British Republicans 1: Charles Bradlaugh

When writing Republicanism: An Introduction I had to address what happened to republican ideas during the nineteenth century (beyond my usual area of expertise). I chose to focus on France, Britain and the United States. In the process I discovered several interesting nineteenth-century British republicans. I am continuing to investigate some of these characters for other projects. In this blogpost, and some that follow, I will offer brief sketches showcasing these figures and their ideas.

Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) was a self-confessed republican who established the National Republican League in 1873. Yet despite not being afraid of controversy and firmly owning his republican views, Bradlaugh's The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick addresses the question of republican politics in an oblique fashion.

Charles Bradlaugh by Sydney Prior Hall. National Portrait Gallery: NPG 2313. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

In his preface to the second edition, Bradlaugh stated explicitly: 'This is not ... a Republican pamphlet' (Charles Bradlaugh, The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick. 4th edition. London, 1874, Preface). What he meant by this is that rather than calling for the abolition of the monarchy, he was simply pointing out that the British monarchy is elective and that the British people have the right to choose different rulers should they wish to do so. He based this argument on legislation from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the Parliament of the English Commonwealth, meeting on 25 April 1660, that gave the Crown to Charles II. Similarly, it was the Convention, meeting with all the authority of Parliament, which on 22 January 1688 took the Crown away from James II and passed over his son the Prince of Wales, bestowing the throne instead on James's Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Furthermore, in various statutes passed under the later Stuarts, the right to accede to the throne was limited, first, to members of the Church of England, and then to the heirs of Princess Sophia of Hanover. Given this history, Bradlaugh insisted, Parliament in his own time had the right, both to deprive a living monarch of the Crown and to treat the heir to the throne as having no claim to the succession.

While Bradlaugh insists that he is not advocating a republican regime, but the replacement of one monarch (or dynasty) by another, his hostility to the Brunswicks is vitriolic. He condemns them for their extravagant expenditure (which he charts in detail), for their hostility to the welfare of the ordinary people, and - more uncomfortably for a twenty-first-century reader - for being foreign. Indeed, what he appears to be advocating is the replacement of the current dynasty - after the death of Queen Victoria - with an English alternative.

Given the history of republican arguments, this position is an interesting one. Bradlaugh is harsh in his condemnation of the Brunswick rulers, but despite admitting his own preference for republican rule, in this work at least he is willing to accept the continuation of the British monarchy under another line.

Alongside his republican writing and campaigning, Bradlaugh was also strongly committed to the issue of land reform. He was involved with the Land Tenure Reform Association, the Land and Labour League and the Commons Protection League and in 1874 he wrote The Land, The People, and The Coming Struggle. Indeed, in the 1870s he presented the Land Question as the key political issue of the day.

James Harrington after Sir Peter Lely, published by William Richardson 1799. National Portrait Gallery: NPG D29116. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Bradlaugh was by no means the first republican to take an interest in land. James Harrington's argument as to why England was ripe for republican government in the mid-seventeenth century was grounded in his theory that land provides the foundation of political power, and that in order to secure allegiance and stability the form of government should fit the distribution of land within the nation. Harrington believed that changes introduced by the Tudor monarchs had brought a shift in land ownership away from the aristocracy and towards commoners. The civil war, on Harrington's account, adjusted politics to the economic reality, making England ripe for republican or commonwealth government. Later republicans accepted Harrington's understanding of the relationship between the ownership of land and the exercise of political power. By the late eighteenth century, Thomas Spence was using Harrington's argument to put a radical case for the abolition of property rights in England and for a sweeping redistribution of land in order to ensure the subsistence of ordinary citizens.

Bradlaugh too saw land as crucial to political power, and he shared Spence's profound concern for the poor. However, his assessment of the situation in his own time was an inversion of Harrington's original theory. 'The bulk of the land', Bradlaugh insisted, 'is in the hands of comparatively few persons, and these monopolise the House of Lords, and materially control the House of Commons.' (Charles Bradlaugh, The Land, The People and The Coming Struggle, 3rd edition. London, 1877, p. 3). Indeed, Bradlaugh insisted that it was actually the aristocracy, rather than the monarch, that exercised real political authority within the country. This had negative consequences not only for politics, but also for subsistence. It was in the interests of landowners to keep rents high and the wages of agricultural workers low, resulting in poverty and poor living conditions for many people. Moreover, members of the aristocracy liked to keep vast swathes of their land uncultivated for their own recreation - for example in the form of grouse moors. This had resulted in 'The diversion of land in an old country from the purpose it should fulfil - that of providing life for the many' to instead providing pleasure for the few. (Bradlaugh, The Land, The People and The Coming Struggle, p. 13). This, Bradlaugh insisted, was a 'crime'. Similarly he described the game laws as 'a disgrace to civilisation' and as proof of the influence of the landed aristocracy over the legislature, and the negative character of that influence. Bradlaugh's solution was not to abolish property rights, as Spence had advocated, but rather to compel landowners to act more responsibly. As he argued in a speech in the House of Commons in 1888: 'the ownership of land should carry with it the duty of cultivation or utilisation'. The authorities should, therefore, 'compel the possessors of land to use it for the general welfare' (Charles Bradlaugh, 'The Compulsory Cultivation of Waste Lands' in Speeches by Charles Bradlaugh, ed. J. M. Roberts, 2nd edition. London, 1895, p. 116). Most of the land may no longer lie with the commoners, but it should still be used for the public good.

