Читать книгу An Account of Denmark - Robert Molesworth - Страница 10

There is little doubt that Molesworth, who had Toland design electoral propaganda representing himself as Cato, was a key figure in preserving the republican tradition into the eighteenth century (as well as founding a short-lived dynasty of Whig politicians). Ample testimony to this reputation is evident in Thomas Hollis’s admiration for the Irishman’s life and works. As Hollis recorded, he regarded Molesworth as the author who most neatly captured “My Faith.” Indeed, Hollis was very active in disseminating Molesworth’s writings (which were included in his list of “canonical books”). Blackburne recorded (in his edition of the Memoirs of Thomas Hollis) that Hollis had given away twenty copies of the Account of Denmark.³² Hollis placed a high value on Molesworth’s contributions to the republican tradition, noting him as one of the “last of the English.”

This admiration took a variety of forms. The most public was the reprinting and distribution of Molesworth’s works, but Hollis also commissioned an engraved portrait of Molesworth from Thomas Snelling. A more intimate commemoration can be seen in the “invisible pantheon” inscribed into the landscape at Dorset. As Patrick Eyres has explained, a key signal of Hollis’s admiration for Molesworth’s contributions is embodied in his naming the highest fields on the downland ridge above his Urles farm after him (and his political intimate, Shaftesbury). So Molesworth was not only central to the Whig canon but also stands at the apex of Hollis’s Dorset pantheon.³³

Hollis personally owned two volumes of Molesworth’s works and related pieces, which although evidently specially bound in red morocco, are not decorated with any of his commonplace characteristic symbols of liberty embossed in gilt on the spine or covers.³⁴ As many have noted, Hollis typically annotated his volumes with a record of his intellectual dispositions. So it was with copies of Molesworth’s works. On the initial blank leaves of both volumes, there are scribal notes made by Hollis consisting of a quotation of six lines from the poet Mark Akenside’s Odes and on the following blank page: “The Preface to the Account of Denmark, and the Translator’s Preface to the Franco-Gallia, are justly esteemed two of the most manly, & noble Compositions, in their kind, in the English Language.”

In volume 2 of these works (which includes a copy of the 1721 printing of Hotman’s Francogallia), Hollis has written on the title page “A most curious valuable Treatise.” Above “The Translator’s Preface” he commented, “Observe this Preface. The Translator’s preface to the Francogallia, and the preface to the Acc. of Denmark are two of the NOBLEST prefaces in the English language.”³⁵ These “Golden prefaces” were to remain a staple of the eighteenth-century-commonwealth outlook in Europe and North America.³⁶

The high-water mark of Molesworth’s reputation, prompted especially by the reception of the Account of Denmark, was achieved in the second half of the eighteenth century. On this subject he was, as Aylmer has noted, “much the most controversial writer of the whole century.”³⁷ Molesworth had inside knowledge of the Danish context, having been chosen by William III in 1689 as envoy to counter Louis XIV’s influence at that court. More specifically, his task was to organize the supply of Danish troops for William’s campaigns. The difficulty of arranging the exchange of subsidy for arms—and the deceitful behavior of the French faction—set the tone for Molesworth’s hostility to the Danish monarchy.³⁸ Molesworth, a convinced follower of Sidney’s anticourt disposition, clearly held no deference for Danish regality, as William King, a hostile source, reported. Molesworth broke protocols of access and indeed poached the Danish king’s hares without remorse. As one hostile account noted, “These Actions being represented to the King, his Majesty was extreamly offended at them, and showed it by the cold Reception the Envoy afterwards met with at Court.”³⁹ There was little surprise then that Molesworth, declared persona non grata, took pleasure in reproducing Sidney’s notorious annotation of the ambassadorial commonplace book: manus haec, inimica tyrannis ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem.⁴⁰

Molesworth’s account of the constitutional revolution of the lex regia in Denmark of 1660 (which saw Gothic liberty displaced by a formal legal hereditary absolutism) remained dominant for a century. His bold question, “How did the Danes lose their freedom?” was a persistently urgent one not only for those contemporaries in the British Isles, but for Frenchmen living under Louis XIV, and later for Middlesex citizens and Americans living under George III.

There is little doubt that Molesworth was a key player in the republican refurbishment of Whig ideology after 1689. As an active diplomat and politician in Westminster and Dublin, he both engaged in practical politics and developed an ideological account of republican traditions adapted to present circumstances. He was the backbone of the “true,” “old,” and “real” Whiggism, which as M. A. Goldie has put it, “remained consistently committed to a fundamental redistribution of constitutional power.”⁴¹ Molesworth’s works—both the Account of Denmark and his edition of Francogallia —combined to provide eighteenth-century British, European, and North American audiences with a robust and authoritative account of the institutional and historical origins of liberty in the West.

