CHAPTER XII

THE ANGLICIZATION OF THE REPUBLIC

B) Court, Country and Standing Army

[I]

IN THE TWO PRECEDING CHAPTERS we have examined the emergence and establishment of civic and Machiavellian modes of understanding politics in the language and thought of Stuart and Puritan England. The conceptual universe which obtained there was very different from that of Florence, and we had to go a long way about to understand why it became necessary to envisage England as a classical republic at all; but it may still be described as the same universe, dominated by the same paradigms, as those employed in constructing the model which has guided this book. The world of particular events was ill understood and regarded as a consequence of human irrationality, a zone of secular instability which it was the business of politics to control (if it was not the sin of politics to have created it); and the paradigms of custom, grace, and fortune provided the vocabularies available for guiding the intellect through the dangerous paths of historical existence. When civil war afflicted a monarchy which had been considered a representation of eternal order, we encountered one group of thinkers (to which Hobbes in a sense belonged) prepared to isolate a timeless “moment of nature,” and out of it to reconstitute authority as a rigorously natural phenomenon; but the heterogeneous arguments of Nedham, and the paradoxical relationship discovered between Hobbes and Harrington, showed us the appeal to nature and authority coexisting closely with an appeal to fortune, anakuklōsis, and the republic, and this latter with a further appeal to grace, illumination, and apocalypse. It can be contended, therefore, that down to the exhaustion of the Puritan radical impulses, English political thought continued to face the challenge of the epistemology of the saeculum, and that the vision of England as a classical republic was constructed as a means of meeting that challenge, in the terms in which the languages familiar to us both posed it and recommended its solution.

During the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, however, Western political and social thought passed from its post-medieval to its early modern stage. A massive increase in the capacity for historical self-understanding was one feature of this transition, and it could not have occurred without considerable modification of that rigorously limited epistemology of the secular with which we have been concerned. The causes of epistemological change in this era were numerous and complex, but we are going to find that the language of republican humanism played an important part in the process, and consequently entered upon a paradoxical relationship with the epistemology that had helped to give it birth. The civic humanists of the Renaissance had faced the almost insoluble problem of constituting the republic as both a universal community of value and a phenomenon in the world of particularity; their theory had consequently presented it as a device for mobilizing all rationality and all value, and remaining stable as a totality of virtue. This set of problems remained fundamental for post-Renaissance and Enlightenment minds; but in the intellectual lineage running through Bruni, Machiavelli, and Harrington, theories of mixed government, of arms, and finally of property had provided—at least for those able to overlook Machiavelli’s underlying pessimism—a set of norms for the attainment of stability which reduced the totality of virtue to concrete and manageable terms. What we shall see happening is that these became parameters for the measurement of historical change. To the extent that they did so they greatly increased the capacity for historical understanding, simply by enriching its technical vocabulary. But at the same time they obliged thinkers to evaluate change negatively, as a movement away from the norms which defined it, as they defined stability, rationality, and virtue. The ancient equation of change with degeneration and entropy thus held fast; what was new in the situation was that it could now be defined not as sheer disorder, but in terms of intelligible social and material processes. The antithesis of virtue ceased to be fortuna, but became corruption instead. An increase in the capacity of Western men to understand history presented itself in the form of an acute and growing awareness of the potential quarrel between value and history, virtue and history, personality and history; and the growth of theories of progress during the eighteenth century is not to be understood without understanding of this counterpoint. Such was to be the final contribution of the classical image of man as finding his fulfillment in citizenship. A romantic theory of personality was the necessary response.

These movements of thought will be considered as occurring mainly in an English and American context, and as a preliminary step it is desirable to ask what general changes seem to have taken place in the languages of custom, grace, and fortune, following the revolutionary upheavals of the middle seventeenth century. First it should be noted that the habit of presenting English politics in terms of grace and apocalyptic underwent after 1660 a rather sharp decline. The vocabulary of Godly Rule and the Elect Nation, already perhaps eroded by disillusionment, now seemed part of that spirit of “enthusiasm” which resurgent Anglicanism sought to expunge for the next century and more. The apocalyptic dimension was, indeed, too integrally a part of the age’s thinking to be merely canceled and annulled; it survived in preaching, in literature, and in several areas of the public mind;1 but as a recognized political language with radical possibilities it was long eclipsed and never fully recovered. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments survived as a martyrology and a source of atrocity stories, but ceased to form part of the essential scaffolding of the English mind. Ernest Tuveson² has, however, shown that there were ways in which apocalyptic continued to perform its characteristic if paradoxical function as a means of secularization. The revolutionary chiliasts had increasingly envisaged the millennium as a period in which the rational powers of the human mind should be sanctified, illumined, and set free to rule; and as rational religion steadily prevailed over prophetic “enthusiasm,” the apocalyptic mode remained viable, and appealed to Anglicans of the latitudinarian tradition as a means of depicting a future utopia in which men should have learned from God all that he had to teach them. There are signs of a paradox in the English intellectual scene: republicans like Toland, in so many ways the heirs of the Puritans, emerge as Deists and foes of the prophetic tradition, while the apocalyptic mode of thought is carried on by latitudinarians who are professed enemies of “enthusiasm.” But the republic as millennium has been important enough to our theme to warn us to watch for apocalyptic overtones in post-Puritan republicanism, and it is significant also that in the American colonies, where the revulsion against “enthusiasm” was never so great, Tuveson finds it possible to speak of an “apocalyptic Whiggism” and audible notes of messianism may be heard to this day. But it was one thing for millennial expectation to serve as a framework in which to present schemes of rational optimism and rational explanation; quite another for it to serve as a surrogate in the absence of any ability to supply them. Its day was not done, but it was for the present removed from the center of attention.

