While prosecuting what the Defence of Poesy calls a “civil war among the Muses,” Sidney marshals an especially crucial argument against the muse of history (96). “Many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness,” the historical muse sounds the voice not of truth and moral persuasion, but instead of political turpitude (111). Just consider the kinds of stories that fill history’s “old mouse-eaten records,” Sidney asks (105). Cypselus, Periander, Phalaris, and Dionysius were all real-world tyrants who enjoyed quiet deaths, unpunished for their crimes. Discredited by its own mouse-eaten records, history’s culturally familiar moral power emerges from the Defence as considerably less than exemplary, both because of the existence of such stories and also more importantly because of the character of historical narrative itself. “Captived to the truth of a foolish world,” history is condemned to narrating over and again the triumphs of tyranny (111). With an audacity as sly as it is comically hyperbolic, the Defence disposes in a few curt, ironically pointed sentences of centuries of humanistically inspired commentary on history’s exemplary moral power. It is hardly the historian’s fault that he is compelled to tell the truth, Sidney might have admitted if pressed, but therein lies the critical point. Historical truth is simply inadequate, given the foolishness of the world, to the demands of historical life.
It is useful to begin with renewed attention to how Sidney configures the relationship between poetry and history in his Defence since that relationship is crucial for understanding his preoccupation with tyranny in the text as a whole and for reevaluating the connection between his poetics and his politics. Tyranny has attracted a great deal of attention in studies of The New Arcadia, but little has been written about the tyrants who populate the Defence in such numbers.1 It is not only when taking the historian to task for his disciplinary shortfalls that Sidney interests us in tyranny. He muses too upon the failures of the philosopher. Plato’s real-life enslavement at the hands of Dionysius, the Sicilian tyrant whose education in virtue he failed to procure, becomes shorthand for the failure of philosophy generally in its confrontation with tyranny. In turn, the metamorphosis of Hiero I from tyrant to just king is credited to Simonides and Pindar, as another tribute to the superior powers of the poet (128). When Sidney wants to exemplify the “eikastic” powers of poetry—its capacity to “‘figure forth good things’”—he does so, centrally, by alluding to a portrait of “Judith killing Holofernes,” one of the great biblical prototypes of tyrannicide (125). When he seeks to illustrate the power of the stage to create “divine admiration,” he highlights the accomplishments of George Buchanan, that Scottish humanist whose specialty was tyrannicidal tragedy (137).2 The success of poets in confounding tyrants takes center stage in Sidney’s defense of tragedy as a genre. What the Defence terms “the high and excellent Tragedy … maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours” (117).
Moreover, tyranny supplies the critical context for Sidney’s most prominent and most telling exposition of poetic imitation, his illustration of the “speaking picture” of poetic mimesis by reference to the rape of Lucretia. It is the Defence’s first detailed illustration of Sidney’s complex argument about imitation—one of those abstract discussions in the text’s thick exposition that fairly screams for clarification by way of example. Its placement, then, is rhetorically significant just as its conjunction of historical event and poetic-making appears deeply purposeful. As the rape of Lucretia was the originating moment of Rome’s freedom from tyranny—since it was the historical occasion motivating Lucius Junius Brutus to extinguish the line of Tarquinius Superbus—that rape secures in Sidney’s text the foundation for a detailed account of how the “right poet” writes. While historically Lucretia’s story marks the beginning of the Roman republic, here poetically her story serves as the moment of genesis for an argumentatively crucial illustration of how mimesis works.
Adopting as an analogy the practice of “the more excellent” painter who avoids merely counterfeiting “such faces as are set before” him, Sidney proceeds to illustrate how mimesis ought to function by asking his readers to extrapolate an ideal poetic practice from the example of the painter (102). Set free from history (unlike those historical and philosophical poets confined “within the fold of the proposed subject”), the right poet ranges with “no law but wit … into the divine consideration of what may be and should be,” depicting a Lucretia equally free from historical constraint (102). She is represented not as she appeared in life, but as the “outward beauty of” her chastity (102). Her chastity is the “Idea” out of which the speaking picture is made, a universal whose reality is guaranteed by the access of the erected wit to truths that transcend the always corrupt and mutable world of historical events.
In Sidney’s version of the story, Lucretia is liberated twice, both times by the agency of her own virtue. In one instance, her chastity frees her from the tyranny of Tarquin (“when she punished in herself another’s fault”) and in a second instance, that chastity frees her from the tyranny of historical verisimilitude (when the speaking picture declines to copy her body in order to imitate her virtue) [102]. When history itself emerges as a form of tyranny—both history conceived as the brazen world of events, and history conceived as a science captive to the folly of the world of events—then the conjunction of poetics and politics is startlingly complete. Real freedom from tyranny becomes more than a possible subject of poetry. It emerges instead as its necessary and important work. So often when Sidney writes about poetic action in idealizing terms, he does so with metaphors of the chaste body: in the portrait of Lucretia, in the repetition of Agrippa’s tale about the divided body politic, and in the complementary stories of David’s lust for Bathsheba’s body and Nathan’s healing fiction. The chastening of the body—its government, its discipline, and its purgation—goes hand-in-hand with Sidney’s desire to liberate history from tyranny.3 It joins hands too with Sidney’s desire to chasten the discourse of the public domain, to free Ideas from contamination by tyrannical passions.
To argue that Sidney understood history itself as a kind of tyranny and “right poetry” as a vehicle of liberation is to move from the outset against the mainstream of critical interpretation about the politics of Sidney’s poetics—at least as that mainstream is measured by the critical literature of the 1990s. The argument presented here is a departure, centrally, from the most detailed and most influential of the cultural materialist readings of the Defence, Alan Sinfield’s once startling depiction of Sidney’s “puritan humanist” project as the originary text of a Soviet-style literary criticism haunting the tradition of English studies. As the product of what Sinfield terms “aesthetic absolutism,” because of its pretensions to represent universals, the Defence is really propaganda (he claims) on behalf of “sectional interests”—Sidney’s personal commitments as the member of a “puritan faction” that pursued an “earnest protestantism.” A prisoner of irremediable tensions between humanism and Protestantism, Sidney’s aesthetic emerges in Sinfield’s reading as an ideologically driven vehicle “correlated broadly with the absolutist aspirations of the Elizabethan state” and focused narrowly on driving that state “in a particular direction in order to reinforce a sectional stance.”4 A decade after its publication, Sinfield’s reading is now only “once” startling. The proliferation of new historicist and cultural materialist readings of Renaissance texts has made the historical move between Sidney and the Soviets a common rhetorical maneuver, a familiar leap on the historical trampoline achieved for persuasive effect, and no doubt intended for critical enlightenment.5
A genuinely historical appreciation of the politics of the Defence demands renewed scholarly attention to the history shaping Sidney’s intellectual life. Sinfield is clearly right about both Sidney’s commitment to a universalizing epistemology and the importance of his association with a specific community (informed by specific political and pious values). But Sinfield’s essay, apart from some broad generalizing paragraphs about earnest puritans, never attempts to locate Sidney inside a historically specific community of that sort. Once more, by constructing a too-ready association between the Defence’s universalizing epistemology and the oppressive absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, he disregards those very historical conditions that lent Sidney’s epistemology its political significance.6 This chapter attempts a different approach by calling attention once again to Sidney’s connections to the Philippists. More specifically, I will argue that the epistemology of the Defence needs to be recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among that intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon—the so-called Philippists—and the early proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. When the universalizing imperative of the Defence is seen in light of the historical conditions that supplied it with its meaning and its lived sense of urgency, Sidney’s text emerges, surprisingly and with a genuinely historical power to startle, as the politically significant vehicle of a poetics of liberation.
What Sidney learned from his months of study in Vienna and his lifelong friendship with Hubert Languet—and all the personal and public relationships enabled by that friendship—went beyond an education about how to read and to write or even an education about Christian piety. From the first, Sidney’s Continental stay was designed to further the prospect of what many in the leadership of Reformed Europe came to expect would be a brilliant political career. William of Orange even eyed him as a son-in-law. Whatever the fate of that career, its frustrations and untimely demise, the education designed to prepare Sidney for public life imparted to the full range of his studies—his sophisticated training in the new hermeneutic as well as his exposure to the principles of Philippist piety—an equivalent public and political orientation. Considered as a discrete subject of analysis, Sidney’s poetics are comprehensible as an extraordinary application of the new hermeneutic inscribed in Melanchthon’s oratorical theory to an original and revolutionary conception of fiction-making. Free from the constraint of verisimilitude (mere counterfeiting) and the opacity of traditional allegory, the metamorphic power of Sidney’s golden world poetics secures an unprecedented cultural preeminence for poetry as that form of knowledge best able to realize the scope of all humane learning, virtuous action. Once more, Sidney’s poetics are open to comprehension, in a similarly discrete kind of analysis, as the equally extraordinary outgrowth of his training in Philippist piety. Unburdened by the constraints of a Reformed theology sometimes hostile to the fictive products of human imagination, Sidney’s poetics are inspired by Melanchthon’s carefully moderated optimism about human agency—an assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will—and, most signally, by his celebration of that agency’s scope, however limited, to secure freedom from the sovereignty of sin. For a writer like Sidney, who opines about mistress-knowledge in one breath as the tough stuff of virtuous action, and in another as the joyful apprehension of one’s own “divine essence,” human learning was by definition inseparably bound to a pious anthropology.
Moreover, for a writer like Sidney, whose Philippist humanism taught him to regard virtuous action as linked to a knowledge about what is godlike inside oneself, as an awakening of those small sparks of the divine innate to the mind, no hard boundaries could be maintained between humanist learning and Reformed piety, any more than such boundaries could be maintained between a Philippist humanism and a Philippist politics. Virtuous action is public action in a political world. To consider Sidney’s politics in the Defence, then, is to approach more centrally the scope that defines the whole—to understand more specifically how and why Sidney celebrated poetry as a pious means of realizing virtue in the public domain. Similar to its hermeneutics and its piety, the politics of Sidney’s poetics are informed by a Philippist-inspired search for liberation—a liberation from the sinfulness of sovereigns, a variety of sinful sovereignty whose shadow seems everywhere to haunt, challenge, and nearly to tyrannize over the Defence’s aggressively optimistic claims about fiction-making.
Tyranny was a topic of enduring concern for Sidney. It shadowed everywhere that remarkable correspondence he pursued with Languet during the decade of the 1570s. As mentor and student exchanged information, analysis, even prayer about the machinations of papal and Spanish power, it was tyranny and the resistance to tyranny (not national interest or state affairs) that constituted their primary vocabulary for analyzing European politics. State affairs clearly mattered. In the correspondence between Languet and Sidney, letter after letter reported the news from Spain, Italy, France, the Low Countries, England, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere, but always with attention to the international consequences of events. One typically wide-ranging letter from the correspondence illustrates the point well. In December of 1575, Languet wrote to Sidney, reminding him that “Spain was the first of the overseas provinces which submitted to the Roman yoke, but that now the Spaniards rule a good part of Italy.” His remarks were a prelude to reflections about France, where he predicted—wryly, with the occasional cynicism that punctuates his political reflections—that the French Catholics “wearied by calamities … will [eventually] send to the Spanish of their own accord, and put themselves under their protection”—as soon, that is, as the Spanish have settled their affairs in the Low Countries. Such reflections, in turn, had consequences for the English, who dreaming upon the lost heroes of their past—the Chandoses and the Talbots—had forgotten the need to fear Spanish tyranny. Italy, France, the Netherlands, England—all were dominoes poised for the fall. “As for the Pope,” Languet continued, “you know what you have to hope for from his good will.”7 Christendom was the anvil upon which papal power beat, and Rome the workshop responsible (in Languet’s words) for so “many Christian princes …, in our memory and that of our fathers, turn[ing] moderated and well-ordered princedoms into tyrannies.”8
Such disasters required analysis on an international scale, and in light always of the divisions that mattered most—the ones that divided confessions, not nations. When Fulke Greville later remembered his friend, Philip Sidney, as a prescient analyst of international politics—one with an eye, especially, to the dangers of “papist” Spain—he was remembering Languet’s influence upon him. In the face of such dangers, beyond analysis, Languet sought comfort from the pious knowledge that “our calamities provide a splendid example of divine justice.”9 Sidney, in turn, puzzled by how to interpret the always fluctuating fortunes of the cause, replied characteristically to his mentor’s solemn reports, “Almighty and gracious God rules Christendom with wonderful providence in our time.”10 The shared vocabulary indicates how mentor and student conceived of their own historical moment. Contemporary history was apocalyptically burdened, as a battleground between the forces of light and darkness—the liberating power of true church, on the one hand, imperilled by the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism, on the other. In turn, that sense of impending apocalypse had practical consequences for Sidney’s own actions.
Real tyrants abroad led Sidney to accept his diplomatic mission to organize a Protestant League to counter them. In turn, the perceived threat of tyranny at home influenced his decision to write against Queen Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou. Spanish tyranny helped to motivate Sidney’s fascination with the Americas and his interest in Huguenot schemes for colonizing the New World. In view of such threats, Languet once joked that his pupil needed to change his name from one Spanish tyrant’s to another’s (from Philip to John), when John of Austria appeared to threaten England with invasion from the Netherlands. Such humor was the anxious by-product of a perilous international crisis that extended through the whole of Sidney’s adult life.11 The Netherlands was the crossroads where Armageddon appeared most imminent. Several times in the early 1580s, Sidney seemed poised to launch into action there with or without Elizabeth’s blessing. When that blessing finally came in the form of Leicester’s poorly conceived and poorly executed mission, he rushed headlong to the defense of Dutch freedom and to his death.12 In turn, Sidney’s lifelong preoccupation with tyranny found expression especially in his most important life-work: the elaboration of his New Arcadia, populated by notable numbers of tyrannical villains and by his twin tyrannomachist heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus. Tyranny, then, was a familiar issue for Sidney, but Phalaris’s inclusion in the Defence’s rhetorically extended catalogue of history’s bad exemplars is an especially pointed reminder about the personal character of those political concerns at stake for him in addressing the challenge of contemporary tyrants.
Sidney had a history with Phalaris that is worth recounting. Phalaris was a tyrant of Acragas in Sicily in the sixth century BC, who became legendary for roasting his victims alive in a brazen bull. As a result, his name became a byword for tyranny. In July of 1574, in a letter addressed to Languet, Sidney bitterly attacked a French humanist and politique, Guy du Faur, Sire de Pibrac (1529–84), for publishing a justification of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre—that current event supplying the most notorious evidence of Catholic tyranny at work.13 Languet responded in a remarkable letter, which is at once a defense of Pibrac and a moral education for Sidney. In that letter, Languet represents himself as unwilling to hold either Pibrac’s Catholicism or his apology for the Massacre against him. Instead and surprisingly for Sidney to be sure, he praises Pibrac as “a man of such talent, such learning, and eloquence too, that I do not know whether France possesses his equal.”14 With the usual pointedness of the teacher, Languet proceeds to extrapolate from the particular instance of Pibrac’s fault—writing a letter that fear for his own death provoked—to a general lesson to be learned from his behavior.15
He was compelled to ransom his life with that letter, for which you so grievously reproach him, and I by no means approve of his action, for, as the poet says,
... Phalaris licet imperet ut sis
falsus et admoto dictet periuria tauro,
summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori,
et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
(… though Phalaris himself should command you to tell lies and bring up his bull and dictate to you a perjury, believe it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and to lose for the sake of life, the cause of living.)
Good letters supply good lessons. At the moment that Languet urges Sidney’s tolerance for Pibrac’s all-too-human weakness, he supplies by way of Juvenal’s Satires a corrective example to follow. Tyranny must be resisted, even as one must recognize the inevitable weakness of people who are oppressed by its power. The ignorant fail to understand tyranny, and the learned are compelled to complicity by a natural instinct to preserve themselves.
Phalaris came to Sidney as a moral example in Languet’s letters, and he figured prominently at a crucial moment in the political philosophy of another intimate friend, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. As the previous chapter showed, Languet mentored the two Philips, Mornay and Sidney, as twin students of the Reformed cause, and it is some evidence about the continuity of their education that they employ the same historical vocabulary, even in response to the same historical events. Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1576) was the most carefully argued and the most notorious of all those resistance tracts produced in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and Phalaris appears in that tract precisely at one of those few moments in which the memory of the Massacre is specifically invoked. Moreover, the reference to Phalaris occurs in exactly the same literary context recalled by Languet’s letter, Juvenal’s Satire VIII. In an argument in which Mornay imagines the response of the people to “a prince [who] commands that any innocent be killed, or that he be despoiled,” he conjures into memory the example of “some Papinian [who] … will reproach Caracalla to his face and will choose death rather than obedience: ‘Even if Phalaris himself orders him to be false, and to dictate perjuries under threat of roasting alive …’.”16 Drawing from the Scriptores historiae Augustae, Mornay inserts his allusion to the beastly Phalaris within the context of Roman imperial history—the story of the Emperor Caracalla’s murder of his brother Geta, and the refusal of the praetorian prefect, Aemilius Papinianus, to compose a speech to the senate in justification of that murder.17
The Roman imperial allusion secures a heightened grandeur and significance for the contemporary event as an obvious parallel to Huguenot interpretations of the Massacre (one more fratricidal tragedy in peril of a whitewash). Once more, the allusion functions didactically as the expression simultaneously of pointed optimism about the inevitability of resistance to tyranny. Papinian-style heroes always appear to undo tyrants, Mornay’s text clearly implies—an echo of that long tradition of anti-tyrannical literature extending back to Cicero, then Christianized by John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas, in which tyrants providentially get their due.18 Such optimism is important to note because when it is read in light of Languet’s correspondence with Sidney, Papinian’s action becomes in Mornay’s idealizing political philosophy the story of a Pibrac who operates as a Pibrac should—as a corrective example from the realm of history that shows how “one in whom … conscience remains” will effectively counter tyranny. Its optimism is, in no small measure, intended as persuasion to the faithful to maintain the cause, confident in the triumph of virtue even after the tragic Massacre (30). By contrast, for Sidney, Mornay’s appeal to Papinian—conjoined with the allusion to Juvenal—must also have carried a sharp memory of the real-life Pibrac, a less sanguine reminder of how ineffectively tyranny found resistance both on and after St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572. For all of the optimism of moral philosophy, history constantly proved itself a grim, sad, foolish business.
