my Raleigh Lecture for the British Academy, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’.8 It was not only the uncertain future which tended to make publicspirited, and even self-interested, Elizabethans citizens as well as subjects, prepared to speak up for ‘all England’. The present was equally important as a stimulus. The monarch was a woman, and women were not supposed to possess the requisite skills to run a whelk stall, let alone a kingdom. It is a fair assumption that this was an anomaly posing a dilemma more often discussed in unrecorded conversation than committed to paper. Tightly interwoven with the problem of the monarch’s gender was the perception among Elizabethan Protestants that the preservation of their religion, seen as God’s cause, was the chief end of government, and that 7 Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T.E. Hartley (3 vols, Leicester, 1981–95), vol. 1, pp. 129–39. The Ciceronian source is De Officiis I vii 22. 8 Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92.

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true religion was threatened by a global conspiracy known as popery, demanding a kind of war against terror. For such Protestants, and they included men at the heart of government, obedience was owed, ultimately, only to God. Ungodly rulers were not to be obeyed (so Mary Stuart had been justly deposed from her Scottish throne), and obedience was owed only conditionally to rulers who allowed their private interests to take precedence over their public responsibilities, under God. For that was a fair definition of tyranny. ii But the soil into which the seed falls must have a great deal to contribute: to the growth of the tree, the branches, the birds. This was evidently an idea whose time had come. The soil in this case had been richly cultivated by a number of important and relatively recent developments in the study of early modern English civilization. I shall specify seven such developments. First, that matter of counsel, to which John Guy has paid particular attention, and its wider ramifications and political implications.9 The problem of counsel had been definitively, if elusively, addressed in Thomas More’s Utopia. But that was the beginning, not the end, of a debate which outlasted the Tudors. Under Henry VIII’s tyranny there was understandable despair. Could good counsel ever be the solution? Only princes who were already good were susceptible to it, and they didn’t need it.10 But the minority of Edward VI and the gendered rule of Mary and Elizabeth gave good counsel a second wind. Moreover, the ideal and practice of counsel fitted neatly into the political theory of mixed monarchy which Sir John Fortescue had adumbrated in the fifteenth century, and which in the sixteenth century was enriched by the Aristotelian model of a polity combining a judicious cocktail of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic ingredients: England not a ‘mere monarchy’. It was Simon Adams, opposing the emphasis on factional difference as endemic to Tudor politics, and in particular scouting Conyers Read’s Burghley versus Leicester split in the Elizabethan Privy Council, who first made us believe in an effective conciliar regime, sometimes at odds with the Queen, as characterizing politics and government in the mid-Elizabethan years.11 9 John Guy, ‘Monarchy and Counsel: Models of the State’, in The Sixteenth Century 1485–1603, ed. Collinson (Oxford, 2001), pp. 114–42; The Tudor Monarchy, ed. Guy (London, 1997), pp. 78–109; Guy, Thomas More (London, 2000). 10 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005). 11 Simon Adams, ‘Faction, Clientage and Party: English Politics, 1550–1603’, ‘Eliza Enthroned? The Court and Its Politics’, ‘Favourites and Factions at the Elizabethan Court’, all in his Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester, 2002), pp. 13–67.

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What has happened to our understanding of the part played by Parliament in the monarchical republic? Twenty years ago, Elton argued that Parliament was above all an effective legislative institution. Contrary to the stories told by Neale in his account of the Elizabethan Parliaments, and Neale was always in the sights of Elton’s high precision rifle, Parliament was not called for political reasons, and was not thought of as a political assembly. ‘Bills and acts of all kinds, not political issues, were the business of Parliament.’12 (The singular title Elton chose for his book of 1986, The Parliament of England, rather than the plurality of Neale’s Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, is significant, for Elton’s Parliament was an institution, not a series of events.) But this was partly wrong. There was a lot of politics going on and there were some significant events. Some of the politics consisted of major political players at the level of Court and Privy Council referring to parliamentary debate difficult issues (the difficulty often being the Queen) which could not be resolved or progressed otherwise. This was the politics of the Court, or centre, pretending to be the politics of the Country.13 A case in point might be that patriotic speech on the succession of 1567, already cited, Burghley ventriloquizing through a ‘poor man’ who claimed to be a humble backbencher. But there was also a genuine politics of the Country. Job Throckmorton told the Parliament of 1586: ‘It is wondred at above, that symple men of the countrey shoulde be so forwarde, and it doeth amaze us in the countrey that wise men of the Courte should be so backward.’14 Elizabethan MPs, or many of them, believed that they constituted an enlarged Council, representing the nation at large. When Peter Wentworth was questioned over his intemperate speech to the Parliament of 1576, he said: ‘Yf your honours aske me as councellors to her Majesty, you shall pardon me, I will make you no answere … For I am now no private person; I am a publicque and a councellor to the whole state in that place … But if you aske me as committees from the House, I will then willingly make you the best answere I can.’15 There was more to all this than Puritanism, but Puritanism was an important part of it. As for the ‘men of business’ with which Elton and Michael Graves Elton, ‘Parliament in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 161. Elton himself furnished a good example of this kind of parliamentary politics, albeit it with perhaps too much emphasis on a divided Privy Council with various fish to fry, in his essay ‘Arthur Hall, Lord Burghley and the Antiquity of Parliament’, in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, vol. 3, pp. 254–73. See also Glyn Parry, ‘Foreign Policy in the Parliament of 1576’ (forthcoming). In 1586, following the Babington Plot, Burghley told Walsingham: ‘We stick upon parliament, which her Majestie mislikes to have, but we all persist, to make the burden better borne and the world abroad better satisfied’ (quoted in Guy, ‘Monarchy and Counsel’, p. 134). 14 Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments, vol. 2, p. 312. 15 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 435. 12 13

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replaced Neale’s ‘radical’ Puritans, Thomas Norton and his ilk, they could be wearing either hat, or both.16 Accompanying the growing preoccupation with the idea of counsel and the reality of conciliar rule there has been a renaissance of interest in the English Renaissance, and more specifically in the classical humanism which dictated the content of secondary and tertiary education, provided a political vocabulary and a rhetorical method, and, more than that, the values to which lip service, and sometimes more than that, was paid by those exposed to such a formation: values which, so far as affairs of the commonwealth were concerned, were essentially Ciceronian. Minds moulded by this kind of pedagogy instinctively approached every question in utramque partem, which is to say that the debates articulated according to the rules of rhetoric, the essence of counsel, were conducted inside every man’s head and commonplace book. As Stephen Alford demonstrates, one of the best examples of such a formation and of that kind of political intelligence was William Cecil, Lord Burghley.17 Assumptions that the values of classical humanism were extinguished at the moment when Thomas More’s head was struck from his shoulders; or that they withered and ceased to have any resonance and utility under the English sun monarch, Elizabeth I; or that they were superseded towards the end of the sixteenth century by the new taste for Tacitean modes of political analysis: these are now substantially corrected, especially in the scholarship of Markku Peltonen.18 The coming together of literary and historical scholarship is the third development which has nourished our growing tree, a kind of compost or fertilizer. Whether or not we want to line up behind the banner of Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘New Historicism’, and most historians for good reasons do not, we are far more aware than our fathers and grandfathers both that many of our historical sources, ‘documents’, need to be read and understood with sensitivity to genre as texts, and that literary texts, above all in an age when most politicians and statesmen were also writers, shed their own light on the history of the period. Blair Worden’s study of the politics encoded in Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia is a case in point.19 16 Collinson, ‘Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, pp. 59–86 (with references to Elton and Graves). 17 Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity. 18 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995). 19 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, 1996). It is a sign of still uneasy relations between our two disciplines that Worden’s book was not better received by literary scholars. But among other important, and various, contributions to the convergence, see H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2004); Tom Betteridge, Literature and Politics

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Another is Scott Lucas’s anatomizing of the poems known as A Mirror for Magistrates in this volume. The dimensions of the monarchical republic have been expanded beyond measure by the growing convergence of political history and social history, sometimes called the ‘new’ social history, something which I celebrated in my Cambridge inaugural lecture of 1989: ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’.20 For the social historians, and especially Keith Wrightson and some of his pupils, thinking in particular of Steve Hindle, have not only finessed our understanding of social structures. They have gone deep into the undergrowth of local communities to describe processes and praxis which were nothing if not political.21 One ought not exaggerate the novelty of such an approach. Before Wrightson and Hindle there was more to English social history than G.M. Trevelyan, who had famously defined his subject as history with the politics left out.22 A long time ago both S.T. Bindoff and Hassell Smith demonstrated the extent to which policy and legislation at a national level were prompted by local concerns and initiatives.23 To have a monarchical republic you must have, a word interchangeable for the sixteenth century with republic, a commonwealth. In several of these fields of inquiry, political, religious, social, literary, we come up against the Elizabethan discovery of England, and of Englishness.24 This discovery was not totally new, any more than our recent discovery of the discovery. England had discovered itself many times, not least in the conviction, fostered by the Hundred Years War, that it was not France. But the sixteenth century saw a more fervent patriotism, a devotion to in the English Reformation (Manchester, 2004); Walker, Writing Under Tyranny. And see earlier books by Walker: Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1998), and Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 1996). See also Walker’s chapter ‘The Renaissance in Britain’ in Collinson (ed.), The Sixteenth Century, pp. 145–87. 20 Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, pp. 1–27. 21 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000); Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520– 1770 (Cambridge, 1999); Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). 22 G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London, 1942), p. vii. 23 S.T. Bindoff, ‘The Making of The Statute of Artificers’, in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. Bindoff, Joel Hurstfield and C.H. Williams (London, 1961), pp. 56–94; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974). 24 Rowse, ‘The Elizabethan Discovery of England’, ch. 2 of his The England of Elizabeth (London, 1950); Collinson, ‘A Nation’s Self-Discovery in Space and Time’, Douglas Southall Freeman Historical Review (Spring, 1999): 82–114.

