MORE than in other literary forms, political argument and change are registered and initiated in prose: in any history of prose, the representation of political theory and communication of political argument must be to the fore. But it would be hard, and potentially misleading, to argue for ‘political prose’ as a satisfactory genre in its own right in the 1500–1640 period; rather, the political is a category which ranges across the modes of historical, philosophical, religious, and fictional writing and is to be found in such prose genres as the utopia, the dialogue, and travel writing, as well as works which have a more obviously polemical or theoretical political purpose. As has been recently pointed out, ‘one of the problems with the concept of “political thought” is that it has tended to limit the number of places in which historians of early modern England have looked to find contemporaries thinking about politics’ to those canonical texts which look most like modern, secular conceptions of a political treatise—although literary scholars over the last two decades have been more inclined than historians (and probably at times over-inclined) to hear the political resonance of every textual form.1 My discussion below, which of course is necessarily highly selective, consequently encompasses several prose writers, prose works, and kinds of prose writing which are treated from other perspectives elsewhere in this volume.
This is not to say that educated early moderns did not have a concept of politics as a crucial branch of human behaviour and a distinct category of knowledge. In the humanist curriculum undertaken by every Elizabethan and Jacobean grammar-school boy, civil science (scientia civilis) was, as a subset of moral philosophy, part of the fifth and culminating element of the studia humanitatis. Some commentators argued that in the Aristotelian tripartite division of Renaissance moral philosophy into ethics, œconomics, and politics, the superior discipline was politics because it concerned the good of the state, which was a higher good than the individual or the family. Hence, Thomas Hobbes felt justified in declaring in De Cive (1642) that in writing about civil science he was making a contribution to the most valuable of all of the sciences.2 In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon concludes his anatomy of knowledge with ‘Civil Knowledge’, declaring, with a flourish, that ‘with civil knowledge [I] have concluded Human Philosophy’. Later, in the Novum Organum (1619), he refers to ‘natural philosophy [and] the other sciences, logic, ethics, and politics’. If politics hardly seems to equate with logic as the kind of science on which one might compose a textbook—it is, says Bacon in the Advancement, the ‘subject which of all others is most immersed in matter, and hardliest reduced to axiom’—Bacon sought to develop something like a handbook to political behaviour in his Essays, or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1597, 1612, 1625), one of the best places to quarry for trenchant remarks on early modern English (elite) culture.3 The Essays, in their initial 1597 incarnation, have aptly been described as ‘an analysis of the language of politics’ in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign; and, as we shall see, the aphoristic style of the Essays should remind us that, if the political did not habitually take any particular mode of prose, prose style was understood to imply particular political perspectives.4
Several further preliminary points should be made. The idea of ‘English’ political prose from 1500–1640 needs to be qualified firstly by the fact that several of the works discussed below, such as those by Thomas More and George Buchanan, were composed in Latin, the language of international scholarship and diplomacy, and later translated into English, and through translation found a more ‘popular’ (or at least literate) audience; and secondly, that several of the most influential political prose writers of the period were not English, such as the Scotsmen John Knox, Buchanan, and James VI and I. Finally, any discussion of political languages and ideas in Britain before 1640 is faced with the temptation of reading backwards from the political ferment of the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the constitutional innovations of the 1650s—two decades which are perhaps the great age of political prose in English—and so runs the risk of creating a falsely linear (or ‘Whiggish’) narrative of inevitable progress towards ideas and arguments that can look more like modernity. There has been a particularly lively debate over the last decade about the extent to which republican and anti-monarchical political thought existed before the execution of Charles I in 1649, in poetry and drama, as well as prose.5 I seek here to side-step some of the pitfalls of anachronism, while preserving the outlines of the historical narrative—it is unquestionable, for example, that John Milton’s apology for the regicide, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), engages deeply and explicitly with the Calvinist resistance theory developed by Knox and Buchanan in the mid-sixteenth century—by focusing less on ideas of kingless government than on representations of the abuse of kingship.
I am particularly concerned with the impact of the two great movements of this period, the Renaissance and the Reformation, on perceptions of tyrants and definitions of tyranny in English prose. The first section of the essay sketches the influence of the Roman historian Tacitus on representations of kings, courts, and tyrants from the second decade of the sixteenth century to the third decade of the seventeenth; the second section explores the rise of, and reaction to, theories of resistance and tyrannicide that emerged from mid-sixteenth-century religious conflict, but were nonetheless indebted to classical thought. One conclusion that may be taken from the essay is the need for some qualification, in the British context at least, of Richard Tuck’s powerful argument that the ideal of a life of active and virtuous public service that animated early and mid-sixteenth-century European political writing, largely derived from the Roman moralist Cicero, gave way after around 1580 to a ‘reason of state’ mentality, influenced by Tacitus, which was characterized by scepticism and flexible morality, and which could buttress absolutism as much as it could justify, in the context of the English revolution, political innovation.6 This narrative of the development of political thought is interestingly comparable to once dominant and now much qualified arguments in the sphere of English prose style about a shift in late Elizabethan England from Ciceronian to Senecan and Tacitist styles. What we shall find, rather, is that Tacitist and Ciceronian political languages cohabited in English writing as early as Thomas More and the very beginning of the Henrician age. It should be emphasized, finally, that the prose works discussed below have been selected as far as possible both for their intellectual force and innovation and for their literary interest.
