Order and conflict: Anthony Ascham and English political thought (1648–50) 9781526135070

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During the crucial period between the Second Civil War and the aftermath of the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of the English Republic, when he served as official pamphleteer of the Parliament and the republican government, the arguments exposed in Ascham’s works paved the way for much of contemporary political discussion. Ascham put forward a complex argument in support of Parliament’s claims for obedience which drew on the political thought of Grotius, Hobbes, Selden, Filmer and Machiavelli. He combined ideas taken from these authors and turned them into a powerful instrument of propaganda to be deployed to the service of the political agenda of his Independent patrons in Parliament. Barducci’s investigation of Ascham’s works will bring together an intellectual analysis of his political thought and an analysis of the interaction between politics, propaganda and political ideas.

Marco Barducci is the Gerda Henkel Member at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain

Barducci

The book as a whole will provide a careful and systematic analysis of Ascham’s career and writings for the first time in English. It will be of interest to historians of early modern England and early modern print and propaganda, as well as to scholars of political thought, political science and intellectual history.

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he Puritan Revolution of mid-seventeenth-century England produced an explosion of new and important political thinking. But while due attention has been given to the most famous thinkers, there are other important figures who have been relatively neglected, of whom Anthony Ascham is one. This book provides the first full-scale study of Ascham’s political thought.

Order and conflict

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Order and conflict Anthony Ascham and English political thought, 1648–50

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ISBN 978-0-7190-9680-8

9 780719 096808 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Marco Barducci

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Order and conflict

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Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General editors dr alexandra gajda professor anthony milton professor peter lake

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dr jason peacey

This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Recently published in the series Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion hugh adlington, tom lockwood and gillian wright (eds) The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage in early modern England gemma allen

Black Bartholomew’s Day david j. appleby Insular Christianity robert armstrong and tadhg ó hannrachain (eds) Reading and politics in early modern England geoff baker ‘No historie so meete’ jan broadway Republican learning justin champion News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 david coast This England patrick collinson Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic monarch cesare cuttica Brave community john gurney ‘Black Tom’ andrew hopper Impostures in early modern England: Representations and perceptions of fraudulent identities tobias b. hug The politics of the public sphere in early modern England peter lake and steven pincus (eds) Henry Neville and English republican culture gaby mahlberg Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum jason mcelligott and david l. smith Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England anthony milton Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.com.

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Order and conflict Anthony Ascham and English political thought, 1648–50 . MARCO BARDUCCI

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Marco Barducci 2015 The right of Marco Barducci to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 9680 8 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Edited and typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs

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Contents

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preface–ix

   Introduction

1

1  Oaths 2  Natural law, conscience and self-preservation 3  Natural law, civil power and religion 4  Jus belli, possession and usurpation 5  Romans 13 and patriarchalism 6  Tyranny and reason of state 7  Anthony Ascham: de facto theorist or ‘commonwealthsman’?

30 42 60 69 80 93 103

   Conclusion    125   

bibliography–131

  

index –141

vii

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Preface

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. This book was originally intended as a revised version of my work Anthony Ascham ed il pensiero politico inglese (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2008). However, while reworking the Italian text with an eye to an English audience, I began a process of general revision and enrichment which ­ultimately resulted in a different book. This book incorporates the results of research that I have conducted since 2008, in libraries and archives in the USA, Italy and the UK. In particular, this work has been completed in my time as a fellow at the Folger Shakspeare Library (Washington DC). I would like to thank the Centro Editoriale Toscano for having allowed me to reproduce some parts of Chapters 1 and 3 of the original book. Most of all, I would like to thank Glenn Burgess, J. C. Davis, Jason T. Peacey, Mark Somos and Blair Worden for having encouraged me to present this work to an English audience, and for their immensely useful comments and revisions on drafts of the work in manuscript. I owe a great debt to Alan Marshall, who patiently read the manuscript and helped me to prepare it for publication, and to Justin Champion, who constantly supported and encouraged me during the preparation of this book. Finally, I am grateful to the ‘Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain’ series editors at Manchester University Press, who helped me to ­reorganise and thereby improve the material here presented.

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Introduction

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he Puritan Revolution of mid-seventeenth-century England produced an explosion of new and important political thinking. But while due attention has been given to the most famous thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Sir Robert Filmer and the Levellers, there are other important figures who have been relatively neglected, of whom Anthony Ascham is one. Ascham does attract a certain amount of scholarly interest, but his ideas have not been given their proper due or been rigorously analysed. Therefore, this is the first full-scale study of Ascham’s political thought. During the crucial period between the Second Civil War and the aftermath of the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of the English Republic, when he served as official pamphleteer of Parliament and the republican government, Ascham did not develop a completely innovative political theory. Nonetheless, the arguments exposed in Ascham’s works paved the way for much of contemporary political discussion. Ascham put forward a complex argument in support of Parliament’s claims for obedience which drew on the political thought of Grotius, Hobbes, Selden, Filmer and Machiavelli. He was capable of combining ideas taken from these authors and turning them into a powerful instrument of propaganda to be deployed to the service of the political agenda of his Independent patrons in Parliament. Ascham thus represents a case in point of the interaction between politics, propaganda and political thought in the context of the English Civil Wars. What he said, how he said it, and the kind of audience he addressed, strictly depended on and were consistent with the political aims of the politicians who sponsored him. Ascham’s works were intended to convince lay Presbyterians and royalists to adhere to the policy of national pacification implemented from 1648 by the Independent ‘party’ within Parliament. Ascham’s political works, therefore, were not the result of theoretical speculations or of detached analyses: they were expressly devised to convince people to take sides in the context of the ongoing revolution. Ascham’s political ideas and languages were tailored, 1

Order and conflict

on the one side, to the political message he and his political patrons wanted communicating to their audience, and on the other, to the political, religious and cultural expectations of their intended recipients. Our investigation of Ascham’s works will therefore bring together an intellectual analysis of his political thought and an analysis of the interaction between politics, propaganda and political ideas.

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LIFE AND WORKS The fate of many English republican ambassadors between 1649 and 1650 was tragic. The story of Isaac Dorislaus, murdered at The Hague by royalist killers because of his participation in Charles I’s proceeding, is well known.1 That of Anthony Ascham, the subject of this study, is less so. Ascham, initially designated by the Council of State as ‘agent’ of the Republic to the Merchant Company of Hamburg, became eventually ‘official Agent’ to Madrid.2 In the Spanish capital there were some exiled Cavaliers who served as both official and unofficial envoys from Charles II, such as Edward Hyde, Lord Cottington, Richard Fanshawe and Lord Goring, whose task consisted mainly of collecting funds among English merchants in Spain to be earmarked to the royalist armies operating in Scotland and Ireland.3 Ascham’s embassy to Madrid was regarded by royalist envoys as a serious threat to their mission. Hyde and Fanshawe’s wife Ann reported that ‘some young men meeting in the street with Mr Progers, a gentlemen belonging to the Lord Ambassador Cottington, and Mr Sparkes, an English merchant’ complained about ‘the impudence of this As[cham] to come a public Minister from rebels to a court where there were two ambassadors from the king’.4 The attitude of Charles II’s agents towards the envoys from the republican government was surely influenced by a declaration of 1649 of the king’s legitimate heir. He affirmed his firm purpose ‘to pursue and bring to their due punishment those bloody rebels who were either actors or contrivers’ of his father’s execution, and the murder of Dorislaus left no doubts about the implications 5 of such a declaration. Hyde himself, in a message addressed to the English merchants in Spain, asked for their help ‘to take and follow those courses and counsels which are most likely to take vengeance upon those incurable rebels’.6 Ascham and his retinue arrived in Madrid on Sunday 5 June. Here he was welcomed by the king’s emissary Don Diego De Moreda, and then he and his servants were lodged in a decaying guesthouse located in a street named Cavalero de Grava. Ascham repeatedly complained about the accommodation which had been assigned to him. This was not much for its unhealthy and unhygienic conditions, rather for the fact that he did not find in Cavalero de Grava either guards for the protection of his retinue or ‘locks or bolts on the doors or windows’.7 Notwithstanding, before the guards promised by the Spanish 2

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Introduction

Secretary De la Torre arrived, Ascham’s assassins moved into action, killing him in the evening of 6 June 1650. Ascham’s six murderers were the royalist exiles Henry and Valentin Progers, William Spark, ‘and the swordsmen John William, Edward Halsall and William Arnet’.8 According to a note in the Thurloe State Papers accurately describing these occurrences, while four hired assassins positioned themselves on the stairs in order to prevent any kind of assistance to the victims, the remaining two, probably Spark and William, proceeded with the assassination of Ascham.9 Not being a Catholic, and also having red hair (a feature that Spaniards associated with Judah), Ascham was buried in the courtyard of the pension, while his baggage was hidden by his secretary. However, Hyde sent to Charles II an incised medal that Ascham carried around his neck, representing a crown slashed with a drift, with the words ‘O. B. S. Newark 1646’ below, as a reminder of Charles I’s surrender to the Scots at the end of the first Civil War. Along with the medal, Charles II’s envoys also found a book, presumably Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments.10 Jason T. Peacey has demonstrated the involvement of Edward Hyde and Lord Cottington in Ascham’s murder by pointing to the role of Henry Progers, the murderer who was on the service of the royalist agents at the court of Madrid.11 Hyde charged his secretary to spread at the court of Madrid slanderous rumours relating to Ascham, who was accused of having ‘particularly fomented the death of the king, and the change of government’ (arguably through his books). The retrieval of Ascham’s medal and of ‘a book of his, which was found among his papers’ was invoked as an evidence of his plan ‘to seduce and deceive’ the King of Spain himself.12 Ascham’s murder had a profound impact on English public opinion and thus produced immediate political reaction. At midnight on the day of Ascham’s death, the Council of State ordered the ports of the north Atlantic Spanish coast sealed, in order to contain the spread of news of the event.13 The Rump seized the opportunity to turn the whole episode to its favour by deploying the pages of the Mercurius Politicus to accuse Charles II of 14 the homicide of Dorislaus and Ascham. The parliamentary poet George Wither, in his Historie of Parliament ascribed responsibility for the republican ambassadors’ execution to the ‘slaves to that Tyranny from which this Commonwealth hath happily … vindicated themselves’.15 The Council of State urged George Fisher to bring Ascham’s remains back to England, and gave him a letter to be forwarded to Philip IV requesting him, under the penalty of commercial reprisals, to proceed without delay to the sentencing of the ‘sponsors and complices’ of the ambush.16 In 1651, Du Gard, ‘printer to the Council of State’, published The Process and Pleadings in the Court of Spain upon the Death of Anthony Ascham, James Howell’s translation of Augustin del Hierro’s prosecution of the accused originally titled El doctor Don Augustin de Hierro contra don Iuan Guillin, Guillermo Esparque, Valentin Prost, Guillermo Arnet, y Odoardo vsual … por auer muerto a traiciò, y de caso pensado Antonio 3

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Asikan. Three years later, Marchamont Nedham (editor of the official journal of the regime, the Mercurius Politicus) was charged to reply to some tracts in defence of the assassination which had appeared in Spain with A True Account of the Late Bloody and Inhumane Conspiracy. To gain some idea of how strained the atmosphere was in England after the murders committed by royalist agents around Europe, we should turn to Thomas Hobbes’s considerations of these events in his autobiography. After the publication of Leviathan in 1651, Hyde, as councillor to the now Scottish King Charles II, had interpreted Hobbes’s masterpiece as a sort of defence of the republican government, and had informed the king of this opinion, thus provoking his wariness of the author exiled in Paris. The dangerous situation in which Hobbes found himself, between 1651 and 1652, reminded him of Ascham and Dorislaus (‘Tunc venit in mentem mihi Dorislaus et Ascham/ Tanquam proscriptio terror ubique aderat’), and convinced him to return to 17 England and swear loyalty to the Republic in 1652. Ascham’s murder troubled the court of Philip IV. The Spaniards feared for the safety of their London representative Alonso de Cardenas,18 but there was most of all incertitude about how to deal with the trial of the English detainees.19 Notwithstanding the diplomatic pressures on the government of Madrid, the contention between the two nations relating to Ascham’s affaire remained unsettled, so that when Cromwell declared war on Spain in 1655, he could include the murder of the ambassador among its main causes. Anthony Ascham’s career began, as will be discussed, as a writer of popular political propaganda, and tragically ended with political assassination in the cause of the Republic. Anthony à Wood, much later, thus summarised his life: The said A. Ascham, who was born of a genteel family, was educated in Eaton school, and thence elected into King’s coll. in Cambridge, 1633. Afterwards, taking the degree of masters of arts, closed with the Presbyterians in the beginning of the rebellion, took the covenant, sided with the Independents, became a great creature of the long parliament (by whose authority he was made tutor to James, Duke of York), and an active person against his sovereign. At length being looked upon as sufficiently antimonarchical, was by the rump parliament sent their agent or resident at the court of Spain in the latter end of the year 1649.20

Ascham’s reputation as being ‘sufficiently antimonarchical’ rested upon his writings, in which he had established an ability to converse with Presbyterian and royalist opponents to the parliamentary regime in the fierce ideological crucible of the 1640s. The task of sketching an intellectual biography of Ascham is a testing one. The handful of biographical sources relating to him covers only short and scattered episodes of his life. Most of the information on Ascham derives from second-hand reports, and these were very often distorted for ideological purposes. Therefore, our understanding of Ascham’s life principally coincides 4

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Introduction

with the knowledge of his works. He was born in 1614 at Boston, Lincolnshire. His father was Thomas Ascham, alderman of the town. We know that he studied at Eton from 1630 to 1634, and that in 1634 he was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge. There he studied humanities, becoming a Bachelor of Arts in 1638. Even though it is unclear whether he gained the title of Master of Arts in 1642, Ascham continued to collaborate as a Fellow with King’s College until his death.21 The Catalogue of the Provost, Fellows, and Scholars reports that Ascham was regarded as a very cultivated man and that he travelled across 22 Europe in his youth. In 1646, after the recapture of Oxford from the parliamentary army, Charles I’s younger sons, the ­thirteen-year-old Duke of York, the future James II, and his younger brother the Duke of Gloucester, were put under the authority of Algernon Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Percy was one of the makers of the New Model Army and a leading exponent of the group of Lords who sided with Parliament during the English revolution. It seems likely that it was the Earl of Northumberland who appointed Anthony Ascham as a tutor of Charles I’s younger sons, preferring him to the famous mathematician Jonas Moore, who complained about the ‘malicious and cunning subtlety’ of his direct competitor.23 Between the end of 1647 and early 1648, Ascham wrote a manuscript treaty entitled Of Marriage, which, transcribed ‘per J. Hinson’ (on 12 October 1658), is now conserved at the University Library of Cambridge.24 There is neither an introduction nor references or notes that explain why, or for whom Ascham wrote it.25 Nonetheless, this manuscript is significant because it displays many of the political arguments that Ascham would later deploy in his published works. Ascham conceived matrimony as a union, which originated a social body (the family) which was essential for the continuation of humankind. On the ground of such a fundamental scope sanctioned by God, internecine conflicts between the two ‘parties’, coinciding with the husband and wife, had to be set aside. Along with arguing for the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, Ascham’s unpublished manuscript had a more contingent pedagogic intent, which related to his current activity as tutor of the king’s younger children. Complementary to Ascham’s emphasis upon order and stability both within the family and state, was his insistence on the importance of educating children to obedience and loyalty, rather than to liberty and rebellion. Having terminated his appointment as tutor to James Duke of York no later than April 1648, Ascham devoted himself to making a career as a political writer. When, in the first months of 1648, Ascham devised his first political work for a group of Independents in Parliament, the Discourse Wherein is Examined what is Particularly Lawfull during the Confusions and Revolutions of Government, he transposed his views on the relations between order/stability and obedience/protection within the family, drafted in the manuscript on marriage, to the current political situation. The Discourse was published in London ‘in St Paul’s Churchyard’ by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley, and 5

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purchased by George Thomason on 28 July 1648,26 but in fact it was entered in the register of the Stationers’ Company, the corporation of London typographers and booksellers, on 23 April. The immediate context for the publication of the Discourse was the aftermath of the Vote of No Addresses, intended to support the Independent rejection of any further personal negotiation with Charles I, and to impose a new constitutional settlement based on the Heads of the Proposals. The Heads provided for a limited constitutional change which, apart from a restraint on the king’s appointment of counsellors and high officers by a Parliament rendered more geographically representative, would have left royal prerogatives almost intact. The Heads also wished for the restoration of the Episcopal Church and the Common Prayer Book, and granted a limited toleration for ‘tender consciences’, that is for those 27 Calvinists who would remain outside the pale of the national church. One of the supporters of that political line, aiming to establish a form of mixed government which actually subordinated the king to Parliament, was Ascham’s patron the Earl of Northumberland. Northumberland asserted (and Ascham promptly fashioned in ideological terms), that the defeat of the king entitled the Independent faction to ‘dispose of the kingdome and affaires as they pleased’.28 Ascham’s Discourse aimed to achieve a broader coalition around the points made by his Independent patrons in the Heads. Notwithstanding, it was not intended as a constitutional treatise, neither did it refer explicitly to the Heads. Since the negotiations between Parliament and the Crown (and, concomitantly, between Independent and Presbyterian MPs) were still in progress, and the terms of the possible agreement with the king were open to further negotiations, the Discourse cautiously did not appeal for one specific kind of settlement. Ascham, indeed, focused on the moral and legal presuppositions which would render the agreement to a constitutional settlement (in this case the Heads) imposed by the ‘Political’ Independents the only rational solution to current political crisis. The Discourse’s chosen targets were the Presbyterians, who wished to continue the negotiations with Charles I on the basis of their loyalty to the Oath of Allegiance and, most of all, to the Solemn League and Covenant. The Commons took the Covenant on 25 September 1643, and so did many different personalities, ranging from the radical Gerrard Winstanley to Oliver Cromwell, who initially bound their consciences to the accomplishment of the clauses of the Covenant, and then receded from it as the circumstances changed. After 1643, many professors were removed from their universities because of their refusal to subscribe to the Covenant. This was the fate of the Chancellor of King’s College after the purge executed by the Earl of Manchester, who was replaced by Benjamin Whichcote. Ascham, along with other fellows of King’s College, continued to collaborate with Whichcote despite his scepticism about the imposition of the Covenant. In a memorandum dated to 1649, this is how Whichcote justified his decision to take the oath: ‘1. It was the act of then ruling power. 2. I am now indemnified for it by the indubitable power. 6

Introduction

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3. It was not then my contrivance when time was. 4. I had an invitation or willing acceptance of person interested. 5. The necessity required me, and I served their necessity’.29 Ascham himself took the Covenant, firstly because this was required by the ‘ruling power’ in order to maintain his academic position, and secondly to conform to the political line of his patron the Earl of Northumberland. Ascham sought to convince his Presbyterian readers that the constitutional settlement devised by the victorious ‘party’ would retain the king, and comply with the religious clauses of the Covenant.

FROM THE REGICIDE TO THE REPUBLIC The execution of Charles I occurred on 30 January 1649 at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. On 4 January, the Commons voted ‘That the people are, under God, the original of all just power’. On 7 February, a week after Charles I’s beheading, the same House declared that as a consequence of the dramatic occurrences which had troubled England over the last years, ‘the office of king in this nation, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interests of the people’.30 On 10 February, the Rump resolved on ‘alterations touching kings and House of Lords’,31 but it would take nearly a month before the Parliament devised the acts (17 and 19 March) abolishing the king and Lords, and set forth a declaration Expressing the Grounds of their late Proceedings, and of Settling the present Government in the Way of a Free State.32 According to a note by the court physician George Bate (who treated Charles I, Cromwell and Charles II) ‘The Rump Parliament about the 10 of January 1648/9 after they had made an Act for constituting a High Court of Justice directed an Order to this Mr. Cook, together with Mr. Ask. and Dorislaus, to draw up a Charge against his Majesty’.33 Dorislaus, a Dutchman by birth, was shortly afterwards appointed as republican ambassador at The Hague. John Cook was a Leicestershire lawyer and a former prolific pamphleteer who sided with the Independents. During the trial of Charles I, he acted as 34 a prosecutor. Ascham too was involved in the momentous events. According to a letter of John Milton addressed to Bradshaw in 1653, ‘Mr. Ask.’ took an active role in the proceedings against Charles I. Written in support of the poet Andrew Marvell, Milton’s letter assured the judge that ‘It would be hard for them [the Council of State] to find a man so fit every way for that purpose as this gentleman, one who I believe in a short time would be able to do them as good service as Mr. Ascham’.35 Even though Milton released Ascham from being ‘even suspected’ of the regicide in The Second Defence of the English People (1654)36 his reference to Ascham’s ‘good service’ to the Republic, being not related to his diplomatic mission in Spain, since that was prematurely interrupted by his assassination, suggests at least two hypotheses. The first, it may relate to his participation in the charging of the king.37 The second 7

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suggestion (considering that Marvell became famous as a republican poet and personal assistant to Milton as his sight was fading) and the more likely, was that Ascham’s service was as official writer of the Republic. Edward Hyde’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England indirectly substantiates this hypothesis. Hyde reported that when Parliament ‘resolved to send an envoy to Madrid … made the choice of one Ascham, a scholar, who had written a book to determine in that time, and after how many years, the allegiance which is due from subjects to their sovereigns, come to be determined after a conquest; and that from that term it ought to be paid to those who had subdued them: a 38 speculation that they thought fit to cherish’. It is not possible to demonstrate with certainty Ascham’s factual role in the events between December 1648 and 30 January 1649. However, Ascham’s writings in support of the republican regime, and his consequent appointment as ambassador of the English Republic to Spain provide us with sufficient information for recovering the political and intellectual context within which his works can be interpreted. The Council of State of the Republic was appointed by the Rump on 17 February, and was expected to sit for one year. Many of the state councillors were affiliated with the political group of the Independents.39 Whereas Parliament had a tight control over its executive, most political initiatives came from the Council of State. The leaders of both governmental bodies of the Republic shared a political line which aimed to defend the new regime against the radical potential of the revolution, and gain the consent of the people. With this in mind, some leading exponents of the Rump and the Council of State, Oliver Cromwell, Arthur Haselrig, Henry Vane, Oliver St John, William Masham and Bulstrode Whitelocke (which group Whitelocke named as ‘juncto’ in reference to their broad agreement about the regime’s priorities), had to counter the opposition of Levellers, radical and republican MPs, and orthodox clergymen, and to gain the support of those Presbyterians who had sided with Parliament during the Civil Wars, but who remained loyal to the monarchy on the basis of the clauses of the Covenant.40 After April 1649, the Rump’s policy of appeasement with the Presbyterians touched mainly on the issue of the reformation of church government.41 While a majority of lay Presbyterians in London was disposed to negotiate with the government, a steady opposition to the republican regime came mainly from the clergy. Presbyterian clergymen, from their pulpits and sermons, launched a harsh campaign of propaganda both against the ‘usurping’ regime, and the multiplication of schismatic and heretic sects that they associated with the concession of liberty of conscience. In June 1649, the majority in Parliament passed an ‘Act for the Maintenance for Preaching Ministers and other Pious Uses’ against Henry Marten and his radical fellow MPs, reserving to needy ministers £20,000 drawn from the sale of chapter lands and dean.42 In August, the Rump ‘seemed more likely than ever to give its blessing to the Presbyterian settlement of 1648’.43 The royalist opponents to the regime 8

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Introduction

noted in the pages of the Mercurius Aulicus that ‘the juncto’s votes run all for presbitery, so that some think the independent juncto will be turned again into a presbyterian Parliament’.44 This is the political context in which we should place the two writings of Ascham published in the summer of 1649, the Combate Between Two Seconds (entered on Thomason’s register on 2 July) and The Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience, of 27 August. From mid-1649 on, the Rump’s political line aimed at achieving a national pacification through politics and propaganda. Ascham’s activity has to be set in this latter part of the governmental agenda. These two pamphlets were intended to implement the politics of national reconciliation devised by the ‘juncto’. They addressed mainly those Presbyterians who were hesitant whether to accept the republican government or loyally comply with the Covenant.

THE ENGAGEMENT CONTROVERSY A proposal set forth by the government in February 1649 aroused a wide-­ ranging debate over the issues of obedience to the present regime, and the validity of the oaths of loyalty between the subjects and the sovereign authority. This debate, which later became known as the ‘Engagement controversy’, involved both the supporters and the opponents of the Republic. It started with the proposal to enforce an engagement of loyalty initially on nominated members of the Council of State, and successively on all male subjects over the age of eighteen. The main purpose of the Engagement was to commit the new members of the Council to the defence of Parliament, and the members of both legislative and executive bodies of the government to ‘the maintenance and defence of the publique liberty of this nation’. The enforcement of an oath of loyalty was not in itself necessary for the requirement of obedience to an imposed authority, as both ‘obedience’ and ‘authority’ were generally regarded as grounded in nature and sanctioned by scripture. Nonetheless, the case of the Engagement serves us as a reminder of the importance attributed by English contemporaries to conformity to oaths for conscience’s sake. It also helps us to understand the terms of the debate provoked by its extension in October 1649 to both the higher and the more lowly servants of the state, who were expected to have been signatories of previous oaths, namely the Covenant and the Oath of Allegiance. The debate concerning the allegiance to the Republic and, accordingly, the lawfulness of the Engagement, was therefore one of the most controversial and, for some aspects, original intellectual outcomes of a conflict that, having moved to the battlefields of Ireland and Scotland, had in England now turned into a propaganda war. A Combate Between Two Seconds was Ascham’s reply to two tracts published in the previous months, that is A Religious Demurrer of the Presbyterian Nathaniel Ward (26 May 1649), and the anonymous A 9

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Second Part of the Religious Demurrer published a few days later, and probably authored by Edward Gee (6 June 1649). Both ‘Demurrers’ were intended in turn as a response to Francis Rous’s The Lawfulness of Obeying the Present Government of 25 April 1649, which is usually considered the pamphlet that started the controversy over the Engagement.45 In A Combate, Ascham supported Rous’s arguments about the necessity of obeying the present government, even though it had not a lawful title to rule. Rous’s argument was built on a specific reading of a key text of Calvinist political thought, such as St Paul’s Romans 13:1–7. According to St Paul’s injunction the magistrate’s ‘power’ was the mark of God’s sanction, and therefore it had to be obeyed. The ‘Demurrers’ insisted on equating the ‘authority’ to rule with the lawfulness of the sovereign title which, they argued, belonged to the heir to Charles I. In this 14-page pamphlet, Ascham redeployed most arguments that he had already concocted in the Discourse of 1648, to show the Presbyterian detractors of Rous that obedience to Parliament was the only way to avoid the country having to 46 surrender ‘to a military power [and] to be ruled by force and not by lawes’. The response to those who had laid ‘scandalous and uncharitable suspicions on the person of him that wrote for obedience’, was arguably suggested to Ascham by people close to the moderate group of the Parliament and Council of State, to whom Rous himself was affiliated. Rous was a prominent MP since 1626 and a former provost of Eton, where Ascham was educated. Rous was a Presbyterian who ultimately supported the Independents, and who had been readmitted to Parliament only after February 1649. Rous and Ascham were arguably acquainted since at least the mid-1640s, when Rous served in the ‘Committee for the King’s Children’s Family’, which appointed the Earl of Northumberland to the custody of Charles I’s younger sons.47 On 27 August, The Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience was published. It was intended as a further response to the two ‘demurrers’, and ‘to the Author of the Grand Case of Conscience’, published no later than 22 June. After the two versions of the Discourse, the Bounds and Bonds is Ascham’s most sig48 nificant work. Similarly to the Combate Between Two Seconds, the first part of the Bounds and Bonds aimed to associate the lawfulness of the ‘usurping’ government (i.e., the Republic), to its capacity to rule according to the principle of equity. The second part sought to demonstrate ‘That this Obedience to the Present Government is not Contrary to, but Consistent with our Solemn League and Covenant’. Consistently with two entries in the Thomason Tracts, Ascham appears to be also the author of two pamphlets published under the pseudonym of ‘Eutactus Philodemus’ (Disciplined friend of the people). These writings are respectively Genesis es telos eksousias, or the Original & End of Civil Power of April 1649, and An Answer to the Vindication of Doctor Hammond (12 May 1650). Scholars such as Zagorin, Tuck and Salmon have however disproved Ascham’s authorship of these writings on different grounds. Zagorin and 10

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Introduction

Tuck have noted that the author set forth democratic positions echoing those of the Levellers,49 and displayed much more republican sentiments than Ascham’s authored works.50 Salmon has pointed out that in his reply to the Anglican casuist Sanderson of January 1650, Ascham in fact expounded ideas that were substantially different to those of Philodemus.51 We may add further evidence which disproves the identification of Ascham with Philodemus. If we look at the dates of publication, or even at the dates of their entries on Thomason’s register, we note that Genesis es telos eksousias appeared almost contemporarily to Rous’s pamphlet, as if Ascham developed a potentially dissenting line of reasoning with respect to the core arguments of the Discourse or of his later writings, while he was offered the opportunity to make a career in the service of the Commonwealth. As regards the Answer to the Vindication of Doctor Hammond, it was published in spring 1650, while Ascham was on a mission to Spain. This is puzzling, both in the eventual motives of its composition and in Ascham’s effective capacity to complete it before his departure, when he was moreover severely ill. The Rump’s policy, from September 1649 to January 1650, was marked by a twofold and conflicting agenda: on the one hand, the regime’s awareness of its lack of consensus in the nation provoked the decision to extend the Engagement to all its male subjects over the age of eighteen. The radicals, republicans and moderates in the government shared this policy, so that their differences were shortly sacrificed to the main task of keeping the Commonwealth alive. On the other hand, the survival of the government relied on its capacity to counter the unwavering opposition of the Levellers and of some of the army leaders, and to gain the support of its hardline opponents, such as the lay Presbyterians. The ambivalence of this policy also reflected on the ‘Engagement controversy’, as the Rump resolved to endorse the arguments of Rous. In November 1649, Ascham published his most important work, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Goverments [sic],52 which was but a re-edition of the Discourse enlarged with nine chapters. As it plainly emerges from the title, Ascham pointed to the ‘violent changes’ which had torn apart England in the last year, with the purpose of ‘legitimating new obedience after confusions’.53 Once more, Ascham called for obedience to the new government, and, to a less extent, and often implicitly, for the taking of the Engagement, on the ground that only those who held the ‘plenary possession’ of the power had the right to rule. On the condition that – as Ascham underlined – the magistrate had to rule for the common wealth. The ­references to ‘Mr. Hobbs’s’ description of the state of nature as a state of perpetual war, and the comparison, at times critical, between Grotius’s and Hobbes’s visions of the relation between natural rights, social compact and sovereign authority, are some of the most significant adjuncts to the 1648 version. They reflected the sense of increasing urgency and anxiety with which the anti-­ radical groupings in the Rump, of behalf of whom Ascham wrote, were seeking to 11

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re-establish peace and order after the revolution. In fact, the main difference between the expanded edition of 1649 and the Discourse was the kind of settlement that Ascham was arguing for. Of the Confusions and Revolutions was intended to support the ongoing attempts to reconciliate the Presbyterians with the republican government, and marginalise radical tendencies within it. Ascham urged his moderate readers to coalesce with new government by shifting the focus of discussion from the issue of its (unlawful) origins, to the similarities between its political and religious ends, and those of monarchical government. The legal and philosophical analysis of the relation between ‘allegiance’ and ‘protection’, grounded in the languages of natural and international law, casuistry, patriarchalism and Divine Providence, and which formed the ideological framework of both versions of the Discourse, allowed Ascham to re-adapt a work originally intended to support the imposition of a monarchical-parliamentary settlement based on the Heads, to the post-­revolutionary context of the Republic. By deploying a sort of anti-radical theory of the Republic, Ascham and his patrons hoped to consolidate the alliance with Presbyterians, against the radical and republican minority in the Rump and the army. However, the defence of a government originating in a revolution was at odds with the imposition of the Engagement and with the demand for giving up any kind of resistance to the Republic. Such a contradiction became the focal point of the critical responses to Ascham. The most trenchant case against Ascham’s de facto legitimisation of the government came by the famous Anglican casuist Robert Sanderson. In A Resolution of Conscience, published no later than 1 December 1649, Sanderson affirmed that the reading of Ascham’s book ‘on Revolutions’ had not convinced him ‘of the necessitie and lawfulness of conforming into, and complying with an unjust and unlawfull power’.54 Ascham responded shortly after with a Reply to a Paper of Mr. Sanderson. The Reply was published in early January 1650, a few days before his appointment by the Council of State as ambassador of the Republic 55 at the court of Philip IV of Spain. Unlike other official pamphleteers of the regime, there is no evidence of any kind of contract signed with or remuneration given to Ascham from the government for his propaganda. Once more, the lack of sources obliges us to make some conjectures. We know that both Milton and Nedham were closely linked to John Bradshaw.56 Since September 1649, Bradshaw was charged with monitoring the activity of press licensing through the control of the Stationers’ Company. Arguably, then, Ascham himself was in touch with Bradshaw, and his diplomatic appointment did not displease him, whether or not he did eventually contribute along with Cook and Dorislaus to the drawing-up of the act of accusation of the king. Bradshaw sat at the head of the Council of State, in which capacity he had to act as a go-between the moderate and radical factions in the government, and consistently as 12

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Introduction

a trait d’union between both political groupings and the official writers of the regime. Ascham’s relation with him might have been of the sort of one between employer and employees rather than one of patronage and of ideological common ground. Ascham never showed enthusiasm for the Republic, declaring on the contrary in Chapter VII of the Discourse and Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, that the present government was an usurper one, and that he preferred limited monarchy. Both Ascham’s career and previous relation of patronage, and the kind of arguments he deployed in his writings, placed him closer to other pre-eminent personalities of the Rump who were not favourable to the Republic. This is the case of three of the ‘juncto’’s leaders, Haselrig, Cromwell and Whitelocke, who regarded the trial of Charles I as an unexpected and dramatic consequence of his firm opposition to the continuance of the negotiations with Parliament. Soon after the execution of the king, Haselrig confessed ‘force was much upon us. What should we do? We turned ourselves into a Commonwealth’.57 Cromwell (himself a former protégé of Northumberland) was in the forefront of the opposition of Charles I, and yet he did not distinguish himself by his republi-can sympathies. Whitelocke, even after his adhesion to the Republic, did not conceal his aversion to the regicide. Between 1650 and 1651, the first ambassadors of the English Republic were chosen among the protégés of leading members of the ‘juncto’. Charles Vane and Richard Bradshaw were relatives of Henry Vane and John Bradshaw. The committed republican Dorislaus, first ambassador to the United Provinces, was himself close to the ‘Lord President’ of the Council,58 while his successor at The Hague Oliver St John was linked to Oliver Cromwell.59 From November 1649, shortly before Ascham’s mission to Spain, Whitelocke was in touch with the powerful Earl of Northumberland, who approached him on different occasions seeking his support on a couple of cases to be brought to the Parliament’s attention.60

ASCHAM IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT The investigation of Ascham’s work has been generally linked to the Engagement controversy. Between about the mid-1950s and 2010, scholarly interpretations of Ascham’s works have distinguished themselves principally between those which have pointed out his indebtedness to Hobbes or to Grotius. Another, although consequent distinction must be drawn between those approaches which have emphasised the secular or the religious quintessence of Ascham’s political ideas. A long tradition of scholarship, inaugurated by Perez Zagorin in 1954 and pursued in the 1960s and 1970s by Quentin Skinner, has focused on Ascham’s writings with the purpose of reconstructing the intellectual context of Hobbes’s Leviathan. At the same time, Ascham has been associated with the group of ‘de facto theorists’ who, between 1649 and 1652, put forward 13

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a utilitarian and sceptical defence of parliamentary accession to power after Charles I’s defeat. Zagorin traced a distinction between two sorts of supporters of the Commonwealth: the ‘official theorists’ (like Milton and Nedham), who championed the values of republicanism such as the aversion to monarchy and the superiority of free states, and the ‘unofficial theorists’, like Ascham, who demanded loyalty to the new regime on the basis of pragmatic and utilitarian arguments.61 According to Zagorin, Ascham drew his theory of the origins of civil government from a state of nature directly from Hobbes’s 62 Elements of Law Natural and Politic and De Cive. The essays of Skinner, which appeared between 1965 and 2002, interpreted post-1649 writing in the light of the categories of ‘modernisation’ and ‘secularisation’, and like Zagorin, linked the work of Ascham to the intellectual origins of Hobbes’s political thought. In 1965 Skinner affirmed that Ascham and other ‘Engagers’ elaborated ‘a fully articulated and rationalist theory of sovereignty for the first time in the history of English political thought’, so that ‘they may also be regarded as an important means of throwing some further light on the intellectual standing of Hobbes himself’.63 Ascham’s indebtedness to Hobbes, and especially to the Leviathan, was substantiated by the relation he traced between ‘protection’ and ‘obedience’.64 Ascham was therefore a leading exponent of a ‘lay’ and ‘secular’ stream of thought which culminated in Hobbes’s utilitarian and rational civil philosophy.65 Skinner continued to avow the tie between Hobbes and the political thought of the Engagers even in the revised versions of his essays on Hobbes, republished in 2002 with the title of Visions of Politics. There he referred twice to Ascham’s uses of Grotius, both in his analysis of property (the account of which was made ‘very much in the manner of Grotius’), and when he said that in 1648 Ascham had treated the right of conquerors ‘in the manner of Grotius’. However, when citing Filmer’s critique of Hobbes’s theory ‘of original freedom’, Skinner reported that Filmer had mentioned ‘Mr. Selden, Mr. Hobbes, [and] Mr. Ascham’, thus omitting that the first name of 66 the list was Grotius. The centrality of the influence of Grotius on Ascham has been pointed out by J. M. Wallace and Richard Tuck. According to Wallace, there were two core ideas that Ascham took from Grotius: first that, according to the law of nature, human beings preferred to submit to an usurper rather than to risk their lives; and second, that obedience was consistent with the state’s aim to preserve social order. To Wallace, the relation between obedience and protection, which marked Ascham’s work, was not derived from Hobbes, but from a ‘loyalist’ reading of Grotius.67 Wallace’s analysis had the merit of highlighting both the influence of Grotius’s political theories on Ascham, and the continuity of Ascham’s thought with earlier political debate. These aspects were taken up and developed by Tuck in his study on Natural Rights Theories.68 Tuck distinguished two different ways in which English authors read Grotius’s natural rights theory in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625): a ‘conservative’ one, which argued for a total resignation of natural rights to the state, and 14

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Introduction

a ‘radical’ one, which was linked to the principle of ‘interpretative charity’, but which remained peripheral in the debates of the time.69 The ‘radical’ interpretation of Grotius (which detected in peace and self-preservation the chief ends of the social compact, claimed the right of resistance against despotic rule in extremis, and allowed for the return to a community of property in cases of extreme necessity) was mostly deployed by the Levellers Overton and Lilburne.70 According to Tuck, therefore, Ascham’s theory incorporated both the Levellers’ radical premises about the inalienability of some individual rights, and the conservative stance that it was lawful to obey even a tyrannical 71 government on the condition that it maintained social order. Tuck’s focus on natural rights theories shared with Skinner the view that post-1649 English political culture, of which Ascham’s works were a case in point, was increasingly dominated by secular and rational arguments disseminated by the works of Grotius and (more obviously) of Hobbes.72 In 1985 Stephen A. State made the case for a mere ‘rationalist-utilitarian’ interpretation of political writings from 1640 to 1651, and recommended adopting a ‘“deontological” interpretation of theistic natural law’.73 State challenged Skinner’s assertion ‘that Ascham’s argument was exclusively Hobbesian in the sense of being ‘rationalist-utilitarian’ and hence devoid of religious or other moral sanction’. This interpretation was misleading insofar as Ascham regarded ‘right reason and honesty’ as instruments that God had given to men to let them live a peaceful and godly life.74 From God also originated the ‘right of preservation’.75 Ascham’s work, therefore, dealt with issues that disproved the ‘secular pragmatism into which Skinner has cast him’, such as the Calvinist idea that ‘de facto possession is an indication of God’s favour’.76 The issue of the rational or religious nature of Ascham’s work has been recently dealt with by Sarah Mortimer.77 Ascham is regarded by Mortimer as ‘the most sophisticated rejoinder to the position taken by the Socinians and by some of the royalists’ during the 1640s. Unlike the prevailing tendency to confine it within the circumscribed context of the Engagement controversy, Ascham’s thought has to be understood by placing it ‘within a broader European argument about the relationship between Christianity and natural 78 right or natural law’. According to Mortimer, Ascham combined parliamentarian/non-Socinian natural law theory with the early 1640s royalist and Socinian claims for absolute obedience. With this purpose Ascham mainly drew on Grotius’s De Jure, a work which enabled him ‘to accept government of the day as it stood’, and to evade ‘the practical and often messy compromises of the political world’.79 With the exception of Mortimer’s, all of the above-mentioned studies on Ascham set his works in the context of the debates originated by the imposition of the Engagement. The Engagement controversy has been principally regarded as a debate over the lawfulness or unlawfulness of swearing loyalty to the Rump’s de facto authority, and this presupposition has consequently influenced the interpretation of the meaning of Ascham’s political ideas. The 15

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interpretation of the controversy over the Engagement has been questioned by Edward Vallance.80 According to Vallance the case of Ascham provides evidence of the misleading tendency to focus on issues related to the origins and ends of government, which had constituted a shared presupposition of many interpretations of the debate that started after the imposition of the Engagement. Ascham, indeed, devoted a considerable part of his works to showing that certain oaths, like the ‘promissory oaths’ (which included both the Oath of Allegiance and the Covenant) might lose their validity in specific 81 circumstances. As it plainly emerges from this brief overview of the different scholarly interpretations of Ascham, we are dealing with an author who was familiar with a variety of traditions of thought, and who tackled a number of issues in support of Parliament. Some scholars have insisted on the influence of Hobbes (Zagorin, Skinner) or of Grotius (Wallace, Tuck) on Ascham’s political thought. Some have pointed out the ‘rational-utilitarian’ (Skinner, Coltman) or the ‘religious-providentialist’ character either of his natural law theory (Mortimer) or of his de facto theory (State). Others, finally, have disagreed over the true nature of the contexts of Ascham’s works (Vallance, Condren). With regard to the debate from 1648 to 1652, historians have complained about the risk of oversimplifying complex events through the deployment of historiographical labels like ‘de facto theory’ or ‘Engagement controversy’. Others, instead, have made the case for the tendency to trace clear-cut distinctions between rational/secular and religious/providentialist ideas.82 A series of questions related to the meanings, sources and contexts for Ascham’s work remain, therefore, unanswered. Was he mostly indebted to Hobbes or to Grotius? Was his de facto theory the cutting-edge of an ongoing process of secularisation of English political thought, or did he merely adapt languages and ideas which entered political debate in the 1640s to new circumstances? Did Ascham participate in a dispute originated by the imposition of the Engagement, or did he deal with a variety of themes (ranging from natural rights to the origins and ends of civil government) that also included the validity of existing oaths and covenants? Does it still make any sense to talk of ‘de facto theory’ or ‘Engagement controversy’ with regard to the political writings from 1648 to 1652? Do these labels really explain the heterogeneity of issues dealt with by the debates of that period? In order to provide a comprehensive explanation of Ascham’s political thought, this book will carefully and thoroughly re-read his works, keeping an eye on the immediate contingencies of their publication, and temporarily laying aside (without necessarily rejecting them) the interpretative approaches and explanatory categories of existing scholarship. A distinctive feature of Ascham’s work was precisely the complexity of arguments and languages deployed by him in order to cope with specific historical, political and intellectual circumstances. Such a complexity was not necessarily re-fashioned by 16

Introduction

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him into a logically coherent or systematic political theory. On the contrary, self-contradiction and inconsistency were the inescapable outcomes of Ascham’s attempts to fulfil specific propagandistic tasks and to adapt a set of given ideas to the unrelenting ‘revolution of governments’ of that period. Therefore, before moving on to analyse Ascham’s political thought, it is important firstly to outline a different approach to the examination of his works. This will then make it possible to re-cast the terms of the political and intellectual context in which Ascham’s works need to be understood.

APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY The idea underpinning the present investigation of Ascham’s work is that he was an author who coherently sided with Parliament (more precisely, with political groupings within the House of Commons and then within the Rump) during the Civil Wars, and who re-deployed the arguments relating to parliamentary sovereignty which had been used throughout the 1640s. Ascham’s reputation as a de facto theorist, which undeniably points out some distinctive features of his work (Ascham himself used the term de facto in relation to his argument), underestimates the complexity of his political thought. The historiographical label ‘de facto’ bears some inconsistencies, and also makes it difficult to locate Ascham in the context of pre-1648 and post-1649 English political discourse. The term ‘de facto’ is traceable to Skinner’s essay on the ideological context of Hobbes, and it incorporates his basic assumptions about the surfacing of rationalist-utilitarian languages in late 1640s English political thought. The use of labels like ‘Engagement controversy’ or ‘de facto theory’, to denote respectively the context and the core of Ascham’s works, actually tends to explain too much or too little. Nonetheless, scholars have continued to use the label de facto, even when they rejected Skinner’s thesis. The ideological presuppositions of the de facto theory need to be re-set in the broader intellectual framework of the political debates of the Civil Wars. Ascham was an anti-radical supporter of Parliament, and his de facto theory was basically an attempt (whose outcomes were in some respects definitely original) to adapt the theory of parliamentary sovereignty to the dramatic and unpredictable events of 1648 and 1649. We may even call this attempt ‘de facto theory’, but only on the condition that we stress both continuities and discontinuities with earlier political discourse. Ascham differed from earlier parliamentarian political theory because he had to cope with different circumstances, such as those that occurred from 1648 to 1650. To this end he could dispose of the new conceptual frameworks made available by the circulation and reception of the works of Grotius and Hobbes. As we will show, Ascham was mostly indebted to Grotius rather than to Hobbes. He drew from the Dutch lawyer a theory of natural rights on 17

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which he grounded both the link between obedience and protection, and an Erastian vision of state–church relations. Nonetheless, the fact that Ascham drew extensively on Grotius, as Wallace and Tuck pointed out, does not mean that he did not also draw on other authors. Ascham purposely combined and used ideas taken up from Grotius and Hobbes, but also from Machiavelli, Bodin and Filmer, to convey Parliament’s request for loyalty from a (mainly) Presbyterian audience. The same inclusive perspective will be adopted in relation to the supposed ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ meaning of Ascham’s work. The emphasis on one aspect at the expense of the other is another misleading result of the attitude which reads complex and intertwined historical processes in the early modern period through the lens of a dichotomous approach. The term ‘secularisation’ was explicitly used or implicitly presupposed by Skinner, Judson and Tuck to denote the prevalence in Ascham of a rational and thus non-religious vision of politics. According to Mark Somos, this term refers instead ‘to the process of gradual, and often unintentional, removal of Christian theology from all aspects of thought’.83 ‘Secularisation’ was therefore an ongoing process, which entailed the interplay of theological and non-theological issues, and thus the co-existence of various degrees of religious and not-religious ideas rather than their mutual exclusion. Ascham’s use of Grotius’s theory of God-derived natural rights was intended to restore peace as this was a prerequisite for a godly society. According to Grotius, men had been equipped with reason for a better understanding of God’s message contained in scripture. Theological and non-theological aspects co-existed in Ascham’s work, as well as in the authors on which he drew, so that they need to be examined altogether. One of the most remarkable outcomes of the scholarly debate over Hobbes, Ascham and the Engagement controversy, was the opening of a concomitant methodological debate over the history of political ideas which culminated in Quentin Skinner’s theory of ‘contextualism’.84 Skinner’s theory stressed the importance of exploring the meanings of texts in the light of the linguistic contexts and the debates out of which they emerged. Skinner’s ‘contextualism’ therefore established the centrality of political discourse in intellectual history.85 This approach has fostered a number of objections which concerned the kind of relations which existed between the language, the ‘text’ and the ‘context’. J. G. A. Pocock questioned the connections between the author and the languages upon which he can draw. Each individual is influenced by the contexts in which he is embedded, so that it remains unclear whether he may autonomously choose according to his intentions, or whether his choice is conditioned by socially shared values.86 In other terms, why did, for example, Ascham choose Grotius’s natural law theory or Hobbes’s vision of the state of nature in order to convince his Presbyterian readers to conform to Parliament’s rule? Did the linguistic ‘context’ in which he concocted his work 18

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Introduction

– let us assume it was the Engagement controversy – pre-determine the kind of languages on which he resolved to ground his arguments? Finally, was the performance of Ascham’s texts consistent with his original intentions? From these considerations follows another controversial aspect of Skinner’s approach to the history of political thought, which is relevant to our own understanding of Ascham’s work, and which concerns the analysis of ‘context’. Despite the lengthy discussions over the inconsistencies of Skinner’s analysis of the context of Hobbes’s Leviathan, a common denominator of the scholarship on Ascham is the focus on the intellectual and linguistic analysis of his works. From Zagorin to Mortimer, Ascham’s works, no matter whether they were pre-eminently secular, Socinian, providentialist, sceptic, Grotian or Hobbesian have been interpreted in the light of the discursive context out of which they emerged. Even if we reject the conclusions reached by Skinner about the sources and meanings of Ascham’s thought, we cannot but agree with him on the fact that the kind of use that Ascham made of diverse political languages was intended to produce specific reactions in his readers. From 1648, Ascham had addressed lay Presbyterians, calculatedly using arguments drawn from Romans 13, patriarchal theory and Grotius with the precise purpose of winning their favour. Yet, what is open to question is the assumption that the context within which the understanding of Ascham’s work ought to be set is exclusively a linguistic and intellectual one. Ascham’s service to Parliament in the capacity of a writer gravitating around the political group of Independents, suggests the need to expand the interpretative context of his work, and to look at the political agenda pursued by his patrons during his career. The political and religious ends pursued from 1648 to 1650 by the parliamentary groupings to which Ascham was affiliated, had a significant influence both on Ascham’s ‘intention’ in concocting and setting forth his arguments, and on the choice of the target of his writings. What Ascham said and how he said it depended on the political message his patrons wanted to communicate to a specific audience. But while his patrons sought to achieve this aim through practical politics, Ascham used the far more versatile and powerful instrument of language. To say that there was a political context for Ascham’s writings, or that patronage relations conditioned the concepts and the meanings he wanted his readers to understand (or, to put it in Skinner’s term, the ‘speech act’ he wanted to perform), does not involve tracing any causal relation between political action and political thought. With ‘influence’ I particularly mean the tracing of ideological boundaries which delimited the intellectual ground of what could and what could not be said consistently with the political agenda of government. This means that the range of arguments and languages that Ascham could make use of, as well as the meaning he wanted his audience to understand, were pre-determined by social and thus non-strictly intellectual factors. What rendered political action and language interconnected in a seventeenth-century English context was, first of all, the fact that many of the political decisions and acts 19

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passed by Ascham’s patrons were intended to perform more than one ‘perlocutionary act’.87 Secondly, Ascham’s propaganda was regarded as an ideological arm of politics. Hereafter we will focus on these two issues separately. The Earl of Northumberland’s adherence to the Independent MPs’ decision to subordinate the king to Parliament in the wake of the Second Civil War; the return to the Rump, from early February 1649, of many MPs who had been expelled at Pride’s Purge; the postponement of political and religious measures submitted by the radical minority (from the act of pardon for the regicides to the proposals for different methods of financing the congregated churches), along with the passing in June 1649 of an ‘Act for the Maintenance for Preaching Ministers and other Pious Uses’ and, in August, of the plan for the establishment of Presbyterian Church settlement, were all political acts which pursued more than one objective. Along with managing specific issues, these measures were intended to reassure the nation about the moderate agenda of the majority in Parliament and the Council of State. Both the acts passed and those rejected or deferred by the Rump were ways of encouraging the people to believe that the new government would pull apart the Levellers’ and the army’s radicalism, pacify the country, and achieve the religious clauses of the Covenant. The same political acts were intentionally charged with more than one meaning, as they were propagated among public opinion by newspapers and news sheets, in order to gain the consent of specific social and religious groupings.88 Letting former Presbyterian dissenters recover their seats, and assisting needy ministers were intended to be taken as conciliatory gestures and expected to engender specific reactions, such as conforming to the rules of the new government, or at least not resisting them. Practical politics was thus performed with propagandistic purposes. Among the elements which may contribute to the grasp of an author’s intention in writing a text, there are the interests of social and political groupings behind him, which may have affected how political language was used. In the case of Ascham, the link between practical politics and political language, along with his personal relations of patronage, may be traced to the mechanisms of propaganda. Here, the history of the book deserves attention in relation to our attempt at expanding the context for Ascham’s political thought, insofar as it investigates the text from the perspective of the functioning of the printing process, manufacture, and the market for printed texts. As Jason T. Peacey put it, ‘books ought to be understood in terms of the purposes, aims and intentions of those involved in setting them before the public’, and with this purpose it is necessary to recover the link between ‘authors, publishers and patrons’.89 The political writings that appeared in England from 1648 to 1650 should thus be regarded as political acts insofar as they were capable of shaping political and social contexts.90 The connections between politics, propaganda and political thought in Ascham’s time may be also detected in governmental attempts to monopolise communication through the granting of press licences to those who 20

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Introduction

sided with influential groupings in Parliament. The passing of the ‘Press ordinance’ on 30 September 1647, the setting-up of the ‘Committee for unlicensed pamphlets’ in January 1648 (which favoured the Independents at the expense of the Presbyterians), and, finally, the decision of September 1649 to subordinate the Stationers’ Company to the Council of State presided over by John Bradshaw, and to grant press licences to librarians and booksellers close to the army and Parliament, were all stages in a process which tended to secure the government’s control over the forms of political expression. The works published by Ascham were, if not commissioned by (we do not have any evidence of commission) at least approved and encouraged by the political personalities and groupings to which he was affiliated, and they were published by editors (Humphrey Moseley and, most of all, John Wright) who were granted the press licences in order to publish his works. However, to say that Ascham’s political thought needs to be set in a twofold context consisting of a debate which directly set him and Francis Rous against Ward, Gee and Sanderson on the one hand, and of the political agenda of the groupings to which he was affiliated on the other, does not mean that he was necessarily an ‘unofficial’ author or a ‘turncoat’. Ascham’s works were the product of a shared strategy to gain the consent of a significant portion of his countrymen and former allies, and were thus deliberately tailored to the ideological background of his supposed readers. Nonetheless, they also incorporated his beliefs and values. Ascham’s arguments never trespassed definite ideological boundaries: he always prioritised stability over ‘confusion’ and disorder both within family and state; he was contrary to the total resignation of individual rights to the civil magistrate, even though he allowed for resistance in extremis; he subordinated church to state, and was favourable to a certain degree of religious toleration; he wished for a civil government against military rule, and always displayed aversion towards the Levellers and their democratic doctrine. As such Ascham broadly adhered to the political line of the ‘Political’ Independents. Having explained the necessity of an approach which understands Ascham in the context of political groupings negotiating for power, it is also important to outline how it might be possible to rethink the intellectual context of his work in the light of existing scholarship. As we hinted earlier, with the exception of Mortimer’s study on the influence of Socinianism on the English Civil Wars (that locates Ascham in the broader European debate over Socinianism, but underestimates Ascham’s direct involvement in current English political affairs), the majority of studies on Ascham have tended to interpret his work in the context of the Engagement controversy. Yet, Ascham’s core arguments were already concocted in the manuscript treaty Of Marriage and in the Discourse, both of which were completed before the beginning of the debate which began with the enforcement of the Engagement. Similarly, Rous’s pamphlet of April 1649, which is commonly acknowledged to be the tract 21

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Order and conflict

which started the Engagement controversy, was ‘directed’ to ‘a declaration [that] had been lately published … which proposed proofes that though the change of Government were believed not to be lawfull, yet it may be lawfully obeyed’.91 It would therefore be incorrect to associate this work by Rous with the Engagement controversy, because it was clearly occasioned by the Declaration of March 1649. Furthermore, there are no explicit references in it to a first, narrower version of the Engagement, which, at that time, was still under discussion in the Council of State. Many of the writings which appeared immediately after 1649, in fact, dealt with the broader issues of loyalty or resistance to the present government, while the Engagement question increasingly emerged after the approval of the enlarged version of October. This is not to say that no significant debate emerged from the attempts to force the Engagement on MPs, state employees and male subjects aged over eighteen. But it is to suggest that the complexity of the issues dealt with by the political debates from 1648 to 1650 cannot be reduced entirely to a debate over the lawfulness or otherwise of taking the Engagement. Although Ascham’s Discourse anticipated the submission of the Engagement, it would pave the way for much of the following discussion about issues relating to the validity of earlier oaths, the sovereign rights deriving from conquest, the origins and ends of civil power and its relations with individual rights and religion. Ascham’s works will therefore be examined within a more precise intellectual perspective than that which is usually entailed by the Engagement controversy, and which focuses on the authors (Rous, Gee, Ward, Sanderson) who, after 1648, provided him with the ideological occasione for the development of his political thought.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK Ascham’s political theory was intended to convince his moderate readers to abandon all resistance to the authority of Parliament (1648) and the Republic (1649). To this end he dealt with a variety of themes ranging from oaths, natural law, liberty of conscience, the relation between obedience and protection, the origins and ends of government. Being about the political and intellectual contexts of Ascham’s works from 1648 to 1650, the thematic structure of this book reflects the way in which Ascham dealt with these themes separately, in order to provide a clear sense of how he related to what was going on around him. From 1648 Ascham sought to convince the Presbyterians to submit to the constitutional settlement imposed by the Independents who had won the Civil Wars. Ascham’s argument in support of parliamentary authority was mainly addressed to his former allies, the Presbyterian laymen and moderate clergymen. Almost coherently in his works, he asked them not to resist the settlement imposed by moderate groupings within Parliament. With the 22

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Introduction

king vanquished, former oaths and covenants had lost their validity, so that obedience to Parliament and the Republic was not sinful. Notwithstanding the minority (1648), or abolition (1649) of kingly office, the new government (independently from its constitutional settlement), as it was sanctioned by providence, was committed to achieve the religious clauses of the Covenant. Chapter 1 focuses on how Ascham’s propaganda primarily dealt with the issue of the validity of oaths. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Ascham’s use of natural law theory in support of the Parliament’s authority and religious policy. Chapter 2 endeavours to examine how Ascham combined Grotian, Hobbesian and Seldenian natural law theories in order to convince his readers to submit to the de facto authority of Parliament in return for self-preservation. Chapter 3 follows and expands this line of enquiry by focusing on the religious implications of Ascham’s use of the language of natural law. Chapter 4 shows that, between 1648 and 1650, in order to establish the Commonwealth and the obedience of ‘subjects’ (a term that he continued to use even after the setting-up of a republican government), Ascham proposed a synthesis between Grotius and Machiavelli, underlining the priority of state order over political participation, and justifying war as a means of accessing power only to confirm the necessity of re-establishing order. In order to tailor this argument to the religious and political culture of his Presbyterian target, Ascham brought together a theory of civil ‘power’ drawn from jus belli, Romans 13, and the language of patriarchalism. In Chapters 5 and 6 Ascham’s use of Romans 13 and political patriarchalism is reconsidered by giving a special attention to his reception and use of the work of Robert Filmer. Finally, Chapter 7 examines Ascham’s political thought in the light of contemporary political theories and works. To this end, it recovers the reciprocal influences and contaminations between Ascham and other supporters of Parliament and the Republic, like Dury, Milton, Nedham and Hall. I will argue that the distinction between de facto theorists and republicans, usually deployed to make sense of the political debates from 1648 until at least 1652, fails to account for the complexity and eclecticism of political thought during the Republic. The study of Ascham’s writings suggests that it is possible to recover such complexity beyond overly narrow uses of historiographical labels like ‘Engagement controversy’, ‘de facto theory’ and ‘republicanism’, or unhelpful dichotomies like ‘republican’ versus de facto, or royalist/monarchist versus republican.

NOTES 1 P. A. Maccioni and M. Mostert, ‘Isaac Dorislaus (1595–1649): the career of a Dutch scholar in England’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society, VIII (1984), pp. 435–7.  2 CSPD (Calendar of State Papers Domestic), 1649–1650, pp. 288 and 297. 23

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Order and conflict   3 I. Pérez-Tostado, ‘Murder as a weapon of exile: English politics at the Spanish court (1649–1652)’, in D. Worthington (ed.), British and Irish Emigrants and Exiles in Europe, 1603–1688 (Leiden, 2010), p. 145. 4 Cit. in G. Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640–1660 (London, 2003), p. 82. 5 BL. Add. 15856, fos. 22–31.  6 Clarendon State Papers, vol. II, p. 481.   7 Cit. in I. Coltman, Private Men and Public Causes: Philosophy and Politics in the English Civil War (London, 1962), p. 213.  8 Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, p. 82.  9 Thurloe State Papers, I, pp. 149–51. 10 Coltman, Private Men, p. 216 (a picture of the medal is reproduced on the frontispiece of Coltman’s book). 11 J. T. Peacey, ‘Order and disorder in Europe: Parliamentary agents and royalist thugs 1649–1650’, The Historical Journal, 4:49 (1997), p. 969. 12 The Process and Pleadings in the Court of Spain upon the Death of Anthony Ascham (London, 1651), pp. 236–47. 13 Pérez-Tostado, ‘Murder as a weapon of exile’, p. 150. 14 Mercurius Politicus, n.3, 20–27 June 1650. 15 G. Wither, Respublica Anglicana or the Historie of Parliament (London, 1650), p. 40. 16 Peacey, ‘Order and disorder’, p. 973. 17 T. Hobbes, Verse Life, in G. C. A. Gaskin (ed.), The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic: Part I: Human Nature Part. II, De Corpore Politico with Three Lives (Oxford, 1994), p. 260. 18 Cf. A. J. Loomie, ‘Alonso de Cardenas and the Long Parliament, 1640–1648’, English Historical Review, XCVII (1982), pp. 289–307. 19 Ascham’s secretary George Fisher kept on informing the Council of State about the delay of the Spanish justice, which he ascribed to the manifest intention of Philip IV to play for time expecting the outcomes of the conflict between Charles II and the Parliament before deciding whether to follow the diplomatic and ­philo-parliamentarian policy of the Duke of Medina, or of the philo-royalist Don Louis de Haro (Peacey, ‘Order and disorder’, p. 975). With this in mind Fisher wrote that ‘Mr. Ascham’s murderers will surely die in prison, for the king cannot put them to death and yet he will no release them’ (The National Archives, SP 94/43, pp. 65–7 and 69–82). 20 A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (London, 1817), 3, pp. 749–50. It followed a concise report of Ascham’s murder by royalist assassins. 21 Alumni Cantabrigienses, compiled by J. Venn and J. A. Venn (Cambridge, 1922–54), I; G. Baldwin, ‘Anthony Ascham (bap.1614, d.1650), in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) Online edition; L. Stephen (ed.), ‘Anthony Ascham’, in Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1885), II. 22 ‘A. Ascham’, in A. Allen (ed.), Catalogue of the Provost, Fellows, and Scholars (1541– 1683) (King’s college MSS, circa 1750), II. 23 Cit. in Coltman, Private Men, p. 209. 24 MS. Gg. I. 4, registered in C. Hardwick (ed.), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, III (Cambridge, 1858), pp. 15–16. The catalogue’s curator has described the manuscript as ‘a small quarto, on paper … Written out apparently for the press’. I have consulted the edition 24

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Introduction published in J. M. Perlette, ‘Anthony Ascham’s “Of Marriage”, English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1973), pp. 284–305. The transcription of this manuscript was made ‘By A. A. Gent’. It bears the place and date of the original edition ‘London, 1647’, and appears to have been ‘written out apparently for the press’. By taking as a point of reference a footnote citation of Henry Hammond’s Of the Power of the Keyes published on 3 September 1647, and as a term ante quem 23 April 1648, the date of Ascham’s Discourse’s entry on the Stationers’ register, Perlette has dated the writing of Ascham’s treatise to the period between autumn 1647 and winter 1648 (Perlette, ‘Of Marriage’, p. 285). 25 Neglected until Skinner’s influential essay on the ideological context of Hobbes’s political thought (Q. Skinner, ‘The ideological context of Hobbes’s political thought’, Historical Journal, 3:9 (1966), pp. 309–10), a complete version was eventually published in English Literary Renaissance review. The immediate context for the work was the fact that during the English Civil Wars, marriage and divorce became the focus of theological and legal discussion. The regulation of civil or religious marriage became the object of harsh disputation in the Westminster Assembly from 1643, as a marriage service had to be included in the new Directory of Worship. During the sessions of the subcommittee set up for drawing up the Directory, the Independents regarded marriage mainly as a civil contract, while the Presbyterians insisted on its sacrality as a ‘covenant of God’ (S. Achinstein, ‘“Saints or citizens?” Ideas of marriage in seventeenth-­century English republicanism’, Seventeenth Century, 2: XXV (2010), pp. 249–50). According to the Anglican Canons of 1604, divorce was not allowed in England but in cases of ‘uncleanness’, and even in this case it was not a complete divorce to be conceded, rather a ‘limited’ divorce. This position met a wide consensus among Anglicans and Puritans (J. Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven and London, 1970), pp. 16–17). After 1646, ecclesiastical control over marriage was replaced by the civil control of the Justices of Peace. Informal separation agreements were performed around the country, while both Puritan and Anglican clergymen continued to conduct clandestine matrimonies in private chapels and houses. In this context, John Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644), The Judgment of Martin Bucer (1644), the Tetrachordon, and the Colasterion (1645). John M. Perlette has convincingly argued that the affinities of phrasing and argumentation between Of Marriage and Milton’s tracts on divorce suggest that Ascham’s treatise was originally intended as a polemical response to Milton (Perlette, ‘Anthony Ascham’s “Of Marriage”’, p. 286). Milton regarded the covenant of matrimony as one between ‘God and man, or man and man’ and fashioned in revolutionary guise through the legitimisation of divorce. Just as the contract of matrimony could be severed when it did not fulfil the aims for which it was agreed, so citizens retained their liberty to severe political obligation to the civil magistrate when their spiritual or civil freedom was despoiled. 26 Most of the contemporary tracts here examined were consulted from the collection of the Thomason Tracts, held at the British Library. Therefore, where the reported dates include the reference to the day and month, these relate to the date on which George Thomason noted that he received his copy. 27 J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (London, 2001), p. 26. 28 Cit. in P. Baker, ‘Rhetoric, reality, and the varieties of Civil-War radicalism’ in J. Adamson (ed.), The English Civil Wars (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 211. 25

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Order and conflict 29 R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 254. 30 Journal of the House of Commons (CJ), 7 February 1649. 31 A. Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale 1609–1676 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 59. 32 K. Lindley, The English Civil War and Revolution: A Sourcebook (London, 1998), Chapter 6 passim; J. Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 252–3. 33 Coltman, Private Men, p. 209n. 34 S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 125. 35 Letter of Milton to John Bradshaw, 21 February 1653, cit. in W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), I, p. 425. 36 J. Milton, The Second Defence of the English People, in D. M. Wolfe (general editor), Complete Prose Works (New Haven, 1958), IV, p. 647. 37 Cfr. Coltman, Private Men, p. 210n; D. Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (New York, 1986), p. 336. 38 E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. (Harvard, 1843), 2, p. 747. 39 About the composition of the Council of State and on the conservative attitude of its members linked to the group of Independent MPs (also labelled ‘Political’ or ‘Royal Independents’) the essays of V. Pearl still remain valuable: ‘Oliver St. John and the “Middle Group” in the Long Parliament’, English Historical Review, LXXXI (1966), pp. 490–519; ‘The “Royal Independents” in the English Civil Wars’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, XVIII (1968), pp. 69–96. 40 B. Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 183–4. 41 S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate 1649–1660 (London, 1903), I, p. 64. 42 C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660 (1911), pp. 142–8. 43 Worden, Rump Parliament, p. 206; However, thanks again to low attendances in the House and to the support of the army outside Parliament, the radicals were able to win the wrangle with moderates, by rejecting the act for the establishment of a Presbyterian system of church government on the ground that it showed no ‘respect to tender consciences’ (CJ, 6–7 August 1649). 44 Mercurius Aulicus (1643), 14–21 August 1649, pp. 3–4. 45 J. M. Wallace, ‘The Engagement Controversy 1649–1652: an annotated list of pamphlets’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library (June 1964), pp. 385–405. 46 A. Ascham, A Combate Between Two Seconds (1649), p. 15. 47 J. Sears McGee, ‘Francis Rous and “scabby or itchy children”: the problem of toleration in 1645’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (September 2004), p. 420. 48 A. Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience (London, John Wright (27 August) 1649). 49 P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), p. 83. 50 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 257. 51 J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959), p. 102. 52 The title’s mistake Goverments instead of Governments, also appears in other editions of the pamphlet. From now on I will refer to it with the correct phrasing. 26

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Introduction 53 A. Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, Part. II, Chapter XIII, ‘Of the time for legitimating new obedience after confusions’. 54 R. Sanderson, A Resolution of Conscience (by a Learned Divine) in Answer to a Letter sent with Mr. Ascham’s Book (London, 1649), p. 1. 55 On 31 January 1650 the Council of State ‘Resolved that Mr. Anthony Ascham do go Agent into Spaine’, and during the same session Charles Vane and Richard Bradshaw were appointed agents of the Republic respectively in Portugal and Hamburg (CJ, 31 January 1650). Two days later Whitelocke reported from the Council of State a commission to be given to Ascham consisting of his credentials as ‘Commissioner and Agent to the king of Spain’ (CJ, 2 February 1650). His annual salary was established at £800. 56 B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), Chapter 4, and pp. 195–7. 57 Cit. in S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: the Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997), p. 224. 58 Peacey, ‘Order and disorder’, pp. 953–65. 59 CJ, 23 January 1651; cfr. Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 118n. 60 Whitelocke Papers X, fo. 69, cit. in Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, p. 125. 61 Zagorin, History of Political Thought, p. 63. 62 Zagorin, History of Political Thought, pp. 65n, 71. The distinctive features of Zagorin’s analysis of Ascham’s political thought were taken up by Irene Coltman. In 1962 Coltman distinguished between private men and public causes with regard to the attitude of those authors who, after 1649, backed the republican government on mere utilitarian and egotistical grounds. Such a distinction provided the basis for Coltman’s negative assessment of Ascham’s scepticism (Coltman, Private Men). 63 Q. Skinner, ‘History and ideology in the English revolution’, Historical Journal, 8 (1965), pp. 169–70. 64 Q. Skinner, ‘Conquest and consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement controversy’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London, 1976), p. 88. 65 Skinner, ‘Conquest and consent’, p. 87. 66 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, 2002), III, pp. 277, 296. 67 J. M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), p. 35. 68 R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979). 69 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 143. 70 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 150. 71 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 152. Tuck devoted one chapter of his Philosophy and Government to Ascham. In Natural Rights Theories, Tuck noted how the ‘sceptic’ Ascham actually prefaced his first political treaty with a few statements of Tacitian taste (such as the regret for the ancient greatness of the Roman republic and for the Senate’s control over the Emperors) which echoed Milton’s praise for an aristocratic republic (p. 255). Ascham regarded self-preservation as both an individual (‘every particular man’) and a collective right (‘the preservation of the whole’), and in so doing he got closer to the natural rights theories of the Independents Parker and Ireton. Yet, unlike them, he rejected the option of a representative 27

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Order and conflict government, and defended the idea of a government imposed through the sword (pp. 257–8). 72 According to Margaret Judson’s book of 1980 the arguments Ascham put forward during the controversy which started in 1649 testified to a shift From Tradition to Political Reality ((Hamden, 1980), pp. 82–3). 73 S. A. State, ‘Text and context: Skinner, Hobbes and theistic natural law’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), p. 27. 74 State, ‘Text and context’, p. 29. 75 State, ‘Text and context’, p. 30. 76 State, ‘Text and context’, p. 31. 77 S. Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: the Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010). 78 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, p. 114. 79 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, pp. 115–16. 80 E. Vallance, ‘Oaths, casuistry, and equivocation: Anglican responses to the Engagement controversy’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 59–77. 81 Vallance, ‘Oaths, casuistry, and equivocation’, p. 69. In 2006 Conal Condren added other ingredients to the pot of the political and religious context out of which Ascham’s works emerged. According to Condren, the label ‘de facto theorists’ had been attached ‘to the wrong people’. In the wake of 1649 the dividing line did not fall between those who argued for submission to a government de facto and those who claimed for submission only to a government de jure, but rather between those who claimed for allegiance to ‘office’ and those who claimed for allegiance ‘to the right personæ only within their sphere’. Ascham and the Engagers justified de facto obedience to an office/person whose rule conformed to God’s commands, while ‘non-subscribers’ made allowances for de facto obedience (although ‘passive’) to an ‘office’, but contested the wrong ‘persons’ who held that office (C. Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 295–9). 82 B. Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), p. 297. 83 M. Somos, Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Leiden and Boston, 2011), p. 4. 84 Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53. 85 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The concept of language and the métier d’historien: Some considerations on practice’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), p. 19. 86 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 5–7. 87 Skinner and others drew particularly on J. L. Austin’s notion of the ‘perlocutionary act’ performed through speech, for which words ‘produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them’ (J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962), p. 101). 88 Cfr. A. D. T. Cromartie, ‘The printing of parliamentary speeches, November 1640– July 1642’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 23–44. 89 J. T. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 19–20; J. T. Peacey, ‘The management of 28

Introduction

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civil war newspapers: authors, entrepreneurs and editorial control’, Seventeenth Century, 21 (2006), pp. 99–127. 90 C. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987), p. ix. 91 F. Rous, The Lawfulness of Obeying the Present Government (1649), p. 1.

29

Chapter 1

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. Oaths

D

uring the English Civil Wars political parties, groupings and individuals had tended to legitimise their conduct by referring to providence and salus populi. Parliamentarians had been entitled to oppose a lawful king because providence and scipture told them to do so.1 Cromwell and the army had intervened in politics as they reputed themselves as ‘instruments of providence’.2 Independents had disagreed with Presbyterians over the interpretation of God’s and scipture’s signs concerning conduct towards the Crown. Charles I had been executed and the kingly office abolished when ‘the providence of God has laid this title aside’.3 A similar case has to be made for salus populi. The protection of people’s safety had required opposition to the king’s personal rule in 1642, expelled Presbyterians from Parliament in 1648, repressed the radicals’ and Levellers’ claims for individual liberties against parliamentary absolutism, abolished the kingly office in 1649, and, finally, legitimised the republican government. Providence and salus populi had thus become arbitrary criteria of legitimisation of political and religious change. Moreover, many of these arguments were not peculiar to parliamen4 tarian rhetoric, as they were shared also by royal polemicists. As Ward had put it in Second Demurrer: who had the authority to interpret scipture, and turn what supposedly was providence into a legitimisation of parliamentary government? How to know if and when the recipient of divine imprimatur had shifted from king to Parliament? Finally, who had the capacity to interpret what salus populi was, and accordingly show to people the right way to act for their ‘conscience’s sake’? In the wake of the events of 1648–50, political and religious writings were often intended to persuade men to cope with their bewilderment and choose whether to obey actively or passively, or to resist authority. Much of these writings thus dealt with the entwined issues of conscience and obligation.5 Ascham’s whole line of reasoning was aimed at convincing his readers to act rightfully despite the royalist attempts to ‘embroile our conscience’. As 30

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Oaths

Wallace had emphatically put it, the Civil War was regarded by those who participated in the controversies of the 1640s ‘as the most colossal case of conscience with which they had ever to contend’.6 Conscience was an act of deliberative judgement, consisting of the application to a specific circumstance of a person’s knowledge of right or wrong.7 A judgement might be right or mistaken, as human reason was limited, and it resulted from the interaction between the will, the law of nature or right reason, and the knowledge of scipture. To Calvinists, God’s word interpreted through reason was the source of individual conscience. Acting in bad conscience was thus a sin. In Reformed countries, both civil laws made by and oaths of allegiance sworn to lawful authorities were binding in conscience, so that the nature of political 8 choices taken by persons would affect their soul. During the Civil Wars, changes of political and religious allegiance had caused a number of ‘cases’ of conscience, so that an increasing number of polemicists had made recourse to the advice of casuists. Recurring references to ‘right’ conscience as a guide to political conduct are to be found in Charles I’s official discourses and writings. The king’s conscience was the essence of monarchical rule and his reason was a special capacity to discern God’s will. Charles I had been equipped by God to put ‘the salvation of men’s souls above the preservation of their bodies and states’.9 The king’s private conscience also embodied the collective conscience, so that those who opposed its authority were men of ‘no conscience’.10 Charles I himself often made recourse to the advices of the casuist Sanderson since his exile in the Isle of Wight, especially on the occasion of his resolve to abandon Episcopacy for Presbyterian Church government in 1646.11 Debates over casuistry (a branch of moral theology concerned with applying general rules of conduct to specific cases), followed the imposition of loyalty oaths in 1641 (Protestation oath), 1643 (the Covenant), and 1649 (the Engagement).12 From 1649 to 1650, the accusations of unlawfulness thrown at the Rump by Presbyterian authors pointed to the continued obligation to the Covenant. English Anglican and Puritan casuists 13 agreed that oaths to unlawful things should not be kept. According to Ascham, with the king vanquished, former oaths and covenants had lost their validity, so that obedience to the Parliament and Republic was not sinful. Notwithstanding the minority (1648), or abolition (1649) of kingly office, the new government (independently from its constitutional settlement), as it was sanctioned by providence, was committed to achieve the religious clauses of the Covenant. It followed that subjects acting according to the dictates of the law of nature and reason (which commanded obedience to those who ‘full possessed us’), were actually acting according to God’s will, and therefore could not sin.

