THE PROBLEM OF ENGLISH MACHIAVELLISM
Modes of Civic Consciousness before the Civil War
[I]
IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS we have been engaged upon an exploration of a mode of thought which may be termed “Machiavellism,” and consisted in the articulation of civic humanist concepts and values under the stresses of the Florentine predicament in the years 1494 to 1530. A conceptual world dominated by the paradigms of use, faith, and fortune was subjected to strain by the republican decision to pursue universal values in a transitory form, and this strain was intensified by happenings in the world of experience after 1494, when the Florentine republic failed to maintain itself against Medicean reaction and the Italian republics failed to maintain their system of relationships against French and Spanish intruders. From these complex tensions we have noted two major outputs: Machiavelli’s revision of the concept of virtù, finding its most controversial expression in the advice given to the principe nuovo and its most durable lessons in the theory of arms as essential to liberty; and a renewed and intensified study of the Aristotelian-Polybian theory of mixed government, in which Venice figured as both paradigm and myth and, in her capacity as antithesis to Rome, helped deflect attention from Machiavelli’s military populism. The concepts of custom, apocalypse, and anakuklōsis, based on the triad of use, faith, and fortune, have remained operable throughout, and we have noted only an observable tendency—of great importance to republican theory—to replace the concept of fortune with that of corruption: a means, it may be suggested, of introducing secondary causes into what was otherwise an image of pure randomness. In this respect there has been an intensification of historical self-understanding; but the medieval triad remains intact.
We have next to embark upon a study of how patterns of “Machiavellian” thought became operative in England, and at a later period in colonial and revolutionary America; and, as regards England at least, the greatest single difficulty we face is that there occurred in that culture nothing like the relatively simple options for vita activa, vivere civile and the republican remodeling of the historical self-image, which were all we found necessary to posit in order to account for the highly complex conceptual rearrangements which ensued. Republican and Machiavellian ideas had to become domiciled in an environment dominated by monarchical, legal, and theological concepts apparently in no way disposed to require the definition of England as a polis or the Englishman as a citizen. Our first problem will be to ascertain how it was that they became domiciled at all, and we cannot do this without initially reviewing the modes of consciousness with which they had to compete; we shall have to see whether these earlier political languages encountered problems which made a partial recourse to the republican vocabulary convenient or necessary.
There is a prima facie case for holding that an ideology of civic activism was incompatible with either the institutions or the beliefs of territorial monarchy. To use the terminology of Walter Ullmann,1 the “descending thesis” of authority left the individual under a king with little function but to obey those above him in a hierarchical order and to pass on the duty of obedience to those below him; while the “ascending thesis” of corporate rationality served mainly as a theoretical means of constituting a people as a body intelligent enough to recognize that it had a head, a stalagmite of intelligence capable of rising toward the descending stalactite of authority. The corpus misticum which Fortescue recognized as needing to be governed politice2 was far from being an Aristotelian polis, it was a fellowship of reason, capable of cognizing rational laws, a fellowship of experience, capable of generating a body of remembered customs which became its second nature, but not a fellowship of action or a partnership of directing virtues in which men were intelligently participant according to the diversity of their individualities. Fortescue could never have recognized predicaments like those diagnosed by Machiavelli and Guicciardini as part of the very stuff of political life, or devised machinery like that of Guicciardini and Giannotti as the means by which such predicaments could be resolved; Venice to him was a legal entity distinguished by the antiquity and rationality of its municipal laws,3 just as England was. The corpus misticum was, indeed, exposed to the solvents of methodological individualism: a body whose head was the prince, it was nevertheless made up of individuals who had heads of their own—as in the frontispiece to Leviathan—and the problem of relating the intelligence of the subject to the intelligence of the prince could be productive of tensions. But reason and experience alone could never provide grounds for characterizing the individual as a citizen; that could only happen if there were revival of the ancient notions of political virtus, of the zōon politikon whose nature was to rule, to act, to make decisions; and so far, only the ideology of the vita activa, operating in a communal climate where men were indeed called to assemble and make decisions, has emerged as showing how such a revival could take place. In the territorial and jurisdictional monarchy, the individual took on positive being primarily as the possessor of rights—rights to land, and to justice affecting his tenure of land—and a structure of “ascending authority” existed mainly as a structure of customs, jurisdictions, and liberties, in which such rights were embodied and preserved and which rose to meet the descending structure of authority that existed to command its continuance and enforcement. In the world of jurisdictio and gubernaculum the individual possessed rights and property—proprietas, that which rightfully pertained to him—and was subject to authority which, since it descended from God, was never the mere reflection of his rights; and the central debate was, and has remained, how far the two conceptual schemes—ascending and descending powers, jurisdictio and gubernaculum, rights and duties—were integrated with one another. It can be strongly affirmed, however, that to define the individual in terms of his rights and his duties, his property and his obligations, is still not enough to make him an active citizen or a political animal.
It is not surprising, then, that for some time scholars have sought to raise not only the question of how the values and concepts of civic humanism could become established in a territorial-jurisdictional monarchy such as England,4 but the larger question of how and when, in what terms and under what conditions, the Englishman could develop a civic consciousness, an awareness of himself as a political actor in a public realm. One of these books, Donald Hanson’s From Kingdom to Commonwealth,5 is noteworthy for the stringency of its assertion that jurisdictio and gubernaculum were never integrated and hardly related; that medieval and Tudor Englishmen lived under a conceptual scheme of intractable duality which the author terms “double majesty”; and that the collapse of this duality, which Hanson considers did not take place until the Civil War of 1642-1646, was the necessary and (it would almost seem) the sufficient condition of “the growth of civic consciousness.” If this is a correct summary, the argument would appear somewhat too drastic, but it has the merit of posing a challenge which historians have been tardy in recognizing. The growth in England of civic consciousness as he defines it does indeed present a problem; it is a difficult subject of which less than enough has been written; but there is evidence to suggest that it grew along a number of lines, and that we should proceed cautiously as we approach the further problem of how the Englishman acquired the means of seeing himself, in Aristotelian, Machiavellian, or Venetian terms, as a classical citizen acting in a republic.
One powerful and persuasive argument presents the saint as preceding the citizen. Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints6 presents the Calvinist or classical Puritan individual as the type of the first revolutionary, the first radically alienated man in modern Europe, filled with a sense of his loneliness—a loneliness before God—associating with others on the basis of their common responsibility to values which are not those of society, and possessing a program of action whereby these values are to become the foundation of a reformation of the world. Walzer salutes—though he does not share—the older Marxism of Christopher Hill,7 in which the alienation and activism of the Puritan creed appear as the ideology of middling and industrious persons emerging from the broken forms of feudal society. Walzer’s saints are clerics, gentlemen, and lesser nobility, and the social origins of their alienation are not located in a feudal-to-bourgeois transition. But if the abortive revolutions of seventeenth-century England were not made by middling and industrious persons, they were not made by the classical Puritan ministers depicted by Walzer—indeed, his analysis specifically stops short of the sectarians who made them.8 The abortive revolutions were the work of an army—a unique phenomenon in itself—inspired by millennial hopes which were only half accepted, and led by legally educated lesser gentry profoundly split in their ideologies, almost to the point where this amounted to a split in personalities. With half their minds they were radical saints; with the other half they were conservative reformers, deeply committed to a traditional order in which they saw the source of all secular values, even those which should reform it. Their revolution failed less because there were not enough of them—revolutions are the work of minorities—than because they constantly and fatally insisted that their radical and chiliastic reformation must be endorsed and legitimized by the ancient liberties of England. It can even be argued that their chiliasm was part of their failure to detach themselves wholly from the secular world. The pure Calvinism isolated by Walzer was too austere, too rigid in its alienation, to need the visionary hopes of apocalyptic promise; but chiliasm was a more prominent feature of the Puritan mind than he has recognized.
