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INTRODUCTION

Edward Wortley Montagu (1713–76) was the son of an exceptionally wealthy father and a celebrated and talented mother. Edward Wortley Montagu senior (1678–1761)—Member of Parliament (MP), diplomat, and man of business—eloped on 23 August 1712 with Lady Mary Pierrepoint (1689–1762), later to achieve fame under her married name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as at first the friend and then the foe of Alexander Pope, as a pioneer of inoculation for smallpox, and as an Oriental traveler. Almost nine months to the day after the elopement, on 16 May 1713 Lady Mary gave birth to a son.1

After an infancy passed in Constantinople, where his father had been posted as British ambassador, a period of troubled schooling at Westminster, and an imprudent early marriage, Edward Wortley Montagu junior’s youth was spent in dissipation, travel, and minor criminality (being, for instance, a known associate of several highwaymen). His early years also included spells as a soldier (when he acquitted himself well enough, being mentioned in dispatches after the battle of Fontenoy on 12 May 1745), as a student of Oriental languages at the University of Leiden, as a bibliophile, and as a diplomat; his command of languages apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded

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the War of the Austrian Succession. From 1747 until 1761 Montagu led a racketty life in Paris and London, acquiring and discarding wives, mistresses, and illegitimate children. He also served as an MP for first Huntingdonshire and then Bossiney, a constituency in Cornwall controlled by his father. He supplemented his parental allowance by operating as a professional gambler, where he seems not to have been above, if not actual cheating, then certainly entrapment and intimidation.

On the death of his father in 1761 his hopes of inheriting the major part of the vast family estate were disappointed, and he contested the will, which had been drawn up to the advantage of his sister, Lady Bute. Very wealthy herself as a result of her marriage, she was prepared to settle. Furnished by the Butes with cash and an estate, and confirmed as MP for Bossiney (thereby acquiring a useful immunity from imprisonment for debt), Montagu shook “the dust of an ungrateful country” from his feet, and retired to the continent.2 For the remainder of his life he traveled in Italy and the Levant, pursuing both esoteric scholarly enthusiasms and, on occasion, the wives of other men. He affected Turkish costume and professed to be a Muslim. But in March 1776, a broken bone from an ortolan or beccafico on which Montagu was dining lacerated his throat. An abscess developed, leading to a general infection, and he died in Padua on 29 April 1776. In its mingling of luxury and mishap, touched with a dash of absurdity, the manner of Montagu’s death was entirely in keeping with the way he had lived his life.

However, in 1759, and in what seems to have been an attempt to secure the favor of his bookish, political father, Montagu had temporarily laid aside his feckless and dandyish ways. In that year he published Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks, a work of no little scholarship and some political engagement, which he seems to have begun during the summer of 1756, and which was received by the literary world with polite applause.3 It was revised and expanded for its second edition

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the following year, and this revised text was reprinted for an English readership in 1769 and again in 1778. Dark suspicions lingered that the book had in fact been written by Montagu’s former tutor, the Rev. John Forster.4 But setting those rumors to one side, why might Montagu have believed that a book which extracted from the histories of five republics of the ancient world political, military, and economic lessons for mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen would improve his standing in the eyes of his father? The answer to that question must be approached by way of a review of the worsening international situation from the late 1740s, and the early phases of the global conflict in which Britain would thereafter be embroiled with France.

The Political and Military Context

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1747)—in which, as we saw, Montagu had played a minor diplomatic role—proved to be nothing more than an armed truce. In the early 1750s tensions between the French and English in India began once more to rise as the English East India Company resisted French attempts to establish control over the Carnatic and the Deccan. In the West Indies, England and France squabbled over the “neutral” islands. Most gravely, in America the ambitious French strategy to link their settlements in Canada with Louisiana by means of a series of forts along the Ohio and the Mississippi had led to skirmishes with the English colonists, who were themselves now seeking to break out from the eastern seaboard and acquire additional territory west of the Allegheny Mountains.