31

Order and conflict

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CONSCIENCE AND OBLIGATION The aim of Ascham’s works was to propose a political argument in support of Parliament’s authority that would be capable of securing the consent of his readers, and convincing those who were torn apart by moral dilemmas of the lawfulness to obey the commands of the ruling power. Ascham sought therefore to lure moderate opinion towards what many saw as radical solutions (the imposition of parliamentary supremacy over the king, and the promotion of liberty of conscience). When Ascham engaged in the writing of the Discourse, on the eve of the Second Civil War, a final agreement between Charles I and Parliament 14 still seemed distant. The country was troubled by a political uncertainty provoked both by Charles I’s personal unfitness to rule and by the lack of a settlement with the army and the Commons, which would resolve the current imbalance of prerogatives within the institutional framework of the ‘King-inParliament’. Ascham’s aim was to convince his readers to abandon all active resistance to the parliamentary party that held control over the country. This ‘party’ was composed of the ‘Political’ Independents in Parliament and the ‘Grandees’ of the army who attempted to reach an agreement mainly with moderate Presbyterians on the basis of the Heads of the Proposals. Soon after the outbreak of the Civil Wars, contemporaries noted the existence at least of two groupings or ‘interests’ or ‘parties’ within Parliament, which from 1644–45 were given the labels of ‘Independents’ and ‘Presbyterians’.15 From a strictly political angle, the Presbyterians wished almost ­unconditionally to restore Charles I to the throne, while the Independents claimed to leave to Parliament those sovereign prerogatives that it had seized during the Civil War before proceeding with the disbandment of the army. From a religious standpoint, however, the differences between the two groupings were more difficult to trace. In the 1640s, Presbyterianism was a movement of religious reformation which operated particularly in the city of London, and which could count on the support of the Scottish Kirk and of a number of members of both Houses of Parliament. Its main purpose was to establish in England a national church on the model of those of Scotland and Geneva, which would promote a reformation of ethics and society. Presbyterians aimed to achieve their reformation plans on the one hand through the imposition of a rigid discipline and the struggle against liberty of conscience, and on the other, through the active involvement of the people in the life of the parishes. They exploited the new media made available by the press market, along with new meeting points such as alehouses and coffee houses, to involve a wider number of people belonging to diverse social classes in their ecclesiastical initiatives.16 The Independents or Congregationalists claimed reformation origins, which had challenged the Caroline-Laudian church, but as the revolution went on, they distinguished themselves from the Presbyterians especially 32

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over the issue of church government. The priority given by the majority of Independents to the individual interpretation of scipture, along with the idea that only chosen people were destined to salvation, opened up the way to liberty of conscience and to the settlement of congregated churches which were complete in themselves.17 Unlike the Presbyterians’ preference for a national church with full self-government, the Independents (and particularly the so-called ‘Royal’ or ‘Political’ Independents in Parliament, whose practical interests sometimes differed from the religious concerns of con18 gregated churches), assigned a pre-eminent role to the civil magistrate in implementing religious reformation.19 During the mid-seventeenth century, Independents and Presbyterians repeatedly attempted to reach a national agreement on key doctrinal issues on the grounds of a common Calvinist theology, and of their shared commitment to reform the government of the post-Anglican church.20 However, since at least the 1640s, the political and religious conflict in England was exacerbated by the deployment, by contemporary writings, of a language that instead of pointing out their ideological similarities, emphasized the differences between ‘factions’ or ‘parties’, thus rendering the terms ‘Presbyterians’, ‘sectarians’, and ‘Independents’ labels for rigid and distinctive membership.21 As Vallance has convincingly pointed out, the nature and validity of oaths was a central theme in Ascham’s Discourse, to the extent that it was intended to convince the Presbyterians to renounce the clauses of the Oath of Allegiance and the Covenant concerning the defence of the king’s family and person.22 The Presbyterians’ loyalty to oaths formerly sworn to the king, which troubled the conscience of his readers, was in fact prejudicial to the settlement of the country. An oath, Ascham explained, was ‘a religious attestation of God with an imprecation of his wrath when we assert or promise that which is lawfull and in our power’.23 Oaths were divided into ‘assertoria’ and ‘promissoria’. The former concerned past or present events, while the latter related to ‘something to be done or omitted in the future’. Ascham built his argument on this second type of oath. Even though every oath was binding in conscience as ‘God stands as the witnesse’, in case of promissory oaths ‘the swearer … is naturally … obnoxious to change and uncertainty’, which might prejudice their fulfilment. Necessity, ‘Caesar of Caesars’, compelled the subjects to swear an oath or promise touching on ‘lawfull things’, even if this was required by an ‘unlawful magistrate’. Yet, being acts sworn in promissory oaths to be fulfilled in the future, changes of circumstances may prevent from their accomplishment. By adopting this line of argument, Ascham implicitly addressed the Presbyterian ‘covenanters’ dealing with the issue of religious reformation. Since the main aim of the oath enforced on us by the magistrate concerned ‘religion and the promoting of faith’, ‘if the authoritie fails’ to accomplish the things sworn, we are freed from such bond. In other words, as Charles I had revealed himself unfit to accomplish the religious clauses of the Covenant, ‘we owe nothing to the magistrate’.24 33

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In the manuscript on marriage Ascham already wondered ‘Wherefore may not inconvenient marriages bee broken off’ (Chapter 3). Men often wish to break the bond of marriage because of ‘the incommodities which occurred in it’. Notwithstanding ‘[t]he world continues its order and unity amongst the continual alterations and contrarieties of the elements’. Ascham’s insistence on the necessity to give up internecine conflict between husband and wife for the achievement of the superior aims of love, truth, reproduction and children’s care, has been regarded by some scholars as at odds with his later adhesion to a republican government originated by a revolution.25 Yet, Ascham’s position epitomised the ambivalence of many of those writers and politicians who, after January 1649, would support the republican government mainly with the purpose of halting the revolution and restoring the state’s order. ‘Wee should expect that in our families which we are sure to meet with in the state, in which there is noe calme without danger of a storme’. Divorce was dangerous as it would accelerate the process of familial disaggregation provoked by passions and ‘incommodities’.26 The effects of divorce were particularly damaging for the education of children. According to Chapter 5, ‘Of the education of children’, the ‘law of nature’ established that parents had the duty of providing for the ‘nourishment and education’ of their children, and the ‘laws of marriage … immediately give him title to his parent’s goods, to his name, to his honour, and takes care of him after his father is out of the world, yea sometimes before he himself is in it as posthumes’.27 According to Ascham the stability and continuity of a family would have been imperilled by divorce. Therefore, instead of retaining the liberty to sever a marriage contract when it prevented from conducting a peaceable and virtuous life, as Milton thought, it was important for the education of both the children within a family and the subjects within a commonwealth, to follow the reason and maintaining at any price that ‘alliance’ between parties, which only ‘may bee a concause with God and nature of a reasonable and religious 28 life’.

ALLEGIANCE AND USURPATION In the Discourse Ascham remarked that juridical casuistry foresaw a series of circumstances in which it was lawful for the subjects to sever the bound of allegiance with their sovereign. These were the cases in which princes violated the clauses of a bargain made with the subjects both ‘explicitly’, through a compact, or ‘implicitly’, by conforming to the customs of the kingdom. Subjects were freed from allegiance when their prince ‘abandon his Kingdome’ or ‘give away, or subject his kingdome to another Crowne’. Another case, taken up from the royalist casuist Sanderson’s ‘Preaelec.7 sec. 7’, was that invoked by Parliament between 1640 and 1642, for which ‘a prince through mad fury or folly, seeke in a hostile way the destruction 34

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of his whole kingdom’.29 Finally, quoting Grotius, Ascham reported a fourth case, according to which ‘if the prince have a part of the supreme right & the people the other part, notwithstanding an Oath of allegiance to him, he may be opposed if he invade the other part of supreme right’.30 Once he had dwelt upon the occasions in which oaths could be lawfully severed without incurring sin, Ascham passed on to demonstrate ‘how a man may take an oath from an unjust invading party, contrary to those oaths which perhaps he tooke first from the just party, who possibly brake no conditions with him’. There were two other cases in which men could swear ‘such opposite oathes’. Firstly, when, at war already formed, ‘the right party for a time releases him of his former oath or duty to him’ thus leaving him in the situation of not knowing whether the ‘usurping party’ will fulfil its 31 promises. Secondly, when a man found it impossible to abide by a previous oath and was at risk of being put at death, as in the case of a soldier who, being imprisoned by the enemy, renounced the ‘sacramentum militare’ for not being sentenced.32 Ascham granted that the present situation could not be dealt with merely in terms of legal casuistry, as it had to be set in the dramatic context of a war just concluded with the ‘expulsion of a just party’ (Charles I’s exile at the Isle of Wight). He asked whether an individual who found himself in such a situation shall ‘give himself up to the finall allegiance of the unjust party or no?’ (Chapter 9). To those who doubted whether to adhere to the new government because of the oaths previously sworn to the king, in the Lawfulness Rous replied by taking up Ascham’s argument concerning the prescription of those oaths (‘promissoria’) binding for too long periods in our lives, which therefore may not be fulfilled. Still drawing on the Discourse, Rous reassured his readers that, notwithstanding the part of the Covenant regarding the protection of the king’s person and family being by that time invalidated, the clause requiring ‘to estirpate profanenesse, heresie, and blasphemy, and to endeavour a reformed life in ourselves’ might still be fulfilled by the new governors.33 One of the objections (and probably the more effective) to Rous, expounded by the Religious Demurrer, touched on the validity of the Covenant. The Covenant would be rendered null and void in case of vacancy of a lawful heir to Charles I. On this occasion the principle of ‘absolute conquest’ would be valid, and we ought to pay the tribute due to Caesar. However, the present government being ‘bicipitous and amphidoxous’ because of the presence of the Prince of Wales, son and legitimate heir to the dead king and commander-in-chief of the Scottish army, the Covenant imposed loyalty to him.34 At page 9 of the Combat, dealing with the issue of oaths, Ascham confronted the ‘second Demurrer’’s observation whereby the authority of tyrants who succeeded throughout English history, had not been immediately acknowledged by Parliament and the subjects. Both the ‘Oaths and Covenants’, and the laws and decrees imposed by them, were held to be valid only after their agreement by new parliaments. Accordingly, Gee observed that the 35

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Order and conflict

Engagement would not be valid until the ratification by a parliament regularly elected. Ascham replied, saying that the validity of an oath relied on the effective authority which imposed it. It may be that past compacts and oaths, insofar as imposed by usurpers, he suggested, were ‘not held valid and obeyed by the generation that made them’. Far more original than these arguments, however, were the considerations expounded by Ascham in the last pages of his defence of Rous’s pamphlet. Regarding the objection previously raised by Gee concerning the lack of popular consent to the present government, Ascham reminded his opponent that human beings were rational creatures, so they would be persuaded to swear the Engagement for ‘reason and justice’. Yet, instead of tackling the fundamental critiques advanced by Gee about the potentially revolutionary outcomes of the de facto theory, Ascham continued to insist on the ‘utility’ and ‘necessity’ of obedience to the Republic. Also the Oath of Allegiance, along with the safeguard of the king’s person and family, provided for the defence of Parliament and the ‘liberties of the subjects’, in order that the duration of the Commonwealth would be ensured even in case of absence of the king. Furthermore, Ascham reassured his moderate readers that the submission to the Rump would eschew the risk of leaving the government ‘to a military power to be ruled by force and not by lawes’.35 In what looked like a veritable refrain of Ascham’s propaganda, that is the argument for which ‘when a unlawfull power commands lawfull things, a man … may obey’, there reflected a desperate attempt devised by a majority of MPs in the Rump (on behalf of whom Ascham wrote), to dissociate the rule of Parliament from both social and religious radicalism, and military power. In the second part of The Bounds and Bonds, Ascham sought to demonstrate that ‘This obedience to the present government is not contrary to, but consistent with our Solemn League and Covenant’. This issue remained of crucial importance in the negotiations between Independents and Presbyterians in the aftermath of the establishment of the Republic. Along with the points already touched on in the Discourse, such as those related to the ‘promissory oaths’ and to the Commonwealth’s capacity to achieve a ‘godly reformation’, Ascham deployed a further series of arguments. He pointed out the inconsistency of the opposition to the parliamentarian ‘party’ by those who wished to reform the English Church by means of an invasion of the Scottish army led by Charles II.36 He also stressed the meaninglessness of the distinction between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ obedience, saying that the alternative was between to fully obey or not to obey (and thus to sin).37 There are no references to the Engagement either in A Combate or in The Bounds and Bonds. Only at the end of his reply to Ascham, did Ward deal with the Engagement, wondering why people should engage with Parliament and the Council of State, if they ‘have [not] as yet ingaged to us, to be true and faithful in protecting and governing us’.38 36

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However sophisticated and punctual was Ascham’s argumentation, it proved unable to undo the knot of the presence of the Prince of Wales, whom in a context marked by a broad disaffection to a kingless government, was regarded by many as the only valid option for restoring peace and stability in the country. Chapter 9 of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, tackling the question ‘Whether in the violent changes of so many princes and governours … and after the killing of five royall heires and successors the people who then submitted, broke any Oathes of Allegiance or Supremacy’, expanded some of the themes already dealt with by the previous chapter of the Discourse, which related to the issues of the change of governments in consequence of war, sovereign rights deriving from conquest, and the liberty of the ‘victorious party’ to impose new oaths of loyalty over the vanquished. The theme was not new, since Ascham had already argued for the legitimacy of voiding compacts on specific occasions in other tracts. Yet, with respect to 1648, the condition of England had radically changed, so that Ascham added a new condition which consented to break the bound of loyalty to the king and his successors, that is their ‘extinction’.39 Ascham was here involved in a heated controversy with those Presbyterians who continued to invoke the military intervention of the Scottish army for the restoration of monarchy and Presbyterian Church government. Ascham recalled how after the so-called ‘bishop war’, and the invasion of England in 1638, the Scots had initially rallied with Parliament against Charles I and subscribed the Covenant. They had successively embarked on personal negotiations with the king over exchanging its restoration with the establishment in England of the Presbyterian Kirk. The recent accession of Charles II (Stuart) to the crown of Scotland had been legitimised on the grounds of the clauses of the Covenant concerning the king’s inheritors. Ascham thus accused the Scots of having precluded the achievement of a pacific religious reformation in the neighbouring Commonwealth, ‘by dividing the king from agreement here, and the people one from another, and by invading the whole nation itselfe afterwards’.40 Furthermore, by backing the Presbyterian opposition to the present government, the Scots had violated the Covenant’s clause imposing the compliance with both prerogatives and laws of settled governments. From all this derived that as the Scots had disregarded the compact of 1643, the Englishmen may now dispense with it as well.41 The second point touched on by Ascham related to the validity of the Oath of Supremacy or Allegiance sworn to Charles I. Supremacy differed from allegiance, insofar as the previous was an ‘assertory’ oath, while the latter was ‘promissory’. Ascham argued that both supremacy and allegiance were linked to ‘protection’, and therefore lawful obedience was due to a government which was in ‘full possession’ and for as long as it was capable of guaranteeing the people’s security. ‘Possession is the great condition for our Obedience or Allegiance’, and the king being not presently in such a condition as to fulfil 37

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this duty, we ought to understand ‘the words lawful and rightful’ in a quite different sense: allegiance is now lawfully due to a commonwealth because it possesses us and thus complies with the premise of any allegiance, that is protection.42 The complex vicissitudes related to the drafting of the third version of the Engagement, and its extension to all the adult males of the country, did not alter the terms of contemporary political debates upon the issues of loyalty to the present or past government. On 1 December 1649, George Thomason entered on his register A Resolution of Conscience, a short pamphlet by the Anglican Divine and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, Richard Sanderson, expressly intended by the author as a reply to the argument put forward in ‘Mr. Ascham’s book’, published in November. Despite the negative attitude of Sanderson towards Ascham’s work, the Anglican Divine was keen to acknowledge the force of some of the arguments set forth by the author of Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments. The first of Ascham’s ideas praised by Sanderson was ‘that self-preservation is the first and the chiefest Obligation in the world’. The second that even the oaths concerning acts to be performed in the future, that is the ‘promissory oaths’, were subordinated (and 43 therefore might lose their validity) to the self-preservation of individuals. In order to justify his refusal to take the Engagement, Sanderson declared that he would have not resisted the present authority, but he neither would have sworn loyalty to it, insofar as the lawful authority embodied by Charles II was likely to be restored. Sanderson declared that only on these conditions was it plausible ‘to submit unto the impositions, or complie with the persons of a prevailing usurped power, unjustly commanding things not in themselves unlawful, or make use of their power to protect one from others injuries’.44 Ascham responded to the trenchant case made by Sanderson in A Reply. The Anglican casuist recurred to the art of equivocation, which had been the subject of his lectures at Oxford, in order to combine a passive obedience to the government with a rejection of the Engagement. Ascham asked Sanderson (and Gee) if they would have tolerated in conscience a similar stance at the beginning of the Civil Wars, for example by suggesting to the judges of the Courts of Justice to accept the Oath of Allegiance to the king, and to act immediately after ‘against his will’. There was no room for ambiguities in the social compact, affirmed Ascham: either we obeyed in return for protection, or we perpetuated the status belli. In conclusion, from 1648 to 1650 Ascham’s propaganda primarily dealt with the issue of the validity of oaths, and insisted on the reciprocal relation between obedience and protection. Ascham’s argument in support of parliamentary authority was mainly addressed to his former allies, the Presbyterian laymen and moderate clergymen. Consistently in his works, he asked them not to resist the settlement imposed by moderate groupings within Parliament. In fact, as a consequence of its victory over royalist forces, Parliament (more 38

Oaths

precisely, the moderate Independent party within it), held an absolute power over the country, which entitled it to protect its subjects, and prevent the risk of anarchy and military rule. The next chapters will focus on Ascham’s use of natural law theory in support of Parliament’s authority and religious policy.

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NOTES 1 See A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). 2 Davis, Oliver Cromwell, Chapter 6 passim. 3 B. Worden, ‘Providence and politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, 105 (1985), p. 55.   4 B. Donagan, ‘Casuistry and allegiance in the English Civil War’, in D. Hirst and R. Strier (eds), Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 96–8, 103. 5 Donagan, ‘Casuistry and allegiance in the English Civil War’, p. 92.  6 Wallace, Destiny his Choice, p. 10. 7 T. Wood, English Casuistical Divinity during the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952), pp. 67–72. 8 K. Thomas, ‘Cases of conscience in seventeenth-century England’, in J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 31–4.  9 Eikon Basilike, p. 86, cit. in K. Sharpe, ‘Private conscience and public duty in the writings of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 3:40 (1997), p. 653. 10 Sharpe, ‘Private conscience and public duty’, p. 652. 11 Clarendon State Papers, vol. II, 265–8. 12 Cf. A. R. Jonsen and S. Toulmin (eds), The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). 13 Vallance, ‘Oaths, casuistry, and equivocation’, pp. 62–6; J. P. Sommerville, ‘“The new art of lying”: equivocation, mental reservation and casuistry’, in E. Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 159–85. 14 Ascham’s Discourse was published ‘for Humphrey Moseley’, a London bookseller and publisher, and a ‘freeman’ of the Stationers’ Company since 1627. During the Civil Wars and Interregnum, Moseley, whom was reputed to have royalist sympathies, issued a wealth of collections of poetry, including Milton’s Poems in 1645, and specialised in polite literature, perhaps as a decision to avoid dealing with the political and theological issues which were at stake in the current crisis. A study of the practice of adding booklists to the volumes appeared in mid-­seventeenthcentury England suggests that Moseley’s business strategy was mainly directed to a royalist audience. Yet, from the late 1640s to the early 1650s, Moseley also published some political and religious tracts, such as James Howell’s Letters (1647), the Maximes of State or The Christian Commonwealth (1650), the Letters Between the Ld George Digby and Sr Kenelm Digby kt Concerning Religion (1651), Guido Bentivoglio’s Historical Relations of the United Provinces & Flanders (1652), and the English translation of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1656). Moseley’s publication of Ascham’s Discourse is not surprising then if we consider its being intended as a non-radical defence of the parliamentary attempt at reaching an accommodation with the king. Furthermore, Moseley’s membership of the Stationers’ 39

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Order and conflict Company suggests far more pragmatic interests in following the flood of political events, and foreseeing the developments of current policy. Moseley’s publication of Ascham may arguably have been intended as a way for keeping a foot in both camps (a royalist one and a parliamentary one), but it also serves us as a reminder of Ascham’s moderation and capacity to appeal to both a Presbyterian and royalist audience (H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (Oxford, 1968), pp. 132–3; D. Masson, The Life of John Milton (New York, 1860), pp. 448–50; P. Lindenbaum, ‘Publishers’ booklists in late seventeenth-century London’, The Library, 11 (2010), p. 395). 15 J. Peacey, ‘Perceptions of Parliament: factions and “the public”’, in Adamson (ed.), The English Civil Wars, p. 84. 16 J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 507–30; A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 18–19. 17 T. Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter, and the Formation of Nonconformity (Farnham, 2011), pp. 25–6. 18 Cooper, John Owen, pp. 28–9. 19 R. W. Dale, History of English Congregationalism (London, 1907), pp. 284–6. 20 B. Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991), pp. 45–6. 21 Hughes, Gangraena, p. 333; cf. C. Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth Century England (London, 1994). 22 The Oath of Allegiance was sworn by public officers and magistrates before being appointed, and bound them to defend the king and his successors ‘against all conspiracies and attempts whatsoever, which shall be against his or their persons, their crown and dignity’ (The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner (3rd edn, Oxford, 1906), p. 269). The Covenant of 1643 was the price paid by Parliament in return for the military support of the Scottish army against Charles I. It was at the same time a civil compact, a military alliance for the defence of the constitutional liberties of both kingdoms, and a religious ‘covenant’ providing for the establishment of the Presbyterian Church in England, Ireland and Scotland. The Covenant had to be sworn by ‘noblemen, barons, knights, gentlemen, citizens, burgesses, ministers of the gospel, and commons of all sorts’ for the maintenance of ‘the rights and privileges of the parliaments, and the liberty of the kingdoms’ and the preservation and defence of ‘the king’s majesty’s person and authority’. (The Solemn League and Covenant (1643), in Lindley, English Civil War, pp. 128–9.) 23 A. Ascham, Discourse Wherein is Examined What is Particularly Lawfull During the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1648), p. 46. 24 Ascham, Discourse, p. 56. 25 Perlette, ‘Anthony Ascham’s “Of Marriage”’, p. 286. 26 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 297. 27 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 304. 28 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 305. 29 Ascham, Discourse, p. 77. 30 Ascham, Discourse, p. 78. 31 Ascham, Discourse, p. 80. 32 Ascham, Discourse, p. 81. 40

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Oaths 33 Rous, The Lawfulnes, p. 10. 34 N. Ward, A Religious Demurrer, Concerning Submission to the Present Government (1649), p. 6. 35 Ascham, A Combate, p. 15. 36 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, pp. 54–8. 37 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, pp. 62–4. 38 N. Ward, Discollimium (1650), p. 42. 39 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 87. 40 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 89. 41 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 90. 42 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, pp. 93–4. 43 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 5. 44 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 4.

41

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Chapter 2

. Natural law, conscience and self-preservation

I

n his Preface to the Discourse, Ascham advised his readers that his argument in support of Parliament’s rule differed from the terms of the political debate of the early stages of the Civil Wars. By casting aside the preceding disputes over the prerogatives of king and Parliament, or the lawfulness of ruling titles, Ascham spoke to the subjects’ consciences, and declared that they had to decide how to act rightfully in the context of an ongoing war, in which both their lives and souls were in danger. In addressing lay Presbyterians and royalists, men who were reluctant to approve the amendments to the royal prerogative proposed by the Independents because of their loyalty to the Covenant and the Oath of Allegiance, Ascham grounded his argument on natural law. The first part of Ascham’s Discourse focused on ‘what things, and how farre a man may lawfully conform to the power and commands of those who hold a kingdome divided by civill warre’. In the first instance, Ascham argued, we ought to decide ‘What is requisite to make a thing lawfull’ (Chapter 2). Ascham drew on the twofold and overlapping distinction between reason and will, and between natural and/or divine laws and ‘civill or humane’ laws. ‘Plain reason shew us that naturall and mathematicall causes have more certitude than civill’. Human actions, instead, proceeded from ‘a mutable and a various principle, (the will) [that] cannot alwayes be alike or uniforme’. Accordingly, human laws depended on ‘different circumstances’, and were therefore adaptable to them. Human beings might deliberate ‘de absolute debitis et absolute illecitis’ exclusively on the basis of ‘nature’s laws’, for ‘they were in force before man, prince or people were in being; and God himself cannot now alter them, they flowing intrinsically from his sanctity, wisdom, and justice; or else they flow from nature whose rule (according to God’s making of it by that which is in himself) is right reason and honesty’.1 Natural laws governed men before God revealed his will or laws to men. ‘God’s and nature’s fixt laws’ thus differed from civil laws: to the former (that Ascham 42

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Natural law, conscience and self-preservation

also associated with reason of state) ‘we are all equally obliged’. The latter serve ‘only to give a rule for an equall and a mutuall community in those things which God and nature gave us to dispose of as we would our selves’. As the present condition of England was marked by the king’s vacancy, men could not decide about their allegiance on the ground of positive laws (including former oaths and engagements). Instead, they had conscientiously to follow the dictates of God-given reason.2 Against those who raised the issue of conscience to refuse loyalty to Parliament’s authority, Ascham replied that to obey a magistrate who ensured protection was consistent with natural law and God’s will, and therefore did not prejudice the salvation of conscience.

WAR, CONSCIENCE AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION One of the principal motives that prevented many people from accepting a constitutional settlement imposed by the Independents was that it was the outcome of an unjust war, and therefore it originated from a sin. The issue at stake here was again that of conscience’s sake: obeying a sinner is the same as committing a sin. Therefore, the third part of the Discourse tackled the issue of the consistency of ‘the nature of warre’ with ‘the nature of the Christian religion’. Ascham adopted a twofold line of argument: in the first, he sought to demonstrate that war was consistent with natural law and scripture. Secondly, not all types of war were consistent with the Christian religion and the natural law of self-preservation, only the defensive war. From the point of view of the Independent party, the Civil War had therefore been a lawful (i.e., not sinful) attempt to defend itself from the kingly usurpation. Ascham also addressed those ‘Christians [who] find their Consciences checkt, as if they had an interdict from Heaven restraining them … from defending their persons and temporal Rights by the effusions of humane bloud’.3 In fact, ‘all the Christian world is embroyl’d in warre’. War ‘was first against beasts, and afterwards against those who were like to beasts’. ‘Homo homini (non Lupus sed) Daemon’. The ‘law of warre’ begins ‘where a court of justice ends, and is not able to put us in possession of our rights’.4 Ascham further developed this argument in Chapter 2, asking ‘Whether a warre be unlawfull in order to the lawes of nature’. The answer was negative ‘Because nature recommends us to an internal honesty and equity; as also to our own preservation’. With this regard, ‘if one would afflict my person, nature shews me the way how I may defend my selfe, and reason sets the measure. God and naturall equity required eye for eye, and tooth for tooth but no more’.5 Natural law, although distinguished from God’s law, was in harmony with it, as God expressly gifted human beings with a natural right of self-preservation. Furthermore, examples of ‘just wars’ consistent with natural rights abounded in scripture. It was, for example, the case of Abraham’s war against the ‘foure Kings’, which was approved by God after the battle, but which was 43

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originally commanded to him but ‘by the Commission of nature, or by the light of natural Equity’. In conclusion ‘all warre is not repugnant to the lawes of nature’.6 In Chapter 3 Ascham passed on to determine ‘Whether all warre be unlawful by the law of Gospel’. Mortimer has demonstrated that the terms of this discussion derived from the broader circulation of Socinian ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England. Between around 1630 and 1660, English readers were interested in Socinus’s separation of state and church, natural law and Christianity.7 The pacifism inherent in Socinus’s idea that Christ prohibited war and all taking of life was contested by Jonasz Schlichting’s Questiones Duæ (1636). In this work, the Polish nobleman conceived the power of the magistrate to use coercion for the maintenance of order within society as given and sanctioned by God. The magistrate’s right to take his subjects’ life through capital punishment could not be countered by the natural right to self-defence.8 In Chapter 3, Ascham made explicit the case for the idea underpinning ‘Schlichtingius’’s argument, that ‘Lex religionis tollit legem naturæ’.9 ‘Thus therefore I prove that some warre is still permitted under the Gospel’. God’s ‘primary interdict of shedding humane bloud’ contained in the sixth Commandment ‘was no impediment either to capital punishment, or warre’.10 ‘Schlichtingius objects that there is nor equity nor equality in a tooth for a tooth, a blow for a blow, for in this restitution, that which is taken from the one is no restored to the other’.11 Ascham replied by conceding that ‘punishments ought to bee proportioned to offences’, although it must be distinguished between ‘equity which is generall’, and ‘compensation which is more particular’. ‘Capitall justice’, that is the right to harm or kill a wrongdoer, ‘was instituted by God … more for the affrightment of others, than for the amendment of the sufferers’.12 The meaning of Ascham’s discussion of capital punishment and retribution was consistent with the Discourse’s general attempt to bring together a vision of government as originating from a compact grounded in natural rights (that appealed to the Independents), with a top-down vision of sovereign authority as derived from God through providence (that appealed to the Presbyterians). Individuals retained some of their natural rights upon entering society, but both scripture and self-preservation commanded them to obedience to the superior magistrate that ruled with equity. Ascham also confronted Grotius’s and Hobbes’s visions of ‘the severall ways for obliging people to one perpetual and standing allegiance’. Grotius ‘supposes such a fixt allegiance in a people, because a particular man may give himselfe up to a private servitude forever as among the Jewes and Romans’. ‘Mr. Hobbes’ supposed ‘that because a man cannot be protected from all civil injurie unlesse all his rights be totally and irrevocably given up to another, therefore the people are irrevocably and perpetually the governour’s’. Both arguments, however, ‘what weight of reason soever they may have at the beginning of a war’ signified nothing at the end of it. Secondly, the case varied 44

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again depending on the form of state: England was a mixed state, in which people ‘shared in the supreme authority’. Thirdly, both the Jubilee among the Jews and the old Roman law concerning the ‘manumission of servants’, provided for a return to a condition of liberty from one of slavery. Fourthly, ‘such a totall resignation of all right and reason’, as Ascham affirmed against Hobbes, ‘is one of our morall impossibilities’. In fact, ancient Jews ‘had a right of judging and punishing acts notoriously contrary to the light of nature and reason’. ‘Suarez, Vasques and Grotius de Iur. bel. lib. 3.cap.19’ granted that they who are ‘notoriuosly impious and belong not to any Common-wealth’ may be punished by any man ‘according to the lawes of nature’. The only significant difference, however, was in Grotius’s opinion touching on the magistrate’s prerogative to punish. The addition of this chapter was intended by Ascham to clarify his view on natural rights, thus expanding the ideas already put forward in his discussion with ‘Schlichtingius’ concerning the same issue. Ascham explained that natural rights were not totally alienated when submitting to the civil magistrate, as they had both civil (the self-defence against wrongdoers), and moral and religious implications (the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’). However, they could not be used to justify resistance to the superior magistrate. Ascham understood Grotius’s opinion in the sense that ‘such an intire absolute Magistrate may not himselfe be punisht by any, rather than we may in no case punish others’.13 ‘How it be’, Ascham concluded, ‘it is but equitable that a publique hand should inflict punishment in case of meuum and tuum, and of private injuries’. From this, however, it derived ‘that our generall and originall rights are not totally swallowed up either in the property of goods or in the possession of persons, neither is all that which was naturall now made civill’.14 For Ascham the request of submission was consistent with the subjects’ retention of some of their natural rights, insofar as allegiance was conditional on the capacity of the government to rule equitably.

OBEDIENCE OR RESISTANCE? ASCHAM AND THE RADICALS Most pre-1648 parliamentary political theory was intended to legitimate the right of resistance of the people and Parliament to Charles I’s misrule. After 1648, power being actually held by Parliament, Ascham had to prioritise the duty to obey over the right to resist. He thus disagreed with radical Independents and the Levellers, warning about the risks for social order deriving from the claims for individual liberty and religious freedom. The culture of seventeenth-century English ‘radicalism’ has been the object of contrasting assessments by historians. It incorporated both ‘progressive’ instances, such as the claim for liberty of civil and religious conscience against any kind of outward oppression (especially that associated with Anglican and 45

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Presbyterian ecclesiology and orthodoxy),15 and more ‘conservative’ ones, such as the opposition to the politics of centralisation of the state promoted by Charles I, which drew on ancient constitutionalism and common law.16 The phenomenon of seventeenth-century English radicalism has been often associated with the rise of religious sects, such as the ‘Ranters’, ‘Diggers’, ‘Levellers’, ‘Fifth-monarchists’ and ‘Quakers’. However, from the point of view of its moral and social aspirations, radical culture was marked by a strong unity of intents.17 Radical stances were supported by those Independent MPs who declared their aversion to a Presbyterian Church settlement, but also by those who, in the City of London, wished for a broader religious tolerance, and, finally, by the majority in the New Model Army, who regarded their opposition to Charles I’s misrule as divinely sanctioned. In the 1640s, officers and soldiers of the New Model Army, the ‘well affected’ radicals of London, and their parliamentary allies formed an ‘Independent alliance’ ‘that sought to abate the threat of a Presbyterian covenanted settlement’.18 During the summer and autumn of 1647, the unity of the ‘Independent alliance’ went through a crisis because of the negotiations over the settlement of the kingdom. The issue at stake was the attitude towards the Presbyterian majority in Parliament and the king. The strains within the Independent alliance came to the fore during the Putney debates of October– November 1647. At Putney, the high officers of the army (the ‘Grandees’), Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton (who were also MPs), sought to achieve a compromise between the requests which came from the troops, and the group of Independent MPs which included Oliver St John, and a group of very influential Lords. This group included the Earl of Northumberland, Ascham’s protector, to whom Cromwell and Ireton too were linked by patronage.19 To this end, in the summer of 1647, Ireton, Lord Wharton, and Viscount Saye and Sele drafted The Heads of the Proposals, and submitted it to Charles I in the autumn of the same year. In responding to the critiques of the radical minority, according to which the Heads betrayed ‘the just ends of war’, Ireton made plain that such a settlement needed to be imposed over Charles I, as ‘wee doe butt take the Kinge as a man with whome we have bin at a differ20 ence, wee propound termes of peace’. In June 1647, the radical minority of the ‘Independent alliance’ composed of Parliament men, civilians, army officers and soldiers, drafted an alternative settlement to the Heads. While the ‘Grandees’ of the army (Cromwell and Ireton) prepared to comply with Presbyterianism and restore Charles to the throne, the New Model Army’s Declaration (14 June) argued for a purge of Presbyterian MPs from Parliament, and called for regular elections. On 7 September, Charles advised Parliament that he indeed favoured the Heads. Then, before the gathering of the general council of the army, the same group of people who drafted the Declaration (that included, among its leading personalities, Sexby, Wildman, Petty, and some new agents of the army), collated the first Agreement of the People (28 October). Two variant editions of it appeared on 4 and 5 November 1647.21 46

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The first part of the Agreement called for more frequent elections in order to curb parliamentary power, while the second put forward a theory of popular sovereignty grounded on the natural rights of individuals. According to Philip Baker, ‘the Agreement sought to deny Parliament an active role in any settlement; indeed, the army would evidently impose the Agreement upon the nation following its forceful dissolution of the Long Parliament’.22 The group of persons who drafted the Agreement ‘in tandem with [Henry] Marten’s break with the “Royal Independents” in that year’ pointed to the fragmenta23 tion of the Independent alliance. The ‘Grandees’ called those who opposed the projected settlement with the king, based on the Heads of the Proposals, ‘Levellers’. The term ‘Levellers’ did not exist until Ireton named them so.24 It was put into circulation ‘perhaps with the general purpose of discrediting those to whom it applied’.25 After Putney, the name of Levellers would apply to those who implemented a campaign for popular sovereignty based on the Agreement.26 The radical minority of the ‘Independent alliance’ made an extensive use of the language of natural rights. They argued that since peace and individual security were the main purposes of the social compact, individuals retained either the right to resist despotic powers or, in cases of extreme necessity, to return to a communal state. Unlike those who implemented a campaign for popular sovereignty based on the Agreement, Ascham used the language of natural rights to remark that the only guarantee for the subjects to survive derived from the obedience to those who de facto held power. He therefore did not assert that individuals swallowed up their rights upon entering society, rather that these rights, the most important of which was the right of self-preservation, demanded obedience. From 1648, Ascham therefore differed from the preceding radical and philo-parliamentarian interpretations of natural law theory, in that he stressed the necessity to obey the present government and, accordingly, to renounce the right of self-defence. His analysis of natural rights was always set within a relation of reciprocity between allegiance and protection both within the family and state. The natural law commanding self-preservation therefore ­intertwined with the setting-up of a supreme authority capable of protecting subjects. In an important passage Ascham affirmed that the worst risk for a ‘Society or State’ was to be reduced to ‘a dissolute multitude’ by ‘confusion’. This confusion ‘arises most out of the reflexion which particular men may make on their particular rights and liberties’, which perhaps may lawfully 27 belong to them, but are not always convenient for them to have’. The reference here was to the claims of those Independent radicals who grounded their opposition to the negotiations with Charles on the liberties of the free-born citizens of England. Unlike the idea underpinning the Agreement that natural liberty was linked to representation, the core of the ‘de facto theory’ consisted exactly in this: following the dictate of human nature, obedience was due to those who delivered protection. 47

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NATURAL RIGHTS AND PROPERTY Ascham’s analysis of the relation between natural right to life and the right of property (that recalled the analogous distinction traced by Ireton at Putney),28 played a key role in his claims for Parliament’s authority. According to the principles of ‘Christian charity’, it was possible to derogate from ‘human laws’ (property) in cases of ‘extreme and desperate necessity’, and returned to natural laws (community of goods) in order to guarantee the right to life. Thus, since the condition of England was one in which people’s lives were constantly threatened by the Civil War, it was possible to set aside disputes over the lawfulness of current parliamentary policy towards Charles I, which drew on arguments from juridical and institutional tradition of the kingdom, and to submit to the government in return of self-protection. In Chapter 5 Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments Ascham dealt with the issue ‘Of the originall property and of the entailing parcels of the Earth in particular properties’. This was devised by Ascham as an accusation to those pretending ‘by a new Art of levelling’ to annul the differences ‘betwixt kings and them’.29 These theories, rather than restoring the original community among all men, and thereby delivering mankind from the tyranny of private property and money, undermined the fundamentals ‘of the constitution of societies, of the lawes of nature and nations’. Equity and self-preservation did not require a democratic government, but simply the application of the principles of ‘simplicity and charity … For good civil states are not contrary to, but make up the perfection of the natural’.30 The unequal distribution of land derived from original unequal possession and ‘in this manner Nimrod was probably the dispenser of the fortunes of his followers’, as ‘our Conqueror William was of his here’. Ascham purposely assimilated the republican and democratic ideas of the Levellers, as exposed in the Agreements, with the communitarian experiment at St George’s Hill, in order to stigmatise both as enemies to the pacification of the country. The laying down of a ‘civil state’, and the return to a state of community of families, would have entailed the fading of the distinction of ‘meum et tuum’, and consequently the return to a condition similar to a shipwreck, in which anyone could keep whatever he got by possession and 31 force. By quoting Selden, Ascham introduced the distinction between ‘right of nature’ and ‘State of nature’. Subjects could better secure their ‘share in subsistence’ not by returning to a state of nature which lacked of any ‘sanction of a law’, but by submitting to a ‘civil State’, under which ‘I … have a right of nature to do or not to doe such things are not yet cautioned against in Law, and are honest; but yet the restraint which law and society hath on me in other things hinders me from doing the former as in a state of nature’.32 Similar anti-radical tenets were held in Chapter 6 ‘Of the nature of money, its civill use and valew’. By referring to the view that buying and selling, and later the 48

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use of money, were sinful – a view that was reminiscent of the ‘true Levellers’ (i.e., the Diggers), but was more broadly attributed to the Levellers to discredit them – Ascham stressed the essentiality of money for commerce. Despite its being cause of social injustice, money was also an essential instrument both for ‘our necessities’, and for the exercise of ‘our charity, which is a branch of religion and justice’.33