There are dimensions which need to be added to Walzer’s portrait, and it will appear that these are dimensions of time. In the first place, there is need to study the eschatological dimension of the saint’s activism—the sacred present in which he acted, the sacred future which he expected to determine it—and this would take us all the way from Calvin’s rigorous (and perhaps Augustinian) refusal of all speculation upon this question, through the steadily increasing chiliasm of the sects and the steadily increasing antinomianism which accompanied it. But it would not be sufficient to study this dimension in isolation, since we shall find that in England—apparently to a greater degree than in any other Protestant society—apocalyptic was national, a mode of envisaging the nation as existing and acting in sacred time, with the consequence that the English saint might see his election and his nationality as co-inherent: he was a saint as he was one of “God’s Englishmen.” But “England” remained an obstinately national and secular concept—there was no Puritan Logres, the mystical and esoteric Britain of the Arthurian romantics—and the English apocalypse, the doctrine of the Elect Nation, has therefore to be considered as, in part, a means of conceptualizing, in a complex and particular time-frame, a public realm, at once secular and godly, in which the individual, at once saint and Englishman, is to act. In these terms it becomes a mode of civic consciousness, one of those modes for whose emergence in English history we have begun to seek; and since there could be tensions—the whole history of the Cromwellian years is testimony to them—between the individual’s veneration for the institutions of his Elect Nation and the radical acts which his election might call him to perform upon them, chiliasm’s evident concessions to the saeculum become important. Since it was in part a mode of national consciousness, it could take a conservative or a radical form; and since it might pose the dilemma between conservative and radical action, it might raise the problem of innovation in a form greatly but not overwhelmingly remote from that in which Machiavelli had considered it under the heading of virtù. The apocalyptic mode can therefore be studied as one of those modes of secular consciousness which blurred the purity of the “revolution of the saints,” and as one of those modes of civic consciousness which antedated the arrival of the classical concept of citizenship.
The problem now becomes that of exploring what further modes there were, available to Englishmen of the post-Reformation era, of conceptualizing a public realm in which they might act and modes of action appropriate to the realm thus defined. Since there is already reason to suspect that the dilemma of Cromwellian Puritanism was a dilemma between several modes of action, one of which was that of the radical saint, we may further suspect that the alternative modes, whatever they may have been, had grown up together with the last-named and were in some measure co-inherent with it. If we can trace such a growth, it will deliver us from the oversimplification apparently to be found in Hanson—in which there is nevertheless some truth—that Englishmen, denied civic consciousness by the prevalence of “double majesty,” were pitchforked into it by the trauma of “double majesty’s” collapse; as from the oversimplification, possessing a long and more or less Marxist pedigree, that an intensely religious consciousness of individuality was secularized into bourgeois rationalism overnight, since it had never been more than the ideology of an emergent class—though there is much evidence to suggest that rapid secularization of consciousness did occur and requires explanation. There is an interesting passage in The Revolution of the Saints in which Walzer, following H. G. Koenigsberger, presents revolutionary consciousness as developing in response to the “modern state’s” impact upon consciousness in general;9 but he appears to visualize this “state,” very much in the romantic tradition, as a leveling, centralizing and rationalizing force, to which an appropriate response is the hardness of individual alienation. Both Walzer and Hanson, in their very different ways, seem much under the influence of the concept of “traditional society” as the inert and prepolitical antithesis of “modernization”;10 and this concept, however carefully refined, is liable to dichotomize our thinking. We have seen at considerable length that Old Western men had access to more modes of consciousness and articulation than the merely traditional; and the paradigm of “humanism,” within which this book so largely operates, should suggest a similar diversity of modes of intensifying the individual’s consciousness of himself in relation to the saeculum and the secular culture.
An impressive literature of recent historiography indicates that English humanism developed its civic awareness by projecting the image of the humanist as counselor to his prince. To the extent to which the humanist thus envisaged possessed, like Fortescue’s lawyer, awareness and skills which the prince did not, he was contributing to an association a virtue of his own, an individual capacity for participation in rule, and had thus taken a step in the direction of the Aristotelian image of the citizen. In The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance,11 Arthur B. Ferguson has traced through Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith the growth of the self-image of the counselor: of his understanding of the role he played, the intellectual and political capacities he must possess in order to play it, and the public realm in which he played it, seen as an association of ruler and subjects whose relationships might be defined in terms of their reciprocal obligations to seek counsel and to give it. As Ferguson’s narrative develops, there is in some respects a growing stress on association at the expense of hierarchy; the counselor is increasingly known by his capacities, on which the prince relies, and is becoming something more than a “good” subject appealing to the conscience of a “good” ruler; and words like “civic” and “citizen” become usable by Ferguson and by some of his central figures. But the community of counsel does not become a republic in the acephalous sense; “common weal” or res publica, it remains a corpus of which the prince is head, a hierarchy of degree in which counsel is given by every man sitting in his place. (Walzer points out that the image of a diversity of particular virtues was actually better preserved in the medieval hierarchy of degree than in the inscrutable individualism of the predestinarian Calvinists.)12 In the same way, Ferguson traces how the increasing humanist ability to control secular concepts gave rise in England, as it so often did elsewhere, to an enhanced capacity to see the realm as an entity undergoing change over time;13 but it is highly significant to note what forces he sees as setting limits to this increase. The social idealists of the mid-sixteenth century saw government—the wisdom of the prince counseled by the wisdom of the realm in parliament—as capable of legislation, and legislation as capable of bringing about a more just and a more prosperous distribution of the common weal than actually existed; the humanists who “discoursed of the common weal” dedicated themselves to an understanding of the economic forces at work in society. This thrust, however, together with what ideologies of dynamism it carried with it, was turned back in favor of the static and medieval ideal of maintaining the realm as a hierarchy of degree, a frame of order which must not be shaken; there was only one order and chaos lay outside it.
What is significant here is that Ferguson’s exploration of “civic” aspects of English humanism has led us to the concepts of parliament and legislation. As we broaden our view of the different versions of civic humanism, we look for local variants of the figure of the “citizen,” the zōon politikon who rules and is ruled. In French legal humanism and the political thought of the Wars of Religion, he seems to appear chiefly in the guise of the subordinate magistrate (whether seigneur or officier) who rules and is ruled; and we ask the question, to which Bodin returned on the whole a negative answer, whether a society of such magistrates could constitute a polis or community of participation. But England possessed, in court, common law and parliament, a more intensive organization of national consultation, and instead of the magistrate exercising his subordinate or derived imperium we meet with the more many-sided, and in that respect more civic, figure of the counselor, who may appear as the country gentleman, representing a shire or borough to counsel his prince in parliament, under a writ which enjoins him to treat of all matters affecting the realm and to serve as representative of the whole body politic, in a commune consilium regni. As the sixteenth-century gentry moved massively into the representation of boroughs, they moved massively into the schools, universities, and inns of court, seeking in all these an education which equipped them to serve the prince, to counsel the prince, and to compete for local office and influence in a structure of government and jurisdiction which was at once the prince’s and theirs. The education they received may in a highly general sense be termed humanist, and in search for an English variant of politically active humanism, and for a humanist-derived mode of civic consciousness available to Englishmen, we may turn from the idealists of the mid-century toward the emergent ideologies of the parliamentary gentry.
