Will Morrisey Reviews

Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth, or The Long Parliament.  Stephen Holmes, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

 

Conceived in large part for war, the modern state extracted revenues from the people it ruled with greater ease than had been possible for the feudal state. Whether under a regime of the one, the few, or the many, centralization of ruling institutions enhances the authority to defend, to attack, and to tax. England in the seventeenth century was no different, but in its case the regime struggle between the one and the few, seemingly ended by the Tudors, reappeared in the form of a struggle between monarch and Parliament, with both sides appealing to the many for support. 

The “Long Parliament”—long because it began in 1640 and dissolved twenty years later—followed the “Short Parliament,” which lasted a mere three weeks, itself following an eleven-year period when Parliament didn’t convene at all. Charles I summoned Parliament to vote on funding for a war against recalcitrant Scots. When Parliament refused to cooperate unless grievances about royal abuses of power were address, the king unhesitatingly sent the gentlemen home. The reason the Long Parliament was able to be so, well, long was that members had stipulated that it could only be dissolved if they agreed to it. 

Length of tenure did not assure stability of government. On the contrary, this Parliament saw civil war in England, as Oliver Cromwell seized power and executed Charles, whose son then laid claim to the throne. Charles II lost the war and spent nine years in exile along with many royalists, including Mr. Hobbes. He returned to rule in 1660. 

Why did British politics take this catastrophic turn? What caused the “Behemoth” of the Long Parliament to rear its head, bringing down Job-like affliction upon the English? Hobbes thought he knew. As Stephen Holmes writes in his excellent introduction, “the causes of the upheaval were not economic and legal, as James Harrington had argued in Oceana (1656), but rather psychological and ideological. Civil war broke out because key actors were bewitched by irrational passions and tragically misled by doctrinal errors.” Moreover, in Hobbes’s view, the best defense against the behemoths of this world isn’t God, as the Bible would have it, but “leviathan,” the modern state whose portrait he’d drawn in the midst of the troubles. 

In his Epistle Dedicatory to his fellow royalist and religious skeptic Sir Henry Bennet, Baron of Arlington, Hobbes explains that his book consists of four dialogues. The first dialogue identifies “the seed” of the “memorable civil war” along with “certain opinions in divinity and politics.” The second dialogue describes “the growth” of the war “in declarations, remonstrances, and other writings between the King and Parliament published.” The third and fourth dialogues provide “a very short epitome of the war itself,” drawn from James Heath’s Chronicle of the Late Intestine War (1661). [1]

Dialogue I consists of a conversation between “A,” a witness to the war, and “B,” a younger man who wants to learn about it, seeking to know “the relation of the actions you then saw, and of their causes, pretensions, justice, order, artifice, and event.” “A” considers the war a peak of injustice and folly, the product of hypocrisy and self-conceit. “The people were corrupted generally, and disobedient persons esteemed the best patriots,” despite the merits of King Charles I, a man who lacked “no virtue, either of body or mind.” The people “would have taken either side for pay or plunder,” but the king’s treasury was low, and his enemies had money. But there was more at work than material inducement. The corruption extended to the people’s minds. Hobbes identifies seven types of seducers: Presbyterian ministers; Catholics; advocates of religious liberty (Independents, Anabaptists, Fifth-Monarchy men, Quakers, and miscellaneous smaller sects); liberally-educated republican parliamentarians; urban businessmen (admirers of the commercial Dutch Republic); the poor (who welcomed war as a means of advancement); and the self-seducing people themselves, “ignorant of their duty,” with “no rule of equity.” The central group on the list of religious libertarians, the Fifth-Monarchy men, “held that Christ’s was at this time to begin upon the earth.” The central group on the overall list is the ‘classical republicans.’ That is, “A” hints that the key enemies of Great Britain’s Anglican and monarchist modern state were ‘apocalyptics’ or revolutionaries religious and secular.

