Liberty as Independence

It is now over thirty years since I was an undergraduate. Even so I remember clearly how impressed I was by Quentin Skinner's ability to fill a large lecture theatre at 9am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings for his lectures on Liberty. It was clear why he succeeded in doing so; his lectures were rich, thought-provoking, and eloquent.

Skinner's most recent book, Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal marks the culmination of almost four decades of his thinking about the topic (though, of course, he has written on many other subjects in the meantime). This blogpost offers my reflections on a recent symposium to celebrate the book, that took place at Cambridge University

The idea of liberty as independence is grounded in the crucial distinction, set out in the Digest of Roman law, between a freeman and a slave. A slave is understood as being dependent on the will of their master and, therefore, constantly subject to that person's arbitrary will, whether or not they are physically constrained. By contrast, a freeman is not dependent on the arbitrary will of anyone else. In political terms, this requires living under the rule of law and having some input into the making of those laws. This understanding of liberty contrasts with what we might think of as the modern 'liberal' view, by which it is defined as an absence of impediments or restraint

Liberty as independence was initially closely linked to the Roman republican tradition - indeed it has often been labelled 'republican liberty'. Yet, as Liberty as Independence articulates, it was broader than that. In the first place, many of its advocates also incorporated into their thinking a crucial element of what Eric Nelson has presented as an alternative Greek tradition in republican thought. From this point of view, it is important to be free not only externally from the arbitrary will of other human beings, but also internally from one's own passions. Skinner presents this in a Roman rather than a Greek guise, citing Cicero's claim that 'A free man' knows how to 'govern his affections and desires' (Quentin Skinner, Liberty as Independence, Cambridge University Press, p. 19). Skinner also clearly demonstrates that this understanding of liberty was widely adopted in early modern Europe, not just by advocates of republicanism but also by monarchomach theorists, ancient constitutionalists, and advocates of theories of natural rights - including John Locke.

Liberty as Independence focuses on Britain in the century or so between the Glorious Revolution and the American and French Revolutions, when this view of liberty was dominant. It was adopted not only by the Court Whigs (who claimed to have transformed it into a reality) but also by many of their real Whig and their Jacobite opponents. The book then examines the process by which liberty as independence came to be eclipsed by the notion of liberty as an absence of restraint. This had been articulated by Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s, but only rose to hegemonic status in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions. The question Skinner poses at the end of the book is whether this shift marks a moral gain or a loss.

Statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau outside the Pantheon in Paris. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

James Harris's paper at the Symposium, 'No democracy, no Liberty', centred on a fundamental tension at the heart of the idea of liberty as independence. It requires that the  people have influence on or give consent to the laws by which they are governed, implying a close link with democracy. At the same time, however, to the extent that democracy operates by majority rule, some individuals will find themselves subject to a decision with which they do not agree. And on this account of freedom, that renders them unfree. This tension was explored in Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on America - where democracy is presented as necessarily posing a threat to liberty. It was also addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who spoke of the need for individuals to be 'forced to be free' by coming to recognise the general will as their own (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later political writings. ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 53). Yet neither Rousseau's squaring of the circle, nor the Anti-Federalist solution of a bill of rights, seems a satisfactory answer to the problem.

Both Jessica Patterson's paper and my own considered how the theory of liberty as independence might help us to think about the debates over citizen militias that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Jessica highlighted the importance of 1780 for the doctrine of liberty as independence. In the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence - in which the colonists deployed this doctrine to justify separation from Britain - it was also used by advocates of reform in Britain and by opponents of the slave trade. It was particularly salient in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots of June 1780, which saw several days of rioting in London in opposition to the passing of the Papists Act (1778). To quell the disturbance, King George III eventually brought in 10,000 soldiers who fired on the crowd without first reading the Riot Act. While estimates vary, at least 200 people were killed and many others injured. For some at the time, including the Orientalist and reformer William Jones, this demonstrated why it was dangerous to be dependent on the arbitrary will of a ruler. In the aftermath of the Riots he published An Inquiry into the legal mode of suppressing riots with a constitutional plan for future defence, in which he argued that the solution to the threat posed to liberty by this sort of arbitrary power was to arm the citizen body. Jessica went on to highlight the influence of these ideas in the nineteenth century in the writings of Chartists, Owenites and Marxists