Mid-century humanism had, perhaps, entertained the vision of parliament legislating for the commonweal; but by the end of the century, the gentlemen of the House of Commons more and more saw parliament’s function as the preservation of liberty, and liberty as rooted in a fabric of immemorial custom with which it was possible to identify every major juridical and governmental institution, up to and including parliament itself. The ideology of the Ancient Constitution can be accounted for by means of a purely structural explanation: all English law was common law, common law was custom, custom rested on the presumption of immemoriality; property, social structure, and government existed as defined by the law and were therefore presumed to be immemorial.14 But if we think of it as ideology, as coming into being as social creatures sought new ways of conceptualizing themselves, we can characterize it as a mode of civic consciousness particularly appropriate to a gentry asserting itself in parliament, in litigation, and in the local administration of the common law. And the word “civic” is not used inadvertently. Nothing could be more misleading than to picture the vehement assertion of the antiquity of English laws and liberties as an inert acceptance of “traditional society.” It was rather traditionalist than traditional—to adopt a distinction of Levenson’s15—an assertion of conservatism; and conservation is a mode of action. The Englishman who saw his realm as a fabric of custom, and himself as a custom-generating animal, saw proprietor, litigant, judge, counselor, and prince as engaged in a constant activity, one of preserving, refining and transmitting the usages and customs that made him and England what they were. The cult of customary antiquity was a peculiarly English brand of legal humanism, and the great Jacobean antiquaries, who asserted it as they began undermining it, were humanists of a very special sort; and, however remote from civic humanism in the republican and Florentine sense, it was, unmistakably and post-medievally, a species of civic consciousness. It defined, in traditionalist terms, a public realm and a mode of action therein.
We have seen that custom, as the origin of second nature, served as the best means of explaining what made a people and its laws uniquely and autonomously themselves; and wherever we read that a people must be governed by laws suited to its nature, it is second nature and customary law that are primarily intended. A claim to uniqueness was a claim to autonomy, and when it was asserted that there was nothing in English law and government that was not customary and autochthonous, the claim was being made that the English possessed a historical and immemorial sovereignty over themselves; they were not, and they had never been, anything which was not of their own making. More effectively even than the Henrician assertion that England was “an empire and hath so been acknowledged in the world,”16 this articulated a claim to national secular independence of the universal church. In French thought of the later sixteenth century, an affinity has been traced between Gallicanism, which asserted the jurisdictional autonomy of the church in France, and the labors of great scholars and antiquaries who used the sheer complexity of French legal and institutional history to argue that it was sui generis and of its own making.17 Conceptually of less sophistication, the cult of the Ancient Constitution did the same service for the Church of England as by law established.
But the historical autonomy of England in religious affairs was asserted—as that of France was not, and as does not seem to have been the case on a comparable scale in any other Protestant nation—by means of the construction of a national apocalyptic, primarily a product of the Marian exile and classically expressed in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. It seems not impossible that the conceptual origin of this English restatement of sacred history lay in the Henrician claim that England was an “empire.” If Henry VIII’s servants intended no more than an assertion of juridical status, nevertheless an empire must have a historical affiliation with Rome; and the figure of Constantine, born at York and playing a role in the Trojan and Arthurian legends of “Britain,” was ready to hand.18 But Constantine in his role as first Christian emperor, maker and unmaker of popes and councils, author or non-author of the supposed Donation, could also figure at the highest level of argument concerning the derivations of church and empire. He might appear as the “equal of the apostles” who had established the church as an extension of imperial authority, or he might appear as the grand apostate who had established a false church by an unwarranted abdication of that authority; and variations on both these themes were numerous and bewildering. Any or all of them, however—and sooner or later the same must be true of any interpretation of the church in terms of rival legal systems—must present the Body of Christ, or church militant, as appearing in history, and consequently must present a scheme of sacralized history for it to appear in. We are back at the point where the secular prince and the anti-Augustinian heretic might join hands; both desired to deny that the church on earth possessed an authority derived from the unmoving celestial hierarchies and willed by God from the extra-temporal perspective of the nunc-stans, and both had an interest in reidentifying human salvation with human history, in order to deny that the pope possessed such an authority and to explain how he had asserted a false claim to it. But if human history and human salvation were coterminous processes, a sustained historical injustice—such as one which denied this identification—must be the work of forces hostile to salvation; and it was to become near-dogma that the pope was identical with Antichrist, the false image of Christ’s return who figured in so many versions of the eschatological drama.19 The pope’s falsehood consisted not in any claim to be the returning Messiah, but in his assertion that Christ was present throughout time, in the substances of the sacrament and in the institutions of the church. Against him godly princes, upholding their purely secular authority, upheld the purity of that time in which Christ had not yet returned and it was known that he had not but would. The saeculum was more truly Christian than the false pretense of eternity maintained by Rome. If the new radical saints, each conscious of his own utter isolation before God and the utter uniqueness of each believer’s relation with God, did not see the secular prince as exercising a Christ-like authority—some probably did—they nevertheless saw him as a witness and protector of witnesses to the truth concerning Christ’s return: a judge, and at least a protector of prophets, in the new Israel.