He nonetheless begins his more detailed analysis with the second group, the Catholics, who were eager to restore the authority of Rome that English monarchs had overthrown in the previous century. That authority was founded on a particular interpretation of Scripture, to which the Church added the claim that the Pope serves as God’s representative on earth. Pointing out the “great difference between a subject and a disciple, and between teaching and commanding,” “B”—rather in the future spirit of Voltaire, proving that there can be an apostolic succession among atheists, too—suggests that in claiming the role of “supreme judge concerning lawfulness of marriage,” including “the hereditary succession of kings,” the pope has established “a monopoly of women,” the reverse image of Plato’s community of wives in the Republic. In further claiming the right to absolve subjects of their duties and oaths to their lawful sovereigns by proclaiming those sovereigns heretics, the pope establishes “two kingdoms in one and the same nation and no man [is] able to know which of his masters he must obey.” For his part, “A” prefers to “obey that master that had the right of making laws and of inflicting punishments.” If the pope were to counter-argue that he wields both a king’s right to kill the body and God’s right to kill a soul by means of excommunication, “A” replies that the “disobedience to the king’s law is sin and to die unrepentant of sin is also to be damned”—leaving his readers, and his sovereign, damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And that is precisely his point: What is called heresy is rightly considered as no more than “a private opinion,” since if transferred to the public sphere it leads to a flat contradiction.

Heresy consists of a challenge to “the power spiritual,” “A” continues. When “B,” a good Protestant, asks, “who can tell what is declared by the Scriptures, which every man is allowed to read and interpret for himself?” “A” answers that the four Church Councils (those at Nicaea, Macedonius, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, respectively) “had no obligatory force but from the authority of the Emperor.” The Emperor Constantine was never told that his conversion to Christianity made him subject to Pope Sylvester; either the pope claimed no legislative power over secular monarchs at that time or he committed an act of “foul play” by failing to disclose his alleged authority. Moreover, a Catholic “friar” in Peru had his king, Atabalipa, “murdered” for refusing to consent to the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—rather forcefully attesting to Church acquiescence to secular authority. The popes only began their encroachments on that authority when Rome was overrun by barbarians and the people no longer so much feared the Emperors, who lived “far off at Constantinople” and could not come to their aid. It was “the negligence of the Emperors” which allowed the clergy, not letting a good crisis go to waste, to insinuate into the people the opinion that the pope and his subordinates had the true power.

“B” then preaches out of the text of Leviathan: God “gives all the kingdoms of the world, which nevertheless proceed from the consent of the people, either for fear or hope.” The Pope doesn’t bestow kingdoms upon kings, on behalf of God; on the contrary, “the Popes themselves received the Papacy from the Emperors”—that is, the “donation” of Rome to the popes came from the Emperor Constantine after his conversion. 

Recurring to the theme of the papal monopoly of women, “A” declaims against the doctrine of priestly celibacy. Under this law, either a king may not be a clergyman, which cuts him off from “a great part of the reverence due to him from the most religious part of his subjects,” or he will enter the church and sacrifice his right to sire lawful heirs to his throne. Either way, “in any controversy between him and the Pope…his people would be against him,” and so (to continue the implied analogy to Plato’s Republic) he would also lose the support of the ‘guardian’ class of his kingdom, as the pope gets “a great many lusty bachelors at his service.” By turning many among every kingdom’s warrior spirits into spiritual warriors, the pope empowers himself and weakens the secular monarchs. “B” concurs. A “Christian king, or state,” even if well provisioned in money and arms, will have difficulty recruiting soldiers in a Catholic country, “for their subjects will hardly be drawn into the field and fight with courage against their consciences.” Let’s not go so far, cynical “A” rejoins. After all, “there are but few whose consciences are so tender as to refuse money when they want it.” The real danger comes when “the Pope,” exercising his own considerable powers of the purse, “gives power to one king to invade another.” For Hobbes, material causes are the proverbial bottom line of human conduct.