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the mother country and commonwealth, which almost disproves the credo of many historians of more recent periods that nationalism can only be discussed after the French Revolution and industrialization. (It all depends, of course, on what you mean by nationalism.) William Camden said of his great work Britannia, and it was the merest commonplace: ‘The glory of my country encouraged me to undertake it’, ‘the common love of our common mother and native country’. Here was, if not nationalism, a culturally constructed nationhood. Nationhood and patriotism were nourished from several sources.25 The literal discovery of England, its landscapes and monuments, the work of John Leland, William Camden and the other antiquaries, Christopher Saxton’s atlas, and even the poet Michael Drayton, represented the adoption of the art of ‘chorography’, invented in Italy. The biblical story of ancient Israel was, as Adrian Hastings observed, the original model of the nation;26 God’s dealings with his often recalcitrant people, threatened by powerful enemies, the template for understanding the predicament in which Elizabethan England found itself. The Bible in English, Tyndale’s Bible, was the most notable landmark in a process described by one scholar as ‘the triumph of the English language’.27 The schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster (Spenser’s schoolmaster) wrote of ‘the treasure in our tongue’. ‘I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.’ Spenser himself exclaimed: ‘Why a God’s name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?’28 This was, of course, a European-wide cultural experience, with the vernacular Bible most often at its heart. Above all, and underlying the very identity of England and its polity, was the place and the function of its laws, legal education, and legal institutions. Law and legal history have never been my strong suit. But before ending this ‘Afterword’ something should be said about the important book recently published by Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution, modestly subtitled An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006). Finally, I must not forget the impact on Elizabethan historical studies of women’s history, the gender factor. Here the most important work has 25 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994); Shrank, Writing the Nation; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003). 26 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), especially ch. 2, ‘England as Prototype’. 27 Richard F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (London, 1953). See also Janel Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style 1380– 1580 (Chicago, 1984). 28 Richard Mulcaster, The first parte of the elementarie (London, 1582), p. 269; Spenser quoted by Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 1.

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been that of a contributor to this volume, Anne McLaren. I suspect that for all the reasons now rehearsed we might be talking about a monarchical republic even if Elizabeth had been a man, and especially if he/she had differed fundamentally from ministers and advisers over what was best for the realm and nation. But that gender was a factor in what was still supposed to be a man’s world is not to be denied, and gender-sensitive history is certainly an enrichment. 29

iii It is time to refer and respond to the songs of some of the birds perched on the branches of our tree: the essays which make up this volume. John McDiarmid, Dale Hoak and Stephen Alford between them provide the ideas extended in my 1985/86 lecture with much needed depth. John finds the root of monarchical republicanism in language, the language of a humanist educational curriculum, for there was a correspondence between linguistic and political thought in minds like those of Sir Thomas Smith and Sir John Cheke, and a particular indebtedness to the Latinity of Cicero. Language was itself republican, in that it derived from ‘a sort of mutual covenant and consent among men’. Hoak and Alford provide the Edwardian backcloth the monarchical republic thesis requires. The political philosophy characterized as monarchical republicanism, deeply embedded as it was in the minds of Cecil and Smith, owed a great deal, not only to their educational formation, but to the political apprenticeships they had both served under the regime governing in the name and title of Edward VI: an effectively acephalous regime which anticipated what might again materialize in the event of Elizabeth’s untimely death. The project for an Anglo-Scottish union, in effect the ingestion of Scotland in a British state, was a particularly striking example of what monarchical republicans could get up to in those unusual conditions. Smith’s famous treatise De Republica Anglorum, which has been read in many ways, was, according to Hoak, an account of a parliamentary monarchy, and a mirror to Cecil’s concerns at the time of the debates about the Queen’s marriage and the succession in 1563. Stephen Alford’s account of Cecil’s political creed presents us with a double paradox: a career as (in effect) Prime Minister of unprecedented length (forty years), but always pursued, not with boring continuity, going on going on, but in a long-running emergency, my ‘exclusion crisis’; and guided by the sense that royal government was a matter too important to be left to kings and queens. As he explained to his son towards the end of his life and career, Cecil’s first duty was to God, which meant that in the last 29 Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999).

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resort he was bound to obey the Queen, who was God’s ‘chief minister’. What he did not spell out, although it is implicit in his interregnal projects of 1563 and 1585, was that his ultimate political duty was to the English state, which, as he said, must continue in all respects. Markku Peltonen digs deeper still into the ideal of active citizenship underlying our monarchical republic, finding its roots in the centrality of eloquence, which was a skill taught in grammar schools up and down the land. But it was not universally available. No 1870 Education Act in Elizabethan England. Nevertheless, there was in the pedagogical literature an assumption that the ars rhetorica was, or ought to be, in principle, widely available and applicable. But these same publicists saw a problem in allowing free political discourse in a monarchy such as England. If eloquence was a mode of conducting debate amongst the elite, when directed towards the people it was a way of exercising power. This is no more than we should expect from a hierarchical society such as Elizabethan England, which may have been an (aristocratic) monarchical republic, but was certainly not a democracy. But Scott Lucas, suggesting that the pervasiveness in Elizabethan England of a quasi-republican critique of monarchy has not been sufficiently explored and explained, finds part of the answer in that perennial favourite and best seller, A Mirror for Magistrates. For the Mirror’s modern editor, Lily B. Campbell, these texts were also a mirror to the Elizabethan polity, ‘written in complete accord with Tudor ideas’, ‘the orthodox Tudor doctrine’.30 But Lucas catches rather different reflections. The ground bass running through the poems was a doctrine which no Tudor monarch could have willingly endorsed: that monarchy was no more and no less than a public office, with the monarch, like any other officer, liable to be called to account. Lucas in effect asks us to add the Mirror to the list of texts canonically associated with resistance theory: Knox, Goodman, Ponet. Andrew Hadfield’s arresting reading of ‘Shakespeare’, the multi-authored Henry VI plays and Richard III, leads to parallel conclusions. Although we have long ceased to credit Shakespeare with mounting a rostrum, or a pulpit, it is clear that these plays investigated ‘the disintegration of a political nation’ and are resonant with the politics of the decade to which they belong, a time fearful of the likely result of an uncertain and contested succession, an English Civil War: something which Elizabethans knew had happened in the recent past, and hoped to avert in their own time. The theatre was recounting for a politically sensitive audience ‘the bloody origins of a dynasty that was just about to end’. Here the ur-text was not Cicero but the tragic poetic commentator on Rome’s degeneration, Lucan. The battle of Towton, in which more Englishmen died in a single action than ever before, or until the first day on the Somme, was ‘the English 30

A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 48–9, 52.

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Pharsalia’. Was ancient Rome a model to copy, or an example to avoid at all costs? Hadfield helps us to understand the mood of relieved surprise, in April 1603, when James VI came peaceably to the English throne. Richard Cust’s essay on an archetypical ‘virtuous’ local magistrate of the early seventeenth century, the Warwickshire gentleman Sir John Newdigate, is an important demonstration of how the political ideology conveyed by A Mirror for Magistrates was carried into the practicalities of provincial governance. If McDiarmid tells us that concern for good language readily converted into politics, Cust provides evidence that the discipline of reading and ‘commonplacing’, carried on in the study or some such private space, sometimes for eight hours a day, distilling notes, quotes and precepts from such sources as Plutarch’s Lives, fed into public performance, monarchical republicanism in action. Cust on Newdigate reinforces Grafton and Jardine on Gabriel Harvey: study was for action.31 The stern conditions which Newdigate applied to subaltern magistrates like himself he also required of the supreme magistrate, a critique of monarchy informed by the history he learned from texts like the Mirror, and from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Newdigate was the kind of man with whom the Stuart successors to Elizabeth would have to deal. As one is entitled to expect, these essays not only extend our understanding of the English monarchical republic. They further problematize, and often correct at important points, what was originally a fairly crude and underexplored idea. I find Ethan Shagan’s critique telling. I have recalled how my summer in the Huntington in 1984 brought me face to face with Burghley’s audacious interregnal scheme – and Swallowfield. Shagan quite correctly insists that not only were these expressions of two very different sorts of monarchical republic. They were actually in conflict with one another, since the aspirations of civic-minded humanists were centralizing and rationalizing, a model of the commonwealth which had little room for the many local peculiarities and inconsistencies of the late medieval English polity. And participation in local government could be self-consciously subversive of the structures of royal authority. There is an interesting match between Shagan’s essay and Andrew Fitzmaurice at the other end of the volume on that American world of new common wealths and town meetings which Swallowfield had foreshadowed. For both Shagan and Fitzmaurice tell stories of faction, conflicting interest, hatred and corruption, even in the case of Fitzmaurice, writing of Virginia in the 1620s, unmitigated disaster. Monarchical republicanism in these contexts was not sweetness and light but skulduggery. Shagan quietly removes my rose-tinted spectacles. But as Fitzmaurice suggests, the very fact that in these communities so much dirty linen was washed in public 31 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, no. 129 (1990): 30–78.

