Myths Concerning Republicanism 6: The Material Culture of Republican Rule or the Problem of the King's Head

The Seal of the Commonwealth. This is the version from 1651, the earlier 1649 version wore out.

The prospect of executing Charles I raised a problem for the English Parliament that, on the face of it, may look trivial but which was in fact very important: what was to be done about the royal seal? The seal was used to indicate royal approval on official documents and was therefore a crucial mark of legitimacy. Yet the royal seal (which depicted the King's head on one side and his coat of arms on the other) could not be used by a regicidal regime. Monarchies had a ready-made symbol in the image of the monarch, republics had to be more creative to find effective ways of representing the regime in material form. Another myth of republican government might then be that it is difficult to create a powerfully symbolic material culture for a republican regime. Yet various creative and innovative attempts have been made to do so.

The English regicides were certainly not deterred by the problem. Before Charles I had even been condemned to death plans were in train to produce a replacement seal. Four weeks before the regicide a new 'republican' seal had been designed and four days before Charles's death Thomas Simon was paid to produce it. As a result, the seal of the commonwealth was ready for use just a week after Charles had been executed. In place of the King's arms it depicted a map of England, Wales and Ireland (Scotland was not yet under the control of the English republic). In place of the King's head was an image of Parliament in session, reinforcing the point that that body (rather than a single individual) was now the sovereign.

Bust of a boy wearing a phrygian cap. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One obvious source of inspiration for later republicans was the Roman Republic where inscriptions, images, material objects, architecture and rituals were all developed to reflect and reinforce the power of the state. The acronym SPQR (senatus populusque romanus, 'the senate and people of Rome') served as a reminder of where power lay in the Roman system and was used as an emblem of Rome's republican government, being emblazoned not just on official documents, but also on coins and buildings. The Roman legacy also furnished a number of motifs that were picked up by later republican states. One of these was the phrygian cap or liberty bonnet. Its origins lay in the practice of shaving the heads of slaves in ancient Rome. Freed slaves would, therefore, be given a hat to hide their shaved head while their hair grew back. On this basis the phrygian cap became a symbol of liberty.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ‘The Allegory of Good Government’ from the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The frescoes that the artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti produced for the Sale dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena between 1337 and 1339 constitute a particularly lavish example of the way in which republican ideology can be reflected in visual form. The cycle of six paintings present good and bad government and the effects of each in the city and in the countryside. Like written texts, the frescoes have been subject to conflicting interpretations. Quentin Skinner has challenged the traditional Aristotelian or Thomist reading, arguing instead that the frescoes reflect the ideology of pre-humanist texts and, more especially, the particular account set out in Bruno Latini's Li Livres dou trésor (Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume II: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 39-116). On this basis Skinner argues that the placing of the figure of peace in the middle section of the middle painting of the cycle reflects the pre-humanist view that the goal of good government is the preservation of peace and concord. He also claims that the regal figure, which had been seen as a symbolic representation of the Thomist doctrine of the common good, is in fact supposed to indicate the kind of magistrates the city should elect in order to secure the common good. Moreover, by simultaneously depicting this figure as representing the city of Siena and a supreme judge, Lorenzetti was emphasising Latini's point that the supreme ruler or judge of Siena must be the Sienese themselves. However we interpret these images, they constitute a powerful representation in visual form of republican political ideas.

Republican material culture could be used not simply to reinforce and disseminate the values of the ruling powers, but also as a tool of opposition. In eighteenth-century Britain Thomas Hollis and Thomas Spence both deployed images and artefacts alongside texts to mount extra-parliamentary republican campaigns.

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

At the heart of Hollis's campaign were the texts of earlier republican authors that he republished. These included Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government, James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs, Marchamont Nedham's The Excellencie of a Free State and works by John Milton. But it was not merely the words of these volumes that mattered to Hollis, their physicality or material form was also crucial to the messages that he wanted to convey. The volumes that Hollis republished, and then sent to furnish public and university libraries across Europe and North America, were lavishly produced and deliberately associated with each other by their appearance. They were bound in red leather and embossed with symbols - including a small liberty bonnet. Each volume also bore a portrait of the author designed by the Italian-born painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Cipriani. The portraits were enclosed within a wreath made by two laurel branches (alluding to the victory laurels of ancient Rome) underneath which the liberty cap was repeated. Copies of the portraits were also printed separately, perhaps as advertisements for the volume or to be displayed on a wall. Hollis also commissioned Cipriani to design medals to commemorate key victories, including one which depicted Britannia wearing a liberty cap that was designed to celebrate the victory of the British over the French at Louisbourg in 1758.

Thomas Spence's political programme was grounded in the 'Land Plan' that he first presented in a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in November 1775. Though the lecture caused controversy and resulted in Spence being expelled from the society, he continued to promote his plan in a variety of publications. These included, not just conventional political pamphlets, but also utopian, semi-fictional works such as Crusonia and Spensonia, and his cheap periodical Pig's Meat. Like Hollis, Spence also experimented with visual representations. In particular he produced tokens depicting images that reflected or served as short-hand reminders of his land plan. He also used the images, as Hollis did, to reflect his broader political views, though he was less reverential. Rather than celebrating military victories he tended to use his tokens to complain about present day injustices. Spence's tokens were subversive in their function as well as their appearance. They were produced in response to the shortage of low denomination coins in the eighteenth century. Spence's tokens could be used by the public as small change and then exchanged for legal tender at his shop. By this means his tokens could be seen as replacing or subverting government authority and royal power. This was particularly the case with those on which the head of the monarch was replaced by an image of a radical activist such as John Horne Tooke or John Thelwall. Spence also counter-stamped official regal coinage with his slogans.