But the growth of an English apocalyptic also stems from the circumstance that it was England which now claimed to stand responsible for its own acts in the drama of sacred history. In a sense, the imperial and apocalyptic mythologies were only means of projecting this new mode of consciousness. In the seminal modern study of Foxe, Haller points out—from a standpoint far removed from Walzer’s—that the leaders of the Marian exiles were not alienated rebels, “but high-ranking members of a displaced hierarchy and intellectual class cherishing a real prospect of returning by legitimate means to legitimate power.”20 The sign from heaven which convinced them that their nation was elect—the death of Mary and the advent of Elizabeth—ensured their legitimate return and delivered them from resort to tyrannicide and rebellion; how far they could have been pushed toward truly revolutionary alienation, had this event been long delayed, we cannot know. The point is that it was not delayed, and that the “empire” which they saw as adversary of Antichrist and witness to the truth remained “England”—a complex of secular laws, secular legitimacy, and secular history. This complex occupied an apocalyptic moment and discharged an apocalyptic role; we have another illustration of the thesis that it was the secular which necessitated the apocalyptic; but there is an important difference between this and the last time we saw such a thing happen. To Savonarola the affirmation of Florence’s apocalyptic role involved both an affirmation and a repudiation of the city’s secular past; it was the “second nature” of the Florentines which fitted them to inaugurate the renovation of the church, but in that renovation “second nature” was to be burned away. To the legal and legitimist minds of Tudor Englishmen, renovation—if they thought of the word—was primarily a matter of recovering a rightful jurisdiction over themselves (even the saint was radically legal-minded). But a jurisdiction—especially to men disposed to think of law in terms of precedent and custom—must be rooted in a past, and that past must constantly be affirmed. Consequently, the vision of England as occupying a moment of apocalyptic election entailed the vision of England discharging a special role—largely identical with the maintenance of an autonomous jurisdiction—throughout church history. Archbishop Parker, as well as John Foxe, labored to recover the details of this history, in which Joseph of Arimathea, Constantine, King John, Wyclif, and Elizabeth all played important parts;21 and the idea of England’s uniqueness in sacred history culminates in Milton’s much-quoted but quite un-John-Bullish remark that God revealed himself “as his manner is, first to his Englishmen.”22
The English apocalyptic was therefore past-facing and, initially at least, tended toward the postmillennialist assertion that the thousand years of the devil’s binding are over and the climactic struggle with Antichrist at hand, rather than to the premillennialist proclamation of a thousand-year reign of Christ and the saints, in which the renovation of all things is imminent. The former is more likely to affirm the validity of existing institutions, the latter to proclaim their imminent transcendence; two attitudes which Savonarola had brought very close together, but which here appear widely separated. The difference between them is one of choice and emphasis; the postmillennialist may still look to a reign of Christ on earth yet to come, but is frequently dramatizing his decision not to do so; but we have now returned to the point of studying apocalyptic as a mode of civic consciousness. The Elect Nation—England seen as occupying a moment and possessing a dimension in sacred history—was a theater of action, and the individual was by its structure defined—as “God’s Englishman” rather than simple “saint”—as acting a role therein. The modes of his action, however, could be and were defined in more than one way. As a subject of the “godly prince,” successor perhaps of Constantine, who ruled the Elect Nation and preserved it against encroaching Antichrist, his action was defined as his obedience; it has been convincingly shown how, to Foxean Puritans, the sin of the Laudian episcopate was that they derogated from the prince’s authority, not that they made it absolute.23 But the uniqueness of England, and so the purity of its immunity from Antichrist, could also be defined in terms of its antiquity as a community of custom; and here the activity of God’s Englishman was that of an inheritor at common law, receiving property, liberties, and customs from his ancestors and passing them on in a perpetual condition of refinement. To the men of 1628 the reaffirmation of Magna Carta and the struggle against Antichrist at home and abroad were to be much the same.24 But finally, the activity of God’s Englishman must sooner or later be defined as that of the Puritan saint; and here, a disjunction could become visible between the Elect Nation and the community of the elect. If the emphasis fell on the former, the individual’s business was to obey the prince, to continue the customs, to maintain the realm; if it fell on the latter, then the elect might do what they were called to do, and the theater of political action might consist exclusively of their relations, with God and with each other, as they did it. We can easily see that God’s Englishman might have to choose between acting as Englishman, as traditional political being, and as saint; but it is not certain that to see this is to see to the bottom of the problem.
It is suggested that the English apocalyptic—to which no close parallel seems to exist among the phenomena of Protestantism—developed because of the intensity of the English Protestant’s involvement with the secular institutions of his realm; simultaneously Erastian and chiliastic, he saw his election as identical with his membership in a historic nation, and rewrote sacred history to accommodate his election on the only terms possible. Recent work on the fairly close connection between John Foxe and John Knox suggests that the latter had relatively little sense of historic Scottish nationality, and the apocalyptic thinking of Scots Calvinism before 1637 contains no coherent account of Scottish history as that of an Elect Nation.25 If then it was a secular commitment which impelled the Puritan saint in the direction of apocalyptic, we must see him as markedly less alienated from the social order and its governance than Walzer at times suggests; and we must reexamine the role in Puritan thinking of that antinomianism which Walzer abstained from studying. Antinomianism classically arises when the believer comes to feel that the authority of God or Spirit, exercised directly over and within him, takes precedence over, and annuls, the authority of some law which he formerly acknowledged as uttering commands necessary to his salvation; in extreme cases he may symbolically break the old law to signify that he has passed beyond or above it. Christians were antinomian in respect of the Mosaic law; Joachite Spirituals in respect of the Age of the Son and the authority of the successors of St. Peter; and a premillennial chiliasm is almost invariably antinomian in respect of existing forms of authority. But we think of antinomianism, considered as a phenomenon in the sociology of religion, as a characteristic of independent sects radically alienated from both ecclesiastical and magistratical authority; and in Anabaptists, Mennonites, and other sects of the Radical Reformation, there is plenty of evidence for this phenomenon. Radical and antinomian sects of many kinds were of course abundant in the Cromwellian phase of Puritanism, but in general they were characterized by a greater degree of politicization, a greater willingness to advance programs of drastic secular reform in fields such as government, law, and the distribution of property, than characterized their Swiss, German, and Dutch equivalents; and the problem for historians has been to determine whether this simply indicates the impact, on the relatively self-conscious and highly governed society of England, of the difference between Calvinism and chiliasm, between the magisterial and radical Reformations.
It has seemed possible that this was simply a difference of degree; that the same alienation, conviction of depravity, and experience of conversion, that led to the triumph of discipline in personalities of the Calvinist kind, produced the triumph of the antinomian Spirit in personalities of the sectarian kind; but Walzer, in deliberately cutting off his analysis short of the sectarians, may be hinting that a simple further stage of extrapolation is not enough to explain the phenomena of antinomianism. If it can be accepted, as we have been suggesting, that the English saint was not radically alienated from the secular order, but on the contrary radically involved in it, and that his apocalypticism was the measure and product of this involvement, the difference between Calvinism and chiliasm will cease to appear a simple matter of two stages in the same sequence of alienation. The crucial moment will be that at which God’s Englishman, having initially believed that his nation was elect because of the intensity of his involvement in its institutions, comes to believe that some or all of these institutions are unworthy of the work to which the nation is elect. This moment has been identified by Lamont as one, frequently to be found about 1641 or 1643, at which the believer abandons the apocalyptic of Foxe in favor of that of Thomas Brightman, who declared that the Church of England was no more than the Laodicea of the third chapter of Revelations, and that the Philadelphia lay elsewhere or was yet to come.26 This is plainly a moment of antinomianism; but the laws which the elect are now rejecting are—since the church rejected is one “by law established”—of a secular character and possess a well-known secular history which must now be reevaluated and condemned. One by one, church, monarchy, and parliament itself passed into this highly specialized limbo, and each time a new sector of English history was denied and rewritten; and while the political capacities of God’s more antinomian Englishmen were bent upon the devising of new institutions to replace them, those of Englishmen of an older stamp fell back on a sullen preference for what was ancient even if it was not elect. William Prynne—again in Lamont’s analysis—emerges as one who opted for the Ancient Constitution at the end of a lifelong commitment to the Elect Nation; he closed his career heroically studying Tower records in search of the origins of Parliament, while rather pathetically comparing himself to Hilkiah the high priest who “found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.”27 There was no covenant to be found in the Tower; only usage and precedent.