The language of custom, on the other hand, seems to have both survived and revived during and after the restoration of the monarchy. The ideological context of Harrington’s writings was that of an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the revival of a house of lords and the return of government by three estates—the formula of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions which had equated the classical balance of one, few, and many with the traditional structure of king, lords, and commons. Every step in the process of restoration which began in 1658—the return to the traditional franchise, to the hereditary peerage, and finally to the historic monarchy itself—was a return, under an increasingly thin veil of “mixed government,” to that Ancient Constitution whose legitimacy and authority were held to derive from the immemorial continuities of custom. The writings of Sir Matthew Hale (d. 1675), the Chief Justice who had upheld the common law throughout the Protectorate, form one of the most brilliant articulations3 of the philosophy of custom—of usage, presumption,⁴ and prescription—that links Fortescue, Coke, and Edmund Burke. It is true that, a few years after Hale’s death, the doctrine of the Ancient Constitution underwent unforgettably damaging attacks from a group of Tory scholars led by Robert Brady, who employed the feudal interpretation of English history to demonstrate that the constitution was neither immemorial nor customary, but owed its being to royal action and social change.⁵ But it would be an oversimplification to suppose that the historic constitution was now prepared to abandon its foundation in antiquity. It is argued by Corinne Weston⁶ that the assertion by Exclusionists of the antiquity of the commons, which called down the rebuttals of Brady and his friends, was intended to claim for the two houses that coordinate authority in legislation which the King’s Answer had seemed to concede them in 1642, and that the intention of the Tory writers was to refute this claim and leave the king in possession of the initiative. If this interpretation can be accepted, it would follow that it was not their main purpose to set the authority of the Crown above that of custom, but to deny that the constitution was reducible to any formal distribution of powers. Its true character, they argued, must be found in complex processes and the actions of past kings and parliaments, dictated by the needs of the moments in which they were taken. Such a perspective is not altogether unlike that of Hale’s philosophy of custom, in which every moment is unique and part of a continuous flow of emergencies; the only, if crucial, difference is that the historian proposes to know and resurrect each past moment in its particularity, the lawyer merely to presume its existence in its continuity with others. But wherever there were common lawyers, the language of use, tradition, and immemorial antiquity was sure to flourish; it did so throughout the eighteenth century, alongside many different modes of thought, and its reassertion by Burke himself was neither archaism nor antiquarianism.7

The third language of our model is that with whose further history we are concerned, but we should remind ourselves that it was no longer founded upon the primacy of ideas about fortune. Calvinist predestinarianism, the growth from many sources of a vocabulary of secondary causation, perhaps the decay of the Aristotelian stress upon form and telos, had heavily eroded the conception of external circumstance as a random, irrational, deforming force. It may also be arguable (it usually is) that changing social conditions were exercising an influence as well; an interesting study in historical semantics might be written to show how a man’s or woman’s “fortune” came to bear the predominantly monetary meanings of inheritance, acquisition, or dowry.⁸ At all events, we are about to enter upon a period in which the terms virtue, virtus, and virtù are of great significance in their Roman and Renaissance connotations, but their antithesis is no longer circumstantial fortuna so much as historical corruption. A general reason for this we already know. The material and moral conditions necessary to the commonwealth in which virtue was possible had been established in a series of increasingly acceptable paradigms; the problem now seemed to be legislative and political—could these conditions be established, and if so could they be maintained?—and to admit of answers in material and moral, rather than voluntarist or charismatic, terms. The virtù of the prince seemed of less immediate concern than the virtue of the legislator, senator, or citizen. But to understand the exact shapes in which these problems presented themselves, we have to begin by understanding how it was that the formulations of Machiavellian and Harringtonian republicanism came to appear appropriate in the parliamentary monarchy of Restoration England.

[II]

The moment at which this began to happen can be conveniently located at—and in fact has not yet been traced much earlier than—the year 1675, in which also Hale died and the controversy over the feudal origins of parliament began again to get under way. The first known authors of what has been called the neo-Harringtonian interpretation9 of English politics were the writer of a pamphlet entitled A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country,¹⁰ who may just possibly have been John Locke and was certainly someone as close as he was to the Earl of Shaftesbury,¹¹ and Shaftesbury himself in a speech to the House of Lords.¹² Other more or less Shaftesburean pamphlets may be associated with these, and in 1677 Andrew Marvell, a more independent figure, published his Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which belongs to the same intellectual stream. Finally, in 1680, at the height of the controversy over the Bill of Exclusion, Henry Neville, an old associate of Harrington himself and not, strictly speaking, an Exclusionist at all,¹³ published Plato Redivivus, a political dialogue which may be taken as the culmination of the first attempt to restate Harringtonian doctrine in a form appropriate to the realities of the Restoration.

There are three circumstances which are crucial to the understanding of this first manifestation of neo-Harringtonianism. The first is that Shaftesbury was contending against the endeavors of the king’s minister, Danby, to build up a “Court party” in the House of Commons by means involving patronage, places, and pensions. The second is that he chose to link this allegedly sinister influence with the growth of a professional or “standing” army. The third is that his argument was not only delivered in the House of Lords—in which he sat—but was, like Neville’s after him, intimately bound up with the fact of the House’s continued existence. To take these in order, the policies of Danby are usually taken as marking the revival of the Crown’s efforts to master the arts of parliamentary management, at which the first two Stuarts, as well as Oliver Protector, had been notably unsuccessful; its importance for our purposes is that the polemical counterattack promoted by Shaftesbury restated the old antithesis of “Court” and “Country” in a new form, one based on employment of the civic and republican concept of “corruption,” in a version which owed much to Harrington and was at the same time decisive in developing the theory known to us as “the separation of powers.” The “Court” which came under attack from this time on was composed no longer of courtiers or of servants of the king’s prerogative, so much as of “ministers”—a key term, usually of opprobrium, in Whig ideology—who were seen as employing patronage in the attempt to render parliament compliant with the administration’s policies. Opposition politicians hostile to these endeavors sought to represent them as illegitimate, and did so by terming patronage “corruption”—not merely in the sense that it overstepped the proper limits of royal favor and entered the sphere of bribery and venality, but also in the sense that we noted first in Guicciardini: the substitution of private for public authority, of dependence for independence. Patronage, it was argued by the pioneers of the “Country” ideology, rendered representatives of the people, who ought to be as independent as those they represented, dependent upon the Court and the ministers from whom they received it; and dependence was worse, because more lasting, than mere venality—if it was bad that a member should receive a purse of guineas for voting with the Court, it was ten times worse that he should receive a pension, or hold an office, in the Court’s gift, since this rendered subservience to the Court his permanent interest. From this there arose two of the most recurrent if never-satisfied demands in the “Country” political program: that for the exclusion of officeholders or “placemen” from the House of Commons, and that for short, i.e., frequently elected, parliaments—triennial if annual could not be secured—on the grounds that to send members regularly back to their constituents for reelection was the best means of ensuring that they did not become dependents of the Court.

