Indeed, the French reception of Molesworth’s project was a contributing element to the complex diplomatic politics surrounding the peace settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession, between 1709 and 1712. Contributing to the paper war around the so-called renunciation crisis (which demanded the recall of the Estates-General to formally register Philip of Spain’s renunciation of the French throne), civil history was pitched as a challenge to Ludovicean absolutism. Very much like Molesworth, Boulainvilliers exploited historical writing to deliver a narrative of the past that showed an unhallowed conspiracy of Gaulish bishops and Merovingian kings subverting Frankish liberty. Ambitious clergy, credulous laymen, and despotic kings are recurring themes of both English and French commonwealth historical writing. Dynastic privilege was dismissed as an “absurd fact”: constitutional form, which promoted the involvement of aristocratic virtue over hereditary principle, was commonly applauded.56
Much later in the 1780s, Molesworth’s polemic account of the history of Danish tyranny was redeployed for revolutionary French audiences in a short extract of chapters 7 and 8. The brief prefatory comments of this pamphlet remark, “Ce livre n’a point été fait pour les circonstances présentes; il est dans toutes les Bibliothèques; J’en ai tiré deux chapitres, dont la lecture m’a fait frémir.”57 The point of reproducing the text was to indict the role of the Church as an agent of despotism. Despite the existence of a good constitution, the Church had turned the Danes into slaves: “cette Révolution fut opérée par le dévoument hypocrite des prêtres; par la colère aveugle des communes, par l’imprudent obstination des nobles.”58 The afterlife of Molesworth’s writing was persistent.
Molesworth not only defended the value of liberty but also undertook a philosophical and historical inquiry into the conditions for its preservation and corruption. In effect he extended the project of Machiavelli’s commentaries on Livy into the circumstance of more modern and contemporary societies. Despite the work of Nathaniel Bacon and Algernon Sidney, in the absence of an account of a specifically Britto-Gallian past (George Buchanan’s history of Scottish liberty and Hotman’s French version provided prescriptive models), Molesworth produced material for the political imagination of British audiences.59 He provided, however, not simply an ancient constitution for implementation but a broader sociological inquiry into the origins and fortunes of liberty, which readers might refine and apply to contemporary circumstances. The evidence of Molesworth’s political writings and their afterlife also allows us to glimpse how traditions of thinking about liberty developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Molesworth’s edition of Francogallia acted as a conduit for repositioning the resistance theory of the French wars of religion into a form digestible and pertinent to the age of revolutions. With this “contagion of liberty,” works written as livres de circonstance, in order to legitimate specific acts of resistance against religious tyranny, were transformed into volumes encouraging ideological opposition to corruptions in contemporary political societies. Readers of Francogallia in the 1570s might have been embarked on raising arms against the French or Spanish monarchy, whereas readers of the English editions in the 1710s or 1760s read more to validate public political principles shared by large numbers of other like-minded readerships.60 Recommendations to read the works in newspapers and advertisements significantly broadened their readerships and enhanced the possibilities of their enjoying practical political consequences.
Molesworth’s writings provide ample material for an answer to J. W. Gough’s very pertinent question, “How did political liberty in the eighteenth century depend on what had happened in ancient France?”61 Molesworth mobilized historical erudition for public debate. Working with earlier discourses he searched for what was regarded as a set of historically intelligible fundamental principles. By combining Hotman’s gaulois constitution with Tacitus’s Germanist traditions, he claimed to have identified extant institutions and processes that instantiated principles of liberty. He also identified those agencies (beliefs and institutions) that corrupted freedom. The point of the combination of the edition of Francogallia and the analysis of the Danish case was to establish how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were. By drawing from the final chapter of the 1576 version of Francogallia (not reproduced in Molesworth’s editions) on superstition, Molesworth significantly contributed to the identification of the corrupting role of clerical institutions.
Scattered throughout Molesworth’s correspondence are barbed comments about the popery and tyranny of the High Church. Even men like the Low Church polemicist Benjamin Hoadly were dismissed as traitors when they accepted preferment over principle.62 This is not to say that Molesworth was irreligious: he left money in his will to build a church at Philipstown; in 1704 he instructed his wife not to forget to “enter the children’s ages in the great bible at Breckdenston.”63 Even late in his life he took a lively concern in the selection of curates: his son dismissed one candidate with the comment that “when he finds himself armed with credentials from Heaven and the Ecclesiastical Authority on earth to back them, it would be very extraordinary if he grew more modest.”64
Throughout his political career in London and Dublin, Molesworth had opposed intolerance and ecclesiastical tyranny. This had led him to support attempts to strengthen the legal basis of liberty of conscience. But it had also led him into direct conflict with the political institution of the Church in Ireland in 1713 when he suffered deprivation of his privy council seat for accusing the High Church clergy of turning “the world upside down.”65 As a consequence Molesworth was regarded as being in “odious colours” for his “intolerable profanation of the Holy Scriptures.”66
A friend of freethinking and heterodox men like Toland, Matthew Tindal, and Anthony Collins, Molesworth was explicit in regarding all clerical claims to political authority as “popery” and priestcraft. According to Molesworth, churchmen, even of Protestant varieties, exploited their authority in education to create servile prejudice and their own advancement—intolerance, persecution, and mental dependence lay at the root of tyranny. Citing the case that the Protestant Calvin had burned Servetus at Geneva, he confirmed “whosoever is against Liberty of Mind, is, in effect, against Liberty of Body too.” All de jure divino claims, such as “Monarchy, Episcopacy, Synods, Tythes, the Hereditary Succession to the Crown,” were improper and unacceptable to “real Whigs.”67 Indeed, as Molesworth took delight in reinforcing, Whiggism was constrained to no particular religious confession—Jews, Turks, even “Papists,” might be “great lovers of the constitution and liberty.” Toleration should be extended to “Pagans, Turks, Jews, Papists, Quakers, Socinians, Presbyterians, or others” because, Molesworth insisted, bigotry was the “very Bane of human Society, and the Offspring of Interest and Ignorance, which has occasion’d most of the great Mischiefs that have afflicted Mankind.”68 Religious tyranny created a dependent mind and by consequence a more effective political slavery: true commonwealth liberty lay in the freedom of reason and a good constitution.
Molesworth’s writings transformed the resistance theory of the previous century into an ideology of vigilance against the latent possibilities of contemporary despotism. This account of commonwealth ideology did not categorically oppose either monarchy or the modern and developing institutional forms of the state and society; however, it warned its readers to remain alert to the preconditions of tyranny in cultural, political, and economic forms.
The History and Reception of the Texts
An Account of Denmark was recorded in the Stationer’s Register on December 16, 1693, to publisher Timothy Goodwin. Subsequently, Daniel Poplar was threatened with prosecution for licensing the work. David Hayton has discovered evidence that throws important light on the scribal circulation of the text in the winter of 1693. John Stanley noted in correspondence with Robert Harley (at that time