Encountering Political Texts at the National Library of Scotland 1: An Appetiser

The National Library of Scotland. Image by Rachel Hammersley

Next week the exhibition 'Encountering Political Texts' opens at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). This is the second exhibition related to the 'Experiencing Political Texts' project (an account of the first, which was held at Newcastle University's Philip Robinson Library last summer, can be found here). It is also our final Experiencing Political Texts event. Though the general themes are similar to those in the Newcastle exhibition, the focus of each cabinet and the items on display are different. Next month's blog will offer a full account of the exhibition, this month I provide a quick taster, discussing what are perhaps my favourite items in the exhibition - the volumes produced by Thomas Hollis.

I have discussed Hollis in previous blogs, and so will not repeat those details here. Instead I will focus on the volumes in the NLS collection, some of which feature in our exhibition. These volumes originally formed part of the Advocates Library of Edinburgh. This was a law library that was officially opened in 1689. From 1710 it became a legal deposit library, meaning that it received a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom. Between 1752 and 1757 the Keeper of the Advocates Library was the philosopher and historian David Hume. In 1925 the National Library of Scotland was created by an Act of Parliament

Hollis made donations to the Advocates Library at various points during the 1760s and 1770s, at a time when he was also sending books to Oxbridge college libraries and to public and university libraries in Europe and North America. Many of the NLS Hollis volumes include a dedication, written in Hollis's hand. Though the messages vary slightly from copy to copy the basic formula is this:

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

An Englishman, a lover of liberty, citizen of the world, is desirous of having the

honor to present this to the Advocate's Library at Edinburgh.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library

Most of the Hollis volumes at the NLS are bound in red Morocco with symbols added to the cover in gold tooling and stamped in black ink on the inside pages. They were the work of John Matthewman, who was Hollis's main bookbinder until around 1769 when he absconded due to a debt.

Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Among the volumes sent to the Advocates Library were several works from the commonwealth tradition. These include Henry Neville's Plato Redivivus, which had first appeared in 1681 at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. It sought to apply the principles set out by Neville's friend James Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) to the very different political situation of the 1680s. The work was republished by Andrew Millar in 1763. Hollis seems to have been quick to call for a second edition since an entry in Hollis's diary for 15 November the following year records a conversation Hollis had with Millar in which he 'Engaged him to reprint, that master-work intitled "Plato Redivivus. Or a Dialogue concerning Government", written by Harry Neville the friend of James Harrington, and like him ingeneous.' (The Diary of Thomas Hollis V from 1759 to 1770 transcribed from the original manuscript in the Houghton Library Harvard University, ed. W. H. Bond. Cambridge, Mass., 1996. 15 November 1764). The dedication in the Neville volume is a little fuller than the basic version reproduced above, with Hollis declaring himself a lover not merely of liberty but also of 'the Principles of the Revolution & the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover'. The tools on the cover of this volume are a cockerel on the front and an owl on the back, with a Pilius (liberty cap) on the spine. The cockerel symbolises alertness or vigilance, the owl - wisdom, and the Pilius - liberty. Inside the volume is a stamp depicting Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) and one of Britannia (NLS: [Ad].7/1.8).

Also in the collection, though not in an original Hollis binding and probably not donated by Hollis himself, is a copy of Algernon Sidney's, Discourses Concerning Government. First published in 1698 by John Toland, the volume was reprinted several times during the eighteenth century with additional material being added each time. The copy in the NLS is a 1772 reprint of the 1763 edition printed by Andrew Millar that was edited by Hollis and which marked the high point of the work in terms of size, incorporating a biography of Sidney, additional works by him, and letters taken from the Sidney papers. This version includes an Advertisement signed by J. Robertson and dated 21 October 1771, which explains that various corrections (not previously picked up) had been made regarding the names old English names and places. The volume also includes the famous engraving of Sidney that Hollis commissioned from Giovanni Cipriani in which Sidney is dressed in armour and enclosed within a laurel wreath. Below that image, and repeated on the title page and later in the work, is a small Pilius, highlighting Sidney's commitment to liberty.

John Milton, The Life of John Milton (London, 1761). National Library of Scotland, Dav.1.2.10. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

As well as publishing the first version of Sidney's Discourses, Toland had also published the works of John Milton in 1698. To accompany this, he wrote and printed The Life of John Milton which was then reprinted by Millar in 1761. This was another of the works that Hollis sent to the Advocates Library in the 1760s. It is particularly interesting because it has not one but three gold tools on both the front and the back. On the front is Athena with a branch on one side of her and a feather on the other. On the back the cockerel, Britannia, and the owl. The proliferation of gold tooling perhaps reflects the particularly high esteem in which Hollis held Milton. Hollis referred to Milton as 'divine' and 'incomparable'. And as well as collecting and disseminating Milton's works, Hollis had a picture of him in his apartment and even managed, in 1760, to purchase 'a bed which once belonged to John Milton, and on which he died'. This he sent as a present to the poet Mark Akenside, suggesting that if 'having slept in that bed' Akenside should be prompted 'to write an ode to the memory of John Milton, and the assertors of British liberty' it would be sufficient recompense for Hollis's expense (Memoirs of Thomas Hollis. London, 1780, pp. 93, 104, 112).

Following J. G. A. Pocock, a sharp distinction has tended to be drawn between the commonwealth writers (including Milton, Sidney and Neville) and John Locke. Now much questioned, this distinction also does not appear to have existed for Hollis who felt quite able to celebrate Locke as well as Milton. Several copies of Locke's works appear among the Hollis volumes in the NLS. One of these (a copy of the 1764 edition of Two Treatises of Government produced by Millar) resembles the commonwealth works in depicting Athena on the front and the Pilius on the back (with stamps of a Harp and Britannia on the fly leaves). Another emphasises the association of Locke's works with liberty by repeatedly using the Pilius image (NLS: [Ac].4/1.7).

Finally, several of the volumes donated by Hollis to the Advocates Library focus on religious rather than political matters, including several by the clergyman and religious controversialist Francis Blackburne (1705-1787). Born, like Hollis himself, in Yorkshire, Blackburne lived most of his life in Richmond. Though he became a clergyman in the Church of England, Blackburne subsequently refused to subscribe again to the Thirty-nine Articles, the defining statement of the doctrines and practices of that Church. His best known work The Confessional (which Hollis had persuaded him to publish and to which he gave his commendation 'Ut Spargum' - that we may scatter them) engaged with the history of the Church of England and the controversies over subscription. It was a text that prompted a fierce pamphlet exchange, allegedly amounting to ten volumes worth of material (B. W. Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). The presentation copy of The Confessional that Hollis gave to the Advocates Library bears a stamp of Athena inside the front cover and one of an owl in the back. The front bears a gold tool of Caduceus or staff of Hermes, a symbol of peace and rebirth, and the back a gold-tooled branch with leaves (NLS: Nha.Misc.32).

Francis Blackburne, Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1768). National Library of Scotland: Nha.Misc.31. Image credit: National Library of Scotland.

Hollis also presented a copy of Blackburne's Considerations on the present state of the controversy between the Protestants and Papists of Great Britain and Ireland (1768) which, like the Milton volume, bears more than one emblem on the front and back covers. In the centre of the front cover is a gold-tooled Britannia, with a cockerel placed in the bottom left corner. The back depicts Athena centrally with an owl bottom right. The spine features the Caduceus (Nha.Misc.31).

Though he remained within the Church of England, Blackburne had close family connections to Theophilus Lindsey and John Disney who were involved in the establishment of Unitarianism, suggesting a link to Hollis's own Dissenting position. Moreover, just as Hollis devoted his life to preserving the memory of great thinkers of the past and present, so Blackburne played a crucial role in preserving the memory of Hollis himself. Following his friend's death, Blackburne produced a two-volume account of Hollis's life, which has been described as a 'memorial to Hollis's radical tradition' (Young, 'Blackburne, Francis', ODNB).

A number of the Hollis volumes described in this blogpost will be on display at the 'Encountering Political Texts' exhibition at the National Library of Scotland between Friday 8th December 2023 and Saturday 20th April 2024.

The Swinish Multitude

In his influential and prescient early assessment of the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke revealed his contempt for ordinary people - describing them as a 'swinish multitude' and, in the eyes of some, questioning their right to education. If the natural social hierarchy was challenged, Burke argued - 'learning', together with its natural protectors and guardians the nobility and the clergy would be 'cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude' (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. 8th edition. London, 1791, p. 117). The phrase hit a chord. As this Google Ngram illustrates, there was a huge spike in its usage following the publication of Burke's text, and it continued to be deployed well into the nineteenth century. The popularity and persistence of the phrase prompts several questions. Where did Burke get the idea from? What was the response to it? And why did it continue to be used for so long?

The origins of the phrase can be traced back to the Bible. In the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew Chapter 7 Verse 6, Jesus declared:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you (King James Bible).

‘A Swinish Multitude’, by John (‘HB’) Doyle, printed by Alfred Duôte, published by Thomas McLean. Lithograph. 7 October 1835. National Portrait Gallery: NPG D41349. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The reference not just to pigs, but also to trampling good things under foot, makes clear that this was the source of Burke's phrase (interestingly the conceit also appears in William Langland's poem 'Piers Plowman' and in John Milton's 'Sonnet XII', where the 'hogs' are condemned for failing to properly understand the nature of liberty). Moreover, the notion of 'pearls of wisdom' enhances the connection with learning. Burke's opponents in the 1790s were quick to subvert his jibe and turn it to their advantage.

Early responses simply expressed hostility to Burke's sentiment. As, for example, William Belsham's reference in one of his Essays, philosophical, historical and literary of 1791 and Charlotte Smith's in her novel Desmond. Commenting on the calmness of the French people on the King's return to Paris Lionel Desmond asserts, in a vein that perhaps also alludes and responds to Milton's use of the term:

This will surely convince the world, that the bloody democracy of Mr Burke, is not a combination of the swinish multitude, for the purposes of anarchy, but the association of reasonable beings, who determine to be, and deserve to be, free. (Charlotte Smith, Desmond. A novel, in three volumes. London, 1792, Volume 3, p. 89).

Around the same time there appeared a song entitled 'Burke's Address to the "swinish" Multitude', to be sung to the tune 'Derry, down down', which satirised  Burke's position.