For his part, “B” continues to insist on the malign effects of claims made by spiritual powers. The power of absolution of sins, supplementing the previously mentioned power of damnation, coupled with the alleged power of transubstantiating material things into spiritual things, “would have an effect on me”—if he believed it—to “make me think them gods, and to stand in awe of them as of God himself, if he were visibly present.” As private men, preaching friars in the pope’s spiritual army can “call the people together, and make orations to them frequently…without first making the state acquainted” with what they are doing and what they are saying. “A” is less concerned about what doctrines the friars tell the people to believe as the person whom they are telling the people to believe. “For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.” With the preaching friars, the pope takes hold of the terms of the social contract. “The end which the Pope had in multiplying sermons, was no other but to prop and enlarge his own authority over all Christian Kings and States.” The infection has spread even to the universities, and therefore to the few and not only the many, by the Thomistic blend of Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic-Christian doctrine. The “great books of school-divinity” are incomprehensible even to their authors. Oxford University began under the auspices of the pope. Q.E.D., in the view of Hobbes, who as a philosopher opposed Aristotle’s teleological understanding of nature as vigorously as he opposed Catholic Christianity.

And not only Catholic Christianity. The toleration of Christian preaching without state supervision is a feature of Christianity itself. Before Constantine, the Roman emperors kept a suspicious eye on Christian preachers, persecuting them for any political heresies they might commit. In England, Henry VIII prudently ‘updated’ this policy by making Christianity a civil religion, founding the Anglican Church for that purpose. 

But, given the well-designed sway of clergy over the few and the many alike, did Henry manage that? In England, a scandal among the Catholic clergy turned the opinion of “the gentry and men of good education” against them; since these men were in Parliament, the people inclined to support them. Meanwhile, Lutheranism had advanced in England and—centrally, and keeping with Hobbesian materialism—revenues from Catholic institutions were sent by the king to “eminent gentlemen in every county,” confirming their support. Henry VIII didn’t hesitate to use force against his enemies, punishing the opposition quickly and severely. Finally, invasion from abroad by Catholic forces was impossible because Spanish and French forces were fighting each other. “A” maintains that other European monarchs recognized the “cheat” of the Papacy but let the pope’s “power continue, every one hoping to make use of it, when there should be cause, against his neighbor.”

Lutheranism proved only the beginning. Although, like Moses, the pope set himself up as the sole interpreter of God, after the Bible was translated into the “vulgar languages,” “every man became a judge of religion, and an interpreter of the Scriptures to himself.” Although this proved useful against the pope, “A” (tacitly criticizing young “B”), mislikes it, as it gave rise to another set of seducers and corrupters of the people, the Presbyterians. They became powerful with “the concurrence of a great many gentlemen” who, having studied “the glorious histories and the sententious politics of the ancient popular governments of the Greeks and Romans,” became partisans of “a popular government in the civil state.” They took on the role of the earlier preaching friars, this time haranguing the people in favor of democracy. They exploited anti-Catholic sentiments, inveighing against sin—especially sexual desire, thereby bringing “young men into desperation and to think themselves damned.” This enabled them to assume the role of confessors and guides, again in imitation of the Catholic clergy, and again with the effect of enhancing their moral and political authority. In this instance, however, the Presbyterian republicans served not merely as spiritual ‘guardians’ but enlisted a real military auxiliary into their armies. In sum, “if craft be wisdom,” the dissident Parliamentarians “were wise enough.” The source of their craft has been the universities. “The Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.”

