Why England was & is not Republican, Johann Sommerville explains
Pre-Civil war parliaments defended liberties, Cicero was concerned with state security
Johann P. Sommerville wrote:
ESSAY 11
English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England
In his much-cited article on the monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I, Patrick Collinson wittily remarked on the redundancy of ‘the Communist Manifesto at a Conservative Party Conference’. Since the 1980s, when those words were written, the redundancy has grown, spreading beyond the Conservatives and into or even beyond New Labour. While Marxism has been falling from fashion, republicanism and its history have been attracting increasing attention from scholars in general and from early modernists in particular – not least through the influence of Collinson’s article.
Collinson argued that in important respects it makes sense to view Elizabethan England not as a pure monarchy but as a monarchy tempered with republican elements. For example, English counties were often largely self-governing and can in some ways be seen as ‘gentry republics’, while in towns it was not uncommon for people ‘of very humble status’ to be involved in government. The ‘vitality’ ‘of traditions of localized self-government’ in turn allowed the growth of civic consciousness, Collinson contended, and he questioned J.G.A. Pocock’s notion that ‘In no way was Tudor England a polis or its inhabitants citizens’. Collinson was careful, however, not to press his thesis too far, and he circumspectly noted that England under Elizabeth I was also a monarchy, in which the Queen herself played a major role in the formulation of national policy, and in which she was keen to correct any misunderstandings ‘“of the absolutenes of her Majesties government”’, insisting that she could ‘“direct her pollicie”’ without the assent of her council – a body that in any case served at her pleasure. Collinson stressed that his article did not argue ‘for the incipience in Elizabethan England of a kind of constitutional monarchy, still less of a headless republic or even of a continuous, coherent republican movement’.
Since Collinson’s article first appeared, much work has been done on republican and quasi-republican thinking in the decades before the English Civil War. This work has implicitly or explicitly challenged the claim – made by Pocock, Blair Worden and others – that the history of English republicanism really begins only in 1649, when the country became a republic. It has also challenged the idea that the main or even only ideology used by members of the English parliament to question the high prerogative claims of the first two Stuart kings was rooted in the English common law. Pocock and Glenn Burgess asserted that the common law mind was dominant in early seventeenth-century England. By contrast, some recent scholars – and perhaps especially David Norbrook, Markku Peltonen and Quentin Skinner – have argued that certain important republican ideas survived and even flourished in early Stuart times, providing a key preliminary chapter in the story of English republicanism. Not all of these ideas, they claim, were strictly republican in the most literal sense, for they did not all absolutely entail a non-monarchical constitution. Quentin Skinner has labelled one group of such ideas – and especially of ideas about liberty – ‘neo-Roman’ rather than republican, but he sees republican and neo-Roman thinking as closely linked, and David Armitage similarly refers to ‘the republican and neo-Roman traditions’. Skinner and others have come to emphasize the importance of this neo-Roman republicanism in the years before 1649 and, indeed, in the period before the English Civil War. According to Skinner,
one of the most potent sources of radical thinking about the English polity in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1642 was provided by classical and especially Roman ideas about freedom and servitude. Far more than has generally been recognized, the outbreak of the English revolution was legitimized in neo-Roman terms.
That the republican or neo-Roman roots of the English Civil War have not generally been recognized is something of an understatement, for virtually none of the many modern scholars who have written on the origins of the Civil War seems to have recognized the existence, let alone the crucial significance, of neo-Roman theory, whereas all have in varying degrees acknowledged the importance of ideas drawn from the common law. Some scholars remain sceptical that neo-Roman or republican ideas really were important in England before the Civil War. Perez Zagorin, for example, expresses the belief that ‘in the ideological conflicts that led to the English civil war’, the neo-Roman or classical republican ‘theory of liberty was insignificant compared to the prominence of other types of argument drawn from the English past which alleged that the exercise of various powers by the king was repugnant to law and such fundamental laws as Magna Charta’. Zagorin is not alone in advancing the suggestion that when English people in early Stuart times talked about liberty and about the dangers of servitude, the kind of servitude that they had in mind was derived not from ancient Roman ideas about slavery but from ‘old English law and the image, taken from the medieval law of villeinage, of the villein who had no rights and was subject to the will of his lord’.