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NATURAL LAW THEORY: ASCHAM AND GROTIUS Ascham’s natural law theory, as well as his theory of the origins of society, was mainly drawn from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Grotius was certainly the thinker who provided Ascham with the broader range of arguments. From the Dutchman’s works Ascham drew a vision of conscience as guided by rational natural rights, a theory of the origins and ends of government based on the relation between protection and obedience, an Erastian approach to state–church relations which entailed a certain degree of liberty of conscience within the pale of a national church, and, finally, a modern analysis of the rules regulating the relations between states at war, based on the law of nations. Grotius’s works circulated in England and were the subject of thorough discussion from the 1610s to at least the early eighteenth century. They attracted particular attention in the 1640s and 1650s. Grotius was normally referred to by many of his English admirers as the ‘most learned’ man of the century, and almost everyone, from Chillingworth to Locke, possessed copies of his works, praised his learning, and embraced some of his doctrines.34 In his works the Dutch lawyer engaged with issues – such as the natural rights of men, the relationship between the church and civil authority, the reformation of national religion, and the analysis of civil war – that were familiar to those English authors who deployed his doctrines instrumentally during the revolutionary debates of the mid-seventeenth century. Ascham’s indebtedness to Grotius is therefore a case of study of the depth of influence of Grotius’s works in the political and religious culture of the Civil Wars. Scholars who deal with the theme of Grotius’s reputation in England have tended to focus on the 35 reception of Grotius’s natural law theories, exposed in De Jure. Between 1628 and 1652, Robert Filmer repeatedly identified Grotius’s natural law theory of De Jure as a major contribution to English religious and political conflict in the first half of the seventeenth century.36 Some decades later, Richard Baxter reminded his readers that Grotius’s treatment of the right of war provided parliamentarians with an important argument in support of their claims for resistance to monarchical absolutism.37 During the early 1640s, royalist supporters close to the Great Tew circle of Oxford, such as Digges and Hammond condemned Parker and the theorists of parliamentary resistance to Charles I by drawing from Socinus and Grotius’s De Jure a natural rights theory based on the total alienation of the liberty of individuals to the sovereign authority.38 49

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For their part, parliamentarians quoted the passage of De Jure that asserted that if more groupings took part in the exercise of sovereign power (as in the case of English ‘mixed polity’), each group had a natural right to defend itself against the abuse of power by the other.39 A different interpretation of De Jure was promoted by the writings of Henry Parker and the radicals Overton and Lilburne. In his Observations Parker opposed the theory of the total resignation of individual rights to the king, invoked in the early 1640s by the royalists of the Great Tew circle, stating that in the name of salus populi ‘it is not possible for any nation so to enslave it selfe and to resigne its owne interest to the will of one Lord, as that Lord 40 may destroy it without injury, and yet to have no right to preserve it selfe’. In England’s Birth-Right Justified (1645), John Lilburne referred to the liberties of the native Anglo-Saxon populations which were infringed by Norman conquerors, and claimed that the defence of individual liberties against Charles I’s despotic rule entailed the return to a primitive condition of freedom based on natural law. Richard Overton’s An Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body (1647) declared that ‘it is a firme Law and radicall principle in Nature … to save, defend and deliver himself from all oppression, violence and cruelty whatsoever’.41 In the first chapters of the Discourse (in both versions of 1648 and 1649), Ascham started by addressing the dilemma of individuals required to decide whether to obey a government of doubtful legality. God-derived natural laws showed men what was morally right and ‘lawful’ and what was wrong, but the act of applying these categories in particular situations depended on their will. Unlike the Socinian strand of thinking about natural law, Ascham held that natural rights were not totally forfeited when individuals entered society. Ascham focused his discussion on natural rights in order to discover a remedy for those problems engendered by the Civil Wars that could not be solved through legal precedents or human-positive laws. With this in mind, he did not forge a novel theory of natural law, but, through the analysis of the origins of community and property, he set out those natural rights (first of all the right of self-preservation) which would provide a divinely sanctioned guide to moral conduct in those troubled times. By following the dictate of nature, consisting of ‘right reason and honesty’ springing from God’s ‘sanctity, wisdom, and justice’, men could act properly and save their consciences. Ascham’s whole line of reasoning was drawn here from Grotius’s De Jure. A second line of reasoning deployed by Ascham to demonstrate the lawfulness of Parliament’s authority was taken up by the Grotian analysis of sovereign rights deriving from victory in a civil war, grounded in the law of nations or jus gentium. However, in dealing with the issues of conscience and obligation to Parliament, Ascham not only drew on Grotius’s De Jure, but also on other writings of the same author, such as De Imperio and De Veritate, which significantly influenced English political and religious culture of the period. 50

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The difficulty of discerning exactly where quotations drawn from various works of Grotius appear in Ascham’s writings mostly arises because of his habit of using Grotian arguments without mentioning the name of Grotius, or at most using the formula ‘Grotius says’ or ‘as Grotius hath observed’, while he explicitly cited De Jure only a couple of times in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments.42 The original community was described by Ascham in Grotian terms. According to Grotius, it was a regime of community of property inspired by the values of ‘charity and simplicity’, while the right of ‘possession’ was established only afterwards, as a consequence of work 43 and custom. Men were naturally sociable, that is with ‘a certain inclination to live with those of his own kind’, as they could fulfil their natural aims only within ‘a community’.44 The law of nature upheld a right of individual preservation, so that the capacity to acquire the earth’s fruits through work was subordinate to subsistence. When the law that regulated property prevented someone from surviving, as a result of an excessively unequal distribution of land, then it was legitimate to derogate from such a positive right by restoring the ‘naturall community among all men’.45 Civil law was derived from society, natural and civil, and it required obligation insofar as it related to justice and virtue. Grotius then distinguished between ‘natural’ and ‘volitional’ law: natural law ‘is the rule and dictate of right reason’, and was inherent to the nature of men.46 To Grotius, God was the ‘Author’ of nature. As a creator, God was therefore efficient cause of human nature and of the natural laws by which men regulated their conduct.47 In dealing with the issue of ‘conscience’s sake’ confronting the moderate opponents of Parliament and, after its enlarged version of October 1649, of the Engagement, Ascham dwelt upon Grotius’s (and ‘Suarezius’s’) vision of the nature of human ‘reason’ and ‘will’ to say that those who acted according to right reason acted in accordance with God’s own will. God had in fact implanted natural rights in men as he wanted them to distinguish between right and wrong, and behave accordingly. By recalling Grotius’s scattered and incomplete references to natural law throughout De Jure, Ascham neither insisted on a mere ‘rationalist’ or ‘secularised’ interpretation of Grotius, nor pointed to the famous passage of Prolegomena XI, in which the latter hypothesised the autonomy of right reason from God (‘What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede … that there is no God’). Indeed, since Ascham’s purpose was to cope with contrasting interpretations of scripture and casuistry (which questioned the lawfulness of obedience to Parliament), he reminded his readers that acting according to reason meant acting according to God’s will. For Grotius/Ascham obligation was conditional on protection. Ascham acknowledged with Grotius that human beings did not totally renounce their natural rights when they entered into civil society, though he continuously requested that men not use them and obey. In The Bounds and Bonds Ascham echoed Independent arguments and the parliamentary resolutions 51

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of 4 January 1649, by affirming that the recent change of government ‘was made by the present supreme power of the people’.48 Yet, unlike former parliamentary claims for resistance to the king, and similarly, indeed, to both Independent and Presbyterian moderate positions, in his published works he stressed the necessity of obeying a God-given and fatherly ‘power’ mediated by the people. In doing so, Ascham was consistent with Grotius’s concern with social order. In De Jure Grotius had characterised the state as ‘a compleat body of free persons, associated together to enjoy peaceably their rights, and 49 for their common benefit’. Grotius therefore identified the order of the state with the subjection of individuals to the will of the supreme magistrate turned into law, and with the consent of the people as ‘subjectum commune’. The peace and security of the state allowed citizens to enjoy earthly happiness and, most of all, to follow the precepts of Christ’s word. The rights of the people (as well as his English followers, Grotius oscillated between a social and individual vision of natural rights) as ‘coetum perfectum’ (perfect body) were not extinguished by changes of government, because ‘that sovereign power which is in the king as head, rests still in the people as a whole, whereof the head is a part’.50 Grotius did not totally reject the idea of popular sovereignty, but he was on the whole against the right of resistance that might derive from it.51 His idea was that single individuals were free to dispose of themselves (‘potestas in se’), so a free people might transfer or lose its sovereign power, or chose the kind of government which best suited it.52 Beyond some uncertainties and vagueness, Grotius’s attempt was to reconcile the idea of a God-given dominion derived mediately from the people’s renunciation of their ‘potestas gubernandi’ (ruling power), with the idea that individuals retained some of their rights and liberties (like property, which was somehow connected with natural law,53 or the right of punishment) which they may decide whether to use or not.54 Despite the attempts by parliamentarian authors to draw from Grotius’s De Jure a theory of rebellion, there were many English authors who pointed instead to Grotius’s concern with order and obedience. For example, in A Fuller Answer to an Infamous and Trayterous Pamphlet of 1648, intended as an accusation to the passing of the Vote of No Addresses, Edward Hyde reported ‘that Royalist Hugo Grotius saith so, that an inferior iudge can do 55 nothing against the will of the supreme magistrate’. Ascham also took up many of Grotius’s ideas about natural law in the manuscript Of Marriage. There he espoused the idea (which had been used already by royalist writers in their claims for non-resistance to Charles I),56 that individuals renounce their liberties when they subscribe the matrimonial bound. Ascham there prioritised the stability of the family over divorce, and therefore drew on Grotius’s thesis of the impossibility of recovering natural rights once alienated. Dealing with the right of punishment in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments Ascham explained that Grotius (along with the late Scholastic Suarez and Vitoria) had assigned to the people the right of 52

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punishment of acts against ‘the light of nature and reason’, but forbade individuals to use that same right against an ‘absolute Magistrate’.57 Many of the issues tackled by Ascham by drawing on Grotius had been dealt with also by Selden. Ascham referred to Selden’s De Jure Naturali (1640) in Chapter V ‘Of the originall property’ (added to the first part of the Discourse in the 1649 version), by introducing the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘right of nature’.58 In writing the De Jure Naturali, Selden admitted to have been profoundly inspired by Grotius’s De Jure, although the two authors significantly differed in their conceptions of natural law, property and obligation.59 Nonetheless, Ascham’s quotation (which was used to counter the radical demands for religious and political freedom grounded in natural rights) took up Selden’s idea that although men had always been bound by natural laws (the ‘Noachide precepts’), these were not binding without the command of a superior magistrate.60 By referring to Selden, Ascham implicitly admonished all those radicals, Levellers, and their potential sympathisers among the lower ranks of the army, that there was neither guarantee of ‘meuum and tuum’, nor any chance to enjoy the ‘rights of nature’ without submission to Parliament.

NATURAL LAW THEORY: ASCHAM AND HOBBES In the Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques (1652), Filmer listed Ascham among ‘the authors of the principles of the civil law’ Grotius, Selden, and Hobbes.61 Ascham’s first references to Hobbes appeared in The Bounds and Bonds, but it was only in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments that Hobbes’s ideas were significantly deployed. Ascham used Hobbes alongside Grotius to stress the urgency of prioritising the settlement of the country rather than claiming further political and religious reforms. In the chapter on property (which drew mainly on Grotius) Ascham added a Hobbesian statement to say that if the right of property was guaranteed within a ‘civil state’, the return to a communitarian condition dominated by the ‘right of nature’ would entail the fading away of the dis62 tinction between ‘meuum et tuum’. In ‘heroicall times’, Ascham reported, quoting ‘Mr. Hobbes’, the original families, ruled by the elders and driven by a spirit of ‘conservation’, were ‘left in a state of warre’. It was the ‘jus creaturarum rationalium’, that is the law of nature, that led men to turn this original state of perpetual war into a civil society cemented together by ‘mutuall feare’. If in original patriarchal families political obligation was grounded in familial duties, modern societies were indeed based on a compact that provided for absolute obedience to those who took care of ‘our security and protection’.63 Hobbesian ideas were also part of Ascham’s approach to the issue of liberty. When subjects alienated their ‘general rights’ in return for protection, they had to be aware of ‘every new law still diminishing some degree of them’. Yet, however absolute the magistrate’s authority, there were limits to it, so 53

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that when it was exercised against nature and the people’s consent, it could be resisted and overthrown. Finally, Ascham insisted on the fact that the end of government was not to suit the individuals’ passions, as this was unattainable even in the state of nature due to the ‘disproportions which are betwixt our appetites, our senses’. It was indeed to relieve subjects from the persistent apprehension for their security originating from the lack of a sovereign authority. What were the works of Hobbes from which Ascham drew these additions to his book of 1648? Hobbes completed the Elements of Law Natural and Politic and De Cive in the early 1640s, but they were both published later. The manuscript of the Elements had been finished in May 1640, and, as Hobbes recalled, ‘though not printed, many gentlemen had copies, which oc64 casioned much talk of the author’. Between 1649 and 1650, copies of the Elements were circulated by the royalists. Between February and May 1650 republicans did the same with the two pirate parts of it, Humanæ Naturæ and De Corpore. A handful of printed copies of De Cive circulated in 1642, but it was first published in France in Latin in 1647, while its English translation appeared no later than March 1651.65 Arguably, thus, when Ascham referred to ‘Mr. Hobbes’, he had in mind the Elements rather than De Cive, since the former was more readily available in England than the latter.66 In the Elements Hobbes had traced a neat distinction between a state of nature, dominated by men’s right to pursue the ‘bonum sibi, that which is good for themselves, and avoid that which is hurtful’ (most of all death), and the life under a ‘body politic’, instituted through a rational compact stemming from the ‘law of nature’.67 When comparing Hobbes’s theory of political obligation with Grotius’s, Ascham drew on Chapter 15 of the Elements, in which Hobbes explained that ‘To transfer right to another, is by sufficient signs to declare that other accepting thereof, that is his will not to resist, or hinder him, according to that right he had not before’.68 In associating the enjoyment of the right of property with the submission to sovereign authority, and in contrasting it with the absence of such rights in a supposed primitive communal state, Ascham recalled the passage in which Hobbes had listed among the causes of rebellion the opinion that ‘subjects have their meuum, tuum, and suum, in property, not only by virtue of the sovereign power over them all, distinct from 69 one another, but also against the sovereign himself’. Finally, when Ascham affirmed that ‘non-obedience in a State is but a Chimera, neutrality, a State without relation. There is no subsistence for it in any State, and unlesse you will allow me to concurre with others, and under others in lawfull things, I must leave the world; my subsistence being onely in a conjunction with others here in this jurisdiction’, he took on what was a recurrent theme of Hobbes’s work, that is the tight interdependence between obedience and protection. Although the use of Hobbes’s languages and concepts became increasingly significant in the later writings of Ascham, these did not alter or distort 54

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the ideological frame of Ascham’s whole argument (which remained solidly indebted to Grotius), but rather complemented and underscored some of its themes. Ascham had insisted upon the need to obey the present government in order to avoid the risk of ‘confusion’. To this end he had pointed to the relation between obedience and protection. Grotius had taught that liberty was unachievable outside the state, and resistance was but an extrema ratio. In the dramatic circumstances following the abolition of monarchy and the Lords, the primary task of government was to stabilise the revolution, restore order, and contain the rising tide of social and religious radicalism; Ascham decided to make his argument for obedience more compelling by drawing also on Hobbes. Both Grotius and Hobbes shared the assumption that according to natural law, the protection and security of ‘life and limbs’ had priority over individual liberty. There could be neither civil or religious freedom, nor enjoyment of property rights without obedience, just a state of war and prevarication dominated by mutual fear. However, the kind of use that Ascham made of Hobbes with respect to Grotius was not a merely rhetoric one. He arguably regarded some of Hobbes’s ideas as compatible with his argument for obedience, but the reasons why he resolved not to rely more broadly on the civil philosophy of the Elements have to be traced to the purposes behind and the target of his propaganda. A first explanation for his prevalent adhesion to a Grotian line of argument instead of a Hobbesian one has to be found in the latter’s statement that ‘Democracy precedeth all other institution of government’. Aristocracy and monarchy belonged to two successive developmental stages of human society. In expressing his preference for monarchy, Hobbes explained that ‘the institution of a political monarch proceedeth in the same manner, as did the institution of the aristocracy (viz.) by a decree of the sovereign people, to pass the sovereignty to one man named, and approved by plurality of suffrage’.70 In Leviathan Hobbes would seek to modify these potentially democratic origins of sovereign power by refashioning his ideas of ‘authorisation’ and ‘rep71 resentation’. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand Ascham’s wariness in referring to a political theory that, also due to its theoretical detachment from political contingencies and ideological partisanship, at that moment fitted with the Levellers’ democratic claims for electoral and social reform. Another reason for Ascham’s prudence in dealing with Hobbes’s political theory is given by Ascham in Chapter 18 of Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments. Here Ascham repeated the assertion he had already made in 1648 that the complete alienation of natural rights to a supreme magistrate ‘was our moral impossibility’, and set it against what he regarded as Hobbes’s theory of total resignation expounded in the Elements.72 In Chapter 3 the religious implications of Ascham’s use of the language of natural law will be dealt with more thoroughly alongside his stances on the relations between civil power and the church. Both will be understood in the context 55

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of the religious and political negotiations ongoing between Independents and Presbyterians.

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NOTES  1 Ascham, Discourse, p. 8.  2 Ascham, Discourse, p. 9.  3 Ascham, Discourse, p. 95.  4 Ascham, Discourse, p. 97.  5 Ascham, Discourse, p. 100.  6 Ascham, Discourse, p. 103.  7 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, p. 3; on the English receptions of Socinus’s ideas, see also Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and “The One Supreme God”’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antritrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-century Europe (Leiden, 2005), pp. 241–98.  8 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, pp. 31–2.  9 Ascham, Discourse, p. 106. 10 Ascham, Discourse, p. 107. 11 Ascham, Discourse, p. 134. 12 Ascham, Discourse, p. 135. 13 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 122. 14 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 123. 15 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, Chapter 2. 16 On the theme of ‘radicalism’ see G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007). 17 J. C. Davis, ‘Against formality: one aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3 (1993), pp. 265–88. 18 P. Baker and E. Vernon, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, Historical Journal, 1:53 (2010), p. 44. 19 Coward, Cromwell, p. 52. 20 D. Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Rochester, 2006), p. 102. 21 P. Baker and E. Vernon, ‘Introduction’, in P. Baker and E. Vernon (eds), The Agreement of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 1–4. 22 P. Baker, ‘“A despicable contemptible generation of men”? Cromwell and the Levellers’, in P. Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (London, 2009), pp. 102–3. 23 Baker and Vernon, ‘Introduction’, p. 41. 24 B. Worden, ‘The Levellers in history and memory, c.1660–1960’, in M. Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates (Cambridge, 2001), p. 280. 25 J. Morrill and P. Baker, ‘The Case of the Army truly re-stated’, in Mendle (ed.), Putney Debates, p. 119. 26 Baker and Vernon, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, p. 59. 27 Ascham, Discourse, p. 70. 28 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 246; Farr, Henry Ireton, pp. 105–7. 29 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 18. 56

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Natural law, conscience and self-preservation 30 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 19. 31 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, pp. 21–2. 32 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 24. 33 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 27. 34 Cf. M. Barducci, Grozio nel Pensiero Politico e Religioso Inglese, 1632–1678 (Florence, 2010). 35 The following sketch of the English receptions of De Jure in the 1640s is drawn from M. Barducci, ‘Hugo Grotius and the English Republic: the writings of Anthony Ascham, 1648–1650’, Grotiana, 32 (2011), pp. 42–6. 36 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, p. 110. 37 R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxteriane (London, 1689), p. 38. 38 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, Chapter 4 passim. 39 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 143; Scott, Commonwealth Principles, p. 111. 40 Cit. in M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: the Political Thought of the Public’s “privado” (Cambridge, 2003), p. 126; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 146–7. See also E. H. Kossmann, ‘Bodin, Althusius en Parker, of: over de moderniteit van de Nederlandse Opstand’, in E. H. Kossmann (ed.), Politicke theorie en geschiedenis: verspreide epstellen en voordrachten (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 127–38. 41 R. Overton, An Appeale from the Degenerate Representative Body (London, 1647), in D. M. Wolfe (ed.), Levellers Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1967), pp. 159–60. 42 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, pp. 115, 122. 43 On Grotius’s theory on the origins and development of property, from a primitive condition of community of goods, cf. H. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace in three books, translated into English, to which are added all the large notes of Mr. J. Barbeyrac (London, 1738), II. 2. 2–4. 44 Grotius, Prolegomena to Rights of War and Peace, VI, p. XV. 45 Ascham, Discourse, p. 15. 46 Grotius, Prolegomena to Rights of War and Peace IX, p. XVIII; Rights of War and Peace, I.1.10, p. 9. 47 Grotius divided volitional law into ‘divine’ and ‘human law’, with the latter being subdivided into ‘civil right’ (which resulted from ‘civil power’ and ‘governs the State’), and the ‘law of nations’. As for the law of nature, the law of nations (whose existence is substantiated by ‘continual use, and the testimony of men skilled in the Law’) was universal in so far as it originated from ‘the will of all’ (Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 14, p. 15.) Like Suarez (whom Ascham himself quoted in the Discourse), Grotius regarded God as a lawmaker even though God did not issue commands directly to men apart from revelation (C. Edwards, ‘The law of nature in the thought of Hugo Grotius’, Journal of Politics, 4:42 (1970), pp. 791–3.) Both the ‘dictates’ of human reason, society, and the laws derived from society were therefore of divine origin. After he had associated the law of nature to the nature of man, in the Prolegomena Grotius went on to explain that ‘even the law of nature itself, whether it be that which consists in the maintenance of society … though it flows from the internal principles of man, may notwithstanding justly be ascribed to God, because it was his pleasure that these principles should be in us’ (Grotius, Prolegomena to Rights of War and Peace, XII, p. XIX). By having willed to make ‘appetitus societatis’ a distinctive feature of humanity, God was in fact the efficient cause of society. In Prolegomena VI Grotius wrote that ‘among the things 57

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Order and conflict peculiar to man, is his desire of society’, and later on explained that ‘the Author of nature was pleased, that every man in particular should be weak in himself, and in want of many things necessary for living commodiously, to the end we might more eagerly affect society.’ (Grotius, Prolegomena to Rights of War and Peace, XII, p. XX). By the dictates of reason (reason being implanted by God) man discerned the natural laws, and therefore ‘What’s just and right’, for man ‘has received from nature a peculiar instrument … of knowing and acting, according to some general principles.’ (Grotius, Prolegomena to Rights of War and Peace, VII, p. XVI). In Book I, Chapter I, Grotius defined ‘the Divine voluntary law’ as ‘that which is derived only from the will of God himself.’ By such origin it was distinguished from the law of nature ‘which in some sense … may be called Divine also.’ (Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 1.15, p. 16). Here Grotius referred to Prolegomena XII where he had affirmed that the law of nature could be attributed to God because of His having willed the trait of reason in human beings and then footnoted the statement with a reference to St. Chrysostom, which said: ‘When I speak of nature … I mean God, for He is the author “of nature”.’ (For this overview of Grotius’s unsystematic and unaccomplished treatment of natural law, I have drawn on the still valuable article by Edwards, ‘The law of nature’, pp. 790–7.) 48 Ascham, Bounds and Bonds, p. 26. 49 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 14, p. 15. 50 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, II. 9. 8, p. 266. 51 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I.4.1–7, pp. 101–11. 52 An illuminating analysis of these aspects of Grotius’s thought is to be found in F. M. De Sanctis, Grozio: diritto naturale e diritto civile (Naples, 1994), pp. 50–4. 53 Cf. J. Salter, ‘Hugo Grotius: property and consent’, Political Theory, 4: 29 (2001), pp. 544–55. 54 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, II. 20.9, pp. 412–15. 55 E. Hyde, A Fuller Answer to an Infamous and Trayterous Pamphlet (1648), p. 134. 56 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, Chapter 4 passim. 57 Ascham, Confusions and Revolution of Governments, p. 122. 58 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 24. 59 G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (Oxford, 2009), II, p. 490–1; cf. J. P. Sommerville, ‘Selden, Grotius, and the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution in moral and political philosophy’, in V. Kahn and L. Hutson (eds), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 2001), pp. 318–42. 60 J. P. Sommerville, ‘John Selden, the law of nature, and the origins of government’, Historical Journal, 2:27 (1984), pp. 443–4. 61 R. Filmer, Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques, in R. Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writing, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), p. 237. 62 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, pp. 21–2. 63 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 109. 64 W. Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1839–45), IV, p. 414. 65 M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Hobbes’s ambiguous politics’, History of Political Thought, 4: XI (1990), pp. 639–73. 66 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 303. 67 T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. F. Tönnies (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 54–5, 68–74. 58

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68 Hobbes, Elements of Law, p. 58. 69 Hobbes, Elements of Law, p. 138. 70 Hobbes, Elements of Law, p. 95. 71 G. Burgess, ‘Contexts for the writing and publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, History of Political Thought, XI (1990), pp. 683–5. 72 Cf. also State, ‘Text and context’, pp. 27–32.

59

Chapter 3

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. Natural law, civil power and religion

A

s hinted in Chapter 2, during the 1640s opposition to Charles I also drew on natural law theory. Parliamentarians shared the idea that the natural right of self-preservation was better secured through the safeguard of 1 state’s order. However, Presbyterian writers put an emphasis on the people’s consent, regarding it as duty toward God-derived authority, while they were reluctant to ground civil power on individuals promising to retain (and not 2 use) their natural rights. On his part, Ascham was eager to reassure his Presbyterian audience that even though this ‘power’ was given to Caesar by God, it had to be exercised not arbitrarily, but in respect of ‘those tacit conditions which are cleared by the rules of naturall equity’. What the moderate Independent was engaged to do in 1649, along with the influential and former Presbyterian MP Rous, was to negotiate the consensus of his former Presbyterian allies by presenting the new government as committed to the achievement of religious reformation. What kind of religious reformation was still the object of discussion both within and outside the Parliament, especially over the issue of the liberty to be granted to ‘tender consciences’. In this context, the importance of natural law for the understanding of the essentially ethical message of scripture and, therefore, for salvation, was a focal point of discussion. This is what Ascham referred to when he agreed with Grotius about the moral impossibility of renouncing the capacity to judge what was morally just or unjust. Yet, unlike him, this was exactly the point that had been made by Hobbes in The Elements when he affirmed ‘That subjects are not bound to follow their private judgments in controversies of religion’ (Chapter 6, p. II), and ‘That subjects are not bound to follow the judgment of any authority in controversies of religion which is not dependent on the sovereign power’ (Chapter 7, p. II). God had inscribed moral law into men to let them understand the ethical message contained in scripture and behave accordingly. Ascham’s dealing with Grotius’s (more than Hobbes’s) natural law had therefore moral and religious implications, 60

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which related to the kind of reformation of the English church championed by the Independents.

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NATURAL LAW AND LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE Despite his frequent attempts to reassure Presbyterians that the new government would achieve the religious clauses of the Covenant, in a few passages touching religion, Ascham displayed his favour towards a moderately tolerant national church. When, in the Bounds and Bonds, he stated that all differences in religion did not make another religion, when he prioritised inward faith over ‘conformity to visible Ceremonies’, and, finally, when he argued that due to the limitation of human reason, which did not permit us to fully grasp God’s truth, it was dangerous ‘rigidly to punish (in person or estate) peaceable dissenters in religion’, Ascham put forward arguments which were basically 3 shared also by Milton, Nedham and Cromwell. Ascham’s insistence on Grotius’s natural law as a guide for ‘just’ conscience and moral conduct was not drawn solely from De Jure, but also from De Veritate. Written while Grotius was imprisoned at Lœvenstein, De Veritate (1627) aimed both to emphasise the distinctive features of Christianity with respect to other religions, and to prioritise piety over doctrinal divergences in order to achieve peace and unity.4 The purpose of this work was to demonstrate the existence of one God, the significance of Christ’s life, the authenticity of scripture, and its moral doctrine. Like Arminius, Grotius conceived human will as predisposed to the good by means of natural law. Finally, the last three chapters asserted the superiority of the Christian religion over paganism, Islam, and Hebraism. De Veritate’s theological doctrine was founded on a minimal number of principles (the existence of God, Christ, and the validity of scripture) that could be accepted by all the Protestants. Consistent with his Arminianism, and against strict Predestination, in De Veritate Grotius affirmed that the superiority of Christian religion with respect to other religions consisted also in encouraging virtues such as modesty, moderation, goodness and moral conduct.5 An insistence upon practical Christianity and reformation of manners,6 along with an attempt to ground a rational moral virtue in theology which drew on Platonic, Arminian and Socinian traditions, and a reaction against pessimistic predestinarian theology, were also common denominators of republican and Independent religious culture.7 The pursuit of ‘true religion’ and the achievement of a ‘Christian commonwealth’, which were distinctive features of an increasingly influential strand of thinking about religious reformation in the English revolution, were grounded in the literary tradition of Christian humanism, within which the works of Plato were particularly relevant. Plato’s rational and moral metaphysic, his emphasis on the individual’s pursuit of God’s truth against clerical or state restrictions, his pursuit of the 61

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common good through the achievement of political and religious unity influenced the works both of the ‘commonwealthsmen’ Milton, Henry Neville, Henry Vane, Algernon Sidney, as well as of Anglican-royalist reformers like Chillingworth and Hammond. The revival of Platonism in revolutionary England dated back to the works of English and Continental humanists and reformers, such as Erasmus, More, Colet, Philip Sidney, Du Mornay and Grotius. In De Veritate Grotius, who was commonly acknowledged to be the heir to Erasmus by his English admirers,8 drew extensively on Plato and Mornay to demonstrate the consistency of ancient theology with Christianity.9 Some of the Cambridge Platonists, like Peter Sterry, became mentors of pre-eminent republican writers Milton and Henry Vane Jr.,10 while we may assume that the Chancellor Benjamin Whichcote was well acquainted with the Fellow of King’s College Anthony Ascham. Thus it was not chance if Platonic themes (such as the search for truth through friendship and love, and the relation between heart and mind) abundantly recurred in Milton’s and Ascham’s matrimonial tracts.11 The idea that the understanding of the Christian religion required the combination of human reason and scripture (which was shared also by Cambridge Platonists), so that men had been purposely equipped with natural law in order to grasp it with the assistance of God’s revelation, and that the core of God’s message was ethics (an idea that was also recalled in De Jure), constituted the core of Grotius’s De Veritate. This work had spanned the cultural background of English religious reformers since at least the early 1630s, and one of its promoters in England was referred to by Ascham as ‘Master Chillingworth’.12 According to the peace-maker Ascham, only through the re-establishment of order and peace could men reach salvation behaving according to God’s ethical rules set out in scripture and inscribed into their souls. To this end, along with granting a moderate tolerance to ‘tender consciences’, it was important to subordinate church to the civil magistrate.

ERASTIANISM Ascham’s Discourse was a factional work that supported the anti-clerical stances of many Independents. The question at stake in 1648 was the re-­ negotiation of the balance of powers between king and Parliament, and it therefore pertained to the secular sphere. In the preceding years, the Presbyterian ministers of the Westminster Assembly had claimed for the church the control of the access to the sacraments and the power to excommunicate. Ascham reminded that as God-given ‘right-of dominion’ was a ‘sacred theme’, many ‘divines (or rather ministers of the holy order)’ thought that the ‘whole question is to be defined at their tribunal by the text of the Bible’. The Discourse, instead, remarked that clergymen’s speculation had to be limited to the act of creation of magistracy, while as regarded questions arising from the 62

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exercise of sovereign power, as this ‘consists in and is specified by contract, and in those tacit conditions which are cleared by the rules of natural equity’, they fell under the competence of ‘lawyers’. Presbyterian ministers could not deal with political and legal issues relating to the rule of present government. The third part of Ascham’s Discourse and Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, which tackled the issue of the consistency of ‘the nature of warre’ with ‘the nature of the Christian religion’, was almost entirely copied from Chapter 2, Book I of De Jure, in which Grotius had sought to demon13 strate that the law of war was not in conflict with natural law, the law of 14 15 nations, and the Gospel. However, the third chapter of this part of the Discourse also suggests that Ascham knew another of Grotius’s works, that is De Imperio. De Imperio had been intended as a theoretical and speculative work on state–church relations and church government. It affirmed the civil magistrate’s authority over church and religion independently from its governmental form, praised episcopacy, and showed its compatibility with Presbyterian Church government. Grotius started writing De Imperio in 1614, during the dispute between ‘Remonstrants’ (Arminians) and ‘Counter-Remonstrants’ (orthodox Calvinists), which culminated in the convocation of the Synod of Dordt in 1618. The first draft of that work was finished in 1617, but it was published in Middelburgh, in the Dutch Republic, in 1647.16 De Imperio had been intended to settle the political divergences between civil magistrates and clergy concerning the appointment of ministers and the convocation of synods. Both parties’ main concern was to secure social peace, and with this aim, both wanted the church to be subordinate to the state.17 Consequently, Grotius conceived De Imperio as a manifesto of a state-sponsored Erastianism.18 It advocated a relatively tolerant church under the control of the ‘higher power’ of the state, particularly over the appointment of ministers and decisions relating to forms of worship. The interest of the English audience in De Imperio, which culminated 19 in Barksdale’s translation of it in 1651, obviously grew after 1647. Selden, who was an admirer of Grotius (he owned nearly twenty of his books),20 in De Synedriis quoted De Imperio five times. He referred to him in a passage concerning the practice of excommunication and accessory punishments amongst the Jews;21 the similitude between the words ‘ecclesiasticum’ and ‘synedrium’;22 the practice of ordination through ‘cheirotonias’ (where he quoted De Imperio’s Chapter 10 on the election of pastors);23 and the sphere of influence of ‘imperium’ respectively on sacred and civil matters among the Hebrews.24 Finally, in a long passage taken from the edition of 1647 (‘Lutetiae (ut dicitur)’) Selden acknowledged Grotius’s De Imperio as a praiseworthy ‘libellum’ which had compellingly demonstrated that much of the religious sanctions in vogue among the Hebrews (such as excommunication) were not divine punishments but human laws.25 De Imperio was also quoted by Richard Watson in his Regicidium Judaicum as evidence of the fact that the 63

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Order and conflict

killing of Jesus (that he compared with the murder of King Charles), and the consequent ‘confusion and disorder’ which had afflicted Israel/England, had depended on the ‘corruption of the priests’.26 It derived the necessity to subordinate the church to the civil magistrate. Watson graduated from Cambridge, where he taught Hebrew, and was linked to ‘Arminian’ bishops such as Matthew Wren (brother of Christopher, who owned a manuscript of De Imperio). During the trial and execution of Charles I he withdrew to The Hague, from where in 1651 he intervened in the religious dispute between Episcopalians and Scottish Presbyterians with 27 a pamphlet entitled Akolouthos. Against ‘these bloody Presbyters’, Watson used an Erastian argument which he largely drew from De Imperio. Following De Imperio’s Bodinian vision of ‘summum imperium’, Watson affirmed that a prerogative of ‘soveraignité’ was the power of ‘State and Prince’ to call synods. He quoted Grotius when he denied the divine right of the clergy, and when he affirmed the prerogative of civil power ‘in spiritualibus’.28 Both in the Discourse and in The Bounds and Bonds Ascham had asserted, against Presbyterian ministers, the superiority of civil authority over ecclesiastical authority. In line with this, in the Discourse he drew on the description of the authority held by Moses over state and church provided by Grotius in De Imperio. While demonstrating, with a series of arguments, the consistency of jus belli with scripture, Ascham affirmed that ‘it cannot be shewed by any induction out of the Scripture, that the judiciall law of the Jewes Commonwealth (which contained capital punishments and warre) did actually cease till Jerusalem was destroyed’, nor that it was repealed by the Hebrews after the advent of Christendom.29 The ‘judiciall law’ of Moses, who was both ‘the high priest’ and ‘a civill judge’, continued to regulate the relations between Jewish peoples even after the destruction of Jerusalem, and neither Christ, whose ‘prophesies’ had foreseen that event, nor the Apostles ‘ever speak of the expiring such a law’. To the Objection claiming that ‘the judiciall law was abrogated by Christ, because he forbad that which before was lawfull by it’ (such as, for example, ‘in matter of divorce, in the number of wives, in revenge of tooth for tooth’), Ascham replied that ‘Grotius thinks it enough to answer here, that betwixt those precepts and the law, there is no contradiction but only a difference’, for ‘God never yet totally abolished the judiciall law’, but rather recommended ‘precepts of morall virtue’, while the magistrate had the duty to establish what was right or wrong.30 Ascham here referred to Grotius’s analysis of ‘imperium circa sacra’. Ascham’s understanding of the ‘judicial law’ as a civil law was consistent with the analysis of the supreme magistrate’s ‘imperative judgment’ on ‘sacred and profane matters’ made by Grotius in Chapter 5 of De Imperio, while the analysis of the relation between human rights and divine laws was the object of Chapter 3. Finally, the examples of Mosaic law, and the separation of ‘authority over sacred things and the sacred functions’ were directly 64

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drawn from Chapter 2, entitled ‘The authority over sacred things and the sacred function are distinct’.31 Notwithstanding his task to sponsor the governmental attempts at reconciliation with Presbyterians and royalists, Ascham displayed the Erastian and anti-clerical stances of many Independents when he traced a sharp dividing line between the prerogative of divines and civil authorities.

PEACE IN STATE AND CHURCH: OBEDIENCE AND TOLERANCE To Ascham’s mind, the meanings of Grotius’s De Jure and the arguments put forward in De Imperio dovetailed. De Imperio was mainly a political and legal work which affirmed the subordination of both church government and theology to the ‘supreme power’ of the state, developed the distinction between ‘power’ and ‘office’, and put forward a treatment of natural, divine and human law. In De Imperio a theory of natural rights had been developed alongside a theory of a (Christian) sovereign power irresistible by lower magistrates. The scattered passages of De Jure dedicated to the analysis of natural law were almost entirely taken up by De Imperio.32 Similarly, Grotius recycled in De Jure I, 4:1–7 (concerning the question of resistance to civil authority), the quotations from De Imperio against the theses of Calvinist and Catholic ‘monarchomachoi’.33 In both writings, Grotius contested the right of resistance of private persons and lower magistrates. But while in the work of 1625 he sought to ground state order also in the sociability of human nature, in De Imperio he had deployed a more traditional vision of the God-derived power of the magistrate, epitomised by his initial extended quotation from Romans 13,34 and complemented by a reference to the original power of ‘the fathers of families’ in civil and church government.35 These two visions of politics and society associated with an emphasis on state order, were pulled together by Ascham in his attempt to reconcile individual liberty (of conscience) with a durable and stable civil ‘power’. Were differences in religion reasonable grounds for killing? In Chapter 3 of the Discourse, Ascham explained that in the present condition men killed each other rather ‘for civil than for ecclesiastick causes’. ‘Every difference in religion makes not another religion’. Espousing the religious attitudes of the Independents, as the emphasis on inward faith rather than on ‘conformity to visible ceremonies’, on the limitation of human understanding of God, and therefore on the difficulty of precisely determining alleged ‘theological’ errors, Ascham concluded that ‘it is dangerous rigidly to punish (in person or estate) peaceable dissenters in religion thus differenced and understood’.36 The ‘demurrer’ Ward had objected that ‘toleration’ was ‘the next inconvenience’ to the obedience to the present government. In The Bounds and 65

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Bonds Ascham displayed again his familiarity with the religious positions of the Independents, by replying that: a) Christian religion was not tolerated but ‘enjoyn’d’; b) there was not a unique confession of faith which could be inferred ‘out of Scripture’, and therefore magistrates could ‘recommend, not force their notions and logick on the people’, while their authority ‘may be more peremptory’ in matter of ‘meum and tuum’.37 In what turns out to be an important passage of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments touching on the principles and extension of the magistrate’s rule in civil and religious affairs, Ascham explained that the present government was neither ruling according to principles of reason, nor according to the principles of natural religion (‘I know religion to be a doctrine of faith, as faith relates to a principle out of the discovery of nature’). The ‘powers which possesse us’ guaranteed political justice according to their will, while, in matter of religion ‘can only explaine and recommend, not 38 authorize what God alone was the author of’. Ascham’s natural law theory, which he drew from Grotius, Hobbes and Selden, had therefore both civil and religious implications. Ascham’s attempt to combine the idea that individuals retain some of their rights upon entering society, with an insistence upon the binomial obedience and protection was underpinned by the idea that victory entitled the Independent party to impose a constitutional and religious settlement over the country. Chapter 4 will examine Ascham’s use of Grotius’s analysis of jus belli as a basis for legitimating obedience to the Parliament (1648) and the Rump (1649).