How so? At the universities, young gentlemen read the works of Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus, “whom any ingenious reader, not knowing it was the design, would judge to have been two of the most egregious blockheads in the world, so obscure and senseless are their writings,” which can “serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men.” As for Aristotle, the universities’ staple, “none of the ancient philosophers’ writing are comparable” to his “for their aptness to puzzle and entangle men with words, and to breed disputation.” Theology is the bastard child of religion and philosophy of the verbal sort. “I like not the design of drawing religion into an art, whereas it ought to be a law; and though not the same in all countries, yet in every country indisputable.” Disputation in matters of religion provides a lever for political democratization and thus for republicanism against monarchy. through study of Greek and Latin, Englishmen discovered “the democratical principles of Aristotle and Cicero, and from the love of their eloquence fell in love with their politics.” “A” judges Aristotle’s ethics especially objectionable, based as it is on the doctrine of the mean between extremes. “It is not the Much or Little that make an action virtuous, but the cause; nor Much or Little that makes an action vicious, but its being uncomformable to the laws in such men as are subject to the law, or its being conformable to equity or charity in all men whatsoever.” Indeed, “the virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth.” This sounds like classical conventionalism, but “A” has something else in mind—his own, decidedly un-Aristotelian version of natural law. Obedience to the law is justice and equity “which is the law of nature.” That is, obedience to the law is natural, even if the laws one obeys are conventional. Such obedience is also prudent, inasmuch as it avoids punishment. Obedience to the law preserves your life; self-preservation is the first law of nature.

If obedience is the virtue of a subject, what are the virtues of the sovereign, the one who ordains and enforces the law? They are maintenance of peace at home and resistance to foreign enemies—again, things conducive to self-preservation—fortitude, frugality, and liberality. The central virtue of the sovereign, fortitude, most clearly distinguishes him from his subjects, inasmuch for the private man who is not a soldier “the less they dare, the better it is for the commonwealth and themselves.” By contrast, for the sovereign fortitude serves both the commonwealth’s preservation and his own. Frugality and liberality might seem contradictory, except that frugality is a virtue the sovereign exercises in order to preserve the commonwealth’s resources and perhaps to avoid popular resentment, whereas liberality is a virtue he exercises in relation to his officials because it induces them to diligence on his and the commonwealth’s behalf while helping to assure their fidelity to both. “In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth”; the material motives of self-preservation and material gain, not the spiritual or the philosophic causes of religious and university-bred men, are the only pathways to peace and prosperity. Thus, the “great virtues” of Henry VII and Henry VIII should be joined: Henry VII ruled at a time in which there was not “much noise of the people” to trouble him as he “fill[ed] his coffers”; Henry VIII practiced “an early severity” in his reign, crushing his religious opponent, the Catholic Church, in his realm. “Without the former”—revenues—force “cannot be exercised.” The impressive exercise of the latter material cause depends upon the former material cause.

Therefore, religion rightly understood is “the law of the commonwealth.” In a sense, the pope is right. Human beings indeed must receive their religious precepts and laws from human beings. Hobbes instead disputes whether the pope and his priests should rule any commonwealth beyond Rome, which was given to them by an emperor. “There is no nation in the world, whose religion is not established, and receives not its authority form the laws of that nation” because “men can never by their own wisdom come to the knowledge of what god hath spoken and commanded to be observed, nor be obliged to obey the laws whose author they know not.” The only question is, “when there is question of his duty to God and the King, to rely upon the preaching of his fellow-subjects or of a stranger, or upon the voice of the law?”

What if a king commands “anything that is against Scripture, that is, contrary to the command of God”? If subjects are entitled to make such a judgment, “to be judge of the meaning of the Scripture,” then “it is impossible that the life of any King, or the peace of any Christian Kingdom, can be long secure,” as this doctrine “divides a kingdom within itself,” a condition in which (as the Bible itself teaches) it cannot stand. Nor can Quakers exempt themselves from their obligation to obey the law. There is no such thing as passive disobedience. “Every law is a command to do, or to forbear: neither of these is fulfilled by suffering.” Moreover, these same individuals, Christian pacifists, would not accept a death penalty carried out on themselves. “Do you not see,” “A” asks, “that all men, when they are led to execution, are both bound and guarded, and would break loose if they could, and get away?” “A” evidently finds the examples of Socrates and Jesus, of the philosopher and the Man-God, unimpressive. 