The British response to these French provocations was muffled and slow—the consequence of hesitation and a lack of consensus among a political class in transition. But eventually, in October 1754, British regiments under the command of General Braddock set sail for the colonies, and measures for raising troops in America were put in motion. The

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outcome was, to begin with, disastrous. In July 1755 Braddock led his troops into a French ambush on the Monongahela and suffered dreadful casualties, from which he himself was not excluded.5 Public sentiment in Britain was further depressed by the apparent fruitlessness of the naval blockade of Brest which from July to December had been entrusted to Hawke, and which had somehow failed to engage the French fleet under the command of de la Motte. The new year brought fresh reasons for alarm in the form of well-founded fears of a French invasion.6 The resulting public panic over the state of the nation’s defenses prompted Pitt and Townshend to propose a Militia Bill which cleared the Commons in May 1756 but was rejected by the Lords. To fill the gap, mercenary troops were imported from Hanover and Hesse (events to which Montagu would make several references in Reflections).7 The final provocation arrived that same month, with news that (as British ministers since February had feared would happen) French forces had landed in Minorca.

A formal declaration of war with France followed, and although this to some degree cleared the air, it did not herald any immediate improvement in British fortunes. In April a squadron of ten ships under the command of Admiral Byng had been sent to relieve Minorca. Byng was slow to reach the theater of operations, and once there failed to engage the enemy with resolution, instead returning to Gibraltar, leaving the Minorcan garrison to struggle on until it finally surrendered, after a gallant defense, on 28 June 1756. British public opinion was outraged, and a scapegoat was required. Byng was the sole and inevitable candidate. After a court-martial in February 1757 he was shot the following month “pour encourager les autres” as Voltaire memorably put it.8

However, now the tide of war was beginning to turn in Britain’s favor, although as is commonly the case the actual moment of reversal from ebb to flow escaped the attention of most onlookers. In the summer of 1756 the

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collapse of Newcastle’s continental diplomacy and his evident inadequacy as a war leader had led him to make overtures to William Pitt, then the most effective speaker in the Commons, and a man whose Patriot platform was proving popular in the country at large and devastating in the House. Eventually, after several months of maneuvering and false starts, by the summer of 1757 Pitt and Newcastle were working in harness, the latter as First Lord of the Treasury, but the former as the dominant figure in both the Cabinet and the Commons.9

The change in the direction of policy and the tone of administration was immediate. The Militia Bill was reintroduced, and finally passed the Lords in June 1757. The German mercenaries were sent home, and two new regiments were raised from the same Highland clans that, a mere twelve years before, had seemed to threaten the very existence of the Hanoverian regime.10 The American colonists were by turns flattered, encouraged, and cajoled into making greater efforts for their own defense, and for the security and extension of the empire. Frederick the Great, Britain’s ally on the continent, was generously supported with money and men; considerable French forces, which might otherwise have made a nuisance of themselves in America, were thus tied up in central Europe. In less than three years the strength of the British navy was increased by fifty-five thousand men and seventy ships, and with it the operational reach of British arms was transformed.

Pitt’s strategy, which his extraordinary energy and charismatic personality made feasible, was to exploit Britain’s financial advantage over France, and to deploy the manpower so raised to seize the initiative on every front of what he realized was a world war.11 France was to be

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destroyed as an imperial power, not only in America, but all over the globe. As Johnson observed, “Lord Chatham [as Pitt was to become in 1766] was a Dictator; he possessed the power of putting the State in motion.”12 The fruits of such a strategy inevitably took some time to appear, and the second half of 1757 seemed at first like a continuation of the previous trend of calamity, with the defeat of Frederick the Great at Kolin, the duke of Cumberland’s signing of the Convention of Kloster-Zeven which crystallized a temporary French advantage in Germany, the fiasco of failed British raids on the French coast, and the loss of Fort William Henry on Lake George to the accomplished and professional French general Montcalm. The following year, however, was more promising. Frederick enjoyed some spectacular successes on the continent;13 the navy showed itself to be more effective in disrupting French operations; there were victories in America (including the capture of Louisburg and Fort Duquesne); and a series of well-planned lightning raids on the coast of Brittany and on French settlements in West Africa demonstrated in British forces a new proficiency in mounting combined operations.

