Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 39

The crisis of 1659–1660, in which republicans rallied round the ‘good old cause’ in the hope of preventing a return to monarchy, spurred republicans into a sometimes acrimonious debate about which constitutional arrangements could best secure the nation against this imminent threat. Harrington maintained that his proposed constitutional mechanism already incorporated the checks needed to weather this (or any) political crisis, but was opposed by others who feared his commitment not only to allowing former royalists to vote, but to maintaining regular elections on a three-year rotation for both the Senate and the popular house of his legislature. Some republicans of a more pragmatic or more aristocratic bent were placing their hopes in a ‘select senate’, to be appointed rather than elected, and hoped to give it powers which could keep the nation safe from any storms caused by an elected lower house. Rome was drawn into these disputes, with the nature of Roman citizenship, the powers of the Senate and the popular assemblies, and the membership of the Senate all under discussion (see Chapter 15; Chapter 16; Chapter 22). Henry Stubbe, working with the godly republican, Henry Vane, who had since 1656 been willing to countenance a two-tier citizenship with the godly in charge, took up the cudgels for a select senate, in direct dispute with Harrington. For Harrington, one of the flaws in the Roman Republic, which rendered it ‘unequal’ and therefore mortal, was the constitution of its senate. Senators holding office for life, or a senate which drew exclusively from a separate hereditary order, were fatal to the carefully orchestrated balance of his commonwealth, and he saw the Roman Senate as representing both problems. In addition, the popular assemblies were rigged in favour of wealthier inhabitants, so that ‘the first and second [property] classes may give the suffrage of the whole people’ (Harrington 1977: 731–732). For advocates of a powerful select senate, however, these apparently aristocratic elements of the Roman republican constitution were treated not as flaws but as models for a safely controllable republic in a time of desperate political instability and popular royalism. Stubbe argued that the Roman constitution demonstrated how a ‘counter-poyse’ could balance popular power: voting in the comitia centuriata was rightly determined by the ‘very unequal proportion’ of centuries made up of the elites. The powers of the Roman Senate, too, could offer a model to England: Stubbe conceded that legislative power at Rome was in the people, but emphasised that the Senate’s emergency powers could even ‘annul Lawes made by the People’, and ultimately argued ‘that as all the good government of that Republick, and all the grandeur was derived from the Senate, so the aforesaid Senate was a power in some cases co-ordinate, or rather Supreme to the People’ (Stubbe 1659: 73–74).

Milton, in the final crisis of the republic in 1659–1660, was desperate to safeguard liberty of conscience in religion and prevent the return of a ‘single person’ to power. In the autumn of 1659, he was suggesting that some version of the Rump Parliament needed to be recalled again and sit as the supreme power. Tellingly, he regarded this remnant of a House of Commons not as a popular assembly but as a ‘Senate’ and he noted that ‘although Magistracies be annuall in most commonwealths yet the place of Senator hath bin alwayes during life both in Rome, Venice & elsewhere’ (Milton 1980: 336). A senate of this kind was an essential foundation for much-needed stability and this justified bypassing the people, at least temporarily. In the second edition of his Readie and Easie Way the following year, Milton suggested that in due course, once the republic was genuinely secure, the people would be allowed local assemblies in their towns to balance the power of the central, perpetual senate or Grand Councel. But he summarised the history of Rome to warn that ‘the ballance… must be exactly so set, as to preserve and keep up due autoritie on either side, as well in the Senat as in the people’. The story of the Roman Republic was the story of the growing ambition of the people and the increasing concessions made to them: but the people’s victory was Pyrrhic, bringing down the ‘tyrannie’ of Sulla upon them in reaction against their gains under Marius (and, presumably, paving the way for the loss of the Republic altogether). At least at the outset of the Roman Republic, the people had had the prudence not to press for representation via the tribunes until the Republic was secure (Milton 1980: 435–443). During the dying throes of the English Republic, Milton thus looked to the earliest years of the Roman Republic as a model which demonstrated how controlled and aristocratic government might have warded off the chaos of the late Roman Republic.