Royal iconography has always been dominated by the image of the monarch. Finding an equivalent symbol to represent republican authority has been a matter of debate and experimentation for republican regimes and opposition republicans alike. Their endeavours have produced a rich repertoire of republican imagery which draws heavily on the Roman legacy, but also reflects different national and temporal contexts.

The concern of those involved in the redesign of the seal in 1649 was to ensure that it reflected the reality of the new situation. By contrast, the official iconography of the United Kingdom today misrepresents the form of government that now prevails. The state is officially a monarchy, as reflected in the fact that the Queen's head is depicted on the royal seal, coins and postage stamps. Yet sovereign power now lies not with the monarch, but in the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps it is time to return to the iconography of 1649? Contrary to the myth, there is plenty of scope for doing so.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 5. Petrus Cunaeus

In previous blogposts I have explored the ways in which James Harrington drew on the ideas of earlier thinkers. So far my focus has been on figures who remain well known today: Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon. But Harrington was also inspired by thinkers whose names have not survived so well in popular memory. 

Petrus Cunaeus, reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One of these is the Dutch author Peter Cunaeus whose book De Republica Hebraeorum appeared in 1617 as part of a series of works produced by the Dutch printer Elsevier on past and present republics. It was translated into English by Clement Barksdale in 1653, not long after the English had established their own 'Commonwealth or Free State'. 

Harrington was particularly interested in two aspects of Cunaeus's account of the Hebrew Commonwealth. The first of these was the law of jubilee. This stated that every fifty years land that had been bought or alienated in the intervening period would be returned to its original owner. Cunaeus referred to this practice as the 'lex Agrarian Hebraeorum', which was translated by Barksdale as the 'Agrarian Law' (Petrus Cunaeus, Of the Common-Wealth of the Hebrews, translated by C. B., London, 1653, p. 13). Cunaeus did this in order to encourage comparison with other ancient practices, and especially the Roman agrarian law. Since Harrington explicitly advocated the establishment of an agrarian law for Oceana, this terminology - and Cunaeus's endorsement of the practice - was useful to him. The terms of Harrington's agrarian law were not identical to the Jewish idea of jubilee; he did not call for land to be returned to its original owner after a set period, but rather restricted the amount of land that could be passed on to one heir, effectively undermining the principle of primogeniture. Yet, both systems were designed to limit inequality without threatening social stability. 

The idea of an agrarian law was not popular at the time, even most seventeenth-century republicans followed Machiavelli in rejecting the practice. It is, therefore, all the more striking that Harrington followed Cunaeus in explicitly challenging Machiavelli's account of the fall of the Roman republic. Against Machiavelli, Cunaeus and Harrington insisted that it was the mismatch between the distribution of land and the holding of political power - essentially the failure to properly implement an agrarian law - that had caused the Roman republic to fall. Given the controversy surrounding agrarian laws, even among those who favoured republican government, Cunaeus's account was also useful to Harrington in its insistence that the law of jubilee was instituted by Moses at God's behest. Here, as elsewhere in his use of the Hebrew Commonwealth, Harrington was able to claim divine support for a controversial idea.

Image of Moses as taken from the frontispiece to The Oceana and other works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Religion also lay at the heart of the second aspect of Cunaeus's De Republica Hebraeorum that was important to Harrington. According to Cunaeus, God had given authority in both civil and religious matters to the civil magistrate. Instead of being viewed as separate jurisdictions, civil and religious affairs were both under the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Once again this prefigured Harrington's own insistence in The Commonwealth of Oceana that a national church be preserved; and that it, and its clergy, were to remain under the authority of the state, although he also insisted that liberty of conscience should be granted to members of other Protestant sects. On this point, too, Harrington's use of Cunaeus set him apart from other English republicans at the time, most of whom advocated the complete separation of church and state.

Paying attention to Harrington's use of Cunaeus serves to correct the understanding of English republicanism that has tended, at least until the early twenty-first century, to ignore its religious dimension. Being able to draw a parallel with the Hebrew Republic provided a religious justification for some of the more innovative elements of Harrington's programme. At the same time, we can see that the question of how to organise religion was itself central to his concerns. Thanks to Cunaeus, Harrington was able to view the Hebrew Commonwealth as an ancient example that could usefully be deployed in early-modern constitution building.

These observations also have resonance today. Separating church and state has not always worked as an effective means of ensuring toleration for religious groups, not least because it tends to set up a contrast between religious organisations and the secularism of the state. Harrington certainly believed that toleration could be better secured under a system in which the civil magistrate oversaw the state religion, but also allowed freedom of conscience to separatist groups. The question of what the relationship should be between politics and religion remains a live issue today and one on which the sometimes simplistic solutions of the present might be complicated and enriched by attention to past discussions.

The relationship between property and political power has also proved to be a hot political topic in recent months. Research by Guy Shrubsole suggests that 1% of the people now own half of the land in England (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author). Moreover, without government intervention even greater disparity is likely in the future, since landowners can use the income they gain from rent and capital appreciation to buy yet more property. This was why Harrington argued for government intervention to reduce future inequality. In the light of Shrubsole's research Peter Hetherington has pointed in a similar direction, suggesting that the solution is to end 'the inheritance and capital gains tax breaks which make trading land so attractive to the few at the expense of the many' (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/england-private-landowners-uk-reform-inheritance-tax). Yet many of those in positions of power remain unwilling to address the issue. At a time when the frontrunner in the Tory leadership campaign, Boris Johnson, has pledged to raise the higher-rate income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000, thereby cutting the tax bills of 3 million higher-income earners by approximately £3,000 (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/10/tory-leadership-race-what-are-candidates-promises-on-tax), we might wish to reconsider the mechanisms for redistributing wealth in the modern world and whether they are fit for purpose.