Within four years of the accession of Henry VIII to the throne in 1509, Thomas More (c.1478–1535) began to compose a history, apparently first in English and then in Latin, of the ascent of Richard III to power in the aftermath of the death of Edward IV in 1483. Both versions remained unfinished: More seems to have left them aside soon after he entered the King’s service and became a Privy Councillor in 1517.7 The vernacular History of King Richard the Third first appeared in several of the Tudor chronicle histories published by Richard Grafton, before William Rastell published the text from More’s own manuscript in his 1557 edition of More’s works. (The reign of Mary I meant it was no longer potentially dangerous to advertise the name of More the Catholic martyr.) Thereafter, Rastell’s text was incorporated into the Elizabethan chronicle histories of Holinshed (where Shakespeare read More and found inspiration for his Richard III [1592–3]) and Stow, with the result that its distinctiveness as a finely crafted prose narrative was to an extent submerged: its literary form, with invented orations given to characters in the narrative and an emphasis on the role of individual psychology in historical action and political behaviour, did not find a worthy vernacular imitation until Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of Henry VII (1622), which is similarly an important work of political thought, as well as historical and literary prose.
More’s History is a highly sophisticated piece of historical writing which shows his humanist immersion in the techniques of classical history, particularly the ancient Roman historians Sallust, who charted the decline of the Roman republic into imperial tyranny; Tacitus, who recounted the tyrannical excesses of the early Roman emperors; and Suetonius, who wrote the lives of the ‘Twelve Caesars’. Aristotle, in both the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, is very clear on the distinction between a king and a tyrant. As Milton explains in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: ‘Aristotle and the best of Political writers have defin’d a King, him who governs to the good and profit of his People, and not for his own ends.’8 Or, as More himself puts it in one of the 280 Latin epigrams that he composed in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, which were published in the 1518 edition of his Utopia (first pub. 1516), a tyrant ‘feels that the people were created for him so that, of course, he may have subjects to rule’.9 The tyrant treats all other people, whether civil subjects in the public sphere or friends and family members in the private, as purely instrumental in his pursuit or maintenance of power. The character of a tyrant as someone who is not bound by normative human bonds of affection and trust is exemplified in the famous character sketch of Richard at the beginning of the History, which also illustrates the influence on More of Tacitus’s account of the emperors Tiberius and Nero as masters of dissimulation:
Hee was close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart, outwardly coumpinable where he inwardely hated, not letting to kisse whome hee thoughte to kyll: dispitious and cruell, not for euill will alway, but after for ambicion, and either for the suretie or encrease of his estate. Frende and foo was muche what indifferent, where his advauntage grew, he spared no man deathe, whose life withstoode his purpose.10
The powerfully evocative phrase ‘not letting to kisse whom he thought to kyll’ is derived from the account in Tacitus, Annals 14.56 describing Nero’s behaviour after he refuses to let his former tutor Seneca leave the court: Nero ‘added to his words an embrace and kisses, [for] he was made by nature and trained by habit to veil his hatred with treacherous caresses’ (‘his adicit complexum et oscula, factus natura et consuetudine exercitus velare odium fallacibus blanditiis’).11 As Dermot Fenlon has observed, More’s Richard ‘thrusts his way forward from the pages of Suetonius and Tacitus to assume power in Renaissance England [as] a classical tyrant in a Christian setting’.12
Richard’s most outrageous violation of natural bonds and boundaries is, of course, the murder of his two young nephews, the princes in the Tower, an act which ‘al the bandes broken that binden manne and manne together, withoute anye respecte of Godde or the worlde’ (p. 6). Nero’s treatment of Seneca is pointedly recalled when Richard welcomes the second nephew out of the sanctuary of Westminster, with More extracting grim irony from Richard’s title of ‘Protector’: ‘The protector toke him in his armes & kissed him with these wordes: Now welcome my lord even with al my hart’ (p. 42). Although Richard does not actually violate the church’s law of sanctuary, he does force the Queen and her children out through intimidation, and More gives Richard’s co-conspirator, Buckingham, a brilliant speech of rhetorical redescription or paradiastole, condemning sanctuary as a convention which preserves criminals from the law (pp. 30–2). Here we see how the tyrant makes even language and meaning subject to his will. For More, the abuse of the divine law of sanctuary also exemplifies the way in which tyranny subordinates God’s law to the will of the tyrant; and the point is placed in the mouth of Queen Elizabeth: ‘was there never tyrant yet so devilish, that durst presume to break [the right of sanctuary]’ (pp. 37–8). The sacrament of marriage is then also violated by Richard when, with the connivance of self-interested clerics and lawyers, he works to secure his own legitimacy by having the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth declared retrospectively invalid. The tyrant’s abuse of the marriage sacrament in More’s History, of course, assumes ironic resonance in the light of More’s later personal history, specifically his execution in 1535 by Henry VIII for refusing to accept his king’s break from Rome in the pursuit of a divorce. Given that the History seems to have been composed before More entered Henry’s service, if we want to relate it to Henry’s rule we should probably treat it as a work of counsel to the new King, rather than a criticism of him—a warning of how good government, by which a king properly acts as a father to his people and which is exemplified in More’s text by the rule of Edward IV, can rapidly fall into tyrannous conditions in which all human, natural, and divine law is violated and people are treated as slaves. Reginald Pole, once a scholar patronized by Henry and a man doubtless familiar with More’s History, would later compare Henry both to Nero and to Richard III as one of the great tyrants of history.13