More substantial responses to Burke's argument about learning also began to appear. One of the earliest of these was A reply to Mr Burke's invective by the radical Thomas Cooper. Cooper was defending himself and his associate James Watt against an attack made by Burke in Parliament on 30 April 1792 concerning their presentation to the Jacobins on behalf of the Constitutional Society of Manchester. In the course of his defence, Cooper reflected on the relationship between knowledge and freedom. He condemned Burke for presenting national ignorance as a means of maintaining the position of the privileged orders and called instead for the dissemination of political knowledge so that the people could understand and secure their rights and freedoms:

Thus we find that public Ignorance is the Cement of the far famed Alliance between Church and State; and that Imposture, political and religious, cannot maintain its ground, if Knowledge and Discussion once finds its way among the Swinish Multitude. (Thomas Cooper, A Reply to Mr Burke's Invective. Manchester, 1792, p. 36).

Portrait of Thomas Cooper by Asher Brown Durand, after Charles Cromwell Ingham. Line engraving, 1829. National Portait Gallery: NPG D10570. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This whole section of Cooper's work was inserted, unacknowledged, into the Address published by the Birmingham Constitutional Society soon after its establishment in November 1792. This is perhaps not surprising since the raison d'etre of these societies was precisely to spread political knowledge, and it was partly the actions of the London Society for Constitutional Information (alongside those of the Revolution Society) that had provoked Burke in the first place.

Around the same time, works began to appear that were presented as being written by 'one of the "Swinish Multitude"'. One of these was entitled A Rod for the Burkites. It was printed in Manchester and perhaps again emerged from the circles around the Constitutional Society. Sonnet for the Fast-Day. To Sancho's Favourite Tune by one of the swinish multitude was another satirical song to the tune 'Derry, down, down'. James Parkinson, writing under the pseudonym Old Hubert, published An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke, from the Swinish Multitude in 1793. Parkinson, a successful palaeontologist and surgeon who gave his name to Parkinson's Disease, was also an active radical with a sharp concern for the poor. Parkinson's Address argued that since men are all alike, they must all be swinelike. The difference, then, was between 'Hogs of Quality' who enjoy the luxuries of the stye and the poor swinish multitude who have to work hard to survive and are obstructed at every turn:

Whilst ye are chewing the greatest dainties, and gorging yourselves at troughs filled with the daintiest wash; we, with our numerous train of porkers, are employed, from the rising to the setting sun, to obtain the means of subsistence, by turning up a stray root or two, or perhaps, picking up a few acorns. But, alas! of these we dare not partake, untill, by the laws made by ye Swine of quality, we have first deposited by far the greatest part in the store house of the stye, as rent for the light of heaven and for the air we breathe. (James Parkinson, An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke, from the Swinish Multitude. London, 1793, pp. 17-18).

Moreover, Parkinson also argued that keeping the poor ignorant was a deliberate means of keeping them down:

it would be no more than justice, if these lordly Swine would enable us to instruct our young, so that they might be capable of comprehending the innumerable laws which are laid down for their conduct; and which should, they, even through ignorance, transgress, they are sure immediately to be sent to the county pound, or perhaps delivered over to the butcher. (Parkinson, Address, p. 19).

Title page of Spence’s Pigs’ Meat. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Special Collections: Rare Books (RB 331.04 PIG). Reproduced with kind permission.

A further move by the radicals built on this point. In September 1793 two new periodical publications appeared that again commandeered the porcine language on the part of the poor. Thomas Spence's One Pennyworth of Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude was swiftly followed by Daniel Isaac Eaton's Hog's Wash; or, a Salmagundy for Swine (subsequently retitled Politics for the People). These works not only spoke to and on behalf of the so-called 'swinish multitude', as Parkinson had done, but were designed to provide them with useful political knowledge. They offered short extracts from a range of texts that were 'Intended' as Spence explained:

To promote among the Labouring Part of Mankind proper Ideas of their Situation, of their Importance and of their Rights, and to convince them That their forlorn Condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten nor their just Cause unpleaded, neither by their Maker nor by the best and most enlightened of Men in all Ages. (Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat, title page).

Similarly, the full title of Eaton's publication explained that it consisted:

Of the choicest Viands, contributed by the Cooks of the present day, AND of the highest flavoured delicacies, composed by the Caterers of former Ages. (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Hog's Wash, 1793).

Title page of Eaton’s Politics for the People. Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Special Collections: Friends (Friends 336-337). Reproduced with kind permission.

The extracts presented for the enrichment of the swinish multitude were eclectic. They included passages from: popular radical authors of the day such as William Frend, Joel Barlow, and John Thelwall; previous generations of radicals including John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney; but also more mainstream authors like Jonathan Swift, John Locke and Samuel Pufendorf. Moreover, the Bible was also a fundamental source for both editors, with quotes from various books of the Old and New Testaments being deployed to demonstrate that God favoured support for, rather than oppression of, the poor.

Though politically they were polar opposites Spence and Eaton endorsed what they saw as Burke's sense of the connection between ignorance and oppression and, therefore, between knowledge and resistance. Their hope was Burke's fear; that by providing the poor with political nourishment - feeding their minds as well as their bodies - they would be led to see and acknowledge both the oppression under which they suffered and the justice of their right to overthrow it. This, it was hoped, would provoke them into action. It did not, of course, but both the hope and the fear remain to this day.

Texts at an Exhibition

Ever since I volunteered, as an undergraduate, in the Coins and Medals Department of the British Museum, I have been interested in how complex ideas can be presented effectively to the general public. As a volunteer I sat in on an initial meeting to discuss plans for what would become the permanent Money Gallery. I remember the excitement of thinking about how to convey centuries of history accurately - but also accessibly - with a restricted number of objects and very little text. Though I ended up becoming an academic rather than a curator, that challenge has always appealed to me. For this reason, when applying for funding for the Experiencing Political Texts project, I was keen to include an exhibition as one of our outputs. In the end we decided to offer two - one at the Robinson Library at Newcastle University and another at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. The former opens this month and in this blogpost I hope to encourage you to visit the exhibition by providing a taste of its content.

Encountering Political Texts

An unbound pamphlet The Last Newes from the North (London, 1646). Newcastle University, Robinson Library, Rare Books: RB 942.062 LAS.

How do we encounter political ideas and information? How did early modern people do so? And what do we make of their political texts? A work like Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, a daunting volume that argues the case for the divine right of kings on the basis that all kings are descended directly from Adam, is likely to feel very alien and inaccessible to a modern audience. The regular use of Latin phrases, the grounding in Biblical learning, the long unwieldy sentences, the use of the long 's' (which looks like an 'f') all conspire to put the modern reader off. Filmer's text is still read today (indeed it appears in Cambridge University Press's 'blue text' series in an edition produced by Johann Somerville in 1991) and it has been the subject of an important recent monograph by Cesare Cuttica. Yet its survival owes less to its relevance today than to the fact that it acted as a provocation to at least three important political texts of the 1680s: James Tyrell's Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681); John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) and Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government (1699).

Of course, not all early modern political texts took the form of, often lengthy, books. During the turbulent period of the British Civil Wars politics was increasingly conveyed to a wider public via newsbooks (the forerunner of the modern newspaper), pamphlets (short cheap publications usually engaging with a specific political issue), broadsides (a single page that was designed to be posted up on a wall), and even ballads (political songs). There were, therefore, lots of opportunities for people - even those with limited literacy - to gain political knowledge and engage with current affairs.

The Physical Book

A central theme of the Experiencing Political Texts project has been the idea that books are physical objects and that their materiality can contribute directly to their argument. Paying attention to features such as the the size, paper quality, typeface, and ink can contribute to our understanding of the message the author was seeking to convey and how it might have been received by readers. Moreover, changes in these features in different editions of a particular work can transform the reading experience and how the work is interpreted and understood. In the exhibition we explore these issues by displaying alongside each other several different versions of James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana.

The Imagery of Politics

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), frontispiece. Newcastle University Special Collections and Archives, Bainbrigg: BAI 1651 HOB.

Authors can use images as well as words to convey their ideas to readers. Some early modern books (especially expensive volumes) began with a frontispiece illustration that conveyed the argument of the book in visual form. The exhibition includes two early examples of this: Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Eikon Basilike. It also considers what authors did to present their argument succinctly when they could not afford a fancy illustration.

Editing Political Ideas

The Author’s Preface to John Milton, A Defence of the People of England, ed. Joseph Washington (Amsterdam, 1692). Newcastle University, Robinson Library, Bainbrigg: BAI 1692 MIL.

Important political texts tend to survive beyond their immediate context and might be reissued multiple times. Though the text itself usually remains relatively stable, editors will adapt the size, quality, and design to suit their intended audience and may also add paratextual material to make the text accessible to contemporary readers or to demonstrate the relevance of the ideas to the times. The exhibition uses editions of John Milton's prose text Pro populo anglicano defensio (A Defence of the People of England) to demonstrate just how an editor can influence how a text might be approached and read.

Editing Ancient Politics

Of course, early modern editors also produced their own editions of older texts, especially those from ancient Greece and Rome, which were viewed as providing important insights on political matters. As with editions of contemporary texts, decisions about design and production were used to direct the work to particular audiences and to influence how it was read. In particular, there is a distinction to be drawn between works aimed specifically at learned readers and those intended for wider consumption.

Politics in Periodicals

Periodical publications were one of the success stories of the eighteenth century. The number of titles expanded rapidly and their format and relatively low cost made them accessible for those beyond the political élite, including artisans and women. While part of their aim was to entertain, many also included a philosophical, moral, or political dimension, prompting us to ask whether these count as 'political' texts.

Thomas Spence’s periodical Pigs’ Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (London, 1793-1795). Newcastle University, Robinson Library, Rare Books: RB 331.04 PIG.

Conversations in Print

Some periodicals also encouraged debate - inviting readers to respond to articles via letters or essays of their own. This idea of print as a forum for debate was also reflected in the 'pamphlet wars' of the early modern period in which two or more authors debated a particular issue or issues. The exhibition provides examples of both exchanges that occurred quickly, within a matter of weeks, and those that occurred over a longer period of time.

Experiencing Political Texts

Ultimately our aim is to encourage visitors to think more deeply about the nature of political texts. What makes a text political? How does its physical form contribute to that characterisation? We might even ask what constitutes a text? We are also keen to encourage people to think about how the form in which they read a work affects the reading experience. The experience of reading a text digitally on a screen is different from reading the same text in hard copy. But equally, reading an original edition of an early modern text is a different experience from reading a modern edition. It is even the case that reading an original edition today is different from the experience of reading it when it was initially produced. Finally, does this lead us to think differently about how we engage with politics today?

'Ut Spargam' and other Hollis Marginalia

An example of the smoke printed symbol of the pilius or liberty cap taken from Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, or a dialogue concerning government (London, 1763). This copy, which was donated by Hollis to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, is now held at the National Library of Scotland: ([Ad]. 7/1.8). It is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library.

