England said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light
A new section on the website starts today..
I am today creating a new website section titled ‘Light!’ which has several ‘heavy’ weighty objectives to be treated with a light touch.
The new webpage blurb (see it here) will probably be along these lines —
Tracking the secular Enlightenment, the Separation of Powers, and the rise of the modern state as a system. England said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. And England saw the light, and it was good; and the English nation divided the light from the darkness.
‘Light’ is my abbreviation for ‘Enlightenment’, specifically the English Enlightenment movement which first took off (I would argue) in the 1620s and reached a highpoint under the guidance of Henry St John Bolingbroke and David Hume in the mid-1700s.
From the 1620s onwards English lawyers, parliamentarians and disgruntled nobles prepared the ground for the world-first innovation of the separation of powers. They more less achieved their goals in the ‘constitutional revolution’ of 1641. There then followed bloodshed in the Civil War and a religious quasi-dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. Of course, bloodshed combined with religious dictatorship were nothing new in history. Yet from this cauldron there eventually was born the first democracy with separation of powers and rule of law, and from which later sprang capitalism.
I call it Type 7 ‘system over system’ society. Type 8 non-system statist societies are all of today’s basket cases, plus the menacingly ‘dark’ communist dictatorship — China.
Last week I bought a new iPhone 16. It is of course 100% ‘made in China’. I needed to replace my ten year old iPhone 7 and thought I would beat the post-tariff (BUT pre-exemption!) price. Actually I also have an iPhone Xs because I have multiple needs.
But the point I want to make is that China is capable—if it could get away with it and slip the chip past the eyes of Apple—of placing snooping devices in communication devices used by all of the terribly complacent gullible and trusting citizens of the free democratic and capitalist West who prefer to ‘see no evil’ unless it is a Trumpian evil.
The communist-dictatorship-that-is-China still uses and tolerates forms of slave labour. Even were the Chinese labour employed in Apple factories not technically ‘forced’ labour, using the definitions employed by the Enlightened parliamentarians and lawyers of 17th century England ALL Chinese citizens are—technically—‘slaves’. There has recently been a focus on the use of slave labour in the manufacture of solar panels in China. A former leader of the UK’s Conservative Party campaigns against it.
This is how longtime loyal subscriber to Social Science Files, the historian Johann P. Sommerville, describes the Romanesque ‘slave’ condition in 17th century England:
[A] powerful case was mounted against royal prerogatives by neo-Romans, who asserted that discretionary powers made people not merely villeins – who were personally free, though they lacked property – but slaves – who had neither personal freedom nor property. These neo-Romans, so the case goes, rejected all discretionary or prerogative powers, and stressed the link between freedom and prosperity, following such ancient Roman writers as Sallust. … In fact, slaves, villeins and bondmen were all regularly linked in early modern thought and writing, and people rarely made much effort to distinguish them. All were contrasted with free men. According to John Cowell, ‘Villein (villanus) … signifieth in our common lawe a bondman, or as much as Servus among the Ciuilians’ (the Civilians are Roman lawyers, and servus is the Latin word for a slave). So villeins are bondmen and bondmen are slaves. Sir Thomas Smith, in his highly influential De Republica Anglorum , stated that the Romans had ‘two kindes of bondmen’ of which one ‘were called servi ’ (slaves) and were bound to their master and his heirs, while the second were bound ‘to the mannor or place, and did followe him who had the manors’. The first type of these ‘bondmen’, he said, ‘be called in our lawe villens in grosse’ while the second ‘are called villaines regardantes’. …
… After Charles I’s execution, John Milton warned the English that if they restored monarchy they would ‘shew themselves to be by nature slaves’, unfit for liberty, and ‘ready to be stroak’d & tam’d again, into the wonted and well pleasing state of thir true Norman villenage’. These words make no sense if slavery and villeinage are radically different institutions. In English legal theory, then, villeins were bondmen. They were not personally free. Speaking in the parliament of 1628, the lawyer John Selden asserted that the key ‘difference in their persons’ between ‘villeins and freemen’ was that freemen ‘cannot be imprisoned at pleasure’ while villeins can. …
Speaking against Ship Money in the Long Parliament, the lawyer Oliver St John [MGH: see below] declared that ‘the villaine had no property against the Lord’ and also that ‘hee had no liberty of person, the Lord might imprison him at his pleasure’.