Sidney—it is worth recalling—was himself present at the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and may even have seen the mutilated corpse of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny.19 It was for him both a life experience and the monumental political tragedy of his day. The Massacre was a watershed event in the conflict between Catholics and Reformed Christians—even perhaps, together with the assaults of the Sea Beggars, the watershed event of its era. It effectively polarized the competing confessions into armed camps, challenging and ultimately undoing the hopes of irenicists in both parties for moderation and the now more distant dream of ecumenical reunion and peace. Languet clearly understood the event’s importance and its challenge to his principles, and he met that challenge with the inevitably paradoxical response of a man whose principles struggle painfully to adjust to life. From Languet’s perspective, what Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon meant to Rome, the Massacre meant to contemporary civilization: a triumph of tyranny. As he wrote to Sidney in 1574, reminding him of “the monstrous crime of which you and I were spectators: ‘The die is cast,’ as Caesar said, and the fire which has been kindled in Christendom because of religion can be extinguished only by its destruction.” The sense of urgency was enormous, as was the complexity of the problem of knowing how best to contain or control those fires of tyranny. Languet’s letter expresses a hope that the tyrants will simply destroy themselves. He prays for providential relief, that God “in the day of his wrath, … remember mercy.” Once more, he cautiously reminds Sidney of a need for their allies to “change [their] ways” [mores], recognizing piously God’s anger at the sins of the faithful or calling pragmatically for better military preparedness—perhaps both.20 The Massacre would lead Languet, Mornay and Sidney to articulate more effective arguments for actively resisting tyranny, even—paradoxical as the response might seem—as Languet would continue to impress on his pupils, Sidney and Mornay, the importance of moderation, tolerance, and understanding as essential components of a just response to tyranny’s “monstrous crime[s].”
Sidney’s allusion in the Defence to Phalaris comes complete with a history, then, one that is important, first, because it draws attention to his own lived experience with tyranny. Phalaris was a figure whom Sidney knew both from the pages of Juvenal and from the streets of Paris. The allusion matters also since Phalaris’s name came loaded in Sidney’s circle with certain specific, controversial political assumptions. In the same sentence from the Defence that Sidney writes about Phalaris, he mentions (as if in passing) that just as the poets have devised “new punishments in hell for tyrants,” so philosophy teaches “occidendos esse”—that tyrants ought to be killed (112). The “as if” quality of his phrasing is significant. He can write about tyrannicide as if it were a settled doctrine of political philosophy precisely because, for himself and for those friends with whom he was most closely connected, the doctrine needed neither argument nor proof. In fact, the whole of Sidney’s discussion of tyrants in this central passage of the Defence debunking the historian’s moral pretensions—beginning with the allusion to Marcus Junius Brutus’s slaying of Julius Caesar and proceeding to Dante’s supposed invention of new torments for tyrants—echoes a tradition of republican literature descending from fifteenth-century Italy.21 The Defence does not argue the case for tyrannicide. It assumes tyrannicide as a good. The question posed by Phalaris’s appearance in this passage and by Sidney’s Defence as a whole—considered from the vantage of its public political purpose—is how best to counter tyranny, and it is from this perspective that the allusion to Phalaris matters most.
Phalaris was a name usefully invoked whenever the question arose in Sidney’s own circle about how effectively to counter tyranny in practice—whether the issue concerned the private application of a moral philosophical principle (as in Languet’s letter) or the public articulation of a political philosophy (as in Mornay’s treatise). Juvenal’s Satire VIII was a shared point of reference among Languet, Mornay and Sidney. In its original form, Juvenal’s poem is a fierce assault against the vices of the contemporary Roman nobility and a negative example—exploitable to good pedagogical ends by the mentor Languet—that “nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus” (“virtue is the one and only true nobility” [l. 20]). More important, Juvenal’s poem became inside this circle of friends a common point of reference for considering how to move from ought to is: for moving, that is, from the proposition that tyrants should be resisted to real resistance. All three were agreed that tyrants “occidendos esse.” What would have amazed, amused, and perhaps even dismayed his friends is Sidney’s argument that poetry best supplies that vehicle for resisting tyranny rather than history or philosophy. For in that argument was implied the relative inferiority of his friends’ favored intellectual pursuits—the passion of Languet for history, of Mornay for moral and political philosophy. Juvenal matters, Sidney seems to say, for better reasons than his friends would have acknowledged, and for better reasons that a second humanist text featuring Phalaris would have supported: Book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric—among those books that Sidney himself is said to have translated. (Languet’s letters are replete with joking admonitions about Sidney’s fondness for Aristotle.) At the moment when Aristotle’s discussion turns from cataloguing the orator’s reservoir of commonplaces to a consideration of the argumentative power of examples, he narrates a story about poetry and tyranny. Aristotle’s first instance of the power of the example recalls the poet Stesichorus, and his use of a fable to dissuade the people of Himera from supplying a bodyguard to their tyrant, Phalaris, lest they become his slaves.22 As a prophylactic against tyranny, Aristotle’s celebration of the political power of the poetic example proved deeply meaningful to Sidney.
In the wars against Phalaris, Sidney goes armed not with Languet’s histories or Mornay’s moral philosophies, but with Aristotle’s examples. (The “example” was from the first for Sidney a vehicle of liberation.) His point in mentioning Phalaris is really most importantly one about Juvenal, or one about poetry that is. But how he bolsters his position on behalf of poetry’s power to undo the worst effects of tyranny with arguments that simultaneously draw upon and contest key intellectual assumptions of his friends, Languet and Mornay, forms an important and untold story about his Defence of Poesy. That story begins again with the interest of Sidney and his friends in Phalaris, a figure excoriated in the language of the Defence for his “abominable injustice” and reviled as a kind of dog unleashed from history’s “kennel” (112). As Sidney’s vocabulary suggests, what made Phalaris’s tyranny so striking was its very beastliness. Roasting his victims alive within a bronze bull that turned their screams into savage bellowing, all for the pleasure of his own entertainment, made Phalaris a memorable figure inside a circle of friends who defined tyranny as a violation of nature. Phalaris is both the exemplary tyrant and the aesthetic barbarian par excellence. Screaming victims are, for him, an unnatural delight. To confound the barbarians among them, Languet, Mornay and Sidney all had recourse to that increasingly popular and potent political vocabulary coming into renewed prominence inside sixteenth-century Europe, the vocabulary of natural law.
Scholars from Robert Hoopes to R.S. White have written extensively about the pervasive influence of natural law arguments upon an early modern English culture. From John Fortescue to Richard Hooker, from Christopher St. Germain and Thomas Starkey to John Aylmer and John Ponet—that is, for a significant cadre within the intellectual elite of the English political culture—natural law arguments maintained a magnetic attraction. Once more, as historians like Robert Eccleshall and Patrick Collinson have shown, that attraction was maintained especially (though not exclusively) among an articulate minority of learned Englishmen eager to promote the vision of a limited or mixed monarchy. All of the writers named above, Fortescue to Hooker, belonged to that group—and clearly Philip Sidney did as well, as I will indicate.23 More specifically and more to the immediate point at issue, Quentin Skinner has written about the significance of natural law arguments to the development of Renaissance political discourse, and most especially to their key role in the history of resistance theory. In particular, Skinner has described the struggle among the Huguenots after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as an embattled minority seeking religious freedom, to devise a logic and a language for defending rebellion against tyranny that would have a broad national appeal transcending confessional boundaries. As Skinner has made clear, natural law arguments, with their appeal to unwritten universal laws inherent within the individual conscience, were crucial in bolstering the persuasiveness of the new resistance theory, and once more, he has identified Mornay’s Vindiciae as that historically significant resistance text inside which natural law arguments enter first.24 The logic of natural law supplied in principle as well as in practice a rhetoric easily accommodated to the new hermeneutic, designed to craft clear, energetic, rational discourse in which argumentative “scope” acquires assent in the public domain. When the “scope” of such discourse is informed by logic having the force of natural law, such arguments would compel (not merely acquire) that universal assent so urgently desired.
It is important to call attention to the renewed popularity of natural law arguments in terms both of content and form because Sidney’s poetics can be read usefully as an effort to realize the public, political promise of those arguments. Considered from a political vantage, his poetics can be read as an interventionist vehicle designed to remedy the principal disease of this first ideological era of European politics: its fracturing by the tyranny of confessional disputes.25 Poetry affords the natural and ideal complement of an anti-confessional and anti-tyrannical politics. Sidney insists, doubly, upon the peculiar power of poets to teach the “commonplaces” (moral and political truths drawn from nature) and to realize with stunning effectiveness the advantages of natural law discourse’s reasoned, non-polemical mode of argumentation. The very freedom from history of the golden world—its autonomy—guarantees its freedom from the merely partisan polemical rhetoric that contaminated and therefore corrupted contemporary discourse. To retreat by way of fiction to Nature—to nature as it is “chastened” by the making power of the poet’s wit—is to encounter (with all of the complexities that inform Sidneian fictions) a pun writ large: a fictive landscape that sustains the illusion that a life lived in nature (amidst bushes, shrubs and trees) is equivalent to a life lived according to Nature (the dictates of natural law). It is to watch, therefore, the language and logic of natural law discourse achieve substance as a fiction, on the groundplot first conceptualized in the poetics of Sidney’s Defence.
If Quentin Skinner is correct, then, in emphasizing the importance of natural law arguments to sixteenth-century resistance theory, he is demonstrably wrong—and this is a point that matters profoundly for understanding Sidney’s role in this history—to argue for the novelty of these arguments in Mornay and to attribute (as cultural historians sometimes continue to do) the source of his new language and logic to Thomas Aquinas.26 It may be an attractive historical irony to imagine the Protestant Mornay turning Catholic scholastic philosophy back against the Tridentine Church, raiding Aquinas for the philosophical weaponry to topple the Pope’s minions from the throne of France. However, there is a more plausible explanation for the renewed popularity of natural law arguments in Mornay’s Vindiciae, and for the popularity of those arguments in other resistance texts inside Britain, John Ponet’s lucidly argued A Shorte Treatise of politike power (1556) and George Buchanan’s influential De jure regni apud Scotos (1579), as well as for the thoroughgoing dependence of Sidney’s political writings and poetics on natural law theory.
When Languet urged Sidney to moderate his criticisms of Pibrac in that letter written in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, he did so as a mentor “by nature and by principle averse to judgments of this sort,” explaining that “many people criticize me for this [moderation] and say that I derive it from my teacher, Melanchthon. Thus far I regret neither my teacher nor my principles, and shall not be led away from either by the criticisms of those who are naturally more captious or severe than I am.”27 Confronted by crisis, he took refuge in his teacher’s principles. In turn, by identifying himself with Melanchthon, Languet reminded Sidney about his distinctive political affiliation—the source of his own commitment to the Protestant cause—and, just as meaningfully, about the source of that political commitment in a distinctive brand of Protestant education.28 That influence is measurable across an extensive disciplinary domain from rhetoric and dialectics to natural philosophy, and it is an influence demonstrable, too, in Melanchthon’s pervasive employment of natural law arguments derived from Aristotle and his scholastic commentators in reshaping moral, philosophical and political learning for the Protestant north. Its employment was central to his intellectual career, as his most recent students have demonstrated in considerable detail.29 Natural law played a constitutive role in fashioning Melanchthon’s conception of oratory, most importantly (as I have emphasized) in the identification of textual loci and mental notitiae—rhetorical commonplaces and those innate ideas set ablaze by them. So also, principles of natural law figured prominently in the development of Melanchthon’s theology as primary means of saving distinctions between Gospel and Law, of clarifying the will of the Maker to make himself known, the likeness of man to God in affect and intellect, and the liberating potential of knowledge of all kinds. Most important in this context, however, was Melanchthon’s introduction of the language and logic of natural law into resistance theory during the Wars of the League of Schmalkaldan in the late 1540s. Under attack by imperial powers, the Protestant princes of Germany needed some means to justify armed defense against sovereign authority, and consequently some radically different political arguments from the ones Luther had employed against the peasant rebellions of earlier decades. The church’s survival demanded it.
Confessional wars were fought as fiercely by books as by cannons, and in 1546, Wittenberg aimed a blast squarely against Charles V’s sovereignty by the republication of Luther’s Warnunge an seine lieben Deutschen (Warning to His Dear German People). Luther’s name remained the big gun in the German Protestant arsenal even after his death, and mobilizing the power of that name was crucial to the cause. His Warnunge, however, was a cautious, constitutionally based argument about the illegality of threatened imperial violence rather than a call to arms. (If no Reformer could fulminate with Luther’s zeal, no Reformer ever equivocated with his aplomb.) In 1531, active resistance was something Luther would not condemn, but it was hardly a theme that he was ready to trumpet. That trumpet blast in favor of resistance by the Protestant faithful against the depredations of imperial power was left to Melanchthon, who added his own Preface to Luther’s Warning early in 1547 in which active resistance (“Gegenwehre”) is not merely tolerated or endorsed by legal argumentation, but instead piously heralded as a “true work, which God has planted in nature.”30
Luther’s political conservatism is legendary, and like most legends easily exaggerated. Throughout his career, his political thought was structured in Augustinian terms upon complex binary distinctions between the two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. Few contemporaries celebrated Christian freedom more zealously than Luther, but freedom belonged wholly to the realm of the spiritual, as a gift to the faithful whose inward self-government derived from their free acceptance of the Word. By contrast, “obedience” was the watchword of the temporal realm, where the sword of government—an instrument of wrath and judgment against sinful humanity—coerced outward submission to the law.31
When the temporal realm threatened the obliteration of the spiritual, however, events forced changes in Luther’s political thought. In 1530, Charles V, having settled his affairs in Italy, crossed the Alps intending to make the Holy Roman Empire wholly Roman again by enforcing the seemingly defunct Edict of Worms (1521), that Catholic assault against Reformed religion. Luther’s political transformations in the face of that temporal threat have been well documented, from his early rejection of the legitimacy of armed resistance against the Emperor; to his sudden acceptance at Torgau (1530) of constitutional arguments in favor of resistance; to his eventual accommodation of an uneasy mixture of apocalyptic, legal and natural law arguments justifying military response on the part of Germany’s Protestant princes.32 For historians from Quentin Skinner to Robert Von Friedeburg, those transformations in political thought matter largely because they help to clarify the origins of early modern resistance theory. Recovering those origins, in turn, has assigned to Lutherans—rather than to Calvinists—the pivotal role in the development of early modern “resistance” theories or (as they are now frequently called) theories of self-defense. My emphasis is different. As Cynthia Grant Schoenberger has shown, from the late 1530s to the mid-1540s German publications were replete with both constitutional and natural law arguments espousing the doctrine of resistance, though as she notes “natural law arguments came increasingly to the fore.”33 She has shown, too, that natural law arguments—allied to notions of “atrocious injury,” the legitimacy of self-defense, and the magistrate’s duty to protect his subjects—entered Melanchthon’s political thought well before Luther was ready to acknowledge any one of them, though he came eventually to acknowledge them all.34 Where questions of “Gegenwehre” were at issue, Melanchthon led the way and Luther followed, in a complex, reciprocal passage of ideas between student and teacher.35 Early modern political theory in Germany was pivotal to the development of resistance theory in northern Europe, but it was so in considerable measure because of its Philippist character.
When Melanchthon added his Preface to Luther’s Warnunge in 1547, he restated in concise terms a natural law theory of resistance that he had for several years elaborated more extensively in scholarly commentaries, polemical letters, and formal position papers addressed to the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, and that he would again articulate in his extensive rewriting of one of the most influential resistance tracts of the German Reformation, the Von der Notwehr Unterricht (Instruction Concerning Self-Defense).36 Like Luther, Melanchthon’s turn in political thought, from the recommendation of passive disobedience to tyranny to the justification of active resistance against it, happened slowly, and only under the pressure of historical events. Melanchthon, too, followed Luther in preaching the blessings of government and rejecting arguments in favor of active disobedience, but Charles V had allied himself with Papal tyranny, and Papal tyranny threatened the chastity of God’s true church. Unlike Luther, who preferred the limited (therefore safer) boundaries of legal argument, the more scholarly Melanchthon returned to the familiar domain of bonae litterae—the texts of the classical literary tradition—to bolster constitutional claims on behalf of self-defense with philosophical arguments. Out of his humanist learning, he constructed both an influential and conceptually elegant case for defending active resistance against tyranny. His return to bonae litterae, however, was managed in characteristically Melancthonian fashion. At the core of his defense was a powerful Pauline conception of natural law reanimating classical political theory for the needs of contemporary culture.