In last month's blogpost I noted that social media platforms have now taken over as the dominant source of news and political information for younger citizens in the UK. One of the main concerns about this shift in news consumption habits is the notion that such platforms tend to generate echo chambers. This results in individuals rarely being confronted by - and therefore required to engage with - views that differ significantly from their own. It can produce a polarisation of positions and a tendency to demonise - rather than seeking to understand - alternative viewpoints. The political dissemination campaigns of the late eighteenth century that were the focus of my last blogpost could be seen as leading to a similar outcome, with campaigners voicing particular viewpoints (such as the benefits of political reform), and dismissing alternative views. Yet in the case of Thomas Hollis, the picture is more complex.

I have touched on Hollis and his campaign several times in previous blogposts, so will not go into great detail here. Suffice to say that he sent a huge number of books to university and public libraries in Britain, continental Europe, and North America. Harvard College in Massachusetts was the recipient of the largest collection of donations, with around 3,000 volumes being sent over several years. Part of Hollis's aim in sending works to university libraries was to influence the education of the rising generation.

An example of the embossed symbol of the wise owl again taken from the National Library of Scotland’s copy of Neville’s Plato Redivivus: ([Ad].7/1.8). Reproduced under a Creative Commons License with permission from the Library.

As well as sending the works free of charge, Hollis also manipulated the physical appearance of the volumes he sent in order to shape how they were read and understood. One technique he deployed was to add symbols or emblematic tools to the works (either smoke printed into the text or embossed onto the binding) which served as a shorthand for the content. A pilius or liberty bonnet indicated that the work advocated liberty, a sword was associated with the right to overthrow tyrants, the cock symbolised alertness or vigilance, and an owl showed that the work was wise (unless it appeared upside down in which case it had the opposite meaning). More details on the emblematic tools Hollis used are provided in William Bond's lecture, 'Thomas Hollis: His Bookbinders and Book binding', which can be accessed here.

Another method Hollis used was to add handwritten comments to the texts expressing his views on them or pointing readers towards related works in the collection. Most of these comments were specific to the text itself (and I discussed some of these in a previous blogpost) but there were at least three phrases that can be found repeatedly in works that form part of the Harvard collection.

An example of Hollis’s handwritten marginalia. This comes from an edition of John Milton’s Works, ed. Richard Baron (London, 1753). Reproduced with permission from the Harvard Library copy.

One of these is the phrase 'Ut Spargam', which translates roughly as 'that we may scatter them', 'spargo' being the Latin verb meaning to scatter, strew, or sprinkle. Hollis added this phrase by hand to more than twenty of the volumes he sent to Harvard College. For the most part these are works that set out and celebrate the rights and liberties of the people in politics and religion. They include: several works from the French monarchomach tradition, written by Huguenots in the late sixteenth century, opposing absolute monarchy and justifying tyrannicide; several collections of speeches, acts, or declarations by the English parliament of the 1640s during its confrontation with Charles I; English republican texts such as James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana and Catharine Macaulay's History of England; and several works that deal explicitly with the rights of the people, including Benjamin Hoadly's The common rights of subjects, defended, William Petyt's, The antient right of the Commons of England, and a 1658 work called simply The rights of the people. The point of the Latin phrase was presumably to indicate that these works should be disseminated so that people around the world would come to know their rights.

A box commemorating the repeal of the Stamp Act. From the National Museum of American History. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.

There were, of course, particular reasons why this message was pertinent to the American colonists in the 1760s (when Hollis sent most of these works to Harvard). This was a period during which the conflict between the colonists and the British government was escalating. The imposition of the Sugar Act in April 1764 and of the Stamp Act in March 1765 had led the colonists to fear that the British were seeking to exploit and oppress them - imposing taxes without according them representation, thereby infringing their rights as British subjects. The second of these acts provoked the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 - an early example of co-ordinated action on the part of the colonists. Yet despite securing the repeal of the Stamp Act the following year, the exercise of British control continued. The repeal was deliberately accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament's right to control the colonies. In June 1767 further customs duties were imposed, and the following year British troops moved into Massachusetts, which had been the focus of the colonial protests. It is not difficult to read off from Hollis's gifts to Harvard his attitude towards the crisis and the fact that he saw it as crucial in this context to remind young American citizens of their rights and the threats posed by overbearing power.

The second phrase Hollis adds to multiple volumes is 'Felicity is Freedom and Freedom is Magnanimity'. It appears in seven works, most of which are recognisably republican texts and two of which also bear the 'Ut Spargam' tag (Harrington's Oceana and Macaulay's History). Interestingly it also appears in A short narrative of the horrid massacre, which described the Boston Massacre of 1770 when British troops fired on protestors. A direct connection is, therefore, drawn between the events of mid-seventeenth-century England and recent colonial affairs. In fact there is a third strand to the parallel, since Hollis attributes the phrase 'Felicity is Freedom and Freedom is Magnanimity' to Thucydides. In Book 2 of The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides praises the bravery of the Athenians who died in that war, sacrificing themselves for their country, and he urges their successors to follow their example:

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own,

where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a

record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart. These take as

your model and, judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of

valour, never decline the dangers of war.

(http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.2.second.html)

Like the ancient Athenians and the republicans of seventeenth-century England, the American colonists were displaying a spirit of patriotism that led them to put the good of their country ahead of their own personal interests. The 'Felicity is Freedom' tag endorsed their willingness to fight - even to the death - to defend their rights.

Yet Hollis's strategy was not simply to present his readers with one side of the story. One of the works to which he added the phrase 'Ut Spargam' was Henry Sacheverell's account of his trial. Sacheverell was an Anglican clergyman and popular preacher. In a sermon delivered in November 1709, which he subsequently printed illegally, he attacked Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the execution of Charles I. At his trial, which opened in February 1710 and was accompanied by rioting, Sacheverell was found guilty. As a strong advocate of the Dissenting cause, Hollis will not have shared Sacheverell's views and the parallel drawn between Catholics and Dissenters will have been an affront to Hollis's staunch anti-Catholicism. Yet he still believed that Sacheverell's own account of his trial should be widely disseminated.

Moreover, the plot thickens further if we draw into the discussion Hollis's third repeatedly used inscription: 'Floreat Libertas, Pereat Tyrannis'. The words themselves celebrate the triumph of liberty over tyranny. Yet the works to which Hollis added these words were produced not by advocates of liberty, but by their tyrannical opponents. They include: the collected works of Charles I and his account of his trial; the Letters and dispatches of Charles's close advisor the Earl of Strafford who was executed by Parliament in 1641; and The free-holders grand inquest by the divine right theorist Robert Filmer. It is no doubt significant that while he strongly opposed the arguments reflected in these works, Hollis did not hide them from the Harvard students, but deliberately sent them copies, alerting them by his handwritten inscription that these works contained the arguments of tyrants. Hollis's position seems to have been that it was not sufficient for the colonists to be educated on their rights, they also needed to have a clear picture of what tyranny looked like so that they could recognise it and act quickly when it was imposed against them.

Underlying these decisions by Hollis we can perhaps glimpse the hand of the man he described as 'the divine Milton' (Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, Esq., ed. Francis Blackburne. London, 1780, pp. 60 and 93). In Areopagitica (1644) John Milton argued against the censorship of books, drawing a contrast between the food of the body and that of the mind:

Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in

John Milton in the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. Image by Rachel Hammersley

the healthiest concoction; but herein the

difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet

and judicious Reader serve in many respects to

discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate (John

Milton, Areopagitica. London, 1644, p. 11).

Hollis, following Milton, believed that the American colonists needed to engage with and understand tyranny in order to be able to defend their rights and liberties. The same argument holds today. We cannot understand, let alone defend, what is right, if we are not prepared to listen to, and engage with, alternative viewpoints - even those we might find distasteful.

Northern Early Modern Network

The second conference I attended in the week commencing 17 January was organised by the Northern Early Modern Network. It was delivered in a blended format, which allowed for the best of both worlds. Participants commented on the pleasure of speaking to a live audience after so long in isolation. Yet, including an online presence meant that speakers based in Austria, Spain, Poland, and Malta could participate without having to travel long distances. Most of the speakers were current postgraduates (and I have focused on what they had to say) so the conference provided a snapshot of the future of early modern studies. The excellent papers I heard led me to reflect on a number of themes.

Several papers focused on lesser-known figures or those who challenge conventional narratives. Daniel Johnson explored how Isaac Watts sought to reconcile his religious views with Enlightenment rationalism. Leanne Smith's paper centred on the Fifth Monarchist John Canne and examined his interweaving of religious and republican ideas. She emphasised his commitment to the republican understanding of liberty as freedom of the will and to popular sovereignty. Maddie Reynolds presented her research on the scientific work of Mary Sidney Herbert, showing the subtle strategies that she had to employ as a woman operating in a male setting. Subtlety and careful manoeuvring were also required of the Elizabethan diplomat William Davison, who was the subject of Rosalyn Cousins' paper. Rosalyn showed how Davison saw himself not simply as a servant of the Queen but as a servant of the commonwealth, meaning that he was willing to challenge orders that he thought threatened the country.

Davison's manoeuvring primarily concerned his relations with others, but some early modern individuals and groups, like Herbert, had to manipulate their own identity and self-presentation in order to succeed. Two very different examples of self-fashioning were offered in the papers by Livia Bernardes Roberge and Marlo Avidon. Livia discussed the construction of identity by the Leveller and Digger movements, showing how both groups adopted labels initially intended as terms of abuse, but also highlighting the differences in the process by which they did so. Marlo's paper centred on the women celebrated in Peter Lely's series of portraits 'Windsor Beauties'. She argued that beauty could operate as a form of power for women at that time and that the portraits provided them with some agency within the boundaries of objectification.

Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Robinson Library, Newcastle University. BAI 1651 HOB. Reproduced with kind permission from the Library.

This notion of self-fashioning points towards a second theme highlighted in various papers, namely the importance of active engagement as part of early modern religious, cultural, or political processes. This theme was first drawn to my attention in Joshua Rushton's paper on the shifting landscape of sanctity in early modern Venice. Joshua's account of the promotion of the cults of St Mark and St Antony in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries served to emphasise the importance of the spiritual engagement of the laity through the consumption of hagiographical writings and participation in processions. Participation in the politics of the state could also come through enrolment in the army, which is why many republican authors celebrated the idea of citizen soldiers. Nicolau Lutz alluded to this tradition in his paper, but his main focus was on Thomas Hobbes's rather different treatment of the army in Leviathan. Hobbes denied that the army had a corporate nature; rejected its right (or the right of any individual soldier) to act as a representative of the state; and, in complete opposition to the republicans, sought to separate the soldier from the citizen or subject. His ultimate aim, Nicolau explained, was to depoliticise the army.

