Ideas and Politics in Early Stuart England

Where have all the ideas gone? In recent years this has been not so much the question asked but the lament expressed by some historians of early modern England. Most obviously the older generation of historians, such as J.H. Hexter and Lawrence Stone, who themselves lived through the ideological ferment of the 1930s, have denounced, at times emotionally, recent revisionist interpretations of the seventeenth century in which faction and interest feature more than passion and principle. But their complaints have also been echoed by some younger scholars, whose own experience of the 1960s perhaps sharpened a sense that issues and principles deserve a more prominent place in any history of the decades before the English Civil War

It is difficult not to share these misgivings. The English Civil War was arguably the most radical and violent revolution in English history: an anointed king was executed, monarchy, bishops and the House of Lords abolished; pamphlets challenged all order and property in church and state, claimed natural rights and equality for men (and even women) and advocated religious toleration, free love and communism. Once we ascribed these momentous events to equally momentous ideological clashes which were evident decades before 1642. In the quarrels between Crown and Parliament, we saw rival constitutional and political theories, the advocates of custom and law, parliaments and liberty contending with the apologists for monarchical absolutism. Puritanism we described as the sacred ally of the parliamentarian cause: challenging the authority of the church, proclaiming liberty of conscience and providing, as had the Calvinists of sixteenth-century France and the Netherlands, the revolutionary ideology that transformed the discontented into soldiers for Christ and the constitution against the whores of Babylon and Whitehall.

Revisionist scholarship, however, disbanded the troops and demolished the ideological banners. Geoffrey Elton, John Kenyon, Conrad Russell and others effectively challenged the thesis of constitutional conflict between absolutist kings and parliaments straining for sovereignty and freedom. Patrick Collinson, Nicholas Tyacke and others denied the revolutionary impulse of puritanism to lay stress on the underlying theological agreements between the Puritans and the ecclesiastical establishment. Over the last decade, the buzz word in early modern history has been 'consensus'. So, we are asked to believe, apart from the wrangles of self-interested individuals or factions for profit and place, apart from a few differences over surplices and ceremonies, apart from cultural differences denoted by long and short hair, psalms and love songs, there were no real divisions in state or church. The justices of the peace in the provinces, the county historians informed us, attended their estates and (less frequently) their duties, uninterested in national politics and issues; the lower orders unthinkingly followed their lords. The revisionists' picture of early modern society, in other words, literally duplicated the ideal pronounced from the Tudor and Stuart pulpit: an ordered world in which, reflecting the hierarchy and harmony of the heavens, each had and accepted his naturally appointed place.

And yet the problem persists. Monarchy, lords and bishops were abolished: 'How did men get the nerve to do such unheard-of things?' The question was posed twenty years ago in Christopher Hill's ambitious search, for The Intellectual Origins of The English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1965). The thesis of Hill's book – the attempt to connect scientific, historical and legal thought to puritanism, social change and revolution – rightly met with sharp criticism: the use of evidence was dubious and the crucial connections often tenuous, indeed tendentious. Perhaps that is why the interest in intellectual origins, like that in rising gentry, waned. But Hill was right to assert the importance of his subject and in discussing science and philosophy, history and law, he emancipated the history of political ideas from the narrow study of only the grand texts of political theory. It is his central question that needs to be reposed: not what were the intellectual origins of the English revolution, but what was the relationship of ideas to politics in the decades of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries?

Twenty years after Hill's Intellectual Origins, a young scholar has returned to such questions and offered a bold and clear answer. In Politics and Ideology in England 1603-40 (Longman 1986) Johann Sommerville argues that there were conflicting political ideologies that 'divided Englishmen in the early seventeenth century': theories of royal absolutism, of popular consent and of the ancient constitution. Where the absolutists, often clergy, claimed that the king was answerable to none but God and the obedience of subjects a religious as well as secular obligation, others, usually lawyers and Members of Parliament, emphasised the contractual and reciprocal basis of the relationship between the king and subjects who had only conditionally transferred to the monarch the sovereignty that was once theirs. Law and custom were seen to guarantee the rights and liberties of subjects and to constrain the power of kings. Parliaments which drew their authority from the law and in turn secured the law thereby perforce clashed at times with rulers who sought to extend their authority. Given the 'ideological gulf', 'conflict' in practice was inevitable.