In writing a Tacitist analysis of historical power politics, More anticipated, by well over half a century, the interest in later Elizabethan England in the depiction of tyranny, court corruption, and statecraft by the Roman historians, and in particular Tacitus. The interest was shaped by the so-called ‘new humanism’ of late sixteenth-century Europe, which was characterized, in the aftermath of the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli’s notorious separation of politics from morality in The Prince (c. 1513), by ‘efforts to reconcile a pragmatic and analytical approach to politics with an underlying commitment to fundamental religious and ethical norms’.14 Tacitus appealed to the pre-eminent ‘new humanists’ such as Montaigne and the great Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius because they saw analogies between life under the absolutist monarchies of their time and the tyrannies of imperial Rome; and also because Tacitus exposed the dissimulation and immorality that purchased success in political life but, unlike Machiavelli, he did not advocate the behaviour he described. There are glimpses of the fascination of More’s historical style for those who were adapting Tactitus in England at this time. Tacitus was the principal source for Ben Jonson’s tragic drama Sejanus His Fall (c. 1603), which depicts the suppression of liberty and virtue under Tiberius and his notorious favourite, Sejanus, and which powerfully conveys Jonson’s sense, as Blair Worden puts it, of the Tiberian ‘extravagance of servility and flattery’ in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. Around the time he was writing Sejanus His Fall in 1602, Jonson accepted an advance for ‘a book called Richard Crookback’, presumably a play about Richard III. The work was never written, or has not survived, but Jonson’s close annotation of his copy of More’s Latin version of the History indicates that More would have been his principal source for ‘Richard Crookback’: there are over 1,600 annotations in 3,000 lines of print (whereas Jonson’s copy of More’s more famous exploration of politics and society, Utopia, is ‘nearly unmarked’).15
The first English translations of Tacitus’s Agricola and Histories, by the Oxford scholar Henry Saville, appeared in 1591 and Richard Grenewey’s rendering of the Annals followed in 1598: they inaugurated a vogue for Tacitist prose style, as well as political analysis.16 The argument of Morris Croll, in his seminal articles, for a shift in English prose style at the end of the sixteenth century, from imitation of Ciceronian eloquence to a preference for the sharper, aphoristic, paradoxical style of Tacitus and the Stoic philosopher Seneca, was over-schematic and has since been much modified. Moreover, it has been shown that ‘the relation between style and ideology’ in England is more ‘fluent and provisional’ than Croll maintained in his arguments that an ‘Attic’, anti-Ciceronian style expressed ‘the disillusion of the modern intellectual under the absolutist regimes of the seventeenth century’.17 Nonetheless, the heterodox political character of late Elizabethan English Tacitism is apparent in the association of several of its foremost exponents with the circle around the Earl of Essex, who led a failed insurrection against Elizabeth in February 1601, at a time when the anxiety about the succession to Elizabeth, which characterizes the 1590s, had reached a pitch. Saville, a known intimate of Essex, had written for his rendering of the Histories his own introductory account of the fall of Nero in the style of Tacitus: in this account deposition and resistance are viewed as morally indifferent political acts performed by men possessed both of classical virtue and Machiavellian virtù.18 Saville’s translation and original Tacitist work were very closely imitated by Sir John Hayward in his The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (1599), which depicts the deposition of a weak Richard II and the accession of Henry IV. The work was dedicated to Essex and Hayward was immediately suspected by Elizabeth herself of having had seditious intent in his history—of drawing implicit analogies between the weak Richard and Elizabeth, and between the virile Bolingbroke and Essex. Hayward was arrested and interrogated by Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, among others. Hayward was eventually released, but the attraction of his history to the supporters of Essex is suggested by their apparent arrangement of a dramatic adaptation of Hayward’s work in the days before the rebellion, presumably to remind the audience of the historical precedent for the deposition of a monarch.19
Hayward, like More, invents speeches for his characters and adopts a semi-dramatic mode of prose—his work comes, of course, after a decade of history plays on the English stage—as he sets about exposing the ‘politic history’ of courts, according to which specific historical episodes reveal universal laws of human behaviour and motivation, applicable to all times.20 But Hayward is also writing after Machiavelli and his history is Machiavellian in its morally neutral exploration of dark political arts and the psychology of political actors, expressed in aphoristic style. So Hayward has the Archbishop of Canterbury (supposedly the representative of Christian ethics) tell Bolingbroke that it is too late to step away from conflict over the throne because Bolingbroke is popularly spoken of as a contender: ‘even good princes are nice in points of soveraignty & beare a nimble eare to the touch of that string’ (p. 66). The aphorism is, in fact, taken straight from Savile’s own effort at Tacitist history, ‘The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba’, when Titus Vinius tells his friend Galba that he has no choice but to proceed with rebellion against Nero: ‘Even good princes are jelous of soveraine points, and that string being touched, have a quicke eare.’21 Elizabeth’s reaction to Hayward’s ‘politic history’ made the Tacitist (and Machiavellian) point that had caught Hayward’s eye in Savile.
