Caroline Robbins's important book The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, which first appeared in 1959, provided the impetus for a detailed investigation of the legacy of English republican ideas which has involved some of the best known names in intellectual history; including John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Bernard Bailyn and Justin Champion. That legacy was the focus of a workshop held at Newcastle University in September 2021, organised by Gaby Mahlberg as part of her Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship. The workshop offered an excellent line-up of speakers who raised a number of interesting new questions for investigation. As usual, what follows is my own personal take on the workshop and the ideas it generated.
The legacy of English republicanism is, of course, centred, on a canon of texts. But, as many of the papers demonstrated, intellectual historians now recognise the importance of private as well as published works, of intellectual networks, and of the role played by editors and printers in shaping the physical form of those texts. In her excellent paper 'John Milton in the United Provinces', which opened the workshop, Esther van Raamsdonk showed that Milton had incorporated into his Second Defence information that had appeared in private correspondence between two Dutch intellectuals Daniel Heinsius and Issak Vossius in which they had been reflecting on Milton's First Defence. There is no evidence of any direct communication between Milton and these Dutchmen. Rather, Milton's knowledge of their exchange probably came via bridging figures who knew both parties, such as Lieuwe van Aitzema or John Drury. Esther's wider point was that 'reception' need not simply be one way but that in this case there was a two-way communication from text to reception and then back from reception to text. Such complexities only become evident if we incorporate into our research manuscript as well as published texts, and the networks within which both authors and readers were situated.
This notion of the complexity of transmission was a broader theme in several of the papers. While Heinsius and Vossius discussed Milton's ideas, they firmly rejected his views. In her own paper Gaby told a similar story about the reviews of seventeenth-century English republican writings in the conservative German periodical Acta Eruditorum. The journal had an explicit policy of neutrality on political matters, but did still review some politically sensitive texts, such as the English republican writings, albeit with a degree of objective distance. It was suggested that there is a parallel here with the claim in social media that a re-tweet does not necessarily indicate endorsement. Of course even if the review is written from a position of neutrality, the ideas contained within the original work are still being transmitted to new audiences - not all of whom will share the attitude of the journal editors.
John Milton by William Faithorne, 1670. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 610. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.
One aspect of the English republican writings that many Europeans appear to have been uncomfortable about was their endorsement of regicide. Esther van Raamsdonk noted that, despite living under republican rule, Dutch commentators were highly critical of the execution of Charles I. In his consideration of Baruch Spinoza's knowledge of English republicanism, Thomas Munck reinforced this point. He noted that the Dutch saw themselves as having taken a more authentic route to republicanism than the English, and that they condemned the overthrow of Charles I as dangerous and insincere. While Spinoza was sympathetic to republican rule, he was deeply critical of the English abolition of monarchical government, no doubt partly because the process by which it came about was at odds with both his pacifism and his commitment to genuine popular sovereignty. This problem not only affected the Dutch. When responding to questions following his paper on Richard Price, Christopher Hamel, acknowledged that it was difficult for Price to cite Milton directly because of his link to the regicide. Similarly, Gaby believes that part of the reason why less work has been done on the legacy of English republicanism in Germany than in Britain, France and America is because of the more conservative path that Germany took in the eighteenth century, which has led historians to assume that works justifying regicide will not have found an audience there.
Another element of English republican thought that has often been seen as becoming less relevant or even distasteful as the eighteenth-century progressed is the agrarianism of James Harrington, which was increasingly at odds with the growing commercial society. In my own paper I showed that, in fact, Harrington's theory about the relationship between land and power remained a consistent theme for at least some republicans in Britain right through to the nineteenth century.
Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1775. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 5856. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.
A further complication to our understanding of the legacy of English republican works was introduced via the papers and discussions of the second panel, where it was argued that there was a Saxon tradition of republicanism that emerged and developed alongside the more conventional ancient tradition. In his excellent paper on 'John Tutchin and Commonwealth Poetics', Joe Hone made a persuasive case for Tutchin as a commonwealth writer and the author of a number of commonwealth poems, including Aesop at Amsterdam and The Foreigners. He went on to demonstrate that there was a distinct vein of Saxon republicanism in these writings. For Tutchin freedom was a right that the English had inherited from their Saxon ancestors and these birth rights and native freedoms were given greater emphasis than the civic virtue central to ancient republicanism. Ashley Walsh has already published an excellent article on Saxon republicanism, and so it is not surprising that his paper on the standing army debate complemented Joe's paper in this regard. Ashley emphasised the fact that the standing army debate of the 1690s encouraged the revival of ancient constitutionalism, with advocates of the militia often looking to the Saxon past rather than to classical precedents. This remained a key strand of militia debates right through the eighteenth century. Moreover in later papers by Christopher Hamel and Max Skjönsberg it was clear that Saxon republicanism - and particularly ideas of natural rights and patriotism - remained important to later eighteenth-century commonwealthmen and women, including Price and Catharine Macaulay. Saxon republicanism is, however, complex. In discussions we noted its ambiguous nature as, on the one hand, an insular doctrine with elements of ethnic or racial exclusivity and, on the other hand, transnational features. Not only did the Saxons come to Britain from Germany, but there were also parallels in other countries (such as the Batavian tradition in the Dutch context). The group felt that there is more work to be done in this area.
Finally, given my current preoccupations, I noted when participants touched on issues of genre or materiality. The legacy of Milton's works has been interesting in this regard. His seventeenth-century reception in the Dutch Republic, as Esther van Raamsdonk noted, was focused on his prose writings. But, as Tom Corns reminded us, there was a 'cleaning up' of Milton's reputation in Britain from the late 1680s through a shift towards his poetic works and the crafting of his reputation as the English Protestant Virgil. Also of interest in relation to Milton was the fact that he was often praised for the style while being condemned for the content of his writing - as in the idea that he defended a bad case well. Joe Hone began his paper with the bigger question of why the commonwealth tradition is primarily a prose tradition, given that a wealth of commonwealth poetry was produced during the 1680s and 90s when the two were more or less on an equal footing. Moreover, it is clear from Joe's works that John Darby printed both poetry and prose and saw the connection between them. One possibility is that it was the preferences of the influential figures who shaped and transmitted the commonwealth tradition - including John Toland and Thomas Hollis - that were crucial.
Thomas Hollis’s edition of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government. Houghton Library, Harvard University. HOU F *EC75.H7267.Zz751s Lobby IV.4.14. I am grateful to the Houghton Library for permission to reproduce this and to Dr Mark Somos for his assistance.
The mention of Hollis brings us to the final paper of the workshop, by Allan Reddick, and to the question of books as material objects. Allan noted that Hollis sometimes sent English-language books to places where few would have been able to read them, raising the question of what his purpose in doing so was. In part it was probably about ensuring the preservation of these texts and the ideas contained within them, but Allan suggested that he also thinks that Hollis saw the books as having an almost talismanic quality - an idea that is reflected in the complex iconography that he incorporated into his editions and bindings. Hollis was no doubt influenced by his hero Milton's notion (expressed in Areopagitica) of books carrying a potency and agency and constituting an abstraction of the living intellect that bred them. The commonwealth works Hollis republished might be viewed, then, as warriors for liberty and, in this regard, our investigation of the commonwealth tradition concerns their still on-going battles.