Though he takes us back to ideological conflict, Sommerville does not return to the old Whig story of parliaments paving the way to a future English liberalism. Valuably he stresses often the ambiguity of the intellectual influences and the importance of foreign as well as English thinkers. Most of all through citations from pamphlets, sermons and speeches he restores to the age that vitality of political reflection and debate which has been absent from recent political history and which eludes those who look only for the great texts of political theory. His book, however, is flawed by its very structure and open to question at several key points. Sommerville arranges his chapters and argument around contending theories and their proponents, as though men were already mustered into ideological camps. As I read him, however, I constantly thought of individuals who could not be confined to either company, or, more accurately, who would not have recognised the polarisation Sommerville draws. Obvious examples among thinkers are John Selden, Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson; among practical politicians, Thomas Wentworth, William Noy or John Pym. And James I, too, for all his theoretical pronouncements about his authority, shared with MPs a devotion to the law and a sense of his duty to rule in accordance with it. This is not to deny that such figures advanced different, indeed contradictory arguments at different times, nor to negate clashes of ideas. But it is to suggest that there was a common stock of ideas on which arguments drew; that statements belonged to occasions rather than emerged from coherent and rigid theoretical positions; that the conflicts, rather than dividing men into contending groups, took place within men's minds.

These conflicts – tensions is a more appropriate term – existed both within and between the texts which were the common intellectual inheritance of western Europe in the Renaissance: the texts of ancient philosophy, the classics and the Bible. They were also tensions between ideals and the actual, or to put it another way, between theory and experience. One intellectual bequest of the Middle Ages to early modern Europe was the idea of the respublica Christiana, the unum corpus, the one body of the whole Christian commonwealth in the holy mother Church and empire. If the Reformation shattered any such reality, the quest well into the seventeenth century for Christian reunification and the rejection of religious toleration demonstrate that the idea of universality and unity had an enduring hold on men's minds. Moreover, in Tudor England, it was held that the Christian commonweal might be established in one country. Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is premised on the inseparable integration of Church and state, law and authority, the individual and the commonweal. Common references to the body politic remind us that the Commonwealth was conceived as a natural organism in which, as in the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe, all parts – or humours – must work in harmonious balance if the realm were not to fall into distemper.

It escaped few, of course, that this was not a satisfactory or accurate depiction of their world: a world of social change, religious difference, ambitious factional manoeuvrings, threats from abroad. And yet the theory of the natural commonweal in which ethics, religion and politics were inseparable not only persisted; it was vociferously asserted in pulpits and proclamations. The figure who dared to challenge its fundamental tenets, to argue for politics as a quest for power free from religion and morality, was read only with horror. Niccolo Machiavelli was anathema to Elizabethan England – 'Old Nick' was the devil himself.

Early modern England then adhered to a unitary theory of the commonweal while religious and social change challenged it in practice at many points. Not surprisingly, the discourse of politics was shared, but men did not always act consistently or according to their words, nor did they always mean the same by them. The tensions were in part a consequence of political differences in an age that had no capacity ideologically to accommodate difference. The Civil War was not the outcome of new revolutionary ideologies; but it was in part the consequence of the discussion of new political problems being confined by traditional languages.

Thirty years ago Professor Pocock taught us one of those languages: that of The Ancient Constitution. Where earlier historians had depicted antiquaries and precedents as protagonists and arsenals for parliaments, Pocock demonstrated that the appeal to the past and the common law were shared. Kings, councillors and commons appealed to precedent genuinely to resolve problems as well as to support positions. They looked to the law (a reflection of natural, divine law) to resolve differences and often believed, as in 1628, that a shared pronouncement on the law was the same as a political concordance. We should not be over cynical about Charles I's consulting the judges in the 1630s or about parliament's tortuous attempts in 1642 to find legal justification for its actions. Both demonstrate that neither before 1642 challenged the rule of law, nor could conceive of politics as a contested pursuit of power rather than as a matrix of duties and rights held together by law.

Scripture bequeathed another vocabulary to the political dialogue because, it was believed, political authority had been necessitated by the fall of man and the state existed to make the godly as well as good life possible. Once again it was a common vocabulary. All believed in one divine Truth. Scripture was not ambiguous; sin had deprived man of the innocent knowledge to comprehend it. The perception of God's light now required reason and faith, study and sermons, but there could be no conflict between understanding and revelation, nor more than one true interpretation of God's word. Though the Reformation severely strained such beliefs, it did not dispel them. In Elizabethan England, Catholic recusants were to be reclaimed, all were to attend the parish church, differences were defined as a diaphora, leaving the central tenets of faith shared. Here, however, the tensions were greatest: the logic of predestination was a Church separate from the commonweal, an individual relationship with a wilful God, even the possibility of resisting an ungodly magistrate.