A lack of political agency can also arise as a result of poverty or disability. Genna Kirkpatrick explored this idea in her examination of the treatment of these themes in the play The Honest Man's Fortune (1613). Genna emphasised the complex interrelationship between poverty, disability, status, and social structures, arguing that the play explores the ways in which the obstacles faced by those who are poor or disabled are not inherent in nature but the result of social structures that favour the rich and able-bodied.

Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas), Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne by Pieter Louis van Schuppen, after Abraham Diepenbeeck, c.1655-1658. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D11111. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Engagement in the private sphere was explored in two papers. Harriet Palin's account of the practice of catechising in early modern England showed how catechesis was used as a process of self-reflection and how for many the aim was to bring a shift from rote learning towards deeper engagement with religious understanding. Lauren Kilbane's paper on the theme of mourning in Margaret Cavendish's play Bell in Campo presented the play's war widow Madame Jantil as a living monument to her grief and emphasised the performative dimension of her role. Her creation of a funeral monument to her husband reflected one opportunity for self-fashioning that was open to women at the time.

Another kind of cultural performance was explored by Nicole Maceira Cumming in her paper on James VI's passion for hunting. As Nicole noted, hunting was not merely an enjoyable pastime but a means of preparing young aristocratic men for their duties - especially in times of war. Nicole insisted that James understood the role of the hunt as a display of power and argued that this was why in Basilikon Doron, he favoured the 'noble' pursuit of hunting with hounds - which reinforced hierarchical distinctions - as against the form of hunting that was more typical in Scotland at the time.

James VI of Scotland and I of England by Daniel Mytens 1621. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 109. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

It is not just in hunting that entertainment is combined with pedagogy, several papers explored the role of playacting and games as educational tools. Maria Maciejewska's paper on Jesuit plays about Japan noted that plays were crucial to education within Jesuit schools. Not only were they a means of practising Latin and rhetorical skills, but they also provided an opportunity for the exploration of emotions. In her paper Nuna Kümin emphasised the importance of play not just to education but to research and set out her methodology of using games as a means of exploring early modern musical improvisation - an area that is lacking in source material. Nuna ended her paper by picking up her violin and playing one of her games, offering a wonderful audio feast of early modern style improvisation.

Another common theme was the circulation of ideas and the different methods deployed for promoting this. The dissemination of ideas via texts was explored in Alex Plane's paper on the library of James VI and I. Alex argued that James's library functioned as a reference resource not just for his work as an author but also in his role as monarch, with key texts that dealt with specific contemporary issues often being bound together. Information could also be held and carried by people. This idea was explored in Sergio Moreta Pedraz's paper on the role of the governors of the "Estado do Brasil" and "Estado do Maranhao"; in Maciej Polak's exploration of the correspondence of the Royal Commissioners Marcin Kromer and Jan Dymitr Solikowski; and in Rosalyn Cousins's account of William Davison. These figures were all valuable because of their considerable understanding of politics and international affairs, which often far exceeded that of the rulers for whom they worked. In his paper Carlo Scapecchi explored the transmission of a different kind of knowledge, showing how Flemish weaving techniques were imported into Renaissance Italy through the migration of a group of Netherlandish weavers to Florence. Finally, Thom Pritchard's paper focused on the transmission of news around Europe and its disruption due to meteorological events. Employing the analogy of the acoustic shadow, whereby the sound of guns can be distorted by disruptions to sound waves caused by phenomena such as wind currents, Pritchard presented the idea of an informatic shadow where storms and other features of the little ice age impacted on the movement of news across the continent.

John Milton by unknown artist, c. 1629. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 4222. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Given that I am preparing to launch the Experiencing Political Texts network, I took particular note when contributors spoke about genre or the materiality of texts. Victoria Downey presented John Milton's use of the epic in Paradise Lost as a deliberate nod to classical authors such as Virgil, which allowed him to explore surprising elements or silences within the Biblical account. Focusing on his treatment of the serpent, Victoria showed how Milton made use of intertextual readings and allusions to present his theological convictions within the Biblical narrative. Shifts of genre within texts could also have powerful meaning, for example Lauren Kilbane showed how Cavendish switched from prose to verse to indicate that her characters were memorialising. Emily Hay's paper on the sonnets of Mary Queen of Scots showed that the genre of a work could even be twisted - or misrepresented - by later editors and printers for their own ends. She made a convincing case that the poems that were presented as love sonnets to Erle Bothwell - so as to implicate Mary in the murder Lord Darnley - may originally have been written as religious devotional works.

St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valetta, Malta. Image from Wikimedia Commons

The materiality of texts and objects was addressed directly in several papers. Alex Plane reminded us that a library is not just a collection of texts, but an assemblage of physical objects and that material features such as bindings, inscriptions, and marginalia can be as revealing as the printed words. Maddie Reynolds provided an illustration of this in her paper on Mary Sidney Herbert, pointing out that the frontispiece to The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia used emblematic and iconographical images not just to provide details of the plot, but to represent in visual form the alchemical idea of transformation. Nor is it just the materiality of texts that can be revealing. In her paper on the tryptich The Deposition of Christ from St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valetta, Lydia Pavia Dimech argued that gouge marks in the frame which holds the painting can help make sense of its history. Understanding texts and images as physical objects also means thinking about their dissemination. Roslyn Potter's paper on John Forbes's Songs and Fancies addressed this issue, noting the strategy that was employed of sending it direct to music schools to encourage its use.

I am posting this blog in the immediate aftermath of a period of industrial action that has highlighted the immense pressures that academics are under today with pay and pensions squeezed while working conditions deteriorate. Postgraduate students are at the sharp end of this crisis, often doing hourly-paid teaching on precarious contracts to develop essential skills and to make ends meet, while facing an uncertain future. For those of us working in the humanities these worries are increased by concerns about the future of our disciplines, and especially of early modern research. In this context, the conference was heartening. The scholarship on display was strong and the papers reflected new and exciting avenues of research, many of which have direct relevance for the world in which we live today.

With this in mind it seems appropriate to end with Claire Turner's paper on the smellscape of the seventeenth-century plague outbreaks. This is part of her wider PhD project that explores how the plague impacted on the five senses, thereby adopting a new approach to an old topic. The history of the plague has, of course, gained fresh relevance in the last two years, and Claire's reference to techniques such as airing rooms and segregating households sounded all too familiar. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may seem a long time ago - and much has changed in the intervening period - but Claire's paper reminded us not only that we continue to face similar problems but also that our common humanity means that we often approach them in similar ways.

Translating Cultures: Ideas and Materiality in Europe, c.1500-1800

Courtesy of the pandemic, during October I 'attended' two conferences in two different countries (the United States and Germany) without leaving my study. While I have attended various virtual conferences over the last eighteen months, these were the first hybrid events to which I have been invited. There is, of course, much that is good about this shift - not least the fact that reducing our international travel is better for the environment and that events that include a virtual dimension are more accessible for those with caring responsibilities. The fact that we have all been forced to get to grips with online platforms such as Zoom during the pandemic means these events tended to work more effectively and run more smoothly than the occasional attempt at hybrid events I attended in the past. Nevertheless there are, of course, trade-offs. In one sense it is good that I could attend these events while still fulfilling my duties as a teacher, Director of Research for my School, and a mother. But whereas when one attends a conference in person other duties recede into the background for a couple of days, this time I had to intersperse listening to conference papers with other activities, including transporting my daughter to football training and holding office hours with students, making it difficult to immerse myself fully in the topic of the conference. As Adam Smith would have recognised, there is a cost involved in switching from one activity to another.

Nonetheless both conferences provided much food for thought. In this blogpost, I will comment on just one of them: the latest in a series of workshops led by Thomas Munck and Gaby Mahlberg, and held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel Germany, involving a group of European scholars interested in cultural translation. Since this was the fourth time we have met as a group it was very much a case of pulling together strands of thought that we have been working on for a while, with a view to producing a joint publication. All the same, the papers generated some new ideas for me.

Ironically, given how long we have been thinking about cultural translation, one observation I had was about the limits of what we can know. This was brought directly to our attention by Thomas Munck in his paper: 'Untranslatable, unsellable, unreadable? Obstacles, delays and failures in cultural translation in print in early modern Europe'. Thomas's starting point was why some authors and works are not translated despite exploring potentially interesting and relevant topics. As an example he highlighted the case of the Scandinavian thinker Anders Chydenius, who wrote on popular eighteenth-century topics such as population decline, free trade, and freedom of the press, but whose works were not translated from Swedish into other European languages. Thomas identified various reasons why works do not get translated: what is written could be difficult to convey in another language; there might be conceptual barriers to translation - in that the ideas expressed may be considered out of bounds in other contexts; the works might be deemed boring and therefore unsellable; or there could be fears that they would be censored either pre- or post-publication. In addition, other members of the group noted that the existence of Latin editions can be seen to render a translation unnecessary. The difficulty for us as historians of the early modern period is in determining what the reason or reasons were in any particular case. Other papers brought up specific examples of this. Gaby Mahlberg noted that there is evidence that both a French and a Latin translation of John Toland's Anglia Libera were planned, but there are no extant copies - meaning either that the translations did not materialise or that no copies survive. We do not know which is the case, even less why. In his paper on the French translations of Thomas Hobbes's works, Luc Borot raised several related questions: why some works by Hobbes were translated but not others; why parts of some works were translated but not the whole work; and why some translations flourished while others floundered. Even, as in the case of Hobbes, where extensive correspondence between author and translator exists, we can often do little more than speculate on the whys and wherefores.

Paul Rycaut, after Sir Peter Lely c.1679-80. National Portrait Gallery NPG 1874. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

While there is a lot that we do not know, there is also a great deal that translations can reveal, not least about the preoccupations of the translator, printer or their audience. Ann Thomson's fascinating paper on translations of works about the Ottoman Empire highlighted several examples of translations being used for purposes that were different from - and sometimes even at odds with - the intentions of the original work and its author. One such example is the seventeenth-century French translation of Paul Rycaut's work The Present State of the Ottoman Empire. His account was designed to highlight the benevolent nature of the rule of the Stuarts in England - and at the same time to condemn the rule of the Puritans during the 1650s as being more like oriental despotism. The references to the Stuarts were, however, cut from the French translations and instead the 1677 version used Rycaut's book as a vehicle for discussing the situation of Protestants in France. Similarly, Luisa Simonutti's paper shed light on the manuscript translation of the Doctrina Mahumet which is held among John Locke's papers in Oxford and clearly contributed to discussions about toleration among his circle.