Charles Bradlaugh by Harry Furniss, 1880s-1900s. National Portrait Gallery: NPG 3555. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

As well as being a founder member of the National Republican League and a member of various land reform groups, Bradlaugh also helped to establish the National Secular Society and acted as its president from 1866 to 1871 and again from 1874 to 1890. Bradlaugh was particularly critical of the hypocrisy of the aristocracy who exploited and crushed the poor for their own ends, but then listened to the sermons of bishops, endowed churches, and talked of the importance of saving souls. Bradlaugh was keen to defend both the truth and the morality of secularism. While uncompromising in his atheism, Bradlaugh made reference back to the more subtle freethinking commonwealthmen of the early eighteenth century. In 1877 he established 'The Freethought Publishing Company'. The notion that this may have been an allusion to Anthony Collins's A Discourse of Freethinking of 1713 is reinforced by the fact that Bradlaugh also wrote his Half hours with the freethinkers under the pseudonym Anthony Collins.

Bradlaugh's philosophy, then, involved a critique of the key institutions of the Crown, the Aristocracy, and the Church. While he addressed these issues separately, he was well aware of the connections and overlap between them, and the threat that all three could pose to the people. Throughout his career Bradlaugh worked to uphold the public good, and to place the interests of ordinary people at the heart of politics, he had every claim to be a republican.

Commons versus Public Good

In English, the terms 'republic' and 'commonwealth' have tended to be understood as synonyms. 'Republic' comes originally from the Latin 'respublica'. Since 'res' means 'thing' or 'affair', the respublica is effectively the public thing or public good. A 'republic' then, in its simplest terms, is a government that operates in the interests of the public rather than in the private interests of the rulers. 'Commonwealth' is an English version of the same idea, referring to what is in the common interest. While the regime established following the execution of Charles I in early 1649 was officially called the 'Commonwealth and Free State', it was frequently described as a republic. Yet while these terms have been used as synonyms, they do have different connotations deriving from their historic use. This was brought home to me through work I have been doing on the project 'Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of Urban Commons'. Commons are a long-standing feature of the landscape of the British Isles, but in the mid-nineteenth century an interesting shift occurred, whereby these spaces - and especially those located in urban areas - began to be characterised as public assets rather than as the locus of common rights.

Nomansland Common Hertfordshire. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The origins of commons date back to medieval times. In general they were manorial wastes over which specific common rights were granted to particular groups of local people. In most cases these rights were agricultural and related to subsistence. They included: the common of pasture, the right to graze animals such as sheep, cows, or horses on the common; the common of estovers, which was the right to gather wood or other vegetation such as furze to use as fuel, for repairs to houses or equipment, or for animal bedding; and the common of turbary which was the right to take peat or turf for fuel. As Guy Standing has argued, what these rights offered was a kind of safety net to help the local community (and especially its poor) through hard times (Guy Standing, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 2019, pp. 8, 38). 

Norwich as viewed from St James Hollow on Household Heath. Wastes and Strays, 18 June 2020. Image by Sarah Collins.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the ownership and management of many commons situated in urban areas was transferred from the local lord of the manor to the city authorities. For example, Durdham Down was bought by Bristol City Council in 1861 and, after a protracted legal battle, the City Corporation of Norwich officially took legal ownership of Mousehold Heath from the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral (the original landowner) in 1883.

These changes in ownership and management encouraged the perception that urban commons were public assets. In certain respects this was a positive shift. In general it meant that the land had to be open and accessible to the public at large rather than just to commoners or local residents. It also reinforced the growing sense that the primary purpose of these spaces was recreation rather than agricultural activity, which was generally fitting, given their location.

Charles Bradlaugh by an unknown photographer, 1860s. National Portrait Gallery NPG Ax18357. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.

Yet, while there were gains, something was lost in this transformation. Gone was the idea of commons as offering subsistence or as providing a safety net for the poorest during difficult times. Yet many people still lived precarious lives. The land campaigner Charles Bradlaugh cited research on the poor conditions in which many workers were living in the 1870s. He noted that in one Bedfordshire parish 'one-third of the entire population were receiving pauper relief, and it seemed altogether to puzzle the relieving officer to account for the manner in which one-half of the remainder lived' (Charles Bradlaugh, The Land, The People, and The Coming Struggle. London, 1874, p. 9). Even today with the increasing reliance on food banks and the emergence of zero-hours contracts, it would seem that the need for such a safety net remains, and yet the state benefits that had been established in the first half of the twentieth century to serve as this have been greatly weakened since the 1980s. Secondly, there was a shift away from a sense of shared ownership. While commons were not usually owned by the commoners, the fact that they enjoyed rights of access and rights to various produce of the land, created at least a semblance of ownership. And ownership, in turn, helps to give people a sense of identification with the space as well as encouraging them to cherish, protect, and take care of it. Such sentiments are less likely to arise if these green spaces are seen as a public asset - a resource provided for the public by the authorities but remaining firmly under council control. Finally, commons invoke a sense of working together for a common purpose and, therefore, of reciprocity. To gain what they needed from the common, commoners had to exercise their rights by labouring on the common whether by grazing their animals there or by gathering wood for fuel. Once the commons are regarded as a public asset or a service provided to the public, the sense of users having duties or responsibilities over the space is diminished.

Cows grazing on the Town Moor in Newcastle. Wastes and Strays. 10 May 2021. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

What might be the benefits of shifting back from a language of public assets and resources to one of common goods? Could it be used to curb the increasingly pernicious tendency to appeal to 'efficiency' in order to cut public services to the bone? Could it be a means to establish the primacy of community ahead of the private interests and benefits of those in privileged positions? Could it even lead to the introduction of a fair system of taxation, which is viewed not as an unwelcome burden on the individual, but as an opportunity to build a rich and sustainable society in which all members are provided with the means to flourish?

I am getting carried away, but as an intellectual historian I do believe that the language that we use to frame our understanding has the power to bring concrete political change. There might well be benefits to be gained from reclaiming the idea of the 'common wealth' and encouraging active engagement and participation on the part of citizens.