Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 38

Republicans analysed the constitution of the Roman Republic as well as invoking its spirit. Constitutional thought was often not at the forefront of English republicanism in this period, whether because existing constitutional arrangements could not easily be challenged (especially by those writing in support of the government), or because for some republican authors the spirit of republicanism was more important and urgent than its precise form. Nonetheless, Rome offered guidance on the principles which should animate a successful republic, starting with the location of sovereignty itself.

The English republicans were far from united (and sometimes far from consistent) in their approach to republican government: who should directly exercise power and through what institutions. Some were far more willing to trust the people to participate in government or elect governors than others. However, their comments on Rome reveal that even the less populist republicans were largely united by a fundamental belief in the ultimate sovereignty of the people. Milton’s First Defence made the case that the people’s majesty justified the English in punishing their tyrannical king, whose creator they were in any case. In support of his case he turned to Cicero’s speeches and to words Cicero credited to Lucius Crassus in De Oratore, which Milton used to argue that ‘though the Senate governed the People, yet it was the People that had given over that very power to regulate and govern themselves unto the Senate’. Milton then imagined his opponent, Salmasius, objecting that this might be true in populari statu – in a democracy or popular government – but that it would not have been true after the (supposed) lex regia transferred the people’s power to the emperors, perhaps a more appropriate parallel for monarchical England. Milton replied that even under the empire, Tiberius and other emperors went through the motions of acknowledging the people as their superiors (Milton 1932: 182–185). In spite of this wider claim about sovereignty, what is most significant is Milton’s judgement that the Roman Republic was a ‘popular state’, a frequent synonym for the Greek term ‘democracy’. Early modern opinion was somewhat divided about this, with some following Polybius’s lead in describing Republican Rome as a mixed polity (see Chapter 8), but as Richard Tuck (2006) has pointed out, the claim that Rome was fundamentally a democracy was supported by Jean Bodin among others.

James Harrington, too, argued that the people at Rome were sovereign – ‘as appears by the ancient style of their covenants or laws: censuere patres, iussit populus [the fathers resolved, the people commanded]’ (Harrington 1977: 166) – and took that as grounds for describing Rome as a popular state. Rome was one of the founts of ancient prudence which guided his imagining of an ideal ‘equal commonwealth’. However, ancient prudence was not a neutral term in Harrington’s vocabulary; it essentially meant the politics of commonwealths rather than monarchies – even mixed monarchies such as England with its two Houses of Parliament. Harrington did not simply reject the ancient ideal of mixed constitutions outright. Indeed, he appealed to it in justifying his own complex balanced constitution and suggested – following Polybius – that Rome was one example of a mixed government. Ridiculing Hobbes’s denial of the existence of mixed governments, Harrington asked which of the simple forms of government could have been senatus populusque Romanus (the Senate and people of Rome) (Harrington 1977: 163). However, in spite of this early defence of mixed government, Harrington rested his theory on foundations which ultimately led him in a rather different direction. Harrington classified his ideal commonwealth of Oceana and the ancient commonwealths – as far as he could – as popular governments or democracies. Popular government was the only viable form for a polity when the balance of landholding was popular; to ensure that the commonwealth was viable in perpetuity, it had to be equal, preserving the balance of land through an agrarian law and ensuring that a system of rotation prevented an oligarchy of the powerful from forming. The Roman Republic was a popular government, but it fell short of being equal in both these senses, and that led to its downfall.

Harrington aligned himself with the Roman authors he saw as supporters of the popular interest and was sensitive to anti-populist sentiment. The popular or democratic nature of the Roman Republic ultimately depended on the assemblies (comitia), and particularly the comitia tributa, ‘being a council where the people in exigencies made laws without the senate, which laws were called plebiscita. This council is that in regard whereof Cicero and other great wits so frequently inveigh against the people, and sometimes even Livy’ (see Chapter 16; Chapter 9; Chapter 11). But in Harrington’s own ideal polity, popular government was carefully channelled: popular sovereignty was expressed through election of the representatives who legislated. Harrington thus defended popular power on two fronts: both against detractors who saw Rome as a terrible warning of what would happen if the people were given too much power, and against those who – perhaps following Machiavelli with his enthusiasm for tumults between the orders at Rome – were in danger of being too careless in the powers they gave to the people. At Rome, a cardinal error had been made when the comitia tributa were set up: the people had been allowed to debate (in Harrington’s republic, the popular house approved or rejected the senate’s proposals without debate) (see Chapter 16). Thus, in spite of his barbed comment about Cicero’s attitude, Harrington swiftly conceded that ‘To say truth, it [either referring to the comitia tributa, or to the struggle reported by Livy 2.56–60 for plebeian magistrates to be chosen by the comitia tributa] was a kind of anarchy, whereof the people could not be excusable, if there had not, through the course taken by the senate, been otherwise a necessity that they must have seen the commonwealth run into oligarchy’ (Harrington 1977: 211–212). The Roman Republic was flawed, because the people had had to struggle, against the continued monopolisation of power by the senate, to achieve a share in power which reflected the popular property balance which prevailed in the earlier part of the Republic’s history. In a sense both the people and the senate (or patricians or nobility) ended up with too much power, as their roles within the constitution did not allow real popular sovereignty to be coupled with effective noble oversight (see Chapter 15). The consequence, as Harrington vividly put it, was that Rome was not one commonwealth but two, ‘the one oligarchical in the nobility, and the other a mere anarchy of the people’, and that these two were locked in a struggle which the nobility eventually won, leading to the death of the Republic (Harrington 1977: 272).