In 1542 Melanchthon published a second edition of his Prolegomena in Officia Ciceronis, which he supplemented for the purpose of clarifying what was fast becoming again for German Protestants the most urgent political question of the day: whether it is right vim vi repellere, to repel force by force. The passage bears quotation at length:37
Bestiae naturali inclinatione repellunt violentiam, quia cuilibet naturae insita est a Deo appetitio conservandi sese: in homine autem duae res movent ad depulsionem iniustae violentiae, στoργή [storge], quae est appetitio conservationis sui, altera res est notitia, quae docet, quomodo haec στoργή regenda sit, et docet genus humanum sic conditum esse, ut conservetur aequalitas.
Sunt autem notitiae naturales leges naturae, quae sunt radii sapientiae Dei, sparsi in mentes, ut sint testimonia de Deo, ostendentia discrimen inter iusta et iniusta.
Verum est igitur dictum, vim vi repellere natura concedit, sed notitia naturalis docet intelligendum esse certo modo, vim iniustam repellere licet vi ordinata, scilicet officio magistratus, cum eius auxilio uti potest, aut manu propria, si desit magistratus, ut si quis incidat in latrones. Nec Evangelium delet naturalem notitiam, non abolet politicum ordinem, cum dicit (Rom. 12. 19.): Non ulciscentes vosmet ipsos, sed magis munit politicum ordinem, quia docet petere defensionem a magistratu, et prohibet seditiones.
(Animals resist violence because of a natural inclination, since God has placed in every nature whatsoever an appetite for self-preservation: in human beings, however, two things lead to the resistance of unjust violence, στoργή, which is the appetite for self-preservation, [and] the other thing is notitia [an innate idea], which teaches, how these στoργή should be governed, and which teaches humankind that this is established in order that justice [aequalitas] be preserved.
Moreover these notitiae [innate ideas] are laws of nature, which are rays of God’s wisdom, dispersed in minds, so that they might be testimonies of God, markers for discriminating between the just and the unjust.
Therefore this dictum is true: nature allows force to repel force, but an idea innate in nature [notitia naturalis] teaches that this is to be understood in a certain way: that it is legitimate to repel unjust force with authoritative force, that is, by the office of the magistrate, when his help is able to be employed, or by one’s own hand, if the magistrate is absent, just as anyone would do if fallen upon by robbers. Neither does the Gospel abrogate the idea innate in nature [naturalem notitiam], nor abolish political order, when it says: Take not vengeance upon yourselves, but rather it fortifies the political order, since it teaches [us] to seek defense from the magistrate, and it prohibits sedition.)
Even as Melanchthon sets out to authorize the use of force against force, his trademark moderation is evident. First and last, his support is for the maintenance of political order. Opposed to acts of sedition and anarchy—chaos that he associates with Anabaptist revolution—he limits his support of resistance to “just” causes (in which the injuries are, as he writes elsewhere, atrocious). Also, he expresses a strong preference for authorized magistrates to exercise force against tyranny, rather than private persons (an argument that anticipates the role of the “subaltern” magistrate in subsequent Huguenot texts). Once more, by invoking the principle of self-preservation, Melanchthon characterizes the use of force to fight force not as active resistance—always difficult to justify in a hierarchical political order—but instead as legitimate defense, the extension of an inherent desire for self-preservation to the public realm.38 What was fundamentally new and important about Melanchthon’s employment of the natural law argument was the philosophical and theological weight that he imparted to its logic.
Much of that philosophical weight descended to Melanchthon—appropriately enough in the Prolegomena in Officia Ciceronis— from Cicero himself. Cicero was Rome’s most eloquent advocate for the law of nature, and he identified true law with “right reason, in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging, everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”39 For a humanist like Melanchthon, every word of Cicero’s argument about right reason would have been true gospel, and his eloquence itself proof of the reality of natural law. But the law of nature meant something more to Melanchthon than it did to Cicero, and hence the significance of his effort to reinvigorate classical philosophy at every juncture of this discussion by reference to Pauline theology. Not simply a principle of right reason or a moral idea that confers obligation, the law of nature is also written by God in human hearts. In Romans 2:14–15, Paul identifies “the work of the law written” in the “hearts” of the gentiles, “their conscience also bearing witness, and their reasonings mutually accusing or even excusing them.” Cicero was right about the law, but right for reasons that no pagan could fully comprehend.40
In the Roman Digest, the appeal to natural law is a convenient legal device for allowing (always necessary) exceptions to the prohibition of violence from the civil interactions of private citizens. In Melanchthon’s reinterpretation of the Digest, the appeal to natural law is transferred from the private domain to the public. In the course of that transference, transporting the legitimacy of self-defense from private persons to the body politic, the interpretation of Cicero brings into play a fully developed Christian anthropology, one that relocates the legitimacy of defense both in the body and the mind, among those natural affections that move the heart and those ideas that govern judgment. Government for Luther was always Augustinian in kind—a product of and remedy for sin. Hence, when Luther wrote about the obligations that Christians bear toward their fellow beings, or the duties of magistrates to their people, he did so principally by reference to the “law of charity.”41 Melanchthon’s rehabilitation of natural law—more fully elaborated and detailed than Luther’s—made political obligations and duties seem as natural (hence, as desirable, reasonable and right!) as the instinct to breathe. When government is aligned with natural law, and natural law is identified with God’s love for mankind, then new possibilities for virtuous public action in defense against tyranny become available.42
Melanchthon’s single most influential effort to justify resistance derived much of its persuasive power, not surprisingly, from a similar application of natural law principles to political life, Von der Notwehr Unterricht (Instruction Concerning Self-Defense). This is a book with a complicated history. Von der Notwehr Unterricht was originally composed by a colleague at Wittenberg, Justus Menius, whose manuscript was partly corrected by Melanchthon before its first publication in 1547. That work was rewritten again before the publication of the second edition, also in 1547, for which Melanchthon assumed responsibility. The German text was then subsequently translated into Latin by Johannes Marcellus, another professor at Wittenberg, as De defensione concessa humano generi iure naturae (About the Defense Permitted to Humankind by the Law of Nature).43 Its original publication in German highlights its pointedly political purpose: the work was a clarion call to arms, a device to mobilize popular support for the war and to fortify the consciences of Christian soldiers battling the Emperor. However, the Latin title articulates most clearly the logic of its central argument. Self-defense derives its foundational authority from universal laws of nature inscribed in humankind—laws inscribed in the conscience by God, as this aggressively Protestant document constantly insists. The anonymous status of the publication illustrates at once the perils of the historical moment, as imperial troops descended upon Germany’s Protestant princes, and also Melanchthon’s characteristic cautiousness, especially at this moment of peril, about lending his name to incendiary, political controversies.
By self-defense, what Melanchthon had in mind was more than passive disobedience or a refusal, Papinian-style, to follow the Emperor’s commands. He justified as well an active military response, even tyrannicide. In answer to his central organizing question about whether an active response against tyranny is permitted, Melanchthon wrote: “Certum est omnes homines bona conscientia sequi & amplecti, quod statuit ius Naturae, quod vere ius divinum est. Est autem omnibus hominibus haec Lex, quasi lumen quoddam, divinitus impressa, quod in atroci & notoria iniuria, cum destituimur a Magistratu, liceat nobis uti defensione, adversus pares, & adversus superiores.”44 (It is certain that all men should follow and be filled with good conscience, which is a law of nature, and which truly is a divine law. Moreover this Law is a light to all men, having been divinely impressed on them, showing in cases of atrocious and notorious injuries, when we are oppressed by a Magistrate, that it is permissible for us to act in our defense against equals and against superiors.) Moreover, Melanchthon proceeded to argue that there are many cases in which natural law both permitted self-defense and also actually commanded (“sed etiam mandata”) husbands to shield wives and magistrates their subjects, and princes the church.45 The commander Thrasybulus who liberated Athens from the unchaste violations of the Thirty; the citizen Pelopidas who rescued Thebes from Spartan tyranny; even the wife of Alexander Pheraeus, who murdered her tyrannical husband, all acted according to natural law by punishing rulers who had themselves defied those appropriate (those “natural” boundaries) inside which the power appropriate to the magistrate’s calling should operate. They acted, in short, out of a natural duty to protect the chastity of the family and of the state, and consequently in defense of good order.46
By 1542, in his revised commentary on Cicero’s De officiis and his newest version of the Loci, Melanchthon had already displayed with considerable sophistication the argumentative power available to natural law discourse. What is striking about these new resistance tracts, in German and in Latin, is their self-conscious deployment of the natural law argument as a rhetorically effective mode of argumentation. When he explains in a letter of January 1547 how he came to revise and rewrite Justus Menius’s original treatise, Melanchthon recounts his aversion to Menius’s “raving and wild” words, and his desire for a more “erudite and moderate” argument. Melanchthon’s distaste for Menius prefigures Mornay’s disgruntlement with Stubbs. For both, natural law discourse provided the principal means to chasten the body politic by taming “wild” words.47
At the core of Melanchthon’s political thought is reverence for government. Like Aristotle, Melanchthon is philosophically committed to the notion that the state exists by nature, partly because of its origin in satisfying natural appetites—the desire for self-preservation, family, and society—and partly because of its goal in realizing natural purposes—the disposition of peace, harmony and justice.48 Beyond Aristotle, Melanchthon conceives of government as natural because it is a divinely bestowed blessing whose beauty forms one of the principal theological proofs for the existence of God. As a result, when he writes about the state in his Loci of 1543, Melanchthon seeks to enlist among the governed obedience and honor for their governors.49 Such reverence is entirely consistent with his concept of government as a divine blessing, and it helps to explain his popularity with Henry VIII and Elizabeth, sovereigns anxious to hedge their crowns with divinity. But such reverence is also fully consistent with Melanchthon’s several important elaborations of a natural law theory that endorsed active resistance to tyranny as both a lawful response and a pious duty. If government is a blessing, in its chaste disposition of the body politic, then tyranny is rape and punishable as such. To argue that Melanchthon’s variety of extended and philosophically complex defenses of resistance were written under the pressure of historical events is not to suggest that they were inconsistent with his political philosophy as a whole. Reverence for government coexists readily enough with horror for tyranny as products of the same commitment to a natural law theory of politics.50
Tyrannicide is both the natural response and the true obligation of a free people. This was an argument that Reformers eager to safeguard the liberty of the church transplanted to England and to Scotland—and Quentin Skinner’s thesis notwithstanding, this was an argument that Reformed Christians of the later sixteenth century hardly needed their volumes of Aquinas to discover. In 1556, John Ponet (1514?–56) dedicated his Shorte Treatise of politike power to “all true naturall Englishe men,” and mobilized against orthodox Tudor support of Queen Mary’s sovereignty the newly potent language and logic of natural law.51 A call-to-arms masquerading as a philosophical justification for tyrannicide, Ponet’s treatise appeals for authority at every stage of its methodically organized argument to natural law theory. Natural law accounts for the origins of society, it endorses the exercise of right reason in government, it explains the predations of tyranny from the primitive to the contemporary church, it guarantees citizens absolute right to the ownership of property, and it enables the Treatise’s climactic celebration of the wisdom of the ancients (to the shame of contemporary Christians!) in acknowledging that “it is naturall to cutte awaie an incurable membre, which (being suffred) wolde destroie the hole body.”52 Ponet’s point about England’s political body is plain: Mary Tudor must be excised.
The “plain” character of Ponet’s point is as distinctive as its content. Natural law is “the touchestone to trye every mannes doinges (be he king or begger) whether they be good or evil,” and indispensable as that touchstone because “it is so playne and easie to be understanden that no ignoraunce can or will excuse him that therin offendeth.”53 A Pauline rigor attaches to political discrimination, as well as to scriptural interpretation. Persuaded of the importance of natural law as right reason implanted in the mind by God, Ponet means to persuade his readers by example as well as by argument. He organizes his text by a series of argumentatively key questions (e.g., “Whether it be lawful to depose an evill governour, and kill a tyranne”), and writes in response economical replies that reflect as they endorse standards of right reason in the exercise of political power. For a document so obviously polemical in purpose, the Short Treatise is remarkably temperate, even cool-headed in its rhetoric.54 Contemporaries such as Christopher Goodman and John Knox advance parallel arguments in defense (more and less) of resisting tyranny, but they do so as thoroughgoing biblicists—without appeal to the language and logic of natural law. Ponet’s pious commitments are no less powerful than Knox’s or Goodman’s. (Like Melanchthon, for his authorization of natural law as right reason, Ponet turns to Cicero filtered through the lens of Paul.)55 Ponet’s distinctiveness, rather, derives from his evident education in and absorption of the sixteenth-century’s new hermeneutic, those new methodical skills of reading and writing that here achieve “scope,” a final aim, purpose and target. The Short Treatise tethers the arrow of tyrannomachy to the bow of natural law argumentation. Goodman’s treatise, it is well to note, ended life as it began—as a sermon-in-the-works destined to be ignored. Ponet’s was reprinted twice on the eve of England’s civil war.56
A decade later and a kingdom to the north, George Buchanan naturalized fundamentally the same arguments in his anatomy of tyranny and Scottish politics, the controversial De jure regni apud Scotos (1579). Like Ponet, Buchanan grounds his argument on behalf of tyrannicide in natural law theory. Defending the right of a free people to resist tyranny or misgovernment requires, logically, an exposition of good government, “the original and cause of creating kings, and what the duties of kings are towards their people, and of people towards their kings.”57 That exposition, etiological in kind, generates an image of the state as a body whose natural condition is harmony (with king safeguarding people, and people safeguarded by law)—an image that reason has power to expose, in turn, because of that natural “LIGHT infused by GOD into our Minds.” While the “scope” of the king, as physician to the state, is to promote “the health of the body,” the tyrant operates, as unnatural monster, to corrupt that body for his own lusts.58 Buchanan’s point is made as powerfully as Ponet’s: “occidendos esse,” tyrants must be killed. Natural law demands it.
Buchanan’s recourse to the vocabulary of “scope” is revealing about his rhetorical commitments. Organized on the platonic model of a dialogue, Buchanan’s treatise affords a methodical discussion about the duties of kings—and the “natural” consequences of abrogating those duties. De jure regne apud Scotos proceeds as a series of questions and answers, with orderly summary of arguments, consideration of objections, provision of historical and literary examples, definition of key terms, interpretation of scriptural texts, of positive and ecclesiastical law—the whole work on display as the finely tuned product of a cosmopolitan humanism enormously confident about the power and persuasiveness of its own eloquence. Again, that confidence proceeds in large measure from Buchanan’s assumptions about natural law. When argument succeeds in distinguishing clearly between “what doth pertain to the nature” of a king and a tyrant “the people will understand also, what their duty is towards both.”59 Understanding naturally secures action, and action, in turn, gives tyrants their due. Ponet’s confidence in natural law results in plainness that is both learned and polemical. By comparison, Buchanan’s confidence creates claritas that is sophisticated and studied—studied, because it secures the ground for his identification of an “art or science” of politics, as the right reason, “out of which, as from a fountain or spring, all laws provided … for the preservation of human society must proceed and be derived.”60 That reason notably is providential. Buchanan’s politics and political theory are motivated, like Ponet’s, by zeal for the international Reformed cause. Amidst the tensions of confessional warfare after St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, the frequent call for the revival of political science among the elites of Reformed Europe, echoed in Buchanan’s work and founded in the language and logic of natural law discourse, arises as an interventionist strategy to secure relief from impending chaos.
Mornay was not the first, then, to espouse a right to resistance on the foundations of natural law theory. Ponet and Buchanan developed similar arguments by the same means.61 Mornay’s Vindiciae contra tyrannos distinguishes itself mainly because of its sophistication in elaborating that theory. The pseudononymous Cono Superantius prefaces the Vindiciae’s consideration of the obligations that bind prince and people by locating the source of those reciprocal obligations—as twin constants mirrored throughout the argument’s unfolding—in “God and nature.”62 From these constants, Mornay derives his twofold consideration of the origins of kingship. Kingship is considered both as a covenant and a contract, both in relation to divine law and to natural law, depending on the summa—the major aim or scope—of those questions raised about it. Mornay proceeds, in short, as a political philosopher, not as an historian. His account of origins is logical, not factual.
First, kingship is analyzed as that covenant established among God, prince, and people, which delimits popular obedience in respect to princely abrogations of divine law; and second, he analyzes kingship as that contract established between the prince and the people, which fixes the conditions under which tyrants can be resisted and the duty of foreign princes to intervene on behalf of “pure religion” and the oppressed.63 The logical connection that binds covenant to contract—that demands a necessary connection between the divine and the human—is the philosophical interpretation of natural law that informs Mornay’s argumentative matter. In his Christian Aristotelianism, “law is a mind, or rather, a gathered multitude of minds. For the mind is a particle of the divine breath, and he who obeys the law is seen to obey God and, in a certain way, to make God his judge.”64 Scriptural arguments about the covenant among God, prince and people (Questions One and Two) are underwritten consistently by reference to classical moral philosophy and contemporary history. In turn, political arguments about the contract between prince and people (Questions Three and Four) are persistently supported by biblical interpretations and by patristic and scholastic authorities. As the Preface proclaims, Mornay’s double “method of teaching,” by proceeding from “causes and major propositions” to “effects and consequences,” renders kingship “visible and comprehensible, as if ascending through certain degrees to the peak (ad summa) so that in the manner of geometricians—whom he seems to have wanted to imitate in this matter—from a point he draws a line, from the line a plane, and from the plane he constitutes a solid.”65 Right reason produces right knowledge about kingship—knowledge at once natural and Godly—and creates consequently right teaching reflected in the very method of its making.