Building on traditions that drew from Tacitus’s Germania and a variety of ancient constitutionalisms, Molesworth provided a comparative account of both the flourishing and the corruption of political liberty. The historical cast of the ancient freedoms of the Franks recorded in the edition of Hotman was balanced by the analysis of a contemporary sociology of liberty in the Danish example. Molesworth’s project was not naively nostalgic, but sought to establish the existence of living traditions in modern institutions and to nurture such traditions where they already existed. As he explained, in translating the account of the “ancient free state” of Europe, he desired to instruct “the only Possessors of true Liberty in the World, what Right and Title they have to that Liberty.”⁴²

Many historians have engaged with the political uses of the past in the early modern period. Accounts of the complex historical relationships between the ancient constitution, the feudal law, the so-called Gothic bequest, and the Norman Conquest, all had contested consequences for contemporary political society.⁴³ As J. G. A. Pocock has underscored, “to understand the role of historical argument after 1688–89, we must understand that the Gothic liberties and the Norman Yoke, as well as the ancient constitution and the feudal law, persisted into the coming century.”⁴⁴ Although not explored by Pocock, Molesworth’s writings were the starting point for the continuation and repositioning of this earlier discourse. His encounter with the Gothic past operated in a more profound way than simply the invocation of perdurable historical precedent. Far from declining as a way of engaging with the present, the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and the 1701 Act of Settlement, prompted a renegotiation of past and present. These “Gothic” claims—articulated powerfully by writers like Nathaniel Bacon and Algernon Sidney—were distinct from the immemorialism of legal mindsets articulated earlier in the seventeenth century, which proclaimed the precedence of common law. A core value, and one fundamental to Molesworth’s account, was that any crown was held conditionally by consent of the people. Molesworth’s decision to redeploy the Gothic model described in Francogallia for eighteenth-century readers meant that those who encountered the text had to establish for themselves the pertinence of sixteenth-century arguments for their own contemporary contexts.⁴⁵

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw very different (and competing) historical constructions of these “Gothic” traditions. Some recovered fundamental constitutions; others explored the history of the elective crown in Saxon history. Historical inquiries into the nature of the Norman Conquest, into the origins and authority of Parliament (or more specifically into the rights and privileges of the Commons), were frequently influenced by accounts of these continental “Gothic” experiences. Indeed, the permeability of this pan-European constitution implied that nationally specific experience was potentially comprehended from these broader traditions. Molesworth’s writings are a classic expression of this. In the Account he delivered an analysis of Danish tyranny; in his edition of Hotman he presented the glories of Frankish liberty. Both of these works were regarded as having specific pertinence to the contemporary British experience, and British readers were expected to make sense of these nonindigenous traditions and apply them to their own circumstances.

The strength of Molesworth’s writing was that, as Colin Kidd has noted, it delivered a “robust science of society,” which resonated with a variety of powerful anti-absolutist discourses exploring the ethnic and institutional dimensions of liberty. After Molesworth, “in France as well as England, Denmark had become a byword for modern despotism.”⁴⁶ More important, Molesworth’s Account delivered a method as well as a message. As emphasized in his preface, the examination of a “constitution” (whether physical or political) was a matter of natural observation. By observational experience, gathered from the rational study of history or derived from traveling, it was possible to know “experimentally” the causes of the decay of liberty and health.

This empirical dimension to Molesworth’s work was recognized by contemporaries—indeed, extracts and abridgements from the Account were included in collections of travel and ethnographic writings in the 1740s and 1760s. A member of the Royal Society, Molesworth was adept at reading the political consequences of cultural practices, as his collaborative annotation with Toland of Martin Martin’s Western Isles demonstrated.⁴⁷ Core to this method was the principle of a good education calculated to liberate the mind from dependence on “slavish opinion.” As Molesworth insisted, “good learning as well as travel is a great antidote against the plague of tyranny.” Here his polemic was directed against even the Protestant churchmen of his time who, in their stranglehold on the universities, were perceived as the main corruptors of the “public spirit.” For Molesworth, since tyranny began in the mind, the principles of liberty and the free state needed to be promoted by a philosophical education. The monkish bigotry of the pulpit taught only “servile opinions” in place of the principles of rational liberty.

