Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 35

On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed for high treason. He had been defeated in two civil wars, but it was the army and its more radical civilian allies who had purged parliament and ensured that he would be tried rather than restored. The regicides had no clear political or constitutional agenda for the aftermath of the regicide, but the new state was eventually declared a Commonwealth and Free State and for the first four years of its existence was governed by the purged ‘Rump’ parliament and a Council of State. From the beginning, a minority of committed republicans – although not with any unified programme – found it hard to make headway against the more politically conservative elements of the regime; in December 1653, after the short-lived experiment of a nominated parliament, many republicans became even more disaffected when Oliver Cromwell became head of state as Lord Protector. There was more to disturb the regime’s republican and other critics as the Protectorate went on: a system of military government in the localities under the Major-Generals from 1655 to 1656 and then, partly in reaction, the offer of the crown to Cromwell and his reinstallation not as king but as a distinctly more regal Lord Protector in 1657. Richard Cromwell’s succession to his father’s role after Oliver’s death in 1658 was contested and in 1659 he was forced from power amid clamour for the ‘good old cause’ of the republic, and replaced by the reinstated Rump Parliament. The collapse of the rule of the Rump led to the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

This was a period of turbulent events and successive constitutional experiments, but also of an unbreakable political stalemate arising from the lack of political consent from the nation for regicide and non-monarchical rule, and from the tensions between army men and civilians, between republicans and moderate potential monarchists within the former parliamentarian cause, and between godly reform and political pragmatism. The story of the Roman Republic in English political life in these years is the story of the aspirations, fears and, ultimately, deep disappointments of the English republicans. To navigate these choppy waters, republicans at different times called on different interpretations of the Roman Republic and its relevance to England, emphasising sometimes populist and sometimes aristocratic elements of the Roman polity, sometimes the spirit of Roman republican valour and sometimes the detail of Rome’s constitutional arrangements, sometimes the birth of the Republic and sometimes its death throes and its aftermath in the early imperial period. These choices were determined by political circumstances and polemical exigencies, as well as by the differing characters and priorities of the republican authors themselves.

Rome was an appealing exemplum and a viable site of controversy because education beyond elementary level in early modern England was founded on classical languages and texts. Mastery of Latin was a principal aim of grammar-school education and a prerequisite for university study, although some schools were also able to give their students a grounding in Greek. Feingold (1997) further emphasises ‘the centrality of classical languages and literature’ to a university curriculum which was essentially humanist in its approach. Knowledge of the Roman Republic thus came partly from direct encounters with ancient texts in the original, but these texts were used in particular ways in education – often, for example, students constructed commonplace books of moral exempla, a practice which might discourage much historical contextualisation of events (Cox Jensen 2012: 37–43). English translations of ancient texts, or parts of them, also circulated; and beyond these, early modern authors in both Latin and English offered accounts or analyses of Roman institutions and government (e.g. Goodwin 1614). England was very much part of a European market for books, with editions of classical texts often imported, and works by continental scholars commonly used (Cox Jensen 2012: 55–61). Thus, republican authors had access to the latest discussions of the workings of the Roman constitution through works such as those of the Italian scholar Sigonius (Carlo Sigonio) (e.g. Sigonius 1560). Although our understanding of Roman institutions has developed since then, early modern authors had plenty to work with when bringing Rome into their topical republican works. A brief introduction to the republican authors is necessary before we proceed to consider the different ways in which they invoked the example of Rome.