Mornay’s philosophical sophistication in applying natural law theory against tyranny is best displayed in a core passage from his third quaestio’s analysis of “What the Purpose of Kings is.”66 He layers text upon text in characteristic humanist fashion, moving from a brief citation of Aesop’s fable about the horse who allows himself to be mounted for defense against a boar; to Augustine’s reflections on the charitable economy of the natural household, in which husbands command wives, and parents children, not with “arrogance,” but “with compassion in providing”; to Seneca’s description of the golden age, which featured “wise men” acting as kings to protect the weak from the strong and to rule “out of duty [officium], not … regality [regnum]”; to Cicero’s account about the genesis of kingship from “conflicts … about the ownership of things [among] citizens”; to the demand of “the people of God” in I Samuel:8 for a king who would serve justly and insure “that indeed right should be done to all equitably.”67 Sacred and secular, philosophical and poetic, erudite and popular literature are assembled in neoteric style—in a highly allusive, compact fashion accommodating traditional authorities for a presentist political purpose.68 All these assembled authorities authorize the destruction of tyrants who defy that single natural law illustrated comprehensively: “the one purpose of command is the people’s welfare.”69 As an argument with scope, economically organized and rich in the commonplaces of the classical and Christian tradition, such prose is the unique product of the new hermeneutic.
When Melanchthon argues for the legitimacy of self-defense against tyranny and the value of civil liberty, he derives his natural law argument from Roman Law, vim vi repellere natura concedit. When Mornay argues about the purpose of kings—in a text whose scope is tyrannicide—he derives his central argument from the same principle of Roman Law. “But clearly,” Mornay writes, kings were created so that “they should defend individuals from each other and all together as a whole from external attack, either by exercising jurisdiction [iure dicundo] or by repelling force with force [seu vim vi repellendo].”70 Kingship has its origins in the natural right of self-preservation. To threaten or to abrogate that right, then, in defiance of nature, is to open kings to the full force of tyrannicidal remedies.71 In turn, freedom is a double-edged sword in Mornay. On the one side, people are “free by nature,” but that original freedom is corrupted by the sin of self-love—and such freedom needs temperance by law and its living embodiment, the king. On the other, the king must respect the freedom of the people to maintain life and livelihood, as he must care for “pure religion,” and he does so, again, by ruling according to law. Law, at once divine and natural, chastens the tyranny of self-love and self-loving sovereigns, as the chief agent of what Cono Superantius characterizes in his Preface as the “perfect image of the governance of kingdoms … a legitimate, chaste, and blameless matron without any excessive adornment.”72 The perfect kingdom, then, is a Lucretia purged of the ravages of Tarquin, and the perfect political hero, Brutus—Tarquin’s nemesis and the chief tyrannicidal namesake of the Vindiciae’s pseudnonymous author, Stephanus Junius Brutus.
Mornay’s point is rhetorical as well as political. Chastity is a figure of good rule and good discourse, whose avoidance of “excessive adornment” suggests simultaneously something about the extraordinary promise and potential of natural law discourse itself—not just as it is methodically embodied in Mornay, but also as it finds realization in Ponet’s plainness and Buchanan’s eloquent scope. Natural law discourse is writing that has been chastened—tempered, because it avoids the excessive adornments, and because it seeks to avoid, too, in its alliance with “right reason,” those contaminating passions traditionally associated with rhetorical excess. But temperance is not limited to rhetorical issues about diction. A more important chastening of discourse takes place as Mornay and Buchanan and Ponet seek to liberate those ideas that must inform just government from the contaminating passions of party-political confessional debate and the vicissitudes of historical events. (Politics distinct from ethical ideas—politics as a business of power—is a Machiavellian anathema to these figures.) When Mornay considers “the purpose of kings,” he does so without reference to contemporary political debates (the text contains only one Huguenot-inspired allusion to the Massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day), and he writes, too, without reference to theological or religious differences.
Liberated from history, and those passions that contaminate the realm of events, Mornay is set free amidst the golden age speculations of Senecan philosophy and the Augustinian vision of a natural economy to render true “kingship”—the idea of kingship as it should be, not as it is—“visible and comprehensible” to the reader. (Intimations of the Defence!). It needs to be emphasized, of course, that this temperate retreat from history, party-political controversy, and confessional wrangling (in Mornay, as in Ponet and Buchanan) is motivated by an urgent desire to engage with history. Mornay’s Vindiciae is a vehicle for liberating the oppressed from tyranny, both a call to arms to the faithful, and an appeal to moderates for the freedom that would obviate the necessity of that call. It needs to be emphasized, too, that Mornay’s retreat from religious controversy is motivated, simultaneously, by an urgent desire for religious reformation. The Vindiciae is a summons to princes everywhere to accept their duty to protect “pure religion,” and his employment of the language and logic of natural law is the very means by which he seeks to obtain his pious ends. It is a calculated, strategic, and brilliant response to the new politics of confessionalism that dominated Europe in the last half of the sixteenth century, and that achieved especially virulent form in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. For Mornay, as for Ponet and Buchanan, the recourse to right reason as a standard of discourse is an effort to demystify, not to secularize philosophical argument. Right reason is the natural and divinely empowered vehicle of reflection, and need not (to borrow a phrase from Sidney) be banished from the church of God.
As a result, it is not necessary to follow Quentin Skinner in positing a sudden rekindling of scholastic enthusiasm among these devotees of Reformed Christianity in order to account for the revitalization of interest in the language and logic of natural law theory or to postulate the birth of a “secular” political discourse. An alternative explanation for their common commitments emerges clearly enough. That alternative presents itself plausibly as the product of shared historical connections—the allegiance among these writers to the same republic of letters. John Ponet was a Cambridge educated bishop and a Marian exile who by his own report discovered in Melanchthon one of his principal “comforters.”73 George Buchanan was a long-time friend and companion of Languet, that Burgundian who gave up friends, family, and homeland to devote his life to Melanchthon’s service. In the mid-1560s, while living in Paris, Buchanan belonged to a circle of humanists that included, in addition to Languet, Charles de l’Écluse, Paul Schede, and Johannes Sambucus—all of whom were distinguished intellectuals and Philippists, students or followers of Philip Melanchthon.74 In the late 1570s, after his return to Scotland, one of Buchanan’s closest friends in England was Daniel Rogers, himself an intimate of Languet’s circle and the son of the Marian martyr and Philippist, John Rogers (1500?–55).75 Within this international republic of letters, constituted by Reformed humanists devoted to preserving the “true” church from its international enemies, Mornay’s reliance on natural law theory could not have been interpreted as an act of ironic scholastic inversion. It would have been received instead as traditional argumentation derived from a long-standing political discourse with its roots in Melanchthon and its branches in Ponet and Buchanan.76 Since mid-century natural law theory had itself been naturalized in the Reformed north as a response to what these humanists viewed as the threatening tempests of the Catholic League’s tyranny.
Mornay, Ponet, and Buchanan were all proponents of limited monarchy, not republicans in any meaningful sense of the term. Buchanan included one of the century’s most exclamatory celebrations of that most familiar topos, just kingship, in his De jure and labored to impart substance to that celebration by tutoring one of the princes upon whom Reformed Europe placed its best hopes, James VI of Scotland.77 Mornay devoted himself to the service of that other great hope of the international evangelical cause, Henry of Navarre, his best candidate to become what the Vindiciae idealizes, that sovereign who truly embodies law by submitting himself to its dictates. Like the moderate and sometimes reluctant Melanchthon, then, they were spokesmen for limited monarchy and civil liberty, but also far more aggressive spokesmen for natural rights because of the confessionally explosive times in which they wrote.78 In the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, after decades of accumulating disasters from the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League to the martyrdoms under Mary Tudor to the atrocities of Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands, it became brutally apparent to the Reformed that Christian liberty could not survive without political liberty, that Luther’s two regimens would not stay separate. Whatever the distance between Wittenberg and Basle—the respective sites for the publication of those two cannon blasts of the Reformed cause, the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos— and the diversity among those rhetorical and political positions adopted by this group of thinkers, it is useful to refer to them as inhabiting the same intellectual community because of their commitment to the international Reformed cause, their opposition to the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism, their idealization of an ecumenical Christianity, and their rigorous and thoroughgoing employment of the language and logic of natural law as a primary means to chasten the public domain amidst the confessional turmoil of European politics. It is helpful, too, to think of them as inhabiting the same community because of the personal relationships that bound one to another. The distance between Wittenberg and Basle, geographical and temporal, was no metaphor for Hubert Languet. As chief lieutenant to Melanchthon, intellectual companion to Buchanan, and intimate friend, guide, and educator to the twin Philips, Mornay and Sidney, Languet was the living connection who made this community a reality—the teller of old “true tales” (in Sidney’s tribute) who best knew how to mark the miles between Wittenberg and Basle, between the early struggles of the cause and the later because he was “shepherd best,” best instructed in the language and logic of natural law.
It was one thing to contemplate taking arms against a sea of troubles. It was quite another, for humanists writing in this republic of letters, to counter tyranny with the pen. As Skinner has shown, one major appeal of natural law arguments to such writers was their confidence in the power of universal standards of reason to secure freedom from partisan wrangling. Such confidence existed everywhere inside this circle, especially between teacher and student. It was found in the last service Languet performed for the cause, his partial authorship in 1581 of An Apologie for William of Orange (1533–84), the great Reformed champion of liberty in Europe’s most important political theater, the Netherlands. Consistently advancing arguments from natural law, Languet’s Apologie employs the “strength and soundness of reason” to demonstrate how that Spanish Phalaris, Philip II, had sacrificed his natural claims upon sovereignty.79 Sidney, too, knew the value of polemical arguments grounded upon natural law, especially as a defense against tyranny, and he employed them with seemingly similar confidence. Nothing is more typical of his early political writings, his “Discourse on Irish Affairs” and his “Letter to the Queen,” than his efforts to justify his positions by means of the language and logic of natural law. Imposing a cess tax upon Ireland, as Sidney’s father Sir Henry wished to do, was a cure for “lenity” and a bridle upon tyranny sanctioned by natural law. So when Sidney considers how much lenity ought to be employed in administering Irish affairs, he makes his judgment according to “the general nature of all countries not fully conquered”; according to his understanding of the Irish as a race subject to “a natural inconstancy”; and according to his perception of their political disposition as “a nation which live[s] tyrannously … one over the other.”80 In turn, when Sidney writes to Queen Elizabeth advising her against the marriage to Anjou, he urges her to consider “the nature of the thing done” and asks her to recognize “as in bodies natural … so in this body politic the peril of any sudden change.”81 He warns her about the “united minds” of her Catholic subjects, “as all men that deem themselves oppressed naturally are,” and he provides her with “natural causes” for anticipating “contempt” from her people in the event of the marriage—a marriage that is “beyond all reach of reason” and, therefore, beyond the boundaries of natural law. To counter this opposition, Sidney recommends nature’s remedies, “virtue and justice,” as “the only bonds of the people’s love.”82
The marriage to Anjou threatened England with tyranny, or to quote Greville’s account of Sidney’s “Letter to the Queen,” with the metamorphosis of “our moderate form of Monarchie into a precipitate absoluteness.”83 The stakes were high, but Greville marvels none the less at Sidney’s confidence in offering such advice to Elizabeth, attributing that confidence to his assurance that this sovereign whom he regarded as the source of England’s “quietnes” and Europe’s “onely protectour of [God’s] Church,” would grant him the liberty to speak.84 Greville was right about Sidney’s confidence (he appears not to have suffered because of his opposition to the marriage), but some of Sidney’s confidence derived, too, surely from the assumed power of his own natural law argument (modeled like Mornay’s on the example of “the Geometricians”) and its potential persuasiveness to the Queen. Leicester and Walsingham may have swayed his decision to write, but Sidney would never have written without believing that he could move the Queen’s mind. The very fact that a young aspiring author like Sidney would send a copy of his letter to George Buchanan—arguably the most distinguished intellectual among the Reformed—argues powerfully for such confidence. It is well to emphasize the letter’s methodical organization; its careful unfolding of an argument about motion in the political body by analogy with physical bodies; its conspicuous avoidance of papist-bashing (despite the excess of Catherine de Medici derided as a Jezebel); and its studied removal from the unsophisticated, out-of-court biblicism of a John Stubbs. The young Philip Sidney was already an accomplished practitioner of natural law discourse. Moreover, it is important to notice the letter’s persistent preoccupation with—as one more natural law argument seeking to counter tyranny by right reason—issues about the mind: Sidney’s concern about the “minds” of English Catholics, about the possible “contempt” of Elizabeth’s subjects, about the means for preserving the people’s love for the Queen, and the Queen’s own need to maintain stoical constancy. Sidney’s whole argument trades, in fact, upon an analogy between the tranquility of the English kingdom and the tranquility of the Queen’s mind, as if the state were merely an image of that mind (its reasons and its passions) writ large. In an age of confessionalism, in which pious ideologies so often determine personal allegiance, ideas and the mind assume enormous political significance.
Beyond Skinner’s point, then, about cross-confessional purposes, at the foundations of the textual labors of this broad body of humanists committed to natural law discourse are the assumptions of what can only be termed a deeply held intellectualism: a belief that real political change derives first and foremost from changes in how people think—especially in how they think about the primary issues of moral and political philosophy. That intellectualism is reflected, for instance, in Ponet’s confident assertions about the plain character of natural law, its accessibility to interpretation, imprinted (as it is) upon the conscience, and the rigor of his Pauline assertions about the indispensability of that law as touchstone to political decision-making. A parallel intellectualism is found in Buchanan’s characterization of natural law as a treasury for minting a new political science, the persuasiveness of right reason for discriminating between legitimate kings and tyrants, and the mimetic potency of virtuous sovereignty as a public image of political consequence. In Mornay’s most important philosophical works, the desire to transcend partisanship finds expression in even more confident assertions about the geometric precision of reason. Whether addressing the problem of atheism in the De verité (that plea for universal Christian truth in an age of confessionalism) or Machiavellianism in the Vindiciae (an assault against the corruption of political culture by corrupt books), natural law arguments appeal inclusively to readers of “whichever party or nation or condition they belong” on the optimistic assumption that reason will naturally create agreement.85
Moreover, intellectualism is reflected in the content of their shared agreements about the nature of tyranny—as a perversion (literally), an unnatural inversion of the nature of good government originating in the perversion of the individual mind or soul. Tyranny is a form of self-love—or rather, a manifestation of self-love in the public arena. Ponet’s fundamental political distinction is between the true king who maintains “justice, to the wealthe and benefite of the hole multitude” and the tyrant “that seketh his owne gayne.” Buchanan defines justice, in good classical terms, as that principle that “allow[s] every man his own,” and then deepens classical precept with Christian charity, distinguishing between the true king who “beareth rule for the subjects welfare” and the tyrant who rules “for himself.” Mornay in the Vindiciae elaborates a similar paternalism, when he cites Augustine to demonstrate that “to command is nothing other than to show concern for the people,” a selfless exercise of power mirrored in Seneca’s accounts of kingship in the golden age, and shattered—in these brazen years—by the predations of the unnatural tyrant “who serves only his own welfare and desires, who neglects and perverts all laws .…”86
Ponet, Buchanan, and Mornay represent tyranny in essentially similar ways, as one more point of agreement inside a community of humanists whose shared understandings are so often illuminated by commonplaces in Melanchthon’s thought. Toward the conclusion of the Loci communes of 1555, when contemplating worldly authority, Melanchthon argues that God “gave men light, namely, understanding of natural law through which we know that we should make and keep order in governments, and are obliged to obey natural law as God’s will.” Once more, as he writes in application of this argument, such laws distinguish true kings from tyrants—the latter consistently distinguished from the former as rulers who pursue “their own general happiness” and “seek their own tyranny, welfare, pomp, sensual pleasure, and suppression of the truth.”87 Such commonplaces are illuminating because they underscore the logic of that shared intellectualism of the resistance theorists. A consistent correspondence is maintained between the public and the private spheres, political and moral life, because always for the Reformed humanist the reality that counts most is the one that situates the individual in relation to God. Tyranny in the state proceeds from the tyranny of sin over the soul, as a repetition of Melanchthon’s distinctive reading of Adam’s fall as a sin of self-love. From the earliest version of the Loci communes (1521), the emphasis remains the same: “Thus it happens the soul being without celestial light and life is in darkness. As a result, it most ardently loves itself, seeks its own desires and wishes nothing but carnal things .… It cannot but be that a creature whom the love of God has not absorbed, loves itself in the highest degree.”88 The rape of Lucretia is a speaking picture of tyrannical self-love at work in the state and the soul, and chastity, rightly interpreted, the agent of tyrannicide.