That positive trend was consummated in 1759, the famous “Year of Victories”—and also, of course, the year in which Montagu’s Reflections was published, but too early for its text to take account of the sudden upturn in British military fortunes.14 In May, Guadeloupe was captured; on 1 August, British regiments were conspicuous at Minden in Ferdinand of Brunswick’s great victory over a numerically superior French force under Contades; on 13 September, Wolfe took Quebec (accompanied the following year by Canada in its entirety); and finally in November, a French fleet gathered to escort across the Channel the transports of an invading French army mustered on the Brittany

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coast15 was almost entirely destroyed by Hawke in the battle of Quiberon Bay.

However, the death of George II on 25 October 1760 and the accession of his grandson George III inaugurated the endgame of the Seven Years’ War. The new king and his closest adviser, Lord Bute (who happened also to be Montagu’s brother-in-law), were determined to bring to a close what they regarded as a bloody and expensive conflict. In the spring of 1761 France and Russia began to negotiate for peace, and relations between Pitt on the one hand and George III and Lord Bute on the other, which in the mid-1750s had been cordial, but which had been put under strain in late 1758 by Pitt’s high-handedness in office, steadily worsened, until on 5 October 1761 Pitt resigned the seals of office. By the summer of 1762, and with the resignation of Newcastle on 26 May of that year, Bute became First Lord of the Treasury and was thus fully in the ascendant. Peace negotiations moved forward with renewed velocity, and on 3 November 1762 the duke of Bedford signed the preliminary articles of what on 10 February 1763 would become the Treaty of Paris. Pitt rose from his sickbed to denounce the terms of the preliminary articles as unduly lenient toward France and embodying an unforgivable desertion of Britain’s heroic Protestant ally, Frederick the Great—but to no avail.

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the arguable shabbiness of her behavior in sealing the peace, at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 Britain was beyond question the dominant world power, with vastly enlarged territories in America, a free hand in India, and no serious rival among the great nations of Europe. The situation was caught in a remark of Johnson’s made a few years afterward:

It being observed to him [Johnson], that a rage for every thing English prevailed much in France after Lord Chatham’s glorious war, he said, he did not wonder at it, for that we had drubbed those fellows into

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a proper reverence for us, and that their national petulance required periodical chastisement.16

Yet it was a precarious eminence, as Johnson’s likening of Pitt to a “meteor” (as opposed to the “fixed star” of Walpole) perhaps hinted.17 At least some of the seeds of the two great convulsions of the later eighteenth century—the War of American Independence, and the French Revolution—can be found in the legacy of the Seven Years’ War.

With respect to America, the deceptive glory achieved in 1763 encouraged British statesmen to adopt imperious policies toward the North American colonists—policies which, as Fred Anderson observes, actually ran counter to the lessons a more subtle observer would have drawn from the conflict:

In the Philippine episode [the capture of Manila by Draper in 1762] more than any other of the Seven Years’ War, the principles of imperial dominion stood out with unmistakable clarity. Military power—particularly naval power—could gain an empire, but force alone could never control colonial dependencies. Only the voluntary allegiance, or at least the acquiescence, of the colonists could do that. Flags and governors and even garrisons were, in the end, only the empire’s symbols. Trade and loyalty were its integuments, and when colonial populations that refused their allegiance also declined to trade, the empire’s dominion extended not a yard beyond the range of its cannons.18

Pitt had realized that, to achieve victory, he must embrace Britain’s North American colonists. Accordingly he treated them as allies, not as auxiliaries, still less as subordinates; and they in turn saw themselves as partners in the project of empire. But victory turned the minds of British politicians away from the comprehensive policies which had been the mother of success and beckoned them instead down the ruinous paths of autocracy. The exertion of control from Whitehall was now the favored mode of administration. The resulting new techniques of imperial administration raised in the minds of the colonists doubts as to whether their interests and those of Great Britain were not only the same but even aligned.