But significantly in early modern England, that logic was not pursued. The Puritans did not separate. If the Civil War were, as has recently been argued, a war of religion, it was less, at least initially, a Puritan revolution than a war against (as Parliamentarians saw it) Papists and Jesuits or (as some royalists viewed it) sectaries and separatists. It is important to note that both groups were regarded by most as outside the Christian church and commonweal whose citizens were God's Englishmen, and important to recall that each side labelled the other as 'schismatics'. Not until after the fighting was the idea of one church seriously challenged and the cloak of Christ's truth so visibly rent into many pieces.

Law and religion are seventeenth-century languages with which we are familiar – not least, I suspect, because they are the languages in which fundamental conflicts were voiced during the 1640s and 1650s. In early modern England, however, there were other common languages signifying shared premises which were fundamental to contemporary reflection on the state before the revolutionary decades. They were learned, it is important to observe, from a common education received in grammar schools and university by those gentlemen who were to be the governors of the realm. These are the languages bequeathed by the ancients in texts philosophical, ethical, rhetorical and historical, as well as self-pronouncedly political.

As David Wootton recently reminded us in a good introduction to Divine Right and Democracy (Penguin, 1986), a key text of political discourse in early modern England was the works of Aristotle. Though there were challenges to Aristotelian science and logic, the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw a revival of Aristotelianism in England. Aristotle described the state as a natural outgrowth of the family. Its purpose was to attain the highest good for its citizens; it was a moral community. The best state therefore was that which was most virtuous, and the only legitimate governments were those which promoted the common welfare of the citizens through good laws and justice – be they monarchies, aristocracies or democracies. Aristotle therefore bequeathed a clear philosophy of the purposes of the state, but neither prescribed its form of government, nor defined (because he did not think in terms of) powers and rights. His was an ambivalent legacy and men could read in him the patriarchal basis of royal authority and the right to resist tyrants, the rule of law, and the rule of the makers and interpreters of law, the rule of one and the rule of many, defence of republics and of strong monarchy. Scholars have recently stressed the 'eclectic Aristotelianism' of the Elizabethan universities – the adaptability and openness of Aristotle's philosophy to change and influence. Not least because there was no rival philosophical system, we badly need a study of the interpretations and changing interpretations of Aristotle's Politics in Renaissance England, if we are to understand the ideological and political tensions of the age.

The same may be said of that other ambivalent heritage of the age of humanism: the texts of classical rhetoric and especially history. The humanists urged the study of history as a source of moral guidance (philosophy teaching by examples) and as manuals for statesmen. In the classics rulers read of imperial grandeur and grand palaces that celebrated their authority. Yet in histories, popular at Oxford and Cambridge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, young gentlemen, future governors, read of tyrants as well as virtuous rulers, republics as well as empires, coups, assassinations and rebellions as well as the calm of Augustan empire. Scholars have identified the 'classical republicans' of the 1650s and late Stuart age. In a recent incisive essay, Blair Worden reminded us of Hobbes' claim that the Civil War had been caused by 'the reading of books of policy and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans'. If there is little direct evidence to support Hobbes' contention, that may be because the subject has been neglected.

It has been neglected not least because in studying the history of political ideas we have narrowly circumscribed our subject and our evidence. We have sought inappropriately for systematised thought in formal theoretical treatises. So to confine the history of ideas is to pass over other rich documents – as well as histories, poems and plays, proclamations and pictures, ceremonies and other cultural practices – from which we may study political attitudes and debates. It is, then, no accident that some of the most exciting recent discoveries in the history of political ideas have been made by historians of culture, not all of them writing from within the historical academy. In Theatre and Crisis, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), for example, Martin Butler recently uncovered incisive examinations of political ideas in the drama of Caroline England. Roy Strong in Art and Power (Boydell, 1984) furthered his work on the political values and ideas symbolically represented in masque and festival. And most recently and most extensively, Malcolm Smuts has elucidated the political philosophy that informed court culture and especially the philosophy that inspired Inigo Jones' political architecture through a study of Jones' marginalia to Aristotle's Ethics, Plutarch's Moral Works, Polybius and the Italian philosopher Piccolimini. (Smuts, Court Culture and The Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England, Philadelphia, 1987). Like the Aristotelians of Elizabethan Oxford, Jones drew on but also interpreted and adapted his sources. The imitation of the classics was not slavish in Renaissance England. It is the shaping force of classical sources and their interpretation in the light of circumstance and other influences that we now need to study across the spectrum of cultural and political life.