‘Carte de Tendre’ from Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Another adaptation between source text and translation was explored in Amelia Mills's excellent paper on Aphra Behn's translation of Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de l'Isle d'Amour. Tallemant's work drew inspiration from Madeleine de Scudéry's 'Carte de Tendre', which appeared in her book Clélie, a Roman History; and Amelia showed us a beautiful copy of the original 'Carte de Tendre' (which survives in the Herzog August Bibliothek). The map was designed to demonstrate how suitors could find their way into the affections of women by travelling to one of three destinations: Tendre sur reconnaissance, Tendre sur inclination or Tendre sur estime. Tallemant reinvented Scudéry's map shifting the destination from tendre to amour - with its more erotic overtones embodying a male rather than a female perspective. In her translation of Tallemant's text, Aphra Behn moved the focus back to a female-centred vision and to the intellectual meeting of minds that had been behind Scudéry's original. As Amelia demonstrated, this was reflected in the translation of particular words with, for example, the French word 'plaisir' not rendered as the obvious English equivalent 'pleasure' but rather the less emotionally charged 'content(ment)'. In doing so, Amelia argued, Behn was very deliberately looking back to the decade of Scudéry and her circle, and suggesting that there was much that English women of the 1680s might learn from them.

In Behn's case the shift of tone and emphasis came largely through the translation of particular terms, but in many other cases it came instead through paratextual material. Alessia Castagnino talked in her paper about the translations of the Abbé Noël Pluche's work Le Spectacle de la Nature. She noted that the Spanish translation incorporated footnotes which were deliberately used to emphasise the work of Spanish scientists and to highlight the important contribution of the Jesuits to the advancement of global knowledge.

Footnotes were also used to shift the focus of James Porter's Observations on the Religion, Law, Government and Manners, of the Turks, which was discussed in Ann Thomson's paper. She noted that the edition of the French translation produced by the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel added a wealth of footnotes which developed the themes of toleration and the condemnation of prejudice and superstition. Thus a translation of a work that was originally intended to offer a balanced - even sympathetic - account of the Ottoman Empire, was used by the STN as a means of attacking Catholic intolerance. Another example of a printer influencing the reading of a work through the addition of paratextual material was noted in the presentations given by Mark Somos and his team, who are working on the Grotius census. As Ed Jones Corredera reminded us, the important series of works on republics published by Elsevier in the seventeenth century included often quite elaborate frontispieces that were the work of the printer rather than the author or translator, allowing the printer to stamp their own message on the text.

The interest of members of the group in the material form of the text also extended to how translations were laid out on the page. Many translations (including some of those discussed above) included additional notes. The 1677 French translation of Rycaut's The Present State of the Ottoman Empire went a step further in having such extensive notes that they had to be added at the end under the heading 'Remarques Curieuses', so as to avoid clogging up the page. This was not always a concern for translators, however. Asaph Ben-Tov mentioned Thomas Erpenius's Historia Josephi, which included both the original Arabic text and not one but two Latin translations all on the same page - a literal interlinear translation and a more Latinate rendering in the margin. As Johann Camman's handwritten comments on his copy of the text make clear, the work was used by Camman as a language-learning tool rather than for its substantive content. This was not unusual in the case of bilingual versions - Alessia Castagnino suggested that the same was true of the bilingual (French and Italian) edition of Pluche's Le Spectacle de la Nature.

Early modern translations, then, served a variety of purposes. The publication arising from the Wolfenbüttel workshops will explore many of these, and I look forward to seeing it come to fruition. At the same time, I am sorry that this means that there are currently no more trips to the beautiful Herzog August Bibliothek scheduled in my diary.

Commonwealthmen and Women: The Legacy of English Republicanism in Britain and Europe

Caroline Robbins's important book The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, which first appeared in 1959, provided the impetus for a detailed investigation of the legacy of English republican ideas which has involved some of the best known names in intellectual history; including John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Bernard Bailyn and Justin Champion. That legacy was the focus of a workshop held at Newcastle University in September 2021, organised by Gaby Mahlberg as part of her Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship. The workshop offered an excellent line-up of speakers who raised a number of interesting new questions for investigation. As usual, what follows is my own personal take on the workshop and the ideas it generated.

The legacy of English republicanism is, of course, centred, on a canon of texts. But, as many of the papers demonstrated, intellectual historians now recognise the importance of private as well as published works, of intellectual networks, and of the role played by editors and printers in shaping the physical form of those texts. In her excellent paper 'John Milton in the United Provinces', which opened the workshop, Esther van Raamsdonk showed that Milton had incorporated into his Second Defence information that had appeared in private correspondence between two Dutch intellectuals Daniel Heinsius and Issak Vossius in which they had been reflecting on Milton's First Defence. There is no evidence of any direct communication between Milton and these Dutchmen. Rather, Milton's knowledge of their exchange probably came via bridging figures who knew both parties, such as Lieuwe van Aitzema or John Drury. Esther's wider point was that 'reception' need not simply be one way but that in this case there was a two-way communication from text to reception and then back from reception to text. Such complexities only become evident if we incorporate into our research manuscript as well as published texts, and the networks within which both authors and readers were situated.

This notion of the complexity of transmission was a broader theme in several of the papers. While Heinsius and Vossius discussed Milton's ideas, they firmly rejected his views. In her own paper Gaby told a similar story about the reviews of seventeenth-century English republican writings in the conservative German periodical Acta Eruditorum. The journal had an explicit policy of neutrality on political matters, but did still review some politically sensitive texts, such as the English republican writings, albeit with a degree of objective distance. It was suggested that there is a parallel here with the claim in social media that a re-tweet does not necessarily indicate endorsement. Of course even if the review is written from a position of neutrality, the ideas contained within the original work are still being transmitted to new audiences - not all of whom will share the attitude of the journal editors.

John Milton by William Faithorne, 1670. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 610. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One aspect of the English republican writings that many Europeans appear to have been uncomfortable about was their endorsement of regicide. Esther van Raamsdonk noted that, despite living under republican rule, Dutch commentators were highly critical of the execution of Charles I. In his consideration of Baruch Spinoza's knowledge of English republicanism, Thomas Munck reinforced this point. He noted that the Dutch saw themselves as having taken a more authentic route to republicanism than the English, and that they condemned the overthrow of Charles I as dangerous and insincere. While Spinoza was sympathetic to republican rule, he was deeply critical of the English abolition of monarchical government, no doubt partly because the process by which it came about was at odds with both his pacifism and his commitment to genuine popular sovereignty. This problem not only affected the Dutch. When responding to questions following his paper on Richard Price, Christopher Hamel, acknowledged that it was difficult for Price to cite Milton directly because of his link to the regicide. Similarly, Gaby believes that part of the reason why less work has been done on the legacy of English republicanism in Germany than in Britain, France and America is because of the more conservative path that Germany took in the eighteenth century, which has led historians to assume that works justifying regicide will not have found an audience there.

Another element of English republican thought that has often been seen as becoming less relevant or even distasteful as the eighteenth-century progressed is the agrarianism of James Harrington, which was increasingly at odds with the growing commercial society. In my own paper I showed that, in fact, Harrington's theory about the relationship between land and power remained a consistent theme for at least some republicans in Britain right through to the nineteenth century.

Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1775. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 5856. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

A further complication to our understanding of the legacy of English republican works was introduced via the papers and discussions of the second panel, where it was argued that there was a Saxon tradition of republicanism that emerged and developed alongside the more conventional ancient tradition. In his excellent paper on 'John Tutchin and Commonwealth Poetics', Joe Hone made a persuasive case for Tutchin as a commonwealth writer and the author of a number of commonwealth poems, including Aesop at Amsterdam and The Foreigners. He went on to demonstrate that there was a distinct vein of Saxon republicanism in these writings. For Tutchin freedom was a right that the English had inherited from their Saxon ancestors and these birth rights and native freedoms were given greater emphasis than the civic virtue central to ancient republicanism. Ashley Walsh has already published an excellent article on Saxon republicanism, and so it is not surprising that his paper on the standing army debate complemented Joe's paper in this regard. Ashley emphasised the fact that the standing army debate of the 1690s encouraged the revival of ancient constitutionalism, with advocates of the militia often looking to the Saxon past rather than to classical precedents. This remained a key strand of militia debates right through the eighteenth century. Moreover in later papers by Christopher Hamel and Max Skjönsberg it was clear that Saxon republicanism - and particularly ideas of natural rights and patriotism - remained important to later eighteenth-century commonwealthmen and women, including Price and Catharine Macaulay. Saxon republicanism is, however, complex. In discussions we noted its ambiguous nature as, on the one hand, an insular doctrine with elements of ethnic or racial exclusivity and, on the other hand, transnational features. Not only did the Saxons come to Britain from Germany, but there were also parallels in other countries (such as the Batavian tradition in the Dutch context). The group felt that there is more work to be done in this area.

Finally, given my current preoccupations, I noted when participants touched on issues of genre or materiality. The legacy of Milton's works has been interesting in this regard. His seventeenth-century reception in the Dutch Republic, as Esther van Raamsdonk noted, was focused on his prose writings. But, as Tom Corns reminded us, there was a 'cleaning up' of Milton's reputation in Britain from the late 1680s through a shift towards his poetic works and the crafting of his reputation as the English Protestant Virgil. Also of interest in relation to Milton was the fact that he was often praised for the style while being condemned for the content of his writing - as in the idea that he defended a bad case well. Joe Hone began his paper with the bigger question of why the commonwealth tradition is primarily a prose tradition, given that a wealth of commonwealth poetry was produced during the 1680s and 90s when the two were more or less on an equal footing. Moreover, it is clear from Joe's works that John Darby printed both poetry and prose and saw the connection between them. One possibility is that it was the preferences of the influential figures who shaped and transmitted the commonwealth tradition - including John Toland and Thomas Hollis - that were crucial.

Thomas Hollis’s edition of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government. Houghton Library, Harvard University. HOU F *EC75.H7267.Zz751s Lobby IV.4.14. I am grateful to the Houghton Library for permission to reproduce this and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance.