It is now clear why “A” began his discussion of English factions with the Catholics. As a Protestant, “B” readily accepted a criticism of papal authority. But his Protestant assumption, that every person has the right conscientiously to interpret Scripture, needed correction; “A” waited carefully to bring that out. “B” is not yet convinced, asking, What if a tyrant commanded me to execute my own father? “A” pretends that no king or even a tyrant is “so inhuman.” A king, in particular, rules by law. The law is general, not specific; as a subject, you are bound to obey it “unless you depart the kingdom after the publication of the law, and before the condemnation of your father.” 

Since the universities sit at “the core of the rebellion” against the English monarchy, they are dangerous to the commonwealth. They “nevertheless are not to be cast away, but to be better disciplined,” required to teach that “the civil laws are god’s laws.” Religion should surely be taught, but rightly—as “a quiet waiting for the coming again of our blessed Savior, and in the meantime a resolution to obey the King’s laws.” There must be no “mingling our religion with points of natural philosophy.” “B” concurs. This is the only way toward “lasting peace” among the English.

In Dialogue II, the interlocutors turn more specifically to the actions of Parliament against the King, the object of “B’s” initial inquiry. “A” recounts that members of Parliament falsely charged that the King intended to reintroduce Catholicism to England. (Suspicions had arisen because the Queen was Catholic and because the Archbishop of Canterbury sympathized with ‘liberal’ Protestants whom Calvinists regarded as forerunners of a move towards Rome.) “A” has no interest in suppressing Catholic belief itself: “A state can constrain obedience, but convince no error, nor alter the minds of them that believe they have the better reason. Suppression of doctrine does but unite and exasperate, that is, increase both the malice and power of them that have already believed.” In fact, “I confess I know very few controversies among Christians, of points necessary to salvation. They are the questions of authority and power over the Church, or of profit, or of honor to Churchmen, that for the most part raise all the controversies.” Power, money, and pride (recall that mighty Leviathan is “king of the proud”) motivate men in political controversies, not spiritual concerns. “For what man is he, that will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself?”

In these matters, the practice if not the philosophy of the ancients ranks above the practice of Christians. Greek and Latin “heathens were not at all behind us in point of virtue and moral duties, notwithstanding that we have had much preaching, and they none at all.” The heathens had a ceremony-centered civil religion, not a doctrine-centered dissenting one, or more than one. England needs more “discreet and ancient men” in the pulpits. And in Parliament. “Impudence in democratical assemblies does almost all that’s done; ’tis the goddess of rhetoric, and carries proof with it.” There, urban businessmen wield considerable influence, but “London, you know, has a great bely, but no palate nor taste of right and wrong.” The private business seen in the great centers of commerce requires only “diligence and natural wit,” whereas “for the government of a commonwealth, neither wit, nor prudence, nor diligence, is enough, without infallible rules and the true science of equity and justice.” Since those rules and that science are not followed anywhere, sedition has afflicted all “the greatest commonwealths,” not only England.

If the teaching of Leviathan were heeded, the people would obey their monarch and England would be at peace. “Ambition can do little without hands, and few hands it would have, if the common people were as diligently instructed in the true principles of their duty, as they are terrified and amazed by preachers, with fruitless and dangerous doctrines concerning the nature of man’s will”—debates over predestination versus freedom, for example—and “many other philosophical points that tend not at all to the salvation of their souls in the world to come, nor to their ease in this life, but only to the directions towards the clergy of that duty which they ought to perform to the King.” The parliamentarians want no such thing, desiring instead “the whole and absolute sovereignty, and to change the monarchical government into an oligarchy” consisting of themselves, soi-disant republicans. Since “there can be no government where there is more than one sovereign,” no mixed-regime republic can sustain itself; it is a matter of force, as “he that hath the power of levying and commanding the soldiers, has all other rights of sovereignty which he shall please to claim.” Ergo, as “B” puts it, the rule of Parliament amounts to “tyranny over the King,” a tyranny that parliamentarians eventually will extend over the people after the king, their protector, no longer controls the regular troops or the militia. Truly, “the legislative power (and indeed all power possible) is contained in the power of the militia,” the armed populace. He who rules it rules the country.