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is paradoxical evidence of an underlying yearning for social harmony and order, an agreed standard, for all that some observers looked on with Tacitean cynicism. ‘The monarchical republic was active in America, but more in its breach than its observance.’ What we are reading is ‘a vocabulary of corruption’, so many ‘humanistic diagnoses of the ills of civil society’. Peter Lake provides the most insightful interrogation of the monarchical republic thesis, its appropriateness, its limitations and internal contradictions. Lake usefully distinguishes between the quasi-republican manoeuvres of an inner core of councillors and the publicization and politicization of their concerns outside the tent, ‘the politics of popularity’. ‘You could certainly have one without the other.’ But the evidence is that when it suited him Burghley was ‘a past master of recourse to the politics of popularity’. I can only applaud the main thrust of Lake’s argument: that monarchical republicanism had much deeper religious roots than some commentators have allowed, that to understand Elizabethan England we need to appreciate ‘the meld between religion and politics’. He is surely right in seeing Archbishop Whitgift’s onslaught on his religious opponents as a resurgence of unalloyed monarchism, aimed as much at politicians like Burghley as at dissident preachers; and perfectly encapsulated in the confrontation between the Queen and the very unpresbyterian but monarchical republican, Archbishop Grindal, whose famous letter to the Queen was a plea that she listen to a kind of counsel, that of her bishops and other divines. To a considerable extent, the anti-republican, anti-populist reaction of the 1590s, which John Guy has characterized as ‘the second reign of Elizabeth’, had its origins and driving force in AntiPuritanism.32 But what Lake learns from this affair, that monarchical republicanism was ‘an ideology that very seldom dared to speak its name’ surely underestimates the leverage which leading politicians – and Grindalian bishops – had on the direction of the Elizabethan church-state. It spoke its name in 1560, in the decisive intervention in Scotland, and in 1587, in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; and, less dramatically, in the many little victories which were those successful initiatives pursued while the Queen was looking the other way. Anne McLaren’s essay reminds us, if we needed reminding, that a monarchy was what England under the Tudors was, in principle an 32 Guy, ‘Introduction: The 1590s: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I?’ and ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity’, both in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. Guy (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–19, 126–49; Ethan H. Shagan, ‘The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in the 1590s’, The Historical Journal, 47 (2004): 541–65.

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unlimited monarchy. What happened when Elizabeth died was dynastic succession, after forty years of ultimately sterile debate, quasi-republican interregna now redundant. In the end it all came down to what Elizabeth said, or conveyed by hand signals, on her death bed. Politicians now had to come to terms with a Stuart monarchy which defined itself as no previous regime had done: under James I what we may call self-conscious monarchy, on different terms from life under the last of the Tudors. And according to the political philosophy of James VI’s spin doctor, Sir Thomas Craig, whatever Elizabeth may have said or signalled about the succession was neither here nor there. The crown was hereditary, and James was the lawful heir, who, if need be, would have invaded to claim his rightful inheritance. But that the monarchical republic had not ceased to exist on the morning after Elizabeth’s death is revealed by Sir Robert Cotton’s account of what happened next. When Privy Councillors and others of the nobility met in the Privy Chamber at Whitehall, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, and others of the Privy Council who were not ennobled, offered to sit at the lower end of the table, giving precedence to some of the nobility who were not Privy Councillors. For technically, and constitutionally, Elizabeth’s Privy Council had ceased to exist at the moment of her death. And if James VI of Scotland had been living just round the corner, or, say, at Hatfield, where Elizabeth had been found in November 1558, that is no doubt how it would have been. But James VI, not yet quite James I, was four hundred miles away, which gave the monarchical republic its last hurrah. So on that morning the noblemen ‘in respect of ther former authoritye’ insisted that the councillors should ‘keep their places’, and sit at the head of the table. The meeting then arranged itself ‘every man according to his degree in Counsell’. It heard what was known about the Queen’s last wishes, and ‘after some speeche had of diuers compettitours and matters of state at length’ confirmed that the Scottish king was now their lord and master. It was an interregnal decision, although the interregnum had lasted only a few hours.33 iv ‘Historians of both English politics and the English state have vastly underestimated the urban dimension of their subjects.’ So Phil Withington tells us in an important study of citizenship as almost by definition a civic thing: The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005).34 I can only respond ‘touché’! I paid far too little attention to the towns of Elizabethan England in my 33 34

British Library, MS Cotton Titus C.VII, fol. 57, in Sir Robert Cotton’s hand. This judgment occurs on p. 7 of Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth.

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supposedly seminal lecture, and for that matter the urban dimension of the English monarchical republic is missed in the essays collected in this volume. Members of his seminar would often hear Sir John Neale say that there are ‘no pundits in history’; although his offsider Joel Hurstfield thought that he made an exception of himself. The idea that Elizabethan England was some kind of monarchical republic may not have an indefinite shelf life. Even Sir Thomas Smith, for all his deeply internalized civic humanism, knew that England was an absolute monarchy, and said so: ‘To be short the prince is the life, the head, and the authoritie of all thinges that be doone in the realme of England.’35 (The question, of course, is whether Smith thought that that was the case only constitutionally and formally, as it still is [O.H.M.S. on official correspondence], or in more practical reality.) So a challenge to monarchical republicanism in the name of a Queen who was, after all, sovereign, is only to be expected. It is made in a book by Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005). Mears tells us that the governance of Elizabethan England was less conciliar and more regal than we have begun to think. Taking the endless debates of 1579 concerning the proposed royal marriage to the duke of Anjou as an example, Mears argues that the Queen received advice from informal groups of variable composition, the full Privy Council performing less an advisory than a formal, rubber-stamping role. I am reminded of the political crisis surrounding the sacking of Archbishop Grindal, when Burghley complained that the Queen’s Italian doctor, Julio Borgarucci, was ‘more of her Majesty’s counsel than two or three that are of present Council’.36 Mears concludes: ‘Elizabethan counselling was … neither institutionalised nor conciliar, … but informal and dynamic.’37 But this argument cuts both ways. The fact that the Queen took advice, with varying degrees of informality, from a variety of sources, that policy emerged from ‘networks’, with the principal political players all having their own networks, clearly has the potential to widen the scope of the political nation. And much of Mears’s book, which with impressive detail tells us that people of all sorts talked to each other, and corresponded with each other, and often about politics, makes that very point, positing a kind of Habermasian society which had no need of coffee houses in order to operate as a public sphere. In other words, Mears’s book further enriches

35

Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982),

p. 88. 36 Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979), p. 255. 37 Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse, p. 47.

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our understanding of a complex and ceaselessly interactive political society, whether we choose to call it a monarchical republic or not. Quentin Skinner and Johann Somerville within this volume, and Jonathan Scott and Alan Cromartie in two important recent books outside it,38 place my Elizabethan monarchical republic in the wider context of the two or three centuries from Sir John Fortescue to James Harrington and beyond. Skinner reminds us that the makers of and publicists for the English Republic which replaced monarchy in 1649 found, as we might today, that monarchy and a free, republican state were simply incompatible. But that drastic repudiation of many centuries of English history was indicative of the pathology of government under the early Stuarts. If no bishop no king, then if no Charles I no English Republic. And Skinner agrees, in effect, with Cromartie in his construction of a ‘constitutionalist revolution’ in those two centuries, that the rule of law, under and by the law, had made a monarchical republic entirely feasible, government monarchical in form but republican in character. So Henry Parker, in 1642, argued, even as he contemplated the torpedoing of that principle in the king’s negative voice, and as that King insisted that a monarchical republic would be no monarchy at all. When James II reiterated those arbitrary principles in spades, the Glorious Revolution, in effect, restored the monarchical republican constitution of England: the triumph (but contested) of whiggery. Setting himself against the Skinnerite emphasis on a strong strain of ‘neo-Roman’ thinking in the politics of a man like Henry Parker, fixated on the idea of liberty, Sommerville returns to an old-established view that the roots of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis are to be found in principles of the common law. On this point he is in tune with Cromartie’s The Constitutionalist Revolution. There were significant anti-republican elements at large here. If monarchy was too important a matter to be left to monarchs, republics (commonwealths) could not manage, or be well managed, without monarchs. Sovereignty was not the same thing as government. So William Cecil’s plans for an orderly interregnum were as fully monarchist as they were republican. The sooner the English state found itself under the rule of a non-anomalous (i.e. male and adult) and uncontested monarchical ruler the better. A regularized interregnum was the way to get to that destination. This was still a ‘king-saturated mental world’.39 I am in no position to adjudicate on these varied interpretations of what might be called the post-Elizabethan monarchical republic. Let us simply

38 Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004); Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006). 39 Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, pp. 89–90.