As we have seen, proponents of the neo-Roman thesis about liberty place great weight on the text of Justinian’s Digest in which slavery is defined as ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. The most influential English medieval common law treatise, Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England , used precisely the same definition, but applied it to villeins. It employed the terms servus [slave] and villanus [villein] interchangeably, declaring (for example) that a ‘free man is made bond (servus ) by an acknowledgement made in the king’s court, as where, being in the court of the lord king, he acknowledges himself a villein (villanum )’.
[Source: Johann P. Sommerville, English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England, in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England, edited by John F. McDiarmid, Ashgate Publishing 2007:212-14]
The Light! page
The main purpose of the ‘Light’ will be to exhibit high quality historical books dealing with economic, political, communicational, institutional, philosophical, scientific and artistic or literary innovations during England’s 17th and 18th centuries, in order that I do not lose sight of the goal — the creation of the first ‘thoroughly modern’ society. I may also use the ‘Light’ section for pieces on themes of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.
I enjoy and value this most important period in human history and want to delve deeper into the literature. I stopped reading about 17th century England exactly three years ago when I began Social Science Files after a momentous decision to theorise the entire history of all human societies. Right at this moment I am struggling to untangle the theoretical lineage between Herbert Spencer (my admiration for his work grows) and Talcott Parsons (my admiration for his work declines). I hope to publish on this theoretical topic soon in order that I may be free to get on with my final account of the ‘functional differentiations’ that effectively enabled and shaped the first society.
While I persevere with the six societies that precede the 17th century I know I will greatly welcome some regular light relief on familiar ground—quite literally ‘familiar’ ever since I realised that two of my ancestral relations played leading parts in the institutional constructions of this period. I mentioned Henry St John already. The other was Oliver St John about whom I learned more in today’s book exhibit. Blood lineage has rather more entertainment value than the Parsonian theoretical lineage.
Just the ‘Foreword’ and some bloodline snippets today …
This book received glowing reviews from several leading scholars of British history.
Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown, published by William Collins in 2022
Foreword
This book was born of ignorance. Studies of the seventeenth century tend to deal either with some aspect of the kingdoms of the Stuart monarchy or with the world of the civil wars and the Revolution. There are lots of good reasons for dividing an entire century into manageable chunks, but it was not, of course, how it was. Those who walked the streets of Lincoln or London, shared a bottle of wine in the inns of Exeter or Edinburgh, in the 1630s often did so still in the 1650s and 1670s. Their dress and the style of their hair might have changed, and age would have weathered their skin and blurred their sight, but this was nothing to how the environment around them had shifted over that time. Few, if any, other generations of British people can have experienced such a period of national political and social change. Many of those I knew from both the earlier and later seventeenth century lived through these republican years and I wanted to know more of what they had experienced.
Very few people tuck neatly into one historical ‘age’ or another, or live only in the years with which they are most closely associated. Samuel Pepys and Christopher Wren, quintessential figures of the age of Charles II, were respectively a naval secretary and a pioneering mathematician during the 1650s. Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary, and her husband Lord Fauconberg, whose boisterous wedding party Oliver himself had hosted, were popular figures at the late Stuart courts; the Earl was ambassador to Venice, a friend of the Duke of Monmouth and, later, a prominent supporter of the Glorious Revolution. Well into the reign of Queen Anne the residents of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire would see an elderly man out riding with his dogs, or sketching landscapes, who was none other than Richard Cromwell, one-time Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
This book attempts to inhabit Britain in the only period in its history when it was a republic and to try, by seeking to stand at the shoulder of a number of contemporaries, to understand what it was like and why. It is not a book about the civil war, which was largely over by the time it begins. But it is a book about life in a post-war land scarred by conflict and its monumental cost – human, material and financial. The nine men and women taken as protagonists are not representative of British society – the sources make this impossible – but they do represent different experiences. Some, such as John Bradshaw, President of the first Commonwealth Council of State, stood at the centre of events, others, the young visionary Anna Trapnel or the Norfolk gentlewoman Alice L’Estrange, at the periphery. Some, most notably Oliver Cromwell, are household names, others, such as the irrepressible newspaperman Marchamont Nedham, are unknown to all but academics.
Through the surviving primary sources I have tried to piece together a picture of what their lives were in these years and to do so in a way which also tells the story of the age. The men and women of the 1650s were not two-dimensional woodcuts or joyless caricatures but real people, with friends and enemies, anxieties and aspirations, desires and disappointments like any person alive today. My hope is that through them the age in which they lived – which was at times as unfamiliar to them as it is to us today – might become more real and make more sense to we who, after all, walk in their footsteps still.