Sir William Jones by James Heath, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1799. National Portrait Gallery. NPG D36735. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

My paper too focused on citizen militias, William Jones, and his Inquiry. But where Jessica looked forward to the nineteenth century, I examined these late eighteenth-century arguments in the context of the 'Standing Army debate' of the 1690s. This was sparked by William III's decision to maintain his armed force after the Treaty of Ryswick had brought an end to the Nine Years' War. A number of real Whig commentators objected that a standing army constituted a threat to the liberty of the nation, and argued for the use of a citizen militia as a defensive force. It was these arguments that were revived by William Jones and other members of the Society for Constitutional Information in the 1780s. They reprinted several key tracts from the 1690s debate, as well as producing works of their own on the subject, including Jones's Inquiry and John Cartwright's The Commonwealth in Danger (1795). Jones, Cartwright, and others argued that ordinary citizens should be armed and trained militarily. Moreover this was presented as an essential counterpart to parliamentary reform, including the establishment of universal suffrage. This was, no doubt, an alarming prospect to many, and perhaps contributed to the displacing of liberty as independence by liberty as freedom from restraint at the end of the eighteenth century

Richard Price by Thomas Holloway after Benjamin West, 1793. National Portrait Gallery NPG D5556. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Niall O'Flaherty's paper, 'Against Absolutism: Measuring Liberty in a Constitutional Crisis', also argued that Liberty as Independence sheds light on the political debates of the 1780s and 1790s: both by acknowledging the importance to those debates of natural jurisprudence, and by demonstrating the shared ideology of the Whigs in the eighteenth century. In addition, Niall emphasised the value of Chapter 5 of the book, which draws on novels by Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett, focusing on their critiques of the unchecked power exercised by local justices. Niall argued that this highlights the importance of local government at this time, and the fact that the tyranny exercised over the poor was often discussed in political rather than moral terms. Here, the connection between the local and the national, and between the history of political thought and other branches of history, are illustrated. Niall also noted that one consequence of this broad commitment to liberty as independence was a range of views on what constituted 'arbitrary power'. Benjamin Hoadly, in the early eighteenth century, allowed a large degree of discretionary powers for the executive (as necessary to curb the Jacobite threat), whereas later figures, like Richard Price and Thomas Paine, insisted on fewer discretionary powers - or even none at all. Finally, Niall wondered about the motivations behind the shift from liberty as independence to liberty as absence of restraint, and the extent to which late eighteenth-century advocates of the neo-Hobbesian understanding of liberty were motivated by the fact that it offered a more practical means of addressing contemporary problems.

The symposium raised many topics for further exploration. One of the most important is the question of who constitutes 'the people' - i.e. those who are to enjoy independence through consenting to the laws under which they live. For some of the thinkers discussed in the book, the definition seems to be quite broad (Jones and Cartwright, for example, would have said all adult males) but for others it was restricted to those who were educated and held property. Liberty as independence, then, has the potential to be inclusive and emancipatory but it could also be deployed in a more exclusionary fashion. What are the implications of this for its adoption today? Another topic is the relationship between liberty as independence and citizen militias, questions were raised about the differences between the British and continental practices, and about whether being compelled to join a militia could be viewed as an invasion - rather than an extension - of an individual's liberty. Finally, there is perhaps more to be said about how liberty as independence might be applied to other spheres, such as the economy and personal relationships. Even though it was eclipsed by liberty as absence of restraint in the late eighteenth century, it seems that, as Quentin suggested in the conclusion to his book, it does still have 'a great deal to contribute to current debates about the improvement of our moral and political world' (pp. 276-7).

Memories of the British Revolutions

One of the frescoes from the Peers’ Corridor in the Palace of Westminster. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

In the Peers' Corridor of the Houses of Parliament, which leads from the central gallery to the House of Lords, eight frescoes by the Victorian artist Charles West Cope are mounted on the walls. On one side of the corridor are four pictures that depict events from the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars from the Parliamentarian perspective, on the other are four paintings that offer a Royalist account. They were commissioned as part of the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster following a devastating fire in 1834. The idea behind the paintings, and the way in which they are hung, was to represent the fact that the two sides had fought each other during those wars, but that they were now unified once again and working together for the good of the nation. This scheme, and the careful consideration that went into it, reflects the difficulties involved in commemorating the events of the mid-seventeenth century.