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relish the liveliness, importance and even relevance of the discussions of the last twenty years.

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Index active life (vita activa) 20, 24, 118, 199, 225; see also citizenship; commonwealth, commonwealthsman; participation; virtue, as active action, political 3, 11, 13, 14, 19, 23, 116, 117, 182, 184, 191, 193, 194, 209, 234, 236, 255 Adams, Simon 131, 248 Admonition controversy 13, 137–9, 142, 145, 256 Alford, Stephen 2–3, 11–12, 15, 77n8, 89n73, 250, 253 The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558– 1569 2–3, 11, 37–8, 55n3, 56n8, 57n14, 64n47, 77n8, 79n18, 81n30, 87nn69–70, 88n72, 133, 246, 250n17 Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI 3, 43n23, 54n64, 55n3, 67n62, 68, 70, 80n28, 81n29, 85n59, 161n36 American colonies 10, 12, 112, 217–31, 243, 255–6 New England colonies 218, 219, 221, 223, 224, 246 Newfoundland 220n14, 221, 224, 225–6, 227 Virginia 112, 218, 219, 220–21, 222, 227–9, 255 American Revolution 8, 167 Ancient Constitution 2 Andrewes, Lancelot 209 anti-popery, see popery aristocracy 4, 41, 119, 138, 171–2, 173, 195, 210, 211, 219, 254; see also citizenship, inclusive versus aristocratic concepts of citizenship; local governance, ‘gentry republics’; oligarchy aristocratic or oligarchic republic

4, 41, 119, 154, 254 Aristotle 174, 235, 246, 248 Politics 57, 58n17 Rhetoric 112, 114n26 Ascham, Roger 61–2, 73, 78, 121n58 The Scholemaster 55–6, 62, 117, 118 Athens, Athenians 100, 101, 115, 117, 174, 187 Aylmer, John 39, 40–41, 55, 56, 144, 147 An Harborowe for faithfull and trewe subiectes 35, 40, 41, 67, 72–3, 87 Bacon, Sir Francis 184 Baldwin, William 12, 92–102, 105 Barston, John 112n17, 116 Beacon, Richard 204, 210–11 Bible, Scripture 38, 76, 80, 82, 85, 92, 93, 106, 140–43, 165, 167, 172, 173, 176, 185–9, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 252; see also Deborah; Jethro; Moses; Paul, St Geneva Bible 92, 197 blood, blood-right, see monarchy, hereditary Boccallini, Trajano 226–7 Bodin, Jean 177, 207, 208–9, 211 body politic (in early modern discourse) 25, 58, 66, 69–70, 71, 88–9, 165, 167, 172, 178, 179, 192, 194–5, 196, 197 Bond of Association, the 1–2, 22, 35 Bonner, Edmund 41, 72 Boston (Lincolnshire) 31–2 Bracton, Henry de 79, 89, 213–14 Bradford, William 218n7, 223 Britain, British 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 76, 151, 168, 169, 171, 178, 179, 243, 252, 253 Brutus (conspirator against Julius Caesar) 59 Burford (Oxfordshire) 27–30, 34 Burghley, see Cecil, Sir William

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Butler, Nathaniel 220–21, 228 Caesar, Julius 116, 151–2, 159–62, 190 in Lucan 153, 155–6, 158, 159, 161 Calvin, John 16, 92, 100–102 Calvinism, Calvinists 4–5, 122, 181, 185, 189, 193, 194; see also godliness; Puritanism; presbyterianism Cambridge, University of 5, 48, 62–3, 68, 77, 79, 114, 116, 122, 209, 251; see also humanism, Cambridge humanists St John’s College 77, 78, 80, 81, 219 Camden, William 76n3, 252 Cartwright, Thomas 13, 137–9, 142, 145 Cassius (conspirator against Julius Caesar) 59 Catholics 16, 76, 145, 167, 170, 180, 221; see also Parsons, Robert; popery; Rome (connoting papacy) Cato the Elder 60, 62 Cato the Younger 116, 151, 193 in Lucan 156, 157–8 Cecil, Sir Robert 76, 85, 89–90, 168, 253 Cecil, Sir William, Baron Burghley and common law 77, 79–80 and counsel 12, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84, 85–7, 89, 90, 130 early life to 1547 12, 42, 54, 77, 78–9, 80 under Edward VI 11, 39, 41–50 passim, 53, 54, 55, 78, 79, 80–81, 253 under Elizabeth I 11, 12, 13, 35, 38, 39, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81–2, 83–90, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 245, 247, 248, 249, 253, 256, 259 and humanism 73, 77, 78–9, 250 interregnum plans; see also Elizabeth I, issues of marriage and succession in 1563 3, 11, 37, 41, 87–8, 246, 253, 259 in 1584–5 2, 3, 4, 11, 37, 89,

131–2, 138, 166, 170n14, 175, 246, 255, 259 mentioned 14, 111 and monarchy 75, 77, 79–80, 85, 87, 88–90 political conceptions 38, 39, 41, 43, 48, 54, 75–90, 132, 138–9, 253 and ‘popularity’ 130, 131, 138, 139, 249, 256 and Protestantism and the English church 41, 53, 54, 75–8, 81–3, 84, 87, 89–90, 130, 131, 132, 139, 253 Chaloner, Sir Thomas 93, 94n7 Charles I 171, 180, 205, 208, 213, 214, 215, 259 His Majesties Answer to the XIX. Propositions 239–40 Cheke, Sir John 54, 56, 61–3, 66, 68, 69n72, 71n91, 74, 78, 79, 80n28, 81, 114–15, 253 The hurt of sedicion 54, 67, 69–71, 81 Cicero De officiis 57, 58n17, 59–60, 73, 114, 118, 120, 183, 209, 247 linguistic and rhetorical thought 56, 59–61, 62, 113, 114 influence of 56, 59, 61–3, 71, 73, 113–17, 119–20, 253 mentioned 19, 254 political thought 57, 59–60, 73, 214–15, 216n53 influence of 51, 56, 57, 58n17, 73, 110, 134, 162, 183, 188, 191, 192, 205, 206, 209, 214, 218, 225, 228, 247, 250, 253; see also humanism; republicanism, classical and Tacitism 225, 229, 230 citizenship, citizens 2, 8–9, 19, 22, 109–10, 111, 133, 135, 143, 168, 174, 182, 183, 189, 192, 193, 199, 201, 205, 218, 220, 227, 230, 234, 236, 247, 254, 257; see also active life; commonwealth, commonwealthsman; participation; rhetoric,

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and citizenship inclusive versus aristocratic concepts of citizenship 13, 110–27, 254; see also participation, ‘social depth’ of; popularity Civil War, English 3, 10, 15, 155, 202–3, 204, 205, 207, 215, 216 Collinson, Patrick 1–17 passim, 21, 36, 37n1, 76n3, 77, 109–10, 131nn 5–6, 131n8, 136, 144, 147n43, 182, 183, 218, 248n9, 250n16, 250n19, 251n24, 258n36 ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’ 5–10 passim, 19, 55n3, 109–10, 182n3, 217n2, 251 ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ 1–17 passim, 19–20, 21, 22, 25, 35, 37, 38, 41, 55, 57, 73, 77n8, 80, 87n66, 89n75, 91–2, 95, 100, 101n19, 107, 109–10, 111, 131–2, 133, 135, 147, 165–6, 167, 182, 197, 199, 201–2, 203, 207, 210, 216, 217, 218, 221n18, 230, 231, 234, 245–7 common good, see public, public interest Commons, House of, see Parliament, Commons commonwealth, common weal (and related terms) 5, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19–34 passim, 39, 41, 56–72 passim, 84, 96, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 115, 119–26 passim, 129, 133–5, 143, 157, 170, 174, 176n37, 180, 182, 192–7 passim, 207, 208, 210, 218, 222–4, 227, 234–7, 243, 247, 251, 252, 255, 257; see also country; public, public interest commonwealthsman 35, 182, 191, 193, 244; see also citizenship; country, ‘father of [the] country’; participation; public, public man

public weal (and related terms) 96, 103, 113, 195 with fiscal connotation 28, 113 conciliarism, European 80 consent, of the people, as basis of government 4, 24, 56–61, 63–5, 72, 73, 122, 124, 170, 204, 205, 214, 236, 237, 253; see also law, and consent of community; Parliament, consent Constantine the Great 45, 82 Contarini, Gasparo 119, 121 Cornwallis, Sir Willam 186, 188 corruption 12, 72, 96, 99, 102, 103, 107, 136, 192, 193, 194, 221, 222–31, 235, 255–6; see also Tacitism council, see Privy Council counsel, counseling (the monarch) 2, 12, 14, 22, 23, 38, 39, 40, 67, 85, 103, 107, 113, 116, 119, 120, 130, 133, 136, 137, 141– 3, 162, 197, 198, 248, 250, 256, 258; see also Cecil, Sir William, and counsel; Elizabeth I, and council; Privy Council country (in early modern political discourse) 4, 110, 115, 134, 182, 183, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 209, 249, 252; see also commonwealth ‘father of [the] country’ 172, 178, 180, 182, 191 court (monarch’s) 2, 5, 22, 38, 42, 53, 56, 67, 68, 78, 79, 84, 87, 136, 142, 194, 209, 235, 249; see also Privy Chamber, Privy Council Craig, Sir Thomas 168–9, 172–3 The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England 13– 14, 17, 168, 169-79, 257 Cranmer, Thomas 47, 53, 81, 82 Cromwell, Oliver 3, 215, 234 Cromwell, Thomas 23, 75, 77 Crowley, Robert 116 Cushman, Robert 218, 223 Cust, Richard 4–5, 10–17 passim, 118n45, 134n14, 136, 191nn25–6, 255 Daniel, Samuel 153, 156n25