Radical or conservative, God’s Englishmen might inadvertently secularize their thought either in asserting or in resisting a revolutionary impulse which we may now see as antinomian, the paradoxical outcome of a commitment to English institutions so complete that chiliasts would feel called to transform them even if the process made rational utilitarians of its adepts; while conservatives would abandon, in order to defend them, the apocalyptic they had taken up in order to affirm their significance. The dialectic of Ancient Constitution and Elect Nation was complex and made up of many more than two theses. But—at the cost of looking far ahead into the Civil War and Cromwellian years—we have now constructed a survey of modes of civic consciousness which we may hold in mind while exploring the origins of Machiavellian humanism in England. If there was ever a moment—some locate it under Protector Somerset midway in the Tudor century28—when “commonwealth” humanists might hope to use the legislative power of parliament to bring about a regime of social justice, many forces conspired to strangle it. Sheer fear of disorder compelled an obstinate adherence to the vision of England as a hierarchy of degree; the determination of the gentry to retain their established hold on land and local office ensured that, as they flocked into parliament, schools and a new expansion of consciousness, their ideology would be one which presented parliament as a court and political activity as the maintenance of a heritage of customs. The hard core of Protestants returned from exile armed with an ideology intended as much for institutionally committed Englishmen as for radically alienated saints, and sought to implement their program of radical church reform through action in parliament, inaugurating its career of claiming a political initiative even against the crown. From the use of parliament to press Puritan demands it was never possible finally to drive them, and their efforts did much both to destroy the cohesion of crown and parliament and to institute that strange partnership of antiquity-upholding gentleman and lawyer with activist and organizing saint, which was to split the Puritan mind and give it its dynamism, ensuring both revolution and the failure of revolution in the next century.
God’s Englishman was a complicated animal. If there was a revolution of the saints there was also a revolution of the counselors; but what the parliamentary gentry learned from classis, congregation and common law was a technique for organizing the House into committees which could defy the Court while inventing new precedents and new claims to antiquity. This was a far cry from citizenship in the classical sense. New modes of civic consciousness and action there were in some profusion, but as yet there was no way of envisaging the political community as the sum of these interacting modes, which we have seen to be the essence of the theory of the polis. In an important sense it is true after all that post-Elizabethan England lacked a fully developed civic consciousness, and was under the thralldom of a doctrine of double majesty. The literature of debate down to 1614 and even 1649 shows that there was a highly wrought theory of kingship and authority, a highly wrought theory of privilege and custom, a religious veneration for both, and no known means of bringing them together. Yet to say that this reveals a lack of civic consciousness is less true than to say that there was an excess of it, more than the available institutional and conceptual schemes could contain. In the unheralded collapse of the forties and fifties, attempts both radical and conservative were made to restate the terms on which Englishmen as civic beings lived with one another; and in this endeavor theories of classical republicanism played their part.
Custom and grace, then—two of the three components of the model on which this book is based—served as means of explaining a highly autonomous, late Tudor England to itself and affording it images of its own particular yet continuous existence in time. We are in search of the circumstances in which it became important to make use of the model’s third language of particularity: that based on the concepts of fortune and virtue, which in Florence appears to have become crucial only when republican consciousness reached a certain degree of intensity. Elizabethan Englishmen were well acquainted with these concepts, and not a few of them were diligent students of humanist political theory in its republican form—Shakespeare’s Coriolanus could only have been played to an audience sensitive to the idea that a balanced republic was necessary to prevent the corruption of civic virtue29—but they were not in themselves republicans. Consequently, the enormous literature of Fortune in their historical and dramatic writings is preponderantly subservient to the theme of order; the image of the Wheel is used to warn the individual against vaulting ambition which may tempt him out of his degree.30 This is not wholly incompatible with a classical vision of citizenship; it is possible within limits to say that the Few and the Many are estates which must stay in their due places and practice their proper virtues, and to that extent the republic and the hierarchy are one. Yet there is a radical difference between elements ranked in a descending chain and elements balanced against one another. The latter order is kinetic; the balance is maintained by the counterpressures, the countervailing activities, of the elements, and these must practice a relationship among themselves as well as each remaining fixed in its prescribed nature (or virtue). We have seen Donato Giannotti pursuing the implications of a balance of activities to the point where contradictions began to emerge. In the final, Boethian, analysis, the price to be paid for a life of civic activity was vulnerability to fortune; and the republic, being that community in which each individual was defined by his activity, was the community committed by its political form to contend against that vulnerability. States and nations, like individuals, might rise and fall as ambition condemned them to mount upon the Wheel, but only the republic obliged the individual to pit his virtue against fortune as a condition of his political being. Virtue was the principle of republics.
A corollary is that, once a political society was envisaged as a community of active beings, we should expect to find signs of the virtue-fortune polarity and—given the Europe-wide dissemination of Florentine literature—of a true understanding and sharing of Machiavelli’s main concerns. But we have premised that in post-Reformation England, such a consciousness would have to contend with others—the hierarchy of degree, the community of custom, the national structure of election—which defined the individual as public actor, while fixing his activity at levels lower than that which made Machiavellian man existentially dependent on his own virtue. As long as these modes of consciousness held, it would be difficult if not unnecessary to envisage the Englishman as Machiavellian citizen or England as a Machiavellian Rome; and as long as it was presumed that the individual acted in a stable scheme of moral authority, consciousness of Machiavelli would be confined to—and would distort—the disturbing and morally subversive aspects of his thought. The distortion may be further explained by the hypothesis that his moral subversion can only be fully understood when his republicanism has been fully understood and digested. The subjects of Christian princes who raged against the wicked author of Il Principe were unlikely to get things in the right perspective.31
If we premise that a true Machiavellism is to be looked for where a political society becomes highly conscious that its vita is activa to the point of creating its own morality, it is significant that the first English Machiavellians were courtiers. Post-Reformation England was still a princely society, and the social microcosm around the prince was the milieu in which men became most conscious of themselves as actively governing beings. Ideally, a court’s vision of itself was Platonic, a matter of degree and of planets revolving in their appointed orbits around a central sun; and even when it became evident that Greenwich and Whitehall were not beautiful and harmless Urbinos but restless, ruthless, and sadomasochist vortices of power, the older perspective ensured that the Wheel of Fortune remained the image of the courtier’s life in a sense enduringly medieval. He fell only because he had sought to rise. But the literature also betrays a perception—which Augustine and Boethius would have understood even while repudiating—that the courtier was what he could scarcely help being. He had his virtus, his ingenium, which impelled him to act, to seek both service and power, and which exposed him to fortuna. The more this was realized, the more the court became a world with its own moral laws, and the courtier must by his nature expose himself not only to the insecurities but to the moral dilemmas of life there. A late, Caroline, expression of this awareness is to be found in the great letter written by Sir Edward Stanhope to Wentworth as the latter was resolving to take up the Lord Deputyship for Ireland.32 But though the Elizabethan and Jacobean Court produced much memorable language articulating the loathing and fascination felt toward it, no guide or manual to the courtier’s life attained to the level of political vision found in Machiavelli or Han Fei. As a political community, the court was not fully natural to man; it engaged too few aspects of too few personalities. Only the republic posed the full moral challenge.