We have, then, something of a conundrum. Republican and neo-Roman ideas have often been seen as unimportant or non-existent in England in the period before the Civil War, while common law thinking has been regarded as highly influential or even dominant in those years. But recently the significance of neo-Roman thinking has been stressed. … [Just] as Collinson was quite right to claim that some aspects of early modern English government can be seen as republican rather than monarchical, he was also right to be sceptical about the existence of any developed republican tradition, and to be wholly silent on neo-Roman ideas about liberty. … The most important early Stuart arguments about liberty were not derived from Roman republicanism.
Republican and Quasi-Republican Ideas in Early Stuart England
… Quentin Skinner has … linked arguments from the common good or salus populi (the safety or welfare of the people) with republican or more strictly neo-Roman thinking. When the parliamentarians in 1642 attacked the King’s ‘Negative Voice’ – or power to veto legislation – says Skinner, they based their case squarely upon ‘the fundamental maxim that Cicero had cited from the Law of the Twelve Tables: that, in legislating for a free state, salus populi suprema lex esto, the safety of the people must be treated as the supreme law’. More generally, Skinner emphasizes the ‘neo-classical’ nature of parliamentarian arguments for taking up arms at the beginning of the Civil War.
The neo-classical concept to which Skinner pays most attention is the idea of liberty. … In Roman thinking, Skinner contends, what made slaves unfree was not that they were coerced or oppressed by their masters – for masters might be benevolent or absent – but that they were ‘“subject to the jurisdiction of someone else” and consequently “within the power” of another person’. Neo-Romans, he argues, applied this analysis to the powers of the English monarchy, and claimed that if the crown possesses prerogative or discretionary authority, then the English people are not free but slaves. Whether or not the monarch in fact exercises the relevant powers, the people are in a state of servitude: ‘the very existence of such prerogative powers reduces us to a level below that of free subjects’. According to Skinner, it was in the early Stuart period that this neo- Roman account of liberty gained currency in England. He notes that some common lawyers in parliament objected to the crown’s extra-parliamentary financial exactions on the grounds that if the king could take money from his subjects without their consent, their position was akin to that of villeins – the property-less serfs of the medieval English common law. But Skinner stresses that this kind of claim was very far from the neo-Roman theory of liberty. ‘A villein’, he emphasizes, ‘is not a slave, since it is only his property, not his person, which is sub potestate domini’ [under the power of his lord]. The ‘usual common law claim’ was that villeinage is crucially distinct from slavery, since the villein’s ‘personal liberty remains untouched’ though he lacks rights of property. While common lawyers were raising the spectre of villeinage in order to argue against prerogative taxation, says Skinner, some other people began to launch
a much more far-reaching criticism of the royal prerogative on the grounds of its incompatibility with individual liberty. This further attack was grounded not on common law conceptions of villeinage but on classical and especially Roman law distinctions between free citizens and slaves.
He suggests that the spread of neo-Roman theory may have been connected with the fact that the writings of Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus ‘were made available in English for the first time’ in the later sixteenth century. In parliament, he shows, people argued that the crown’s use of prerogative powers outside the law threatened to bring the English into servitude and make them not freemen but slaves or bondmen. He notes, too, that a number of people linked freedom with prosperity. …
Classical Humanism and the Early Stuart Monarchy
The wider the definition of republicanism we employ, the easier we will find it to discover early modern republicans. But there is a price to pay for this, since if we are too liberal in giving recognition to our republican forebears, we are in danger of granting undue acknowledgement to some rather dubious characters. There seems to be unanimous agreement that the French theorist Jean Bodin, King James VI and I, and Thomas Hobbes were not republicans, nor even quasi-republicans or neo-Romans. So if we find some political idea that such theorists heartily endorsed, it will be difficult to argue that it was in any sense an essentially republican or neo-Roman principle.