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The small irony that Washington acquired in the service of Great Britain during the Seven Years’ War the military skills which he would later deploy against the mother country points toward the much larger irony that American independence can, without undue distortion, be seen as the unintended consequence of Britain’s triumph in securing and extending her North American colonies. Meanwhile in France, the check to imperial ambitions sustained in 1763 had removed if not the solution then at least a possible palliative for the economic and social problems which would in 1789 demand more drastic remedies.

Montagu’s Reflections was written as an intervention in the first of these crises, and it went on to enjoy an afterlife in the second and third. As we shall see, it is a work of history which is repeatedly wrong-footed by history itself, being uniformly invoked in support of causes against which events were soon to set their face. Yet the facts of its republication and translation suggest that until the end of the century it never entirely lost its power to interest and even to influence.

Reflections and the Seven Years’ War

By publishing the Reflections in 1759 Montagu was at one level opportunistically following in the footsteps of John “Estimate” Brown, who two years previously had enjoyed meteoric success with his civic humanist chiding of decadent Britain, Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. But Montagu’s focus on the ancient republics gave a distinctive twist to his contribution to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain’s decline. As he explained in the preface:

The design therefore of these papers is, to warn my countrymen, by the example of others, of the fatal consequences which must inevitably attend our intestine divisions at this critical juncture; and to inculcate the necessity of that national union, upon which the strength, the security, and the duration of a free state must eternally depend. Happy, if my weak endeavours could in the least contribute to an end so salutary, so truly desirable!19

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However, although Reflections is a work which asks to be placed in the “civic humanist” tradition described by John Pocock, Montagu’s unpacking of the warnings for Britain to be gleaned from the fates of the ancient republics is unusually nuanced, in that each of the five states he examines—Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome—supplies a separate “lesson” adapted to the needs of Britain in the nadir of its fortunes during the Seven Years’ War. Sparta instructs modern Britain to suppress commerce, refinement, and opulence and to bolster the landed interest. Athens warns of the dangerous levity of a democratical form of government, of the disastrous influence the people can exercise over the constitution and policy of a state if they are not checked by a powerful and confident aristocracy, of the proneness of the people to encourage charismatic despotism (illustrated in the person of Alcibiades), and lastly of the folly of foreign entanglements and “empire-building.” Thebes, more encouragingly, demonstrates the potency of a “very small number of virtuous patriots” to save a state from corruption.20 The calamitous Carthaginian experience with mercenaries shows the incomparable superiority of a militia over hired swords. Finally, Rome plays her customary role in moralized history of showing the fatal consequences of luxury:

But of all the ancient Republicks, Rome in the last period of her freedom was the scene where all the inordinate passions of mankind operated most powerfully and with the greatest latitude. There we see luxury, ambition, faction, pride, revenge, selfishness, a total disregard to the publick good, and an universal dissoluteness of manners, first make them ripe for, and then compleat their destruction.21

In the end, it was the Epicurean atheism of the Roman upper classes which gave the coup de grâce to the Roman state; an interpretation of Roman decline which paves the way for Montagu’s censure of the irreligion of the Britons of his own day—censure which, given his own confessional history, is certainly cheeky, if probably not tongue-in-cheek.22

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Such a summary of the broad outlines of Montagu’s argument in the Reflections does little, however, to show how carefully its analyses and recommendations are not only “Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain” (as the title page states) but also tailored to the political alliances and enmities of its author’s family. Edward Wortley Montagu senior’s political career was defined by his opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. In 1716 he had composed an essay “On the State of Affairs when the King Entered,” in which he had anatomized English politics in 1714 on the accession of George I in terms of the malign influence of one ambitious and rising man:

This brief sketch … narrows into a single-minded attack on Walpole. Wortley sees him as duping and manipulating men of higher rank than himself, widening the gap between Whig and Tory, damaging the King’s popularity by his bad judgement.… Wortley regrets King William’s days, when Treasury Commissioners were “all men of great figure,” not upstarts like Walpole. [Wortley Montagu had been made a Commissioner of the Treasury on 13 October 1714.] He thinks the Treasury is a reliable ladder to greatness, and Walpole ought to be kept off it. He refers indirectly to himself as the only Treasury man who is not Walpole’s creature. He is unable to “hinder any of [Walpole’s] projects,” and can only “inform the King of his affairs.” The essay explains the rift between Court Whigs (bad) and Country Whigs (good but unrewarded).23

Wortley Montagu senior’s opposition to Walpole endured for more than two decades. Only after the eventual fall of the great minister in February 1742 would he exert himself more vigorously in the Commons.24 In the meantime, although he stood apart from the Patriot Whig circles which coalesced around Viscount Cobham in the 1730s, he must have applauded their pursuit of an implacable vendetta against Walpole.25 Conspicuous in the ranks of “Cobham’s Cubs” was a brilliant young

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orator, William Pitt, whom Walpole had driven into opposition and the arms of his uncle Cobham by depriving him of his cornetcy of horse in punishment for his outspokenness in the Commons in the summer of 1736.26 Although Pitt seems never to have been particularly close to the Montagus, they nevertheless thought well of him, and, as a natural ally, they later saw him as a possible source of patronage for their friends and connections.27

Possibly more important, however, than the enmity with Walpole and the potential affinity with Pitt, would be an alliance forged in 1736 when Montagu’s sister, Mary, married John Stuart, third earl of Bute. It was a match apparently entered into out of affection, in the teeth of at least paternal indifference if not active opposition, and without ulterior motives of either a financial or a political kind.28 The early years of the marriage were spent in the isolation and comparative poverty of the Isle of Bute, where the earl resided on his estates and pursued his interests in botany. But in the mid-1740s he and his countess moved to London, where in 1747 he struck up a friendship with Frederick, prince of Wales. Soon Bute became a leading figure at Leicester House (the

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prince’s London residence, and a center of opposition politics). After Frederick’s death in 1751 Bute remained a trusted adviser to his widow. He was appointed tutor to her son, the future George III, whom he educated in accordance with the principles of the “country” opposition: “a composite, idealistic political creed advocating an isolationist foreign policy, the abolition of party distinctions, the purging of corruption, and the enhancement of monarchial control over policy and patronage.”29 In the mid-1750s Bute and Pitt stood shoulder to shoulder in opposition to Newcastle’s policies. But in the later years of the decade their alliance came under pressure as Pitt took up office and came round to supporting and indeed reinforcing Newcastle’s policy of continental engagement.

Montagu trimmed the text of Reflections with some skill in deference to the various imperatives of these family alliances and antagonisms. To echo his father’s hatred of Walpole was easy. Montagu sowed the text of Reflections with disparaging references to “late power-engrossing ministers” and “corrupt and ambitious statesmen” whose misuse of public funds, rather than “superior abilities,” allowed them to “reduce corruption into system”—language easily interpretable by the book’s first readers as attacks on the memory of Walpole.30 In a particularly felicitous moment, a glance at Walpole’s fall allowed Montagu in one breath to rejoice in the punishment of a villain and to commiserate with his father, one of the “honest men” in the opposition, whose name had been counted in the day of battle, but who had been passed over in the division of the spoils:

When the leaders of that powerful opposition had carried their point by their popular clamours; when they had pushed the nation into that war [with Spain]; when they had drove an overgrown minister from the helm, and nestled themselves in power, how quickly did they turn their backs upon the honest men of their party, who refused to concur in their measures!31