It may be arguable that something of the politicized consciousness of the Court was transferred to the Country; that as discontented noblemen and gentlemen intensified their sense of community in parliament and the shires, England itself came to be envisaged as a commonwealth in which the relationships between the estates and the sovereign were kinetic, liable to disturbance by fortune and capable of being described in terms bordering upon the Machiavellian. But our language here must still be tentative. Older modes of expression, centered upon the medieval image of authority descending from God and defining each degree in its place, were still so strong that elements of a republican vision must be thought of as making head, slowly and piecemeal, against a prevailing stream; and when we encounter—as we do—fragments of thought which are recognizably Machiavellian, there is the further difficulty that these may have been filtered through an intervening mode of expression known as Tacitism, whose relationship to Machiavellism is ambiguous.33 The Tacitean vision accepted the prince’s authority as natural, or at least established, rather than innovative, and was thus enabled to share in the general denunciation of Machiavelli as skeptical toward authority to the point of atheism; but it focused upon the relations of courtiers, senators, and other aristocrats with a jealous and suspicious prince and was thus able to draw upon Machiavellian modes of depicting a restless and dangerous political world which, however, was part of the universal structure of authority. The Tacitean prince did well to be suspicious, since he reigned naturally and legitimately over men who were no better than the real (or fallen) world allowed them to be; yet he might not be able to resist the tendency of his suspicion to run to excess and distort the natural and legitimate functioning of his power—it was a trope that jealousy was a characteristic of tyrants. Bacon’s Henry VII is a portrait of a prince who was, on the whole, successful in keeping his suspicion in check; but we are more than once told that though this king’s nobles were not in terror of him, yet they did not cooperate with him more than they must.34
To the extent to which such language, Tacitean, Machiavellian, or other in its origins, came to be applied to the relation between the king and the estates or orders of his realm of England, the problem of stability within the realm would come to be described in terms other than those, predominantly medieval, which Tudor writers had used for dealing with the wars of Lancaster and York. In the writings of some of the most powerful—and unhappy—theoretical intellects among the post-Elizabethan courtiers, we can—subject to the above warnings—detect signs that such a thing was beginning to happen. Fulke Greville’s long versified Treatise of Monarchy is, on the face of it, couched entirely in terms of a descending thesis of power: the king’s authority is absolute, not to be resisted by men, and compared with aristocracy and democracy only to the entire disadvantage of the latter as alternative modes of sovereignty. But it exists only in response to an imperfection in the world, and that imperfection is the result of a mutation, innovation, or fall. There was a golden age “before the tymes of story,” in which order maintained itself without rule by sword or scepter, but
some disproportioned tyde
Of times self humours hath that commerce drown’d
To which this image showes those tymes were bound.35
“The tymes of story” began when men required to be ruled by a sovereign whose dread must keep them in order; and he is presented not simply as a judge, enforcing those eternal laws which men no longer obey of themselves, but a ruler practicing a manipulative statecraft, which works upon his subjects’ now perplexed, fearful, and power-seeking natures in ways they do not fully understand. As an art it is arcane, because the beings on whom it is practiced are no longer wholly rational, and to the extent to which the king is a man, sharing in the general depravity, it may be arcane even to him. In a fallen world, even divinely commanded authority has the character of praxis rather than of pure norm. What makes the king’s power absolute is the fact of moral imperfection, and the conclusion seems inescapable that it may share in moral imperfection itself. Through the king, God commands it so; but even the king may not know why. The distance between the king as God’s deputy executing his judgments and the conqueror as God’s scourge executing his punishments is great but not unbridgeable; and in this context many writers and preachers were to rehearse the ambiguities of God’s warnings to the Israelites when they would have a king. Greville, taking up a classical theme, explains how the “strong tyrant” will, if he is wise, rule in a manner almost indistinguishable from that of a good king36—a subject treated by Aristotle and disturbingly exploited by Machiavelli. But since what makes the tyrant rule virtuously is not moral wisdom and rationality, but mere worldly prudence, he does not fully understand the reason for his own virtue. We are back in the world of Machiavelli’s centaur, and there is a disturbing suggestion that all kings were centaurs in the beginning—“strong tyrants” in at least half of their natures.
There is a disjunction between the king’s authority and his intellect: the former is absolute because the latter is imperfect, and since the imperfection of intellect is shared by the king with all men, the authority which God commands over all fallen men is located in the individual as king only providentially and must be exercised absolutely, but at the same time only prudentially and not rationally. The way is now open to say that because the king shares imperfection of intellect with his subjects, he should take counsel of their laws and customs and of themselves in occasional and regular assemblies; but that because authority is, under God, his alone, he can never be obliged to take counsel of law or parliament and does so only because prudence enjoins it. But this is to say merely that his descending authority meets, in imperfection of intellect, with the imperfect intellects of his subjects, to pool experience and take counsel of one another; to the extent to which experience is cognate with reason, one can say that here the head and members are forming a fairly rational corpus misticum (if rationality can be a matter of degree at all). There is, however, a shift of emphasis, perceptible and important in the Jacobean mind, away from counsel and toward statecraft. If, at the point where king and people meet in imperfection of intellect, the people are thought of as desirous, fearful, and perplexed, the king is not only exercising a thunderous authority over them, not merely pooling their experience with his prudence, but also practicing upon them arcane arts of manipulation.37 To do this he must possess arts unknown to them; he must perhaps know things about their natures which they do not know themselves; but since it is possible to conceive that his authority is the effect of an imperfection of intellect from which he is not himself exempt, and the arts of his statecraft arcane even to him, it is also conceivable that he might, when meeting with his estates, be manipulated as well as manipulator, and the head and members engaged in a competitive exercise of statecraft upon one another. But here the Tudor passion for descending authority interposed a most effective obstacle; such a thing could be thought of only to be denounced; but we can see that if the point were ever reached where it must be admitted that the estates were practicing an active and effective statecraft of their own, and that the arcana imperii had become available to the few and the many, the only means of remoralising the corpus misticum would be to reconstitute it as a republic, in the proper sense of a partnership between different modes of virtue and intelligence. Such a republic might be seen as a response, even more effective than monarchically descending authority, to the imperfection of intellect and the disorder of time; or it might be seen as the restoration of the golden age “before the tymes of story.” To the subjects of James I, however, such a conceptual—let alone actual—reconstitution of the realm was as good as inconceivable.
It was, then, possible to incorporate elements of civic and even Machiavellian thought with the dominant paradigm of monarchy. As the descending authority of the prince met with the civic capacity of the estates, these could be thought of as contributing either their experience or their activity—and as the two houses of parliament learned increasingly to take the initiative, the latter became increasingly apparent. There was an upper house embodying the nobility, a lower house representing the commonalty, and no shortage of classically based language in which these might appropriately be termed the few and the many; and there is consequently no great need to establish the first occasions on which it was said that English government associated the monarchy with the aristocracy and the democracy in ways approved by the best philosophers of antiquity.38 So long as authority remained essentially with the king, however, his need to consult or even treat with the nobility and the commons remained merely prudential, and language savoring of the mixed government of Aristotle and Polybius was technically inappropriate. It was nevertheless far from unknown, and we shall see that when the monarchical paradigm collapsed and the king was forced to admit that, whether of force or of right, he shared his authority with others, terminology was already available for characterizing the government of England as a balanced relationship of king, lords, and commons.
The important point here, however, is that a normative theory of balanced or mixed government was incompatible with Tudor notions of descending authority, and that the elements of republican theory were therefore best adapted to dealing with imperfectly legitimized situations. A king was likely to appear most Machiavellian where there were fewest laws, or even arcana, to guide him, and where the independent wills of the upper or lower estates were most active and least guided by legitimate authority. It was consequently in the study of statecraft that Jacobean intellects were most likely to lay hold upon those elements of the republican tradition which ascribed distinctive characteristics—interests, humors, particulari—to kings, nobilities and peoples, and considered how these might conflict or be reconciled. The concern with secondary causes, often presented as a distinguishing mark of Jacobean historiography, might arise in this way and, to the extent that it did, would appear Machiavellian and skeptical rather than sanguine and scientific.