The mention of Hollis brings us to the final paper of the workshop, by Allan Reddick, and to the question of books as material objects. Allan noted that Hollis sometimes sent English-language books to places where few would have been able to read them, raising the question of what his purpose in doing so was. In part it was probably about ensuring the preservation of these texts and the ideas contained within them, but Allan suggested that he also thinks that Hollis saw the books as having an almost talismanic quality - an idea that is reflected in the complex iconography that he incorporated into his editions and bindings. Hollis was no doubt influenced by his hero Milton's notion (expressed in Areopagitica) of books carrying a potency and agency and constituting an abstraction of the living intellect that bred them. The commonwealth works Hollis republished might be viewed, then, as warriors for liberty and, in this regard, our investigation of the commonwealth tradition concerns their still on-going battles.

A New Utopia: Oceana for the 21st Century

Frontispiece to James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy.

George Monbiot's book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis calls for the creation of a "politics of belonging". He is not the only person to suggest, in recent months, that a new way of thinking about politics is required. These calls have prompted me to think again about the utopian character of James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. 

Historians have long debated whether Oceana should be labelled as a utopia at all, partly because it was very clearly intended as a practical model for a specific place and time. Yet Colin Davis, author of Utopia and the Ideal Society, sees this as precisely one of the key features of a utopia. Davis argues that what distinguishes utopias from other conceptions of the ideal society is their acceptance that limited resources are exposed to unlimited desires: 'The utopian's method is not to wish away the disharmony implicit within the collective problem, as the other ideal-society types do, but to organise society and its institutions in such a way as to contain the problem's effects.' (Colin Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 37-8). This kind of model, one that takes human society as it is and offers practical solutions to human problems - and yet pushes beyond the framework of the current system - is precisely what we need just now. So what would an Oceana for the twenty-first century look like?

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that, in the first place, my twenty-first century Oceana would seek to challenge the idea that politics is the preserve of a distinct political class. Harrington, following Aristotle, believed every citizen should rule and be ruled in turn. He also insisted that human nature dictated that individuals who held power for long periods of time (however good and virtuous they were in the first place) would inevitably become corrupt. Harrington's solution was the rotation of office, with representatives being in post for three years before standing down and being ineligible for re-election for a similar term. Something like this system could be introduced in the UK Parliament. Of course there are problems that would need to be addressed. Being effectively made redundant after three years may deter certain individuals (perhaps particularly the poorest) from standing at all, so jobs would need to be held open and provision made to support those retiring from office. But the potential advantages of politics being an activity in which most citizens engage at some point, rather than the preserve of a political élite, are significant.

Thirteenth order of Harrington's Oceana on the agrarian law.

Another central tenet of Harrington's political programme was the preservation of an equitable division of land within the nation. This was necessary to maintain a balance of property, and hence of power, suitable for commonwealth government. Harrington sought to achieve this through his agrarian law, which required those owning large tracts of land to divide their estate more equally among their children. While land is still a crucial source of the wealth of the super-rich, it has largely been replaced by money as the basis of power. My concern here is not with the redistribution of property in either its landed or monetary form, but rather with the means by which the majority of us earn our money. Work is currently divided in ways that are uneven, creating unhappiness both among those who have too much and those who have too little. Earlier this year the New Zealand trustee company Perpetual Guardian initiated a six-week trial in which its employees were to work four days a week while being paid for five, and in this country the Autonomy Institute has called for the implementation of a four-day week. I am one of a growing number of parents who have made the  switch to working four days a week. While there is a danger (for those of us doing four days' work for four days' pay) of succumbing to the tendency to do five days' work in four, my experience is that a four-day week makes for a better work-life balance, for those able to take it. There are also potential benefits for others since, in my own and many other professions, a large number of highly talented young people are struggling to get their feet on the career ladder. If more people worked fewer days a week then more positions would open up for junior staff. Of course, employers may well complain that it would create a less efficient system. But we could off-set the inefficiencies of having to employ more staff against the efficiencies gained from workers being less tired, more motivated, and less susceptible to stress and its associated health problems. Nor should this change in work patterns be available only to professionals. A wholesale reconsideration of what constitutes a working week ought to address changes and benefits that can be brought to all workers.

Finally, Harrington's commitment to healing and settling a divided nation could be developed for the twenty-first century. As I demonstrated in a previous blogpost, he insisted that peace could only be established in post-civil war England if those on both sides of the royalist-parliamentarian divide were allowed to engage equally as citizens. He was also a strong advocate of religious toleration, insisting that no-one's right to citizenship or to hold office should be rescinded on the basis of religious belief. The Brexit Referendum, along with the debates at home and negotiations in Europe that have followed, have created deep divisions in our society. As a result, we too are in need of healing and settling. I suggest, though, that the solution for us lies less in extending citizenship to those who are currently excluded than in making political citizenship more substantial.

John Milton by William Faithorne, line engraving, 1670. National Portrait Gallery NPG D22856. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

One way of doing this would be to encourage open debate about key issues. This might be seen as going against Harrington's ideas, in that his popular assembly was not allowed to discuss legislative proposals - he worried that popular political debate would lead to anarchy. Yet he saw debate by the Senate as crucial to the political process, and he did not want to prevent popular debate from taking place outside the popular assembly. Moreover, in several of his writings he expressed the idea that greater knowledge would arise from the debating of issues, even suggesting that his model constitution would be improved by others examining and criticising it. There is an echo here of Milton's notion from Areopagitica that good ideas will inevitably win out if free debate is allowed to flourish. If we could create opportunities at all levels of society for free, open and constructive political debate involving those of different political views, perhaps we could construct a society that is more open, tolerant, and better informed.

Sir Thomas More, after Hans Holbein the Younger, early C17 based on a work of 1527. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 4358. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

Of course, what I have offered here is not a utopia but just three proposals inspired by Oceana. A further distinguishing feature of utopias, noted by Davis, is that they are conceived as total schemes. In the early modern era this was often achieved by setting the utopia on a distant island, as Thomas More did in the work that gave its name to the genre. This reflected a fascination with the, as yet not fully charted nature of the globe at that time. While, like More, Harrington was writing a utopia for England, he indicated the intended location more overtly, the fictional guise he employed simply signalled a concern with England as it ought to be rather than as it actually was. Today, the obvious place to situate a utopia would be in the virtual realm. Moreover, with the right software one might even be able to play out the consequences of such a system, as is done in disaster scenario planning (and as Harrington attempted to do in a more basic form in the corollary to Oceana). Perhaps my next step, after my Harrington book has been delivered to the publisher, should be to construct a Harringtonian 'digitopia'.

Early Modern Political Thought and C21 Century Politics: A Workshop

As part of my British Academy Fellowship I organised a workshop at Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society on Wednesday 16 May 2018, on the relationship between early-modern political thought and twenty-first-century politics. The Lit and Phil is an ideal place to host such a discussion, having been a vibrant centre for thought and learning in the heart of Newcastle for more than 200 years. Although its founders eschewed discussion of religion and politics, its forerunner - the Philosophical Society - debated such issues as 'Whether a National Religion, or a variety of Sects, is of greater advantage to the State?', 'Whether the Civil War in the reign of Charles I and the present conflict with America be similar?' and 'Which is the better form of government, a limited monarchy as in Great Britain, or a republic?' 

I invited four distinguished speakers to the workshop each to speak on a different theme. 

Image of Thomas Rainsborough from a mural in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution, talked about political organisation and mobilisation during the Civil War. He focused on the Putney Debates arguing that it was in that forum that some of the arguments deployed ever since for and against democratic change were laid down. Thomas Rainsborough set out his famous plea for the right to representative government and democratic accountability. He argued that: 'the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he' and therefore that 'every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government' (The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, London: Royal Historical Society, 1992, p. 301). Against him General Henry Ireton asserted that only those with property should have the vote. Moreover, as Rees noted, the organisation of those debates themselves hinted towards a more direct notion of democracy, with ordinary soldiers acting as the voices of their regiments. Drawing on his own experiences in opposing the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Rees showed that these arguments retain relevance and resonance today.

Professor Ann Hughes speaking at the workshop. Taken by Rachel Hammersley.

Ann Hughes, Emeritus Professor of History at Keele University, engaged with the question of religious liberty and toleration. The period of the mid seventeenth-century witnessed the articulation of arguments both for and against toleration. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards rejected toleration, citing the dangers that full religious liberty would bring. By contrast, in Areopagitica, John Milton celebrated the acceptance and even encouragement of (moderate) division and variety. Hughes highlighted the fact that Edwards and Milton essentially had different conceptions of the truth. Edwards believed that he knew what the truth was and that the task was to enforce it. By contrast, Milton emphasised the need for openness in order to discover the truth. Once again, we can see how these two views remain in conflict among us today with figures on both sides of the secular-religious divide in danger of being closer to Edwards than to Milton.

Image from Dr Ariel Hessayon's talk at the workshop. Taken by Rachel Hammersley.

Ariel Hessayon, of Goldsmiths College, discussed environmental issues, noting that while we worry today about global warming and its implications for competition over scarce resources, people in the seventeenth century were anxious about the impact of a cooling climate in what has become known as the 'little ice age'. Building on Geoffrey Parker's important work on this topic, Hessayon considered the sources that seventeenth-century men and women used to make sense of what was going on, and their responses to environmental change and challenge.

Dr Gaby Mahlberg speaking at the workshop. Taken by Rachel Hammersley

Finally, the historian and journalist Gaby Mahlberg opened with Berthold Brecht poem Thoughts on the Duration of Exile in order to address the issue of refugees and exile. She reminded us that exile is generally a matter of necessity rather than choice, and explored the ways in which seventeenth-century English republican exiles were affected by the people and ideas with which they came into contact in the nations that gave them shelter. She also spoke of the difficulties they faced in attempting to maintain and pursue their political activities abroad.

The four papers were linked in my mind by the fact that fear seems to have been a pervasive and constant presence in mid-seventeenth-century England. Ireton was afraid of the social anarchy he thought would inevitably arise from giving the poor and propertyless the vote (while those poor and propertyless were of course endlessly fearful of what the authorities would do to them). Edwards was fearful that tolerating certain religious positions would be a slippery slope that would again result in anarchy. The idea of the religious sects of the time as a canker eating away at society is a powerful image of the intensity of this fear. At the same time, members of those religious sects must have been constantly fearful of repression. Extreme weather events and other natural phenomena then, as now, bred fear as human beings grappled with the question of how to deal with what is beyond their control. Finally, exiles and refugees today, as in the past experience great fear for their lives and prospects, and at the same time have the potential to provoke a fearful reaction in others: their 'otherness' makes them suspect and a threat.

Frontispiece from the pamphlet The World Turned Upside Down (1645) taken from https://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/resources/images/early-media-role-woodcuts and shared on the basis of a creative commons license.