Marchamont Nedham’s famous series of republican editorials in Mercurius Politicus deployed Rome – via Machiavelli – in support of a simpler refrain. As the editorials proceeded, Nedham’s emphasis fell ever more insistently on the claim that ‘the People, in a due and orderly succession of their Supream Assemblies, are the best Keepers of their own Liberties’ (Nedham 1651: 1255). He favoured a structurally simple solution to the problems of the English Republic: government by a succession of unicameral representative assemblies. He invoked the Roman Republic constantly in making this case, for the most part ignoring the complexities of the Roman constitution and boiling the story down to a triumph of popular over patrician power. Rome was a positive model for the spirit of liberty which should animate a republic and despite his reverence for Machiavelli (see Chapter 2), Nedham ignored Machiavelli’s Polybian suggestion that Rome was stable once the popular element was included because all three forms of government were now balanced, with kingly power surviving in a different form under the Republic. For Nedham ‘not onely the name King, but the thing King (whether in the hands of one, or of many) was pluckt up root and branch, before ever the Romans could attain to a ful establishment of their Rights and Freedoms’ (Nedham 1651: 1143). Rome was taken not as a model for constitutional complexity, but as a lesson in simplicity: Nedham ignored specific magistracies apart from the tribunes of the people, the crucial fact being that the people elected their magistrates and that their power was of limited duration (see Part III). As for the Senate, after an early suggestion that it offered a necessary tempering of popular power, Nedham swiftly progressed to a sustained defence of popular power exercised through single-chamber legislatures. The role of any ‘standing’ authority or of ‘grandees’ was inimical to this and the Roman Senate, after the expulsion of the Tarquins, was his prime example of just such a self-interested standing body, monopolising power (see Chapter 15).

Rome was thus central to some republicans’ justifications of popular power; but Roman material was also used by those republicans who wanted to insist that an aristocratic element was essential to a long-lasting or balanced republic, or at least that it was necessary in the circumstances they found themselves in, particularly in the crisis of 1659–1660. The regicide had been a profoundly unpopular act, and the regimes of the interregnum, in spite of efforts at healing and settling the nation’s differences, gave a meaningful level of power only to a minority. Even when parliamentary elections returned under the Protectorate, royalists, Catholics and Episcopalians were barred from participating, and the government even acted to exclude troublemakers who were legitimately elected from taking their seats in the House. This apparently insoluble problem of legitimacy was one part of the background to constitutional debate among republicans: how could citizens participate politically in an English republic without undermining its very existence? On the other hand, the reign of Charles I and the experience of rule by the unaccountable Long Parliament and Rump Parliament made republicans wary of parliamentary as well as monarchical corruption and tyranny.

Some republicans emphasised aristocratic or balancing elements within the Roman republican constitution which might be seen as a counterweight to the power of the people in their assemblies and might offer models for English use. As we have seen, Nedham was not the most restrained or aristocratic of the interregnum republicans and he increasingly emphasised the power of the people at Rome and the threat that any senatorial body might pose to it. However, near the outset of his series of republican editorials, Nedham sounded a more cautious note. At this early stage, he diagnosed the constitution of the Roman Republic as ‘an equal mixture of both Interests, Patrician and Popular’, and saw the Senate as offering a distinctive and very necessary element, a body which was fitted to deal with affairs of state which required confidentiality, wisdom and experience. The Senate was also essential to the power of the people: ‘The People without the Senatick Councell were like Sulphur and Mercury, ever in motion or combustion, … but the Senate were as Salt to season, fix and fasten the body of the people’ (Nedham 1651: 1111). This aristocratic body, although prone at points to ‘domineering over the People’, was thus presented – at least in this early editorial – as a necessary aid to the people’s supreme legislative power; perhaps he saw it as taking on executive functions similar to those of the Council of State which was elected annually by the Rump Parliament.

Nedham moved away from this position, but for other republicans it remained crucial to balance or remedy the supposed fickleness, passion or irrationality of the people, of which Roman tumults were always a popular illustration, happily wielded by the republicans’ enemies. This could be achieved through a mixture of constitutional structures and reliance on the superior wisdom and virtue of an elite. Harrington’s regime did this most systematically. For him, a ‘pure’ democracy, rather than a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, was simply not possible (although the resulting regime could still be classed as a democracy). He was also horrified by the notion of an undifferentiated population: social distinction of some kind had a role and he even argued that all populations had a ‘natural aristocracy’ of about a third of men who would prove wiser than the rest. Rome was among his model commonwealths, in spite of its flaws, because it was no mere ‘mechanic’ commonwealth like Athens or the Dutch republic: Sparta, Rome and Venice, by contrast, were ‘plumed with their aristocracies’ (Harrington 1977: 259). Indeed, there needed to be an aristocracy to bring out the republican qualities of the people themselves: the Roman people’s famous valour and love of liberty were enhanced by their marginalisation by the nobles (183). Nobles had the leisure to acquire the wisdom to rule: this may be why Harrington specified a higher property qualification for members of his senate than those of the popular chamber. The senate exercised the republic’s ‘wisdom’ in debating and proposing legislation, whereas the popular chamber reflected the republic’s ‘interest’ by voting on it (810). In spite of the influence of Roman constitutional architecture on this arrangement, Harrington condemned the Roman approach to nobility as based on destructive principles. The closed nature of the patrician order had endangered popular sovereignty by preventing the principles of popular election and of rotation being applied fully; Harrington at some points acknowledged that plebeians were admitted to high office and that the nobility was wider than the patrician order alone, but this did not completely mitigate the danger which the senate and the office-holding elite posed to the state (183–184, 216, 248–249, 261, 611, 731). The composition of the Roman Senate was particularly problematic, in his view, and this became the focus of significant controversy between Harrington and other republicans once the Protectorate fell.