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Deborah 38, 39, 41, 176 democracy 58, 66, 138, 171–2, 173, 175, 195, 210; see also citizenship, inclusive versus aristocratic concepts of citizenship; participation, ‘social depth’ of; popularity Demosthenes 62, 66, 67n61, 115–16, 117, 119 deposition of monarchs 165, 180, 196, 197; see also resistance; tyrannicide as lawful, just 59, 72, 104, 105, 106, 170, 248 Dering, Edward 130–31 discretionary powers, see prerogative or discretionary powers Drake, William 183–5 Dudley, Robert, see Leicester economic activity, issues 20–21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 65, 68, 69, 70, 193–4, 196, 207, 212, 215, 223, 226, 229; see also taxation education, schools 10, 13, 55–6, 62, 67–8, 77–80, 81, 109, 110–13, 117–19, 122, 133–4, 161, 162, 183, 184, 186, 190, 199, 250, 253, 254; see also Cambridge, University of; Oxford, University of Edward I 196 Edward II 49, 196 Edward IV in A Mirror for Magistrates 93, 96, 97, 105 in Shakespeare 157, 160 Edward V in Shakespeare 160–63 Edward VI 7, 10, 11, 35, 39, 41–54 passim, 55, 56, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77–81, 83, 84, 89, 93, 94n6, 161, 248, 253 Elizabeth I and the church 81–3, 140–45, 256; see also Supremacy coronation 38–9, 81–2 and council, counsel, counselors 1, 4, 7, 13, 15–16, 38–9, 40, 75, 76, 78, 83–7, 89, 91, 129–31, 137–8, 141–7, 201– 2, 245–6, 248, 249, 253–4, 256, 258–9; see also Privy

Council, under Elizabeth I and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots 11, 85, 87, 256 her gender, political significance of 7, 38–9, 40–41, 72, 87, 135, 176, 177n42, 247, 248, 253 issues of marriage and succession 1–2, 11, 19, 37, 38, 78, 84, 87–9, 117, 129, 131, 132, 139, 145–6, 152, 154, 163, 165–7, 168, 169, 175, 182, 246, 247, 249, 253, 254, 257, 258; see also Bond of Association; Cecil, Sir William, interregnum plans; Craig, The Right of Succession; law, and royal succession; Parliament, and royal succession; Parsons, The conference about the next succession; Stubbs, The Discoverie of a gaping gvlf ‘second reign’ of 4, 150, 152, 163, 256 Elton, Sir Geoffrey 23, 64n47, 75, 246, 249, 250n16 Elyot, Sir Thomas 118, 119, 185, 186, 188, 195 empire, imperial Britain as empire 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 54, 168, 171, 178; see also Britain England as empire 37, 42, 45, 53, 80, 82, 83, 88, 136, 165 Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande, An 48, 50–52, 54 estates (of the realm) 38, 83, 100, 121, 241 ‘exclusion crisis, Elizabethan’, see Elizabeth I, issues of marriage and succession faction, dissension (in early modern discourse) 12, 27, 121, 123, 125, 139, 140, 157, 158, 211, 221–5, 228, 231, 255 family, origin of government in 57–8, 65, 172

INDEX

Ferguson, Arthur 22, 67n60, 68n69, 69n76, 73 Ferrers, George 16, 93, 94n7, 102–4 Fisher, John 77, 78, 81 Fitzmaurice, Andrew 12, 16, 255 Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 12, 126n80, 217n2, 217n4, 218n5, 220n12, 220n14, 230n59 Fortescue, Sir John 80, 214, 215, 248, 259 Foxe, John 39, 40, 41, 53 France, French 64, 73, 93, 105, 136, 178n45 and Somerset’s campaign for Anglo-Scottish union 46–50 passim in Shakespeare 151, 158, 160, 161 free state 15, 205, 233–7, 238, 239, 242, 243, 259; see also freedom freedom, liberty, free 8, 9, 14, 29, 40, 57, 58, 66, 83, 100, 113, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 135, 136, 138, 182, 202, 203–4, 216, 224, 233, 234, 235–8, 240, 241–2, 243, 244, 259; see also free state; monarchy, free contrasted with bondage, slavery 14, 66, 71, 178–9, 202, 236–7, 238–9, 241–2 freedom, slavery, villeinage 205–7, 211–14, 215 freedom of speech 103, 115, 116, 119, 121 Furio Ceriol, Fadrique 119, 120 Gardiner, Stephen 53–4, 72, 80, 94–5 gender and politics 7, 10, 14, 19, 20, 25, 30, 31, 38–9, 40–41, 57–8, 65, 72–3, 87, 135, 136, 146, 165, 171, 172, 176–80, 225, 247, 248, 252–3, 259; see also Deborah; Elizabeth I, her gender; family Geoffrey of Monmouth 52 Gilbert, Humphrey 118, 119 Glaucus, James 122 A knowledge for kings, and a warning for subiects 122–7

293 Glorious Revolution 15, 168, 240, 259 godliness, godly 11, 38–41, 44, 45, 51–4, 70, 80, 82, 89, 131, 136, 141–3, 145, 168, 173, 181, 185, 186, 189, 193, 199, 248; see also Calvinism; Puritanism Goldie, Mark 172n19, 225n39, 240n41 ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’ 6, 20, 21n7, 23, 110n7, 111n10, 133n13, 217n3, 230n56 Goodman, Christopher 67n61, 254 Gorges, Ferdinando 219, 227 Goslicius, Laurentius Grimaldus 119, 121n59 Grafton, Richard 38, 39, 41, 43–8 passim, 82n39 Graves, Michael 76n2, 130, 249–50 Greece, Greeks 62, 73, 76, 78, 100, 174, 187, 223, 227, 252; see also Athens Greek (language) 46, 51n54, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 74, 114 Greville, Sir Fulke (senior) 181–2, 185, 190, 193 Greville, Fulke (junior) 182, 190, 197n47 Grimalde, Nicholas 114, 118 Grindal, Edmund 13, 139, 140– 44, 146–7, 256, 258 Guevara, Antonio de 185, 186, 187 Guicciardini, Francesco 184 Gunpowder Plot 194–5, 199 Guy, John 4, 6, 7n32, 22, 56n8, 77, 80nn24–5, 85n60, 87n69, 133, 146, 248, 249n13, 256 (ed.) The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade 4, 76n5, 146, 150n6, 256 (ed.) The Tudor Monarchy 1n2, 6, 22, 80n25, 88n71, 248 Hadfield, Andrew 7, 10, 12, 15, 100– 101, 150n4, 252n25, 254–5 Shakespeare and Republicanism 7, 133, 150n3, 150n5 Hales, John 39–40, 41 Hampden, John 122, 208 Harrington, James 205, 242, 259