Although Francis Bacon had been called in to comment on the seditious implications of Hayward’s book, in the context of its dedication to Essex, Bacon had himself been a client of Essex until 1597 and his writing of that period exhibits a considerable Tacitist influence. In the first edition of the Essays, which appeared in that year, each essay consists essentially of a series of separated aphorisms, in which, as elsewhere in his work, Bacon sets about ‘constructing a system [of knowledge] using an anti-systematic form’, so that the structure of the argument becomes ‘cellular’, rather than sequential, clustering aphorisms which develop various perspectives on a theme.22 The 1597 Essays are characterized by a dispassionate Machiavellian political realism, as Bacon offers a conduct book for the courtier which emphasizes the place of dissimulation in court life and political action: ‘If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought another time to know that you know not’ (‘Of Discourse’).23 The Essays may reflect the disillusionment that Bacon felt about his own efforts to follow the path in the 1590s of ‘the ethical courtier, one who sought patronage as a means to approach the seat of power in order to influence the monarch to govern well’—a path set out in works such as The Book Named the Governor (1531), in which Thomas Elyot assures his readers that the ‘end of all doctrine and study is good counsel … wherein virtue may be found’.24 The Ciceronian model of counsel and service proposed in The Book Named the Governor, according to which rhetorical eloquence naturally persuades kings, courtiers, and patrons to virtue, was found wanting by Elyot himself, as his opposition to Henry’s first divorce left him increasingly isolated and disillusioned.25 In the three editions of his Essays, Bacon blends this Ciceronian tradition of humanist counsel (discussed in more detail below) with a cynical ‘new humanist’ realism in what amounts to a conduct or advice book for a man like Essex about how to master the vicissitudes of a life in politics and advance a career in the court.
By the third edition of the Essays of 1625, Bacon had himself experienced a rise to high office, acting as James I’s Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, and an abrupt fall from grace, having lost his status and been imprisoned in the aftermath of charges of corruption in 1621. By dedicating the 1625 Essays to the Duke of Buckingham, the controversial favourite of James I whose influence persisted under Charles I, Bacon would seem to have been making a new bid for preferment through a display of his Machiavellian knowledge of courts. There are many more essays in the 1625 edition and the original 1597 essays have been expanded, their spiky aphoristic structure smoothed out into more continuous prose. Nonetheless, the argumentative progression of each essay retains the provocative and unsettling effect of the aphorism. One might expect ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’, given the title, to present a Machiavellian account of the need for deceit in court politics. But in fact, Bacon opens his essay by declaring that dissimulation is the habitual practice of ‘weaker’ politicians: ‘Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politiques that are the great dissemblers’ (p. 349). But this is not a Ciceronian rejection of dissimulation either, for Tacitus is then quoted to distinguish between dissimulation as the practice of a tyrant and the ‘arts or policy’ of successful rule:
Tacitus saith, ‘Livia sorted well wit the arts of her husband and dissimulation of her son’; attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissumulation to Tiberius … For if a man have that penetration of judgement as he can discern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be shewed at half lights, and to whom and when (which indeed are the arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them), to him a habit of dissimulation is a hindrance and poorness. (p. 349)
As we continue our progress through the essay, it becomes apparent that openness is, in fact, a particularly subtle form of dissimulation used by those who are masters of ‘arts or policy’.26 Yet, habitual dissimulation is both ‘more culpable, and less politic’: though Bacon incorporates Tacitus to advise courtiers and rulers on how to flourish in a world of power politics, Bacon also ascribes habitual dissimulation to the tyrant (p. 351). Rulers who are regarded as tyrannical are morally reprehensible, but also poor politicians. Christian ethics are never quite simply detached from pagan politics in the Essays or elsewhere in his writing.
In his History of the Reign of King Henry VII, published in 1622, the year after his disgrace and expulsion from the Jacobean court, Bacon adopts Tacitus’s annalistic model, as well as More’s semi-dramatic form of historical prose narrative, to present a generally positive portrait of a man who was, as Bacon says in dedicating the book to the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I, ‘ancestor to the king your father and yourself’. And yet, Bacon’s psychological analysis of Henry VII also encompasses characteristics of a ruler that were associated by the classical writers with tyranny, in particular, the constant fear of enemies and suspicion of everyone around him—More dwells on the awful insecurity of the tyrant in his Latin epigrams and in the portrait of Richard III, who ‘never hadde quiet in his mind, he never thought himselfe sure’ (p. 88). Bacon’s Henry VII is ‘a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious’, ‘full of apprehensions and suspicions’, who ‘did suck in sometimes causeless suspicions which few else knew’. (The point about Henry is echoed in the general maxims of ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’: ‘For if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery; as the more close air sucketh in the more open’ [p. 350].) This paranoia makes Henry occasionally act tyrannically, as when he has ‘divers great men’ publicly cursed as the ‘King’s enemies’ on the strength of ‘intelligence [from] confessors and chaplains’.27 It is hard not to suspect that Bacon is here making a point about the way that Henry’s descendant James had behaved in hanging Bacon out to dry on slim evidence.