Recovering a history of Reformed resistance theory matters to the present argument, since it identifies the Defence as a text in dialogue with a community of texts from this same republic of letters. Like Ponet, Buchanan, Mornay and Languet, Sidney too employs the language and logic of natural law theory. Once more, recovering this history matters because it highlights in advance the enormous promise of natural law arguments for a writer like Sidney, himself haunted by the nightmare of tyranny. It is necessary to write, however, about the “promise” of this argumentative rhetoric—its serviceability in securing agreement across confessional boundaries, its employment history in support of the cause—rather than its power. In the aftermath of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572 and the capitulations of well-educated humanists like Pibrac, Sidney acknowledged in his Defence what his friends Mornay and Languet wished to ignore altogether: the helplessness of even the best historical examples and philosophical rules to undo the Phalarises of the world. Henry Sidney did not win the right to impose his cess tax, and though Elizabeth eventually refused Anjou’s marriage suit, nobody ever credited Philip Sidney for influencing her decision. Within his republic of letters, Sidney was one among many writers employing the pen against tyranny, but he was unique for defending the poet’s pen—beyond the historian’s and the philosopher’s—as an especially fit instrument for that labor. This does not mean that his Defence is a call-to-arms against tyranny. Nothing about the history of the text’s circulation as a coterie work passing among family and friends suggests such a purpose. Sidney’s purpose, of course, was to defend poetry, and tyrants populate the text in such large numbers because poetry’s value in the public domain, among such a community of like-minded readers (readers who shared similar pious and political goals), could only be measured by reference to its value in subduing them.
The tyranny of self-love looms large throughout the Defence of Poesy as a theme that binds private to public considerations, the pious to the political. Its setting, again, helps to foreground the point. It is appropriate that Sidney opens his Defence in the Vienna of Maximilian II, his chief place of residence during his Continental tour, where he spent those many months studying under the tutelage of Languet. As a flourishing center for the studia humanitatis, a northern European city eager to rival Venice, Padua and Rome as a capital of learning and culture, Vienna was an appropriate site for meditating about art, especially a newly conceived art of poetry with ambitions to achieve preeminence among the arts and sciences. As home to a Holy Roman Emperor, whose aversion for confessional warfare made the city safe for Spanish Jesuits, an order patronized especially by the Empress Maria, for German evangelical Reformers and humanists (like David Chyträus and Joachim Camerarius the Elder), Bohemian Protestants (like Crato Von Crafftheim), Italian Catholics (like Jacopo Strada), English Catholics (like Edmund Campion) and confessionally mercurial Dutchmen (learned gypsies like Justus Lipsius), Vienna of the early 1570s made an especially good location, too, for Philippist reflections about the pious potential of poetry rightly understood.89 Once more, during these years Vienna was still the center of the imperial court, a nexus of political activity whose historically complex ties to every theater of consequence for the Reformed cause, from counter-Reformation Spain to the embattled Netherlands, made it a city of considerable political consequence. Sidney’s closest friends actively engaged in political work at court during his stay. Languet served as imperial ambassador to the Elector of Saxony, before, during, and after the exile of his party at home. Crato labored both as personal physician to Maximilian, and, more zealously, as political advocate for the Reformed Bohemian church. Another member of Languet’s Viennese circle, Lazarus Von Schwendi, a moderate Catholic, a former military commander under Charles V, and a patriotic proponent of a restored Roman empire was a frequent advisor to Maximilian and author of a steady stream of polemical treatises in favor of religious toleration.90 Maximilian’s Vienna, then, was an appropriate site for relating the art of poetry to the art of government. It was also a watchtower for tyranny.
Sidney opens his argument in the Defence by evoking the memory of the moderate Vienna of Maximilian II. Vienna is to Sidney what Urbino was to Castiglione, a place imbued with nostalgia for a world now lost. By the time that he composed his text, Maximilian was already dead and the potential for confessional reconciliation that Vienna embodied appeared threatened by annihilation as well. By March of 1578, Sidney lamented to Languet that “our cause” is withering away.91 In the eyes of the Philippists, Maximilian’s Vienna stood in conspicuous contrast to what Sidney described as that espaniolated counter-Reformation Prague of the new Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612), whose Tridentine tyranny threatened to undo civil life, civil arts, civil everything. Spanish power, fueled by Papal machinations, was the primary source of tyranny, and an imperial court contaminated by Spanish influence was one factor contributing to Sidney’s fears about the demise of the cause. At the outset of the Defence, the main purpose in recalling Maximilian’s Vienna, of course, was to summon into mind Signor Pugliano, that horseman whose comically splendid devotion to his art nearly makes Philip wish himself a horse—a monitory fable about “self-love” as “better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties” (95).92 Sidney distances himself from the mentor, and not for the last time. But as Pugliano’s self-love is located in the vanished world of Maximilian’s court, as sin threatening the unnatural metamorphosis of man into beast, the very location of the fable shadows a larger public world in which the tyranny of self-loving sovereigns operates unnaturally to darker ends.
Sidney returns to the theme of tyrannical self-love frequently in the Defence, and often with a similar lightness of touch. As one chief rival to the poets, he presents the arrogant philosophers, “casting largesse as they go of definitions, divisions, and distinctions, with a scornful interrogative … soberly ask[ing] whether it be possible to find any path so ready to lead a man to virtue …” (105). As the poet’s other chief rival, Sidney ushers into view the similarly narcissistic historian, “a wonder to young folks and a tyrant in table talk, den[ying], in a great chafe, that any man for teaching of virtue … is comparable to him” (105). The parodied philosopher and historian of the Defence are portraits in pomposity, speaking pictures of self-love tyrannizing over substance as well as style—and style counts in the cosmopolitan economy of Sidney’s poetic universe. Self-love can corrupt English poetry, not just the scholarly disciplines, as happens when a surfeit of “similitudes in certain printed discourses” spawns “a most tedious prattling,” the exaggerated artificiality exercised by the native writer who “more careful to speak curiously than to speak truly … doth dance to his own music” (139). As a genre, comedy has a special concern with solipsism of this sort, when a Plautus or a Terence opens the eyes of one who not seeing “himself dance the same measure” through laughing finds “his own actions contemptibly set forth” (117). But dancing to one’s own music is precisely what poetic imitation of all sorts, properly understood, is designed to inhibit. The liberal art serves the liberal mind. As Sidney learned from Johann Sturm, his one-time teacher at the Strasbourg academy and subsequently his lifelong friend, the always cosmopolitan goal of imitation (the comparatio of great literary models) is to eliminate what this republic of letters universally regarded as the most tyrannical of vices, the sin of self-love: “Imitatio ingenium ultra naturae ducit terminos: ut se amare desinat: & meliores admirari incipiat.” (Imitation leads genius beyond the boundaries of nature: so that it ceases to love itself: and begins to admire better things.)93
The comprehensiveness of Sidney’s concerns is striking. Pugliano’s artistic folly, the philosopher’s and the historian’s disciplinary arrogance, the writer’s stylistic solipsism—all are linked as variations on the theme of self-love. In turn, all shadow that darker political tyranny of Phalaris, who roasting his victims alive for the pleasure of hearing their screams, himself (Cecropia-wise) seems like a beastly parody of the poet.94 Such comprehensiveness is especially revealing, in turn, about Sidney’s conceptual predisposition: his deeply cultivated aversion for the narrowly partisan, whether that partisanship manifests itself as the product of English literary provincialism and its quirky self-pleasing rhetoric, the disciplinary narrowness of arrogant scholars, or the brutal fanaticism of contemporary confessional politics. Against the provincialism of the English tradition, the Defence persistently illustrates its arguments from a cosmopolitan canon of Continental works, ancient and modern. Against disciplinary narrowness, it asserts the claims of poetry as a kind of master-science, superior to history and philosophy, because it performs inclusively (moving and teaching) the work of both. Against the partisanship of confessionalism, it refuses, too, as my discussion of Sidney’s piety has shown, theological disputation and polemical name-calling. Like Mornay’s, Sidney’s mode of argument is selfconsciously “chaste,” chastened from the contaminating passions of partisan political allegiances. Compare his “Letter to the Queen” to Stubbs’s “Gaping Gulf,” and Sidney’s commitment to rhetorical temperance is easily illustrated. In turn, compare his “Letter” to the Defence and that temperance is yet again more obvious. There are no references to Catherine de Medici as “that Jezabel of our age,” or allusions to Anjou’s brutal massacre of the Huguenots at “la Charite & … Issoire,” no disturbing reflections about an English “faction of … Papists,” or foreign enemies in league with the Pope. In fact, the Defence contains not a single acknowledgment of the existence of multiple Christian confessions, much less of warfare between or among them.95 Sidney’s topic, of course, is fiction-making rather than contemporary events, but one of the public virtues of fiction-making, both as a topic and as a topically “chaste” mode of discourse (in parallel to the discourse of natural law) is its freedom from the otherwise necessary display of partisanship. The right poet rescues poetry and learning, church and commonwealth, from the always partisan, always divisive tyranny of self-love. Conceived in this light, Sidney’s apology for poetry emerges as a sort of “cosmopology,” as a cosmopolitan defense of fiction-making in the service of freedom.96 The comprehensiveness of this cosmopology’s concerns, in turn, is revealing about Sidney’s own deep commitment to the “intellectualism” of this circle of humanist allies, and to his own belief that the high-flying liberty of the poet is exercised most vitally in the liberation of the mind.
Sidney’s political beliefs were scarcely the sort that Tudor homilies enforced from the pulpet. His tyrannomachy is scripted into the Defence (“occidendos esse”) as an unorthodox, if not radical political belief. Similarly distinctive political leanings impact the argument at several turns. For example, in an important transitional moment, Sidney summons into imagination a pageant of worthies—those great men who have also been great poets—as a device for lending greater public authority to his claims. As usual, he organizes his list of those worthies with an ecumenical and political inclusiveness, incorporating Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, “piercing wits” from Scotland and “grave counsellors” from France (131). His parade of ancients and moderns, pagans and Christians, is characteristically cosmopolitan—and simultaneously revealing not just about his pious convictions (as the previous chapter argues), but also about his distinctive political principles.
Three of the worthies hailed in this passage, Beza and Melanchthon (the “preachers and teachers”), as well as Buchanan (the “piercing wit” celebrated toward its conclusion), were themselves proponents of tyrannomachy. Once more, as the transitional argument continues with its contrast between poetry’s embrace by other nations and its “hard welcome in England,” Sidney explains that “hard welcome” by reference to his nation’s “overfaint quietness” and its silencing of “the trumpet of Mars” (131). “Idle England,” he goes on to write, “can scarce endure the pain of a pen” (132). Unheroic nations, Sidney’s logic goes, do not value heroic arts—the best products of the muse. Sidney’s coterie audience may well have recognized in this complaint a specific political implication: unheroic times forestall English military intervention against the Catholic League’s tyranny, and such idleness is shameful. Once more, as the parade of worthies suggests, other nations know how to deal with tyrants. Such suggestions, however, stay submerged in a text whose rhetoric appears specifically designed to subordinate them to the demands of the argument at hand. The edge of the topical and the polemical is blunted in order to sharpen attention to principle. Tyrannomachy remains as an idea because it is a principle of right reason and natural law. Specific policy recommendations to Elizabeth are matters Sidney leaves to occasional writings like the “Letter.”
Such implications, then, inside the Defence are sometimes revealing about Sidney’s intense desire for active English intervention on the Continent. Revealing as they might be, however, they can only be loosely labeled “forward Protestant” in kind. In the pageant of worthies, Sidney’s argument achieves its climax not by hailing the sometimes militant Buchanan—that hot-Scot tyrannomachist par excellence— but rather by celebrating Michel de L’Hospital, the longtime Chancellor of France and internationally revered champion of toleration.97 The Sidney who values military intervention and hails the death of tyrants is also the Sidney who recognizes—in an ascending hierarchy of goods—the preeminence of virtuous counselorship and the public peace to be achieved beyond confessional warfare. Sidney’s cosmopolitan politics are too complicated to fit neatly into a box labeled “forward Protestant.” Poised between his commitment to a militant pursuit of the cause and his idealization of ecumenical reunion, between war as the necessary response to the tyranny of the Catholic League and civil arts as irenic means for the restoration of civil conversation, between active virtue and contemplative quiet—those competing poles around which the heroic and pastoral worlds of his Arcadian fictions turn—Sidney’s politics are the product of his Philippist education. They are a politics, for that reason, best pursued not through the subterranean paths of his infrequent allusions to contemporary events, but rather along the open roadway that he constructs from the language and logic of his natural law argumentation.
Nothing shows more profoundly Sidney’s debts to the natural law theorists of his circle than the weight his Defence places upon the anthropological arguments at its core. Returning to those arguments can highlight their important public and political power. Wonderful as the making of golden worlds may be, in their superiority to nature’s brazen one, Sidney carefully structures the conceptual center of his poetics to highlight the consequences of the poet’s making for humankind, for whom the poet’s “uttermost cunning” is employed (100). Humanity’s natural condition is a fallen one. Because of Adam’s sin, as Sidney writes in that core passage at the heart of his golden world poetics, “our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it” (101). The poet’s job—private and public—is determined by Sidney’s anthropological vision. Poetry works by attempting to restore that now corrupted will to goodness, freeing the individual from the brazen world of history—and the sins “natural” to it—as it recreates that “Natural” harmony between wit and will enjoyed in the golden world of Eden.
Sidney reaps the traditional advantages of the natural law theorist’s argument in Christian form: the appeal simultaneously to nature (created nature) as corrupt and to Nature (creating Nature) as a vehicle for securing freedom from corruption.98 Consider how that freedom is gained. As the Defence makes clear, the superiority of the poet’s world to history’s (the explanation for its golden quality) consists “not in the work itself,” but in “that Idea or fore-conceit” represented, counterfeited or figured forth by the poet’s still-erect wit (101). His Idea is a universal truth about experience—a representation of virtue or vice—which stands at the foundation of the fiction, generating speaking pictures and providing unity to the whole. In this context, what is especially noteworthy about those Ideas whenever they are specifically illustrated in the Defence—the chastity of Lucretia, the piety of Aeneas, the courage of Turnus—is their invariable representation as the commonplaces of Sidney’s own education in moral (and political) philosophy. Again and again, in recalling these loci to “the tablet of … memory,” Sidney shows a particular penchant for heroes whose love of family inspires love of country—Ulysses longing to return to Ithaca—and for those (like Aeneas) whose regulation of the passions models public rule of the state, “in his inward self, and … his outward government” (120). Virtue is best illustrated in a public domain, then, as an extension of the private, and as the goal of an expansive, cosmopolitan “gathering of many knowledges”—both Odysseus and Aeneas exemplary travelers (127). Once more, not only does Sidney clearly associate those Ideas given substance by right poets with the principles of natural law theory, but also he accounts for their “rightness” (legitimacy) on the basis of shared philosophical assumptions. As we have seen, the Defence assumes both the autonomy of the Idea and its legitimacy (its authority as an instance of true knowledge).
Sidney draws upon the intellectual assumptions of his circle in specific ways: by adopting an anthropological framework to explain the poet’s “scope” or purpose; by associating the poet’s Ideas with the commonplaces of moral philosophy; and by assuming, as deep structure for his own arguments on behalf of poetic authority, a theory of innate ideas divinely scripted in the mind as natural law. His debts are evident, and their political consequences all the more explicit with the reminder that this argument about the anthropology of the Defence is given a specific authorial source in a poem whose real subject is tyrannicide, the beast fable from the wedding celebrations of The Old Arcadia’s third book. In Aristotle’s ethics, marriage is a species of friendship, and friendship, the virtue that best exemplifies justice.
At the wedding of Lalus and Kala, two Arcadians among the native shepherds of The Old Arcadia’ s Eclogues, Sidney’s fictive double, Philisides, recounts a musical fable that he reports to have learned from “old Languet,” whom he calls affectionately “the shepherd best swift Ister knew.” As fictions multiply inside fictions, with Sidney writing about Philisides performing a song remembered from the teacher of his youth, paradoxically the poem moves closer to the world of real events. Philisides attributes to him both his piety and his moral education:99
He said the music best thilke powers pleased
Was jump concord between our wit and will,
Where highest notes to godliness are raised,
And lowest sink not down to jot of ill.
With old true tales he wont mine ears to fill:
How shepherds did of yore, how now, they thrive,
Spoiling their flock, or while twixt them they strive.
Principles of faculty psychology secure the foundation of Philisides’ political fable about the origins of monarchy: the concord between wit and will that Languet praises as a tenet of natural law (and he is “shepherd best” because he best knows the laws of nature) corresponds exactly to the balance celebrated between sovereign and subjects in the state. When that concord is violated, with the emergence of self-loving sovereigns who “think all things … made them to please,” golden world harmony is undone by brazen world tyranny. The same division between wit and will that motivates Sidney’s aggressively optimistic poetics in the Defence achieves in his beast fable an explicitly political focus: Philisides ends by counseling his “poor beasts” either “in patience [to] bide your hell, Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well.”100 There is no real mystery about Philisides’ advice or Sidney’s meaning. His Arcadias take for granted, as readily as his Defence, the necessity and virtue of tyrannicide. What matters here to the present argument is the clarification that the beast fable supplies about the relationship between the Defence and the natural law theory of Sidney’s intellectual circle. Sidney’s golden world poetic is so frequently couched in the language of natural law, and so persistently motivated by fears of self-love and tyranny, not by virtue of some loose correspondence between friend and associate, but rather—as Philisides’s fable makes clear—as the authorially explicit debt of a student to a teacher. Sidney inherited an anthropology of self-love and a politics of tyrannicide from his Philippist mentor, Hubert Languet, and Sidney means here to repay his debt for that education by means of a unique tribute: Languet is the only contemporary ever explicitly named in Sidney’s fiction.
