An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth (review)

Robert, first Viscount Molesworth (1656–1725) was perhaps the most important of the Irish “commonwealthsmen” identified in Caroline Robbins’s pathbreaking study The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Harvard, 1959; reprinted by The Liberty Fund in 2004). Political historians focus on his exposition of “Gothic constitutionalism” as a classic exemplar of libertarian Whiggism, and explore his connections with the third earl of Shaftesbury, whose advocacy of a “polite” culture of civic virtue he is alleged to have brought to Ireland. After 1715, Molesworth, despairing of preferment in England, retired to his Irish estates and ensconced himself within a circle of disciples, including the young Francis Hutcheson, through whom Shaftesbury’s ideas were transmitted to Scotland. Historians of Ireland are interested in Molesworth’s contributions to the development of a “patriot” interest in the Dublin parliament and the Dublin press after 1714. And historians of Denmark, where Molesworth served unhappily as William III’s envoy extraordinary between 1689 and 1692, still pick over the insults to their native land, its people, and especially its monarchy, contained in the famous (or to, Danes, infamous) Account of the kingdom published in 1694.

These different phases of Molesworth’s life reflect an unsettled temperament and disappointed ambition, resulting in a public life marked by sharp changes of direction. For many years, he was torn between settling in Ireland and London; he oscillated between supporting Whig ministries as bastions against “popish” absolutism, and opposing them when he smelled a betrayal of traditional principles; and he was himself alternately attracted by the prospects of office and repelled by the expectations of patronage. Throughout, however, he kept the greater good firmly in view. Devoted to the ideal of liberty and public virtue, he despised tyranny, especially “priestcraft,” whether Roman Catholic or High Anglican.

Molesworth’s attributable published writings have been gathered for the first time in this handsomely produced volume, one of a series of principal libertarian tracts in the library of Thomas Hollis, the eighteenth-century English Dissenter whose mission in life was to reprint and circulate works from the canon of English republican thought. Hollis was a particular benefactor of American colleges, including Harvard, and this connection presumably forms the rationale for the series. Molesworth’s editor is Mr. Champion, whose own studies of English anti-clericalism, and of Toland, an Irish writer with a close personal connection to Molesworth, fit him admirably for the task.

This edition brings together the Account of Denmark and the full text of Molesworth’s translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (the preface of which is often studied separately), and adds an interesting pamphlet from the days of Molesworth’s Irish exile, the Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), an early example of the literature on Irish “improvement” that reached maturity a decade or so later with the writings of Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs. Although the editorial apparatus is minimal (some might wish for more since Molesworth is not important enough to make another edition likely in the near future), Mr. Champion amply explains for the “general reader.”

The discussion of the Account of Denmark, with its essential warning that liberty could be imperiled and even destroyed by Protestant as well as Catholic monarchs bent on absolute rule, and of Franco-Gallia, with its account of the ideal “Gothic constitution,” in which liberty was guaranteed by aristocratic virtue, sets Molesworth’s writing in a long chronological and a broad continental perspective. It also integrates them into a vision of liberty’s origins in historical processes.

Mr. Champion’s persuasive reading emphasizes Molesworth’s “historical scholarship,” which connects closely with that of Molesworth’s protégé Toland, and finds a link between the Danish and French experience as establishing “how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were.” The afterlife of both texts is discussed...