NOTES   1 J. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 34–7; Mortimer, Reason and Religion, pp. 92–3.  2 Tuck, Natural Right Theories, p. 144.  3 Worden, Literature and Politics, pp. 239–54; F. Rosenblatt, ‘Milton, natural law, and toleration’, in S. Achinstein and E. Sauer (eds), Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), p. 132.   4 J. P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist of the Christian Religion: A Study of His Work De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1640) (Leiden and Boston, 2004), p. 64.  5 Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist of the Christian Religion, p. 52.  6 J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 247–57.   7 B. Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the beginnings of English republicanism, 1649–1656’, in D. Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994), p. 47.  8 Barducci, Grozio ed il pensiero politico e religioso inglese, pp. 45–8.  9 Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist of the Christian Religion, p. 143. 10 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 46–7. 66

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Natural law, civil power and religion 11 However, Platonism was not a distinctive feature only of Puritan or republican writing. Both Cambridge Platonists (such as Whichcote, More and Stillingfleet), and their post-Restoration ‘latitudinarian’ followers (such as Patrick, Tillotson and Fowler), shared the idea that there had been a corpus of revealed truths also called prisca theologia (ancient theology) which had been transmitted through the centuries, from Moses to the Greeks, and, later on, through Valla, Erasmus, Du Mornay and Grotius, to modern Christian exegetes, and which might have contributed in the establishment of the doctrinarian basis of a reasonable and comprehensive Anglican Church (J. M. Levine, ‘Latitudinarians, neoplatonists, and the ancient wisdom’, in R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft and P. Zagorin (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 85–8). Another issue which was dealt with by Cambridge Platonists, latitudinarians and also members of the Royal Society (cf. M. Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981)) was the relation between human reason, ‘the candle of the Lord’, and the knowledge of God, and, accordingly, between natural law and revelation. In 1662 Stillingfleet published his Origines Sacrae. Stillingfleet studied at Cambridge, where he met Henry More, Patrick and others who were to become leading latitudinarians. In the Preface he placed himself in the Platonic tradition of Christian apologetic and mentioned Mornay and Grotius as his forbears (S. Hutton, ‘Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the decline of Moses Atticus: a note on seventeenth-century Anglican apologetics’, in Kroll, Ashcraft and Zagorin (eds), Philosophy, Science, and Religion, p. 71). 12 Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 84 13 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I.2.1–3, pp. 23–7. 14 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I.2.4, p. 28. 15 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I.2.5–10, pp. 28–48. 16 Cf. H.-J. van Dam, ‘Grotius’s manuscript of De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra identified’, Grotiana, 11 (1990), pp. 34–42 ; ‘The genesis of De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra and the manuscript’, Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 81 (1995), pp. 279–317. 17 Hugo Grotius: Ordinum Hollandiæ ac Westfrisiæ Pietas (1613), ed. E. Rabbie (Leiden, 1995), pp. 11–16; H.-J. van Dam, ‘Introduction’ to H. Grotius, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra. Critical Edition with Introduction, English Translation and Commentary, 2 vols, ed. H.-J. van Dam (Leiden, 2001), pp. 10–12; A. T. van Deursen, ‘England and the Synod of Dordt’, in S. Groenveld and M. Wintle (eds), Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, 1994), XI, p. 31. 18 I use this term in a broad sense to denote the theory of the subordination of the church to the state. 19 M. Barducci, ‘The Anglo-Dutch context for the writing and reception of Hugo Grotius’s De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, 1617–1659’, Grotiana 34 (2013), pp. 156–61. 20 G. Toomer, ‘John Selden, the Levant and the Netherlands’, in A. Hamilton, M. H. van den Boogart, B. Wenterweel (eds), The Republic of Letters and the Levant (Leiden, 2005), p. 73; D. M. Barratt, ‘The library of John Selden and its later history’, Bodleian Library Record, 3 (1951), pp. 128–42, 209. 21 J. Selden, Opera Omnia tam Edita quam Inedita (1726), I, part II, p. 876n. 22 Selden, Opera Omnia, p. 927. 23 Selden, Opera Omnia, p. 1106n. 67

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Order and conflict 24 Selden, Opera Omnia, p. 1156. 25 Selden, Opera Omnia, p. 1014. 26 Richard Watson, Regicidium Judaicum (London, 1649), p. 18. 27 J. T. Peacey, ‘Watson, Richard (1611/12–1685)’, ODNB. 28 Watson, Regicidium Judaicum, pp. 35, 100. 29 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 111–12. 30 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 112–13. 31 Grotius, De Imperio, II, 5, p. 195. 32 P. Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste (Paris, 1983), pp. 510–12; Grotius, De Imperio, II, pp. 652–3. 33 Grotius, De Imperio, II, pp. 670–4. 34 Grotius, De Imperio, I.3.10–11, p. 158. 35 Grotius, De Imperio I.2.19–20, pp. 188–9. 36 Ascham, Discourse, p. 137. 37 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 16. 38 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 152.

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Chapter 4

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. Jus belli, possession and usurpation

W

hile the negotiations between Charles I and Parliament around the points of the Heads of the Proposals were under way, as already discussed in Chapter 2, Ascham wrote in the Discourse that since the condition of England was one in which people’s lives were constantly threatened by the Civil War, it was possible to set aside disputes over the lawfulness of current parliamentary policy towards Charles I, which drew on arguments from the juridical and institutional tradition of the kingdom, and to submit to the government in return of self-protection. In the Discourses’s Chapter 5 Ascham linked the obedience to a party (were it ‘lawful’ or ‘unlawful’) ‘which by the variety of successe in civill warre command us and our subsistence and reduce us to these extreme necessities’, to the opportunity to question if ‘those parties have a justifiable cause of warre, or right to command us’. Those who wanted to ground their allegiance to the civil authority on the ‘right’, that is on the legitimacy of ruling titles, had to demonstrate that they held a ‘limpidum titulum’, or even a title ‘as good or a little better’ than that claimed by the opposite party. However, the individual’s conscience was puzzled by the contradictoriness of the evidence provided by the parties at war by drawing on constitutional history and common law, and a whole kingdom ‘may be laid waste’ before these disputes were settled.1 Ascham therefore passed on to deal with the ‘point of fact on which wee would ground matter of right, or a justifiable cause’. Instead of disputing whether the war was ‘for dominion’ or ‘for possession’, in order ‘to a lawful obedience’ in the context of ‘a warre already form’d’, people need just to know ‘Whether the invading party [in this case the Parliament] have us and the meanes of our subsistence’.2 This argument constitutes the core of what scholars, from Skinner onwards, have called ‘de facto theory’. It asserted the necessity to obey any government, independently from its constitutional form, on the condition that it actually held power, and exercised it for the accomplishment of its fundamental ends (i.e., protection). The de facto theory was as much pragmatic as theoretically 69

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original, insofar as it reversed the traditional search for a ‘good’ form of government, and underscored the analysis of the ‘ends’ of civil power. Ascham articulated further his argument by focusing on the capacity of the ‘invading party (just or unjust)’ to supply ‘the means of our subsistence’. With this purpose, he pointed to the example of Henry IV’s acknowledgement of the United Provinces’ sovereignty after their independency from Spain. The King of France’s decision to receive the ambassadors of the Provinces, despite the authority held by Spain over those dominions and their aversion to Catholic religion, relied on the fact that ‘they have possession of the force and power of those places’.3 The ‘fact’ of possession entailed a ‘point of right’. By quoting ‘Grotius in his Treatise de legatis’ Ascham asserted that Where, after he hath shewne how they who are partly subjects and partly not, have a right of Embassy for that part by which they are not subjects, he descends to those places which are divided by civil warre; in which as it is naturall for each party to preserve itselfe by all meanes it can, so usually correspondence abroad by embassie is one means which is not omitted : and the rule which states have for this case is that in regno diviso, gens una pro tempore quasi duae gentes habentur.4

This Latin quotation drawn from Grotius (that would be quoted by republican authors to justify the resistance to Charles’s usurpation), meant that in consequence of a civil war, a people or country could be temporarily divided into two distinct ‘gentes’ or peoples. Therefore, being in a state of war, the relations between these two peoples (that is the parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’, and the royalist ‘Cavaliers’) fell in the casuistry of jus belli.

VICTORY, POSSESSION AND PROTECTION After having explained in the first part of the Discourse that, according to jus belli, ‘possession’ was the prerequisite for rightful obedience, in the second part Ascham went further to speak ‘to subjects obeying an usurper power, after an obligation of Allegiance to another Power’. As Condren has pointed out, well before the idea of an Engagement to be taken by state employees was submitted to the Parliament, Ascham sought to convince those who doubted whether to obey and abide by the Parliament’s decisions because of their previous commitment to the Covenant and the Oath of Allegiance. The Discourse approached this issue from a casuistical perspective, apparently detached from current historical circumstances. In fact, Ascham had clearly in mind the moderate Presbyterians, with whom the Independent MPs sought to reach an agreement until before Pride’s Purge. The first knotty problem to be solved was that touching the duty to pay taxes to ‘an usurping or unjust party’ for warfare funding. By addressing those in the country who opposed the Parliament’s abuse of power, Ascham reminded that when ‘a man is fully possest by an unjust invading power’, and those to whom (viz the Royalist party) ‘we acknowledge our lawfull governours … 70

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declare to us that they will not permit us to pay anything to their enemies’, our active obedience to the government de facto ‘cannot make our acts sinnes’. In fact, the ‘transcendent right which we naturally have in the preservation of ourselves, as also on the right privilege of extreme necessity’, induces us to ‘obey that power which against our wills … hath divested them of the power of their rights, and deprived us of the comfort of their Governments’.5 In cases of extreme necessity, the God-given natural law of self-preservation led men to political obedience despite opposite arguments grounded on juridical legitimacy or precedents, and ‘Princes cannot by their commands change the nature of human condition … obliging us to morall impossibilities’. Such an argument was particularly fitting to those who debated about whether there was a duty or not to hold any office at the service of the ‘invading party’. Ascham explained that two were the cases in which ‘we may lawfully serve an unjust party in our persons’. The first, ‘when it is in order to a just and necessary action which concernes … our owne necessary preservation’. Secondly, when we arm ourselves ‘not in any regard of the cause of warre, but of its effects, which are destruction of life or of livelyhood’.6 It followed that if it was lawful to pay tributes and taxes, and to serve an ‘invading party’ which was in full possession of our bodies and goods, then it was lawful to take new oaths and covenants imposed by the ‘usurper’ with the purpose of securing itself ‘both at home and abroad’. In responding to what was in fact the central issue of the Discourse, Ascham reconnected to the preceding line of reasoning. The Civil War was already concluded with the success of the ‘victorious party’ (the Parliament), and those who once were enemies were now subject to the same authority. Being the principal end of government peace and order, people have to obey the ‘governing powers which are’. Ascham quoted several passages from scripture, from Daniel to the Psalms and St Paul, to affirm that supreme magistrates received their power from God, just as it was God who decided the duration of governments. To not obey ‘the invading or succeeding Governours be like Jehu or Nebuchadnezzar’ was ‘a sin or a treason against God’.7 However, disputes arose when it had to be established whether the invading party was ‘in a full possession of his conquest’. Ascham recurred again to the Grotian analysis of jus belli to illustrate to an hesitant audience the cases in which a victorious party had full possession, and therefore the right to rule them: when there were no other powers in the country which could replace it; when the party alleged to be ‘lawful’ was not in the factual condition to restore his power; finally, when the vanquished openly submitted to the victor. Through this combination of casuistry and providentialism, Ascham showed that Charles I (whom Ascham did not quote, rather preferring to give the example of ‘Ferdinand King of Naples’ drawn from ‘Guicciardin’) not being in a condition to rule the country, as he was in exile under the custody of Parliament and the army, had to agree to an accommodation and yield some of his prerogatives. Furthermore, in order not to give ground to the argument 71

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of ‘Norman conquest’, which had been a war horse of the opposition to monarchy, Ascham also remarked that Parliament was not a ‘conqueror’ but a ‘victor’. This did not mean that Parliament had a lawful title to rule (Ascham repeatedly stressed that the attempts to demonstrate the validity of titles spiralled down into endless discussions), rather that obeying its commands was not sinful according with the universal ‘law of nations’ which regulated war. Since this recognised the sovereign rights of the victorious party independently of the material causes of war, and these rights enabled it to ensure protection, subjects ought to choose to follow the dictate of right reason and obey. In early 1649, Rous made a similar association between ‘victory’, ‘possession’, and the lawfulness of present authority. According to Rous, the dispute involving ‘divines and casuists’ over the relation between scruple of conscience, obedience to authority, and modes of accession to and exercise of power would have been meaningless if we only put aside questions relating both to the lawfulness of titles and to the way of ruling, and we simply obeyed those who hold power in consequence of a victorious war. When we have to decide whether to obey or not the superior magistrate, we ought not to ask ourselves ‘by what right or wrong he hath invaded the power, or in what manner he doth dispence it, but onely if he has power’.8 A major difference between Rous and Ascham was that the former did not use the language of natural law, which infused the political discourse of both moderate and radical Independents, and which could be used to justify resistance to usurpation. In A Religious Demurrer, Ward confessed to be keen to obey an authority ‘of whose legality we are not sufficiently informed’, but he expected Rous first to make clear whether the present authority was ‘lawfull and authentik’ according to God’s will, or to the necessity ‘of the State of England’. Secondly, whether the ‘godly men’ had in conscience to obey even though they regarded the present government as unlawful.9 Similar critiques to Rous and Ascham were put forward by the Presbyterian Gee. In A Second Part of the Religious Demurrer Gee dealt with the question ‘Whether those whose title is held unlawfully, yet being possess’d of authority may lawfully be obeyed’. Ascham and Rous had agreed upon the necessity to obey an usurping government, but they disagreed over the limits of such obedience. To Ascham, an usurping government ought to be obeyed only insofar as it commanded ‘lawfull things’, while for Rous a usurping government ought to be obeyed even if it ruled unfairly. Consitent with such categorical distinction between two versions of the ‘de facto theory’, was Gee’s purpose to know ‘how far we ourselves may submit unto them, without sin’.10 In Gee’s opinion, Rous was a supporter of the unconditional obedience to tyrants both ‘by usurpation’ and ‘by oppression’. He thus distinguished between a ‘passive’ obedience, due to the kind of tyrannical government supported by Rous, and an ‘active’ obedience, due to the kind of government supported by Ascham.11 Gee’s distinction meant that if the (usurping) republican government was respectful towards his 72

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Presbyterian subjects (especially in matter of religion), they would fulfil their duties as subjects (‘active’ obedience). Indeed, if the usurping government ruled only for the advantage of a part, the Presbyterians would not openly resist, but they would at least sabotate the administration of the state, and support every attempt at restoring the lawful successor to the throne (‘passive’ obedience). Gee’s most acute and effective criticism of Ascham and Rous was that their arguments achieved exactly the opposing result to their original aim, as their theory potentially jeopardised any kind of political settlement. The arguments put forward by Ascham and Rous actually opened up the way ‘to insurrection and sediction’. If, in fact, a lawful authority was entrusted to those who seized power through force insofar as their rule was permitted by God, it followed that anyone was encouraged to ‘suppresse the legal authority’, and violate previous compacts between subjects and sovereign.12 Ascham was not keen to advocate the exercise of an usurped authority, and therefore he sought to correct Rous’s ambiguous statement about the absolute necessity to also obey an oppressive de facto authority. Ascham explained that in submitting to the powers ‘which are’, Rous did not intend to equate lawful and unlawful power, neither he ‘speakes against obeying a tyrant that wants right, but of a tyrant that does wrong’. This was a core argument of the Discourse which recurred also in Ascham’s reply to the ‘demurrers’: the order of the state, being the supreme end of magistracy, justified the obedience to an usurping power on the condition that this commanded things necessary for the preservation of the community. In The Bounds and Bonds Ascham replied to the Presbyterian opponents of the republican government saying that ‘things are considerable only so far as they may reach the ends for which they are’. Since ‘the end of very Magistrate is to see justice executed’, and being justice ‘a measure of equity, that is equality’, subjects must obey those who were in ‘full possession of a present power’, and which fulfilled these duties. The right of war (jus belli), which was based on international law, assigned a sovereign authority to the conquering party, and it mattered not if the present Parliament, after having expelled the Presbyterians, was composed only of a faction. Lawfulness was consistent with the ends of government, rather than with its composition.13 Ward had contested ‘necessity’ as a legitimisation of recent changes of government and as a ground for submitting to the Rump. Ascham drew on Grotius’s De Jure to respond that ‘If a king have but a part of supream power … and a people or senate have the other, the king may be forcibly opposed if he invade that part which is not his’. In the case of a civil war, more than ‘conquest’, the right of war established that ‘victory’ allowed a party to dispose of ‘jurisdiction and country, and of the same common law’.14 ‘When war shall happen … (as Grotius, De Jure, p. 7 states it) … betwixt such fundamentall and supreme parties, the king may loose all his share by the right of war’. The right of war (which ‘begins where Law ends’), provided for the subject 73

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to rescind previous oaths and compacts sworn to the defeated authority, and ‘necessity’ drove people to choose what they ‘should be bound to do at the end of a war’. Addressing directly the Presbyterians of England and Scotland, Ascham exhorted them to definitively renounce the Covenant, which bound them to a sovereign held guilty of having shed ‘the blood of three Kingdoms’, and who continued, in the person of his heir, to foster a useless war.15 Ward’s ‘reply to a late book called Bounds & Bonds’ was published in 1650 with the title of Discollimium. Ward explicitly took position against Ascham’s use of Grotius’s De Jure, and specifically against the thesis for which ‘where there is in a state a partnership in power, if one party abuses it or invades the other, the other may resist, and if it overcomes, may seize it as a forfeiture’. He also complained about Ascham’s making of Grotius ‘the Dictator of the whole world’, insofar as it would have taken just a bit of ‘Christian patience’ for reaching an agreement between ‘coparteners, joyn-tenants, or tenants in commons’. Furthermore, the application of this principle drawn from De Jure to the struggle between Parliament and the king was wrong, since ‘it was not the Parliament that judged that forfeiture, but rather the souldiers, who had no manner of right to do it, nor any partnership in Supreme power’.16 The problem of the lack of titularity of the republican government was tackled by Ascham in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, Chapter 18, ‘Of the time for legitimating new obedience after confusions’, in which he drew a twofold distinction between ‘the over-running and the conquering of a country’, and ‘betwixt conquest and victory’.17 The first, ‘as Grotius and Mr. Hobbes say’, was when a conqueror ‘can no longer be resisted’, and new magistrates and courts of justice were created by it ‘for the meum and tuum of the whole land and permit publique meeting for the worship of God’. The difference between ‘conquest’ and ‘victory’ was that the former ‘is an effect of warre undertaken both for the dominion and for the possession of the whole’, as it were the case of William the Conqueror, while the latter ‘was an effect of war undertaken only for dominion, and the possession of the former power, as it resided in the person or party governing’.

ASCHAM’S USE OF GROTIUS’S JUS BELLI Both Anglican and Presbyterian ‘dissenters’ remarked that although obedience to superior magistrates was commanded by God, obedience either to an ‘usurper’ or to an ‘unlawful authority’ was held to be sinful. Ascham’s response drew mainly on Grotius’s De Jure, and expressly on his treatment of the sovereign rights deriving from victorious war grounded in the law of nations. During the Civil Wars, Grotius’s idea that war was directed ‘at those who cannot be held in check by judicial processes’, was deployed by radical and republican writers in support of armed self-defence against monarchical 74

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tyranny.18 Another argument drawn from Grotius’s De Jure deployed by both parties in the conflict, concerned the rightfulness of de facto government after the Civil War was over. In the early stages of the Civil War, the defenders of Charles I, from Edward Bowles to Thomas Morton, replied to those who accused the king of tyranny because of his descent from Norman conquerors, by stating that his sovereign title was lawfully inherited from his predecessors as a consequence of a just war. After the victory of the New Model Army at Naseby in 1645, which marked a turning point for the parliamentary cause, writers such as William Bridge realised that the conquest argument would be used against the king.19 Ascham, in listing the circumstances in which former oaths and covenants might lose their validity, adduced the case in which ‘if the prince have a part of the supreme right & the people the other part, notwithstanding an oath of allegiance to him, he may be opposed if he invade the other part of supreme right’.20 However, in his treatise on jus belli Grotius did not legitimise rebellion, and neither did Ascham, who was interested in convincing his readers to give up resistance to the victorious party. Grotius had in fact distinguished three kinds of war: ‘private’, ‘public’ and ‘mixed’.21 His analysis of ‘mixed’ war concerned the conflict between private individuals and the sovereign magistrate, and thus included civil war and the right of resistance. Grotius plainly affirmed the unlawfulness of resistance, and regarded as just only the war fought by magistrates against their subjects.22 Such an argument might be prejudicial to the parliamentary cause, for the reason pointed out by Ward and Gee: if rebellion was unlawful, how to justify Parliament’s resistance to monarchy? This explains why Ascham dealt with the struggle between king and Parliament in terms of Grotius’s ‘just’ and ‘public war’. According to Grotius, a war was ‘public’ when it involved two sovereign authorities, and it was ‘just’ when it conformed to normative criteria, such as the solemn declaration of war, and the sovereign nature of the enemies. Grotius’s definition of ‘solemn’ and ‘public’ war of 1625 included all the types of armed conflicts independently of the quality of the opponents, or from the justness or unjustness of their conduct.23 This normative definition had minor ideological implications for the parliamentarian cause: if the Civil War between king and Parliament ought to be considered as a public war, it followed that either the debate on the prerogative of sovereign power (drawing on ancient constitutionalism and based on the distinction between ‘gubernaculum’ and ‘jurisdictio’), or the dispute about the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the usurper party, were no longer relevant in the context of a war ‘already formed’. Consistent with De Jure’s dealing with the effects of the solemn war, the victor gained some rights over the vanquished, among which the ‘effectus dominii’, that is the sovereign power over it.24 Grotius’s aversion to mixed government also fitted with Ascham’s defence of Parliament’s authority. The doctrine of the ‘cooperation’ or ‘collaboration’ between the three ‘Estates’, that characterised the English constitutional 75

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debate of the 1640s,25 was bypassed by Ascham in adherence to Grotius’s conception of the relationship between war and the indivisibility of sovereign power traced in De Jure. Besides, from De Jure’s Chapters 11–15 of Book II on ‘Oaths, promises, and contracts’, Ascham drew the thesis by which English citizens, being actually in ‘full possession of the conqueror party’, were released from previous oaths of obligation so that they might take the Engagement.

WAR, POLITICAL CHANGE AND SETTLEMENT: ASCHAM’S USE OF MACHIAVELLI When he was in his early thirties, at the beginning of a would-be promising political career, Ascham engaged himself to cope with the intellectual task of achieving broad coalition around a constitutional (1648), and de facto military settlement (1649) in the aftermath of recent ‘confusions and revolutions of governments’. The issue at stake in his works, rather than the legitimisation of political change, was to ground the restoration of peace in the relation between obedience and protection. Whatever the justifications of conflict at the beginning of the Civil War had been, by now that conflict had come to an end and civil order had to be restored on solid bases. Ascham had never been particularly enthusiastic for the rationale that had led Parliament to declare war on the king. His tone in that respect was always justificatory though never fully repentant: ‘It is a knowne case, that if a man unjustly assault another, and be slaine in the act by the other, this other shall not suffer for it. But in this case we must be certain of two things: First, that we have tried all other meanes of saving ourselves and our livelihood: Secondly, that we enter not the Army with an offensive minde, but cum moderamin. inculpate tutela’.26 Ascham’s awareness of the hard undertaking he had embarked on in the context of the unrelenting changes occurring in those years, also surfaced from the emphasis he gave to the words ‘confu-sions’ and ‘revolutions’ in 1649.27 Ascham’s political argument in support of the politics implemented by his patrons in the Parliament, and, after Pride’s Purge, in the Rump, was mainly drawn from Grotius. However, Ascham concomitantly drew other authors, like Machiavelli, Selden, Hobbes and Filmer, in order to underscore particular aspects of his thought, also depending on the circumstances he and his protectors had to manage in the meantime. The Discourse actually started with the Machiavellian statement that changes in government historically occurred in connection with war, and that any regime, once established by force, demanded equal obedience from its subjects.28 In the midst of Civil War, Presbyterians and Independents found themselves sharing the idea that obedience towards an authority ruling with a rational criterion, identifiable with the principle of ‘equity’, was legitimate independently from its origins.29 76

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The Machiavelli on which Ascham drew (though, as he did with most of his sources, quoting him just one time en passant),30 was arguably that of The Prince. From this work he drew a parallel between the claims of the Rump Parliament to power following a victorious war, and the consideration of the ‘new prince’, and the justification of the absolute obedience of subjects in the name of the order and endurance of the state. Nevertheless, the theme of the conservation of the state was also central to Book I of the Discourses, where Machiavelli had strongly emphasised the roles of laws, orders, education, distribution of wealth, and of the mixed constitution in contrast with the decadence of the republic. In Ascham’s Discourse, the reference to the Grotian concepts of jus belli and jus pacis not only offered a rational and legal foundation for a Machiavellian conquest theory, but most of all supplied the intellectual basis for the restoration of the peace of the Commonwealth. In 1625, facing the cruelties of the Thirty Years War (of which England’s Civil Wars were partly an outcome), Grotius had sought to pursue his Erasmian irenic plan by inferring from the law of nations those universal principles that, in absence of a judiciary resolution, would regulate what he regarded as a ‘condition’ of war and restore peace. Similarly, during the ‘Dutch period’ Grotius had sought to intervene in religious and ecclesiological disputes which afflicted his young Protestant republic with the purpose of laying down the bases for a broader agreement around a few doctrinarian fundamentals (De Veritate), overseen by a strong civil power and administered by a hierarchical clergy under its control (De Imperio). Grotius was acknowledged by his English admirers to be a peacemaker, and thus one who dissatisfied both friends and foes. His English translator and biographer Barksdale depicted him as an heir to Erasmus.31 In ‘A digression concerning some jealousies spread of Hugo Grotius’ the Anglican theologian Henry Hammond reminded his readers that ‘This very pious, learned, judicious man … had learnt to reconcile contradictories, or the most distant extreames’, thus being accused of being concomitantly a Socinian and a Papist.32 Finally, Richard Baxter, though unsympathetic to his reformation proposals, regarded Grotius as a conciliator.33 In advocating the policy of national reconciliation implemented by his patrons, Ascham resorted to the works of one who was broadly acknowledged to be one of the most learned and thoughtful personalities of the century, the ‘peacemaker’ Grotius. In line with this purpose, he regarded Machiavelli as an author who confronted the themes of conservation, state decadence, liberty and war in a complementary manner. Behind English ‘Machiavellianism’ as a vehicle of the classical republican tradition, after 1649 there existed a multitude of uses of Machiavelli’s works that have many aspects in common but which, even in the light of doctrines drawn from other authors, presented undertones of differing significance.34 Between 1648 and 1650, in order to establish the Commonwealth and the 77

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obedience of ‘subjects’, Ascham proposed a synthesis between Grotius and Machiavelli, underlining the priority of state order over political participation, and justifying war as a means of accessing power only to confirm the necessity of re-establishing order. In order to tailor this argument to the religious and political culture of his Presbyterian target, Ascham brought together a theory of civil ‘power’ drawn from jus belli, Romans 13, and the language of patriarchalism. Chapter 5 will provide a detailed analysis of Ascham’s use of Romans 13 and Filmer’s political patriarchalism.

NOTES  1 Ascham, Discourse, p. 23.  2 Ascham, Discourse, p. 25 (original emphasis).  3 Ascham, Discourse, p. 28.  4 Ascham, Discourse, p. 29.  5 Ascham, Discourse, p. 38.  6 Ascham, Discourse, p. 41.  7 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 86–7.  8 Rous, The Lawfulnes, p. 7.  9 Ward, A Religious Demurrer, p. 2. 10 Edward Gee, A Second Part of the Religious Demurrer (1649), p. 2. 11 Gee, A Second Part of the Religious Demurrer, p. 3. 12 Gee, A Second Part of the Religious Demurrer, p. 6. Gee reiterated this argument in the following writings. In An Exercitation Concerning Usurped Powers, he affirmed that: ‘If violent occupation made a right; then it were lawfull for any, that could make a sufficient strenght for it, to rise up in Arms, invade or seize on any Kingdome or Territory, he can prevail over; yea to kill and destroy men and Countreys for Empire and Dominion’ (Gee, An Exercitation Concerning Usurped Powers (London, 1649), pp. 12–13). Again, in A Plea for Non-Subscribers he said that the de facto theory ‘Makes every man a Magistrate that will and every Magistrate a Tyrant to the height of misrule, if hee list, and have force so to make himselfe, and it unmakes every lawfull Magistrate, when any other man please’ (Gee, A Plea for Non-Subscribers (London, 1650), p. 28). 13 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 4. 14 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 6. 15 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 8. 16 Ward, Discollimium, p. 23. 17 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 119. 18 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 112–13. 19 Wallace, Destiny His Choice, p. 27. 20 Ascham, Discourse, p. 78. 21 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 3:1, p. 53. 22 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 4:2, pp. 102–3. 23 Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, pp. 457–8. 24 Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. 3.4–8, pp. 57–71; cf. also Haggenmacher, Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, pp. 571–5. 78

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Jus belli, possession and usurpation 25 Cf. C. C. Weston and J. R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge, 1981). 26 Ascham, Discourse, p. 42. 27 I. Rachum, ‘The meaning of “Revolution” in the English Revolution (1648–1660)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2:56 (1995), p. 199. 28 Ascham, Discourse, p. 6. 29 R. Tuck, ‘Power and authority in seventeenth-century England’, The Historical Journal, 17 (1974), p. 55. 30 Ascham, Discourse, p. 71. 31 Barducci, Grozio ed il pensiero politico e religioso inglese, p. 28. 32 H. Hammond, An Answer to the Animadversions on the Dissertations Touching Ignatian Epistles and the Episcopacy Asserted (1654), in The Works of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond (1684), II, sect. 2, p. 130. 33 R. Baxter, Christian Concord (London, 1653), p. 45. 34 See M. Barducci, ‘Order, conflict, and liberty: Machiavellianism in English political thought, 1649–1660’, in A. Arienzo and A. Petrina (eds), Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England: Literary and Political Influences from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Farnham, 2013), pp. 145–60; M. Barducci, ‘Machiavelli nella cultura politica inglese, 1649–1652: Anthony Ascham e Marchamont Nedham’, in A. Arienzo and G. Borrelli (eds), Anglo-American Faces of Machiavelli: Machiavelli e machiavellismi nella cultura anglo-americana (XVI–XIX) (Monza, 2009), pp. 187–207.

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Chapter 5

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. Romans 13 and patriarchalism

I

n the preceding chapters we have examined the arguments and languages deployed by Ascham to sponsor the policy of coalition-building implemented by moderate groupings in Parliament to put an end to the Civil Wars. From 1648 to 1650 Ascham had insisted upon the necessity to obey the present government in order to avoid the risk of ‘confusion’. With this aim he had pointed to the relation between obedience and protection by combining arguments drawn from Grotius’s jus belli and natural law theory (that appealed to the Independents), with a vision of God-derived and fatherly authority drawn from Romans 13 and Filmer’s political patriarchalism (that appealed to the Presbyterians). This chapter will focus on the latter two issues separately.

ROMANS 13 Ascham had affirmed in the Discourse that the oaths between princes and subjects were acknowledged to be grounded on ‘supreme rights’. Yet problems arose when it had to be established what was the exact meaning and role of these rights within the relations of obedience to governors. In dealing with this crucial issue, Ascham cautiously said that ‘before an intire resignation’ of individual liberty, it would be sensible ‘to make use of private reasons, to see whether there cannot be a distinction betwixt the power of dominion and the 1 right of exercising it specifically by this or those hands’. Ascham took as a starting point of his explanation the interpretation of Romans 13:1–7, which would have been lately taken up by Rous. ‘The powers which are, derive solely from God, by whom all things live, move and have their being’. Romans 13 was a key text of Calvinist political theory. It underpinned a providentialist vision of God-derived sovereign power that was compatible with the political language of Presbyterians. Ascham’s use of Romans 13 was intended both to convince Presbyterians about the need to settle the country (by agreeing to the Independents’ proposal), and to counterbalance 80

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the potentially disruptive implications of the radical Independents’ use of natural law theory. During the Civil War, parliamentary opposition to Charles I was grounded in what Weston and Greenberg had broadly regarded as a Calvinist ‘community-centered view of government’, within which we may for ease distinguish between a Presbyterian and an Independent version both of parliamentary resistance theory and popular consent theory. Between 1642 and 1644, some Presbyterian writers dwelt upon the ‘coordination principle’ within the constitutional framework of the ‘King-in-Parliament’, to assert the supremacy of the two Houses over the Crown. In 1643 Charles Herle, probably the most influential of these Presbyterian supporters of Parliament, in his Fuller Answer to a Treatise Written by Doctor Ferne remarked that while the power of dominion derived directly from God, the forms of government derived ‘mediately’ from the people. The people’s mediation consisted mainly of the adhesion to customary practice and constitutional tradition. Mixed government was the best form of government as it balanced the interests of 2 the three estates, and better secured the ‘Reason or wisdome of State’. The combination of Calvinist constitutionalism, drawn from the works of Beza, Hotman, Buchanan, Calvin, and Grotius, with the theory of collective interest (the ‘iron law’ of salus populi), was a common denominator of the Presbyterian version of parliamentary sovereignty put forward also by Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644), and Nathaniel Fiennes’s Vindiciæ Veritatis (1648, published in 1654).3 The Calvinist theory of God-given power of dominion mediated by popular consent required obedience to the magistrate’s authority except in cases of despotic rule. Presbyterian parliamentarian writers justified resistance to Charles I by referring to the right of resistance of the ‘lower magistrates’ theorised by Languet’s Vindiciæ Contra Tyrannos and Calvin.4 Rous’s interpretation of the famous passage from the Apostle drew on Ascham’s own translation of 1648, and it replicated Charles Herle’s own translation: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers for there is no power but of God, the powers that be, are ordained by God’ (which he had referred to along with a quotation from I, Peter 2:13: ‘submit yourselves 5 unto every ordinance of men for the Lord’s sake’). The English translations of the Latin original version of Romans 13, and in particular of the passage ‘Non est enim potestas nisi a Deo’, disagreed about the meaning of the word ‘potestas’, which was rendered with ‘authority’ or ‘power’. The distinction between ‘authority’ and ‘power’ overlapped with another distinction which was crucial in political debates of the revolution, that is, that between ‘office’ and ‘office-holder’. Much of the pre-1649 political debate was about Charles I’s personal rule, and both the Levellers and the tiny minority of ‘commonwealthsmen’ in Parliament, before expanding their criticism to monarchical government as a whole, emphasised Charles I’s personal unfitness to rule his kingdom. According to Calvinist political theory, the people had to submit to 81

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the exercise of ‘potestas’ insofar as it incorporated the distinctive features of ‘auctoritas’. During the 1620s, the interpretation of Romans 13 had been made even more complicated by new philological analyses of the Greek version of the New Testament made by Calvinist scholars like Thomas Gataker. According to Gataker, the Greek word ‘έξουσία’, which stood for the Latin ‘potestas’, ought be translated into English as ‘authority’, while the word ‘power’ intended as synonym of ‘might’, corresponded to the Greek ‘δύναμίς’.6 Within the political debate of the 1640s, such a philological distinction assumed an important political meaning, as it consented parliamentary writers to contest the obedience to Charles I’s ‘power’ (the ‘office-holder’), without rejecting the loyalty to the ‘authority’ of monarchical government (the ‘office’).7 Between 1642 and 1643, Parker claimed the right of Parliament to resist the king’s authority and to take over the power (‘δύναμίς’) for ‘salus populi’. On the royalist side, John Maxwell and Thomas Swadling distinguished between the authority conjointly held by the king and Parliament, and the power which was a prerogative of the former, in order to legitimise Charles’s right of veto as it derived ‘immediately from God’.8 The ambiguity of such a distinction drawn from Romans 13 was already noted in 1643 by Edward Symmons, a clergyman from Essex, who wondered if with ‘higher power’ it was to be intended ‘onely naked authority … without any relation to the man on whom put’. Should the people obey those magistrates who held ‘power in the abstract’ or those who actually (de facto) held it?9 The Apostle did not talk of ‘power or authority’ separately from the persons holding a magistracy, rather of coincidence between the two terms. He/she or those who de facto held power also possessed the authority to rule.10 In 1649, Rous developed an argument intended to appeal to those Presbyterians whose troubles of conscience prevented them from adhering to the present government. Like Ascham’s Discourse, Rous’s pamphlet did not support a specific kind of governmental form, but it insisted on the necessity to obey those who actually held power. If, as St Paul put it in Romans 13, the power was ‘ordained’ by God to a given person or group of persons, the question concerning how they took possession of that same power/authority was secondary. The drafting of Romans 13 dated back to the time of the Emperor Claudius and his son Nero. Claudius became ‘imperator’ of Rome exclusively with the support of the army against the Consuls’ and against the Senate’s attempt at restoring the republic. The same occurred to his son, ‘so that the souldiery was also the foundation of Neroes Empire’.11 Thus, even though the Roman Emperors took power through armed force, the people submitted to them. Similarly, continued Rous by referring to the case of Henry VII, English history showed that ‘many persons have been settled in supreame power and authority by meere force without title of inheritance, or 82

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just conquest’. It followed ‘that those whose title is held unlawfull, yet being possest of authority may lawfully be obeyed’.12 Both the Second Demurrer and the author of the Grand Case of Conscience had pointed to the contradiction deriving from Ascham’s and Rous’s interpretation of Romans 13. By paraphrasing the controversial passage of St Paul, the two Presbyterian authors made it clear that ‘we must submit to higher powers, not that we may lawfully submit’. Submission was required ‘not for wrath only … but for conscience sake’, wherefore ‘it is ill said that we may lawfully submit in lawfull things, obedience as a matter of conscience being a thing necessary’. Ascham repeated his opinion that in the case in which a lawful magistrate and a tyrant ‘by usurpation’ ‘agree equally in their supremacy and absolutenesse’, the ‘difference of our obedience … is onely in the difference of things commanded’. Unlike the earlier version of this argument, in The Bounds and Bonds Ascham added that when the two adversary polemists affirmed that obedience to a lawful authority was a moral duty even when this ruled immorally, they in fact but legitimised the conduct of Charles I, against whom they had struggled during the revolution. If submission to an authority was conditional on the utility and righteousness of its commands, it also followed that it was necessary to swear loyalty to the Commonwealth.13 Yet, as Gee had already remarked, Ascham’s arguments brought about a severe risk for the survival of the state. To entrust an usurping power with a lawful title could encourage any ambitious man lacking of ‘christian fortitude’ to take over the power through force, pretending moreover the citizens ‘ought to bee submitted unto’.14 Ascham’s and Rous’s advocacy of a power established by usurpation, argued Gee, prevented those unjustly deprived of the title from claiming their lost rights. In An Exercitation Gee restated his opinion that the equation of power and authority derived from St Paul’s statement ‘All power is of God’, had as its outcome the legitimisation of an armed people which rebelled against the government and took over the power. He also added that unlike the past usurpers Nero and Henry VII, who had ruled with the immediate or successive consent of the people, the Commonwealth had over15 thrown Charles I without the people’s approval. Ascham opened his Reply with the following statement: By civill government our Author [i.e. Ascham] means a publique and ministeriall power, ordained sometimes and in some place extraordinarily by God, but ordinarily now by man in his publique necessities, to the end that nations may be conserved from confusions and private injuries, in meo & tuo, and that they may in all formes act securely according to their natures, religion, and necessities.16

According to Gee, every government ‘must be delivered by custome and law’, and this required it to trace its origins back to the founder of the kingdom, and to his line of succession over the centuries. Yet, as Rous had demonstrated, to legitimise a government on the grounds of its lawful succession ‘is of no security to present princes and governours’, because such a tenet was 83

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unreliable.17 The second objection made by Gee at page 2 of the Exercitation, drew on the Presbyterian vision of the king’s accession, according to which the allocation of sovereignty derived ‘1. Immediately by God. 2. Mediately by his committing it to the people to elect. 3. When God by a reservation of his power still interposeth to designe the person’. Gee intended the people’s ‘mediation’ not as a right of election, but as a tacit conformity to the laws and customs regulating the king’s accession to the throne. From his part, Ascham observed that his opponent had not read attentively what he wrote in ‘Chap. 11. parte 2’ of his book, in which he had dealt with the patriarchal origins of the magistracy. The original ‘gerarchaship’, intended as the natural form of dominion of the father over his children, and of the head over his tribe, derived directly from God, without being sanctioned by ‘a free choice of the people’. Therefore, the principle that ‘we obey those who plenarily possesse us, and force us not to the practice of things in themselves impious’ was the only one which guaranteed the security of the individual’s life and the survival of the state, and which prevented all those radicals who were ‘in virtue of private spirit and revelation’ from taking the arms and continuing the war. At this point, the Reply once again dwelt on the controversial interpretation of Romans 13, touching on the distinction between ‘δύναμις’ and ‘έξυσία’. The theory of ‘passive obedience’, invoked by both Presbyterians and Anglicans, claimed for obedience to the present government without entrusting it with a lawful authority. This theory, however, aroused perplexities, while if we concede that ‘potency [is] the originall ground of ruling’, it was possible to agree with what ‘Master Hobbes’ said about the incompatibility of two powers struggling for sovereignty, such as were the Rump and Charles II. Since the power is one and indivisible, and since ‘every country hath not a prophet to give assurance of God’s extraordinary reveal’d will’, it remained but to obey those who de facto held the power.18 Nonetheless, Ascham’s attempt to link the equation between ‘power’ and ‘authority’ to the legitimacy of a total submission to the present government fell short. In replying to the objection that ‘mere violent extrusion takes away a Soveraigns right’, Ascham did not find any better answer than that ‘we are bound to own princes so long as it pleases God to give them the power to command us’. In the face of recent changes of government we shall conclude 19 ‘that the King of the Kings hath changed our Vice-Roy’.