Sidney associates the Ideas of his right poet with the commonplaces of moral philosophy, this chapter has argued, because he was inspired by an old shepherd whose chief vehicle of teaching appears to have been history: “With old true tales he wont mine ears to fill.” Sidney acknowledged profound debts, especially to Languet, even while he was at work importantly in his Defence in contesting related intellectual assumptions. Associations do not constitute identities, and however alike Sidney’s Ideas are to those of the natural law theorist, a crucial distinction exists between their deployment. The distinction is crucial because that difference in deployment of the Idea explains why and how Sidney both borrows key intellectual assumptions of his circle and simultaneously contests them—explains why, in short, such shared assumptions could supply Sidney with a motive for writing poetry rather than history or philosophy. Considering Sidney’s beast fable in light of the philosophical practice of his friend Mornay or the differently styled political philosophy of that piercing wit, Buchanan, clarifies that distinction. Sidney’s fable reads like a poetic embodiment of Mornay’s exposition, “On the purpose of kings.” Philisides’s song is a moral tale about the creation of man, elected as king by a commonwealth of beasts against the advice of Jove, and his subsequent devolution into tyranny. As Mornay layers text upon text to explain the origins of kingship as philosophical prelude to sanctioning tyrannicide, so Sidney’s song narrates a tale about the birth of kingly man as poetic justification for exercising strength to achieve freedom. Mornay begins his exposition with Aesop’s tale of the horse and the bull, and ends with I Samuel 8. Sidney draws upon a different fable out of Aesop—the parliament of frogs—but chooses as his chief narrative vehicle the same story from I Samuel 8. Both assume the natural correspondence of inward government and outward, the virtue of limited monarchy, the natural law that defines kingship as service, and the harmony of natural with divine law. In short, both reason rightly as good students of their Philippist mentor, Languet.
Mornay may or may not have been a “source” for Sidney. The more important point is that Sidney both admires and seeks to enhance the liberating potential of the natural philosopher’s discourse. As Mornay is set free amidst Seneca’s golden age speculations and Augustine’s vision of a natural economy to render true “kingship”—the idea of kingship as it should be—“visible and comprehensible” to the reader, so Sidney labors to give that idea of kingship real substance in the poetic character of his fiction. In view of that labor’s central importance to the Defence’s preoccupation with the public domain, Mornay had demonstrably far more shaping power over Sidney’s poetics than Scaliger, Minturno or any of the Italian theoreticians.
But why is this lending substance to Ideas characterizable as a labor? Inside his circle, Buchanan comes closest to articulating explicitly the political problem motivating Sidney’s image-making labors. Buchanan both insists philosophically upon the mimetic potency of true kingship (“in whose image so great a force is presented to the minds of his subjects”), and despairs historically about its realization (“in these corrupt times of ours; it is hard to find this magnanimity”).101 In philosophy, Ideas remain abstractions, too remote and insubstantial either to achieve clarity or to carry affective force. In history, the Idea is always conditioned by the contaminating circumstances of an imperfect world of events (Phalaris dies quietly in bed, and tyranny goes unchastened). By contrast, Sidney argues strongly, the poet’s Ideas are substantive images exemplified as pictures of his own making. The figuring-forth of the Sidneian poet works “substantially” in his creation of a “perfect picture … of a true lively knowledge”—knowledge that makes a reality available for the reader (101, 107). It is crucial to emphasize the important activity of the poem in presenting a “reality” in order to foreground the extraordinary intellectual and affective power that Sidney attributes to the Idea as it is figured forth—the capacity of the poet’s “perfect” pictures to unleash real powers that exist at once in Nature and in the mind. This is a distinction worth maintaining because it highlights Sidney’s decision to liberate the Idea from its purely conceptual locus in philosophy and its conditional status in history and to return it to its true home in poetry—a liberation that he achieves without sacrificing the exemplary power of Languet’s “old true tales” either by descending into history’s sad captivity to the brazen world of events or by obscuring comprehension with the esoteric matter of philosophy. Since history and philosophy fail, poetry must succeed. The future, otherwise, belongs to Cecropia.
In the Defence, Sidney’s poet “goeth hand in hand with Nature” because that cooperation secures for his Ideas a whole separate order of persuasiveness related to, but distinct from their logical power (100). It secures the added dimension of existential persuasiveness—the persuasiveness that derives from the power of fictions to speak to the needs of human nature. The poet’s Ideas have, therefore, a rhetorical, rather than just a conceptual power, rendering them superior both to the always conditioned examples of unsatisfying history and to the abstractions of philosophical thought. Such insight suggests, in turn, some key assumptions about what it means publicly and politically for the poet “to deliver forth in such excellency” Ideas just “as he hath imagined them” (101).
Sidney attributes to Nature in the Defence extraordinary power, not just as that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—itself a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine—but also the motivating impulse attributed to human nature in its appetite for goodness. The Ideas figured forth by poets have power, Sidney argues repeatedly, because “poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours … that one must needs be enamoured of her” (111). Virtue’s “best colours” are public and political. When the reader is led to imagine Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness” poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved (114). So similarly, in his discussion of heroic characters like Cyrus, Turnus, and Achilles, Sidney cites Plato and Cicero’s opinion “that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” (119). Poetry has such power to “plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” because of the human appetite for virtue and because of that substantive form (the imagined hero himself!) in which the Idea of virtue is made real—its substantiality at once moving and teaching, freeing the will from the tyranny of its own self-serving appetites as it recalls to the mind the goods of Nature (106). Sidney is not naive, and he scarcely thinks poetry always effective. Bartholomew’s Day 1572 and the failures of Pibrac were far too potent memories to allow him to sustain idealizations unreflectively.
Sidney draws upon the anthropology of natural law theorists in order to contest the very adequacy of history and philosophy as disciplines. Or more concretely, what Sidney learned about human nature from Languet and Mornay also persuaded him—given the zodiacal powers of the wit, and the infected condition of the will—that only poetry could have the power to undo the tyranny of self-love over the soul and self-loving sovereigns in the state. Given that anthropology, the wit must be instructed, and (even more importantly) the will moved: both requirements demand a discipline beyond history and philosophy, one that including both, transcends both as his culture’s preeminent (because cosmopolitan) science. In a golden world set free from the contaminations of history—of a past that too often records the triumph of vice over virtue, or a present that too often divides Christian from Christian in endless confessional debate—the poet takes aim against the Idea of tyranny, realized as a substantial image in a fictive world beyond partisan politics, in order to chasten the public domain—to purge the body politic from the contaminations of self-love.
Just as Sidney begins the important work of the Defence by illustrating imitation with the example of Tarquin’s tyranny over Lucrece, so later in the text he highlights two more tales of tyranny, the stories of Menenius Agrippa and the biblical Nathan. It is revealing to revisit those tales with tyranny in mind. The first narrates Agrippa’s success in quelling a rebellion in ancient Rome by means of a story about the interdependence of the various parts of the human body. Popular anger against patrician greed is alleviated as the working limbs of the polity (the plebeians) are made to understand the necessary function of the belly. While the belly (the patrician class) may consume, such consumption nourishes (Menenius’s exemplum insists) the whole of the body politic. Sidney’s second story narrates the prophet Nathan’s success in devising a tale for King David in the wake of his adultery with Bathsheba and his culpability in the death of her husband. Nathan’s fictive account of “a man whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom” quickly shames David into repentance (115). As I have shown in Chapter 2, the two stories are introduced at a crucial juncture of Sidney’s argument. They are placed at the climactic moment of the Defence’s demonstration of poetry’s “most excellent work”—the “high argument” of its confirmatio—just before the turn to justify poetry by an examination of its parts (115). So situated, the tales supply summary proofs of the main burden of Sidney’s claim on behalf of the poet’s “works”—its strangely metamorphic power over its audience. They also supply summary proofs of the poet’s superiority in the public domain—because of those works’ pious and political dimensions—over his chief rivals for cultural authority, the historian and the philosopher.102
The tales of Agrippa and Nathan supply a complementary pair of proof texts. One is drawn from classical history, the other from sacred. One illustrates the power of a fable to provide “a perfect reconcilement” in the public domain, as Agrippa’s tale of the belly heals the divisions in Rome’s body politic; the other illustrates the power of fiction-making in the private sphere, as David is shamed by Nathan’s story of the lamb “as in a glass to see his own filthiness,” to repent for adultery and murder, and reclaim (“as that heavenly psalm of mercy well testifieth”) his role as God’s chosen servant (114–15). As always happens in the Defence, that private story is intimately connected to the public—its “intimacy” guaranteed by David’s status as Israel’s King. One tale illustrates the power of a feigned tale over the people, one over the sovereign. In both, Sidney dramatizes the tyranny of self-love as a universal condition afflicting individuals and the state. In Agrippa’s fable, we see the tyranny of mob violence—one of the principal forms of tyranny analyzed in Buchanan’s De jure and Mornay’s Vindiciae; in Nathan’s tale, the tyranny of lust over the sovereign—one of Melanchthon’s favorite proof texts about tyrannical self-love.103 Paired in this manner, the twin tales seem deliberately chosen in order to illustrate comprehensively, across the domains of pagan and sacred history, public and private life, among the low and the high, the superior effects of poetry’s “most excellent work” in teaching and persuading the knowledge of good government.
As a preface to his illustrations of that work, in the paragraph immediately preceding, Sidney recalls approvingly Aristotle’s claim on behalf of poetry’s “conveniency to Nature” as a way of highlighting those powerfully persuasive acts of identification that make readers want to see themselves as Turnus courageously preferring death to dishonor, as Aeneas piously bearing old Anchises on his back, or as Lucretia chastely resisting the tyranny of lust (114). Both “the whole people of Rome” collectively and David individually are brought to an architectonic knowledge of themselves. They are chastened by fictions that heighten understanding about their natures and that move them by reason of such knowledge to virtuous action (114). In both cases, that architectonic knowledge is liberating, since knowledge about their real natures (the nature of the body politic’s necessary interdependence of parts, the nature of the self’s dependence on God) sparks change that frees them from self-love and renders them what they truly are (a whole people, a chosen servant).104 Poetry’s “most excellent work,” Sidney’s speaking pictures eloquently declare, is liberty.
When Sidney alludes to the story of Tarquin and Lucretia, he does so with an eye to the beauty of Lucretia’s chastity. There are no accompanying images of Tarquin’s punishment. When he recalls the legendary tyrant, Alexander Pheraeus, he attends to him at the moment that he watches a tragic performance. Sidney does not picture him slain by his wife. No images of Holofernes’s head are brought to the poetic platter. There is a certain noticeable restraint in these representations of tyranny, which accords at once with Sidney’s deliberately chaste rhetorical manner and which complements simultaneously a reverential regard for government in all of its private and political manifestations that forestalls the graphic depiction of any sovereign’s fall, however merited.
That reverence for government is evident throughout the argument. If Sidney’s exordium gathers attention wittily to the tyranny of “self-love,” it works as well by means of Pugliano’s comic elevation of the art of horsemanship above “skill of government” to focus attention (amidst the confusion of things great and small) on what counts greatly. Among the early arguments for poetry’s value, Sidney highlights with good Ciceronian precedent its civilizing consequences as the first light-giver to ignorance. In turn, when Sidney opens his key consideration of poetry’s value with respect to the cosmopolitan array of arts and sciences, using as a touchstone for his argument the relation of each to the “works of nature,” he purposefully models his discussion upon one of the best known texts in the humanist republic of letters, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle transforms ethics into a master science, the art of governing private and public life. As the allusive economy of Sidney’s text suggests, with its self-conscious evocation of Aristotle’s opening argument, his claims for poetry as a master science rest on similar grounds—on its superior power to govern that tragic discord at the heart of things, the discord between wit and will. When Sidney arrives, then, at that climactic stage of his argument in which he offers two tales in proof of poetry’s “most excellent work,” it is appropriate that those “princely” stories should warn against tyranny by exemplifying simultaneously the power of good government (115). They are “princely” stories because of their power to govern the passions of a mob and the lusts of a king, as examples of the virtue of obedience—the “perfect reconcilement” that reconciles the plebeians to their place in the body politic, and the “mercy” that restores David to God’s grace (115). On the other side of tyranny is good government. In turn, obedience—rightly understood in the divine and natural order—is liberty.
“Liberty” seems just the right word with which to conclude a discussion about the politics of Sidney’s poetics because it points to the need to rewrite the revisionary critical history imposed upon it by recent critics generally and by Alan Sinfield especially. In particular, it seems high time to liberate the Defence of Poesy from its guilty association with Soviet-style absolutism. There can be no question about Sidney’s intellectual commitments to a universalizing epistemology: the poet’s golden world achieves its legitimacy and power only because the Ideas to which it lends rhetorical substance have the status of natural law. However, as this chapter has argued in some detail, Sidney had recourse to the language and logic of natural law precisely in order to contest the claims of what appeared to his understanding and to his experience of the international landscape as politically abhorrent absolutism. Sidney’s natural law arguments are drawn from the rhetorical arsenal of Reformed tyrannomachists waging campaigns against Tridentine Catholicism, dating from Melanchthon’s appeals against the Emperor in the Wars of the League of the Schmalkaldan to Languet’s assaults against Philip II during the Dutch wars of liberation. Derived from political theorists who espoused a theory of limited monarchy, such rhetoric unsurprisingly was anathema to Tudor absolutists—the exponents of a pious orthodoxy with its own very real absolutist ideology of obedience. In light of which circumstance, assertions about Sidney’s complicity in Elizabethan absolutism seem peculiarly unhistorical, especially when unsupported by analysis. By advancing natural law arguments, Sidney and his circle hoped to have discovered a vehicle for securing reasoned political agreements beyond the partisan rhetoric of confessional debate, the “universalizing” force of its ideas most important for their putative power to reconstruct universal agreement among civil communities. If that hope seems at this historical juncture theoretically naive and pragmatically bankrupt, as the product of intellectually elite humanists who never secured the institutional authority to put purpose into practice, such a hope seems no more dismissible as the product of factional politics than it does as absolutist propagandizing.
The community that matters most for understanding the politics of the Defence is not a faction at the Elizabethan court (vaguely characterizable as “earnest puritan” by Sinfield or “forward Protestant” by Worden), but an identifiable network of cosmopolitan Reformed humanists reaching from Languet to Mornay to Rogers to Buchanan to Sidney, one which found its most important “commonplace” agreements in that distinctive version of Reformed Christianity that derives from Philip Melanchthon’s vastly influential and still-obscured labors. It is to that community that Sidney owes his tyrannomachist politics, his natural law theory, his intellectualist assumptions and his anthropology, as well as his identification of tyranny with self-love. His was a community, an active “republic of letters,” if one likes, but never powerful enough in institutional terms to rise to the level of a faction. Recovering a history of ideas from that network of intellectually elite humanists with whom Sidney associated intimately throughout his adult life and from which he derived so much of his political and poetic thought has a special urgency, it might be well to conclude, because we still know too little about it.
1 For a recent review of scholarship about tyranny in the Arcadias, see Worden, p. 3–20. See William D. Briggs, “Political Ideas in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Studies in Philology 28 (1931), 137–61; Irving B. Ribner, “Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952), 257–65; Ernest W. Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare’s Art (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962); Martin Bergbusch, “Rebellion in The New Arcadia,” Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 29–41 and “The ‘Subalterne Magistrate’ in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: A Study of the Character of Philanax,” English Studies in Canada 7 (1981), 27–37; and Richard C. McCoy’s still useful study, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia.
2 The best known of his tragedies is Baptistes sive calumnia tragoedia (pub. 1577) in George Buchanan: Tragedies. For Buchanan’s (1506–82) close ties to Sidney, see the well-documented essay by James E. Phillips, “George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle,” Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1948), 23–56.
3 Chastity is always a political issue, and lends itself to various interpretations. Seen from Stephanie H. Jed’s perspective, Sidney’s grounding of his poetics upon the rape of Lucrece stands as another illustration of the compulsive desire of partriarchal culture to control women’s bodies, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989). By contrast, Debora Shuger has argued for the story’s significance in highlighting what she describes as considerably greater contemporary fears about the control of male bodies, specifically the dangerous bodily desires of young aristocrats, “Castigating Livy: The Rape of Lucretia and The Old Arcadia,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998), 526–48. Shuger’s larger point—that Sidney elevates poetry (and his poetic heroes) above the law—complements an extended argument of my own, which I complicate by drawing attention to the operation simultaneously of providential law at the romance’s conclusion, Sidney’s Poetic Justice, p. 175–228. Sidney’s fictions are filled with fictive beings overwhelmed by desire, from Plangus and Erona to Pyrocles and Philoclea. His Cupid, pointing arrows in all directions, seems not very picky about gender distinctions. I should recall, too, in order to highlight the tyrannomachist perspective of the passage, the coincidence between Sidney’s choice of a historical moment ripe with memories of that tyrant-slayer Brutus and the telling pseudonym of Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt, “author” of the most infamous of all the anti-tyrannical texts of the age, the Vindiciae. For Buchanan’s celebration of chastity as a primary Pauline virtue, see “In Castitatem,” in Philip J. Ford, George Buchanan: Prince of Poets (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1982), p. 138. See too Epigrammatum Melanthonis, “Deus est casta mens,” p. 3C (verso).
