3.2 Republican Authors
Much republican writing was topical and urgent rather than formal and theoretical. The pioneering and opportunistic journalist Marchamont Nedham, who had already written in turn for both sides in the English civil wars of the 1640s, was menaced or tempted back from royalism to serve the new republic. Once the Commonwealth was militarily secure, from the autumn of 1651, he produced a series of editorials for the regime’s newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, which have rightly become part of the canon of republican writing of the interregnum. Rome was central to these editorials, whose general line of republican thought was heavily influenced by Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (see Chapter 2). Nedham was, within limits, a populist republican, and his insistence on the need for annual elections – at a time under the Rump Parliament when there were no concrete plans for elections at all – sailed close to the wind. Mercurius Politicus was soon deprived of its editorials. Nevertheless, Nedham was a paid propagandist and he was prepared to produce a justification of the Instrument of Government (the written constitution under which Oliver Cromwell assumed the role of Lord Protector), a work which reverted to an appeal to the balance of the pre-war English constitution, rather than the example of Rome. However, by 1656, he was subversively intervening in a crisis of the protectorate regime and returning to Roman models, by republishing a version of his republican editorials as The Excellencie of a Free State.
Nedham’s friend John Milton partially interrupted his poetic career during the civil wars and interregnum to write polemical prose works, in English and in Latin, which after the regicide turned directly to the defence of the new regime. Milton’s extensive reading of classical and modern texts made him one of the most learned of the interregnum republicans, and Roman precedent and argument featured in his English and Latin works. Milton completed his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a defence of the regicide, before being employed early in 1649 by the new regime as secretary for foreign tongues; much of his subsequent political writing was in the service of the regime, particularly three works in reply to royalist publications: Eikonoklastes (1649) and his two Latin ‘defenses of the English people’, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) (the ‘First Defense’) and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654) (the ‘Second Defense’). Milton had praised Cromwell, now the Lord Protector, in his Second Defense, but he soon retired from his active duties for the regime. In the crisis which preceded the restoration of Stuart rule, Milton’s published and unpublished writings, and especially his Readie & Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, published in two editions in 1660, demonstrated a willingness to institute a narrow and unrepresentative regime to prevent the return of rule by a single person (whether king or protector) or the eclipse of religious toleration. Henry Stubbe, a promising classical scholar writing at the behest of the ‘godly republican’ Henry Vane, similarly used arguments about the Roman constitution to advocate a defensive republican plan for a non-elected senate to take charge in the crisis of 1659. Other republican authors also engaged with Rome in response to unfolding events. John Streater, an army man and printer, was propelled into pamphleteering by Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump Parliament and assumption of power, and made systematic use of Roman parallels to discuss Cromwellian ambition without having to name his contemporary target. Edward Sexby, the republican author of Killing Noe Murder, invoked Roman arguments for tyrannicide in his later attack on the Lord Protector.
All these authors testify to the availability of Roman exempla to republican authors responding to political events, and suggest their familiarity to potential readers too. However, the interregnum republican author who – while not being the most learned – made the most systematic use of classical material did so in a work intended not just to speak to immediate circumstances, but to present a coherent and durable political theory. James Harrington’s career as a political theorist was brief: he published his great work, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in 1656 and repeated its prescriptions in a series of other works in the years up to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Oceana was an allegorised portrait of England under Cromwell, which imagined Cromwell (figured as the ‘Lord Archon’) taking the steps necessary to fulfil England’s destiny to become a true commonwealth (which according to Harrington was inevitable given the popular distribution of land in England). Harrington embraced the intricacies of constitutional mechanisms and took elements of the Roman Republic as a direct model for his carefully engineered fictional commonwealth. He argued that ‘we ought not to detract from the memory of the Romans, by whose means [under Roman rule in Britain] we are as it were of beasts become men, and by whose means we might yet of obscure and ignorant men … become a wise and great people’ (Harrington 1977: 192). Rome was a key plank in the ‘ancient prudence’ which guided Harrington’s constitutional architecture, although the fate of the Roman Republic offered warnings as well as positive precedents. In spite of his ambivalence about Rome, which often led him to emphasise that Rome had fatal flaws and did not ultimately meet his criteria for an ‘equal commonwealth’, Harrington turned to Rome again and again for ideas and mechanisms, making use of ‘consuls’, ‘censors’, ‘tribunes of the people’, ‘dictators’, tribes and ‘classes’, and even naming his legislative chambers the ‘senate’ and the ‘prerogative tribe’ (see Part III of this volume). His elaborate blueprint for a balanced constitutional mechanism made his model – in the absence of other detailed proposals – extremely influential when republicans were agitating for a republican settlement to prevent the impending restoration of the monarchy in 1659–1660.
3.3 Republican Arguments
The English republicans of the interregnum adapted traditions of classical republicanism which have been variously interpreted by scholars: the Roman sources of an early modern republican philosophy of freedom have been particularly emphasised by Quentin Skinner, but even J.G.A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment makes room for Roman elements alongside the influence of Aristotle, particularly through the inheritance of Machiavellian thought (Skinner 1998; 1975; and see Chapter 2). We should not exaggerate the importance of classical republican theory in this political context, which ran alongside less demonstratively ‘foreign’ attempts to establish a republican culture (Corns 1995; Kelsey 1997). However, the events of the civil wars, and particularly the regicide, did release some radicals and republicans from the constraints of English political precedent and allowed classical arguments about monarchy, tyranny and republics to emerge fully into public political debate – even if they had long been familiar in literature and in the schoolroom (Worden 1991: 443–449; Peltonen 2013). Republicans were particularly drawn to Rome because of her longevity and imperial success, as well as the familiarity of texts by Livy, Cicero, Sallust and Tacitus which bore witness to the values of the Republic and to the consequences of its rise and fall (see Chapter 9; Chapter 10; Chapter 11).
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