Whig political thought in Molesworth’s time was a complex mixture of contract, resistance, and ancient constitution—in effect a blend of history and theory. A common assumption underpinning this complexity was that liberty had premodern origins: “I conceive the original of the subject’s libertie was by those our forefathers brought out of Germany.”⁴⁸ For many, the Saxon origin of such Gothic liberty was “a matter of fact” for opponents of such historical assumptions like the Tory Brady, this was “meer Romance.”⁴⁹ The source most commonly associated with this account was Tacitus’s Germania, which represented a primitive Gothic honor and simplicity against a vision of Roman urban luxury and moral torpor. As one commentator noted in 1689, “some have sent us to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English Constitution.” The assumption promulgated by Molesworth was neatly summarized and shared even by court Whig John Oldmixon in 1724: “no nation has preserv’d their Gothic constitution better than the English.”⁵⁰ Written in the 1690s and 1700s in the context of the Hanoverian succession, Molesworth’s defense of an anglia libera, prompted by a Tacitean reading of Frankish liberty, provided a British readership with a non-Roman and anti-Gallic source of constitutional legitimacy.⁵¹

The political context for Molesworth’s contributions was not simply domestic but European: internally the war against popery and arbitrary power in the guise of Tory Jacobitism was rendered more complex by the threat of Louis XIV’s foreign policy. The fragility of the Revolution settlement and, especially after 1700, the insecurity of the succession of the Hanoverian line meant that Molesworth’s polemic against Danish absolutism was a stalking horse for the indictment of latent tyranny at home and practical despotism abroad. The lamentation for the loss of Danish freedom was tuned to English, French, and Dutch ears. Great attention was paid to the preparation of the many French editions of the Account. The inclusion of maps and emblematic frontispieces representing Danish liberty is evidence of this concern to ensure an engaged readership. Later French editions also included useful indices drawing the attention of the reader to significant themes: for example, “Absolus. Les Princes n’ont pû acquerir legitiment le droit d’être absolus” “Governement Anglois, trop parfait pour recevoir aucun amendement” and “Prêtres, ont beaucoup contributé à render le gouvernement de la Russie et de la Muscovie tirannique” “Les païsans de la Zelande y sont aussi esclaves que les negres dans les Barbades.”⁵² It is clear that the Huguenot diaspora of the 1690s would have valued the anti-absolutist thrust of the Account; what is more significant is that twenty years after its initial publication (alongside the edition of Francogallia) French audiences found it a useful resource for engaging with the Ludovicean regime.⁵³ Certainly in the decade of 1710 the reception of the two works connected with the nobilaire and parlementaire resistance in France especially associated with the so-called Burgundian circle coordinated by Boulainvilliers. The nature of the Gothic constitution described in Hotman’s work and the Account set some of the key terms of political debate.⁵⁴ The Francogallian constitution with its emphasis on the role of an ancient and virtuous aristocracy was a useful polemical weapon against Louis XIV’s conception of monarchy.⁵⁵

Indeed, the French reception of Molesworth’s project was a contributing element to the complex diplomatic politics surrounding the peace settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession, between 1709 and 1712. Contributing to the paper war around the so-called renunciation crisis (which demanded the recall of the Estates-General to formally register Philip of Spain’s renunciation of the French throne), civil history was pitched as a challenge to Ludovicean absolutism. Very much like Molesworth, Boulainvilliers exploited historical writing to deliver a narrative of the past that showed an unhallowed conspiracy of Gaulish bishops and Merovingian kings subverting Frankish liberty. Ambitious clergy, credulous laymen, and despotic kings are recurring themes of both English and French commonwealth historical writing. Dynastic privilege was dismissed as an “absurd fact”: constitutional form, which promoted the involvement of aristocratic virtue over hereditary principle, was commonly applauded.⁵⁶

Much later in the 1780s, Molesworth’s polemic account of the history of Danish tyranny was redeployed for revolutionary French audiences in a short extract of chapters 7 and 8. The brief prefatory comments of this pamphlet remark, “Ce livre n’a point été fait pour les circonstances présentes; il est dans toutes les Bibliothèques; J’en ai tiré deux chapitres, dont la lecture m’a fait frémir.”⁵⁷ The point of reproducing the text was to indict the role of the Church as an agent of despotism. Despite the existence of a good constitution, the Church had turned the Danes into slaves: “cette Révolution fut opérée par le dévoument hypocrite des prêtres; par la colère aveugle des communes, par l’imprudent obstination des nobles.”⁵⁸ The afterlife of Molesworth’s writing was persistent.