“A” approves of the younger man’s logical conclusion to “A’s” analysis. “You see what a heap of evils [Parliament] have raised to make a show of ill-government to the people,” following with a “catalogue of those good things they had done for the King and the Kingdom”—this, not only a reply to “B” but a reply, more than a century in advance, to the argument of the American Declaration of Independence. And for their part, English Presbyterians, “with pretended sanctity,” made “the King and his party odious to the people.” While on the right course, “B” as yet doesn’t know the half of it, not having “observed the world long enough to see all that’s ill.” Perhaps spurred to show what he has observed, “B” deplores the “two factions” which “trouble the commonwealth” over no more than their “opinions, that is, about who has the most learning; as if their learning ought to be the rule of governing all the world.” This is only vanity, as what they have learned “is called divinity” but in reality consists of “almost nothing” but “matter of philosophy.” “I do not think they pretend to speak with God and know his will by any other way than reading the Scriptures, which we also do.” “A” steps in with a correction. “Some of them do…give themselves out for prophets by extraordinary inspiration,” although you are right to say that most base their claim to authority only on “their breeding in the Universities, and knowledge there gotten of the Latin tongue, and some also of the Greek and Hebrew tongues, wherein the Scripture was written,” along with “their knowledge of natural philosophy”—which, as “A” will soon remark, is no knowledge at all.

This learning, “A” continues, yields only “the advancement of the professors,” who aspire to the power priests have wielded throughout history—the Druids, the Persian Magi, the priests of Egypt, Israel, and other nations in the Near East, the fakirs of India, and the priests of Ethiopia, who enjoyed the power to order the death of their kings. Empowered priests are dangerous. What are the republican revolutionaries of England, if not regicides? “Our late King, the best King perhaps that ever was, you know, was murdered, having been persecuted by war, at the incitement of Presbyterian ministers, who are therefore guilty of the death of all that fell in that war.” To kill 1,000 of those ministers would have been “a great massacre; but the killing of 100,000 [in the Civil War] is a greater.” As for the would-be priests, the professors, “their divinity was nothing but idolatry; and their philosophy…very little; and that part abused in astrology and fortune-telling.” True science isn’t the Aristotelianism of the dons but the experimentalism of Francis Bacon. True philosophy “can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from [scientists’] obedience to the sovereign power.” [2]

This is why the contradictory claims to power of King and Parliament have led to civil war. Having depended upon the armies it commanded, and hence upon the generals who commanded the armies, Parliament became hostage to the greatest of those generals, Oliver Cromwell, who set himself up as de facto ruler of Great Britain, effectively destroying the prospects for the republicanism parliamentarians said they wanted and the oligarchy they really intended.

In Dialogue III Hobbes attacks the Aristotelian solution to the political problem, the mixed regime. England can never be a “mixed monarchy” because “the supreme power must always be absolute, whether it be in the King or in the Parliament.” Not only were the “seditious blockheads” (called ‘Roundheads’), men “more fond of change than either of their peace or profit,” at fault, but even the King’s counsellors imagined that supreme power can be shared. This illusion “weakened their endeavor to procure [the King] an absolute victory in the war.” But as “B” remarks, “a civil war never ends by treaty, without the sacrifice of those who were on both sides the sharpest”—possibly including the 1,000 Presbyterian ministers “A” had mentioned. The King’s counsellors were “in love with mixarchy,” which, far from being the best practicable regime, as Aristotle claims, amounts in practice to “nothing else but pure anarchy.” “There could be no peace” under such a “divided power.” 

True, “there cannot be a better title for war, than the defense of a man’s own right. But the people, at that time, thought nothing lawful for the King to do, for which there was not some statute made by Parliament.” Parliamentarians justified what “A” regards as a warrantless assertion of authority with a “university quibble,” pretending “that the King was always virtually in the two Houses of Parliament; making a distinction between his person natural and politic; which made their impudence greater, besides the folly of it.”