It is perhaps not surprising that a period of great change and revolution was marked by fear. Thomas Hobbes commented that he and fear were twins (it was said that his mother went into labour on hearing news of the Spanish Armada) and fear certainly played a central role within his political thought. Similarly the title and frontispiece to the pamphlet The world turned upside down of 1645 reflects the sense of fear and strangeness that seems to have been palpable at the time. Historians typically focus on the changes that were introduced, the debates that were played out, and the ideas that emerged, but perhaps refocusing on the fear would prove fruitful. 

Image said to be of Gerard Winstanley from a mural in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

It is also important to remind ourselves that fear need not always provoke a violent, destructive or exclusive response. On this point I was struck by Ariel Hessayon's comment that Gerrard Winstanley's answer to the climactic problems of the seventeenth-century (and indeed to those of poverty and division too) was in essence peaceful, communal and constructive. He set about planting beans and turnips on St George's Hill in Surrey in a bid by himself and the members of his community to feed themselves.

Speaking of Winstanley brings me back to the poster I produced for the event and the image on it depicting a slightly quirky quartet of figures. Winstanley and Rainsborough are there joined by the nineteenth-century Chartist William Cuffay and the "King of the Hippies" Sid Rawle, under a banner stating 'This Land is your Land' 'Take it'. This mural can be found painted on to an artists' studio at the top end of the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle. It would seem that I, and those attending the workshop, are not the only current residents of Newcastle who can see the relevance of seventeenth-century political ideas.

Ouseburn Valley mural with our four speakers: Gaby Mahlberg, Ann Hughes, John Rees and Ariel Hessayon.

You can find another blogpost on this event by Liam Temple, complete with audio recordings of the papers at:http://theosophicaltransactions.com/conference-report-early-modern-political-thought-and-twenty-first-century-politics-16th-may-2018/

Holding Representatives to Account

Concerns about the accountability of members of the UK Parliament have been common in recent years. These have centred, for instance, on the expenses scandal - with claims being made that had little or nothing to do with parliamentary work. This originally broke in 2009, but continues to rumble on. Thus, in October 2017 it was revealed that sixteen peers who had not spoken at all in 2016-17 had nonetheless claimed a total of more than £400,000 in tax-free expenses over that period. Members of Parliament have also been accused of being unaccountable in appearing to challenge, or ignore, the will of the people - for example over Brexit. The reluctant response of some MPs to the referendum - reflected most recently in the voting of an amendment on 13 December 2017 which will give Parliament a legal guarantee of a vote on the final Brexit deal - has led some to accuse MPs of inhibiting the popular will. However, the accountability of those in power is by no means a new issue.

Engraving of George Wither by John Payne from A Collection of Emblemes (1635). Taken from Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Wither_Engraving.jpg

Having been prompted into rebellion by the actions of an unaccountable monarch, who had ruled for an unprecedented eleven years without calling Parliament, the English revolutionaries of the mid-seventeenth century were particularly concerned with the issue of accountability. Some, such as the parliamentary propagandist Henry Parker, insisted that a parliament would, by its very nature, embody the wisdom of the nation and so could not betray the interests of the people, (Henry Parker, Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses, London, 1642, especially p. 22). But, by the mid-1640s, a number of commentators were becoming concerned about the accountability of Parliament itself. The Puritan poet George Wither addressed this issue directly in his Letters of Advice: Touching The Choice of Knights and Burgesses of November 1644. According to Wither, the Houses of Parliament had resolved to call 'false and apostate' members to just account and to disable them from returning to parliamentary trust, so fresh elections were expected. Wither's aim in the work was to advise the knights and burgesses on the kinds of men to choose. In doing so he expressed specific concerns about MPs being unaccountable and therefore becoming distanced from their constituents:

by heedlesnesse in this dutie, they shall make Tyrants and Fooles, Lords over them, who will fawne and court them, till they are elected, and then, scorne and trample them under feet, putting such an immeasurable distance, betwixt themselves and others, of that Body whom they represent, and out of which they were chosen, as if they had forgotten what they were (George Wither, Letters of Advice: Touching the Choice of Knights and Burgesses, 1644, p. 4).

Not surprisingly, fears about lack of accountability only seem to have increased after the regicide enacted by a purged 'Rump' Parliament.

   Those concerned with accountability had various ideas as to how the problem could best be addressed. A common solution was to call for regular elections, as the Levellers did in The Agreement of the People. They insisted that 'to prevent the many inconveniences apparently arising from the long continuance of the same persons in authority' the Parliament that was then sitting should be dissolved on 30 September 1648 and a new Parliament elected every two years. (The Agreement of the People, clauses II and III). Others worried that the mere threat of not being re-elected would not be sufficient to ensure the good behaviour of those in power and so called for those stepping down from office to be required to give a public account of their actions on the basis of which they could then be judged, and if necessary punished. Wither advocated precisely this measure in the postscript to Letters of Advice. He described MPs as: 'servants and inferiours to their respective Counties and Burroughts; and that, by them, they may be called to account, for every omission or commission worthie questioning: either before the present Parliament whereof they are members, or before the next that shall be summoned.' (Wither, Letters of Advice, p. 13). He even toyed with the idea of dismissing those who proved to be 'unfaithful in trust' mid-term. (p. 14). De-selection no less.

John Milton, by unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery, NPG4222. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

   Not all seventeenth-century political commentators, however, believed that such accountability measures were an unalloyed good. Some acknowledged that there was a tension between making rulers accountable (especially by means of frequent elections) and the need for them to develop experience and expertise. John Milton in The Readie and Easie Way, a last-ditch attempt in 1660 to avoid the restoration of the monarchy, questioned the idea of limited terms of office: 'For it appeers not how this can be don, without danger and mischance of putting out a great number of the best and ablest: in whose stead new elections may bring in as many raw, unexperienc'd and otherwise affected, to the weakning and much alterning for the wors of public transactions.' (John Milton, Selected Prose, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 341). Similarly, the Calvinist minister Richard Baxter argued that: 'To have the ignorant and unexercised introduced, and then turned out before they can grow wise' was not a sensible means of operating. (Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont, Cambridge, 1994, p. 140 )

Richard Baxter, after Robert White, oil on canvas based on a work of 1670. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 521. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

 Both Milton and Baxter were responding directly to Harrington's concern with accountability and his distinctive proposals for how this might be secured. Harrington insisted that members of both legislative houses, along with most office holders within the commonwealth, should hold their positions for a period of three years after which they would be required to spend an equivalent period out of office. Elections, though, would occur annually, with one third of the members of each assembly being replaced each year. This system had some advantages. Not only did it mean that there would be no hiatus between the ending of one parliament and the opening of the next, but it also meant that at any time the assemblies would be composed of one third of members with two years' experience who could speak as experts, one third who were in the process of developing their expertise, and one third who would bring new ideas and approaches to national government.

Harrington, and many of his contemporaries, would have identified severe problems with our modern parliamentary system as regards accountability. Holding elections just once every five years would have seemed foolish and dangerous to many of them. Moreover, the idea that at the end of a given parliament the same MPs could immediately be re-elected, without any official scrutiny of their conduct, would certainly have been condemned by Wither and Harrington. They would have derided the fact that it is possible for an MP to sit for more than 40 years without any time out of office - as the 'father of the house' Tam Dalyell did. While it is necessary to balance accountability against the benefits derived from experience, a major problem with our system, as Harrington would have recognised, is that because they are not forced to spend time out of office, members of Parliament can quickly become separated from the interests and concerns of the general public. Moreover, their ability to make laws means that they can prescribe different rules for themselves than for the rest of the population. They do not, as Harrington would have put it, have to live under the laws that they make. Perhaps a move to a system in which there are more frequent elections (perhaps on a rotational basis), with the requirement of regular terms out of office, would increase their accountability?

Republics v Monarchies

The Scottish National Party recently brought the question of the Monarchy back onto the political agenda by voting at their 2017 party conference in favour of cutting public funding for the Royal Family. Delegates supported overwhelmingly a motion calling for the repeal of the Sovereign Grant Act of 2011. While the vote will not bring immediate political change, since Westminster retains control of the Sovereign Grant, the vote has drawn attention once again to the alleged republicanism at the heart of the SNP and the idea that an independent Scotland might choose to replace the Queen as head of state. Such suggestions always produce strong views on both sides, usually labelled 'republican' and 'monarchist'.

On the surface, at least, the distinction between republics and monarchies is a crucial feature of our modern political landscape. Yet the history of these two constitutional forms is far more complex than this simple dichotomy would suggest. Indeed, according to one historical definition, Britain is and has long been a republic, whereas on the basis of another neither France nor the United States of America is worthy of that term. Monarchists and republicans alike might, therefore, benefit from a deeper understanding of the history of these political concepts.

Bust of Cicero. I am grateful to Katie East for providing the image.

The concept of republican government, in both theory and practice, dates back at least to ancient Rome. It was explored in a number of Roman texts, not least those of Marcus Tullius Cicero who was both a politician and a political thinker. In his De re publica Cicero did not define a republic or commonwealth in opposition to kingship, but instead argued 'that a commonwealth (that is the concern of the people) then truly exists when its affairs are conducted well and justly, whether by a single king, or by a few aristocrats, or by the people as a whole'. (Cicero, On the Commonwealth, ed. James. E. G. Zetzel Cambridge, 1999,  p. 59). The key distinction here, then, is between rule that serves the public interest and that which serves private interests. So, on Cicero's account, a monarchy, if properly organised and directed towards the public good, could be a kind of republic. That same idea was still being voiced as late as the mid-eighteenth century, when the Genevan-born political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Social Contract:

I therefore call Republic any State ruled by laws, whatever be the form of administration: for then the public interest alone governs, and the public thing counts for something. Every legitimate government is republican.

The accompanying footnote might appear self-contradictory, if Cicero's position is not borne in mind:

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

By this word I understand not only an Aristocracy or a Democracy, but in general any government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the Government must be not confused with the Sovereign, but be its minister. Then monarchy itself is a republic. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge, 1997, p. 67)

   But while the Ciceronian understanding of a republic survived well into the eighteenth century, from the late fifteenth century onwards a second understanding was developing. This saw monarchy not as one form of republican government, but as its direct opposite. Several historians have recently traced the development of this tradition of republican thought, emphasising its debt to the writings of Italian Renaissance thinkers as well as to a tradition of Jewish Biblical scholarship that offered a distinctive take on the Israelites' plea to God in I Samuel 8 that they be given a king like other nations.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were certainly those who saw republican government as requiring the destruction of monarchy. The English Civil War of the 1640s prompted some parliamentarians to attack not simply Charles I, or even just tyrants, but all kings. Marchamont Nedham was one of several figures who challenged the very distinction between kings and tyrants: 'Had they [the English] but once tasted the sweets of peace and liberty both together, they would soon be of the opinion of Herodotus and Demosthenes that there is no difference between king and tyrant and become as zealous as the ancient Romans were in defence of their freedom.' (Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated, ed. Philip A. Knachel, Charlottesville, 1969, pp. 127-8). This view had practical import too. The 'Act Abolishing the Office of King', which was passed on 17 March 1649, declared the office of king to be 'unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people' and the ensuing 'Act Declaring England to be a Commonwealth and Free State', which was passed in May 1649, insisted that this government was to be 'without any King or House of Lords'.