Henry is also characterized by a material avarice which rides roughshod over law: he was of a ‘disposition [which] nourished and whet on by bad counsellors and ministers, proved the blot of his times: which was the course he took to crush treasure out of his subjects’ purses by forfeitures upon penal laws’ (pp. 116–17). As More tells us in his epigrams, the tyrant is defined by, among other things, his suppression of his subjects and disregard for laws.28 The charge that Charles I had allowed himself to be misled by ‘evil counsellors’ into violating English law and custom was voiced in the later 1620s in parliament by men such as Sir John Elliot, who would die in prison in 1632, and it would become central to parliamentarian apology for civil war in the 1640s.29 In 1626 Buckingham, who would be assassinated three years later, was compared in detail to Tacitus’s Sejanus by Elliot, who was immediately sent to the Tower. Charles is supposed to have observed, in a comment which recalls Elizabeth I’s reaction to Haywayd’s Henry IIII a quarter of a century earlier: ‘If the Duke is Sejanus, I must be Tiberius.’30 In Bacon’s 1625 Essays and 1622 History we can see how in early Stuart England Tacitism could be thought to offer both lessons in how to gain or maintain positions of courtly power and a language of protest against court corruption and tyrannical abuse. If a Tacitist rhetoric against tyranny developed under James I, primarily in the context of ‘court-centred’ politics, then in the later 1620s it contributed to the tensions between crown and parliament which gathered increasing force in that decade and culminated in Charles’s Personal Rule from 1629. The remarkable puritan cleric Thomas Scott published, while a minister in Utrecht, a series of ferocious polemics against peace negotiations with Spain in the mid-1620s, at the same time as he translated the Italian satirist Trajano Boccalini’s playful and heavily Tacitist accounts of the character of tyranny and court corruption, such as Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612/13) or, in Scott’s version, News from Parnassus (1622). By the early 1650s, indeed, the Tacitist account of tyranny had been assimilated into a context of popular political polemic (or ‘public sphere’) beyond court and university: the printer, former soldier, and republican John Streater turned to Tacitus to show Oliver Cromwell to be a latter-day Nero.31 When, in 1649, Milton came to attack the recently executed Charles I as a Machiavellian ‘deep dissembler’ in Eikonoklastes, he set about doing so by accusing the King of having learned his lessons in politic statecraft from Shakespeare’s Richard III. If we believe Milton, Thomas More’s Tacitist history had indirectly, through Shakespeare, provided a tyrant with lessons in how to tyrannize; but by reading Shakespeare’s play, Milton advises, the English people might also discover how tyranny works.32
There is a striking moment in More’s History of King Richard the Third in which More imagines the reaction of the common people to Richard’s usurpation of the English crown: ‘And so they said that these matters be kings’ games, as it were, stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds, in which poor men be but the lookers-on. And they that wise will be meddle no farther. For they that sometime step up and play with them, when they cannot plays their parts, they disorder the play and do themself no good’ (p. 81). Those who involve themselves in the drama of kings and courts are more likely to find themselves swinging from the scaffold than performing on it. Should men then do nothing in the face of tyranny? Book I of More’s Utopia, a work that advertises itself as ‘concerned with the best state of a commonwealth’ (‘libellus uere aureus de optimo reipublicae statu’), engages explicitly with the issue of whether tyrannous rule can be prevented or softened through counsel in the dialogue between the characters of ‘More’ and Raphael Hythloday. The issue had famously been a topic of debate in Plato’s Republic and it was part of the archetypal humanist debate in northern Europe about the relative merits of public service (the vita activa) versus scholarly retreat (the vita contemplativa). Hythloday adopts the Platonic position that the learned man who seeks to counsel kings will end up seduced by tyrannous ways or thrown to wolves. The character of More, however, argues that the virtuous counsellor must ‘not leave and forsake the commonwealth. You must not forsake the ship in a tempest because you cannot rule and keep down the winds.’ Rather, he must employ all his craft and wit to shape policy; ‘and that which you cannot turn to good, so to order it that it be not very bad. For it is not possible for all things to be well unless all men were good, which I think will not be yet this good many years.’33 In a fallen world men must use their cunning to deflect as best they can the naturally tyrannical tendencies of princes. The figure of More defends the principles propagated by the moralists of republican Rome, pre-eminently Cicero in works, such as De officiis, that became standard humanist textbooks, by maintaining that public service in the pursuit of virtue is the noblest way of life. The recognition and reward of virtuous service or virtus is also the best way to establish a free commonwealth. The people of Utopia live ‘in a state of perfect liberty, free from the threat of internal tyranny as well as external conquest, in consequence of being governed in the interests of all its citizens’; rather than, as in contemporary European monarchies, in the material interests of ruling elites secured by hereditary succession and the dispensation of patronage.34 The Utopians have attained this state because their society is built around the encouragement of virtus and a system of representation and consultation which ensures the rule of the wise: in short, ‘Utopia is found to endorse a full-blooded Ciceronian republicanism.’35
Of course Utopia is not, by definition, the real world: the work is not a political treatise, but a fiction in the Erasmian ‘folly’ tradition, in which deadly serious issues are treated with ironic wit and arguments filtered through inversion and paradox. In the real and fallen world men have ‘so to order it that it be not very bad’. More himself followed the path of the vita activa by entering Henry VIII’s service—only to end up on the scaffold. In Utopia the principem or first official (not ‘prince’, as Ralph Robinson in 1551 and some modern translators have it) is elected for life ‘unless he be deposed or put down for suspicion of tyranny’ (p. 62). Moreover, the Utopians had in the past freed some of their neighbours from tyranny and despite the Utopian abhorrence of war, they are ready to take up arms ‘to deliver from the yoke and bondage of tyranny some people that be therewith oppressed’ (p. 107). But More never, it would seem, countenanced the idea of resistance to his own king: his final ‘response to tyranny [under Henry VIII] was martyrdom, not holy war’.36 Even the most radical constitutional speculations of the Henrician age were framed in terms of the vital political and moral role of ‘good counsel’. Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (c. 1529–35), which remained unpublished until the nineteenth century, opens with another rehearsal of the ‘dialogue of counsel’, in which Starkey’s interlocutors debate the merits of the vita activa. Starkey, indeed, seems to have intended that his Dialogue be presented to Henry VIIII in a bid for court preferment; but one wonders what Henry would have made of a work in which the figure of ‘Pole’—representing Reginald Pole, the prominent Henrician cleric and later Catholic cardinal to whom Starkey had acted as secretary in Padua in the 1520s and who refused to support Henry’s divorce, bringing down terrible retribution on his family—repeatedly attacks the idea of hereditary monarchy as a corrupting influence on a country:
Po[le]. wel, master lup[sett]…. yet remember our purpos wel … to fynd out the best ordur that by prudent pollycy may be stablysched in our rea[l]me <& cuntry> … what ys more repugnant to nature, than a whole natycon to be governyd by the wyl of a prynce, wych ever followyth hys frayle <fantasy> & unruled affectys, what is more contrary to reason then al the hole pepul to be rulyd by hym … loke to the romanys, whose commyn weale may be exampul to al other, whych lyke as theyr consullys so lyke wyse theyr kyngys chose ever of the best & most excellent in vertue … thys successyon of pryncys by inherytance & blode was broght in by tyrannys & barbarous pryncys[.]37
As well as the historical example of the Roman republic, Pole cites the contemporary example of Venice, where there is ‘no grete ambysyouse desyne to be ther duke, because hye ys restrynyd to gud ordur & polytyke’ (p. 123). Pole suggests that the English monarch should similarly become a type of Venetian doge within a ‘mixed state’ constitution, his power restrained by a system of checks and balances in which Parliament would elect a ‘Council of Fourteen’ composed of a combination of the wise: citizens, bishops, judges, and lords. The argument that England would be best served by a ‘mixed’ constitutional form would become a standard feature of works, such as Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse of the Commonweal of England (c. 1565; pub. 1583), which loom large in Patrick Collinson’s influential argument that Elizabethan England was regarded as a ‘monarchical republic’ by urban intellectuals who conceived of themselves as Ciceronian ‘citizens’, as well as subjects of the crown, and who maintained their constitutional right to counsel monarchs on the legal limits of their actions.38 But Starkey’s remarkable work goes further in pressing the claims of elective over hereditary monarchy and implying that Henry should sacrifice his power to secure the stability and liberty of his country. Starkey’s ideas are shaped by a combination of Ciceronian republicanism and modern Venetian example: the Dialogue may have been influenced by Gaspar Contarini’s De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, written in the 1520s and published in 1543, which had some impact in England when it was translated as The Commonwealth and Government of Venice by Lewis Lewkenor in 1599.39 Starkey was to align himself with Henry and against his mentor Pole over the break from Rome and it would be anachronistic to categorize the Dialogue as straightforwardly oppositional to Henrician ‘tyranny’: as with Utopia and many pieces of sixteenth-century political prose, including Edmund Spenser’s much-discussed A View of the State of Ireland, written Dialogue-wise (1598; pub. 1633), the work takes the literary form of a dialogue, a playful form beloved of humanists and reflecting the importance attached by Cicero to the role of conversation and rhetoric in shaping a virtuous civil society.40 So we cannot simply ascribe the views of characters in the dialogue either to the author or to those real people, such as Reginald Pole, represented as interlocutors. Nor do we find even in a work as radically speculative as Starkey’s Dialogue any notion of the legitimacy of active resistance to a ruler who has turned tyrannical.
Starkey’s Dialogue is a notably secular discussion of political organization. It was to be mid-sixteenth-century religious conflict which provoked the development of explicit theories of resistance and tyrannicide. The English and Scottish clerics who chose exile in Geneva, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt over martyrdom after Mary I restored Catholicism to England in 1553 became ‘pioneers and innovators in subversive political thinking’.41 The theories of resistance that were developed by the Marian exiles had roots in Lutheran constitutional discussion, but also took vital inspiration from the concluding chapter of Calvin’s Institutio religionis Christianae, first published in 1536, and its discussion of a mixed monarchy in which the ‘magistrates of the people appointed to moderate the licence of kings’ might be said ‘to have a duty to intervene against the ferocious licence of such kings’ in the name of the liberty of the people.42 John Ponet’s A Short Treatise of Politike Power, and of the true obedience which subjects owe to kynges was published anonymously in Strasbourg in 1556 and deals explicitly with the question of ‘Whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant’, invoking a series of examples of depositions and assassinations from biblical, classical, and English history (including that of Richard II). Although Ponet, formerly bishop of Winchester, does not actually mention Mary Tudor at any point, and is more obviously concerned with the tyranny of the Catholic bishops, his arguments nonetheless assume clear political significance as he elaborates, in a manner at times reminiscent of Starkey, on the idea of a mixed constitution, which he describes as ‘the best sort of all’ (sig. Avr):
For as … among the Romaynes, the Tribunes were ordayned to defende and mayntene the libertie of the people from the pride and iniurie of the nobles: so in all Christian realmes and dominiones God ordayned meanes, that the heads the princes and gouernours should not oppresse the poore people after their lustes, and make their willes their lawes. As in Germanye betwene the emperour and the people, a Counsail or diet: in Fraunce and Englande, parliamentes, wherin ther mette and assembled of all sortes of people, and nothing could be done without the knowlage and consent of all. (sig. Aviir–v)
A key distinction for continental Lutheran and Calvinist theorists of resistance was between ‘inferior magistrates’ and private persons: while resistance to tyrannical rule was lawful for the former, it was never legitimate for the latter to take political action. This distinction was maintained, for instance, by the Huguenots who wrote in the aftermath of the St Bartholomew’s massacres in France in 1572, such as the anonymous author of Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579), which was partially translated into English in 1588 as A Short Apologie for Christian Soldiers—and which, Blair Worden has argued, shaped the (disillusioned) imaginative exploration of the state of Elizabethan politics in Sir Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia (c. 1580).43 Ponet accepts the distinction, but then immediately cites the exception of those individuals who are directly commanded by God to act; and then goes on to render that qualification of divine inspiration itself somewhat irrelevant by appealing to the sanction of ‘common autoritie upon juste occasion’:
I thinke it can not be maintened by Goddes worde, that any private man maie kill, except (wher execucion of juste punishement upon tirannes, idolaters, and traiterous governours is either by the hole state utterly neglected, or the prince with the nobilitie and counsail conspire the subversion or alteracion of their contrey and people) any private man have som special inwarde commaundement or surely proved mocion of God: as Moses had to kill the Egipcian, Phinees the Lecherours, and Ahud king Eglon, with suche like: or be otherwise commaunded or permitted by common autoritie upon juste occasion and common necessitie to kill. (sig. Iviiir–v)
Nonetheless, private persons, even inspired ones, can only act, according to Ponet, when the punishment of tyrants is neglected by ‘the hole state’. His fellow exile, Christopher Goodman, takes the same position in How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed (Geneva, 1558), a political work which, typically of the Marian exiles, derives from a sermon. When magistrates ‘cease to do their dutie’, as was the case in Catholic England, then God gives ‘the sworde in to the peoples hands, and he him self is become immediately their head’ (pp. 179–80). John Knox, who would return to Scotland after Mary’s death to play a leading role in the Reformation, also argued from Geneva in 1558 that since in Catholic states ‘no ordinary justice can be executed’, the punishment of idolatrous—which for Knox is equated with tyrannous—rulers ‘must be reserved to God and unto such means as He shall appoint’:
In such places, I say, it is not only lawful to punish to death such as labour to subvert the true religion, but the magistrates and people are bound so to do unless they will provoke the wrath of God against themselves. And therefore I fear not to affirm that it had been the duty of the nobility, judges, rulers and people of England not only to have resisted and againstanded Mary that Jezebel whom they call their queen, but also to have punished her to the death, with all the sort of her idolatrous priests[.]44
Knox’s style is that of the prophetic preacher—exhortatory, declamatory, and zealous. Although Knox uses legal, classical, and patristic authorities, the Bible is the only source of precedents that he truly values: ‘when Knox identified himself with Jeremiah, or Mary Tudor with Jezebel, he was doing much more than invoking scriptural parallels or paradigms. He was appealing to biblical “case law” to establish precedents which were universally binding because they revealed to man the immutable laws of God.’45 As the reference here to ‘Mary that Jezebel’ indicates, Knox is relentlessly ad hominem in his polemic against Mary as a woman, as well as a Catholic. His First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Woman, again published in Geneva in 1558, caused Knox some embarrassment when Elizabeth I, who recognized that the arguments about women could be applied to her equally as well as Mary, ascended the throne at the end of that year. Knox equates a female ruler with a tyrant because both are idols, which Knox defines as ‘that which hath the form and appearance but lacketh the virtue and strength which the name and proportion do resemble and promise … such, I say, is every realm and nation where a woman beareth dominion’.46
Knox and the Scottish Protestants faced the whole problem again when the Catholic Mary Stuart returned to Scotland in 1561 to claim her right to rule. By 1567 Mary was deposed and expelled to England, to the outrage of Catholic Europe. The Scottish humanist George Buchanan, whose previous pupils as a tutor in France had included figures such as Montaigne, became the formidable propagandist of the new Scottish Protestant state. In his Latin dialogue De jure regni apud Scotos, written in 1567–8, but first published in 1579 (and not translated into English in the early modern period), Buchanan dispenses with the terminology of ‘inferior magistrates’ and private persons to state simply that obedience is not due to tyrants, who ought to be put to death by any means by any person; nor does Buchanan in any way qualify his insistence on the authority of the individual citizen to kill a tyrant by locating that authority in divine inspiration. The crucial biblical text with which any resistance theorist had to engage was Romans 13 (‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers’); those who cite this text in support of obedience to tyrants, says Buchanan, will ‘immediately have to face the objection that Ahab was killed at God’s command’.47 It has been persuasively argued that the great classical scholar Buchanan—who refers in one of his Latin poems to the ‘pious daggers’ of Brutus, murderer of Julius Caesar—was influenced in his reductive interpretation of the Calvinist argument for tyrannicide by the Ciceronian definition, outlined in De officiis, of the tyrant. For Cicero, the tyrant is the enemy of all mankind—and it is always lawful to kill an enemy with whom you are at war. John Milton, who would add to the second edition of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates a list of citations from Reformation authorities, including Goodman and Knox, to defend his argument for regicide, makes the same, Ciceronian argument: a ‘just King’ is ‘the public father of his Countrie’, but a tyrant is ‘the common enemie’ against whom the people may lawfully proceed ‘as against a common pest, and destroyer of mankinde’.48 The Calvinist resistance theorists had no wish to introduce republican government such as that in Venice, which they associated with the subordination of clerical authority. Rather, they ‘wished to limit and contain their monarch’.49 Nonetheless, and as the example of Milton suggests, their arguments would become part of the polemical and intellectual context of the English Revolution. If the Circeronian theory of tyrannicide shaped the apology of Buchanan for the deposition of Mary Stuart and of Milton for the execution of Charles Stuart some seventy years later, then we may again need to qualify the claim that it was above all the Tacitist thinking of the ‘new humanism’ which facilitated the more radical political thinking of the 1640s and 1650s.50
Buchanan’s arguments created scandal around Europe and his De jure regni apud Scotos was banned even by the Scottish parliament in 1584. In Elizabethan and early Stuart Britain the appeal of the Calvinist resistance theorists to biblical precedent for popular revolt against tyrannical rulers became polemically associated with the alleged campaign of Presbyterian and ‘puritan’ activists to stir up popular political ferment. In John Whitgift’s polemical responses to the Presbyterian divine Thomas Cartwright in the early 1570s, we can see how the opponents of Presbyterian church government associated its self-governing structures, not without some reason, with the urban republican values and systems of the city-states of Switzerland and Germany in which it had developed.51 The most impressive prose work to emerge from this anti-Presbyterian reaction in later Elizabethan England is Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the first four books of which appeared in 1593 and the fifth in 1597; the books most explicitly concerned with the relationship between ecclesiastical organization and political power did not appear, however, until 1648 (the sixth and