For all the eclecticism and adaptability of the ancient texts, however, their English interpreters of the early seventeenth century appear, for the most part, to have remained conservative. The most conspicuous exception – the justification of rebellion in a series of lectures at Cambridge explicating Tacitus – turns out significantly to have been a Dutchman, the citizen of a country which itself had risen against monarchical authority. In contrast to the French and the Dutch, English political thinkers were generally conservative. Indeed in contrast to the rich body of French texts studied by Professor Salmon (The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought, Oxford University Press, 1959) it is the absence of works of political philosophy, as opposed to political reflections, that is revealing. The English debates of the early Stuart period were not about the fundamental premises – the nature of power and rights, obedience and obligation – but, as John Cooper argued many years ago, about means, about the circumstances in which authority was exercised. It may seem at first that to stress this conservatism is to take us back to the problem posed by Christopher Hill: whence the origins of the radical intellectual ferment of the 1640s?

Here it seems to me that Hill, in searching for the intellectual origins of the English revolution may have posed the wrong question and then been trapped by the need to answer it. For in 1642, even as armies gathered, Royalists and Parliamentarians appealed to the natural and normative condition of unity. They both fought under the banners of law, the ancient constitution and God's truth. They both claimed to be fighting for the preservation of the commonweal, even for the preservation of monarchical authority. Yet, however shared and conservative their discourse, events and experience, for long in tension with ideas, now shattered and fragmented the commonweal. Ironically the death knell of long-established beliefs and philosophies seemed retrospectively to validate them: when the sovereign's head was cut off, women were said to have miscarried. All natural order in church and state seemed to be collapsing with the emergence of radical sects and communists; the end of the world was anticipated – not only by the crackpots – as the logical macrocosmic consequence of the collapse in the microcosm of the commonweal. Now indeed all coherence was gone. Those who were to reflect and write on politics were led necessarily to a radical, novel political philosophy, to a return to first principles now that none of the natural bases of order could any longer be assumed. Accordingly Thomas Hobbes (who had earlier laboured over a translation of Thucydides) believed it essential to identify 'a principle sufficiently powerful to override the conflicting interests even of citizens who did not believe in God' (Wootton). It was also essential for him to incorporate and answer the radical claims of Levellers and others formerly excluded from political participation that government required the continuing consent of the people. From both problems Hobbes emerged with self-interest and power – terms recognisable to us as the central concepts of modern political theory, but terms which did not feature in reflections on politics in early modern England.

Hobbes' political theory emerged, as the opening chapters of Leviathan make clear, from the new atomist science and a rejection of history and precedent. Scientific and historical thinking do not, as Hill tried to show, constitute the intellectual origins of the English Civil War, but new attitudes to nature and the past were among its crucial intellectual consequences. In the perceptive words of John Aubrey: Till about the year 1649... 'Twas held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learnings. 'Twas held a sin to make a scrutiny into the ways of nature.' The Civil War, David Wootton concurred, 'probably did more to change most people's views of nature than the scientific revolution had done to change their views of society'. Perhaps more important, the real consequence of the Civil War was to sever the correspondences – between' natural, political and intellectual order – that Aubrey was still able to recognise.

After 1660 many men sought to rebuild the old world. But whatever their success in restoring the social and political order, the unitary ideology was fragmented beyond repair. Challenges to Aristotelian philosophy were no longer seen as threats to authority in the church or state; the language of religious zeal was all but silent in political discourse; religious toleration even became possible as religion began to occupy a demarcated space, related to but now distinguishable from ethical and political life. Most of all as Steven Zwicker and I have argued in Politics of Discourse (University of California Press, 1987), politics itself was acknowledged as a realm of its own and party legitimized and institutionalised political difference. This demonstrates that for all the old language endured and even tried to conceal the change, men recognised that there was no one uniform Truth according to whose divine and natural principles the state must be governed if the keystone of the arch of order were not to collapse. The demise of the old word (and idea) 'commonweal' is one barometer of that fundamental change.

In arguing for a shift to fragmentation and difference from wholeness and unity, I do not wish to deny the tensions and debates in political thinking of the early modern period. Rather, I wish to suggest that such tensions were fostered by a powerfully normative ideology that often did not explain or accord with experience, yet which persisted. Indeed its very persistence (rather than, as Hill would have it, decay) may have helped to make a discursive, political resolution or compromise impossible and so have contributed to conflict. These tensions have been studied by political historians, but largely neglected in historians of ideas. They have been neglected, I suspect, because those contemporaries who grappled with these tensions and problems in early modern England did not produce clear, analytical texts of political theory. They did, however, in poems and plays, courtesy books and commonplace books, tussle with the strains and stresses within and between inherited ideals and their own experience. The historians of political ideas who bemoan the poverty of theory in early modern England may be so preoccupied with the big dog that did not bark in the night that they do not hear a pack of confused hounds yapping.