John Milton, by unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery, NPG4222. Reproduced under a creative commons license.

Yet even this does not present the full complexity of the concept, since those who agreed that republicanism was, by definition, anti-monarchical, could nevertheless disagree over precisely what institutional form should replace the office of king. Most significant was the distinction between those who insisted merely on the absence of a monarch, and those who outlawed any form of single-person rule. Thus a third definition of republic required that the government was not headed by a single figure, but by a group or council. As John Milton asserted in The Readie and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth: 'I doubt not but all ingenuous and knowing men will easily agree with me, that a free Commonwealth without single person or house of lords, is by far the best government, if it can be had.' (John Milton, The Readie and Easy Way, in Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Parties, Harmondsworth, p. 338). Milton's formulation ruled out both monarchy (as in the reign of Charles I) and a Protectorate (as under Oliver Cromwell).

Moreover, the English revolutionaries had attempted to institute such a form a decade earlier. When Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649 he was replaced not by another single person, but rather by the Rump Parliament, which ruled together with its Council of State, until April 1653. Yet as its short life - and the rise of Oliver Cromwell - would suggest, experiments involving a purely conciliar government have often proved unsuccessful in practice. The experiments in France in the 1790s with the Committee of Public Safety, and later the Directory, further confirmed this conclusion.

Evidently, it is the second definition of a republic outlined above that is most common today, so that a republican wishes to abolish the Monarchy. According to the first definition, that of Cicero, modern Britain could, despite having a Queen as head of state, be counted as a republic so long as government decisions were made in the public interest. Indeed, there were those in the eighteenth century who made precisely that argument. In 1700, the controversial political thinker and activist John Toland declared that 'if a Commonwealth be a Government of Laws enacted for the Common good of all the People' and if they had some means to consent to those laws 'Then it is undeniably manifest that the English Government is already a Commonwealth, the most free and best constituted in all the world.' (John Toland, The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, London, 1737, p. vii-viii). According to the third definition, by contrast, which requires that a single person must not be given considerable power, neither France nor the United States of America (both of which have a President), would be deemed worthy of that label.

Viewed historically, 'monarchy', is no easier to define than 'republic'. We can see this if we consider precisely what features make a monarch. Hereditary rule might be thought of as one key element, but this does not hold in the case of the early-modern Polish monarchy, which was elective. We might, then, say that a monarch generally holds his or her position for life. This would work for the Polish system, but it was also true of the Doge of Venice during the same period, and yet most people would argue that the Doge was the head of a republic rather than being a monarch.  Instead of thinking about the nature of the position, then, we might consider the extent of the power wielded. But this seems no more satisfactory as a basis for distinguishing monarchies from republics, since from the late eighteenth century to the present the President of the United States of America has tended to wield far greater powers than the English monarch. While part of the problem here is that the modern British Monarchy is in some ways a misnomer, since our Queen is a hereditary figurehead rather than a power-wielding head of government, even in the late eighteenth century George Washington already enjoyed greater powers in certain respects than George III. (For an interesting exploration of the royal tendencies in the American system see Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2014).

John Lilburne, England's New Chains Discovered, London, 1649. http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/leveller-tracts-6. 18.10.17. Taken from the Online Library of Liberty [http://oll.liberty.org] hosted by Liberty Fund, Inc.

This is not to say that important differences between what are conventionally labelled as monarchies and republics do not exist. The expenditure of public money on the Royal Family and the upkeep of royal palaces has always been one of the stronger arguments in the British republican arsenal (though of course presidential systems and legislative assemblies also incur costs). But we must also be careful not to assume that all our political problems can be solved by establishing a republic. It did not take long even for those seventeenth-century English revolutionaries who had called for an end to the monarchy to realise that many problems remained in its wake. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that, less than a month after the regicide, the Leveller leader John Lilburne published a pamphlet which he entitled England's New Chains Discovered.

Intellectual Biographies Workshop, Newcastle University 04.07.17

 Intellectual biography is in vogue at present. Edmund Burke, David Hume and Karl Marx have all been the subject of recent studies and these have been widely reviewed in academic journals and the popular press. There is also biographical interest in a number of seventeenth-century figures, as a workshop held at Newcastle University on 4 July testified. The aim was to explore intellectual biography as a genre or approach, and to consider the particular challenges it presents as well as the opportunities it offers. The discussion was stimulating and wide-ranging and has set me thinking about many issues.

One is the very nature of intellectual biography itself. A common approach to this, discussed at the workshop, involves a distinction between the work and the life, or perhaps even between the 'external life' and the internal 'life of the mind'. In these terms, intellectual biography can be contrasted, on the one hand, with critical commentary that focuses on published texts alone, and, on the other, with biographies focused exclusively on the private or public life of a subject who did not produce a corpus of published writings, or who is not examined in these terms. Despite this broad consensus, however, several participants at the workshop preferred to avoid the label. So Nick McDowell's study of John Milton will be an 'intellectual life' rather than an intellectual biography and Mike Braddick's biography of John Lilburne is to be titled a 'political life'.

Another issue concerns whether certain subjects are better fitted for intellectual biography than others. At the workshop it was noted that intellectual biographies are more common for the post-1800 period. One reason for this may be that in the early-modern period, generally speaking, the sources are more fragmentary, making it more difficult to recreate the inner life (and sometimes even the external life) from the source material. Sarah Hutton pointed out that this problem is frequently exacerbated where the subject is a woman, since they had fewer opportunities to express their ideas publicly and their private papers are less likely to have been preserved. This can encourage speculation in order to fill in the gaps, but another approach is to focus more on reconstructing the intellectual context around the subject from other sources, not just directly through the subject's own writings, public and private.

Also, in the case of early-modern studies the biographer is more remote from the mental world of the subject, making its reconstruction more difficult, but perhaps also requiring the biographer to build up the mental world from evidence rather than assuming that (s)he understands it. The particular character of the subject may further complicate this.

John Milton by an unknown artist c.1629, NPG4222. Reproduced under the creative commons licence from the National Portrait Gallery.

 Nick McDowell raised the common objection to intellectual biographies of poets that this approach tends to turn poems into vehicles for ideas and downplays the timeless, creative, literary spark of such works. There was also some discussion at the workshop of the idea that a woman's intellectual life might be of a different character or quality from that of most men. This is certainly true in the case of Anne Conway, who, as Hutton explained, did not philosophise in a familiar way. In part this was down to the fact that she had not had the traditional classical education enjoyed by most of her fellow philosophers. The same could, of course, be said of a man like John Lilburne who, though he attended the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, did not go on to university or attend an inn of court. Lilburne, like Conway, had acquired his knowledge in more unconventional and autodidactic ways. Partly because of this, but also partly because of his role as an activist rather than a thinker, his thought is frequently inconsistent and his arguments are not always accurate, even when they were influential. It would be incorrect to suggest that such people as Conway and Lilburne did not have a mental life worthy of investigation, but it may be that different approaches and modes of expression are required in order to do justice to the lives and thought of such individuals.

John Locke from the 1824 edition of his works. Courtesy of the Special Collections Department at the Robinson Library, Newcastle University.

 Even in the case of those who might seem eminently suitable subjects for an intellectual biography, such as philosophers, problems still arise. There is, for example, a potential conflict between the discipline of philosophy, which explores timeless ideas, and the format of biography which is concerned precisely with setting events and ideas within a fixed chronology. Mark Goldie alluded to this problem in slightly different terms when he noted that most of those interested in leading philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are concerned with their canonical texts rather than with their more minor works, or the minutiae of their daily lives.

A major problem with intellectual biographies that participants at the workshop kept returning to is the danger of imposing consistency or coherence where it does not exist. This can take various forms. It might be that the biographer ends up creating coherence out of fragmentary evidence and then imposing it back onto the subject. However, it could equally be that a biographer has to engage with the subject's own self-fashioning, which may have created a coherence that is not, in fact, borne out by the evidence. Gaby Mahlberg's current project adds a further dimension to this problem in that she is writing the biography not of a single individual but of three English republican thinkers. Here, as in the individual cases, it is perhaps as much about understanding or making sense of disruptions and discontinuities as seeking to find unity or coherence.

John Lilburne from The trials of Lieut. Colonel John Lilburne (London, 1649). Courtesy of the Special Collections Department at the Robinson Library, Newcastle University.

Despite the many problems facing the intellectual biographer, there was much agreement about the value of the approach. As I argued in my paper on James Harrington, this allows the relationship between the life and the works (the external and internal lives) to be explored and appreciated, and can result in revelations about the influence of an individual's life experiences on his/her thought or, conversely, the impact of their ideas on their political and social actions. Intellectual biography was also praised for encouraging the exploration not just of texts, but of the social context of their production, the networks (intellectual and practical) of their authors, as well as their audiences and reception. In this respect a contrast was drawn between those working on more well-known figures, who might want to merge the subject into the crowd, for a time, in order to be able to see and appreciate the context in which they were operating, and those working on more obscure figures, who need to be given the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is perhaps particularly important in the case of women, so long hidden within history. Sarah Hutton emphasised the importance of producing intellectual biographies of women in order to restore them to visibility and to demonstrate that women, even early-modern women, had mental lives worthy of exploration. It is equally important in the case of male figures too, though, and can be illuminating beyond the individual. MikeBraddick spoke of the value, to a self-confessed social historian with an interest in state formation and structures, of exploring a life such as Lilburne's within a changing sociological context and of using his life and ideas to elucidate the history of political engagement more generally. 

 Indeed if one thing was evident at our workshop it was that intellectual biography is an inherently interdisciplinary approach. Our speakers and panellists come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (English Literature, Intellectual History, Philosophy, Social History, Modern Languages). The subjects they are working on are equally diverse (poets, political thinkers, philosophers, political activists). But, whatever the specific expertise of author and subject, it is almost impossible to produce an intellectual biography without drawing on more than one discipline.