PATRIARCHALISM The execution of Charles I had been regarded by many as a ‘parricide’. Ward himself had accused the Parliament of having violated tradition and God’s will, since both the fatherly authority over the families and the authority of sovereigns over their subjects were grounded in nature. Ascham countered 84

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the patriarchal argument of Ward by drawing both on his ideas on matrimony and divorce, previously drafted in Of Marriage, and on the critique to the arguments concerning the origins of lawful titles, that he had already deployed in the Discourse, and that had been lately taken up by Rous. Patriarchalism was ‘an important sub-language closely attached to order theory’.20 It maintained ‘the supremacy of monarchs since they held the same authority as Adam, to whom God had assigned absolute power over all creatures’.21 Patriarchalist political theory was inherently contrary to natural law theory. However, consistent with his previous attempt to combine a providentialist vision of parliamentary government based on Romans 13 with Grotian natural law, was Ascham’s attempt to bring together political patriarchalism and (Grotian and Hobbesian) contractualism. In the unpublished manuscript on matrimony, Ascham affirmed that love was the main virtue on which matrimony had to be built. ‘Wee know God but by marriage, and as hee hath espoused his church and made us children by a regeneration. In this analogye therefore we may say, that as love in Heaven meets with such joys, as none can describe or understand … soe none can judge what sence of delight that is, when two harts meete really to make one, but they whoe indeed are soe incorporated’. Yet, this heaven could easily turn into hell, when the opinions of the two ‘parties’ of husband and wife, especially in matter of religion, collide.22 Therefore, before entering ‘into a perpetuall alliance’, people ought to be guided neither by passions nor by the ‘pleasure of sense’. Indeed, ‘The lawe of God as well as of reason, declaires that the best orders of counsaile in this case are to be sought from the prudence of our parents’. In what resembles more a reference to the imagery of the Stuart court’s vision of matrimony based on ‘personal rule’, love and the relation between fecundity and the stability of royal dynasty, rather than to a revolutionary or republican vision of it,23 Ascham explained that ‘for a principal reason of State and of society none ought to be interested in the father’s family without his consent, nor possess the honour and illustrious titles of his ancestors (whereof he is a depositary) without his legitimation’. Therefore, the father’s power over the household was necessary to make lawful the mat24 rimonial contract and preserve the unity of the family. However, in The Bounds and Bonds Ascham stated that the thesis put forward by Ward ‘that the former magistrate was our naturall parent’ was not substantiated, ‘for in this confusion of families in the world, in which the original families are lost, we owe no natural duty to any, but to those from whose blood we derive’. Secondly, if we compare ‘the nature of marriage and of government’, we find out again that they differ in that ‘marriage is not alwaies necessary to every particular man’, whilst ‘the publique body of a people cannot be without government’.25 In Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments Chapter 11, ‘Of the originall of magistracy and civill government in the state of nature, patriark or gerarcha-ship, and in heroicall seizures’, Ascham responded to Ward’s political use of patriarchalism in support of 85

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Stuart monarchy. Ascham agreed that ‘The first magistracy was grounded in nature’ and that the original magistrate was a ‘father’, or ‘a gerarcha or patriarch’ who ruled ‘over families of his owne extraction, and cities of his natural generation’.26 Against those who suggested that the king was the direct descendant of the original magistrate, and therefore like a father to his subjects, Ascham reminded that ‘this is not the state which any people now under heaven are in’, because the ‘originall and capitall families … are lost in their first obscurity’. What now cemented society was not the ‘naturall duty’ of children’s submission to their father, rather the principle ‘of mutual feare’ 27 that originated ‘civil compact as it did religion also’. Ascham explained that individuals had ‘a right of nature to protect ourselves’, from which derived ‘an absolute and supreme right alike to our private persons and to all things’. ‘But’, he continued, ‘all this liberty … was I confesse a great prejudice to us for hereby we were clearly left in a state of warre’. ‘For which reason we rightly opposed whom we would, and as rightly submitted to those who are inabled with such power’. Ascham acknowledged ‘Mr Hobbs his supposition (if there were two omnipotents, neither would be oblig’d to obey the other)’ to be ‘very pertinent and conclusive to this subject’. ‘Power’ was the presupposition of ‘subjection’, but ‘when it is exercis’d against nature and our consents it may as lawfully be shaken off, as it was imposed’.28 In more recent times, however, ‘compact was judg’d a securer way then mere power for the coalition of societies’. ‘Security or protection’ was the ‘chief end’ of society, to attain which ‘we lose much of our generall rights’, insofar as ‘every new law still diminishing some degree of them’ and of our liberty. Ascham’s thesis that, notwithstanding the fatherly origins of ‘power’, it was the link between obedience and protection that justified submission to the present government rather than natural subjection was pursued further in Chapter 12, ‘Of the originall of civil government in confusion of families’. In it, Ascham took up Rous’s thesis about the uselessness of precedents and tradition for the legitimisation of the magistrate’s authority. The origins of magistracies were lost ‘in the dark of the consciences of people’, and granted that there had been ‘a naturall generation of a civill power’, present governments were not able to trace back their line of heritage since the original authority of the fathers over their children. The subjects/children hence found themselves in the condition to have to choose ‘one who takes care of their preservation’.29 Ascham assimilated the relationship between government and subjects to the condition of ‘guardianship’, in which the ‘curator’ had the moral duty to renounce his own private interests and to care about subjects being in a condition of ‘minority’. Thus, if the ‘power’, as a distinctive mark of sovereign authority, was naturally (fatherly) and divinely sanctioned, in the present days the compact between magistrate and subjects was grounded in the mutual relation between allegiance and protection. Ascham’s synthesis between political theories which fitted in the ideological background of both Independent and 86

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Presbyterian readers mirrored the political negotiations ongoing between these two groupings within and outside the institutions.

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ASCHAM AND FILMER The addition of Chapters 11 and 12 of Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, may be traced to the publication, between April and the summer of 1648, respectively of Robert Filmer’s The Anarchy of a Mixed or Limited Monarchy and The Necessity of the Absolute Power of all Kings. Both pamphlets had been anonymously published by Royston, and this is probably the reason why, although clearly referring to their contents, Ascham did not mention the name of the author. In 1648, against the contractual theories of popular government of Catholics (Vitoria, Suarez, Bellarmine) and Protestants (Buchanan, Grotius) authors who had significantly influenced the intellectual background of parliamentary resistance theory, Filmer devised a markedly absolutist theory of sovereign power in support of a vanquished king, based on the nature of 30 fatherly authority over the family. According to Filmer, scripture provided clear evidence of God’s transmission of original sovereignty to Adam and to his descendants by right of primogeniture. Adam’s authority had been exercised first over his family and then, as this latter had expanded during the 930 years of his life, over a commonwealth. The concept of absolute and i­ ndivisible sovereignty that Filmer attached to his argument for patriarchal authority and to his criticism of mixed government was drawn from Bodin. In The Necessity of the Absolute Power of all Kings he reproduced many extracts of Richard Knolles’s translation of Bodin’s République (1576), which was published in 1606 under the title Sixe Bookes of a Commonweale.31 However, in Filmer’s own reading of Bodin, the sovereign power had a fatherly nature instead of a God-given one. When Ascham decided to revise the first edition of the Discourse and to include two chapters which dealt with patriarchal political theory, he had in mind also the kind of objections raised by Ward about his use of Grotius in support of Parliament. Ward had regarded the execution of Charles I as a ‘parricide’ since ‘the former magistrate was our naturall parent’. Patriarchal arguments were common in the ideological opposition to parliamentary ‘usurpation’, and when Filmer’s writings developed a fuller anti-contractual and anti-republican patriarchal theory, they could not be left unanswered. Ascham had repeatedly used references to the metaphor of the family as a state or church since the manuscript on marriage. In The Bounds and Bonds he replied to Ward’s patriarchal description of the origins of civil power, while in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments he engaged with Filmer’s own arguments. Filmer’s The Anarchy and The Necessity of the Absolute Power of all Kings had a considerable influence on the political debates of the 1640s and 1650s.32 Evidence of Ascham’s reading of Filmer is provided by Chapter 87

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11, where he sketched a historical outlook of the origins and developments of society from the ‘naturall state of families’ to a stage marked by ‘heroicall or irresistible seizures’. The passage and argument were arguably drawn from Filmer’s own analysis of Aristotle’s description of ‘heroic king’. Filmer reported that, according to Aristotle’s Politics, kings in the ‘heroic times’ differed from other sorts of kingdoms for ‘the means’ by which they obtained authority, and not for ‘the manner of government’.33 In his answer, Ascham basically re-deployed some of the arguments formerly used by Henry Parker against royalist patriarchalism. In 1643, the royalist Dudley Digges had complained about the failure of natural rights theories to explain the natural subjection to fatherly authority over 34 the families since the origins of mankind. In Jus Populi Parker answered Digges by tracing a distinction between paternal and political power. Fatherly authority ruled original families, but as the world’s population grew ‘Families did incorporate, and grow up into cities, and cities into States’.35 The relation between the despotic authority of the fathers and the natural subjection of children and wives was increasingly replaced by a political obligation based on liberty and consent.36 Like Parker, Ascham acknowledged the patriarchal origins of political ‘power’, although he made no concessions to what Schochet described as ‘moral’ patriarchal doctrine.37 Indeed, Ascham made a political use of patriarchalism in support of parliamentary ‘power’. He also conceived the familial bond in contractual terms. In Of Marriage and in the Bounds and Bonds familial government was grounded in the matrimonial contract, so that the obligation to fatherly or civil authority derived from consent. Consistent with his conciliatory intents, in 1649 Ascham’s argument winked at Filmer’s, so that their differences became less clear-cut. Ascham conceded to Filmer that ‘The first magistracy was grounded in nature’ and that the original magistrate was a ‘father’, or ‘a gerarcha or patriarch’ who ruled ‘over families of his owne extraction, and cities of his natural generation’. However, since the line of succession from the original families had become lost ‘in the dark of the consciences of the people’, the government could not claim authority for right of succession. The present condition was not one in which people had to speculate about the reliability of genealogic trees, but one in which they had to submit to a supreme authority in consequence of a ‘civil compact’ stemming from ‘the interest of feare’. However, if on the one hand Filmer and Ascham disagreed about the form of government which was entitled to exercise fatherly rule, on the other they partly agreed in separating the Adamite origins of political ‘power’ from the forms of accession to ‘authority’. To Filmer, what made kings as such was not ‘the means of obtaining their crowns’ (be it ‘by election, donation, succession or by any other means’), but ‘the manner of the government by supreme power’.38 It followed that notwithstanding the authority residing in one or more persons, the sovereign power was ‘the only right and natural authority of a supreme father’.39 Ascham said that though the original power 88

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over the families and cities belonged to the patriarchs, in recent ages the civil compact had replaced the form of obligation grounded in nature. Yet, after so many violent changes of government, Ascham intended the compact between subjects and sovereign authority as one of ‘curatorship’ or ‘guardianship’, and he thought this could be consistent with Romans 13. A prerequisite of this relation was that the authority (which in this case was embodied by the Rump), held a supreme power with the capacity to ‘take care of their [i.e. of subjects’] preservation’. According to Cesare Cuttica and Edward Vallance, at the end of his life (he died in 1653), Filmer ‘embraced a stance very similar to that of the so-called de facto theorists according to whom the defeated 40 royalists had to submit to the new regime’. The patriarchal theory of monarchical authority, based on the ‘Adamite paradigm’, and formulated by Filmer in the Patriarcha (completed in 1632, but published in 1680), had therefore shifted in the writings of the late 1640s to early 1650s, to a theory of patriarchal ‘power’. Ascham and Filmer, in fact, agreed that the distinctive feature of supreme magistracy was not its governmental form (the ‘authority’), but its sovereign ‘power’. Like Filmer, Ascham admitted that ‘The supreme acts of government are the same in all the forms of government’. In the present rewording, it mattered less if that, in virtue of its patriarchal origins, was a natural/fatherly authority or an authority derived from consent: a distinctive mark of its rule was the exercise of an absolute souveraineté. Filmer drew this directly from Bodin, while Ascham most likely took it up from the French author indirectly from Grotius’s De Imperio.41 In mid-1648, Filmer used his patriarchal theory of sovereign power in a desperate attempt to counter Parliament’s usurpation of Charles’s fatherly authority. One year later, Ascham sought to advocate the protective status of Parliament in the legal terms of ‘guardianship’ and ‘curatorship’. Here Ascham also referred to the legal doctrines of the Dutch lawyer Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (Boxhornius). From the De Rege Hereditario of Boxhorn (a sympathiser of the House of Orange and an opponent of Milton’s republicanism), Ascham drew arguments replying to those who defended the right of succession of Charles II to the throne of England. After 1649, probably aware of the possible pro-republican readings of his former distinction between ‘power’ and ‘authority’, Filmer himself pointed to the right of inheritance as a distinctive feature of monarchical government.42 According to Ascham, Boxhorn had distinguished the ‘succession’ in ‘hereditary and patrimoniall’ when it concerned the property of goods, or in ‘right of blood’ when it concerned the linear succession. Such a distinction, he continued, was not compelling for many reasons: first of all, the transmission from predecessor to successor was held to be lawful on the condition that the principle of inheritance derived ‘from the first prince’, but ‘there is no indubitable proof’ that in the Stuarts’ line of succession there had not been usurpations which had invalidated the legacy.43 When the administrator of a good which was not of 89

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propriety of anybody (like a kingdom) died, the good could not be alienated, but it had to return ‘to him who hath the property of the land’, that is the people. Ascham found this argument difficult, as it was often invoked by the radicals to uphold their demands for political and religious reform. He thus returned to the principle of ‘curatorship’: the people, as a ‘minor’, could not choose their ‘curator’/’guardian’ but rather must submit to a government who might not be able to exhibit ‘an old originall title’ other than de facto power.44 Behind their manifest ideological distinctions (Ascham’s consistency with parliamentary consent theory; Filmer’s harsh criticism of representative governments based on natural law), between 1648 and 1650 they shared an insistence on the ends of sovereign power, prioritising order and protection over liberty and representation. It was also because of the overlapping of some of their arguments that Ascham resolved to deal with Filmer’s thesis in his revised edition of Discourse of 1649. To the eyes of the moderate royalist readers that Ascham wished to win over Parliament’s side, the de facto undertones of Filmer’s patriarchal theory of civil ‘power’ might have considerably challenged his contractual defence of de facto rule on his own ideological ground. If what mattered was the power to rule (whether it had been acquired through consent, conquest, or inheritance), why not restore the king to his legitimate throne and fully obey his fatherly rule? After January 1649 to answer this question became a hard task. Ascham’s de facto justification of parliamentary rule actually became a defence of the tyranny for usurpation. Chapter 6 will examine Ascham’s defence of usurpation and reconsider it in the context of current parliamentary discourses on tyranny and reason of state.

NOTES  1 Ascham, Discourse, p. 76 (original emphasis).   2 C. Herle, A Fuller Answer to the Treatise Written by Doctor Ferne (1643), p. 8.   3 J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959), pp. 82–9; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 235  4 Salmon, French Religious Wars, pp. 86–7.   5 Cit. in Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, p. 57.   6 Tuck, ‘Power and authority’, p. 48.  7 Mendle, Henry Parker, p. 13.   8 T. S. Swadling, The Soveraignes Desire Peace: The Subjects Dutie Obedience (1643) cit. in Wallace, Destiny his Choice, p. 20.   9 Tuck, ‘Power and authority’, p. 52. 10 Rous, The Lawfulnes, p. 2. 11 Rous, The Lawfulnes, p. 3. 12 Rous, The Lawfulnes, p. 3. 13 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, pp. 24–5. 14 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 6. 90

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Romans 13 and patriarchalism 15 Gee, An Exercitation, p. 14. 16 Ascham, A Reply, p. 2. 17 Ascham, A Reply, p. 3. 18 Ascham, A Reply, p. 12. 19 Ascham, A Reply, p. 15. 20 G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park, PA, 1992), p. 134. 21 C. Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch (Manchester, 2012), p. 3. 22 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 294 23 A. Coiro, ‘“A ball of strife”: Caroline poetry and royal marriage’, in T. N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 26–7. Milton’s republican defence of divorce, with its radical political implications, remained controversial with respect to the ‘Anglican model’ of marriage which prevailed in England in the 1640s. According to John Witte’s influential survey of matrimonial contracts in the early modern period, the ‘Anglican model’ of marriage incorporated social, contractual, sacral and sacramental understandings of marriages derived from both Protestant and Catholic professions of faith. A key feature of the Anglican vision of marriage was the equation between marriage and commonwealth. Matrimony was appointed by God as ‘seedbed and seminary’ of the commonwealth ‘to teach church, state, and society essential Christian and political norms and habits’ (J. Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Tradition and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY, 1991), p. 9). Therefore, divorce was rejected insofar as the dissolution of the ‘little commonwealth’ embodied by the family eroded the stability of the ‘great commonwealth’ (Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony, p. 9). In responding to Milton, Ascham mainly adopted the ‘Anglican model’ of marriage. The core argument of Ascham’s treaty was that the marriage contract was indissoluble and divorce contrary to both the laws of God and nature, and the ‘reason of State’. Marriage, he wrote, ‘is the first step that a man makes out of himself; to enter into a partnership of a more communicative life’. After a man has engaged himself in that ‘ffellowship of souls and bodies’, he ‘makes use of his liberty but once; to lose it forever after all his life’. Later on, Ascham so described matrimony: ‘It should be a rough contract which may not cease by mutual dissent (as all other doe). And the change seems to bee no lesse disadvantageous for a man to loose the dominion of his owne person, to take care of Anothers, by whose accesse he seems to lye open to all the blowes of ffortune and to bee besieged with perpetual cares in his owne ffamily’ (Ascham, Of Marriage, in Perlette, ‘Anthony Ascham’s “Of Marriage”’, p. 288). 24 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 293. 25 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, pp. 20–1. 26 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 106. 27 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 107. 28 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 108. 29 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 112. 30 J. P. Sommerville, ‘Introduction’, in Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, pp. xv–xvi. 31 C. I. Smith, ‘Filmer, and the Knolles Translation of Bodin’, Philosophical Quarterly, 13:52 (1963), pp. 249–50. 91

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Order and conflict 32 Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer, pp. 173–6. 33 R. Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy, in Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, p. 159. 34 Cf. D. Digges, The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking Armes Against their Soveraigne (1643). 35 H. Parker, Jus Populi (1644), pp. 43–6. 36 G. J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975), pp. 105–6. 37 According to Schochet, the form of ‘moral’ patriarchalism consisted of ‘the justification of obedience to the state on the ground that political authority had originally belonged to fathers’ (Schochet, Patriarchalism, p. 12). 38 Filmer, Anarchy, p. 132. 39 Filmer, Anarchy, pp. 138–9. 40 Cuttica, Sir Robert Filmer, p. 173; E. Vallance, ‘Protestation, Vow, Covenant and Engagement: Swearing Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Historical Research, 75 (2002), pp. 408–24. 41 On Bodin’s influence on Grotius’s idea of ‘summum imperium’ in De Imperio, see Grotius, De Imperio, II, pp. 628–30. 42 Schochet, Patriarchalism, pp. 120ff. 43 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 113. 44 Ascham, Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 117.

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. Tyranny and reason of state

F

rom the publication of the Discourse, Ascham stated the necessity to obey the civil magistrate that ruled with equity and de facto held the power to ensure self-protection to its subjects regardless of constitutional settlement. But what was the form of government that better secured protection to its subjects? Ascham argued that there were no forms of government that might have terminated the present revolutions, because all had inherent defects. Monarchy was the best form of government, especially when it ‘represents God’s dominion more in the justice, than in the singularity of the governour’. But because there were no kings enabled ‘with prudence and goodnesse’ sufficient to balance their power, it followed that their abuses made the people complain ‘of the losse of their liberties’. Aristocracy should stand as a ‘moderator betwixt the excelses of a kingly and popular power’, but, Ascham said, ‘the bloodiest commotions that are happening in this State … are formed in the middle region of the aire’. Finally, in a passage that epitomises his anti-radical belief, Ascham maintained that democracy ‘reduces all to equality and favours the liberty of the people in every thing’. Moreover, it was ‘very dangerous for a man … to be both patient and physitian to himselfe’. In fact, ‘if this supreme power falls into the hands of a heady and of an unconstant multitude, it is lodged in a great animall, which cannot be better than in chaine’.1 Ascham was thus favourable to monarchy, although kings as individuals might not be worthy of the throne. This point was reminiscent of the position of the political group of the Independents, who before 1649 were seeking to restrain Charles I’s prerogatives in order to end the Civil War, and to reach an agreement with Presbyterians on this ground. Ascham also made clear his aversion to the political and social implications of radical and ‘democratic’ theories. However, Ascham conceded that ‘in the midst of these our shiftings and changings we are naturally inclined to one sort of government more 93

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then to another’. The history of past and present monarchies taught that both Mediterranean and Eastern countries were better governed by monarchy, but in Europe, especially Northern Europe, ‘countries are disposed more to republiques and popular mixtures, tempered according to fundamentall laws, and the authority of Diets and Senats’.2 England was one of these latter countries that were seldom involved in civil wars, and which therefore more frequently lacked a government providing ‘distributive justice, reward, and punishment’. Ascham stressed that the end of government was not to ensure the attainment of ‘sensible pleasure’, rather to free 3 people from ‘the paines of hunger and repletion’. The gaps in civil power entailed the lack of protection, and therefore jeopardised the individual’s natural right to life. Nathaniel Ward addressed two main critiques to Ascham’s defence of the current form of government. Ward admitted that the forms of government were traditionally three (‘democracy’, ‘aristocracy’, and ‘royalty’), and that any one of these forms was approved by God, ‘but alwayes when they have been suitable to the people and places’. However, the present representative body was but ‘the elected Parliament of a faction’, and therefore it resulted ‘legally null’.4 Ward also questioned the Parliament’s authority by asserting through ‘a syllogisme’ that since ‘the supreme power of the Kingdome consists in a Parliament of King, Lords and Commons’, and since the authority sitting at Westminster does not have such a composition, ‘Ergo at Westminster there is no Parliament at all’.5 Ascham acknowledged that ‘seeing the old forme of this State, as it was in the supremacy of Kings, Lords and Commons hath in that relation ceased to be, and is civilly dead’. Therefore, to dispute over the constitution of the present government was a waste of time. ‘[I]t followes then by this position, that the regall government is gone, and that we are in the State of a Republique’.6 The confrontation between Ascham and the Grand Case of Conscience over the issue of the changes of government is also significant. By taking on the traditional Calvinist distinction between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ magistrates, the anonymous author of the Grand Case of Conscience on the one hand had granted that in some cases ‘a government may be altered’ but ‘by higher powers’, on the other that the attempt of a ‘party’ to resist the chief magistrate and to demand 7 obedience ‘as to the legall authority’ was a ‘blasphemy’. Ascham detected two main contradictions in the argument of his anonymous opponent. The first was that he was wrong when defining the Covenant as ‘eternall’, as in doing so he did not allow for any change by any kind of authority whatsoever. Secondly, the recent change of government ‘was made by the present supreme power of the people’, and the reason wherefore ‘both the Houses laid the exercise of regal power aside for some years’ and replaced it by the Commons, was ‘salus populi suprema lex est’.8 This principle, which had been used as a cornerstone for a radical justification of resistance to the monarchy during the 1640s, was actually deployed by Ascham to strengthen ‘this our principle of obedience’. 94

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‘For non-obedience in a State is but a chimera, neutrality, a State without relation. There is no subsistence for it in any State, and unlesse you will allow me to concurre with others, and under others in lawfull things, I must leave the world; my subsistence being onely in a conjunction with others here in this jurisdiction’.9 Obedience was thus conditional on ‘plenary possession’, and governments will last ‘any longer then their swords and strength could bear them up’.10 Ascham reminded his audience that the present government had the right to rule in consequence of a victory, and that his purpose was not ‘to change the tenure of publique and private rights’, but ‘to give laws of greater security 11 to the private rights and possessions of the people’.

EQUITY AND POLITICAL JUSTICE In Chapter 15 of Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments Ascham reconnected to the analysis of the relation between the form of government and the magistrate’s capacity to fulfil its ends already sketched in Chapter 7 of the Discourse. The fact that any form of government was historically subject to alteration did not entail significant changes in the way in which laws were made and the justice administered, being the aims of governments always the same.12 This point served as a reminder of the reasons for which the same claims for obedience could apply to a mixed monarchy and to a republic. ‘The supreme acts of government are the same in all the three governments’, and the same worth in a mixed government ‘For they who concurre with, or limit one another, in that capacity, are co-partners, and doe the same thing together’.13 A change of government, moreover, did not affect ‘neither our humane natures, nor our spirituall relations’, and the ends of the magistrates’ acts remained those of guaranteeing civil justice and promoting a godly life. Besides, ‘into what condition would we put ourselves if we will not obey?’ Ascham scared his audience with the ghost of a perpetual disorder, affirming that ‘in a State there can be no such thing as non-obedience’. Obedience was a ‘necessity’, for ‘he who keep his naturall liberty without relation to a State, shall loose that and everything else’. Obedience was always ‘passive’, as the compliance with the superior magistrate’s commands was consistent with their duties as state officers.14 Therefore, subjects had to be educated to obedience since their childhood. In Chapter 2, ‘Of the state and condition of marriage’ Ascham, who at that time served as tutor to Charles’s younger sons, pointed to the negative effects of divorce on children’s education. His angle of view was eminently political. ‘Love in its first ideas sees nothing in marriage but roses without prickles’, and yet ‘there is noe torture comparable to this when one is obliged to live with a party which hath malicious contrivances, to trouble the repose of a family, passions which dissipate an estate and wound honour’. ‘A hart thus wounded – he continued 95

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– finds the alarum of warre in the midst of a profound peace and sacrifices it self every day to a ffamiliar spirit’. If children grow up in turbulent familial contexts, they ‘receive their malignant impressions’ which deeply affect their character. ‘They sowe rebellion radically in theyr yonge ffaculties, which afterwards contemne the orders both of publique law and of reason: ffrom whence it may bee that commonwealth’s interests themselves soe much in prescribing the conditions of marriage, as the best foundation in society for obedience to publique lawe’.15 The whole reflection about the magistrate’s duties was turned by Ascham into a discussion upon ‘politicall justice’ (Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, Chapter 16). Political justice, which consisted ‘in the reciprocallness of mutuall humane rights, paternall and filiall duties, as we are congregated into Common-wealth and publique socieities’, was primarily related to that ‘equity’ whereby ‘a private man is rightly ordered under the publique magistrate’ and a magistrate ruled according to the customs and for the ‘safety’ of his country. Political justice was therefore intimately connected with the order of the family and state. On the contrary, disorder led to chaos and abuse. The present magistrate ‘who keeps the part of a State in their apt congruities and relations’, had therefore to be obeyed insofar as it administrated justice and protected individuals’ life. Ascham pointed to the binomial protection-obedience to say that since the magistrate fulfilled his duty, the people, being the other contractor of the political compact, were required ‘to a returne of allegiance’. Ascham thus summed up his whole argument: ‘It followes then a fortiori that they who protect us and our children in the Common-wealth, as guardians, physicians, and redeemers in perils, ought in equity to be rewarded with farre greater privileges’.16 Some Presbyterians argued that obedience was due to a magistrate who grounded his rule on the principles of justice and religion. Ascham replied by distinguishing in the first instance between those who regarded justice and religion as ‘immediately learnt by, and practiz’d under some transient authority’, and those who regarded ‘the nature of religion and justice’ as innate in men’s nature. Some, instead, ‘will aske whether there may be not a composition … of authority and reason’. The answer was no, ‘because the ground of the first is peremptoriness of will, and the ground of the other is the intellect’. In the one ‘there is freedome’, in the other ‘necces17 sity’, and they were unlikely to cohabitate within a state.

TYRANNY Both during the negotiations with the king around the points of the Heads of the Proposals, and, even more, after the establishment of the Republic, Ascham did not cease to refer to his own side as ‘usurper’. Ascham’s de facto advocacy of the legitimacy of a new constitutional settlement and form of government 96

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resulting from a civil war always assumed the tone of a post-facto defence. We do not know how self-deceiving, calculated, realistic, or sincere Ascham’s judgement of Parliament’s attitudes towards the king was. Whatever it was, he unemphatically expressed his regret for mixed government, never overtly attacked the king’s person, and always used with his interlocutors the conciliatory tone of one who, in the end, admits to having some guilt and therefore looks forward to finding a reasonable ground for reconciliation. Ascham’s support of parliamentary ‘usurpation’ has to be understood in the broader context of the parliamentary uses of the concept of tyranny during the Civil Wars. Charges of tyranny were thrown at Charles I’s personal rule in the 1640s, and paved the way for his trial and execution in 1649. Yet, as with many other political concepts and ideologies which formed the political vocabulary of the revolution, between 1647 and 1650 the uses of the political category of ‘tyranny’ assumed different tones, and spanned the spectrum of 18 royalist and parliamentarian political discourse. Since the Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, tyranny was usually distinguished between ‘ex parte exercitii’ (by practice), and ‘ex defectu tituli’ (by usurpation).19 This distinction was taken up by many sixteenth-century writers on resistance, and was dealt with alongside the issue of who had the right to resist. Tyrants by practice could be resisted only by inferior magistrates, while, as for usurpers, there were cases (for instance that of a foreign invader), in which private individuals could take arms in defence of their properties and institutions.20 In Regall Tyrannie Discovered (1647) Lilburne had recalled the argument of Norman conquest to demonstrate that Charles I’s descent from ‘William the Conqueror or Tyrant’ (‘what a wicked, bloudy, triviall base and tyrannical a fountain our gratious Soveraignes, and most excellent Majesties of England have spring’), had invalidated the title of his successors.21 The original usurpation of 1066 had therefore nullified the right of succeeding English monarchs to govern their people, ‘for any man in the world whosoever he be, that shall by his sword or any other means thus assume unto himself, and exercise a power over any sorts of men, … against 22 their wills and mindes, is an absolute tyrant and monster’. After the Putney debates and during 1648, when the ‘Independent alliance’ was put at risk by the contrasts relating to the negotiations with the Presbyterians and the king, Ascham put forward an advocacy of Parliament’s authority in consequence of a victorious war that eventually legitimised a tyranny by usurpation (although not one that ruled with ‘impiety and blasphemy’).23 Ascham explicitly used the word ‘tyrants’ in answering to an objection of Ward and Gee regarding his interpretation of Romans 13.24 However, arguably for diplomatic reasons, in his works he preferred using the less compromising terms of ‘usurper’ and ‘usurpation’. Ascham’s defence of Parliament’s ‘usurpation’ (i.e., tyranny without title), was also a consequence of his having shifted the focus of attention from the origins to the ends of government, in order to ask for obedience. Thus, his justification of a kind of 97

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tyranny, rather than a doctrinarian premise of Parliament’s political conduct, was a consequence of the attempt to provide the ideological bases of a settlement in the light of the recent, and largely unexpected outcomes of the Civil War. The same combination of political beliefs and political contingencies laid behind Rous’s hardline claim for obedience to the Rump in early 1649. Ascham’s use of Romans 13 for justifying absolute obedience to the superior magistrate notwithstanding his lack of title and despotic rule has to be understood in the context of the immediate aftermath of Charles I’s execution, when a drifting Rump was desperately seeking to restore a semblance of order in the country. A similar use of the argument of tyranny to Ascham’s and Rous’s views (although directed to different aims), had been made by their colleague John Cook in a speech intended to be delivered at Westminster Hall at the trial of Charles I. The speech, which should have been read by the judge John Bradshaw, could not be delivered due to the king’s refusal to acknowledge the authority of the court, but it was published by Cook himself in 1649 under the title of King Charles’ his Case. In this tract, Cook presented Charles I as a tyrant by practice. Unlike Lilburne, Cook divided monarchs who descended from William the Conqueror into the legitimate and illegitimate.25 The first were those who, despite their lack of title, ruled according to law and the people’s consent, as ‘the King has no more power or authority than what by law is concentrated and committed to them’.26 From 1066, lawful monarchs had sworn to protect the ‘government politique and mixt’. Instead, since his coronation, Charles ‘had a design to alter and subvert the fundamental laws, and to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government’. Cook’s charge mainly drew on the distinction between office and person. Charles had to be removed not because he was a king, but because his purpose as a person was ‘to rule by lust and not by law’.27 And since Charles had often invoked ‘right’ conscience as a guide to his political conduct, Cook (and Bradshaw) pointed to his deliberate choice to act as a tyrant: it was not ‘God’s wrath’ that had ordained 28 Charles’s tyranny, but it was he who ‘wilfully’ ruled so. Milton’s defence of regicide, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, was written during the trial of Charles but published, as was Cook’s pamphlet, immediately after his execution, on 13 February 1649. Milton’s work was intended as a rejection of tyranny in all its forms. ‘A Tyrant whether by wrong or by right coming to the Crown, is he who regarding neither law nor the common good, reign only for himself and his faction’.29 Yet, when a prince overturned the laws of his kingdom ‘breaking all the Covenants and Oaths that gave him title to his dignity, and were the bond and alliance between him and his people, what differs him from outlandish King or from an enemie?’30 From this conflation of the two types of tyranny it followed that resistance could not be undertaken merely by inferior magistrates, but also by private individuals.31

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REASON OF STATE Ascham’s support of usurpation was more consistent with the argument put forward by Cook and Bradshaw than by Milton. Charles had been resisted for his tyrannical rule but not for his lack of title. Similarly the ‘usurping’ Parliament had to be obeyed insofar as it ruled equitably. Ascham’s advocacy of parliamentary tyranny was often justified in terms of salus populi or reason of state. A long scholarly tradition which could be traced to the works of Meinecke, Mosse and Raab, has tended to associate the English reception of reason of 32 state theories with the influence of Machiavellianism. However, in early Stuart culture the presence of anti-Machiavellian themes was often entangled with the rejection of royal prerogative and reason of state, and with criticism of the ‘Machiavellian’ policies of James I’s and Charles I’s courts. But while Machiavellianism never acquired a fully positive meaning, reason of state could be distinguished into the ‘good’ and ‘false’, this latter upheld by ‘Machiavellians’. Reason of state and Machiavellianism, in fact, followed in England two different but very close paths.33 Here the language of reason of state merged into terms such as ‘laws of state’, ‘state necessity’, ‘mystery of state’, ‘arcana imperii’, and it was meant as a combination of judicial discretion and the exercise of royal prerogative for the salus populi.34 In the early seventeenth century, the debate on reason of state mainly focused on the extraordinary means necessary to guarantee the safety of the state and people. With the beginning of the Civil War, as Parliament, particularly through the writings of Parker, drew on salus populi during its quest for sovereignty with the lawful king, reason of state was newly linked to Machiavelli as a republican theorist.35 The complexity inherent in the connection between a negative reason of state, epitomised by its association with the ‘atheist’ and ‘immoral’ Machiavelli, and a ‘good’ one, associated with the preservation of state (political and religious) order and safety, also reflected on Ascham’s attempts to mediate his justification of usurpation through insistence on the necessity for the civil magistrate to rule equitably. These attempts were intended to convince an audience struggling with troubled consciences, and which was seriously concerned about the future of religious reformation. This audience was arguably more sensible of the ethical commitment of Grotius, than of the cunning counsel of Machiavelli. So, in order to distance himself from the Machiavellian implications of reason of state, especially those concerning the justification of internal conflict and political change that appealed to his republican allies,36 Ascham pointed to Grotius’s insistence on the traditional concept of ‘equity’. In order to explain this ideological operation aiming to separate Grotian from Machiavellian reason of state, it is worth considering a pamphlet appearing in 99

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1654 under the title of Politick Maxims and Observations. Purportedly ‘written by the most learned Hugo Grotius’, and translated ‘for the ease and benefit of the English state’s-men’,37 this work consisted of a series of considerations which mainly drew on Campanella’s own edition of passages on ‘Philosophia realis’ taken up from Grotius’s De Jure. These maxims touched on a variety of issues, including the origins ‘Of politique communities’ (Chapter 1), the limits and prerogatives of ruling powers, religious toleration, and ‘that which is called Reason of State’ (Chapter 4). This pamphlet traced a distinction between a Machiavellian ‘bad’ reason of state and a Grotian ‘good’ one, and in so doing it reconnected itself with that English stream of thinking about of reason of state which had sought to legitimate the sovereign right of derogation to custom and positive law for the protection of salus populi. This example helps us not only to understand Ascham’s own reasoning, but also to locate it in the context of analogous approaches to the reason of state argument in that period. In discussing the nature and role of law (starting from Grotius’s distinction of divine, natural and positive), the anonymous author affirmed that ‘Politique reason, which some call the reason of state, and of old, was the same with equity, does transgresse the (strict) letter of the law, but not the sense and scope of it: because it does not abrogate or interpret, &c. any thing but for a greater good’. ‘But the reason of State as it is nowadaies, is nothing else but a devise of tyrants’.38 ‘The difference between reason of State and equity is this, for equity respects the publique good and truth: but reason of State looks upon (onely) the private … good of the power in being’. Bad reason of state was thus ascribed to ‘Machiavel’, and associated with tyranny (by practice). Instead, even in cases of ‘acquisition of dominion’ (tyranny without title), Grotius taught usurpers to rule equitably and according to Christian prudence in order to maintain peace and order within the state.39 Ascham conceded to Parliament’s former supporters and now opponents that there had been an usurpation, but the predominance of Parliament did not meant oppression and atheism: the new government would rule ‘equitably’ for the good of the Commonwealth and not just for a part of it. Ascham sought to convince his readers that obedience to a usurping ‘power’ (i.e., tyrannical) that ruled equitably for the common interest, was consistent with (God-derived) reason, nature, and the law of nations, and therefore was not sinful. Ascham’s undertaking to use anti-radical, non-republican, if not explicitly ‘royalist’ ideas of natural rights and allegiance in support of Parliament and the Republic, challenges existing approaches to the interpretation of the political culture in the period from 1648 to 1650, based on the distinction between ‘republican’ and ‘monarchical’ political discourse. Chapter 7 will reconsider Ascham’s works in the light of the influential but problematic literature on republican theory in the period.