The idea that people in authority ought to promote the public good or the public interest was not a republican or neo-Roman notion, but a commonplace held by virtually everyone. The business of the commonwealth or state, said Hobbes on the opening page of the Introduction to Leviathan, is ‘Salus Populi (the peoples safety)’. James I instructed his son that ‘A good King, thinking his highest honour to consist in the due discharge of his calling, emploieth all his studie and paines, to procure and maintaine’ ‘the well-fare and peace of his people’, ‘euer thinking the common interesse his chiefest particular’. …
… Classical humanist ideas about such things as the public good and active virtue were perfectly compatible with a commitment to monarchy. Early modern monarchs typically relied on the cooperation of locals to govern their countries, and classical humanist ideas were useful in encouraging this. James I had no intention of taking power from those who traditionally exercised it in the localities. He objected when these people – ‘Our principall Ministers for the government of the severall Counties of Our Kingdome’ – idly lounged about London instead of participating actively in running their regions. Collinson has tellingly drawn our attention to the town of Swallowfield, which in 1596 ‘constituted itself, in effect, a self-governing republic of the “chief inhabitants”’. James I showed little inclination to interfere in the affairs of the country’s Swallowfields, provided that they in turn did not trench on his prerogative to run the land as a whole. It is certainly illuminating to view Swallowfield as ‘a selfgoverning republic’, but there is, of course, a metaphorical aspect to this phrase. Queen Elizabeth and her council were doubtless happy enough to allow such towns to administer their own affairs in most circumstances. But they would probably not have been best pleased if Swallowfield had begun to exercise the powers of a sovereign state – which is what a republic literally is – for example by making a treaty with Spain, or declaring war on England. Arguably, the sense in which England was a monarchical republic was that sovereign power was held by the monarch, while in day-to-day administration there was a large degree of local autonomy, often involving people of quite humble social station. …
… Values such as the public good and active virtue, and practices such as the participation of nobles and people in the administration of the realm, were not seen as specifically republican in the early modern period, but as quite compatible with the idea of monarchical sovereignty. That is one problem with the way some historians have constructed a neo-Roman or republican tradition for the early Stuart period. The other problem is that the defences of liberty that the English did undertake in that era were not really couched in neo-Roman terms. English and Roman liberty is the subject of the next and final section.
Villeins and Slaves: English and Roman Liberty
In the early Stuart parliaments, people often said that royal claims to extra-legal discretionary or emergency powers threatened to reduce the status of free English subjects to that of villeins. For example, Edward Alford stated in 1621 that as long as the king could imprison individuals for matters of state and not define such matters, the English people would effectively ‘be Villaines’, while in 1610 Thomas Hedley argued against extra-parliamentary royal levies on exports and imports on the grounds that ‘there is a great difference betwixt the king’s free subjects and his
bondmen’ and that the king may ‘at his pleasure seize the lands and goods of his villani, but so can he not of his free subjects’. As we have seen, some recent scholars argue that a much more 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.
Proponents of the neo-Roman thesis do not themselves seem to be in full agreement on how precisely we may distinguish the common law vocabulary of villeinage from what they tell us is the very different neo-Roman terminology that was used to talk about slavery. Colclough says ‘the distinction … between bondmen and free men’ was part of ‘the language of the common law’ while Skinner, by contrast, quotes talk about bondmen as though it was clearly neo-Roman. 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’. Samuel Purchas spoke of ‘Villaines or Bond slaues’ in Russia, while Sir John Davies argued that the powers of chieftains over their tenants in Ireland were so great that they made ‘the Lord an absolute Tyrant, and the Tennant a verie slaue and villain’. Villeinage, said Thomas Blount, signifies ‘a seruile kind of tenure’, and he asserted that a villein was a ‘Bondman; of which there were two sorts in England, one termed a Villain in gross, who was immediately bound to the person of his Lord and his heirs; the other a Villain regardant to a Mannor’. 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. ‘In old time’, he asserted, ‘none but Jews and villeins could be imprisoned’ at the king’s will – and the ‘Jews were as the demesne villeins of the king’. Speaking against Ship Money in the Long Parliament, the lawyer Oliver St John 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)’.
In the early Stuart parliaments, people often argued that in England the king could not tax or legislate without parliamentary consent, and claimed that he was not empowered to violate rights of property or of personal freedom. Supporters of the crown responded that the king ought ordinarily to respect English liberties, but that in a case of necessity, or for reason of state, or salus populi, the king could infringe them, and that it was the king alone who was authorized to decide whether or not an emergency existed. Such reasoning was employed to justify the Forced Loan of 1626–27 and the imprisonment without cause shown of people who refused it. Earlier, the king’s right to imprison in emergencies without showing cause had been widely recognized, but in 1628 the House of Commons decided that the king had never in fact possessed any such right, and some argued that the king had no discretionary powers at all to rule outside the law in emergencies. The law of the land, they said, provided sufficiently for all possible emergencies, so no extra-legal powers were needed. In part, this position was developed as a response to Charles I’s use of emergency powers in what seemed to many to be no emergencies.