In this, they had the backing not only of religious dissenters but of the urban business classes, ever resentful of the taxes they pay to fight the King’s wars, since “their only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling” by “making poor people sell their labor to them at their own prices.” Although “the first encouragers of the rebellion,” merchants were also “the first to repent” when the King’s army flexed its muscles at their expense.” Deluded by the expectation of security in property rights, merchants are “blind” to “the very thought of plundering”; they fail to understand that property rights rest on force, in practice. Merchants suppose themselves smart and realistic, and they are, when it comes to merchandise. When it comes to politics and war, not so much. He who has the gold makes the rules, but only until he who has the guns takes the gold away.

But the King committed a military blunder, delaying his move against Parliament in order to lay siege to rebellious Gloucester and thereby giving Parliament time to raise new levies. After the King’s capture, the duplicitous Oliver Cromwell, a man ambitious “to proceed as far as [policy] and fortune would carry him,” “contrive[d] how to mutiny the army against the Parliament” by circulating the lie that Parliament intended to disband the army and cheat the soldiers out of their pay. This led to nearly a decade of tyranny. 

Young “B” adduces lessons from these observations. Monarchs should put regime security first, their own rivalries second. It is foolish for foreign princes to aid rebels in another country in an attempt to weaken a rival monarch, “especially when [the rebels] rebel against monarchy itself.” Monarchs should fight each other only after combining against republican revolutionaries. As for republican clergymen, whose “interpretation of a verse in the Hebrew, Greek, or Latin Bible is oftentimes the cause of civil war and the deposing and assassination of God’s anointed,” “you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affairs either of war or peace.” Their kingdom really is in Heaven, and they should leave earthly kingdoms to those who know how to rule them. Finally, “the common people know nothing of right or wrong by their own meditation; they must therefore be taught the grounds of their duty, and the reasons why calamaties ever follow disobedience to their lawful sovereigns.”

A man of some piety, “B” observes that “the original of all laws was in the people,” under God. “A” steps in immediately: the people, “by consent and oaths, have long ago put the supreme power of the nation into the hands of their kings, for them and their heirs.” Admittedly, Parliament represents the people for some purposes, such as receiving petitions for popular grievances, but “not to make a grievance of the King’s power.” What is more, Parliament legitimately meets only when the King calls them; “nor is it to be imagined that he calls a Parliament to depose him.” All the more criminal was Parliament’s execution in 1648, after the King rightly denied their authority to try him at all. The “vices,” the “crimes,” and the “follies” of the majority in the Long Parliament, failures “than which none greater can be found in the world,” thus ruined English life for a generation. Presbyterian MPs and ministers displayed the vices, namely, “irreligion, hypocrisy, avarice and cruelty”; the Presbyterians joined with the Independents or dissenting sects in the crimes of “blaspheming and killing God’s anointed”; the Presbyterians again joined with the Lords in folly, the latter in failing “to see that the by the taking away of the King’s power they lost withal their own privileges.” The lawyers ignorantly overlooked the fact that “the laws of the land were made by the King, to oblige his subjects to peace and justice, and not to oblige himself that made them.” “Lastly and generally, all men are fools which pull down anything which does them good, before they have set up something better in its place.”

Well, not quite lastly. What these men did set up was a “democracy with an army” without considering that the army they authorized was controlled by Oliver Cromwell, who soon acted to “pull [the democracy] down.” What can one expect of “those fine men, which out of their reading of Tully, Seneca, or other anti-monarchics, think themselves sufficient politics, and show their discontent when they are not called to the management of the state, and turn from one side to another upon every neglect they fancy from the King or his enemies”? Such were the founders of the Commonwealth of England regime.

After Parliament put Charles I to death, Cromwell purged it of any members who might have opposed his rule. Dialogue IV begins with an account of the resulting “Rump Parliament.” “A” recalls that a true Parliament includes King, Lords, and Commons,” but this one included only the Commons, and only a few of them. Thus redefined, Parliament’s notion of liberty was a sort of political libertinism, assuming “leave to do what they list[ed]” and so “to abuse the people.” This could hardly surprise any sensible man: “How likely then are they to uphold the fundamental laws, that had murdered him who as by themselves so often acknowledged for their lawful sovereign?” Their lawful sovereign, Charles II, resisted Cromwell until 1651, when he fled to Paris, taking the core of his loyalists with him.