Reconciling ourselves to the history of the British Revolutions (1640-1660 and 1688-1689) is perhaps less of a problem today, since those events are no longer central to British public consciousness or the understanding of our own history. In part this reflects the fact that the mid-seventeenth century features only fleetingly in the school history curriculum. Yet the events of those years still resonate in the way in which we conduct parliamentary politics. The adversarial model of parliamentary debate, the fact that the monarch cannot enter the House of Commons without permission, and the exclusion of Roman Catholics from the line of succession to the throne, all date from the seventeenth-century conflicts.

On 3rd September we held a workshop at Newcastle University on 'Memory of the British Revolutions in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries'. Organised in collaboration with colleagues at the Université de Rouen in France, this was a second workshop aimed at building towards a big grant application 'Memories of the English Revolutions: Sources, Transmissions, Uses (17th-19th centuries)' (MEMOREV). This workshop brought together a number of British and French scholars from different disciplines and career stages to consider how the 1640-1660 and 1688-1689 revolutions were remembered, forgotten, contested and reinvented across the British Isles, Europe, and North America between the mid-seventeenth and the early twentieth century. The aims of the wider project (as set out in the workshop by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille) involve several elements:

Linking the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s with those of the late 1680s and early 1690s. These were often linked retrospectively and, as Jonathan Scott has shown, many of the issues that were fought over in the 1640s were unresolved in 1660 and surfaced again at the time of the Glorious Revolution

Taking a broad geographical approach encompassing not just the British Isles but also continental Europe and North America so as to re-examine the impact of these revolutions on European and transatlantic cultures

Exploring the tension between memory and history and the way in which the two impact each other, including the importance of remembering and forgetting in the fashioning of historiography.

In what remains of this blogpost I will explore my own reflections on this stimulating workshop.

While the British Revolutions may no longer hold the place in the public consciousness they once did, episodes from that era still create tensions or problems for those engaged in remembrance, memorialisation, and even historical interpretation. As an historian who regularly teaches the British Revolutions I am acutely aware of this. I know the horrifying fact that the proportion of the population that died in the civil wars was greater than in World War One, and despite my republican sympathies I am uncomfortable discussing - let alone celebrating - the details of the execution of the King.

As several speakers from our workshop highlighted, the violence and the regicide have created difficulties for those remembering the events ever since the seventeenth century. Isabelle Baudino's paper was particularly strong on this. While early visual narratives of the period, such as A True Information of the beginning and cause of all our troubles and John Lockman's New History of England, did present the violence - the latter including an image of the execution of Charles I by Bernard Picart - later versions replaced these images with tableaus that encapsulated the event without actually depicting the brutality. Isabelle focused on two scenes that proved particularly popular as means of presenting the regicide and Cromwell's reign respectively in ways that were not too shocking or distasteful.

‘Charles the First after parting with his children’ by Samuel Bellin, published by Mary Parkes, after John Bridges. 1841 (1838). National Portrait Gallery NPG D32079. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Rather than depicting the regicide itself, the authors of narrative histories began alluding to that event by recreating the king's final farewell to his children. As Isabelle noted, the regicide was effectively present in this scene, since the reason Charles was having to take leave of his family was because he had been condemned to death, but the act itself was not shown. That farewell scene became ubiquitous not just in narrative histories but also in other forms, right up to Ken Hughes's 1970 film Cromwell.

The other scene Isabelle discussed also features in that film. It was Oliver Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament in April 1653, which became a symbol or shorthand for Cromwell's authoritarian rule. As Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq noted in her paper, Cromwell as a character has also been problematic for those remembering or offering an historical account of the British Revolutions. This is especially true with regard to his activities in Ireland, but Myriam-Isabelle showed that Cromwell was also a difficult figure for historians such as Frances Wright, whose grand narrative England, the Civilizer appeared in 1848. On the one hand Wright was critical of Cromwell's actions and yet she also sought to exonerate and redeem him, describing him as a wonderful man and a guardian of civilisation.