There is a risk in writing about a decade sometimes called ‘the Interregnum’ that it becomes defined in the negative. Given our knowledge of what came next, it is easy to imagine that the return of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the episcopacy was inevitable and that these years were always destined to be a historical blind alley. This is not my contention. The 1650s was a time of extraordinarily ambitious political, social, economic and intellectual innovation, and it was not a foregone conclusion that the British republic would fail. But it was also a time about which a characterisation in the negative, ‘Britain without a Crown’, is relevant. The decade was defined to a significant degree by what was being rejected. Indeed part of the reason for the fall of the republic was that its protagonists agreed far more on what they did not want than what they sought in its place. …
Chapter Eight: Mercurius Politicus
… An elaborate embassy led by the lawyer Oliver St John was dispatched from London to The Hague and on 31 March 1651, St John attended a formal dinner with the States General where he set out their plan for ‘a firm league and confederacy’ between the two republics. The news of this notion had first been publicly aired by Nedham in Politicus, when he had reported two months earlier that a ‘Union between this State and England is much desired by the Common people’. What was envisaged in London was something much more substantial than a trade deal or even a strategic alliance, nothing less than a ‘union’ of these two Protestant republics, one in which sovereignty would be combined and their shared ideological causes advanced.
But the eager optimism of the English diplomats began to fade as the weeks passed and no firm commitments were forthcoming. The Dutch were a hugely successful nation, their prosperity generated in large part by acting as international carriers of goods. They had invested everything in establishing their own independence, and regarded the English proposal with scepticism. The ambassadors returned disappointed and snubbed, and the extensive coverage of the whole affair in Politicus helped ensure disgust with the Dutch was a national sentiment. A few months later, in November 1651, the Rump Parliament passed the Navigation Act, which banned imports to English ports from third-party ships, thereby dealing a nasty economic blow to the Dutch. It would have seismic long-term consequences. …
Chapter Sixteen: On the Watch Tower”
… When Parliament adjourned, the great men of government also left the capital. Oliver St John, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who had been closeted with Cromwell during the many sessions in the spring of 1657, had built himself a magnificent new classical stone mansion, Thorpe Hall, on former church lands just outside Peterborough. John Thurloe, who had begun his career as St John’s secretary, was using the same architect for his new house in nearby Wisbech – though the relentlessness of state business gave him little opportunity to enjoy it (Colour plate 8). John Lambert, architect of the 1654 constitution and one of the powerful army trio, had bought the former royal house of Wimbledon, celebrated for its magnificent terraced gardens, and filled its galleries and chambers with works of art purchased from the sale of Charles I’s collection. Lambert had in the end been unable to stomach the new constitution, which represented a significant diminution of the army’s power, even without the return of the office of king, and at Wimbledon that summer relinquished his commission. …
… London was white with snow when the new parliamentary session opened on 20 January 1658. The coach and superbly caparisoned horses which conveyed the Protector the short distance to Westminster passed through the palely luminous streets from which the dense fall had kept the usual crowds and muffled all sound. Cromwell was not feeling himself, and his usually leonine strength was less than rampant as he crunched over New Palace Yard. He remained anxious about the royalist invasion that might come at any moment, carrying a gun at his side and bolting his chamber door from the inside every night. But his spirit remained strong and he had reason for optimism. … His friend Oliver St John and his army colleague George Monck were named, as was Lord Broghill, who had led the civilian group in the debate on the new constitution. Alongside them was Sir Arthur Haselrige, who had been one of the ‘five members’ Charles I had tried to arrest in 1642, and Thomas Pride himself, who had implemented the purge with which the whole enterprise of government without kingship had begun. For John Bradshaw, however, there was no place. …
Chapter Seventeen": This Lyon Rouzed
… Oliver St John, Secretary Thurloe and Lord Broghill – all supporters of the attempt to make Oliver Cromwell king – in his Council. …
Epilogue
… While this group of regicides was condemned to die, almost all the senior men who had actually been in government during the republican years, and from whom the restoration had been wrested, were allowed to walk free. Many were saved from harsher fates by the intercession of influential friends. Charles Fleetwood and John Desbrow, the army leaders and relations by marriage of Oliver Cromwell, suffered only a ban on holding public office. The same mild censure was all that was meted out to Cromwell’s Lord Chief Justice, Oliver St John, and William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Rump Parliament. …
MGH: What I learned skimming this book is that my ancestral relation Oliver St John was a rather Machiavellian character. Is it for this reason, I wonder, that he was never mentioned in the eighteenth century political writings of his relative Henry St John?
Exhibited in Dr Michael G. Heller’s breaking Social Science Files ‘Light’