“What silly things are the common sort of people,” “B” exclaims, “to be cozened as they were so grossly!” “A” has a rhetorical question ready in answer: “What sort of people, as to this matter, are not of the common sort?” That is, even “the craftiest knaves of the Rump were no wiser than the rest whom they cozened”; they believed their own jive, thinking the “things which they imposed upon the generality were just and reasonable.” Surely no one “can be a good subject to monarchy, whose principles are taken from the enemies of monarchy, such as were Cicero, Seneca, Cato, and other politicians of Rome, and Aristotle of Athens, who seldom speak of kings but as wolves and other ravenous beasts?” They do so because real political understanding comes not from “a good natural wit” but from the science of politics, “built upon sure and clear principles” and “learned from deep and careful study, or from masters that have deeply studied it”—surely not Aristotle, who was no real scientist, even if styled ‘the master of those who know’ by a Romish theologian—but Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan. Hobbes had no readers in this Parliament, who might “find out those rules of justice, and the necessary connexion of justice and peace”—which is indeed a principal lesson of Hobbes’s book.

The members of the Rump Parliament took their principles instead from Presbyterian ministers, who wanted ‘popular’ rule so that they could rule Great Britain through their harangues from the pulpit. “B” asks, “What have we then gotten by our deliverance from the Pope’s tyranny, if these petty men succeed in the place of it, that have nothing in them that can be beneficial to the public, except their silence”—precisely the benefice they preferred not to bestow? What Parliamentarians of the Rump mean by a “commonwealth” or “Free State” was only “that neither this king, nor any king, nor any single person, but only…they themselves would be the people’s masters.” Once so empowered they “gave one another money and estates, out the the lands and goods of the loyal party”—the monarchists.

Given England’s disorder, Irish and Scots rebels made their move and the Dutch attempted to seize an advantage on the seas. These wars only served further to empower Cromwell. In Ireland, “with extraordinary diligence and horrid executions, in less than a twelvemonth that he stayed there, subdued in a manner the whole nation; having killed or exterminated a great part of them, and leaving his son-in-law Ireton to subdue the rest,” a task only interrupted by his death by the plague. “This was one step more towards Cromwell’s exaltation to the throne.” In Scotland, Cromwell won again, if only thanks to blunders by Scottish generals. After the Dutch War in 1652, Cromwell had the obedience of all military forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland, Cromwell disbanded the Rump Parliament, founding the Protectorate regime, that is, his own absolute rule. That is, Cromwell ‘called a Parliament, and gave it the supreme power, with condition that they should give it to him. Was this not witty?”

This regime survived until Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son, Richard, succeeded him, but his irresolution and lack of military reputation soon caused him to be cast aside. “I believe it is the desire of most men to bear rule; but few of them know what title one has to it more than another, beside the right of the sword.” Richard Cromwell didn’t earn the latter and so couldn’t take advantage of the people’s natural desire for peace. Nor could any of the others. “A” lists what “B” calls “the many shiftings of the supreme authority” in England between 1640 and 1659. In 1660, after the majority of members in the Long Parliament failed re-election, the new Parliament recalled the exiled Charles II from France. Charles prudently stipulated that he would in future be authorized to call up the militia without Parliament’s approval. If the people know only the right of the sword but lack the virtù to wield it without a commander, the King had better make sure of them by holding their arms firmly in obedience to himself.

 

 

 

Note

1. Heath was another royalist, author also of a highly critical book on Oliver Cromwell. He is credited with founding the ‘Court’ party, which eventually became the Tory Party.
2. “Appear” is a judicious word choice, inasmuch as Baconian science aims at the mastery of nature for the relief of man’s estate. See Bacon’s quasi-utopian Bensalem, discussed on this website.