294

THE MONARCHICAL REPUBLIC OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The Commonwealth of Oceana 171, 216, 235–6, 237 Henrisoun, James 44–5, 48 Henry V 196 in Shakespeare 149, 151, 157, 158, 163 Henry VI 151 in A Mirror for Magistrates 96, 105, 106 in Shakespeare 152, 153, 156–7, 158 Henry VIII 15, 21, 22, 35, 36, 42, 44, 48, 49, 51, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 178, 209, 248 Hindle, Steve 5, 20n5, 36, 133n12, 246n6, 251 The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 5, 21, 111n10, 251 historiographical debate concerning monarchy, republicanism 1–16 passim, 19–22, 35–6, 109, 112, 131–7, 144–7, 201–16, 218, 222, 229–31, 245–6, 248–53, 256–60 history, use of (in early modern political discourse) 8, 12, 24, 44, 45, 49–52, 62–3, 77, 82–3, 92–107, 115, 117, 120–21, 149–63, 173–5, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 222–3, 254–5; see also Bible; Greece; Livy; Plutarch; Rome (ancient); Sallust; Tacitism; Tacitus Hoak, Dale 4n13, 6, 11, 38n6, 40n10, 42n21, 43n23, 53n62, 56n8, 67n62, 68, 72n97, 81–2, 85n60, 253 Hobbes, Thomas 207 Holinshed, Raphael 186, 196, 197, 255 honesty, honest (in early modern discourse) 31, 62, 64, 76, 100, 117, 121, 192–3, 208; see also virtue humanism, humanists 2–17 passim, 19, 21, 22, 36, 92, 93, 110–22, 132–3, 134–5, 161–3, 183, 184–5, 195, 197, 198–9, 204, 208, 210, 216, 217–30, 250, 253, 255–6, 258; see also active

life; Cicero, linguistic and rhetorical thought, influence of; Cicero, political thought, influence of; education; Elyot; historiographical debate; More; Morison; republicanism, classical; Starkey; Sturm; Tacitism; Vives Cambridge humanists, midTudor 11–12, 42, 54, 55–74, 78; see also Ascham; Aylmer; Cecil, Sir William; Cheke; Ponet; Smith, Sir Thomas; Wilson, Thomas (c. 1523–81) linguistic thought of 56–7, 59–63, 69, 253 and Protestantism, Reformation 42–3, 55–6, 58, 67–8, 70, 72 Christian humanism 185–6, 189, 190–91, 193 and local governance 14, 20–26, 35, 36 and Protestantism, Reformation 4–5, 14, 135, 136; see also humanism, Christian humanism Hume, David 243 Humphrey, Laurence 166–7, 177n42 interregnum 131–2, 257; see also Cecil, Sir William, interregnum plans Ireland, Irish 112, 166, 198, 213, 220, 224 Israel, see Bible Italy, Italians 2n5, 8, 27, 62, 73, 115, 117, 174, 220; see also Venice James I (VI of Scotland) 2n5, 10, 13–14, 145–6, 167, 169–71, 175–80, 197–8, 207–10, 220, 255, 257 James II 4, 240–41, 259 Jethro 181, 193, 195 John (king of England) 104 Johnson, Robert 220, 222–3, 228–30, 231 judges, justices 28, 31–2, 94n7, 102, 121, 137, 142, 143, 181, 186, 189–93 passim, 209, 214; see also magistracy

INDEX

jury, jurymen, jurors 32, 66, 193, 195; see also Newdigate, draft charges and speeches Kantorowicz, Ernst 38, 88 Kingston, Richard 240–42 Knox, John 168, 254 Lake, Peter 4, 5n17, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 118n45, 130n1, 134n14, 136nn20–22, 137n23, 139n31, 146nn41–2, 191n26, 256 law 1, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 51, 52, 59, 82–3, 113, 114, 142, 169, 187, 189, 215, 220– 21, 239, 252; see also nature common law tradition 14, 16, 20, 24, 26, 50, 202, 203, 206, 211, 213–14, 259; see also Ancient Constitution; Bracton; Cecil, Sir William, and common law; Fortescue; freedom, contrasted with bondage, freedom, slavery, villeinage; historiographical debate; Magna Carta; Smith, Sir Thomas, De Republica Anglorum; St German and consent of community, citizens 58–61, 64, 205, 236, 237, 239, 241, 242; see also consent, of the people; Parliament, consent of God 81, 97, 104, 172, 173 and monarch 70, 88, 175, 179; see also prerogative or discretionary powers law as limiting monarch 39, 57, 79, 94, 102–4, 182, 196–9, 203, 214 and Parliament 64, 65, 66, 73, 103, 168, 196, 197; see also Parliament Roman (civil) 26, 79, 205, 212 and royal succession 166, 168 statute 26, 39, 45, 54, 75, 102, 186 law courts 25, 31, 42, 43, 48, 64, 134, 214; see also judges; jury; magistracy; Newdigate Star Chamber 27–30, 32, 209n27 lawyers 5, 50, 77, 80, 93, 137, 168, 206, 213

295 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 83, 84, 111, 131, 147, 248 liberty, see freedom Lipsius, Justus 119, 120, 121, 227 Livy 134, 176, 186, 187, 189, 205, 206, 214, 235, 237 local governance and politics 1, 5–6, 10, 12, 14–15, 19–36, 65–6, 112–13, 116, 133–4, 136, 181–3, 184, 190–94, 197–9, 201, 204, 209, 210, 216, 217, 246–7, 251, 255, 257–8; see also magistracy; Swallowfield ‘gentry republics’ 10, 133–4, 182, 191, 199, 201 London 38–9, 52, 134, 138, 180, 210 Lords, House of, see Parliament, Lords Low Countries, see Netherlands Lucan 152, 154, 163, 254 Pharsalia (Civil War) 12, 152–9, 161 Lucas, Scott 10, 12, 15, 16, 39n9, 93nn4–5, 94nn6–7, 251, 254 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 2n5, 184, 235 magistracy, magistrates 12, 71, 91–107 passim, 112, 142, 173, 181–99, 215, 216, 246, 255 as godly vocation 136, 181, 193, 195–6 Magna Carta 16, 104, 203 Marlowe, Christopher 150, 152, 153, 156 Marsiglio of Padua 80 Mary I 7, 12, 39, 40, 56, 71, 72, 77, 92–5, 248 Mary, Queen of Scots 1, 48, 78, 84, 87, 88, 129, 131, 132, 136, 139, 165, 171, 176, 177, 247, 248 execution of 11, 85, 87, 145, 165, 166, 167, 256 project of marriage to Edward VI 44, 46, 47 McDiarmid, John 55n4, 56n6, 71n91, 253, 255 McLaren, Anne 7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 41, 56n8, 135, 173n25, 256–7 Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 6, 66n55, 72n97, 133, 135, 179n50, 253

296

THE MONARCHICAL REPUBLIC OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Mears, Natalie 6, 7n32, 76n5, 116n39, 130 Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms 16, 86n62, 116n39, 258–9 Mendlesham (Suffolk) 33–5 Milton, John 73–4, 171, 205, 213 Mirror for Magistrates, A 12, 15, 16, 91–107, 251, 254, 255 mixed monarchy, polity 58–9, 110, 132, 204, 210–11, 248; see also monarchical republican thought and practice England as mixed polity 4, 7, 38, 41, 65–73 passim, 132, 137, 138, 145, 163, 242 monarchical republican thought and practice; see also aristocracy, aristocratic or oligarchic republic; citizenship; Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic’; commonwealth; country; historiographical debate; humanism; monarchy; participation; republicanism, classical; resistance Henrician 4, 19–36, 255 local ‘republics’ in Henrician period 14–15, 19–22, 26–35, 255 under Edward VI and Mary I 11–12, 41–54, 55–6, 58–9, 67–74, 80–81, 92–107, 248, 253, 254 Elizabethan 1–4, 12–16, 35-6, 37– 41, 57–8, 72–4, 75–7, 81– 90, 92–168, 181–99, 201, 202, 204, 210–11, 245–59 early Stuart 3–5, 12–16, 167–8, 169, 171, 179, 180, 181–207, 210–31, 255–6, 256–7, 259 1642 and after 15, 167–8, 205, 207, 214, 215, 237–9, 240–44, 259 monarchy, monarch, conceptions of; see also counsel; deposition of monarchs; empire; law, and monarch; mixed monarchy; monarchical republican thought and practice; prerogative or discretionary

powers; sovereignty; Supremacy; tyranny absolute 11, 13, 75, 85, 102, 103, 132, 136, 146, 166, 168, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178n45, 201, 204, 213, 243, 258 divine-right 101, 166 elective 88, 123, 125, 131, 132, 145, 146, 168, 170, 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 180; see also Cecil, Sir William, interrregnum plans; Parliament, and royal succession free free hereditary monarchy 132, 135, 136, 145, 146 James I’s conception of 170, 177, 179–80 in whig usage 239, 243; see also whigs hereditary, blood-right 1, 11, 72, 132, 135, 136, 145, 146, 165–8, 171–9, 256–7 in late Elizabethan ‘monarchical reaction’ 136–46, 166–7, 256 limited 214, 239, 242 as ministry under God 80, 85, 89, 91, 95, 254 monarch as chosen by God 39, 40, 70, 72, 85, 105, 195 as one of 3 classical types of government 57–8, 66, 210–11 parliamentary 39, 41, 48, 54 as public office 85, 91, 95–6, 107, 159, 182, 195–7, 199, 233, 254 Stuart 13, 14, 168–76, 182, 207–11, 214, 215, 239–40, 257, 259 More, Thomas 24, 35, 160n29, 186, 250 Utopia 23, 24, 66, 77, 187, 248 Morison, Richard 22, 24 Moses 173, 181, 188, 193, 195 Mulcaster, Richard 38–9, 41, 112, 117, 118, 252 nation, nationhood (in early modern