It is important to realize that this demand—with its echoes of 1647-1648 and the Good Old Cause—was consciously seen as a Machiavellian ridurre ai principii, and by enthusiasts almost as a Savonarolan rinnovazione; it was designed to secure the same principle as Harrington had aimed at with his mechanisms of rotation, namely the perpetual renewal of independence, freedom, and virtue. The people were free and independent, as was the role of their representative; the moment of election, then—we should recall the raptures of Harrington’s Hermes de Caduceo14—was a moment of freedom, nature, and political innocence, in which a basic principle of government was affirmed; and, as Machiavelli would have agreed, such could not be affirmed too often. But if the freedom of people and representative consisted in their independence, it followed, to men who had read Harrington and to men who had not needed to read him, that freedom and independence consisted in property. The gentry and freeholders of the shires and county boroughs, whom the term “Country” normally comprised, were entitled in these terms to see themselves as a classical populus, a community of virtue, and to see their virtue as consisting in their freeholds. But it was at that very point that the menace of “corruption” became actual; place and pension constituted a species of property, or at least of livelihood, one which rendered the recipient dependent upon the donor; Marvell compared such clients with the blue-coated retainer of bastard feudalism; and the patrons on whom the corrupt representative became dependent might not be merely some powerful faction—setta or intelligenza in the Florentine vocabulary—of dominant “particular men,” but the ministers of the royal executive, forming either a new and illegitimate agency of government (“ministers”) or an old one (“Court” or “executive”) grown corrupt and corrupting through having stepped out of its proper place. The language of “balanced government” and “separation of powers” took on a new meaning—beyond anything to be found in the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions or in Harrington’s philo-Venetian desire to separate “debate” from “result”—when it presented, as the principal enemy of virtue and liberty, a “corruption” springing from the economic dependence of members of the legislative upon resources controlled by the executive. To this threat any formal weakness in the distribution, or “separation,” of powers as between executive and legislative was, at bottom, secondary. The key term is “corruption,” which marks a further stage in the assimilation of English constitutional theory to the categories and vocabulary of civic republicanism.

Marvell could see clearly enough that there were not one but two corrupting agencies at work. The opposition politicians who denounced the corruption of ministers might be aiming simply to replace them and continue working with their tools; and in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, he drew an early portrait of parliament along what we know as “Namierite” lines: the Court interest, the opposition factions, and the independent backbenchers or “Country members.”15 But, unlike Sir Lewis Namier, he maximized the role of corruption by attributing it to ministers, faction leaders and their respective followings, in equal and unmitigated degree; from which it followed that virtue was represented only by the Country members, that their defense of it was static if not passive, and that corruption could be avoided only by those willing both to enjoy no source of income but their estates, and to eschew either the possession or the pursuit of executive power. And it further followed that all power corrupted; that government itself, and parliament considered as a place where power was actually exercised or sought after, could not but be visualized as a mechanism for the corruption of property, independence, and virtue. The ideology that objects to power as such, long established in an England where Country habitually mistrusted Court and property government, was being powerfully reinforced by the adoption of the civic vocabulary; and it was to be the recurrent problem of all Country parties that they could not take office without falsifying their own ostensible values—a problem on which Dr. Johnson was commenting in his dictum that patriotism (a term which had carried “Country” and “commonwealth” connotations since the seventeenth century) was the last refuge of the scoundrel. The problem became inescapable once it was conceded that the executive must win majorities in the legislature, and must win them by means of patronage—a concession implied by Shaftesbury and Marvell alike in their indictments of Danby. There was an ultimate incompatibility between civic republicanism and the facts of legislative sovereignty and king-in-parliament; but for the present the latter provided a vocabulary more flexible and revealing than any other for the conduct, as well as the criticism, of the latter.

In Harrington neither Court, corruption, nor office had been major elements of political analysis; his perspective had been too sanguine and millennial; but it is of significance that the only parliamentary debate in which speakers had employed ideas taken directly from his writings had been the long struggle carried on by the republican group in Richard Cromwell’s parliament to avert recognition of the “Other House” established by the Petition and Advice. We earlier considered the last-named document as marking the return to the three estates of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions and the Ancient Constitution; but the Harringtonian campaign against the Other House had been waged mainly on the assumption that, since it was impossible to restore the historic peerage, a nonrotatory or “standing” upper chamber must consist largely of major-generals and other military grandees, and only the gathering restorationist backlash had led, contrary to Harringtonian assumptions, to demands for the return of the “old lords” as defenders of the Ancient Constitution. The attack upon army officers as members of an entrenched (if not hereditary) aristocracy had been based in large measure on the assumption that to include them in an upper house would be to entrench the army, and the taxation that maintained it, in the constitution; they would sit in parliament for life, and perhaps their heirs after them, and vote themselves the taxes off which they lived.16 The debate of 1659 had therefore been an early and special instance of that complaint against placemen and corruption of which so much was to be heard in later years—military senators would be dependents of state and means of bringing parliament into dependence on state—but there is a further significance in the circumstance that it was army placemen who then came under attack. By 1675 the phrase “a standing army” was among the common coinage of English political debate, and the Shaftesburean writers were regularly coupling it with corruption and regularly opposing it to the ideal of the militia.