eighth books) and 1661 (the seventh book). Against what he regards as the dangerous individualism of puritan biblical fundamentalism and (alleged) claims to supra-rational inspiration, Hooker defends the Elizabethan church settlement as ensuring the national unity secured by an interdependent church and state: his concern is very much with locating national structures of government in their particular historical context against both Catholic and Calvinist visions of a supra-national church government that could and should be applied in the same manner everywhere.52 So Hooker’s defence of episcopacy in England, against the importing of a Calvinist church polity from Geneva, rests on appeals to history, tradition, and reason, as well as scripture. It is important to remember that the appeal here to ‘natural’ reason is always partly polemical, constructed in opposition to the supposed insanity of those who claim private inspiration; but the invocation of reason also suffuses Hooker’s prose, impressively turning style into an embodiment of argument as ‘the complex sentence [becomes] the reflection of rational process’.53
Hooker’s optimistic valuation of man’s rational capacity against a Calvinist emphasis on man’s innate depravity appealed to later anti-Calvinist, tolerationist radicals who were resolutely opposed to a compulsory state church, such as the Leveller William Walwyn.54 At the same time, Hooker’s conception of the universe, as operating according to universal rational laws, leads him to outline a theory of the origin of government, as dependent on the rational consent of the people, which bears some comparison with the later political philosophy of contract developed by John Locke and others: ‘To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way, but only by growing unto composition and agreement among themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves thereunto, that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured.’55 But Hooker’s myth of political origins becomes notably more proto-Hobbesian than proto-Lockean in the eighth book of the Laws, significantly first published in the months before the execution of Charles I. If monarchical power derives from the consent of the people, that does not make the monarch subject to control by the people: ‘as there could be in natural bodies no motion of any thing unless there were some which moveth all things and continueth unmovable, even so in politic societies there must be some unpunishable or else no man shall suffer punishment … Kings therefore no man can have lawfully power and authority to judge … on earth they are not accountable to any’.56
Hooker’s theory of consent leads him to distinguish explicitly between the domestic power of a father and the political power of a king. But the patriarchal analogy was a central theme and rhetorical motif of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (Edinburgh, 1598) composed by James VI as King of Scotland in response to the arguments for resistance advanced by Buchanan and also the Catholic polemicist Robert Parsons. James, probably the most learned of British monarchs (thanks in great part to Buchanan, who had acted as his tutor) and a considerable prose writer, makes some ringing declarations of the divine right of kings to absolute power: ‘Kings are called Gods by the prophetical King David, because they sit upon God his throne in the earth, and have the count of their administration to give unto him.’ A king is the father of his people and the rule of the father over his children is not derived from the consent of his children. Indeed, a king has the power of life and death over his subjects as a father has over his children. In 1610 James, now King of England, told Parliament that: ‘As for the father of a family, they had of old under the Law of Nature patriam potestatem [fatherly power], which was potestatem vitae et necis [the power of life and death], over their children or family, (I mean such fathers of families whereof kings did originally come).’ James accepted that a king may behave tyrannically; but a tyrannical king would be held accountable only by God and his actions could never license uprising. A good king, James accepts, will behave according to the law, of which he is the author; yet, ‘he is not bound thereto but of his good will, and for example-giving to his subjects’.57
Patriarchalism was, as J. P. Somerville observes, ‘at once an account of the origins of government and a description of the nature of political power. It served to show that men had not originally been free, but were born into civil subjection.’58 As an ideology it became increasingly prominent during Charles I’s ‘Personal Rule’ in the 1630s and found its most powerful expression in Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia, composed c. 1628–32, but not published until 1680, after several revisions. For Filmer, the power of kings originated in the power God granted Adam over his children: ‘I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subjection of children is the only fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself.’ He goes on to make many of the points that James had made in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, but Filmer is even more rhetorically forceful and locates his political theory squarely within the current disputes between Charles and parliament which would eventually lead to civil war: ‘the prerogative of a king is to be above all laws, for the good only of them that are under the laws, and to defend the people’s liberties—as his majesty graciously affirmed in his speech after his last answer to the Petition of Right’.59 Patriarchia might look to modern democratically minded readers as the apogee of absolutist hubris in a Caroline England which would soon be consumed by civil war; but it is worth noting that Filmer would prove to be the shrewdest critic of Milton’s awkward claims in the Tenure and the Defensio pro populo Anglicano (1651) that the unpopular act of regicide was performed on behalf of the ‘better’ part of the people of England: ‘Nay J. M. will not allow the major part of the Representors to be the people, but “the sounder and better part only” of them … If “the sounder, the better, and the uprighter” part have the power of the people, how shall we know, or who shall judge who they be?’60
Bacon, Francis. Essays (1597 & 1625), in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Filmer, Robert. Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. J. P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
James I and VI. Political Writings of James I and VI, ed. J. P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Knox, John. On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Lake, Peter, and Kevin Sharpe, eds. Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
More, Thomas. The History of King Richard III, in Complete Works of St Thomas More, Volume 2, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963).
Peltonnen, Marku. Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Pocock, J. G. A., ed. The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Somerville, J. P. Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1986).
Starkey, Thomas. A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989).
Tuck, Richard. Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).