The most recent authority on the writings of Sir Walter Ralegh desires to exclude The Maxims of State—as The Cabinet Council was excluded earlier—from the canon of works composed by Ralegh, while conceding the possibility that it was found among his papers “et faisai[t] partie de sa documentation.”39 There is no reason to suppose the same of The Cabinet Council, though the latter seems to be by a contemporary and perhaps by a minor courtier;40 but if Ralegh knew The Maxims of State, he knew a work in which the classical types of government, both good and bad, simple and mixed, are set out and enlarged by the distinction of monarchies into hereditary and elective, absolute and mixed, inherited and acquired by conquest, and in which means are considered for the preservation of every type and divided into “rules,” which are ethically centered, and “sophisms,” which are not. The Maxims of State alludes to Machiavelli with disapproval, but any contemporary reader would see that it was “Machiavellian” in the sense that it was a work of ragione di stato, in which intelligence was applied to the preservation of unsanctioned as well as sanctioned forms of rule. What is striking is the amount of attention paid to the distribution of arms in ways appropriate to monarchies, aristocracies and popular states;41 for we have learned to consider this a characteristic of works written in the Florentine tradition, where the distribution of arms was among the most important “secondary causes” of the prevalence of aristocracy or democracy, liberty or corruption; and evidence of prior theoretical study by Ralegh on this theme would be of value in explaining its prominence in The Prerogative of Parliaments, the most challenging and original of the political works accepted as by his hand. This dialogue between a councilor of state and a justice of the peace, both of whom have served in the House of Commons, is the first among several analyses of the disordered relations between Stuart kings and their parliaments, with which we shall be concerned because of the “Machiavellian” character of their social analysis.42 An ironical and enigmatic quality pervades the whole work, with the councillor becoming increasingly overbearing and corrupt; and it is assumed throughout that prudence, rather than justice in the obligatory sense, enjoins the king to consult the wishes of his parliaments, aiming at keeping them attached to him while himself retaining complete freedom of action. Yet there is no need to suppose anything ironical about Ralegh’s acceptance of royal authority as legitimate; he merely accepts that its nature is such that it cannot be exercised except by means that must be ironically regarded, that is to say by statecraft. The king governs by art; that is, he governs in a world which is not to be perfectly known, which is therefore mutable and a prey to secondary causes. It is in this context that we learn from Ralegh that part of the king’s problems in dealing with his parliaments lies in the decay of the private military power formerly possessed by great nobles. The maintenance of arms and soldiers is now a matter for the public authority, and the public purse.43
Here we are without doubt looking, from one angle, at a direct awareness possessed by Englishmen of changes going on in their social and political life. Everyone knew about the wars of York and Lancaster, fought by armies which followed great magnates and overmighty subjects; and in the absence of any dominant literary paradigm to account for knowledge of retainers and “bastard feudalism,” we must accept the documentary evidence which suggests that there was a true oral tradition conveying the memory of these fairly recent phenomena. Down until the late seventeenth century, cases can be found of speeches and pamphlets alluding to “blue coats” and “coats and badges” in ways which indicate that the audience knew of these marks of livery which gentlemen had once worn to show their dependence upon great lords, and that it took little pleasure in being reminded.44 But Ralegh, like others, is clearly employing the statement that magnates have lost their former military power in order to develop the general hypothesis that a change has taken place in the social and political relations between king, nobility, and people; and while this passage in The Prerogative of Parliaments forms part of an increasing historical awareness that England possessed a feudal past, the Florentine tradition of regarding the distribution of arms as an index to the distribution of political capacity furnishes the appropriate paradigmatic context for the growth of ideas about the significance of this past in explaining English political change. Ralegh knew his Machiavelli; and Francis Bacon, who also knew him to a degree which might have been discussed at much greater length, not only alludes—both in his History of Henry VII and in his Essays—to the emancipation of the yeomanry from military dependence on their lords, but discusses, in contexts emphasizing empire, expansion, and the greatness of states, the idea that infantry form the nerve of an army.45 He was tapping the tradition—most authoritatively stated by Fortescue—of contrasting the sturdiness of English yeomen with the misery of French peasants, and suggesting that what made the former tough fighters also made them difficult to tax and govern without their consent;46 but once this tradition was stated in a Machiavellian context, it must seem as if made for it.
There were, then, elements of Machiavellism in Jacobean thought: elements, that is, of a “machiavellian” account of the English polity, depicting it as a one, few and many held together by arms, statecraft, and moral ambiguity. From such an account it might not be too long a step to recommending its reconstitution on the higher (if still not unambiguous) moral level of the republic. But only the breakdown of monarchy and civil war permitted such a step to be actually taken. So long as descending authority met with ascending custom, the king’s obligation to respect the privileges of his subjects remained prudential; it was not the consequence of a division and sharing of authority between him and them. John Pym, the future leader of revolution, impeaching Manwaring in 1628 for stating the descending thesis so strongly as to suggest that the sovereign had right to every man’s goods, used language which revealed this in an interesting way. He said:
The form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of a state to the common good; and as those parts give strength and ornament to the whole, so they receive from it again strength and protection in their several stations and degrees. If this mutual relation and intercourse be broken, the whole frame will quickly be dissolved, and fall in pieces, and instead of this concord and interchange of support, whilst one part seeks to uphold the old form of government, and the other part to introduce a new, they will miserably consume and devour one another. Histories are full of the calamities of whole states and nations in such cases. It is true that time must needs bring some alterations, and every alteration is a step and degree towards a dissolution; those things only are eternal which are constant and uniform. Therefore it is observed by the best writers upon this subject that those commonwealths have been most durable and perpetual which have often reformed and recomposed themselves according to their first institution and ordinance, for by this means they repair the breaches and counterwork the ordinary and natural effects of time.47
Pym’s language blends hierarchy with republic. On the one hand, there is a “great chain of being” which can be thrown into disorder by the defection of any one link from its due place or degree; on the other, the chain is a “whole,” its members parts and their participation far enough from the observance of a static order to be termed “mutual relation and intercourse … concord and interchange of support”; and the resistance of order to the naturally debilitating effects of time is to consist of a Machiavellian ridurre ai principii. But it is still unclear whether this is to be more than the reconstitution of the hierarchy. The language is close to suggesting that the king is one of the parts of the whole, in which case it would become necessary to specify what he, and what each other part, contributes toward the “mutual … intercourse” which would in turn become a partnership in shared government. But Pym does not seem to be taking this crucial step from mixed monarchy to mixed government. The language of degree guards him from taking it, and the ridurre ai principii could consist of the maintenance of ancient custom as well as of “priority and place.” He goes on:
There are plain footsteps of those laws in the government of the Saxons; they were of that vigour and force as to overlive the Conquest, nay, to give bounds and limits to the Conqueror, whose victory gave him first hope. But the assurance and possession of the Crown he obtained by composition, in which he bound himself to observe these and the other ancient laws and liberties of the kingdom, which afterwards he likewise confirmed by oath at his coronation. From him the said obligation descended to his successors. It is true they have been often broken, they have been often confirmed by charters of kings, by acts of parliaments, but the petitions of the subjects upon which those charters and acts were founded were ever petitions of right, demanding their ancient and due liberties, not suing for any new.48
Here is the mythology of the Ancient Constitution, in 1628 at a high tide with the great debate over the Petition of Right to which Pym alludes. But if the liberties of the subject were rooted in custom and birthright, property and inheritance—the mechanisms of antiquity—they could not arise from, or entail, any sharing of positive authority between king and people. Pym was successful enough in arguing that the king had not made, and implying that he had not granted or conceded, the liberties; but that is all which separates him from the argument to be used by Wentworth six months later, in which descending authority and ascending liberty have only degree and custom to unite them.