A standing Parliament and a standing Army are like those Twins that have their lower parts united, and are divided only above the Navel; they were born together and cannot long out-live each other.¹⁷

The same might be said concerning the only Ancient and true Strength of the Nation, the Legal Militia, and a standing Army. The Militia must, and can never be otherwise than for English Liberty, because else it doth destroy itself; but a standing Force can be for nothing but Prerogative, by whom it hath its idle living and Subsistence.¹⁸

The Civil War of 1642 had broken out in a dispute between king and parliament for control of the county militia, and had, until the regiments were new-modeled, been fought between elements of that armed force, the only one which England then possessed. Some of the opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate from within the army had come from New Model idealists who still believed themselves to be a people in arms and resented being placed under the direct control of the head of state. The Restoration of 1660—itself in part the work of an army willing to disband itself rather than live at free quarter—had carried with it an unequivocal declaration vesting control of the militia in the king; but a necessary counterpoint to this principle had been an unspoken but no less unequivocal insistence that it should only be the county militia—the freeholders in arms under the gentry as their natural leaders—over which the king was to exercise command. There are some manuscript tracts, of Harringtonian inspiration, which recognize that a monarch logically needs a militia more immediately dependent upon him;19 and a few stalwarts regretted the abolition of feudal tenures for precisely this reason—a feudal host would be the embodiment of an England where every proprietor’s land bound him to direct service and homage.²⁰ It was then a Restoration understanding that the king should command, but should command only the Country, the proprietors in arms; and any attempt on the part of the Crown to acquire added military strength must touch a very sensitive nerve indeed. “The guards are mercenary, and therefore dangerous,” was the observation of an ultra-Cavalier speaker in the House of Commons.²¹

The term “standing army” had been known to Harrington, and he had employed it to denote something politically undesirable: the troops of soldiery kept permanently available to a supreme magistrate, like the guards used by ancient tyrants to establish unlawful power, but briefly permitted to the Lord Archon of Oceana in his capacity as legislator and pater patriae, in recognition of his incorruptible and indeed superhuman virtue.²² Harrington had also employed the term in a more precisely military sense, as the antithesis of “marching army,” which meant one taking the field against a real enemy or present danger.²³ A “standing army,” then, was one embodied but not in the field, resembling the “standing army in time of peace” made subject to parliamentary consent in the Bill of Rights of 1689. But under the orders of Oceana, standing and marching army alike are composed of citizens, and it is only an improper subjection to the authority of a single magistrate which might render the former politically dangerous. By 1675, however, a change of profound importance was coming over the meaning of the term. It was beginning to be used to denote an army of professional officers and long-service soldiers, commanded, maintained, and above all paid by the state. Such an army differed from the condottieri of the Italian writers in being no band of free companions available for hire by any ruler, and from Machiavelli’s sudditi and creati, or Harrington’s janissaries and vassals, in not being personally dependent on any prince or overlord. They were (or might be) Englishmen serving a lawful and public authority, but doing so as full-time professionals practicing what Machiavelli had called an arte, for which they were paid, on a permanent basis, out of no private purse but from monies raised by public authority and disbursed by public officials. This was something new in the world; the mercenaries of the Thirty Years War had been condottieri more often than not, and, even where they were embryo national armies, had soon exhausted their governments’ power to maintain them, bankrupting their princes and devastating countrysides wherever they went, in an incessant secondary war against the peasantry, brought on by their search for food and specie. What was new was, at bottom, the strengthened financial structures which were enabling states to maintain them permanently; and how new this capacity was is indicated by the fact that Harrington, twenty years earlier, had flatly declared it impossible. An army could never be maintained by direct taxation, he said, because of the bitter resistance of the taxpayers;24 and “a bank never paid an army, or, paying an army, soon became no bank.”²⁵ If he conceded that Holland and Genoa might be exceptions—it is not certain that he did—he covered himself with the remark that “where there is a bank, ten to one it is a commonwealth”;²⁶ and there were good reasons for doubting if even these great consortia could meet the costs of a seventeenth-century land army for ever. It is crucial to Harrington’s whole theory that warriors can be maintained, in the last analysis, only by settling them on the land, and that the question is whether this will be done in ways that establish an Asian slave-monarchy, a feudal aristocracy, or a republican citizenry.²⁷ The ideas that a mercantile society can maintain a permanent (as distinct from recurrent) professional army, or that a monarchy could rule such a society with the aid of a military bureaucracy, were rejected.

But by the later seventies, such possibilities were becoming apparent. The guards and other regiments maintained by the English Crown were not numerous compared with what was to come, but they were beginning to resemble a permanent establishment.²⁸ Bureaucracies existed at court to pay and equip them, and among the miscellaneous (and suspect) sources from which the monies came there figured grants which parliament had been prevailed upon to make. To those who believed or professed to believe that ministers like Danby were corrupting the two houses with patronage, this presented a double threat: the grants which increased the numbers of serving officers and civilian bureaucrats at the same moment increased the numbers of place-holders who might come to sit in parliament and vote grants and taxes to maintain them as dependents of the executive; and since the process was self-multiplying and cancerous, parliament was being brought to further its own corruption and subjugation. It was the complaint of 1659 in new and graver tones: instead of a military aristocracy entrenched in an Other House, a military and civilian dependency was now being engrafted upon the commons, and instead of the New Model army—which had indeed never been a “standing army” in the new sense—incessantly searching for an executive capable of maintaining it, the restored Crown was proving to be an executive capable of building up its military force by manipulating and disturbing the traditional constitutional relationships.