Molesworth not only defended the value of liberty but also undertook a philosophical and historical inquiry into the conditions for its preservation and corruption. In effect he extended the project of Machiavelli’s commentaries on Livy into the circumstance of more modern and contemporary societies. Despite the work of Nathaniel Bacon and Algernon Sidney, in the absence of an account of a specifically Britto-Gallian past (George Buchanan’s history of Scottish liberty and Hotman’s French version provided prescriptive models), Molesworth produced material for the political imagination of British audiences.⁵⁹ He provided, however, not simply an ancient constitution for implementation but a broader sociological inquiry into the origins and fortunes of liberty, which readers might refine and apply to contemporary circumstances. The evidence of Molesworth’s political writings and their afterlife also allows us to glimpse how traditions of thinking about liberty developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Molesworth’s edition of Francogallia acted as a conduit for repositioning the resistance theory of the French wars of religion into a form digestible and pertinent to the age of revolutions. With this “contagion of liberty,” works written as livres de circonstance, in order to legitimate specific acts of resistance against religious tyranny, were transformed into volumes encouraging ideological opposition to corruptions in contemporary political societies. Readers of Francogallia in the 1570s might have been embarked on raising arms against the French or Spanish monarchy, whereas readers of the English editions in the 1710s or 1760s read more to validate public political principles shared by large numbers of other like-minded readerships.⁶⁰ Recommendations to read the works in newspapers and advertisements significantly broadened their readerships and enhanced the possibilities of their enjoying practical political consequences.

Molesworth’s writings provide ample material for an answer to J. W. Gough’s very pertinent question, “How did political liberty in the eighteenth century depend on what had happened in ancient France?”⁶¹ Molesworth mobilized historical erudition for public debate. Working with earlier discourses he searched for what was regarded as a set of historically intelligible fundamental principles. By combining Hotman’s gaulois constitution with Tacitus’s Germanist traditions, he claimed to have identified extant institutions and processes that instantiated principles of liberty. He also identified those agencies (beliefs and institutions) that corrupted freedom. The point of the combination of the edition of Francogallia and the analysis of the Danish case was to establish how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were. By drawing from the final chapter of the 1576 version of Francogallia (not reproduced in Molesworth’s editions) on superstition, Molesworth significantly contributed to the identification of the corrupting role of clerical institutions.

Scattered throughout Molesworth’s correspondence are barbed comments about the popery and tyranny of the High Church. Even men like the Low Church polemicist Benjamin Hoadly were dismissed as traitors when they accepted preferment over principle.⁶² This is not to say that Molesworth was irreligious: he left money in his will to build a church at Philipstown; in 1704 he instructed his wife not to forget to “enter the children’s ages in the great bible at Breckdenston.”⁶³ Even late in his life he took a lively concern in the selection of curates: his son dismissed one candidate with the comment that “when he finds himself armed with credentials from Heaven and the Ecclesiastical Authority on earth to back them, it would be very extraordinary if he grew more modest.”⁶⁴

Throughout his political career in London and Dublin, Molesworth had opposed intolerance and ecclesiastical tyranny. This had led him to support attempts to strengthen the legal basis of liberty of conscience. But it had also led him into direct conflict with the political institution of the Church in Ireland in 1713 when he suffered deprivation of his privy council seat for accusing the High Church clergy of turning “the world upside down.”⁶⁵ As a consequence Molesworth was regarded as being in “odious colours” for his “intolerable profanation of the Holy Scriptures.”⁶⁶

A friend of freethinking and heterodox men like Toland, Matthew Tindal, and Anthony Collins, Molesworth was explicit in regarding all clerical claims to political authority as “popery” and priestcraft. According to Molesworth, churchmen, even of Protestant varieties, exploited their authority in education to create servile prejudice and their own advancement—intolerance, persecution, and mental dependence lay at the root of tyranny. Citing the case that the Protestant Calvin had burned Servetus at Geneva, he confirmed “whosoever is against Liberty of Mind, is, in effect, against Liberty of Body too.” All de jure divino claims, such as “Monarchy, Episcopacy, Synods, Tythes, the Hereditary Succession to the Crown,” were improper and unacceptable to “real Whigs.”⁶⁷ Indeed, as Molesworth took delight in reinforcing, Whiggism was constrained to no particular religious confession—Jews, Turks, even “Papists,” might be “great lovers of the constitution and liberty.” Toleration should be extended to “Pagans, Turks, Jews, Papists, Quakers, Socinians, Presbyterians, or others” because, Molesworth insisted, bigotry was the “very Bane of human Society, and the Offspring of Interest and Ignorance, which has occasion’d most of the great Mischiefs that have afflicted Mankind.”⁶⁸ Religious tyranny created a dependent mind and by consequence a more effective political slavery: true commonwealth liberty lay in the freedom of reason and a good constitution.

Molesworth’s writings transformed the resistance theory of the previous century into an ideology of vigilance against the latent possibilities of contemporary despotism. This account of commonwealth ideology did not categorically oppose either monarchy or the modern and developing institutional forms of the state and society; however, it warned its readers to remain alert to the preconditions of tyranny in cultural, political, and economic forms.