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But to pay compliments to both Pitt and Bute, who as the Reflections was being written were becoming gradually more estranged, required more careful management.32

There seemed to be no call for any perfect even-handedness, however. Although George II’s health was not robust, no one could have predicted in 1758 that his death was so imminent; and nothing but the king’s death could convert Bute’s ascendancy over the heir-apparent into that much more substantial thing, real power at court. Meanwhile, Pitt held the reins of political power as Secretary of State, and was the dominant figure in the administration. Some such calculation seems to lie behind the distribution of Montagu’s compliments, which are mainly directed toward Pitt, but which do not preclude some mildly fawning touches designed to gratify Bute, as a kind of insurance policy. The very basis of Montagu’s book, in its engagement with ancient history, could be taken as a deferential gesture toward Pitt, who in 1759 would be praised as the English Pericles, whom Horace Walpole had compared to Cicero and Demosthenes, and whose Parliamentary oratory relied heavily on allusions to ancient history.33 (Pitt is presumably excluded from Montagu’s prefatory strictures on those who have “misrepresented” historical facts and employed the “chicane of sophistry.”)34 On this foundation of implicit flattery Montagu went on to erect more overt structures of compliment to “the Great Commoner,” couching his analyses of ancient history in language associated with Pitt, expressing relief at the calling of

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“a truly disinterested patriot to the helm,” and offering vigorous support to a policy with which, as we have seen, Pitt was particularly connected, namely the creation of a national militia.35 But Montagu also had one eye on Bute, and so this lavish praise of Pitt was accompanied by a trace of reservation concerning one aspect of current British policy, namely its commitments on the continent in support of Frederick the Great.36 Here, Montagu sounded a note of troubled warning, which no doubt he hoped would gratify the isolationist ears of Leicester House. At such moments we glimpse Montagu caught in the ebb and flow of events, and, with some ingenuity but perhaps less dignity, trying to find a posture in which he might at the same time worship both the rising and the setting sun.

The Afterlife of Reflections: America and France

Montagu’s support for Pitt would by itself have recommended the Reflections to Thomas Hollis and his circle—Hollis, who had medals struck to commemorate the great military triumphs of Pitt’s administration, who thought of Pitt as one of the “old friends of liberty” and “an assertor of liberty,” and whose close friend Richard Baron had presented a copy of his edition of Milton’s Eikonoklastes to Pitt, with the inscription: “To William Pitt, Esq. Assertor of Liberty, Champion of the People, Scourge of impious Ministers, their Tools and Sycophants, this book is presented by the Editor.”37

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But, if it is easy to appreciate the congeniality of Montagu’s views to Hollis personally, what at the level of practical politics did Hollis hope to achieve by sending a copy of the Reflections to Harvard? The question of whether or not—and if so, to what degree and in what manner—the example of classical antiquity conditioned the thinking and guided the actions of the Founders has long been the subject of dispute between scholars of the Founding Period. The easy acceptance of early twentieth-century historians that classical influence had been real and defining was rejected by, most influentially, Bernard Bailyn, who judged it on the contrary to be “illustrative, not determinative, of thought.”38 Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby accorded a place to classical republicanism in the early stages of the colonists’ struggle with Great Britain, before it yielded to the “modern republicanism” embodied in The Federalist. John Pocock, Lance Banning, Drew McCoy, and Paul Rahe have more recently tried to tip the balance of historical judgment further back to the benefit of classical antiquity, to the point where the most recent student of the subject can conclude:

It is clear that the classics exerted a formative influence upon the founders. Classical ideas provided the basis for their theories of government form, social responsibility, human nature, and virtue. The authors of the classical canon offered the founders companionship, solace, and the models and antimodels which gave them a sense of identity and purpose. The classics facilitated communication by furnishing a common set of symbols, knowledge, and ideas, a literature select enough to provide common ground, yet rich enough to address a wide range of human problems from a variety of perspectives.39