In his speech of October 1675, Shaftesbury remarked in part:

The King governing and administering Justice by his House of Lords, and advising with both his Houses of Parliament in all important matters, is the Government I own, am born under, and am obliged to. If ever there should happen in future Ages (which God forbid) a King governing by an Army, without his Parliament, ’tis a Government I own not, am not obliged to, nor was born under.29

This vaguely ominous language invokes the balance of three estates described in the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions; but the threat to legitimacy is not simply that of military dictatorship. Shaftesbury’s hearers (his fellow-peers) are perhaps expected to remember Charles I demanding the Five Members or Cromwell expelling the Rump; but the underlying menace is that of corruption rather than coercion. The “King governing by an Army” is no Cromwell, but a Continental potentate who does not depend upon his estates to supply his standing troops,³⁰ and the rhetorical setting to which Shaftesbury’s speech belongs plainly indicates that in England this is to be achieved through the corruption of parliament. The professional officer is the cause as well as the effect of this corruption, and his capacity to act in this baneful way arises from the fact that his decision to become a professional has rendered him the lifelong dependent of the state that can employ him. Harrington—however limited his understanding of contemporary trends in military organization—had argued that a main reason for the survival of “Gothic monarchy” in France was that the French noblesses had now become dependent on the king for their careers, those of the sword expecting to serve him in his armies, those of the robe in his courts and administration.³¹ The English freeholders could not be transformed into a service nobility, but they might be corrupted through too much exposure to the pursuit of place. We recall what Lodovico Alamanni might have said of such a process, but in England the nightmare possibility now existed that parliament, the traditional defender of the freeholders’ liberties, was becoming the means of corrupting and transforming their natures. This was the setting in which the myth of the English militia became potent, and did so in a recognizably Harringtonian form. The pamphleteer who declared that the militia could never act against liberty unless willing to destroy itself meant that it was the property and independence of the people in arms. To Harrington this had been the precondition which rendered a republic inescapable; to men of 1675 it was the guarantee of freedom, virtue, and stability in a restored mixed government of king, lords, and commons, operating to prevent corruption in the materia—the mass of propertied individuals—to which the constitution, traditional and balanced, ultimately gave form. New modes of corruption had become threatening, but the militia, like the frequent elections of parliament which were beginning to be demanded, could be seen as a means to the reactivation of virtue. Whatever brought government face to face with the mass of propertied individuals could be said ridurre ai principii.

The third circumstance mentioned earlier as crucial to the Harringtonian revival of 1675 was its taking place in the context of the continued existence of the House of Lords—and, as regards Shaftesbury’s oration, in the physical setting of the house itself. Harrington, it will be recalled, had assumed that the peerage had ceased to be a feudal aristocracy; that England must now be governed as a republic in which the role of the few was no longer played by those on whom the many were dependent, or by any class exercising a hereditary right to powers denied others, but by an aristocracy of talent and function, chosen in rapid rotation by their fellow citizens for their conspicuous leisure and experience, and exercising only the power of debate—or proposing courses of action—rigorously separated from that of result, or choosing among the courses proposed. This carefully specified definition of “natural aristocracy” (as it was to be called) long remained authoritative. The debate in Richard Cromwell’s parliament, as we have seen, turned on the proposed establishment of an entrenched if not hereditary aristocracy of Cromwellians (not to mention contemporaneous proposals by Vane, Milton, and others for an aristocracy of saints), but produced a backlash of opinion in favor of the old peerage, on the grounds both that their authority in parliament was part of the traditional constitution and that it discharged the intermediary and balancing function ascribed to it by the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions. Harrington himself remained convinced that since the lords could not be restored as a feudal baronage, there was no place for them in the existing distribution of property; and indeed it remains unclear whether, in the era following 1660, they exercised a social power commensurate with their constitutional functions. But we have now to speak of a period in which a hereditary but not feudal aristocracy was paradoxically defended as part of the apparatus of a constitution viewed in neo-Harringtonian terms. To his fellow peers in October 1675, Shaftesbury declared:

My Lords, ’tis not only your Interest, but the interest of the Nation, that you maintain your Rights; for let the House of Commons, and Gentry of England, think what they please, there is no Prince that ever Governed without Nobility or an Army. If you will not have one, you must have t’other, or the Monarchy cannot long support, or keep itself from tumbling into a Democraticall Republique. Your Lordships and the People have the same cause, and the same Enemies. My Lords, would you be in favour with the King? ’Tis a very ill way to it, to put yourselves out of a future capacity, to be considerable in his Service….32

The language is unmistakably Harringtonian, being a direct allusion to that passage in Oceana³³ where it is explained that the decay of feudal aristocracy brought about the Civil War—the king, because he could no longer depend on the peers to keep the people in subjection, being forced to attempt military government, since “a monarchy divested of its nobility hath no refuge under heaven but an army”—and yet the sense is strangely reversed. The lords are not presented as the people’s feudal superiors, and it is in the latter’s interest that they stand between them and military rule. The danger of government by an army is not the consequence—as it had been for Harrington—of the peerage’s collapse, but is a conspiracy promoted by the enemies of peerage, people, and even king; these enemies, then, are working against the traditional mixed constitution and are obviously promoting the new corruption and the new standing army. We find similar thoughts expressed in the contemporaneous Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country:

it must be a great mistake in Counsels, or worse, that there should be so much pains taken by the Court to debase and bring low the House of Peers, if a Military Government be not intended by some. For the power of Peerage and a Standing-Army are like two Buckets, the proportion that one goes down, the other exactly goes up, and I refer you to the consideration of all the Histories of ours, or any of our neighbour Northern Monarchies, whether standing forces, Military, and Arbitrary Government came not plainly in by the same steps, that the Nobility were lessened; and whether, whenever they were in Power and Greatness, they permitted the least shadow of any of them….34