Plaque at Burford Church. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Wright saw the Revolution of 1640-1660 as a positive event, advancing the civilising process, yet for her - and for later parliamentarian sympathisers - it could be difficult to identify moments or characters worthy of celebration. Waseem Ahmed's paper addressed this issue from the perspective of the Left in examining 'Levellers Day', a commemoration of the Leveller mutiny which resulted in the execution of three men - Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins, and Private Church - at Burford in Oxfordshire in May 1649. Despite the violence of this event, and the fact that it marked the end of the main active phase of the Leveller movement, it is the date that Left-wing activists have chosen as a focus for celebration since the 1970s. In his talk, Waseem provided detail on the background to the annual Levellers Day celebration and drew out some of the complexities and tensions inherent in it. Though effectively a celebration of a moment of defeat it celebrates the bravery of these men who sacrificed their lives for a cause they believed in. Moreover, the event is important in offering an alternative history of the British Revolutions distinct from that offered by the establishment, and is part of a wider argument (encouraged by the Communist Party Historians’ group in the 1950s and 1960s) that England does have a revolutionary tradition.

A second theme that cropped up in several of the papers was the importance of networks - both familial and political - to the preservation of memories (especially more hidden or controversial memories). Cheryl Kerry's paper highlighted this in relation to the 'regicides' who had signed the death warrant for Charles I. She showed both that there was a great deal of intermarrying among regicide families and that a number of descendants of the regicides were involved or implicated in later plots and were prominent among the supporters of William III in 1688-89.

Interestingly, Stéphane Jettot demonstrated that the situation was very similar for a group on the other side of the political divide - the descendants of Jacobites. Again there is evidence of intermarriage and Stéphane particularly highlighted the role played by female family members in maintaining memories through the preservation of documents and artefacts.

Lucy Hutchinson by Samuel Freeman, C. 1825-1850. National Portrait Gallery NPG D19953. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Returning to the civil wars, Lucy Hutchinson, who was the focus of David Norbrook's paper, played a crucial role in preserving the memory of her husband, the parliamentarian Colonel John Hutchinson. David demonstrated how important members of her family then were in controlling the publication of the manuscript of her Memoirs and the format in which it appeared.

Gaby Mahlberg also touched on the importance of networks, this time of those with similar political views, in her paper on the dissemination of texts and images relating to the regicide Algernon Sidney in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany. Gaby noted the important role played by Thomas Hollis and his circle in the creation and circulation of key images. Members of that circle included the Italian painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani, the German engraver Johann Lorenz Natter, and the Baron Stolzh.

Giovanni Battista Cipriani’s engraving of Algernon Sidney for the 1763 edition of Sidney’s works commissioned by Thomas Hollis. National Portrait Gallery NPG D28941. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Hollis and his circle worked hard to keep the memory of the British Revolutions alive in Britain and abroad in the late eighteenth century and saw connections between the events of the mid-seventeenth century and their own times. The third theme that stood out to me from the workshop papers was the importance of reverberations and feedback loops both in preserving memories (by ensuring that events remained relevant) but also in distorting the way in which particular events were remembered.

Several participants highlighted the fact that in nineteenth-century France, discussing the English Revolutions was a subtle way of commenting on the French Revolution and contemporary events in France. In his paper on nineteenth-century French school textbooks, Pascal Dupuy explained that parallels between the Stuarts and the Bourbons were especially common in the Restoration period and that discussions of the Stuarts could be read as comments on the contemporary French monarchy.

Another obvious parallel for the French was that between Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell. As Isabelle Baudino explained, Bonaparte's coup added a new urgency and relevance to the image of Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament. It was not only for the French that Cromwell was a striking character. As Maxim Boyko demonstrated in his paper, Cromwell was interpreted by some Italians through a Machiavellian lens. Maxim noted that the Italians also tended to understand the period of the commonwealth and free state between 1649 and 1653 through the lens of the Italian city states, not least Venice.

These ideas have been very much in my mind as I returned to teaching. In my first week back I encouraged undergraduate students on my special subject 'The British Revolutions, 1640-1660' to think about some of the resonances of that period today. I also engaged in a lively discussion with MA students on British values and citizenship and the extent to which these are rooted in history. I hope the MEMOREV project will offer further opportunities to explore the symbiotic relationship between the past and the present, memory and history.