4 Alan Sinfield, “Sidney’s Defence and the Collective-Farm Chairman: Puritan Humanism and the Cultural Apparatus,” in Faultlines, p. 181–214. Sinfield’s essay raises questions, too, about the nature of Sidney’s piety explored more fully in the previous chapter.
5 For a similar application of the Sidney–Soviet analogy, see Gary F. Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1986), p. 42. A decade later, such startling shifts between widely divergent times, places, and cultures have increasingly been called to account for endangering the very historical understanding that they sought to promote. For a critique of “presentism” (the ready application of present-day analogues and political standards to the distant past) in new historical and cultural materialist criticism, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (London and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), p. 15–19. A better balanced introduction to the politics of Sidney’s poetics can be found in David Norbrook’s chapter, “Sidney and Political Pastoral,” in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 91–108; Norbrook argues that Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s “freedom from subjection to empirical fact allows a detachment from traditional ideas and the free exploration of alternatives” (p. 94). For an argument that Sidney’s aim is to restrict and make “more class-bound a varied vernacular tradition” and “to establish a dominant form of national literature” (p. 145), see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), esp. “Whose bloody country is it anyway? Sir Philip Sidney, the nation and the public,” p. 132–69. By contrast to Hadfield’s Anglo-centric reading, I stress the importance of the Defence’ s studied and self-conscious cosmopolitanism.
6 Sinfield’s argument assumes (and a strangely essentializing assumption it is!) that a similarity in conceptual form somehow determines similarity in political significance, as if all appeals to universal ideas were inherently invitations to absolutism. See Oscar Kenshur’s cogent critique of essentialist notions about epistemological principles, “An Exchange on Ideological Criticism: (Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 3 (Spring 1989), 658–68.
7 Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 303, 305, 307.
8 Languet to Sidney, 9 April 1574, in Levy, p. 122.
9 Languet to Sidney, 16 April 1574, in Levy, p. 137.
10 Languet to Sidney, 18? June, 1574, in Levy, p. 204.
11 See Languet to Sidney, 13 May 1574, in Levy, p. 163.
12 For Sidney and the New World, and the fascination with colonization both among the Huguenots in France and the Philippists in Germany, see Roger Kuin’s “Querre-Muhau,” 549–85.
13 I write “appears” because the letter is now lost; mention of the letter regarding Pibrac is found in Languet to Sidney, 24 July 1574, in Levy, p. 230.
14 Levy, p. 230. For the bitterness of the Reformers’ response to the Massacre, see M.-Th. Courtial, “George Buchanan et la Saint-Bartholemy: la ‘Satyr in Carolun Lotharingum cardinalem’,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 58, no. 1 (1996), 151–63.
15 Levy, p. 231–2; Juvenal and Persius, trans. G.G. Ramsay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann 1918; repr. 1961), p. 165. The translation of Juvenal has been modified for accuracy.
16 Vindiciae, p. 30. Scholars still question the authorship of the Vindiciae, sometimes attributing the work not to Mornay, but to Languet. For the best recent discussion of the authorship question, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 465–87.
17 “Caracalla” in Scriptores historiae Augustae, trans. David C. Magie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1953), vol. 2, 21–3.
18 For a brief historical overview of competing interpretations of tyranny, see William A. Armstrong, “The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant,” Review of English Studies 22 (1946), 61–81. See also, Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). For tyranny as a political concern in the Reformed north, see Skinner, esp. “Part Three: Calvinism and the Theory of Revolution,” p. 189–348.
19 See Osborn, p. 70. For Sidney’s witty turn on the Phalaris story in Astrophil and Stella, see Alan Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 96–7.
20 Languet to Sidney, 11 March 1574, in Levy, p.105.
21 See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966; first pub. 1955), p. 94–120. Dante’s republican descendants were more than a little embarrassed by his support of monarchy and took some notable liberties in reimagining his political sympathies; that his Defence repeats—and thereby copies—the mistake of those commentators in attributing to Dante punishments against tyrants never imposed gives some indication about Sidney’s debts to this republican tradition of anti-tyrannical thought.
22 See Rhetoric, Book II. xx. 5–6, p. 275–7.
23 For the employment of natural law arguments among the proponents of limited monarchy, see Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), esp. p. 10–46. The term “limited monarchy” denotes a constitutionally limited monarchy, while “mixed monarchy” points to a mixture of three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) in a balanced polity. The terms were used interchangeably, as Eccleshall indicates, because those who used them assumed “English political practices were informed by objective standards of justice because the legislative process was a cooperative activity in which the monarch was constitutionally obliged to associate with representatives of the community,” p. 1, ftn. 1. On “minority” support for limited monarchy in Elizabethan England, or what he terms “quasi-republican modes of political reflection,” see Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Rylands University Library of Manchester University Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 2 (Spring 1987), 394–424 and De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 22–3; and Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), who argues that “Englishmen were to an extent able both to embrace parts of the republican vocabulary in their own context and to articulate their civic consciousness without a full-scale republican theory,” p. 7. If by “republican,” is meant “constitutional government without a king,” Elizabethan England had few, if any republicans. I prefer to refer (less anachronistically) to supporters of limited or mixed monarchy—since all of the writers whom I address are committed proponents of monarchy.
24 Skinner, p. 325–7, 334–7. Such arguments are traditionally distinctive in terms of both content and form. Employed to enforce distinctions between good and evil, they possess a moral content that distinguishes the natural from the unnatural, the normative from the monstrous—the heroes of fiction (as Sidney would note) from the Phalarises of fact. In turn, these moral distinctions load such arguments with obligatory power. To acknowledge a natural law is to acknowledge oneself as ethically obliged to obey it, and, more important, to stake a claim to natural law is to extend that same obligation to humanity as a whole, since natural law arguments are presumed to carry universal applicability. In form, natural law arguments are traditionally distinctive, too, since the laws of nature are unwritten. As such, they supply ready touchstones upon which to test the legitimacy of positive laws—those scripted products of necessarily contingent acts of human making. The appeal to natural law works analytically to separate the chaff from the wheat—the sumptuary regulations of Leviticus from the Law of Moses, or the Milesian laws from the Justinian Code—and maintains, thereby, side-by-side with its sometimes conservative regard for “the natural order of things” (however defined), a decidedly critical potential vis à vis existing moral, political or religious codes and practices. Appeals to natural law justify murdering a magistrate as readily as they do revering him, a rhetorical lesson Cicero taught well. Behind their power as touchstones, natural law arguments have the formal distinction also of claiming to be rational—available to and demonstrable by reasoned inquiry. That claim to reason provides natural law arguments with their greatest appeal as a persuasive mode of discourse since their rational edge promises simultaneously to sharpen informed reflection and to blunt merely partisan polemic. Achieving renewed popularity in early modern public discourse, natural law is the stuff out of which the ideal of civil conversation finds expression in the late sixteenth century. For a broad perspective on the importance of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the theory of natural law in a Renaissance context, see Charles Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984). For a concise, densely argued study of one important aspect of the natural law tradition, see Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
25 The concept of an “interventionist” discourse derives from Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque, and my The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1995), p. 20–25.
26 Skinner, p. 321–2. In his introduction, George Garnett calls the argument “not only professedly catholic, but uncannily Catholic,” Vindiciae, contra tyrannos: or concerning the legitimate power of a prince over the people, and of the people over a prince (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), p. 1.
27 Languet to Sidney, 24 July 1574, in Levy, p. 233.
28 Paul Oskar Kristeller has testified to the shaping power of that education, identifying Melanchthon as the figure most influential for establishing the humanistic tradition of Protestant Germany, p. 87.
29 Timothy Wengert supplies a good recent overview of Melanchthon’s later career that draws attention to his increasing employment of natural law theory in his last chapter, “Melanchthon at Erasmus’s Funeral: 1528–1560,” Human Freedom, Human Righteousness, p. 139–58. See, too, Schneider on Melanchthon’s development of a “natural theology” in his later years, p. 139–58 and the comprehensive study by Carl Bauer, “Melanchthons Naturrechtslehre,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 42 (1951), 64–100. For a recent study of how Aristotelian rationalism underlies Melanchthon’s understanding of nature and how that understanding relates to his theological conception of reality, see Cornelis Augustijn, “Melanchthons Suche nach Gott und Natur,” in Melanchthon und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit, ed. Günther Frank and Stefan Rhein (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1998), p. 15–24. More specifically, Rolf Bernhard Huschke explores the analogy between orders of law and political order in Melanchthons Lehre vom ordo politicus: Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Glauben und politischen Handeln bei Melanchthon (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1960), p. 31–2.
30 CR 6, 195: “ein recht Werk, das Gott in die Natur gepflanzt hat .…” In 1554 Melanchthon’s trumpet sounded again in English translation, as a blast against the monstrous “scope” of those lords and bishops abusing the faithful under Mary Tudor: Martin Luther, A faithful admonition (London: f. J. Day?, 1554). See the Preface’s warning against “the scope & end of al practices of the Lords & Bishops” to bring into power “the bishop of Rome,” n.p. Making passage to England were both a new rhetorical terminology and a new politics closely allied with it.
31 The Luther who reveled rhetorically in the bloodshed of peasants and who despised the confounding by Anabaptists of Christian liberty with worldly freedom was no friend to sedition (or any other challenge to political authority), whatever the claims of the Catholic opposition—Erasmus included—or the fears of German princes. It is in the context of Melanchthon’s defense of Luther against Erasmus’s attacks that Timothy Wengert describes Melanchthon’s emergence as the author of a “Christian” political philosophy in his commentary on Colossians of 1527/28, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness.
32 For Luther’s political philosophy, see W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther, ed. Philip Broadhead (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984). For detailed historical background for the development of resistance theory in early modern Germany, see Thomas A. Brady, Jr., The Politics of the Reformation in Germany, and the more concise, “Luther and the State: The Reformer’s Teaching in its Social Setting,” in Luther and the Modern State in Germany, ed. James D. Tracy (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publications, 1986).
33 Cynthia Grant Schoenberger, “The Development of Lutheran Theory of Resistance: 1523–1530,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8, no. 1 (April 1977), p. 75.
34 “Luther and the Justifiability of Resistance to Legitimate Authority,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1979), 3–20.
35 James M. Estes describes Melanchthon’s relationship to Luther in matters of political philosophy as that of a strong-minded collaborator, rather than a disciple or interpreter, “The Role of Godly Magistrates in the Church: Melanchthon as Luther’s Interpreter and Collaborator,” Church History 67, no. 3 (September 1998), 463–83. At the heart of Melanchthon’s political thought from the 1520s to the 1550s is the role of the godly magistrate, and Estes is the best guide to the changing character of that thought. See also, Estes’s earlier wide-ranging study, Christian Magistrate and State Church, and his later “Erasmus, Melanchthon and the Office of the Christian Magistrate,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 18, no. 4 (1998), 373–87. On the magistrate’s cura religionis, see Ralph Keen, “Political Authority,” 1–14.
36 Peterson, “Melanchthon on Resisting the Emperor: The Von der Notwehr Unterricht of 1547,” in Regnum, Religio, et Ratio, p. 133–44. Peterson links Melanchthon’s text with the Magdeburg Confession of 1550 (Bekenntnis, Unterricht und Wermanung). See in that connection, Esther Hildebrandt, “The Magdeburg Bekenntnis as a Possible Link between German and English Resistance Theories in the Sixteenth Century,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 71 (1980), 240–52. See, too, Peterson’s “Justus Menius, Philip Melanchthon, and the 1547 Treatise, Von der Notwehr Unterricht,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990), 138–57.
37 CR 16, 573.
38 Legal discourse afforded a familiar technology for legitimizing self-defense, and Melanchthon clearly takes advantage of it, as he cites the increasingly popular dictum out of Roman civil law in justification of resistance: “vim vi repellere natura concedit.” There was nothing new about arguing for self-defense as the product of natural law. Johannes Bugenhagen, one of Luther’s associates, had been doing so since the 1520s. See Bugenhagen’s Brief to the Elector John of Saxony, September 1529 in Heinz Scheible, Das Widerstandsrecht als Problem der deutschen Protestanten, 1523–46 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1969), p. 25–9. See, too, Schoenberger, “The Development of the Lutheran Theory of Resistance,” 65–7. The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodore Mommsen and Paul Krueger (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), XLIII, XVI, 27: “Vim vi repellere licere … idque ius natura comparatur.” For legal discourse and theories of self-defense, see Von Friedeburg, p. 2–36, and for the Calvinist inheritance, Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–80,” The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 159–92.
39 De re publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1959), III. xxii., p. 211.
40 The law of nature is inscribed by God and it is inscribed with a double complexity in Melanchthon’s argument. One natural power that draws us to employ force against force is στoργή, that peculiar brand of love or affection, ordinarily associated with the love of parents for children (or by extension in the patriarchy, with the love of superiors for inferiors). Στoργή is here represented as the love of the self for the self—a natural love of self-preservation, which human beings share with animals. That other natural power that governs the στoργή, and preserves natural affection for moral ends, derives from Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae—those innate (hence natural) ideas of good implanted into the mind by God allowing for the discrimination between justice and injustice. Στoργη secures a material, biological foundation for the agency of natural law as notitiae maintain the moral and intellectual grounds of the argument.
41 See Johannes Heckel, Lex charitatis: Eine juristische Untersuchung über das Recht in der Theologie Martin Luthers (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1973; repr. 1953).
42 The elegance of Melanchthon’s argument consists partly in its easy accommodation to a variety of contexts. Equally strong expositions of natural law, extending from the vocabulary of στoργή and grounded upon the concept of notitiae (“Paulus expresse affirmat”) organize Melanchthon’s arguments on behalf of the defense against tyranny both in the 1543 edition of the Loci as well as in his De licita defensione, an extended polemical letter written in 1546 as another protest against imperial violence. For De licita defensione, see CR 6, 150–55; for self-defense and natural law in the Loci of 1543, see CR 21, 602–3. As the currency of academic commentary, scriptural exposition, and contemporary political debate, natural law had a purchase power of enormous appeal to Melanchthon. Already, its key terms are familiar from earlier arguments in this book, because of the significance that στoργή assumes as a term of art in Melanchthon’s theology, rehabilitating (against the Stoics) the goodness of natural affects; and because of the importance of notitiae for comprehending Melanchthon’s oratorical thought, due to their existentially intimate association with the essential loci of textual invention and narration. Such terms, then, evidence the elegance (the economy and method) of his philosophical thought, his preoccupation with scope (ultimate ends considered in relation to human nature and divine purpose), and the persistence with which his writing returns, across the disciplines, to issues about the nature of nature. For a detailed account of Melanchthon’s evolving ideas about the validity of self-defense and resistance to tyranny, see Von Friedeburg, p. 56–90.
43 The original German text, the Von der Notwehr, was written by Justus Menius, and as Peterson shows, “exists in two quite different versions, the first based on Menius’s manuscript with revisions by Melanchthon, particularly in the second half, and the second for which Melanchthon in the correspondence took full credit,” “Melanchthon on Resisting the Emperor,” 135. It was that second version that served as the basis for the Latin translation.
44 De defensione concessa humano generi iure naturae (Wittenberg, 1547), sig. Eii (verso).
45 De defensione, sig. Eii (verso).
46 Sharp distinctions are made between defense and sedition. Important qualifications maintain, too, that the power of defense resides appropriately in the hands of the magistrate not those of private citizens, but such moderating arguments impose no real limitation upon resistance in a war pitting Germany’s Protestant princes against (as Melanchthon emphasizes here) the foreign powers of the Pope. Defending the body politic against tyranny’s atrocious injuries is at once a natural and a Godly work. Melanchthon’s frequent recourse to the politics of chastity affords a second reason for highlighting the importance of the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and its Latin translation, De defensione. Natural law promises more than a conceptual foundation for argument. Persistently to associate tyranny with sexual violation is to load the forensic cannons with powerful rhetorical matter as well. See Von Friedeburg, p. 69 on Melanchthon’s predilection for examples of single individuals, “in particular women,” defending themselves. In his preface to Luther on self-defense (1547), Melanchthon warns, characteristically, against the depredations of the Italians and Spanish, calling them murderous and unchaste nations, CR 6, 361.
47 CR 6, 363. Melanchthon’s letter is dated 14 January, 1547; after complaining about Menius’s wild and raving words, he adds: “attexuimus disputationem eruditiorem et verecundiorem.” Melanchthon discovered afresh the formal distinctiveness of natural law discourse, the appeal of substituting arguments about universals for the usual polemics of topical, party-political confessional disputes, with their heady mix of name-calling, historical controversy and biblical fulmination.