Defenders of English liberties in the parliament of 1628 also drew extensively on the ideas of the fifteenth-century lawyer and judge Sir John Fortescue, who viewed England as a limited monarchy in which the king was required to rule under the law and with the consent of his subjects. Cicero and Livy were cited far less frequently, Tacitus more rarely still, and Sallust not at all.
One possible reason why Roman writers were not much cited in support of English liberties – despite the fact that speakers in parliament were fond of parading their classical learning – was that Roman thinking diverged considerably from English ideas on a number of key points. Roman tribunes were authorized to veto legislation, so it is hard to see in what way English attacks on a veto power from 1642 are indebted to Roman thought. There was a tension in Roman thought between ‘the right of the citizen to a trial … and the right of the community to take every step to protect itself from destruction’. In the Roman republic, the latter right triumphed on a number of occasions, when magistrates took violent extra-legal action, sometimes armed with a senatus consultum ultimum, justifying such conduct. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 63 B.C., when Catiline allegedly conspired to seize power, and when five of his co-conspirators were executed without trial on the orders of the consul Cicero – an act which led some to denounce Cicero as a bloody tyrant. Cicero not only took ‘unconstitutional measures against Catiline’ but later supported ‘extra-legal moves against Antony’. He used salus populi to allow magistrates to override the law in emergencies. All of this looks much closer to the position of Charles I, and later of the Rump Parliament and Oliver Cromwell, than to that of members of parliament who defended English liberties before 1640. It has been suggested that the principles at issue in Cicero’s execution of Catiline’s supporters were individual liberties on the one hand and the ‘preservation of the current regime’ on the other. Arguably, opponents of the king’s policies in the pre-Civil war parliaments defended liberties, while Cicero was concerned above all with state security.
Such Romans as Cicero had relatively little to say against discretionary or emergency powers. Nor did they criticize the institution of slavery. The ideal of a wholly free population, consisting largely of independent farmers, was English not Roman. Henry Parker’s notion that if the peasants in France were freer, the country would be more prosperous and powerful was derived not from the Romans but from Fortescue. Sallust did not want to emancipate the slaves and replace them with a free peasantry. He took Catiline and his supporters to task for encouraging slaves to rebel. His own conception of a free state was one in which citizens were free, but in which many people were enslaved.
The Roman conception of liberty granted most free citizens only ‘the minimum of political rights’ while reserving real power for the elite few whose standing gave them auctoritas and dignitas. The Roman model of governance, as understood in early-seventeenth-century England, of course involved a senate drawn from the highest ranks of the population, and popular assemblies representing the mass of the people. The popular assemblies could not initiate legislation, but had to vote on measures brought in to them from outside, by senior magistrates. This was close to the system of government that existed in the republic of Venice, and that the English republican James Harrington advocated in his Oceana (1656). By contrast, the early Stuart House of Commons could and did act on its own initiative – with results that included the Petition of Right, asserting English liberties.
English liberties and the institutions that underpinned them in the early Stuart period do not in fact look very neo-Roman. Roman thinking, and Renaissance humanism, undoubtedly had an impact in early modern England. In some respects, too, we can argue that the early Stuart state was not a pure monarchy, since towns and counties enjoyed a considerable measure of self-government. But it is difficult to sustain the claim that there was any developed tradition of republican or neo-Roman thought before the Civil War. Collinson detected no such tradition in Elizabethan England, and it seems that it was likewise absent in the four decades following the Queen’s death. Collinson commented that he did not ‘see 1649 foreshadowed proleptically in 1572 or 1584’. The same goes for 1625 and indeed 1642. [END]
The Source:
Johann P. Sommerville, ‘English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England’, in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England : Essays in response to Patrick Collinson, edited by John F. McDiarmid, Ashgate Publishing 2007
Credit: The Australian 9 September 2022. Caption: Princess Elizabeth is pictured learning basic car maintenance as a Second Subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service on April 12, 1945. Elizabeth was frustrated that she wasn’t permitted to do ‘her bit’ for the war effort and finally her father allowed her to join the service.
"The queen is dead, long live the king" — old English saying.
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