The same shift in emphasis, from historical to normative, is evident here. To Harrington the point had been that once the nobility lost their feudal power the people were free, and the king could govern them only by military coercion—an enterprise in which he would probably fail for want of soldiers. To the men of 1675 the nobility are the historical precursors of standing-army rule, but they are also the sole guarantee against it; and since it has been established upon the ruins of their power in all “neighbour Northern Monarchies,” the need is all the greater to preserve the nobility in England. But the nobility’s greatness and the people’s freedom are not antithetical, as they had been for Harrington; they are inseparable, and the House of Lords is a necessary part of that mixed constitution of which the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions had spoken and whose existence Harrington had denied, condemning it as Gothic instability and “modern prudence.” The word “Northern,” as here used, is moreover a common synonym for “Gothic”—the Germanic invaders, or “Goths,” were held to have come from the Scandinavian north, that officina gentium—and “Gothic” government is presented as a mode of rule, once widespread but now surviving only in England, the opposite of “Military and Arbitrary Government,” and capable of existing only where a nobility has not given place to its necessary antithesis the standing army. The House of Lords, frequent parliaments, and the militia are being enlisted on the same side, that of the mixed and ancient constitution, whose enemy is something Harrington never thought of, the corruption of parliament by patronage and military professionalization, and the militia, to Harrington a new and revolutionary force, is being made ancient, Gothic, and compatible with a hereditary aristocracy—all things he had denied it could ever have been.

What is called the neo-Harringtonian interpretation, then, involved a complete reversal of the historical order found in Harrington’s own account of English government, the reconciliation of his norms—the relation of citizenship to arms and of arms to land—with the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions and the Ancient Constitution. Harringtonian freedom was made to exist in the Gothic and English past instead of being founded on its ruins. This reversal of time-sequence was the necessary consequence of two things: the decision to accept a world in which Crown and peerage had retained both existence and legitimacy, and the gathering belief that the Court’s reviving powers of patronage and military employment presented the main threat to the country’s parliamentary independence. Corruption had not been a prominent term in Harrington’s vocabulary;35 he had been interested mainly in emancipation from dependence in its feudal form; but the republican and Machiavellian language of which he was the chief English exponent was the appropriate vehicle for expounding a theory of corruption, and we are seeing something of the reasons why Shaftesbury and the country thinkers of the 1670s found such a theory attractive. A close friend of Harrington’s, who survived him for many years,³⁶ was now at work upon a restatement of his theory, intended to supply a historical context for the transition from old feudalism to modern corruption.

Henry Neville had been close enough to the author of Oceana to make Thomas Hobbes suspect he had taken part in its composition,³⁷ and had been an active member of the republican rearguard in 1659. During the debates in Richard Cromwell’s parliament he had heard, and opposed, much argument designed to present the traditional peerage as part of the liberty of the Ancient Constitution, but only twenty years later did he employ doctrine of this kind for his own purposes. His Plato Redivivus, a political dialogue published in 1680, accepts the premise that the present troubles of England are due to the decay of the Ancient Constitution,³⁸ which cannot therefore have been the anarchic wrestling-match which it had appeared during the Interregnum. He affirms, however, that it was founded upon the feudal ascendancy of the peerage, and that its decay is the result of a shift in the balance of property which has emancipated the commons from their control. But if the feudal period was one of constitutional freedom, not of oscillation between anarchy and absolute monarchy, something must be said of the position of the non-noble subject during all that time. The year 1680 was one in which the antiquity of the House of Commons, denied in the posthumously republished works of Filmer, had been angrily affirmed by the Whig writers Petyt and Atwood, and was now in process of refutation by the adepts of feudal scholarship headed by Robert Brady.39 Neville, from his own Harringtonian or neo-Harringtonian perspective, is ambivalent on this score. On the one hand he writes (very much in his manner of 1659):

In our ancestors’ times, most of the members of our house of commons thought it an honour to retain to some great lord, and to wear his blue coat: and when they had made up their lord’s train, and waited upon him from his own house to the lords’ house, and made a lane for him to enter, and departed to sit themselves in the lower house of parliament, as it was then (and very justly) called; can you think that anything could pass in such a parliament, that was not ordered by the lords?⁴⁰

But a few pages earlier we read:

And I must confess I was inclined to believe, that before that time [i.e., the reign of Henry III], our yeomanry or commonalty had not formally assembled in parliament, but been virtually included and represented by the peers, upon whom they depended: but I am fully convinced that it was otherwise, by the learned discourses lately published by Mr Petyt of the Temple, and Mr Atwood of Grays-Inn; being gentlemen whom I mention, honoris causa.⁴¹