Princes are to be indulgent, nursing fathers to their people; their modest liberties, their sober rights, ought to be precious in their eyes; the branches of their government be for shadow, for habitation, the comfort of life, repose, safe and still under the protection of their sceptres. Subjects on the other side ought with solicitous eyes of jealousy to watch over the prerogatives of a crown; the authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government, which contains each part in due relation to the whole, and which once shaken … all the frame falls together.… Verily, these are those mutual intelligences of love and protection descending, and loyalty ascending, which should pass … between a king and his people. Their faithful servants must look equally on both: weave, twist these two together in all their counsels; study, labour to preserve each without diminishing or enlarging either, and by running in the worn, wonted channels, treading the ancient bounds, cut off early all disputes from between them. For whatever he be that ravels forth into questions the right of a king and of a people, shall never be able to wrap them up again into the comeliness and order he found.…49
The disputes were not cut off, and the questions were not wrapped up again; but only when debates of this order had become utterly unmanageable did reformulations of the English political order in either republican or Machiavellian terms become more than the expression of a private alienation like that of Ralegh. Once it was admitted that the partnership of authority and liberty had broken down, it could be admitted that government was a sharing of power in a Polybian mixed constitution, and the way was open for further conceptual explorations. But the admission was made reluctantly, by minds clinging to the vocabularies of monarchy and common law; and even after the breach was made, the minds that moved out on to the fortune-tossed waters of republican theory did so under the guidance of theologically based concepts, of casuistry and apocalyptic, which did much to prevent and divert the development of Machiavellian categories of thought. We shall see that English Machiavellism appeared—as Machiavelli’s own thinking had done—in the defeat of a chiliastic revolution; but we shall also find that there was an unexpected sequel.
1 Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (above, ch. 1, n. 32); History of Political Thought in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965); The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). For a vigorous critique, see Francis Oakley, “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Walter Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Politics,” Past and Present 60 (1973), 3-48.
2 De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ch. XIII.
3 Above, pp. 14-16.
4 E.g., Denys Hay in A. Molho and J. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honour of Hans Baron (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).
5 For full title see above, ch. 1, n. 30.
6 Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (see above, ch. II, n. 22).
7 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958); Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964).
8 Walzer, pp. viii, 115, n. 3.
9 Walzer, pp. 1-2, 16. He refers to Koenigsberger, “The Organisation of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 27 (1955), 335-51.
10 Walzer, pp. 1-4, 13-16, 19; Hanson, pp. viii-ix, 2, 7, 9, 11, 18, 336-44, 349-54.
11 Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965).
12 Walzer, ch. V, “The Attack upon the Traditional Political World,” pp. 148-98.
13 Ferguson, ch. XIII, “The Commonweal and the Sense of Change: Some Implications,” pp. 363-400.
14 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, chs. II and III.
15 This antithesis recurs throughout Levenson’s writings (above, ch. VIII, n. 54), denoting a difference to be drawn between the mere transmission of a tradition and the defensive conceptualization of either tradition or transmission. (For another elaboration of this theme, cf. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 233-72.) The theme of Confucian China and its Modern Fate led Levenson to stress how a tradition might die when it needed to be conceptualized in tradition-alistic terms; but for his comparison between China and late 18th-century England—where this did not follow—see his Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (2d ed., 1967), pp. 151-52.
16 Preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533). R. Koebner, Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 53-55, and below, n. 18.
17 Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, especially chs. VI, IX, and X.
18 F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1967), p. 83; he cites R. Koebner, “The Imperial Crown of this Realm’: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great and Polydore Vergil,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 26 (1953), 29-52.
19 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule; Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
20 Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (above, ch. II, n. 22), p. 85.
21 Haller, pp. 63-70, 108-109, 137-38, 149-72; Levy, pp. 87-97, 101-105, 114-23.
22 Milton, Areopagitica; Works, IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), p. 340.
23 William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600-1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 15-21.
24 See the speech of Rouse against Manwaring in Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England, II (1807), 377-79.
25 Arthur H. Williamson, “Antichrist’s Career in Scotland: The Imagery of Evil and the Search for a National Past,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington University, 1973.
26 Lamont, Marginal Prynne, pp. 59-64; Godly Rule, pp. 49-52.
27 Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 159, and generally, pp. 155-62; Lamont, Marginal Prynne, pp. 175-92.
28 W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: the Young King (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), pp. 416-26, 432-38; Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen, pp. 271-73.
29 See Huffman, cited above (ch. X, n. 2).
30 Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 212-25. For a concept of fortuna prevalent among noble houses and their dependents, very far from the Court, but not basically different from the more traditional images there prevailing, see M. E. James, Past and Present 48 (1970), 71-78, and 60 (1973), 52.
31 The best account of English anti-Machiavellism is Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
32 Perez Zagorin, “Sir Edward Stanhope’s Advice to Thomas Wentworth …,” The Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964), 298-320.
33 Levy, pp. 237-51; Peter Burke, “Tacitism,” in T. A. Dorey (ed.), Tacitus (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
34 Bacon, “History of the Reign of King Henry VII,” Works (eds. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, London, 1890), VI, 242; “Of Empire,” VI, 422. Levy, pp. 252-68, examines Tacitean historiography as exemplified in Bacon and Sir John Hayward. See also his introduction to his edition of The Reign of King Henry VII (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972).
35 G. A. Wilkes (ed.), Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke: The Remains, Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 34 (stanza 1, line 1), 39 (stanza 18, lines 3-5).
36 Wilkes, pp. 78-82 (stanzas 171-91).
37 Hence perhaps the contemporary fascination with the moral problem of how far a king might dissimulate with an unmoral subject, short of actually lying to him. See George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957) where Puritan and Machiavellian lines of thought are shown converging.
38 Corinne Comstock Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 9-23.
39 Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh Ecrivain (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), pp. 67-70.
40 Lefranc, p. 64.
41 Oldys and Birch (eds.), The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt. (Oxford: at the University Press, 1829), VIII, 1-36.
42 Ibid., 157-221.
43 Ibid., pp. 163, 183-85.
44 E.g., Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England … (London, 1677), pp. 74-81: “It is as well known among them”—i.e., factious members of the House of Commons—“to what Lord each of them retaine, as when formerly they wore Coats and Badges.” See also Henry Neville, below, p. 418.
45 Bacon, “History of the Reign of King Henry VII,” Works, VI, 93-95; “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,” VI, 446-47. N. Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli (Genoa, 1936), remains an important study of this relationship.
46 Fortescue, ed. Plummer, The Governance of England (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 137-42.
47 Quoted in J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 17.
48 Ibid.
49 Kenyon, pp. 18-19.