Marchamont Nedham’s famous series of republican editorials in Mercurius Politicus deployed Rome – via Machiavelli – in support of a simpler refrain. As the editorials proceeded, Nedham’s emphasis fell ever more insistently on the claim that ‘the People, in a due and orderly succession of their Supream Assemblies, are the best Keepers of their own Liberties’ (Nedham 1651: 1255). He favoured a structurally simple solution to the problems of the English Republic: government by a succession of unicameral representative assemblies. He invoked the Roman Republic constantly in making this case, for the most part ignoring the complexities of the Roman constitution and boiling the story down to a triumph of popular over patrician power. Rome was a positive model for the spirit of liberty which should animate a republic and despite his reverence for Machiavelli (see Chapter 2), Nedham ignored Machiavelli’s Polybian suggestion that Rome was stable once the popular element was included because all three forms of government were now balanced, with kingly power surviving in a different form under the Republic. For Nedham ‘not onely the name King, but the thing King (whether in the hands of one, or of many) was pluckt up root and branch, before ever the Romans could attain to a ful establishment of their Rights and Freedoms’ (Nedham 1651: 1143). Rome was taken not as a model for constitutional complexity, but as a lesson in simplicity: Nedham ignored specific magistracies apart from the tribunes of the people, the crucial fact being that the people elected their magistrates and that their power was of limited duration (see Part III). As for the Senate, after an early suggestion that it offered a necessary tempering of popular power, Nedham swiftly progressed to a sustained defence of popular power exercised through single-chamber legislatures. The role of any ‘standing’ authority or of ‘grandees’ was inimical to this and the Roman Senate, after the expulsion of the Tarquins, was his prime example of just such a self-interested standing body, monopolising power (see Chapter 15).
Rome was thus central to some republicans’ justifications of popular power; but Roman material was also used by those republicans who wanted to insist that an aristocratic element was essential to a long-lasting or balanced republic, or at least that it was necessary in the circumstances they found themselves in, particularly in the crisis of 1659–1660. The regicide had been a profoundly unpopular act, and the regimes of the interregnum, in spite of efforts at healing and settling the nation’s differences, gave a meaningful level of power only to a minority. Even when parliamentary elections returned under the Protectorate, royalists, Catholics and Episcopalians were barred from participating, and the government even acted to exclude troublemakers who were legitimately elected from taking their seats in the House. This apparently insoluble problem of legitimacy was one part of the background to constitutional debate among republicans: how could citizens participate politically in an English republic without undermining its very existence? On the other hand, the reign of Charles I and the experience of rule by the unaccountable Long Parliament and Rump Parliament made republicans wary of parliamentary as well as monarchical corruption and tyranny.
Some republicans emphasised aristocratic or balancing elements within the Roman republican constitution which might be seen as a counterweight to the power of the people in their assemblies and might offer models for English use. As we have seen, Nedham was not the most restrained or aristocratic of the interregnum republicans and he increasingly emphasised the power of the people at Rome and the threat that any senatorial body might pose to it. However, near the outset of his series of republican editorials, Nedham sounded a more cautious note. At this early stage, he diagnosed the constitution of the Roman Republic as ‘an equal mixture of both Interests, Patrician and Popular’, and saw the Senate as offering a distinctive and very necessary element, a body which was fitted to deal with affairs of state which required confidentiality, wisdom and experience. The Senate was also essential to the power of the people: ‘The People without the Senatick Councell were like Sulphur and Mercury, ever in motion or combustion, … but the Senate were as Salt to season, fix and fasten the body of the people’ (Nedham 1651: 1111). This aristocratic body, although prone at points to ‘domineering over the People’, was thus presented – at least in this early editorial – as a necessary aid to the people’s supreme legislative power; perhaps he saw it as taking on executive functions similar to those of the Council of State which was elected annually by the Rump Parliament.
Nedham moved away from this position, but for other republicans it remained crucial to balance or remedy the supposed fickleness, passion or irrationality of the people, of which Roman tumults were always a popular illustration, happily wielded by the republicans’ enemies. This could be achieved through a mixture of constitutional structures and reliance on the superior wisdom and virtue of an elite. Harrington’s regime did this most systematically. For him, a ‘pure’ democracy, rather than a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, was simply not possible (although the resulting regime could still be classed as a democracy). He was also horrified by the notion of an undifferentiated population: social distinction of some kind had a role and he even argued that all populations had a ‘natural aristocracy’ of about a third of men who would prove wiser than the rest. Rome was among his model commonwealths, in spite of its flaws, because it was no mere ‘mechanic’ commonwealth like Athens or the Dutch republic: Sparta, Rome and Venice, by contrast, were ‘plumed with their aristocracies’ (Harrington 1977: 259). Indeed, there needed to be an aristocracy to bring out the republican qualities of the people themselves: the Roman people’s famous valour and love of liberty were enhanced by their marginalisation by the nobles (183). Nobles had the leisure to acquire the wisdom to rule: this may be why Harrington specified a higher property qualification for members of his senate than those of the popular chamber. The senate exercised the republic’s ‘wisdom’ in debating and proposing legislation, whereas the popular chamber reflected the republic’s ‘interest’ by voting on it (810). In spite of the influence of Roman constitutional architecture on this arrangement, Harrington condemned the Roman approach to nobility as based on destructive principles. The closed nature of the patrician order had endangered popular sovereignty by preventing the principles of popular election and of rotation being applied fully; Harrington at some points acknowledged that plebeians were admitted to high office and that the nobility was wider than the patrician order alone, but this did not completely mitigate the danger which the senate and the office-holding elite posed to the state (183–184, 216, 248–249, 261, 611, 731). The composition of the Roman Senate was particularly problematic, in his view, and this became the focus of significant controversy between Harrington and other republicans once the Protectorate fell.
3.5 Discussion about the Senate
The crisis of 1659–1660, in which republicans rallied round the ‘good old cause’ in the hope of preventing a return to monarchy, spurred republicans into a sometimes acrimonious debate about which constitutional arrangements could best secure the nation against this imminent threat. Harrington maintained that his proposed constitutional mechanism already incorporated the checks needed to weather this (or any) political crisis, but was opposed by others who feared his commitment not only to allowing former royalists to vote, but to maintaining regular elections on a three-year rotation for both the Senate and the popular house of his legislature. Some republicans of a more pragmatic or more aristocratic bent were placing their hopes in a ‘select senate’, to be appointed rather than elected, and hoped to give it powers which could keep the nation safe from any storms caused by an elected lower house. Rome was drawn into these disputes, with the nature of Roman citizenship, the powers of the Senate and the popular assemblies, and the membership of the Senate all under discussion (see Chapter 15; Chapter