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4. Reviving Liberty: Writing the English Republic after 1660
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113 c h a p t e r f o u r Reviving Liberty Writing the English Republic after 1660 So virtue giv’n for lost, Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d, Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a Holocaust, From out her ashy womb now teem’d, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem’d, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. —John Milton, Samson Agonistes It is no great surprise to find the arch-Whig G. M.Trevelyan describing the later Stuart period as a bloody “reign of terror,” and the English polity as a state haunted by the unpredictable oscillation between tyranny and decadence.The years between the killing of Charles I in 1649 and the revolution of 1688—the “reign of terror”—provided generations of political activists in England and most famously in the American colonies with a rhetoric, a political language,and a pantheon of heroes.1 John Adams,for instance,in his 1765 1. G. M.Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (1907; New York: Methuen, 1961). David Ogg takes a more measured approach in England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). On the status of later Stuart England for the American revolutionary generation, see Bernard Bailyn, The Dissertation on Feudal and Canon Law, described Charles II and James II as the heart of an enduring “infernal confederacy” designed to quash liberty of conscience and repeal the birthright privileges of English subjects.In less measured terms, Josiah Quincy reads the Restoration as a case of “unexampled folly and madness” that validated the designs of “that odious and execrable race of tyrants ,the house of Stewart.”Trevelyan,Adams,and Quincy all share the polemical view that the repressive conditions of later Stuart England—a culture of public executions, punitive exhumations (of Cromwell’s corpse, for instance), merciless partisan arrests and killings, plots, exile, secret treaties, and millenarian anxiety—were the direct stimulus for an immense philosophical argument and political movement in favor of liberty of conscience, the consent of the governed, and the extension of natural rights law to all individuals. Adams, for instance, suggests that “the Hampdens,Vanes, Seldens, Miltons, Nedhams, Harringtons, Nevilles, Sidneys [and] Lockes are all said to have owed their eminence in political knowledge to the tyrannies of those reigns”and contends that George III abuses his prerogatives and enslaves his subjects “in a manner which no king of England since James the Second has dared to indulge.”2 But what exactly does Adams intend to signify with the phrase “eminence in political knowledge”? Some of his heroes of liberty (Vane, Sidney) were killed by the Stuarts and others were forced into exile or dogged by the everpresent threat of capital violence.This is more than a list of philosophers spurred into action by a repressive regime—it is also a list of dissidents whose lives and deaths became legible as carefully crafted works of art, deliberately fictive or mythic performances of affective exemplarity. For Adams, political knowledge seems to expand into civic magnanimity or the performance of manly excellence. Now there is nothing new about martyrdom and hagiography— the early modern period has examples of such secular and religious selffashioning in superabundance. The difference between the men on Adams’s list and Foxe’s martyrs, Sir Walter Ralegh, or even Charles I, hangs on the republican principle of the vita activa, the view that the health of the polity and the moral worth of the individual emerges from robust, disinterested, intellectually rigorous public deliberation. In the classical republican tradition, the state is a work of art guided and preserved actively from its corruption by the civic virtue of its great Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), J. G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975);Alan Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2. John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (Boston, 1765). 114 Lines of Equity [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:57 GMT) men.Moreover,in the years after the Restoration of Charles II when the English republican project looked hopelessly lost, the lettered resistance of Milton, Neville, Locke, or Sidney is attributable to the ideal of...