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NOTES  1 Ascham, Discourse, p. 71.  2 Ascham, Discourse, p. 72.  3 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 73–4.  4 Ward, A Religious Demurrer, p. 3.  5 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 12.  6 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 89–90.  7 Anonymous, The Grand Case of Conscience Stated, p. 9.  8 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 26.  9 Ascham, The Bounds and Bonds, p. 27. 10 Anonymous, The Grand Case of Conscience Stated, p. 3. 11 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 120. 12 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 130. 13 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 132. 14 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 139. 15 Ascham, Of Marriage, p. 292. 16 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 147. 17 Ascham, The Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, p. 151. 18 On the uses of the concept of tyranny in the context of the Republic and Restoration, see also the essay of A. Marshall, ‘“Mechanic tyranny”: Anthony Ashley Cooper and the English Republic’, in J. Spurr (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621–1683 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 27–50. 19 On the origins and developments of the concept of tyranny from the Middle Ages, see D. Quaglioni, Politica e diritto nel Trecento italiano: il ‘De tyranno’ di Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1314–1357) (Florence, 1983). 20 M. Dzeldzainis, ‘Introduction’, in J. Milton, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), pp. xii–xiii. 21 J. Lilburne, Regall Tyrannie Discovered (1647), p. 11. 22 Lilburne, Regall Tyrannie Discovered, p. 15. 23 Ascham, Discourse, pp. 89–90. 24 Ascham, Bounds and Bonds, p. 22. 25 Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, pp. 125–6. 26 J. Cook, King Charles’ his Case (1649), p. 7. 27 Cook, King Charles’, pp. 8, 38–9. 28 Cook, King Charles’, p. 24; see also Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, p. 129. 29 J. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Milton, Political Writings, p. 16. 30 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 17. 31 Cf. M. Dzeldzainis, ‘Anti-monarchism in English Republicanism’, in M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge, 2002), I, pp. 27–41. 32 A. Arienzo, ‘From Machiavellian policy to parliamentary reason of State: sketches in early Stuart political culture’, in Arienzo and Petrina (eds), Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 132. 33 Arienzo, ‘From Machiavellian policy to parliamentary reason of State’, p. 130.

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34 Daniel S. Berkowitz, ‘Reason of State in England and the Petition of Right, 1603– 1629’, in Roman Schnur (ed.), Staatsräson: Studies zur Geschichte eines politisches Begriff (Berlin, 1975), pp. 165–212. 35 Arienzo, ‘From Machiavellian policy to parliamentary reason of State’, p. 140. 36 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 39, 81, 203. 37 Politick Maxims and Observations, translated by H. C. S. T. B. (1654). 38 Politick Maxims, p. 31. 39 Politick Maxims, p. 94.

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Chapter 7

. Anthony Ascham: de facto theorist or ‘commonwealthsman’?

I

n the aftermath of the Act of March 1649, declaring England ‘to be a Commonwealth’, the Rump did not elaborate a truly republican ideology.1 The members of the unicameral government initially preferred to rely on the traditional languages of providentialism, common law and sovereign rights deriving from conquest. They even grounded their legitimacy upon the idea of popular sovereignty. The people were the source of the magistrates’ authority, and these were entitled to impose new forms of government consistently with their mandate. A new kind of ideological discourse in support of the republican government, inspired by the traditions of Greek and Roman ‘classical’ republicanism and by Renaissance civic humanism, would enter the political debate with the publication of Nedham’s The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated in May 1650, and successively, between 1651 and 1652, by the editorials of the Mercurius Politicus.2 Other apologists of the English Republic were John Milton and John Hall. After the publication of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in 1651 and 1654 Milton published respectively the Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano Prima and Secunda, in which he championed the Republic before a European audience against Salmasius’ Defensio Regia. The young lawyer and polemicist John Hall was well acquainted with Nedham and the poet (and would-be personal assistant to Milton) Andrew Marvell. By 1650 he was writing for 3 Nedham’s newspaper, and in 1651 he published The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy in which he pointed out the flaws of monarchical government. Furthermore, though the republican government installed at Whitehall sought continuity in civil government, it also tried to give a positive substance to kingless authority by devising diverse forms of display (from public parades to the recording of the Rump’s members in oils, stone and metal), and passing acts both for the removal of all the Stuart insignia from public places (the king’s statue was removed from the Old Exchange and replaced by the inscription ‘Exit tyrannus, Regum Ultimus, anno primo restitutae libertatis 103

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Angliæ 1648’), and for the sale of the huge amount of movable goods which had furnished Charles I’s family estates ‘for the uses of the State’.4 After 1649, parliamentary authors have usually been distinguished as either ‘de facto theorists’ or ‘commonwealthsmen’. The former were uncommitted or ‘unofficial’ supporters of Parliament who required obedience to the present government on the basis of mere utilitarian, sceptical, if not cynical rationales. The latter were morally committed (‘official’) advocates of the superiority of republican government over monarchy in pursuit of religious, moral and social reformation. Yet, difficulties arise when it comes to identifying this or that author under the aforementioned labels. Skinner, for example, has referred to Nedham as a de facto theorist in relation to his use of Hobbesian arguments in support of the Rump, and has thus associat5 ed him with Ascham. At the same time, Skinner has argued that the moral philosophy of English classical republicanism was grounded in the Roman idea of liberty.6 This idea also underpinned the Machiavellian celebration of the Roman republic in the Discourses, and since Machiavelli was a principal source in Nedham’s writings, it followed that Nedham was a pre-eminent ‘commonwealthsman’. Others have also included Ascham’s writings among seventeenth-century English ‘key republican texts’.7 The issue at stake here is not one of mere labels, nor solely an understanding of Ascham’s political thought. De facto theory incorporated languages and ideas which are difficult to fit into current definitions of ‘republicanism’. Nonetheless, the writings of Ascham, Rous or Dury were intended to support the rule of Parliament, and after January 1649 that meant the rule of republican government. Over the past two decades a number of works have examined English republican culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, as a consequence, a number of authors who were influenced by and put forward what have been regarded as republican ideas or values, have been tagged as ‘republicans’. A detailed analysis of the scholarly debates over early modern English republicanism far exceeds the intent of this work, so we will touch on them only insofar as they are relevant to the central argument of this book. The study of English republicanism has naturally been linked to the constitutional changes occurring after 1649. It has been argued that there was a republican culture in England (whatever its ideological, moral, religious or linguistic fundamental meaning was) existing independently from a republican form of government. To illustrate how this aspect concerns the interpretation of Ascham’s work, it may be worthwile to take the following example. As a response to the path-breaking study of Patrick Collinson over the ‘monarchical republic’ of Elizabeth I, Skinner has recalled how after the act abolishing the monarchy and establishing a republic of 22 March, leading republican writers like Nedham and Osborne (another author that he lists among the de facto theorists in his essays on the context of Hobbes’s Leviathan) had drawn a ‘categorical distinction between republics and monarchies’.8 The virtues and benefits of a free state, first of all liberty, might have been achieved only 104

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through a constitutional change. According to the Roman concept of liberty men could be free only if they were ‘sui iuris’ that is not ruled by the arbitrary will of another. Liberty was thus intertwined with representative institutions insofar as these acted on behalf of the citizens and therefore allowed no discretionary or arbitrary power. Before 1649 Henry Parker, in his defence of a mixed government in which the king had no ‘Negative voice’, argued for ‘a form of kingship embodying the constitutional arrangements typical of free States’. In so doing Parker pleaded for ‘a monarchical republic’.9 Yet, following the same line of reasoning, how should Rous’s and Ascham’s writing be described? They both argued for obedience to a usurping government, drawing on St Paul’s injunction to obey the God-given power of the supreme magistrate (the former), and on the doctrines of the ‘Royalist’ Grotius and Hobbes (the latter). Does the priority they gave to order and self-preservation over liberty and active citizenship entitle us to talk, with regard to their political theory, of ‘republican monarchism’? Are these terms, monarchy and republic, and their cognate ‘isms’, royalism and republicanism (whether used in broad or narrow sense or even combined as to form a sort of oxymoron) fit to account for the nuances and complexities of the ideological spectrum of intentions, ideas, arguments, or languages which constituted the distinctive feature of English political thought after 1649? The thesis put forward in this chapter aims not to be a merely deconstructive one. No one contends that after 1649 someone gave a positive substance to the republican government, while others were reluctant to overtly endorse the new government without a commitment to kingless rule. What is contended here is rather the tendency to apply to a variety of authors and ideas a binomial conceptual framework consisting of the terms of ‘royalism’ and ‘republicanism’, with the result of expanding this latter as to include almost everything but tyranny. Within this conceptual framework, the de facto theory assumes the status of a circumstantial and occasional political ideology whose relations with republican or royalist ideas remains undefined. What is argued here is that Ascham represents a case in point of the limits inherent in this kind of approach. We could further stretch the definition of republicanism until it included also the de facto theory (insofar as this was used in support of republican government), or regard this latter as something apart despite its being composed of ‘royalist’ or ‘republican’ ideas, or, finally, revert to an oxymoron (however well-grounded and meaningful) like ‘monarchical republic’ or ‘republican monarchy’ in order to account for the ambivalence and variety of uses to which many ideas were put. A slightly different approach might be that of going beyond the inherent exclusiveness of categorical distinctions (a risk increased by recent attempts to give all-inclusive definitions of concepts like ‘republicanism’), and to regard the political debate in which Ascham participated as one developed around at least three political concepts: ‘monarchy’, ‘republic’ intended as a specific form of government, and ‘commonwealth’ intended as ‘State’ or ‘res publica’. 105

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These three concepts were distinct, though connected to different degrees by cognate terms, ideas and values. The work of Ascham, to the extent that it was marked by the use of royalist authors in support of the rule of the Rump, might be situated in the intellectual framework of the language of the ‘commonwealth’ as both connected to and separated from specific forms of government. In order to recover the importance of Ascham in the broader intellectual context of English political thought, I will first sketch the ideological spectrum of political ideas of the ‘official’ authors at the service of Parliament by focusing on the works of Dury, Milton, Nedham and Hall. Then I will point out both differences and similarities between these authors and Ascham. Secondly, we will read Ascham’s works as an attempt, resulting from specific circumstances (the necessity to reconcile the government with Presbyterians and royalists), to frame a political discourse in terms which were neither strictly republican nor royalist, and that might be better understood in the intellectual and linguistic context of the ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state’. With this in mind the anlaysis will be slightly beyond the period so far dealt with, in order to include en passant examples drawn from Grotius, Hobbes and Harrington.

THE WRITINGS OF THE COMMONWEALTH, 1649–52 The arguments set forth by Ascham in 1648, and successively developed and re-adapted to the circumstances of 1649, along with Rous’s pamphlet grounded on Romans 13, would lay the foundations for much of the propaganda campaign inaugurated by the Rump and Council of State after Charles I’s execution. There were three fundamental issues shaping parliamentary propaganda: in the aftermath of January 1649, the Rump asserted the necessity and lawfulness of submitting to the present government; the imposition of the Engagement version of October 1649 marked a development in this debate, as the subjects (at that stage only the state employees) were not asked simply to submit but also to swear loyalty to the new government. These two aspects were framed in order to convince former allies and enemies to rally to the new regime on terms which partly fitted with their political and religious background. These arguments were subservient to the political agenda of moderate groupings within the Rump and the Council of State, but they reflected also (as in the case of the enforcement of the Engagement) the agreement with the republican minority which pressed for an acceleration of political, social and religious reforms. The third kind of arguments which championed the cause of the republican minority clearly asserted the superiority of republican over monarchical government. Ascham and Rous engaged in the support of the first two kinds of argument. Their targets were mainly Presbyterian dissenters and royalists who wished to put an end to the Civil Wars. They significantly differed both in the languages and ideas deployed in 106

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support of the parliamentary cause, and in the kind of settlement they wished for. Another author who served the republican government by using a de facto argument was John Dury. Consistent with the politics of reconciliation implemented by moderate leaders of government, Dury also addressed Presbyterian dissenters requiring them to annul the Covenant and submit to the new government (and take the Engagement) as a means of furthering religious reformation. In the early stages of the Civil War, Dury took an appointment as 10 chaplain to Charles I’s young daughter, Princess Mary, at The Hague. From 1647 to 1649 (along with Ascham), Dury had been appointed as a tutor of Charles I’s sons,11 and in 1647 he had drafted A Model of Church Government intended as a compromise between the Presbyterian and the Congregational Church. Dury was most likely encouraged to intervene in the Engagement controversy by his friend Rous,12 and as a consequence of the publication of the Considerations Concerning the Present Engagement (1650), the Council of State described that work as ‘of great use for better carrying on the Test’ and provided an annual pension of £200.13 Under the supervision of the ‘juncto’’s leading exponent Bulstrode Whitelocke, from 1650 to 1660 Dury held the post of ‘deputy keeper’ of the king’s library at St James’s Palace.14 Between late 1649 and 1651 Dury wrote approximately nine pamphlets in which he affirmed the necessity of submission to the government and accept the Engagement. In his Considerations Dury drew on the arguments already put forward by Ascham and Rous. After having submitted a personal version of the Engagement to the Council of State,15 Dury linked the taking of the Engagement to the acknowledgment of the de facto authority, affirmed its consistency with the Covenant, and, most of all, pointed to the relation between obedience and protection as an essential prerequisite for the accomplishment of the reform of the post-Anglican Church.16 In the pamphlet of 1650 Concerning Ministers Medling with State Matters in or out their Sermons Dury, like Ascham before him, drew on Grotius’s De Imperio affirming that only the cooperation between ‘the magistracy and the ministery’, or better the subordination of ministers to the civil magistrate, would ensure ‘eternall and 17 temporall felicity, both towards God and man’. It was necessary to draw a distinction ‘between the duties of ministers and magistrates’: the former ‘are not properly over men as magistrates are in human affairs, to command and compel obedience to that which enjoined’, neither could they make declarations ‘concerning the affaires of State, which are the magistrate’s employment, their opinions in their sermons touching the Gospel’.18 Like Ascham, Dury implicitly acknowledged that the present government had been established in consequence of usurpation. Notwithstanding, a usurping magistrate having the ‘plenary possession’ of power and who ruled with ‘equity’ was better than civil and religious radicalism.19 Dury shared with Ascham a concern for the issue of conscience, and he also repeated Ascham’s argument concerning 107

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the validity of oaths to say that the clauses of the Covenant concerning the religious reformation would have been kept by the new government after the taking of the Engagement. However, unlike Ascham and more like Rous (whom he referred to a few times), Dury mostly deployed the language of providential Calvinism, and insisted on the more traditional stance that the end of civil government was the guarantee of social peace insofar as this was a prerequisite of a godly life. Rous, Dury and Ascham gave voice to those MPs who now held sovereign power and who had reluctantly backed the execution of the king and had taken back their seats only after the Purge and regicide. Many of them had returned to Parliament with the purpose of curbing the rise of radicalism and restoring the state order. They regretted the Purge, and wished to reconcile 20 with the Presbyterians by allowing them to return into the political arena. Yet, Ascham’s argument, though increasingly deployed at the service of the politics of conciliation with the Presbyterians promoted by the ‘juncto’, was on the whole less moderate than that of his allies, as it incorporated some of the stances (from the idea of popular sovereignty to the demand for religious toleration) that we have associated with the political and religious thought of the Independent MPs. In the political context of 1648–50, some of these ideas were also consistent with those of the minority of radicals who had led the revolution, and who were committed to break with the monarchical past and achieve a true reformation of religion and society. Pointing to the nuances of the ideological tenets within the Roundhead side (rather than insisting on clear-cut distinctions or on rigid affiliations), could also explain both Ascham’s political career and solve some of the difficulties inherent in locating him exactly within the intellectual context of that period. The views of the radical minority of MPs that, with the support of the army, had promoted the regicide, established the Republic, and imposed the Engagement were championed by Milton, Nedham and Hall. Yet, although they originally contributed to the political debate by drawing a ‘categorical distinction’ between monarchical and republican government, on many issues there was a common political and ideological ground between their arguments and those of the speakers of the moderate side like Ascham. We have already hinted at the differences and similarities between Ascham’s and Milton’s views of tyranny and religious toleration. Like Cook and Bradshaw, Ascham did not regard usurpation as prejudicial to the legitimacy of rule. They were concerned with the political conduct of sovereign authorities, whether monarchical or republican. A king or an assembly had to be obeyed insofar as it ruled with equity: the king had failed to do so, while Ascham insisted that the Rump would do better. Milton, instead, more drastically equated monarchy with tyranny. He grounded his argument in support of the republican government on the idea of popular sovereignty. In The Tenure Milton proved that kings were originally instituted through the 108

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consent of the people, so ‘that turning to tyranny they may bee as lawfully depos’d and punish’d, as they were at first elected’.21 People retained some of their liberties, and thus they have ‘the right of choosing, yea of changing thir own government is by the grant of God himself in the people’.22 St Paul’s injunction to obey those who held the power ‘must be also understood of lawfull and just power’ that is the power of the magistrates who ruled with ‘equity’, for the common good.23 What, according to Milton, should have been replaced by the monarchical/tyrannical government in order to better represent the people’s consent? Despite his awareness of the centrality of constitutions in political life, the constitutional pars construens of Milton’s early republican tracts was missing. In the first Defensio we see him oscillating between the general assertion that the republican form of government ‘seemed to God more advantageous for his chosen people’, and the laconic acknowledgement that the constitution that had been settled after the abolition of monarchy ‘is not as such as were to be desired, but such as the persistent strife of wicked 24 citizens will suffer it to be’. Both Milton and Ascham shared a contractual view of the origins of society based on Grotius’s De Jure.25 Apart from the manuscript on matrimony, Ascham’s published works shared with Milton’s Tenure the idea that subjects retained some of their original liberties. They differed over the use to be made in conscience in the exercise of these rights. According to Milton ‘since the King or Magistrate holds his authoritie of the people, both originally and naturally for their good in the first place … than may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him’.26 Milton associated the decision to change government with the possibility of achieving liberty and virtue,27 and with this in mind he turned his natural law theory into a theory of revolution.28 Ascham’s point of departure was almost the same as Milton’s, but he prioritised order and peace, and thus he sought to convince his audience to make right use of their reason and to cease resisting. The differences between the ‘republican’ Milton and the ‘de facto theorist’ Ascham are significant, though not always so clear-cut. They both agreed that individual liberties had religious and ethical implications and could not 29 be surrendered. However, Ascham served a party working for conciliation and settlement, and thus insisted on not turning these rights into rebellion, while Milton celebrated the ‘heroic acts’ accomplished by the few worthies in Parliament and the army. Their political affiliation again helps to make sense of some of their intellectual differences. Ascham’s writings were intended for a Presbyterian and royalist audience (the two, since autumn 1648, seemed to coalesce). Ascham and his close allies sought to find compromise with their former allies, demanding that they submit to a kingless form of government in terms which fitted with their royalism. Accordingly, Ascham condemned the Levellers and the army’s influence over the civil government. Milton (along with Nedham and Hall) thought instead that the Presbyterians were the enemies to liberty. ‘Our Adversaries, Presbyterials’, he argued, had been 109

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former allies in the war against tyranny, but now they invoked the Covenant as a pretext for opposing the trial of the king.30 Yet, despite Ascham’s conciliatory tones with regard to the Presbyterians, it is worth remembering that he shared Milton’s anti-clericalism when he explained, drawing on De Imperio, that ministers ought not to meddle in civil affairs. Among the ‘vulgar and irrational men’ whose ‘throng and noises’ prevented from spelling out the reasons which led ‘the worthies’ to overthrow the government, Milton also included those who had contested ‘for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of iniquity, thir gibrish lawes, though the badge of thir ancient 31 slavery’, that is the Levellers. Milton’s hostility to the Levellers derived from their legal opposition to the trial and execution of Charles, an opposition that bothered his radical protectors in Parliament.32 Finally, on a closer look, even Milton’s and Ascham’s attitudes towards monarchical government appear not to be mutually antagonistic, and even in this case political pressures weighed in determining their respective approaches. Ascham expressly regretted mixed government, and his de facto justification of the republican government was notoriously lacking in any overt commitment or enthusiasm, even if it was not explicitly critical. For his part, Milton’s constitutional republicanism was never a doctrinarian one.33 In the Defensio he admitted ‘that the same form of government is not equally fitting for all nations, or for the same nations at all times’. His reticence about expressing full support for the constitutional change occurred in 1649, along with his scattered though significant appreciations of the historical examples of ‘virtuous’ and ‘good’ kings (even hereditary ones), suggests that Milton’s association of tyranny with monarchy in The Tenure did not derive merely from the belief in the inherent superiority of a kingless constitution. Arguably, it also related to his personal criticism of Charles I’s misrule on the one hand, and to the need to suit the propaganda campaign implemented by Bradshaw, Cook and the radicals (that expanded the charge of tyranny from the person of Charles to monarchical rule as a whole) on the other. Milton’s plea for religious and intellectual freedom was thus not strictly connected with a republican constitution, insofar as even a king gifted with ‘extraordinary virtue’ could virtually look after the salus populi and implement the reformation of the realm.34 The same combination of distinctive features and similarities between Ascham’s and Milton’s writings could be found in Nedham’s The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated. Even more boldly than Milton’s Tenure, Nedham’s first work as official pamphleteer and journalist of the Rump contained overt praise of republican government. Yet, a veritable outline of republican ideology was developed only in Chapter 5 of Part II, entitled ‘Discourse of the excellency of a free State above a kingly government’,35 while the first part was taken almost entirely from Ascham’s work. In it, Nedham addressed to ‘those parties whereof the world consists, viz. the conscientious 110

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man and the worldling’, and tried to reconcile the former with the latter.36 With this purpose, Nedham demanded submission on the basis of de facto arguments, and immediately after he sought to convince his readers about the inherent virtues and superiority of republics. On the whole Nedham’s tract appeared to have a split personality that could be in part explained by looking at the distinct audiences he addressed. One way to make sense of such an eclecticism spanning the intellectual spectrum of the de facto theory and ‘republicanism’ is to look once again at the political context out of which The Case emerged. Two weeks after the publication of The Case, the Council of State paid Nedham £50 and conferred a pension of £100 on him ‘whereby he may subsist while endeavouring to serve the Commonwealth’.37 In both The Case and in the editorials of Mercurius Politicus, Nedham promoted the cause of the regicide in support of John Bradshaw and of the minority of ‘commonweahtsmen’ in the Rump led by Henry Marten, Thomas Chaloner, and Henry Vane.38 He thus applauded the audacity of those radicals who insisted on the necessity to overthrow the monarchy and spread the republican revolution to the Continent.39 However, it is also true that the whole first part of The Case had won for Nedham the designation of de facto theorist. In fact, in consequence of the ongoing confrontations within the Rump between moderate/ reconciliatory impulses and radical/reformatory purposes, Nedham took many of the arguments already expressed by the leading spokesman of the moderate majority, Ascham.40 The subtitle of The Case in fact affirmed ‘The equity, utility, and necessity, of a submission to the present government’ and Chapter 2 established ‘That the power of the sword is, and ever hath been, the foundation of all titles to government’. According to Nedham the first form of government inheriting fatherly authority over the original families was monarchy, and more precisely the ‘tyrannical’ monarchy of Nimrod. Nimrod was a tyrant not in consequence of usurpation, but because he had abused the power entrusted him by the people.41 Like Ascham, Bradshaw and Cook (but unlike Milton), Nedham justified a tyranny by usurpation but not one ‘by practice’. Nedham traced a genealogy of monarchical power from the original tyranny of Nimrod to the empires of Claudius and Nero similar to that traced by Rous in his pamphlet of 1649, and it continued with more contemporary examples. From it Nedham drew the lesson that ‘The sword [is] the only disposer, and dispenser of titles to common-weales & kingdomes’, and that the peoples ‘for publique peace and quiet’ had always ‘paid a patient submission to them, under their various revolutions’. It followed ‘that those whose title is supposed unlawfull, and founded merely upon force, yet being possessed of authority, may lawfully be obeyed’.42 Nedham then followed Ascham’s line of reasoning by overlapping Machiavelli and Grotius in order to show the coincidence between ‘power’ and ‘authority’. He quoted Grotius’s De Jure to note the concept that those who seized rule through force had to be obeyed, while those who opposed them had to be treated as ‘seditious and 111

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trayterous’. According to the law of nations the victors in war had the right ‘to use all meanes for securing what they have gotten, and to exercise a right of dominion over the conquer’d party’. The law of nations thus prevailed over individual conscience in virtue of its universality, and obliged submission to the present government and the abandonment of ‘former allegiances, oathes and covenants’.43 Nedham’s use of Grotius was even more radical than Ascham’s, insofar as it did not deploy the same care in trying to link the issue of self-preservation to that of soul’s salvation. This aspect was particularly sensitive to the Presbyterians, towards whom Nedham displayed overt hostility. Nedham sought to demonstrate ‘That nonsubmission to government justly deprives men of the benefits of its protection’ and, like Ascham, his point of departure was Grotius. Nedham quoted Chapter 20, Book III of De Jure to link obedience 44 and protection. Submission was a necessity, and it entailed the renunciation to the right of resistance to superior magistrates in order to allow the government to fulfil the main duties of a ‘civill communion’, that is the ‘publique safety’ and the ‘publique equity’.45 Finally, according to Rous, but especially to ‘the most excellent Grotius’, the disputes over the legitimacy of the titles of rule were useless since every power came (mediately or immediately) from God. Also Nedham’s Chapter 4, entitled ‘That a government erected by a prevailing part of the people is as valid de jure, as if it had the ratifying consent of the whole’, re-exposed the arguments previously put forward by Ascham in the Discourse’s Chapter 9, and Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, Chapter 13. On the basis of Grotius’s analysis of the ‘right of war’, Nedham affirmed that the parliamentary party who had won the war (like Ascham he did not talk of civil war), had the right to establish a government ‘as valid de jure, as if it had the consent of the whole body of the people’.46 That is, implicitly, in the aftermath of 1649, Parliament may not have had the consent of the people but nonetheless it held a lawful authority. Nedham then recurred to Grotius’s examination of sovereign rights deriving from victory, with the purpose of countering the critiques to the Republic contained in Gee’s Exercitation. In responding to Gee’s observation, according to which in order to establish the legitimacy of the new government ‘a calling from the people [is] necessary and essentiall to a humanely constituted magistracies’, Nedham drew again on Ascham and Rous. If a lawful change of government required ‘the consent of the body of the people, or the major part of their representatives’, in the present condition the people’s consent had been replaced by ‘force and power’.47 However, in the ‘Discourse of the excellency of a free State above a kingly government’, Nedham considerably revised his argument in support of the present government, expounding ‘by way of conclusion’ the positive reasons for adhering to the Republic.48 The republic was the best form of government, as it prevented the advent of ‘a regall, or a Presbyterian, or a popular tyranny’, educated the citizens to the value of freedom,49 defended the 112

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religious and civil liberties of the people,50 embodied the common interest, and ensured the progress of the community. The Case’s first part affirmed that the present government, established in consequence of an usurpation and thus not explicitly legitimised by the people’s consent, had to be obeyed for mere necessity and self-preservation. The final chapter of the second part, instead, pointed to a different relation between the government and the people, one that prioritised liberty over security, conceded the right of resistance, and praised ­representative institutions. These themes were deployed in the editorials of Mercurius Politicus, but in 1650 the intellectually incoherent arguments in support of the Republic displayed by the two parts of The Case mirrored the unsteady equilibrium between ‘parties’ within the new government. In the second part, Nedham started by addressing the single ‘parties’ that had torn apart the country, that is the ‘Royalists, Scots, Presbyterians, Levellers’, blaming the ‘vanity of their designes, together with the improbability of their successe, and inconveniences which must follow … to the extreme prejudice of the Nation’. He spoke for a party composed of ‘men of valor and virtue, free from those corruptions of excesse and riot, and sensible of liberty’. Nedham thus championed the cause of the minority of worthies, the ‘commonwealthsmen’, who, ‘being supported by counsellers grave, serious, abstemious and vigilant, and by a soldiery’, wanted to accomplish the political and religious reformation of the country.51 Between 1649 and 1651 this minority had to arm-wrestle with the majority of moderates wishing to rally with the Presbyterians and royalists, and the work of Nedham, whose political go-between was Bradshaw, leader of the Council of State and charged with the monitoring of the political press, incorporated both stances. What we see epitomised in Nedham’s work of 1650, was the existence of different though interrelated and somehow interchangeable ways of talking of the same government. A former royalist himself,52 Nedham extensively used royalist authors in support of the republican government. These authors were Grotius, Hobbes, Claude de Saumaise, and the two German reason of 53 state theorists Arnold Clapmar and Christoph Besold. The last five pages of the appendix to the second edition of The Case, appearing in October 1650, contained passages taken from Hobbes’s De Corpore.54 As we have seen, this had been also one of the major additions made by Ascham to the expanded version of the Discourse of November 1649. Among the passages taken from Hobbes were those in which he had affirmed that there could be no ‘security for life, limbs and liberty’ without ‘relinquishing our right of self-protection’ and that the order of the nation could be achieved only through ‘a submission to the present power’.55 The overall picture of the writing of the Commonwealth from 1649 to late 1652 (when the republican editorials of the Politicus drawn from The Case ceased to appear), with its apparently inextricable interplay between political allegiances, personal beliefs, and propaganda, is further complicated by 113

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the case of John Hall. After the first Civil War, Hall frequented the literary circle gathered in London by Thomas Stanley, which included figures with a strong royalist political background like Berkenhead, Lovelace, Moseley and Marvell. In the same period Hall also became actively involved in the ‘Hartlib circle’, sharing with John Dury a commitment to achieve a ‘Christian society’ through educational reformation.56 In 1646–47 Hall’s educational commitment increasingly involved him in political controversies. The threat of authoritarian rule under the Presbyterians in late 1647 led Hall to buttress a royalist-Independent alliance, and to declare allegiance to the Parliament in 57 the Second Civil War. Hall’s anti-Presbyterian stances were influenced by the reading of Milton and Nedham. In The Advancement of Learning (May 1649) Hall argued for an educational reform against Presbyterian narrowness. This project might have been achieved either by ‘kings’ or ‘republicks’, but since Parliament had the rule, he asked for the Rump’s support.58 However, his change of side, which earned him employment by the Commonwealth as propagandist after the regicide, did not entail a rupture with Hall’s former royalist connections.59 The death of the young son of Lord Hastings, a few months after the regicide, prompted Richard Brome to publish the collection of elegies Lachrymae Musarum to which Hall made his own contribution. This volume was soundly royalist in tone, as it echoed the tragedy of Charles I’s execution narrated in the Eikon Basilike. Hall’s elegy, with its emphasis on the stoic acceptance of the natural laws governing the world and determining the tragic fate of humans, has been assimilated to Ascham’s de facto defence of the new government.60 In 1651, though, with the publication of The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered Hall displayed an overt commitment to the cause of the Commonwealth. Unlike Nedham’s praise for the virtues of ancient and modern republican constitutions, Hall adopted a ‘negative method’ which pointed out the flaws of kingship, especially of hereditary kingship.61 Some of Hall’s arguments echoed both those of Ascham and Milton. Hall affirmed that in relation to the capacity to achieve their aims, ‘many men … intrusted, and concurring to the same end, might do much more good’ than a single person: ‘it follows then that republics may be as just as authoritative 62 as kingships’. The ‘power’ was not a mark of kingship, as scripture ‘speaks of it in a latitutde of, as extending it to all sorts of establish’d governments’.63 Hall also criticised ‘Boxhornius’s distinction of succession, wherein the next heir must necessarily succede by the original right of the former’. Yet, when it came to examine ‘the intrinsic value and expediency of this Government’, Hall became much more prudent. He cautioned himself by saying that that was such a ticklish issues that ‘even Mr. Hobs in his piece de Cive, though he assured himself that the rest of his book (which is principally calculated for the assertion of monarchy) is demonstrated, yet he doubts whether the Argument which he brings to this business be so firm or not’.64 Hall thus resolved to turn from general notions to concrete examples, by dedicating the 114

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second part to the current situation of Scotland, which he hoped would be transformed into a polity similar to the English one.65

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COMMONWEALTH, REPUBLIC AND STATE From Rous to Hall, a surprisingly rich and varied range of ideas and values were used to support adhesion to the rule of Parliament and the Republic. These ideas were not inherently linked to a singular form of polity. As they touched on issues like the relations between obedience and protection, state power and individual rights, civil magistrate and church, individual conscience and national religion, they related both to monarchical and republican governments. Ascham himself explained that after the establishment of the Republic and the imposition of the Engagement on state councillors, the public debate had dealt with issues ‘in jure publico, in the originall of ­magistracy and government, in the nature of possession, prescriptive right of … necessity, of assertory & promissory oaths’.66 Some further examples may help to clear how a basically dichotomic approach to English political thought from 1648 to 1652, based on the distinction between monarchical and republican thought, can in some cases be misleading. Ascham’s tract on marriage has been included in the republican stream of thought about marriage along with Milton’s, Rous’s, Hutchinson’s, Cooper’s and Sidney’s, according to which ‘marriage serves the interests of civic order’.67 Yet, a concern with the family and social order was also a distinctive feature of the Anglican-royalist vision of marriage. In 1651 was published the first English translation of Grotius’s De Imperio by the Anglican and royalist clergyman Clement Barksdale. The work started with the following statement: ‘By the highest power, I understand a person or a company that hath empire, or authority over the people, subject to the empire of God alone’.68 This work had been originally intended by Grotius (also in relation to the Anglo-Dutch context to which it addressed) for both a monarchical and republican state. Grotius’s concern was with the kind of authority that the ‘highest powers’ held over church and religion. For this reason Barksdale, who was a supporter of Charles II, concluded his translation with ‘An advertisement to the Stationer’, in which he acknowledged that the work might be objected to be ‘any way opposite to the present Government, speaking so much of kings and emperors’. ‘The answer is, that the judicious author distinguished between kings absolute, and such as are confin’d or bound by laws; and cannot act without or against a parliament’. ‘This treatise – Barksdale continued – doth not presume to dispute the States’ authority … but presupposing that, humbly shews them what they may and ought to doe, on behalf of the Church’. With regard to civil power, a senate without a king ‘is as it were a king’.69

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Another example of how ideas originally intended for monarchical government were used on behalf of the republic or could be interpreted as supportive of the Commonwealth, is that of Hobbes. Ascham and Nedham took from Hobbes’s De Corpore some passages concerning the relation between obedience and protection and deployed them in support of the Republic along with the ideas of salus populi and reason of state. In 1651 Hobbes’s Leviathan also appeared. Much of the immediate reactions to this work related to its theology, but there were some authors, like the republican Independent William Rand, who explicitly acknowledged that the Leviathan contained many 70 ideas valid for a Commonwealth, thus anticipating the ongoing controversy over the supposed monarchical, republican, or Cromwellian background of this work.71 Some of the difficulties in locating an author like Ascham within the intellectual spectrum of republican, de facto or royalist thought mainly derive from the current disagreement about the definition of ‘republicanism’.72 So far there have been two main approaches to the understanding of English republicanism: one related to Quentin Skinner’s emphasis on ‘constitutional’ republicanism, consisting of a commitment to kingless government; the other to J. G. A. Pocock’s idea of ‘civic humanism’, consisting of a commitment to the common good of the community which dated back to sixteenth-­century Florentine and particularly Machiavellian humanism.73 Despite recent attempts at combining both these aspects in a long-term context,74 the relation between a supposed corpus of ‘republican’ ideas and values and a kingless constitution remains unsolved. Skinner’s view that a republican constitution incorporated the dyad liberty-representation is at odds in explaining Milton’s and Cook’s opinion that a ‘powerful and virtuous ruler’ (in antithesis to Charles I) could promote the common good and the virtue of his subjects.75 Similarly the idea (associated for instance with Parker), according to which a preference for a mixed constitution limited by the rule of law was a form of ‘monarchical republicanism’, seems to alter the English tradition of monarchical ‘limited’ 76 rule dating back to Fortescue. Furthermore, despite their insistence on the king’s honour and conscience and their defence of his power of veto, from 1645–46 onwards, the ‘constitutional Royalists’ Bramhall, Jenkins, Dallison, Howell and Spelman insisted on the fact that the royal power had to be limited and guided by the rule of law. According to them, it was Parliament which had posed a threat to legality thus violating the people’s consent.77 These positions cannot be categorically distinguished by the ‘monarchical republic’ of Parker. Finally, such a version of republicanism is inconsistent with the possibility that a republican form of government could be supported in terms of divine right (as in the case of Rous), or by admitting its oligarchic or tyrannical nature (as in the case of Ascham and Nedham). One answer, we have argued, is to invoke an ideologically neutral third kind of position, coinciding with the de facto theory. However, the de facto theorists wrote on behalf of the Rump 116

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and the Republic, and they also shared many presuppositions and ideas with republican theorists, so that rather than being regarded as distinct political thinkers, they can be used to argue the inclusiveness and gnoseologic validity of current definitions of republicanism. In 2004 Jonathan Scott attempted a more general survey of the ‘Commonwealth principles’ in seventeenth-century England. According to Scott, the understanding of republicanism requires going beyond single key concepts and authors. ‘To understand republicanism as a whole, or even any one text, we need to recover the constellation of ideas informing what came 78 to be known as the “good old cause”’. The roots of this ‘intellectual phenomenon’ have to be traced to long-term ideological contexts, including the Greek and Latin classics, Machiavelli’s Discourses, ancient constitutionalism, natural law theories, natural philosophy, stoicism and interest theory, and a commitment to radical Protestant reformation. Republicanism was also defined in contrast to monarchy and tyranny. After the collapse of monarchy, English ‘commonwealthsmen’ drew on this cultural tradition in support of the republican cause.79 Republicanism was not a monolithic tradition, as it was marked by internal variety and development over time. Its conceptual content consisted mainly of the values of ‘liberty’ and ‘virtue’, whose accomplishment required a certain constitutional framework which ranged from Machiavelli’s analysis of Rome to the modern examples of Venice and the United Provinces. Liberty also meant people’s sovereignty and the right to change governments according to salus populi.80 The ‘constellation of ideas’ that Scott subsumed under the category of ‘republicanism’ incorporated also James Harrington’s ‘prescription for healing and settling’.81 With its emphasis on order and peace rather than on liberty and political change, Harrington’s Oceana represented a sort of exception with respect to other ‘classical’ republican writings. The reasons for such peculiarity have to be traced to Harrington’s political attempt ‘to unite moderate commonwealthsmen, Presbyterians and Royalists’ and thus ‘overcome partisan division’. With this aim, he drew ‘on Royalist as well as Republican sources and arguments’. Among them Hobbes’s ‘civil philosophy’ provided him with an intellectual framework which prioritised ‘peace and settlement’ 82 over liberty. Yet, the case of Harrington (and we might also include Ascham), poses the problem of the inclusiveness of a definition of republicanism that virtually includes everything but tyranny. Furthermore, Scott’s remarks that republicanism was not a language, because some languages were used for different purposes,83 in fact raises the question of how to distinguish between the meanings of republican and non-republican ideas or languages (whatever their difference is), and the uses to which they were put. Should we put Hobbes’s and Grotius’s ideas within the republican tradition, or rather point to some of their possible applications to the republican cause? What about Ascham’s justification of ‘republican’ tyranny? And, finally, if a concern with 117