297

INDEX

discourse) 25, 29, 36, 58, 61–2, 63, 64, 72–3, 113, 133–4, 143, 176–8, 251–2 nature (in early modern discourse) 24, 26, 205 in Craig, The Right of Succession 171–3, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180 in Smith, De Republica Anglorum 58, 61, 65, 66 Nedham, Marchamont 205, 233–4, 236–7 negative voice, see prerogative or discretionary powers, negative voice or veto neo-Roman thought 14, 133, 134, 202, 203, 207, 208, 211, 212, 213, 216; see also freedom; historiographical debate; humanism; republicanism, classical Quentin Skinner and 14, 132, 135, 202–3, 204–7, 212, 215n52, 259 Netherlands 8, 144, 180, 235 Newdigate, Sir John 12, 17, 181–99, 255 draft charges and speeches 183, 188, 190, 191–8 reading practices 12, 184–91, 192–7 passim, 255 Norbrook, David 13, 202 Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 7, 132, 154n18, 204, 233n5 Northumberland, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Duke of 55, 80, 85, 93 Norton, Thomas 130, 250 (with Thomas Sackville) The Tragedie of Gorboduc 87 obedience 12, 27, 64, 86, 89, 97, 100, 103, 118, 123, 124, 126, 129– 30, 138, 140, 141, 145, 166, 167, 172, 196, 236, 240, 248 oligarchy 58, 66, 138, 154; see also aristocracy; local governance, ‘gentry republics’ oratory, orators, see rhetoric Osborne, Francis 234–5

Osório, Jerónimo 119–21 Oxford, University of 112, 184, 219n11 Parker, Henry 15, 207, 215, 238–9, 243, 259 Parker, Matthew 81, 82, 84, 85, 131 Parliament, Parliaments 246; see also estates; law, statute; law, and Parliament; monarchy, parliamentary; representation Commons, House of 40, 52, 53, 65, 69, 116, 179, 197, 198, 205, 214, 216, 233 conceptions of early Tudor (to 1547) 4, 21, 22, 26, 33, 75, 80 under Edward VI and Mary I 11, 39, 48, 52–4, 69, 70, 72, 80, 101, 102, 103 under Elizabeth I 38–40, 41, 73, 83, 137, 168, 170 early Stuart 179–80, 196–9, 238, 239 late 17th-century 241 consent, parliamentary 53, 54, 64–5, 66, 68, 70, 72, 168, 170, 214, 241; see also consent, of the people; law, and consent of community of different periods under Henry VIII 27 under Edward VI 39, 43, 50, 52–3, 68, 116 under Mary I 39, 94n7 under Elizabeth I 19, 37, 38, 81, 87, 88, 117, 129, 130, 145, 247, 249–50 early Stuart 14, 179, 202, 204–7, 211, 213–15, 230 Rump Parliament 15, 215, 233; see also republic, English, mid-17th-century Lords, House of 53, 65, 88, 116, 179 and royal succession 2, 37, 38, 64, 87–8, 132, 145, 166, 168, 170, 180, 246; see also Cecil, Sir William, interregnum plans; law, and royal succession Parsons, Robert 145–6, 170

298

THE MONARCHICAL REPUBLIC OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The conference about the next succession 146, 170, 171, 175, 176n37 participation, political 4–5, 14, 21–30 passim, 33, 36, 69, 114, 116, 130, 133, 135, 140, 210, 211, 217, 218, 225, 227, 230, 231; see also active life; citizenship; commonwealth, commonwealthsman; Protestantism, and political participation; public, public man ‘social depth’ of 5, 13, 65–6, 68, 69, 71, 193, 201, 210, 217, 246–7; see also citizenship, inclusive versus aristocratic concepts of citizenship; democracy; popularity patriarchy, see gender and politics Patrizi, Francesco 119, 120 Paul, St, the Apostle 140, 223 Peacham, Henry 113, 117 Peltonen, Markku 8–9, 13, 15, 17, 110n6, 116n37, 118n45, 198, 202, 254 Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 3–4, 7, 56n9, 110n6, 133, 134n15, 183, 204, 210, 217n4, 222n22, 225n39, 229n53, 230n57, 250 people, consent of the, as basis of government, see consent, of the people Persons, Robert, see Parsons Peter Martyr, see Vermigli Plato 51, 218 Plutarch 183, 185–7, 191, 197, 255 Pocock, J.G.A. 2, 3, 5n19, 64n47, 198, 202, 204, 216n55, 235n18, 247 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition 2, 3, 8, 201, 202, 204, 243n65, 246, 247 Ponet, John 56 A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power 39, 56, 58–9, 67, 71–2, 254

popery, anti-popery 129, 135, 136, 139, 141, 146, 193, 194, 241, 248; see also Catholics; Rome (connoting papacy, Catholicism) popularity (in early modern discourse) 13, 129–31, 137, 138–40, 141, 145, 180, 256; see also citizenship, inclusive versus aristocratic concepts of citizenship; democracy; participation, ‘social depth’ of Prayer, Book of Common 53, 54, 70, 81, 140 preaching, preachers 5, 53, 54, 81, 109, 138, 140, 141, 167, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 209, 218, 219, 223, 256 prerogative or discretionary powers, royal 15, 40, 53, 65, 68, 75, 89, 103, 166n6, 167, 202–15 passim, 236–42 passim, 259 negative voice or veto 205–6, 214, 238, 239, 259 presbyterianism, presbyterians 131, 137–9, 145, 146; see also Admonition controversy; Cartwright prince (used to denote monarch or ruler), see monarchy printing, printers 38, 43–8 passim, 78, 92–5, 122, 129, 130, 171, 233 Privy Chamber 42, 78, 79, 257 Privy Council 4, 19–22, 25, 26, 32, 36, 41–4, 49, 54, 69, 93, 111, 112, 113, 119, 137, 220; see also counsel under Elizabeth I 1, 5, 7, 14, 15–16, 22, 35, 38, 84, 86–8, 91, 129–31, 143, 144, 146, 167, 175, 201, 210, 245, 248–50, 256–8; see also Cecil, Sir William, and counsel; Elizabeth I, and council prophesyings affair 139–44, 146, 256 Protestantism, Protestants 19, 37, 41, 45, 92–5, 146, 168; see also Calvinism; godliness; presbyterianism; Puritanism; Reformation Elizabethan 1, 39, 78, 129, 132, 136, 143, 166, 171, 179n50, 182, 194, 247–8

INDEX

and political participation, citizenship, republicanism 4–5, 14, 16, 135–6, 193, 256; see also humanism, Christian humanism; humanism, and Protestantism public (in early modern political discourse) 180, 182 public interest, common good, salus populi 113, 135, 192, 203–5, 207–11, 214, 215, 218, 219, 223, 233, 234, 237, 238, 243; see also commonwealth; country contrasted with private interest, self-interest 183, 192, 194, 196–8, 218, 219, 222, 223, 228, 247, 248 public man 85, 133–6, 143; see also citizenship; commonwealth, commonwealthsman; country, ‘father of [the] country’ Puritanism, Puritans 3, 130–31, 137–41, 185, 218, 219, 224, 249–50; see also Calvinism; godliness anti-Puritanism, anti-Puritans 136–41, 144–6, 256 Quintilian 60, 61, 113, 114, 134, 183 Rabelais, François 225 Read, Conyers 43n23, 43n25, 53n63, 76, 78n12, 82n37, 130n3, 248 reading practices 10, 12, 51, 154, 155, 161, 173, 183–93, 195–9, 219n11, 255 rebellion, rebellions 83, 104, 120, 124–5, 145, 195 in 16th-century England 1549 54, 68–71 Northern (1569) 78, 129 Pilgrimage of Grace (1536–7) 32–3 Wyatt’s (1554) 94 in ancient Rome 120–21, 174, 215 in A Mirror for Magistrates 99, 101–6 Reformation 19, 46; see also

299 Protestantism Edwardian 11, 41, 43, 52–4, 67–8, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 81 further reformation, under Elizabeth I 130, 136, 141, 145; see also Admonition controversy; godliness; Grindal; presbyterianism; Puritanism; Vestiarian controversy representation, representatives, political 23, 24, 33, 34, 63–4, 65, 70, 101, 168, 170, 179, 216, 233, 236, 237, 238, 249 republic, republicanism, English, mid17th-century 3, 15, 171, 202, 205, 213, 215, 216, 233–7, 246, 259; see also freedom; republicanism, classical republicanism, classical, humanist 2–5, 8–9, 11–17 passim, 19, 21, 22–6, 35–6, 55–74, 109–27, 132–6, 161–3, 195, 201–31, 250, 253, 254, 255; see also aristocracy, aristocratic or oligarchic republic; Cicero, political thought, influence of; citizenship; historiographical debate; humanism; Machiavelli; neo-Roman thought; republic, English, mid-17thcentury; resistance; rhetoric, and citizenship; virtue resistance, ‘resistance theory’ 12, 14, 15, 30, 36, 56, 59, 71–2, 91–2, 173n25, 197, 254; see also deposition of monarchs; tyrannicide; Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos in Calvin 92, 100–101 in A Mirror for Magistrates 12, 92–107, 254 rhetoric 12, 13, 56, 57, 60–63, 77, 78, 83, 134, 160–63, 175, 183, 186–7, 189, 190, 196, 199, 250, 254; see also Aristotle, Rhetoric; Cicero; education; humanism, Cambridge humanists, linguistic thought of; Quintilian and citizenship 110–27; see also citizenship