48 There is no “state of nature” in Melanchthon’s political thought, comparable to that of John Locke. Outside of government only chaos reigns. For a concise, useful account of key terms in Melanchthon’s political philosophy, see Michel Dautry, “La Politique dans les Loci de Melanchthon,” Positions lutheriennes 22 (1974), 1–21. There is also infrequent acknowledgment of “natural rights” in Melanchthon. Instead, his political vocabulary makes room for a comprehensive endorsement of civil liberty (libertas civilis), as a human faculty ordained by law intimately associated with rights to property and to self-preservation, to the free disposition of choice among virtuous actions and the exchange of goods. Liberty is not license, but exists as a necessary complement to spiritual freedom. In Melanchthon’s suggestive metaphor, civil liberty is the free cultivation of the garden of virtue, immured by the laws of nature and of God, and by those civil laws grounded on them. See his definition of “libertas civilis” in Definitiones multarum appellationum dated 1552/53 and appended to subsequent editions of the Loci, CR 21, 1095–6.
49 These are key political virtues in his thought—and love. The chief source of this idea is, again, St. Paul, and the law of charity (platonically infused) as a principle of social organization: “et amet … ipsos magistratus, custodes politici ordinis,” CR 21, 1009–10: “and let him love the magistrates themselves, as guardians of the civil order.” In Sidney’s fiction, too, the reverence accorded by the people to “the good ruler,” Euarchus—a reverence that grows in characteristic Philippist style from fear to honor to love—harmonizes readily with the tyrannomachist exploits of his heroic son and nephew. As the politics of his Defence makes clear, such harmony extends from Sidney’s own commitment to natural law theory. The coexistence of that “conservative” reverence for government with a “radical” abhorrence of tyranny in Melanchthon’s thought and Sidney’s fiction should trouble the too-eager imposition upon sixteenth-century political philosophy of road maps for the development of republicanism on the one side or absolutism on the other. For Euarchus’s progress from the exercise of “extreme severity” to the enjoyment of his people’s love, see The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 159–61.
50 Melanchthon was no republican, and neither were his followers among the Philippists. Their specific political orientation, however, is difficult to describe by contemporary labels because of the character of their primary political commitment to government itself as an ordo, an order created by God and hence deserving of reverence, no matter what form it assumes—as monarchy, aristocracy, or constitutional democracy. Like most educated people of his day, Melanchthon appears to have been intellectually predisposed to monarchy as the best form of government, but to monarchy limited by law. As early as 1530, in a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, he reflects about the diets of the Empire as modern versions of Sparta’s ephoral government, expressing a marked preference for limited or “mixed” monarchy. In a treatise on geometry, he comments favorably about mixed monarchy, on the popular analogy of a musical concord achieved among the various parts of the body politic—magistrate, aristocracy and populace. On the Spartan ephors and the necessity “ad moderandam vim regiae potestatis” (for moderating the power of the king), see CR 16, 440. On Melanchthon’s evident preference for the Aristotelian “aristocratic” state, as the just, geometrically proportioned balance between tyranny and democracy, see his Praefatio in Geometriam (1536), CR 3, 112. See, too, Scheible, Melanchthon: Eine Biographie, p. 93. Context matters to such discussions. The freedom that Melanchthon permits himself in academic commentaries intended for the learned contrasts with the orthodoxy of his pronouncements in works intended for the lewd; as Robert J. Bast indicates, Melanchthon was still preaching as late as the Catechesis Puerilis of 1540 “the old lesson that tyranny was to be counted as God’s punishment for the sins of the people,” Honor Your Fathers: Cathechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1997), p. 192.
Melanchthon customarily subordinates questions about “the administration of magistrates” (or the art of governing) to a more comprehensive “‘practica’, namely that [form of practical knowledge] which creates honest men, good citizens and governors.” Properly understood, politics is ethics, in Aristotle’s capacious understanding of that term—the art of governing “private manners and public responsibilities” with regard to a “final purpose”: “That nothing should be done that is contrary to virtue.” And nothing done contrary to Christian virtue. See Enarratio in CR 16, 286–7. In Melanchthon’s vision of the political order, the magistrate is defined as “the Guardian of the Two Tables” of the Decalogue, the authority empowered to enforce both those civil responsibilities that people owe to their neighbors (those of the second five commandments) and the laws imposed upon them by God (the first five commandments). Luther’s two kingdoms are effectively merged into one, and the political arena transformed into one of necessary, pious activity: the Godly magistrate serves the church (as its protector against idolatry) in cooperation with the clergy (who preach obedience to the law). Magistrates guard both church and state, and this expansion of guardianship over the universe of human affairs helps to explain, in turn, for the humanistically inclined Melanchthon, the enhanced emphasis on knowledge and the business of promoting knowledge as an instrument of government. In an age of confessional politics, Melanchthon’s “practica” emerged as a pragmatic instrument for providing education, order and liberty to a society in which the spiritual and the temporal intertwined at every turn. See Robert J. Bast, “From Two Kingdoms to the Two Tables: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Magistrate,” Archiv fűr Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998), 79–97. James Martin Estes recounts the influence of Melanchthon’s concept in Christian Magistrate and State Church: The Reforming Career of Johannes Brenz (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 52–4. For Melanchthon’s understanding of ethics and the role of the magistrate, see Ralph Keen, “Defending the Pious: Melanchthon and the Reformation in Albertine Saxony, 1539,” Church History 60, no. 2 (June 1991), 180–95.
51 A Shorte Treatise of politicke power, and of the true Obedience which subjectes owe to kynges and other civile Governours (London, 1556), title page.
52 Ponet, p. 106.
53 Ponet, p. 3, 5.
54 The last chapter of the Shorte Treatise is fiercely personal and polemical in style; see speculation about that abrupt stylistic change in Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 85.
55 When Ponet expands upon his treatment of natural law toward the conclusion, he silently translates Cicero’s De re publica: “For it is no private lawe to a few or certain people, but common to all: not written in bokes, but graffed in the heartes of men: not made by man, but ordained of God: which we have not learned, receaved or redde, but have taken, sucked, and drawne it out of nature: wherunto we are not taught, but made: not instructed, but seasoned: and (as S. Paule saieth) mannes conscience bearing witnesse of it,” p. 105–6.
56 For comparison between Goodman and Ponet on scriptural usage and polemical approach, see David H. Wollman, “The Biblical Justification for Resistance to Authority in Ponet’s and Goodman’s Polemics,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982), 29–41. For Ponet’s vocabulary of “scope” (199–200) and its emergence among those texts from his years of exile, see C.H. Garrett, “John Ponet and the Confession of the Banished Ministers,” Church Quarterly Review 137 (Oct.–Dec., 1943), 47–74 and 138 (Jan.–Mar., 1944), 181–204. Garrett does not recognize the term’s rhetorical provenance.
57 De jure regni apud Scotos, trans. anon. (Philadelphia: 1766), p. 7. For a modern translation, see Charles Flinn Arrowood, George Buchanan on the Powers of the Crown of Scotland (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1949).
58 Buchanan, p. 11, 14. When Buchanan argues his central point, that the king is a physician who tends to the health of the body politic, he asserts: “Scopus etiam idem videtur utrique propositus” (Each also seems to have the same aim in view), De iure regni apud Scotos, Dialogus (Amsterdam, NY: Da Capo Press, 1969), p. 11.
59 Buchanan, p. 7.
60 Buchanan, p. 18. When Daniel Rogers writes to the great Dutch printer Christopher Plantin about Buchanan’s De jure, he states that he does not know whether to praise more highly its contents (“argumentum”) or its presentation (“formam”), one contemporary piece of evidence for the distinctiveness of Buchanan’s writing practice. Rogers’s letter is quoted in I.D. McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 241.
61 For an account of the Vindiciae in the context of Mornay’s polemical writings, see Patry, p. 275–86, and the more recent political biography, with its cogent analysis of Mornay’s political suicide, see Daussy, “Les enigme des Vindiciae contra Tyrannos,” p. 229–58.
62 Vindiciae, p. 11.
63 Vindiciae, p. 5.
64 Vindiciae, p. 98.
65 Vindiciae, p. 10. Such complementarity of argument is (far from inconsistent!) one distinguishing characteristic of Mornay’s self-consciously proclaimed “elegance” of method—his ability to analyze, to resolve into its constitutive components the complex topic of “kingship,” understood first as covenant, then as contract.
66 Much of his argument derives here and elsewhere in the later portions of the Vindiciae, as Quentin Skinner has shown, from scholastic sources—in particular from the more “radical” followers of Thomas Aquinas, Bartolus of Saxoferrato and Baldus de Ubaldis, and from conciliarist political theorists, such as Jean Gerson, Jacques Almain and John Major. In particular, like Gerson, Mornay questions how men, who are “free by nature … have elected the command of another,” as a logical device for turning an inquiry into origins into an argument about ends: “the one purpose of command is the people’s welfare, “Vindiciae, p. 93–4. Ponet and Buchanan are similarly well-versed in conciliarist thought, but Mornay is no more a scholastic than Ponet or Buchanan and his employment of scholastic arguments is only one element in a more comprehensive display of humanist rhetorical eloquence inflected by the sixteenth-century’s new hermeneutic.
67 Vindiciae, p. 92–4.
68 See Roland Greene on the history of the “neoteric,” Cicero’s disparaging term for the “strategic newness” of the poetae novi surrounding, first, Catullus, then Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid and Virgil, “Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), p. 238.
69 Vindiciae, p. 93.
70 Vindiciae, p. 92.
71 Mornay’s argument derives its force because of the anthropological assumptions at its core: “men are free, impatient of servitude, and … born more to command than to obey,” not as noble savages, but rather as creatures infected by the sin of self-love: “each man loves and pursues his own interests.” Self-love sparks conflicts between “‘Mine and Thine’,” those Ciceronian disputes about property (livelihood and life) dictating the necessity of kingship, Vindiciae, p. 93. Such conflicts arise because “man is composed of the divine mind and that brutish spirit,” and consequently “he is often at variance with himself, and frequently becomes demented and insane,” Vindiciae, p. 98.
72 Vindiciae, p. 8.
73 Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge: University Press, 1846–47), vol. 1, 116. C.H. Garrett argues that Ponet’s Short Treatise was designed in tandem with the failed Dudley conspiracy of 1556, which suggests a family relationship of another kind between Ponet’s work and Sidney’s, “John Ponet and the Confession of the Banished Ministers,” Church Quarterly Review 137 (1944), 181–204. For a reading of Ponet in light of the religious and political events of 1553, see Barrett L. Beer, “John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power Reassessed,” Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3 (1990), 373–84 and, more insightful, Barbara Peardon’s “The Politics of Polemic: John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power and Contemporary Circumstance, 1553–56,” Journal of British Studies 22, no. 1 (1982), 35–49.
74 In his chapter on Buchanan’s formative years, McFarlane comments about the “similarity of outlook between Buchanan and Melanchthon,” p. 46, ftn. 11; he notes the unusual importance accorded to natural law arguments in the De jure; and he cites Buchanan’s debt here to Melanchthon’s “moderate and conciliatory views,” p. 335. For Buchanan’s extensive contacts among Languet’s circle in the 1560s, see McFarlane’s chapter, “The court and travel,” p. 225–46.
75 See, too, Francis Oakley’s “On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan,” Journal of British Studies, no. 2 (May 1962), 1–31. While highlighting the importance of natural law to the De jure regni, Oakley argues persuasively for Buchanan’s debt—by way of his teacher, John Major—to medieval conciliarist thought. Familiar claims about the secular character of Buchanan’s argument coincide in the argument with absence of attention to Melanchthon and early Protestant resistance theory.
76 Buchanan explicitly cites Melanchthon as the principal source for his resistance politics, just as Mornay pays tribute to Buchanan as the “Celt” who inspired the Vindiciae’s fictively advertised place of publication as Edinburgh. For Buchanan and his debts to Melanchthon, see Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, “George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution,” The English Historical Review, Supplement 3 (1966), 1–54. Buchanan’s first written formulation of a resistance theory is contained in a document that he authored anonymously justifying the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth, “A copy of a wryting delyvered by the Erle of Morton to the Commissioners for the Queen’s Majesty” (1571). See that document in Trevor-Roper (p. 40–50) for the specific citations to Melanchthon.
77 See Buchanan, p. 47–9, with a celebration of the good king as an image of God.
78 Measure the distance between Wittenberg in 1547 and Basle in 1579—the places of publication for the Von der Notwehr Unterricht and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos— and the distance between them must be calculated by more than geography and time. Within the imperial structure of early modern Germany, it was one thing to legitimize resistance against the emperor (especially one backed by foreign armies of invasion) when there were Protestant princes of the patria who would champion resistance. In the context of the monarchies of northern Europe—England, Scotland, or France—it was quite another to justify rebellion against the king. (See Von Friedeburg, p. 7–34.) Mornay, Ponet, and Buchanan confronted different and more complicated questions about sovereignty and much of the intricacy of their discussions of representation (their preoccupation with covenants, contracts, and trusts) derives from that difference in political institutions. Melanchthon heralded civil liberty, rightly understood; he too was philosophically predisposed toward mixed monarchy and ephoral limits to sovereign authority; he too believed that the prince should be subject to the law; that governors were servants both of pure religion and the welfare of the people, but the claims for popular sovereignty in Mornay, Ponet and Buchanan threatened to impose stricter limits on the authority of magistrates than Melanchthon ever envisioned.
79 An Apologie or Defence, of my Lord the Prince of Orange … Against the Proclamation … published by the King of Spaine, trans. anon. (London: 1581), p.B3 (verso). Languet’s authorship of the Apologie was partial; he was co-author with Pierre Loyseleur and Mornay; or so Mornay’s notes about the work’s composition suggest, as he recounts his desire (and Languet’s) to moderate the excessive, polemical rhetoric of Loyseleur’s original. See Daussy, p. 168–9. Languet knew something from Melanchthon’s experience with Menius about the value of editorial temperance. Pleading against the horrors of the Inquisition that Spain imposed upon the Netherlands, William of Orange states that such persecutors surmount “in crueltie, Phalaris, Busyris, Nero, Domitian, and all tyraunts …”, p. G4 (verso).
80 Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p.11.
81 “A Letter written to Queen Elizabeth,” in Miscellaneous Prose, p. 46–7.
82 “A Letter,” p. 48, 53–4.
83 Greville, p. 63.
84 See Sidney’s “A Letter,” p. 57, 60.
85 Vindiciae, p. 9. For Buchanan’s discussion of the mimetic potency of the image of the monarch, see below, p. 212.
86 Ponet, p. 7, 13; Buchanan, p. 54; Vindiciae, p. 93, 96.
87 Loci Communes 1555, p. 325, 336–7.
88 CR 21, 97–8. “Ita fit, ut anima luce, vitaque coelesti carens excecetur, et sese ardentissime amet, sua quaerat, non cupiat, non velit, nisi carnalia” …. Fieri enim nequit, quin sese maxime amet creatura, quam non absorpsit amor dei.”
89 Martin Eisengrein is one exception that proves the rule; as an exemplar of the “rigid Catholicism” that Maximilian opposed, this court preacher was made unwelcome in Vienna in the late 1560s when the Emperor was forming a commission to bring about ecumenical reconciliation; see Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), p. 148–50.
90 See Maximilian Lanzinner, “Die Denkschrift des Lazarus von Schwendi zur Reichspolitik,” Zeitscrift für historische Forschung 3 (1987), 141–85, and Louthan, p. 106–20.
91 Sidney to Languet, 10 March 1578, in Pears, p. 163.
92 Sidney knew first-hand the difference between these imperial courts, having served as one-time ambassador from Elizabeth to Rudolf II, offering consolations for the death of Maximilian. See Hager on “the odd autobiographical quibble on philippian tendency to horse-love,” p. 113.
93 De imitatione, p. sig. Bii. My quotation comes from a fascinating, extended discussion in Chapter II about the utility of imitation in which Sturm celebrates the cosmopolitan value of the literary arts for remedying self-love. His De imitatione was published while Sidney was his pupil in Strasbourg. See too Anne Lake Prescott’s entertaining analysis of Sidney’s lesson in self-love from his training under Pugliano—Philip learning (as “phil-hippus,” the horse-lover), that is, the perils of solipsism, “Tracing Astrophil’s ‘Coltish Gyres’: Sidney and the Horses of Desire,” Renaissance Papers (2005), 25–42.
94 For Cecropia as a parody of the Sidneian poet, see Levao, Renaissance Minds and their Fictions, p. 235–49.
95 Sidney’s “A Letter,” p. 52–3.
96 I owe the term “cosmopology” to Mr. Hugh Davis, one of the best and brightest of my graduate students.
97 For Languet and L’Hospital, see Nicollier-de Weck, p. 156–60 and Chapter 3 here.
98 See Ponet for example: “This rule [‘how he should behave him self, what he should doo, and what he maye not doo’] is the lawe of nature, furst planted and graffed only in the mynde of man, that after for that his mynde was through synne defiled, filled with darknesse, and encombred with many doubtes) set furthe in writing in the decaloge or ten commaundementes: and after reduced by Christ our saveour into these two wordes …,” p. 2. The best introduction to Sidney’s use of the term “nature” remains Ulreich, 79–83.
99 The Old Arcadia, p. 255.
100 The Old Arcadia, p. 257, 259.
101 Buchanan, p. 48–9.
102 See Chapter 2 above and Enarrationes Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis in CR 16, 283, note 2.
103 See Buchanan (1766) where he cites the “rude multitude” as one of the three principal manifestations of tyranny, p. 6.
104 For an analysis of this passage in relation to Sidney’s contemporary political concerns, see Ferguson, p. 159–65.