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order and peace, along with liberty and change, was a characteristic of the republican constitution, what was left to ‘monarchical’ thought? The purpose here is not to challenge the idea that in the period here examined there was a commitment to republican government by a minority of politicians and authors, who deployed specific arguments and ideas which could be seen as ‘republican’ and which would have a long-standing impact on Western republican culture. What is criticised here, in the light of the examination of Ascham’s work and of its differences and similarities with the other political writings of the Commonwealth, is the persistent attempt to sustain too narrow or too broad definitions of ‘republicanism’ which leave unexplained the nuances and ambiguities of the reception and use of political ideas which were not strictly connected with a republican polity. This search for the ideological and constitutional roots of English republican thinking has in fact provoked a sort of interpretative short-circuit, based on the assumption that since there existed in early modern England (and Europe) the concept of ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘republic’, what remained was to recover its distinctive features and turn them into a consistent definition. ‘Commonwealth’, however, was a ‘contested term’.84 During the sixteenth century the term ‘Commonwealth’ was associated with other terms ‘denoting the ethical and social purposes of government, its duty to provide for security, social order, justice, peace, and prosperity’. It was, in short, ‘a term for the political order, or State’.85 At the same time, according to another stream of thinking about the ‘res publica’ which can be traced mainly to Cicero, the republic was grounded in the consent of the people and run by officers operating on the people’s behalf according to an agreed corpus of laws.86 Both interrelated meanings persisted in the seventeenth century, and with the outbreak of the Civil Wars the role of monarchy in the Commonwealth was increasingly contested in relation to its capacity to look after the common good. In the wake of 1649 the connotation of the Commonwealth as a republican form of government was brought to the forefront by the minority of ‘commonwealthsmen’ in the Rump and their ideologues Milton, Nedham, and Hall. Nonetheless many in the Parliament, especially among the moderates, sought to retain its earlier usage. During the 1640s there had been a broad agreement on both sides about the purpose of restoring the balance of the mixed polity. No one wanted the kingship to be abolished or wished a change of government.87 The proceedings against Charles I rested on a criticism of his personal conduct or, to a more general extent, of the principle of personal and unaccountable rule, but they did not imply the necessity of abolishing monarchy.88 This explains why the acts of March to May 1649 abolishing the kingly office ambiguously adopted the definition of ‘Commonwealth and Free-State’, as if they could refer both to a republic and a monarchy, in the perspective of the restoration of the latter. The Rump tended to use the term ‘Commonwealth’ in the sense of ‘res publica’, that is of state or country regardless of form of government and sometimes as synonymous of ‘kingdom’. Under the 118

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pressures of its moderate majority, the legislative body of the Republic tended to represent itself firstly as a Parliament, ‘the remnant of the Commons which had survived Pride’s Purge’, and secondly as a Commonwealth.89 Ascham himself in 1649 refashioned in a republican guise the same arguments he had put forward in 1648 in support of the monarchical–parliamentary settlement (drawing on the Heads of the Proposals) implemented by the political party of the Independents in Parliament. In 1650 John Lilburne pointed out the continuing ambiguities in the term Commonwealth which could signify either ‘all the good & legall people of England’ or ‘the essentiall and fundamentall 90 government of England as it is now established’. The royalist Sanderson did the same, according to whom the term could stand for the ‘whole entire body of the English nation, as it is a civil society or State within itself’.91 Sanderson’s suggestion that ‘Commonwealth’ simply meant ‘State’ was intended for the royalist to take the Engagement, and, along with Lilburne’s distinction, it was intended to resist the identification of the Commonwealth with the minority of ‘commonwealthsmen’.92 What emerges from the brief overview of the writing of the Commonwealth from 1649 to the early 1650s, is that there were authors like Rous, Dury, Ascham and Nedham who extensively deployed the ideas of Filmer, Hobbes, Besold, Grotius and the argument of divine right power in support of the ‘Commonwealth or Free-State’. Both the translation of Grotius’s De Imperio and the publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan prompted contrasting interpretations about the political intentions of their authors. The works of Grotius and Machiavelli, which constituted a common denominator of moderate, de facto and republican writings, were differently combined by Ascham, Milton and Nedham in order to respond to the problems of state order, conflict and freedom. Then we have Milton’s and Hall’s defence of kingless rule, and Nedham’s praise of free-states. According to what we have indicatively regarded as a dichotomic approach, along with these parliamentary and republican writings stood the royalists. These may be distinguished into the ‘constitutional Royalists’ (drawing on the points made by Charles I’s Answer to the Nineteenth Propositions), and the political theorists of absolute monarchy (Filmer, Hobbes, Maxwell, Williams, Hudson).93 After the abolition of monarchy royalist stances mostly appeared in the form of pieces of propaganda like Eikon Basilike, controversial or consolatory sermons, and ‘a veritable flood of verse elegies’.94 Yet we have Ascham and Hall searching for a royalist– Independent alliance, and also Rous and Ascham backing the ‘juncto’’s conciliatory agenda with the Presbyterians. Moreover, the relation between the Commonwealth and the church cannot be easily ascribed to a specific political side. Ascham, Nedham, Hobbes, Selden, Grotius and Barksdale shared an Erastian vision of church government, but this assumed different undertones (Anglican, Independent, conformist, tolerant) within their broader visions of civil and religious reformation. 119

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Another way, beyond a royalist/republican perspective, to make sense of the complexity of Ascham’s political thought is to take into account the existence of a network of words, values or ideas gravitating around the concept of ‘commonwealth’ or ‘respublica’ or ‘state’. Many of these ideas, like those of liberty, order, revolution, sovereignty, and the analysis of the relation between civil power and religion or of the government’s aims, belonged not only to the conceptual fields of republican or royalist thought, but also to that of the modern ‘state’. The context in which to understand Ascham and other political thinkers of the period is one in which these ideas interacted 95 and produced a specific framework of concepts in moment of crisis. And it was precisely in a moment of crisis, like that ranging from the Second Civil War to the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, that consolidated a way of talking of the ‘state’ that somehow departed from its constitutional forms. The theme of the origins and aims of the ‘state’ had earlier been tackled in a seventeenth-century context torn apart by the Thirty Years War and its repercussions in the English Civil Wars, by Grotius and Hobbes. Both authors were concerned with demonstrating that a civil government could at once concede the original sovereignty of the people and be absolute (in the sense of indivisible and irresistible) in its political allegiance.96 Their twofold purpose was to defuse the revolutionary implications of people’s sovereignty and natural rights, and assign to the civil authorities a power which enabled them to provide for the common good. Hobbes had dealt with this problem from the publication of De Cive in 1642, but he arrived at a satisfactory solution only in the Leviathan. In the work of 1651 Hobbes refashioned his concept of representation in terms of ‘authorisation’, according to which an action could be validly attributed to one person if it was performed by a representative which had been ‘duly’ and deliberately authorised.97 Grotius’s De Jure was another attempt to ground a theory of absolute sovereignty in a social compact. According to Quentin Skinner, as Grotius, Hobbes and Bodin, ‘we arrive at the view that the ends of civil or political association take it indispensable to establish a single and supreme authority whose power remains distinct not merely from the people who originally instituted it, but also from whatever office holders may be said to have the right to wield its power at any particular 98 time’. The name of this ‘single supreme’ political authority, distinguished by the officers who physically represented it, was called ‘république’ or ‘estat’ by Bodin, ‘respublica’ by Grotius and ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘State’ by Hobbes. Hobbes used the word ‘State’ in his Preface to De Cive and recast this notion in Chapter 16 of Leviathan within his theory of an ‘artificial person’. Members of a multitude living in the state of nature instituted an ‘artificial person’ authorised to act on their behalf by ‘some natural person or persons to represent them’. These representatives were called sovereigns, and they could be either a single natural person in the case of a monarchy, or few or many persons in the case of a (aristocratic or democratic) republic.99 120

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Hobbes’s theory of the ‘state’ was an attempt to find a third way between ‘those that contend, on one side for too great liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority’.100 Ascham’s de facto theory was a similar, although theoretically less original and systematic attempt at dealing with the same problem in response to the dramatic circumstances which followed one another from 1648 to 1650. The Civil Wars and the abolition of kingly office had not been backed by a general agreement about the fact that the English constitution was a mixed monarchy. Those who sought to reconcile the country beyond supposed ‘Cavalier’, ‘Roundhead’ or republican partisanship had to find a common denominator for political allegiance, and this was found in the language of the ‘state’. Ascham took from Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, Filmer and Hobbes a set of ideas related to sovereignty, popular consent, natural rights, absolute obedience, protection, religious liberty in order to restore order from a condition of potentially endemic war. These ideas were to be taken as a common ideological ground for coalition, so that they could not strictly belong to one side or another. In doing so, Ascham and other writers were pressed by impending circumstances which may justify for them the tag of de facto theorists. However, this tag risks underestimating the intellectual meaning of these writings d’occasion: in their attempt to cope with unpredictable events, or ride them for personal advantages, they forced and went further than the original ideological content of some of their ideas, dealing with issues which found a more systematic treatment in Hobbes’s theory of ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state’.

NOTES   1 Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, p. 148; Judson, From Tradition to Political Reality, pp. 10–11.   2 Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 219.   3 Worden, Literature and Politics, pp. 59–60.   4 S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, pp. 33, 53–8, 96.   5 Skinner, Visions of Politics, III, pp. 231, 279.   6 Q. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998); ‘Classical liberty and the coming of the English civil war’, in van Gelderen and Skinner (eds), Republicanism, II, pp. 9–28.    7 J. Scott, ‘The English republican imagination’, in J. Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, 1992), p. 37.   8 Q. Skinner, ‘The monarchical republic enthroned’, in J. F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2007), p. 233.    9 Skinner, ‘Monarchical republic’, p. 239.   10 J. T. Young, ‘Durie, John (1596–1680)’, ODNB.   11 T. H. H. Rae, John Dury and the Royal Road to Piety (Frankfurt, 1998), p. 73.   12 On the relations between Rous and Dury see Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, p. 199. 121

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Order and conflict  13 CSPD, 1649–1650, p. 448.   14 Young, ‘Durie, John’.   15 The integral version of Dury’s draft of the Engagement was exposed at page 26 of the third edition of the Considerations which appeared in 1650 but bore the date of 18 December 1649.   16 Cf. J. Dury, The Unchanged, Constant and Single-Hearted Peacemaker drawn forth unto the World (1650).   17 The influence here of De Imperio is also argued in Batten’s John Dury, p. 121 n21.   18 J. Dury, A Case of Conscience Concerning Ministers Medling with State Matters (1650), pp. 24, 50.   19 Dury, Considerations, pp. 16–17, 23; J. Dury, A Disengag’d Survey of the Engagement (1650), pp. 21–2.   20 Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 187.  21 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 8.   22 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 13.  23 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, pp. 9, 15.   24 Cit. in Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 164.   25 Cf. Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 9. Milton here quoted Grotius’s De Jure, I,4:2,1.   26 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 13.  27 Milton saw liberty as antithetical to slavery. Liberty could be attained through the rational government of the passions both within the soul and state. In his approach to the concept of liberty Milton was influenced by the history of Greece and Rome, and particularly by the authority of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero (J. Milton, Defence of the People of England, in D. M. Wolfe (general editor), Complete Prose Works (New Haven, 1958), I, pp. 343, 360).   28 Dzeldzainis, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.   29 Milton shared with Dury an emphasis on religious liberty (a vision that he did not hesitate to display in apocalyptic terms). In 1651 Dury worked on a French translation from the Latin of Milton’s Eikonoklastes which circulated widely on the Continent (Batten, John Dury, p. 125).   30 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, pp. 5, 8.  31 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 4.   32 M. Dzeldzainis, ‘History and ideology: Milton, the Levellers and the Council of State in 1649’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68, 1–2 (March 2005), pp. 269–87.  33 Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 229.  34 Worden, Literature and Politics, pp. 227–32.  35 Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 296.   36 M. Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated (London, 1650), p. 4.   37 P. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008), p. 197.   38 Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham’, pp. 62–3, 71–4.   39 Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, p. 199.   40 On Ascham’s influence on Nedham’s tract, see Barducci, ‘Hugo Grotius and the English Republic’, pp. 56–61.  41 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 6.   42 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 8.  43 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 16. 122

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Ascham: de facto theorist or ‘commonwealthsman’?   44 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 17.  45 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 18.   46 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, pp. 20–1.   47 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 22.   48 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 80.   49 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 82.   50 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 89.  51 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, p. 83.  52 Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, pp. 186–9.  53 On Nedham’s use of the works of Clapmar and Besold, which ‘belonged to a tradition which was not marked by any commitment to republicanism’, see R. Foxley, ‘Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State’, in G. Mahlberg and D. Wiemann (eds), European Contexts for English Republicanism (Farnham, 2013), pp. 49–62.  54 Cf. N. D. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge, 2007), p. 53.   55 M. Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, Appendix, pp. 108–9.   56 N. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2008), pp. 53ff.   57 D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 217.   58 J. Hall, An Humble Motion to the Parliament of England Concerning the Advancement of Learning (1649), p. 5, 14.   59 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 154–5.   60 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 212–13.   61 J. Hall, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, in J. Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works (1737), ed. J. Toland, Preface, unnumbered.   62 Hall, Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, p. 4.   63 Hall, Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, p. 8.   64 Hall, Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, p. 14.   65 Hall, Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, part II, ‘An instance of the preceding reasons out of the Scottish History’; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, pp. 219–20.   66 Ascham, Bounds and Bonds, p. 2.   67 Achinstein, ‘“Saints or citizens?”’, pp. 251–2.   68 H. Grotius, Of the Authority of the Highest Powers about Sacred Things, trans. C. B. (1651), p. 1.  69 C. Barksdale, ‘An advertisement to the Stationer’, in Grotius, Authority of the Highest Powers, unnumbered.   70 J. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 99–101.   71 For a recent survey of the scholarly interpretations of Hobbes’s Leviathan, see J. Hamilton, ‘Hobbes the royalist, Hobbes the republican’, History of Political Thought, 30:3 (2009), pp. 411–54.  72 On the inadequacies of past and present defitions of ‘republicanism’ in the scholarly literature on the English revolutions, see B. Worden, ‘Liberty for export: “republicanism” in England, 1500–1800’, in Mahlberg and Wiemann (eds), European Contexts, pp. 13–32. 123

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Order and conflict 73 B. Worden, ‘Republicanism, regicide and republic: the English Experience’, in van Gelderen and Skinner (eds), Republicanism, I, pp. 307–8.   74 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic; M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995).   75 B. Worden, ‘Milton’s republicanism and the tyranny of Heaven’, in G. Bock, Q. Skinner and M. Viroli (eds), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), p. 229. 76 Worden, ‘Republicanism, regicide and republic’, p. 313.   77 D. L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for a Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 220.   78 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, p. 5.   79 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 6–7. 80 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 8–12. 81 J. Scott, ‘James Harrington’s prescription for healing and settling’, in M. Braddick and D. L. Smith (eds), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 190–209.   82 Scott, ‘James Harrington’s prescription for healing and settling’, pp. 192, 197, 208.  83 Scott, Commonwealth Principles, p. 9.   84 K. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), Chapter 2, passim. 85 Early Modern Research Group, ‘Commonwealth: the social, cultural and conceptual contexts of an early modern keyword’, Historical Journal, 3:54 (2011), p. 664. 86 Early Modern Research Group, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 665. 87 Worden, ‘Wit in a Roundhead’, p. 314.   88 Worden, God’s Instruments, p. 263. 89 Worden, God’s Instruments, pp. 273, 278, 286. 90 J. Lilburne, The Engagement Vindicated (London, 1650), pp. 2–3.  91 The Works of Robert Sanderson, ed. W. Jacobson (Cambridge, MA, 1854), I, p. 28. 92 Early Modern Research Group, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 680. 93 J. P. Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and royalism’, in J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 347–73. 94 R. Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism (Cambridge, 2001), p. 293. 95 Early Modern Research Group, ‘Commonwealth’, pp. 661–2. 96 Q. Skinner, ‘The State’ in T. Ball, J. Farr and R. L. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), p. 117.  97 Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the State’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7 (1999), p. 7. 98 Skinner, ‘State’, pp. 118–19.   99 Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the State’, pp. 18–20. 100 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), p. 3.

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T

his book paints a picture of Ascham as an ‘anti-radical’ p ­ arliamentarian who used ideas of natural right to argue for obedience to authority rather than to challenge it, prioritising order over liberty and representation. Ascham’s career is placed within the context of parliamentarian politics before the regicide, and the politics of the new regime from 1649–50. Unlike mainstream interpretations of Ascham’s works, which have argued for the significance of Hobbesian arguments in structuring the Engagement debates under the Republic, or have pointed out the secular and/or religious quintessence of his thought, this book highlights the complicated mixture of political languages which was used in propaganda for the Parliament and the Commonwealth. By locating the political constituencies which sponsored Ascham’s propaganda, this book offers considerations affecting the interpretation of Ascham’s political thought: firstly, his political patrons and the intended audience of his works. After a sketch of Ascham’s life and works, the book examines the author’s relations of patronage with leading exponents of the parliamentarian group of ‘Political’ Independents. It points then to the relations between Independents and Presbyterians in Parliament between 1648 and 1649, reconstructing in detail their several attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Shortly after the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649, which brought about the change of English monarchy into Republic, the Rump Parliament started a politics of appeasement towards moderate Presbyterian MPs, agreeing to their gradual restoration to their seats. Between 1649 and 1650, two political groupings emerged in the Parliament and Council of State: on the one side, there was a more conservative group, the so-called ‘juncto’ led by Arthur Haselrig (also joined by several exponents of the group of ‘Political’ Independents) whose main purpose was to pacify the country. On the other, there was the group of radicals and staunch republicans (the ‘commonwealthsmen’), externally supported by the army. After 1649, both the ‘juncto’ 125

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Order and conflict

and the ‘commonwealthsmen’ were committed to ending the Civil War and defending the new government. The republican regime thus extensively deployed the instruments of censure and print licensing to require obedience from their subjects. The book therefore links the writing and publication of Ascham’s works to the politics of reconciliation put forward by his protectors in the Rump and Council of State, and promoted by means of the press through the control of the Stationers’ Company. In order to recast the political and intellectual contexts in which this contribution to the understanding of Ascham’s works has to be set, this book provides a fresh historical and chronological examination of the constructing and composition of political groupings (like the Independents, Presbyterians, radicals, ‘juncto’ and the ‘commonwealthsmen’), along with a redefinition of the origin, meaning and dating of the most relevant political debates (like the ‘Engagement controversy’). From a methodological point of view, the book brings together a focus on the intellectual context of Ascham’s writings with a focus on their political and social contexts. Political theory thus overlapped with practical politics, as both were simultaneously deployed for winning the consent of the people, inspiring their conduct and securing their loyalty during the Civil Wars. Ascham’s political ideas and languages were therefore tailored, on the one side, to the political message he and his political patrons wanted communicating to their audience, on the other, to the political, religious and cultural expectations of their intended recipients. What lay between practical politics and political theory in mid-seventeenth-century England, and between intellectual context and political or historical context, was propaganda. Practical politics was entangled with political thought insofar as both were concurrently deployed in the negotiations between political, religious and social groupings both within and outside Parliament. By considering political discourse and political action as facets of the same political agenda devised by the moderate Independents in Parliament and the Rump, the methodology adopted in this book offers new considerations on the factors that shaped Ascham’s languages and ideas. Ascham’s writings represented one of the most impressive attempts (along with Milton’s and Nedham’s) to apply a variety of political, philosophical and religious ideas – related to the origins and ends of government and society, human nature, citizenship, individual conscience and public duties – to current historical circumstances. In pursuing this attempt, Ascham drew mainly on the works of a much praised Dutch thinker, Hugo Grotius. In 1996 Johann P. Sommerville noted that ‘English political thinking in the early seventeenth century was not distinctively English’. ‘More particularly,’ Sommerville continued, ‘we shall see that a number of English writers put forward political doctrines that were precisely the same as those of Continental theorists who 126

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Conclusion

are usually described as absolutists.’1 Glenn Burgess’s introduction to the edited volume on The New British History emphasised the European influences on English history and culture even more clearly. According to Burgess, the investigation of seventeenth-century English political and religious ideas can no longer be abstracted from their broad European context.2 The study of Ascham significantly contributes to a process of recovering the importance of Grotius’s influence on English political and religious debate between 1648 and 1650. A full recovery of the extent and significance of the English reception of Grotius’s works entails a detailed investigation of how each work or idea was interpreted and deployed in a variety of political, ecclesiological, theological and legal contexts.3 The existing historiography of Grotius’s influence on early modern English culture and society has been undertaken from three different perspectives. Each of these has explored a narrow account of the reception of specific works. One powerful investigation has focused on Grotius’s natural and international law;4 a second has pointed to the influence of his Erastian theory of the subordination of church to state;5 the third approach explores the influence of Grotius’s ‘minimal religion’ on English religious culture especially after the 1640s.6 Those who have tackled the issue of Grotius’s influence on English culture and society in the early modern period have tended to focus on single works, or have examined specific aspects of their reception. In other words, scholars have tended so far to underestimate and oversimplify the nuances and sophistications of the English receptions and usages of Grotius at least in the period of the Civil Wars. The analysis of Ascham’s work shows that the reception of Grotius’s tracts is hard to disentangle from the reception of his other works. This book therefore approaches the study of the English receptions of Grotius’s works from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to understand how, from 1648 to 1650, the English engaged with all of Grotius’s works on state and church, international law, natural rights and religion and to consider explicitly how they sought to fit his ideas together. Ascham combined arguments taken up from Grotius’s De Jure, De Imperio and De Veritate in order to sponsor both the political and religious agenda of the Independent group in Parliament. Consistently with the original purposes of the Dutch author, Ascham combined a stress on the sovereign power of the civil magistrate (ruling with ‘equity’), which extended to church and religion (but not to individual conscience), with a theory of social and/or individual natural rights, whose content was primarily ethical. By adopting the acquisition of a sovereignty argument drawn from De Jure, Ascham insisted on the issues of the absoluteness and indivisibility of sovereign power, and, consequently, on the duty to obey unconditionally those who actually held the power needed to secure peace within the context of an Erastian conception of the relationships between church and state drawn from De Imperio. Consequently, by focusing on Ascham’s uses of Grotius (along with Machiavelli and Bodin), this book 127

Order and conflict

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provides a case study of transnational reception of European works on the English political thought of the Civil Wars. This book also argues that the distinction between de facto theorists and republicans, usually deployed to make sense of the political debates from 1648 until at least 1652, fails to account for the complexity and eclecticism of political thought during the Republic. The study of Ascham’s writings suggests that it is possible to recover such complexity beyond overly narrow uses of historiographical labels like ‘Engagement controversy’, ‘de facto theory’ and ‘republicanism’, or unhelpful dichotomies like ‘republican’ versus de facto, or royalist/monarchist versus republican. What Ascham did in the works that appeared between 1648 and 1650, was to collate a set of ideas drawn from the works of influential authors, first Grotius, and then Machiavelli, Selden, Hobbes, Bodin and Filmer, and to turn them into a political manifesto of the policy of reconciliation with Presbyterians and royalists carried out by his Independent patrons at different stages of the revolution. Ascham’s political theory consisted therefore of a sort of intellectual patchwork, whose linguistic and ideological elements were skilfully assembled and intentionally tailored to a chosen target in order to ideologically underpin practical politics. The intellectual purpose underpinning Ascham’s propaganda was to forge an ideological argument capable of overcoming partisan disputes drawing on historical examples and English constitutional tradition. Ascham’s de facto theory was the outcome of his inherently contradictory attempt to use non-partisan and supposedly universally valid arguments to cope with extremely contingent circumstances. Ascham’s concern with the present and future settlement of Britain reflected on his choice to combine the Grotian and Machiavellian theories of the sovereign rights and prerogatives deriving from victory, with their concern with state order and duration. Ascham was involved, alongside Rous, in an attempt to build a coalition with the Presbyterians. To this end he also added to the pot of his eclectic argumentation the languages of providence (Filmer’s) political patriarchalism, and Romans 13 in order to prioritise obedience over liberty, order over revolution and protection over participation.

NOTES 1 J. P. Sommerville, ‘English and European political ideas in the early seventeenth century: revisionism and the case of absolutism’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (April 1996), pp. 168–94. 2 G. Burgess, ‘Introduction: the new British History’, in G. Burgess (ed.), The New British History (London, 1999), pp. 5–7. 3 M. Barducci, ‘Political and ecclesiological contexts for the English translations of Grotius’s De veritate (1632–1686)’, Grotiana, 33 (2012), pp. 70–87. 128

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4 Wallace, Destiny His Choice; Tuck, Natural Law Theories; Tuck, Philosophy and Government; Scott, England’s Troubles; Scott, Commonwealth Principles; Scott, ‘The law of war: Grotius, Sidney, Locke and the political theory of rebellion, History of Political Thought, XII (1992), pp. 565–85. 5 E. Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Somos, Secularisation. 6 Mortimer, Reason and Religion; H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius in England’, in S. Groenveld and M. Wintle (eds), Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, 1994), XI, pp. 42–67.

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(Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.)

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES British Library. Add 15856, fos. 22–31 House of Lords Record Office, MS. CJ, xxxiii fos. 732–4. Public Record Office, London, State Papers 94/43

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Index

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. allegiance 8, 28n81, 31, 34, 43–5, 69, 75, 86, 96, 100, 112–14   see also obedience Aristotle 88, 122n27 Ascham, Anthony   agent to Spain 2, 27n55   assassination of 3, 4, 24n19   Independents and 4–6, 19, 27n71, 32, 42, 44–5, 60–2, 65–6, 72, 80, 93, 119, 125   matrimony and divorce on 5, 34, 52, 85, 91n23, 95, 109   Presbyterians and 1, 4, 6, 19, 22, 33, 37, 42, 44, 61, 65, 70, 74, 76, 80, 84, 96, 106, 110, 119, 125   propaganda and 1–3, 9, 12, 20, 23, 36, 38, 55   property and 14, 45, 48, 50, 53–5, 90   regicide and 7, 125   religion 22, 33, 43, 49, 61, 63, 65–6, 70, 85–6, 96, 108, 127   works by Ascham    The Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience 9–10, 36, 51, 53, 61, 64, 73, 83, 87–8    A Combate Between two Seconds 9, 10, 36    Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments 3, 5, 11–13, 37–8, 48, 51–3, 55, 63, 66–7, 74, 85, 95–6, 112   Discourse 5, 6, 10–13, 17, 21, 22, 25n24, 32–7, 39n14, 42–4, 50, 53, 57n47, 62–5, 69, 70–1, 73, 76–7, 80, 82, 85, 87, 90, 93, 95, 104, 112–13    A Reply to a Paper of Mr. Sanderson 12, 38, 83–4   authority 9–11, 15, 22–3, 30, 35–6, 39, 43–5, 47–50, 53–4, 60, 63–6,

69, 70–89, 94, 96–7, 103, 107, 111–12, 115, 120, 125 Barksdale, Clement 63, 77, 115, 119 Bate, George 7 Baxter, Richard 49, 77 Bentivoglio, Guido 39n14 Boccalini, Traiano 39n14 Bodin, Jean 18, 87, 89, 92n41, 120–1, 127–8 Bowles, Edward 75 Boxhorn, Marcus Zuerius 89, 114 Bradshaw, John 7, 12–13, 21, 26n35, 98–9, 108, 110–11, 113 Bradshaw, Richard 13, 27n55 Brome, Richard 114 Burgess, Glenn 127 Calvin, John 81 Cambridge Platonists 62, 67n11 Campanella, Tommaso 100 casuistry 12, 31, 34–5, 51, 70–1 Charles I, King 2, 3, 5, 10, 14, 31, 35, 37, 45, 49–50, 52, 60, 71, 75, 82–3, 89, 104, 107, 110, 116, 119   negotiations with Parliament 6, 37, 40n22, 46, 48, 69, 93   personal rule 30, 81, 97   trial and execution of 7, 13, 30, 32, 64, 84, 87, 98, 106, 114, 118, 120, 125 Charles II, King 2–4, 7, 24n19, 36–8, 84, 115 Chaloner, Thomas 111 Cicero 118, 122n27 Coltman, Irene 16, 24n10, 27n62 Condren, Conal 16, 28n81, 70 conquest 8, 22, 35, 37, 71–5, 77, 83, 90, 97, 103 conscience 6, 8–10, 30–1, 38, 42–3, 50–1, 60–1, 65, 69, 72, 82, 86, 88, 98–9, 107, 109, 112, 115–16, 126–7 141

Index

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  liberty of 8, 22, 32–3, 45, 49 contextualism 18 Cook, John 7, 12, 98–9, 108, 110–11, 116 Council of State 2, 3, 7–10, 12, 20–2, 24n19, 26n39, 27n55, 36, 106–7, 111, 113, 125–6 Cromwell, Oliver 4, 6–8, 13, 30, 46, 61 de facto theory 13, 16, 17, 23, 36, 47, 69, 72, 78n12, 104, 105, 111, 116, 121, 128 De Haro, Louis 24n19 De Moreda, Diego 2 Digges, Dudley 49, 88 Dorislaus, Isaac 2, 3, 4, 7, 12–13 Du Mornay, Philippe 62, 67n11 Dury, John 23, 104, 106–8, 114, 119, 121n12, 122n15, 122n   works by Dury    Concerning Ministers Medling with State Matters in or out their Sermons 107    Considerations Concerning the Present Engagement 107, 122n15    A Model of Church Government 107 Engagement 10, 18, 31, 36, 38, 51, 70, 76, 106–8, 115, 119, 122n15, 125   controversy on 9, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 21–3, 107, 126, 128 equity 10, 43–4, 48, 60, 63, 76, 93, 95–6, 99, 100, 107–9, 111–12, 127 Erasmus 62, 67n11, 77 Erastianism 63 Fiennes, William (Viscount Saye and Sele) 46 Filmer, Sir Robert 1, 14, 18, 23, 49, 76, 78, 80, 88–90   works by Filmer   The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy 87    The Necessity of the Absolute Power of all Kings 87    Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques 53 Fisher, George 3, 24n19 142

Gataker, Thomas 82 Gee, Edward 10, 21–2, 35, 36, 38, 73, 75, 84, 97, 112   works by Gee    An Exercitation Concerning Usurped Powers 78n12, 83    A Second Part of the Religious Demurrer 72 Great Tew circle 49, 50 Grotius, Hugo 1, 11, 13–19, 35, 44–5, 50–5, 57n43, 57n47, 58n52, 67n11, 67n19, 81, 87, 99, 105–6, 117, 126–7   jus belli and 23, 64, 66, 70–1, 73–5, 78, 80   state–church relations on 18, 21, 49   works by Grotius   De Imperio 50, 63–5, 77, 89, 92n41, 107, 110, 115, 119, 122n17    De Jure Belli ac Pacis 14–15, 49, 51–2, 57n35, 63, 65, 73–6, 100, 109, 111–12, 120, 122n25   De Veritate 50, 61–2, 77 Hall, John 103, 106, 108–9, 114–15   works by Hall   The Advancement of Learning 114   The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered 114 Hammond, Henry 25n24, 49, 62, 77 Harrington, James 106, 117 Hartlib, Samuel 114 Haselrig, Arthur 8, 13, 125 Heads of the Proposals 6, 12, 32, 46–7, 69, 96, 119 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 4, 11, 44–5, 60, 66, 76, 84, 105–6, 113, 117, 119, 123n71, 128   democracy and 55   state and 120–1   works by Hobbes   De Cive 14, 54, 114, 120   The Elements of Law Natural and Politic 14, 54–5, 60   Leviathan 13–14, 19, 55, 104, 116, 120, 123n71 Howell, James 3, 39n14, 116 Hutchinson, Lucy 115

Index Hyde, Edward (Earl of Clarendon) 2–4, 8, 52 Independents 7, 8, 21–2, 25n25, 30, 33, 36, 43, 47, 56, 76, 81 Ireton, Henry 27n71, 46–8

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James VI/I, King 99 Judson, Margareth 18, 28n72 Knolles, Richard 87 Levellers 1, 8, 15, 20–1, 30, 45–9, 53, 55, 81, 109–10, 113 liberty 5, 7, 9, 25n25, 34, 37, 45, 47 Lilburne, John 15, 50, 97–8, 119 Machiavelli, Niccolò 1, 18, 23, 76–8, 99, 111, 119, 121, 127–8   works by Machiavelli   Discourses 77, 104, 117   The Prince 77 Marten, Henry 8, 47, 111 Marvell, Andrew 7–8, 103, 114 Masham, William 8 Milton, John 8, 12, 25n25, 26n35, 39n14, 61, 99, 114, 122n25, 126   civil and religious liberty on 122n27, 122n29   matrimony and divorce on 34, 91n23, 115   political views of 14, 23, 25n25, 27n71, 62, 89, 98, 103, 106, 108–11, 116, 118–19   works by Milton   Defensio 109   The Second Defence of the English People 7   The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 98, 103, 108 monarchy 1, 8, 14, 37, 55, 72, 75, 93–4, 103–5, 108–11, 114, 117–18, 120, 125   absolute 119   limited 13   mixed 95, 121 Moore, Jonas 5 Mortimer, Sarah 15–6, 19, 21, 44

Morton, Thomas 75 Moseley, Humphrey 5, 21, 39n14, 40n14, 114 natural law 16, 18, 39, 42, 48–53, 55, 58n47, 61–3, 65–6, 67n11, 72, 80, 85, 90, 109, 114, 117   liberty of conscience and 22   self-preservation and 15, 23, 27n71, 38, 43–4, 47–8, 50, 60, 71, 112–13 Nedham, Marchamont 12, 23, 61, 106, 108–9, 116, 118, 122n40, 123n53, 126   de facto arguments and 104   free states 14, 112, 119   works by Nedham   The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated 103, 110, 113   Mercurius Politicus 4, 111, 113 Neville, Henry 62 New Model Army 5, 46, 75 Oath of Allegiance 6, 9, 16, 33, 36–8, 40n22, 42, 70 oaths 22–3, 31, 35, 43, 71, 74–6, 80, 98, 108, 115 obedience 1, 9–11, 15, 23, 28n81, 31, 36, 51–2, 65, 69, 71, 73–4, 77–8, 81–2, 84, 94–5, 125–6, 128   education and 5   protection and 12, 14, 18, 22, 37–8, 47, 49, 53–5, 66, 76, 80, 86, 96–7, 104, 107, 112, 115–16, 121 office 7, 23, 28n81, 30–1, 65, 71, 81–2, 93, 98, 118, 120–1 Osborne, Francis 104 Overton, Richard 15, 50 Parker, Henry 27n71, 49–50, 82, 88, 99, 105, 116 Parliament 1, 5–6, 16, 24n19, 26n43, 30, 40n22, 42–8, 51, 53, 60, 62, 66, 69–75, 80–2, 87, 90, 94, 104, 112   juncto 8–9, 13, 107–8, 119, 125–6   Rump 3, 7–9, 11–13, 15, 17, 20, 31, 36, 66, 73, 76–7, 84, 89, 98, 103–4, 110–11, 114, 116, 118, 125–6 143

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Index patriarchalism 12, 23, 78, 80, 85, 88, 92n37, 128 Peacey, Jason 3, 20 Percy, Algernon (Earl of Northumberland) 5–7, 10, 13, 20, 46 Perlette, John 25n24, 25n25 Philip IV, King 3–4, 12, 24n19 Plato 61–2   see also Cambridge Platonists Pocock, John Greville Agard 18, 116 power 52–5, 57n47, 60, 62–90, 93–4, 97–8, 100, 105, 107–9, 111–16, 119–20, 127 Presbyterians 8, 9, 11, 21, 25n25, 30, 56, 73, 80, 93, 97, 108, 1121–4, 117, 126, 128 Scottish Kirk and 32, 64 Progers, Henry 2, 3 Progers, Valentin 3 propaganda 1, 8, 20, 106, 110, 113, 119 property, rights of 15, 52, 89   community of 51, 57n43 punishment 2, 44–5, 52–3, 63, 64, 94 Putney debates 46–8, 97 radicalism 20, 36, 45–6, 55–6n16, 107–8 reason of state 43, 85, 90, 91n23, 99–100, 113, 116 rebellion 5, 52, 54, 75, 109   see also revolution regicide 13, 98, 108, 111, 114 republicanism 14, 23, 89, 103–5, 110, 111, 116–18, 123n72, 128 revolution 1, 5, 8, 12, 17, 32, 34, 55, 61, 76, 81, 83, 93, 97, 108–9, 111, 120, 123n72, 128 Romans 13 10, 19, 23, 65, 78, 80–5, 89, 97, 98, 106, 128 Rous, Francis 11, 21–2, 60, 72–3, 80–6, 98, 104–8, 111–12, 115–16, 121n12   Presbyterians and 82, 119, 128   works by Rous   The Lawfulness of Obeying the Present Government 10, 35 Salmon, John Hearsey MacMillan 10, 11 Sanderson, Robert 11, 21–2, 31, 34, 119 144

  works by Sanderson   A Resolution of Conscience 12, 38 Saumaise, Claude de 113 Schlichting, Jonasz 44, 45 Schochet, Gordon 88, 92n37 Scott, Jonathan 117 secularisation 14–16, 18 Selden, John 1, 14, 48, 63, 66, 76, 119, 128   works by Selden   De Jure Naturali 53     De Synedriis 63 Socinus, Faustus 44, 49, 56n7 Skinner, Quentin 13–19, 25n25, 28n87, 69, 104, 116, 120 Solemn League and Covenant 6–10, 16, 20, 23, 31, 33, 35–7, 40n22, 42, 61, 70, 74, 94, 98, 107–8, 110 Sommerville, Johann Peter 126 State, Stephen 15–16 Stationers’ Company 6, 12, 21, 25n24, 39n14, 126 St John, Oliver 8, 13, 46 Stuart, Henry (Duke of Gloucester) 5 Symmons, Edward 82 Suarez, Francisco 45, 51–2, 57n47, 87, Thomason, George 6, 9–11, 25n26, 38 toleration 6, 21, 65, 100, 108 Tuck, Richard 10, 14–16, 18, 27n71 tyranny, 3, 48, 75, 90, 97–8, 100, 101n18, 105, 108, 110–12, 117   see also usurpation usurpation 43, 70, 72, 83, 87, 89, 90, 97, 99, 100, 107–8, 111, 113 Vallance, Edward 16, 33, 89 Vane, Charles 13, 27n55 Vane, Henry 8, 62, 111 Wallace, John Malcolm 14, 16, 18, 31 Ward, Nathaniel 36, 65, 73, 84–5, 87, 94, 97   works by Ward   Discollimium 74    A Religious Demurrer 9, 72 Watson, Richard 63–4

Index Witte, John 91n23 Wright, John 21 Zagorin, Perez 10, 13–14, 16, 19, 27n62

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Whichcote, Benjamin 6, 62, 67n11 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 8, 13, 27n55, 107 Wither, George 3 Wildman, John 46

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