300

THE MONARCHICAL REPUBLIC OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Richard II 196 in A Mirror for Magistrates 93, 96–104 passim Richard III in A Mirror for Magistrates 96 in Shakespeare 153, 154, 158, 159–63 Rome, Romans (ancient) 8, 25, 120–21, 150, 151, 152, 161–3, 187, 190, 193, 209, 212, 222, 255; see also law, Roman Roman monarchy 57, 174, 187, 191 Roman republic 25, 100–101, 117, 149, 152–4, 155, 158–9, 160–63, 174–5, 214–16 Rome (connoting papacy, Catholicism) 45, 48, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 166; see also Catholics; popery Sackville, Thomas, see Norton, Gorboduc Sallust 134, 183, 205, 206, 207, 212, 214, 215, 216n53 salus populi, see public, public interest schools, see education, schools Scotland, Scots 81, 84, 86, 165, 168–9, 170, 171, 177, 178, 220, 256; see also Craig; James I; Mary, Queen of Scots; Somerset, project of Anglo–Scots Union Scott, Jonathan 8, 14n50, 216n55, 235n17, 259 Scripture, see Bible senates, senators 68–9, 73, 100, 121, 124, 125, 151, 215, 216 Shagan, Ethan 10, 14–15, 16–17, 68, 255, 256n32 Shakespeare, William 133 ‘first tetralogy’ 12, 149–63, 254–5 The first part of the contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster 150, 159 Henry VI, Part One 150, 151, 158 Henry VI, Part Two 150, 159 Henry VI, Part Three 149, 150, 156–7 Richard III 149, 153, 154, 158, 159–63 The true tragedie of Richarde

Duke of Yorke 150, 153, 154, 156n26, 157n27, 159 and Lucan 152–9, 161–3, 254–5 Sharpe, Kevin 2n3, 6, 161n37, 183–4 Sidney, Sir Philip 182, 189, 250 Skinner, Quentin 8–9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 109n1, 183, 198, 202n6, 204–7, 212, 213n41, 215n52, 238n30, 240n42, 245, 259 The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 8, 183, 217n4, 222n22 Liberty before Liberalism 132, 135, 202, 205n14, 206n15 Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes 79n17, 110, 111, 113n21, 126n80 (ed. with Martin van Gelderen) Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage 3n11, 8, 9, 110n6, 169n13, 202nn5– 6, 209n29, 216n55, 217n2 Smith, Henry 186, 188, 196 Smith, Sir Thomas De Republica Anglorum 16, 35, 37– 8, 41, 56, 57–8, 59, 63–7, 68, 166, 212, 246, 253, 258 A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England 56, 65, 67, 68–9, 73, 116 under Edward VI 11, 41, 42–3, 52–4, 55, 67 and Somerset’s project of Anglo-Scots union 41–2, 43–52 passim linguistic work 61–5, 68, 69, 253 mentioned 84, 145, 227 Somerset, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Duke of 42, 43, 46n36, 47n38, 52–4, 55, 67, 68, 71, 79, 80 project of Anglo-Scots union 41, 43, 44–51, 54, 253 Sommerville, Johann 13, 14, 16, 146n42, 172n19, 208n20, 259 Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 203n8, 212n35, 214n46 sovereignty 3, 52, 80, 137, 142, 171, 173, 178, 179, 210–11, 258, 259

INDEX

Spain, Spanish 136, 145, 151, 152, 170, 179, 210, 221 Spenser, Edmund 152, 153, 252 St German, Christopher 80 Starkey, Thomas 14, 16, 24–6, 27, 35 Stockwood, John 109, 110 Stubbs, John 116 The Discoverie of a gaping gvlf 116–17, 121 Sturm, Johann 118, 119 succession to Elizabeth I, see Elizabeth I, issues of marriage and succession Supremacy, Royal 4, 11, 23, 39–41, 52, 53, 75, 80–83, 137, 142, 143, 146 Swallowfield (Wiltshire) 5, 11, 14, 19, 20, 21, 35, 133, 210, 246–7, 255 Tacitism 2n5, 12, 16, 120–21, 184, 225–7, 229–30, 231, 250, 256 Tacitus 16, 120–21, 163, 184, 205, 206, 207, 214, 225, 226, 227, 229–30 taxation, taxes 19, 25, 27–30, 34, 64, 113, 124, 198, 204, 206, 208, 211, 213, 214, 241 theatre, drama 87, 129, 150, 152–3, 246, 254; see also Shakespeare Trenchard, John 241–4 tyrannicide 59, 72; see also deposition of monarchs; resistance tyranny, tyrant 23, 40, 72, 91, 109, 125, 126, 138, 149, 152, 162, 163, 174, 176, 179, 180, 182, 213, 215, 233, 236, 248 in Craig, The Right of Succession 170, 174, 176 of James II 240–42 of Mary I 39–40, 71, 72, 94, 95 in A Mirror for Magistrates 12, 102, 103 in Newdigate 192, 193, 196–7, 198 of Rome (papacy) 83, 135, 136 United Provinces, see Netherlands universities, see Cambridge; Oxford

301 Vaughan, William 224, 225–6, 229, 231 The golden fleece 226–7 The golden grove 186, 187, 226 Venice 121, 174, 175, 179n53, 180, 216, 238–9, 240, 247 Vermigli, Peter Martyr 16, 92 Vestiarian controversy 131, 137, 138, 139 Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos 173n25 virtue, virtues (in early modern political discourse) 2, 21, 24, 133, 134, 135, 151, 182–99 passim, 209, 218, 219, 220, 224, 255; see also honesty as active 13, 20, 203, 204, 208–11, 225, 236; see also active life in Tacitism 225–7, 229–31 as true nobility 203, 204, 208–9 Vives, Juan Luis 112 Walsingham, Sir Francis 84, 147, 202n3, 249n13 Warwick, Richard, Earl of in A Mirror for Magistrates 104–6 in Shakespeare 159 Warwickshire 10, 181–5, 193–4, 197–8 Whetstone, George 12, 186, 192 whigs (17th- and 18th-century) 15, 168, 182, 240–44, 259 Whitbourne, Richard 224–5, 227 Whitgift, John 13, 117, 137–9, 140nn32–3, 142, 144–6, 256 Wilson, Thomas (c. 1523–81) 61–2, 67n61, 113, 114–16 Wilson, Thomas (1560?– 1629) 168, 170 Winslow, Edward 218n7, 223 Winthrop, John 218–19, 223–4 Withington, Phil 6, 116n37, 230n56, 257 woman, women, and politics, see gender and politics Worden, Blair 3, 8n38, 11, 13, 182, 202, 209, 217n2, 233n5, 234n7, 250 Wrightson, Keith 21–2, 36, 251

St Andrews Studies in Reformation History Editorial Board: Bruce Gordon, Andrew Pettegree and Roger Mason, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Amy Nelson Burnett, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Euan Cameron, Union Theological Seminary, New York and Kaspar von Greyerz, University of Basel, Switzerland The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 Beat Kümin Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 Karin Maag Marian Protestantism: Six Studies Andrew Pettegree Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe (2 volumes) edited by Bruce Gordon Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars Geoffrey Dipple Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change c. 1470–1630 edited by Beat Kümin Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French, 1511–1551 Francis M. Higman The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe edited by Karin Maag John Foxe and the English Reformation edited by David Loades The Reformation and the Book Jean-François Gilmont, edited and translated by Karin Maag The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia Thomas A. Fudge

Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics Charlotte Methuen ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson by his Students edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe Auke Jelsma The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625: Sovereignty, Polity and Liturgy Alan R. MacDonald John Knox and the British Reformations edited by Roger A. Mason The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands edited by N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree and Henk van Nierop Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 Thomas Betteridge Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden Timothy G. Fehler Radical Reformation Studies: Essays presented to James M. Stayer edited by Werner O. Packull and Geoffrey L. Dipple Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent Policy and Practice Helen L. Parish Penitence in the Age of Reformations edited by Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 Philip Benedict

Christianity and Community in the West:Essays for John Bossy edited by Simon Ditchfield Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 John Craig The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book edited by Andrew Pettegree, Paul Nelles and Philip Conner Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation Rebecca Wagner Oettinger John Foxe and his World edited by Christopher Highley and John N. King Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe edited by Maria Crăciun, Ovidiu Ghitta and Graeme Murdock The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries edited by Richard Griffiths Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age Michael D. Driedger The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 Anne Dillon Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England Will Coster Usury, Interest and the Reformation Eric Kerridge The Correspondence of Reginald Pole: 1. A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo Thomas F. Mayer Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680 Robert von Friedeburg

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William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559–1577 Brett Usher A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni Apud Scotos Dialogus Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith Music and Religious Identity in CounterReformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 Alexander J. Fisher The Correspondence of Reginald Pole Volume 3. A Calendar, 1555–1558: Restoring the English Church Thomas F. Mayer Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice Daniela Hacke Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 Karen E. Spierling Moderate Voices in the European Reformation edited by Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment edited by Marc R. Forster and Benjamin J. Kaplan Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England Peter Marshall John Jewel and the English National Church The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer Gary W. Jenkins Catholic Activism in South-West France, 1540–1570 Kevin Gould

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