Neville had to maintain the antiquity of the commons, both because a Tory counterattack was denying it in order to show that all liberties were of the king’s gift, and in order to uphold his neo-Harringtonian position that the ascendancy of the baronage had been part of a regime of ancient freedom which must be reformed and preserved. But his closeness to Harrington underlines the paradoxical role he was now playing. The revolutionary of 1656, insisting that there had been no liberty until the commons were free of lords and king alike, was in reality closer to the Tory Brady, who argued on the same grounds that the commons had had no liberty until the king had given it to them; and Neville’s attempt to make Harringtonian liberty seem ancient would have been better argued if he could have joined Atwood and Algernon Sidney in scouting the element of vassalage in feudal society and contending that words like baro had applied to all freemen, noble and non-noble alike.⁴² But his equivocation left him on stronger ground when he sought to argue that the decay of baronage had been part of the decay of the Ancient Constitution. When the king had had only the barons to deal with, they had brought the commons into line for him; but as their power had decayed, he had been confronted by an increasingly independent landowning commonalty over whom he had no means of influence, and the House of Lords was therefore failing—this at least survived from the Harringtonian interpretation proper—to act as that pouvoir intermèdiaire which the theory of mixed government prescribed that they should be.43 Neville had no intention of restoring them to that role; he proposed setting up a series of councils in which king and parliament should administer the executive power jointly; but it is clear from his treatment that a nobility deprived of feudal power, but retaining a hereditary right of summons, might continue to act as titular and honorary leaders of a landowning class from which nothing now differentiated them—as Giannotti might have put it, all were now mediocri. His essential contention, however, is that the decay of the baronage has left the royal executive and its prerogatives face to face with a parliamentary commonalty over whom it has no control; and until a constitutional solution, like that he is concerned to propose, has redistributed power, the relations of Crown and commons are doomed to instability. In the deadlocks which arise, cunning but incompetent ministers and courtiers will gull the king with ingenious proposals, whose effect if carried out might well be to corrupt the people; but Neville, more sanguine than Shaftesbury or Marvell, considers these devices likely to fail.⁴⁴ In particular, his Harringtonian training and his New Model memories combine to make him think that no standing army capable of enforcing the royal power can be recruited from the English commonalty.⁴⁵ But if Neville himself has no highly developed theory of corruption, he has provided the historical context in which one might be situated. It could now be argued that corruption was a necessary expedient to which kings had been driven by the decay of baronial power over the people; the history of peerage might, at the cost of some inconsistency, be assimilated to the myth of a constitution both ancient and uncorrupted; and if a militia of freemen, independent in arms and in tenure, could be made part of that myth, the new phenomenon of military bureaucracy would fit into place as its corrupting opposite.

The formal restatement of Harringtonian doctrine, in what we have referred to as its neo-Harringtonian form, was now complete. Its two essential characteristics were the acceptance of a House of Lords which was not a feudal baronage and was no longer condemned as an entrenched aristocracy, but might be thought of as an almost natural intermediary between Crown and commons,46 and the relegation to the past of that commonwealth of armed proprietors which Harrington had located in the present. To Neville, Harrington’s friend and literary heir apparent, whose experience of the doctrine in action had begun in 1659, it may well have seemed necessary to restate it if its essentials were to survive under the restored Ancient Constitution; and to those in the Shaftesbury circle, as well as Marvell and Neville, who now saw patronage, placemen, and standing army as the chief threat to the political order, an equation of the historic structure of parliament with the classical (as well as historical) militia may have seemed what was chiefly required. But the consequences of reversing the Harringtonian sequence were of moment. The political norm now lay in the past, and the movement of history, which Harrington had seen as a rinnovazione, resumed its common pattern of decline. The motive of the neo-Harringtonians was to denounce corruption; they paid the price of obliging themselves to regard all change as corruption (we recall that they had denied themselves recourse to a millennium). Furthermore, that which was exposed to corruption and degeneration was now the Ancient Constitution, and this must accordingly be envisaged in the form of a balance (as since 1642 it had been normal to do). But since the crucial disturbance was no longer that taking place in the relation of lords to commons, the balance being disturbed might better be seen as one of powers rather than estates; it was the executive that threatened to encroach upon the legislature, and the problem of patronage led to a century and more of debate concerning the separation and interdependence of the powers of the constitution. To qualify as corruption, however, the encroachments of the executive must be seen as more than an infringement of the sphere of legislative action. They must be seen as tending to bring the individual members, as well as the corporate body, of the legislature into dependence upon the executive, a dependence which must be termed corruption since it existed where independence should obtain. The importation of the classical concept of corruption necessitated considerable restatement of a theory of the English constitution itself little known before The King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions. That an ideology so founded received so rapidly such widespread acceptance indicates the importance which the issues raised by Shaftesbury’s attack on Danby possessed for the English political public.

No important response to Plato Redivivus appeared from the Tory side,⁴⁷ a fact which indicates the ideological confusion of the last years of Charles II’s reign. In 1675, when the neo-Harringtonian attack began, the publication of a work of feudal scholarship had fired the train which led to the Brady controversy. In 1679, the republication of the posthumous works of Filmer had had three consequences: the beginnings of the composition of Locke’s Treatises on Government, of Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha,48 and of other works which argued for consensual authority against the patriarchal thesis; the continuation by Petyt and Atwood of the antifeudal polemic begun in 1675, now intended as a riposte to those of Filmer’s works which denied the antiquity of the commons, and the counterattack of Brady and his allies; and the apparently independent composition by Algernon Sidney of those Discourses on Government which were to contribute to his death in 1683. Plato Redivivus, essentially a continuation of the neo-Harringtonian polemic of 1675, was caught up in the battle between Petyt and Brady through Neville’s decision to accept the former’s thesis concerning the House of Commons, and the Tory writers took notice of it only on that score. Brady and his friends were old Royalists rather than new Tories, interested in the defense of prerogative and hereditary succession rather than of patronage and standing armies, and they made no response to Neville’s theses linking the decline of feudalism to the rise of patronage. In the next generation, however, such a response developed, and took the form of a blunt assertion that since feudalism had declined patronage was indeed necessary, and not corrupting.⁴⁹ Such a version of history might have been arrived at by quoting Harrington against the neo-Harringtonians, but more usually rested upon an acceptance of Brady’s theses concerning the feudal past. In the changing patterns of Revolution politics, this argument came to serve the interests of the Whigs, and Whig bishops were carrying on the work of Spelman and Brady by 1698.⁵⁰

Down to 1688, while the Whigs were still a near-rebellious opposition, the statement of the neo-Harringtonian polemic of Country against Court had to coexist with the more pressing need to repudiate Filmer, hold out against the last offensive of the old prerogative and nonresistant school, and finally to justify the Revolution. Generally speaking, these were not operations best conducted in semi-republican or neo-Harringtonian terms, though it is important to bear in mind that Sidney’s Discourses, a voice from the past, recalling the Good Old Cause of the fifties and even the Tacitism of an earlier generation still, condemn absolute monarchy for corrupting the subject and equate virtue with a framework of mixed government so austerely defined as to be virtually an aristocratic republic.51 Canonized for the next century by their author’s martyrdom, they were not published until the crucial year 1698, by which time, paradoxically enough, they appeared less anachronistic than they might have fifteen years earlier. The polemic against patronage and corruption was an attack upon modern government, that against prerogative and patriarchalism was an attempt to bury the past; yet it was the former that entailed the language of classical republicanism, the latter that enlisted the services of Locke. The amalgam which was Whig ideology in the eighties disintegrated during the decade following the Revolution;⁵² and the neo-Harringtonian thesis became an instrument of radical reaction in an era of devastating economic change.