Nevertheless, the American republic sooner or later would embrace ideals and values sharply at variance with those endorsed by Montagu’s Reflections. It would place agriculture below commerce and industry; it would abandon aloof self-sufficiency and instead engage with the world in an imperial manner (albeit without the symbols of imperialism); it would rely more upon a professional standing army than upon the state militias; it would prize consumption, not frugality; and it would elevate private pleasure

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above public duty. Even so, Montagu’s book would enjoy its greatest longevity in America, an edition appearing in Philadelphia as late as 1806.

The French translation of Reflections allowed Montagu to step upon the stage of world history for a third time.40 Although published in 1793, the final chapter added by the translator, André Samuel Michel, applying the lessons of the book to the situation of France, suggests a date of composition some time in 1792, and certainly before the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. Michel’s advocacy of a mixed constitution also perhaps suggests a date of composition before the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. However, although it was published in the midst of a revolution, this is the least revolutionary of texts. Counseling caution, Michel warns against a republic, against a citizen militia, against the de-Christianizing of the country, against any moves to extend “égalité” too far. The constitutionalism, moderation, and lack of fervor shown by Michel make his a rare and lonely voice in the tumults of 1793. His temperate observations on the impossibility of re-creating the moeurs of the classical republics in an affluent monarchy stood no chance against the stridency of the revolutionary cult of antiquity, which prized (or affected to prize) the austere totalitarianism of Sparta and the early Roman republic, and which was most vividly embodied in the paintings of David and the enthusiasm of Saint-Just for the pitiless severities of Lycurgus and Lucius Junius Brutus.41 Once again, Montagu found himself beached by the retreating tides of history.

***

What thoughts are prompted as we finish Montagu’s Reflections? In the first place, we cannot avoid the fact that Montagu’s political opinions amount to nothing more than a herd of the holiest cows of vulgar

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Whiggism: an absolute justification of the Revolution of 1688; a fondness for drawing contrasts between English “liberty” and French “slavery”; undeviating veneration for the “ancient constitution” of the common lawyers which had been handed down to the English from freedom-loving barbarians residing in the woods of ancient Germany; unreasoning suspicion of standing armies; and a tendency to reflect severely on the inveterate wickedness of the Stuart kings.42

There is nothing especially shameful about this. Very few of Montagu’s contemporaries were able to free themselves, even in part and temporarily, from the bewitchment of these Whiggish opinions; and none of them—not even David Hume—managed to do so completely and permanently.43 But, as Duncan Forbes explains, vulgar Whiggism has harmful consequences for historians and what we would now call social scientists, because it inhibits precisely the forms of thought on which those thinkers most rely:

It was the essence of “vulgar” Whiggism that the difference between free and absolute government was not one of degree, but of kind, an absolute qualitative difference, a chalk and cheese, sheep and goats type of distinction, which made any science of comparative politics or comparative study of institutions impossible. On the one hand was liberty, the government of laws not men, which was a feature of free governments exclusively; on the other, slavery and absolutism.44

The numbing effect of this Manichean creed on the comparative and historical areas of the mind explains why Montagu, although a student of republics, has no interest in or even apparently awareness of republicanism, and also why he is unembarrassed by any troubling doubts as to

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whether the examples and precepts he harvests from ancient history are applicable to a modern commercial monarchy, such as Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century.

But, if we have to classify Montagu as mediocre in terms both of the substance of his political and historical opinions and of the intellectual equipment he brought to bear upon those opinions, then we are immediately confronted by the more stubborn and disturbing problem of explaining the durability of his book. After all, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks had at least a walk-on part in the three great crises of the later eighteenth century: the Seven Years’ War, the War of American Independence, and the French Revolution. Montagu’s book illustrates that intriguing truth, that often in human affairs the most important causes are advanced by means of the most ordinary instruments.

David Womersley