¹ See William M. Lamont, “Richard Baxter, the Apocalypse and the Mad Major,” Past and Present 55 (1972), 68-90; M. C. Jacob and W. A. Lockwood, “Political Millenarianism and Burnet’s Sacred Theory” Science Studies 2 (1972), 265-79.

² Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949); The Redeemer Nation: the Idea of America’s Millennial Role (University of Chicago Press, 1968).

³ The Ancient Constitution, pp. 170-81; Politics, Language and Time, pp. 21622, 262-64.

⁴ But it has been pointed out by Paul Lucas that Burke was modifying the normal legal usage of this term; see “On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription: or, an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers,” The Historical Journal 11, no. 1 (1968), 35-63.

⁵ The Ancient Constitution, pp. 182-228.

⁶ See her “Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Controversy,” in The Historical Journal 15, no. 3 (1972), 409-32.

⁷ Politics, Language and Time, pp. 227-31.

⁸ The older terminology survives in usages such as “soldier of fortune,” meaning a mercenary, or “gentleman of fortune” (if anyone ever really said this), meaning a pirate. The notion of a woman’s “virtue,” it is interesting to note, acquired as specifically sexist a meaning as that of her “fortune.”

⁹ Politics, Language and Time, p. 115. This essay was first published in 1966. For the beginnings in 1675 of the “Brady controversy” see The Ancient Constitution, ch. 7.

¹⁰ Printed in State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II … (London, 1693), pp. 41-56, and in Parliamentary History of England, IV, xxxviii-lxvii.

¹¹ For a discussion of this question, see K.H.D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 390-93.

¹² Printed in State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II…, pp. 57-61.

¹³ Plato Redivivus argues for limitations on the power of a Catholic successor, not for his exclusion from the throne.

¹⁴ Above, ch. XI, n. 98.

¹⁵ 1677 ed., pp. 74-81. Grosart (ed.), Complete Works of Andrew Marvell (Fuller Worthies Library, 1875), IV, 322-32. The analogy between factions and retainers is at Grosart, p. 331.

¹⁶ “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” above, ch. XI, n. 49.

¹⁷ Two Seasonable Discourses, in State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II …, p. 68.

¹⁸ A Letter from a Parliament Man to his Friend, ibid., p. 70.

¹⁹ E.g., British Museum, Lansdowne MSS. 805, fols. 75-82.

²⁰ The best-known proponent of this view (not in a directly Harringtonian form) was Fabian Philipps; see The Ancient Constitution, pp. 215-17.

²¹ Colonel Strangways, 29 April 1675; Parliamentary History, IV, 696. Cf., ibid,, pp. 461, 467, 604-608.

²² Toland, op.cit., pp. 200, 203-204.

²³ Toland, pp. 77, 101, 114, 190, 207.

²⁴ Toland, p. 67.

²⁵ Toland, p. 227.

²⁶ Toland, p. 230.

²⁷ Toland, p. 65.

²⁸ For a recent study of their character, see J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: the English State in the 1680s (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

²⁹ State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II …, p. 60.

³⁰ Politics, Language and Time, pp. 121-23.

³¹ Toland, pp. 252-56.

³² State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II …, p. 59.

³³ Toland, p. 65.

³⁴ State Tracts … in the Reign of Charles II …, p. 55.

³⁵ Toland, p. 68.

³⁶ Harrington died in 1677, having apparently been incapacitated for a considerable time. Neville lived until 1694. For as much biographical information as is available on the latter, see Caroline Robbins’s introduction, pp. 5-20, to her Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge University Press, 1969), in which the full text of Plato Redivivus is given; and my “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause,” for his role in the 1659 debates.

³⁷ John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Seeker and Warburg), p. 124.

³⁸ Robbins, Republican Tracts, pp. 76, 81-82, 132-35, 144-50.

³⁹ Ancient Constitution, pp. 187-95.

⁴⁰ Republican Tracts, p. 134.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 120.

⁴² Atwood argued this case at length in Jus Anglorum ab Antiquo (1681) and The Lord Holies his Remains (1682). Sidney, Discourses on Government (3d ed., London, 1751), p. 387.

⁴³ Republican Tracts, pp. 135, 145-48.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 178-82, 198-200.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 180.

⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 192-94.

⁴⁷ W. W., Antidotum Britannicum, and Thomas Goddard, Plato’s Demon, neither of much significance, appeared in 1682.

⁴⁸ The complicated story of Locke’s and Tyrrell’s writings at this time is pursued by Peter Laslett in the introduction to his edition of Locke’s Two Treatises (Cambridge University Press, 1960 and 1963), ch. in.

⁴⁹ See below, pp. 481-82, 494-95.

⁵⁰ Edmund Gibson, later Bishop of London, completed editing Spelman’s works in 1698 (Ancient Constitution, p. 243). See G. V. Bennett, White Kennet, 1660-1728: Bishop of Peterborough (London: S.P.C.K., 1957).

⁵¹ Discourses, II, sections 11-30; III in, sections 1-10.

⁵² Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), chs. II and III in particular. See the Advertisement to vol. 11 of A Collection of State Tracts Published on Occasion of the Late Revolution in 1688 and during the Reign of King William III (London, 1706), for comment on the disruption of Whig solidarity as revealed in pamphlets.