Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-cnmwb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T11:34:41.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: a study of the ideological context of his writings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

J. G. A. Pocock
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew him well) and a few details from Thomas Herbert, we depend for our knowledge of his life on information supplied through John Toland, deist and literary adventurer, who edited his works in 1699-1700. It seems that a sister, Lady Assheton, formed a collection of papers by and concerning her brother, which entered the possession of a younger half-sister, Dorothy, the wife of James Bellingham, then of Levens Hall in Westmoreland. She was alive in 1699, though no longer living at Levens, and made the Assheton collection available to Toland. He found there, and published, a number of Harrington's manuscript writings, and we must suppose that the detail he gives of Harrington's life and circumstances is based either on personal information from Dorothy Bellingham or on material from Lady Assheton's papers. But whether these still exist is unknown, and though some of Toland's statements can be corroborated and few have been proved wrong, there is a great deal of what he says which is very hard to test against independent evidence. This state of affairs is especially unsatisfying when one is trying to reconstruct an account of the intellectual and political situation in which works were read and responded to by their first public; for it is here that Toland (though a serious and conscientious editor), writing forty years later with strong ideological prepossessions of his own, is least likely to be of help.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , November 1970 , pp. 30 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. This paper was first delivered as a lecture to the Tudor and Stuart Club of Johns Hopkins University on March 20, 1970.

2. For all this see Toland's preface to Harrington's works. All references to Toland are to the 1771 edition, Toland, John (ed.), The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, with an account of his life by John Toland (London, 1771), p. xiGoogle Scholar. I am indebteded to Mr. C. R. Hudleston of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society for details concerning Dorothy Bellingham.

3. Toland, , The Oceana and Other Works, pp. xiii–xivGoogle Scholar; Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. Dick, Oliver Lawson (London, 1958), p. 124Google Scholar; Herbert, Thomas, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of King Charles I (London, 1839), pp. 21-22, 29-30, 61, 63, 66, 114, 119-20, 128–30Google Scholar. Aubrey's tale that Harrington was on the scaffold at the King's execution is not supported by Herbert, who was at hand.

4. Cf. Wallace, John M., Destiny His Choice: the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, England, 1968)Google Scholar, for both these works.

5. Harrington, James, Oceana (1656; not in Toland)Google Scholar, “Epistle to the Reader.”

6. Toland, , The Oceana and Other Works, pp. xxviii–xxxiGoogle Scholar.

7. For these phrases see the broadsheet petition itself (B.M. shelfmark 669. f.19.21.); second paragraph: “a good cause … that old cause mentioned in our publike Declarations and Engagements.” See also Woolrych, A. H., “The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate,” Cambridge Historical Journal, XIII (1957), 133–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Harrington, Oceana, third page of “Errors of the Impression.”

9. Toland, , The Oceana and Other Works, pp. xvi–xviiGoogle Scholar.

10. The other edition is described as “printed for D. Pakeman.” Such textual variations as there are suggest additions to the Streater-Chapman text, issuing in the text as printed for Pakeman.

11. Thurloe State Papers, IV, 379Google Scholar. See Woolrych, , “The Good Old Cause,” Cambridge Historical Journal, XIII, 151Google Scholar, n. 98, for Chapman's output as an opposition publisher in 1659. There is a chapter-length account of Chapman's career in Rostenberg, Leona, Publishing, Printing and Bookselling in England, 1551-1700 (New York, 1965), pp. 204–36Google Scholar. See pp. 218-20 for an account of his role in the publication of Oceana, which to some extent anticipates the interpretation given here, and emphasizes the degree to which Chapman rather than Streater may have been the object of government suspicions. The author however slips elsewhere (pp. 138, 157) into the common fault of confusing Harrington with his kinsman Sir James.

12. For the main facts concerning Streater, see D.N.B. (article by Firth) and the works there cited; Brown, Louise F., Political Activities of Baptists and Fifth Monarch Men during the Interregnum (Washington, 1912), pp. 185, 191, 195Google Scholar; Heath, James, Flagellum: or the Life and Death … of Oliver Cromwell (1663), p. 129Google Scholar (conversation with Harrison); Hargrave, Francis, State Trials (1776), II, 195–212Google Scholar; and his writings cited above.

13. Thurloe State Papers, II, 680Google Scholar.

14. Chapman entered the book in the Stationer's Register on September 19; A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640-1708 (London, 1913–1914), II, 1Google Scholar. Mercurius Politicus advertised it on p. 7362 of no. 334, the issue dated October 29-November 6, 1656.

15. For these dates see the British Museum's Catalogue of the Thomason Collection.

16. Toland, , Oceana and Other Works, p. 61Google Scholar.

17. A Copy of a Letter (copy in Bodleian Library), pp. 8-9.

18. Toland's account of the matter is in Toland, , Oceana and Other Works, pp. xv–xviGoogle Scholar, see also Zagorin, P., A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), p. 150Google Scholar.

19. Witley, W. T., A Baptist Bibliography (London, 1916), p. 63Google Scholar. Details of Goodgroom's career may be found here, and in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1667 and 1671.

20. Mr. Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick has kindly supplied information on this point.

21. Thurloe State Papers, V, 197Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., V. 296, 317; VI, 185.

23. Stationers Register, II, 20Google Scholar; Thomason's date of purchase.

24. Knachel, Philip A. (ed.), The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated: by Marchamont Nedham (Charlottesville, 1969)Google Scholar; French, J. Milton, “Milton, Nedham and Mercurius Politicus,” Studies in Philology, XXXIII (1936), 236–52Google Scholar; Beller, Elmer A., “Milton and Mercurius Politicus,” Huntington Library Quarterly, V (1941–1942), 479–87Google Scholar; Anthony, H. Sylvia, “Mercurius Politicus under Milton,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXVII (1966), 593–609CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. I except here the enormously valuable writings of John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice, and Skinner, Quentin, “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” The Historical Journal, VIII (1965), 151–178CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought,” The Historical Journal, IX (1966), 286–317Google Scholar, on which much of the analysis in my own article is based.

26. Beller and Anthony give details of the editorials and their dates which reappear in The Excellency of a Free State.

27. Nedham, Marchamont, Excellency of a Free State (1656), introduction, pp. 21–22Google Scholar. The precedent cited is that of Warwick's restoring Henry VI after driving him out, and ruling as king de facto, sacrificing his old associates behind Henry's name. Cf. Mercurius Politicus, no. 35 (30 January/6 February 1651), pp. 567–68Google Scholar; no. 37 (13 February/20 February), pp. 591-92 (the analogy of Warwick); but the passage as it appears in Excellency does not seem to have been printed previously.

28. Mercurius Politicus, nos. 352 (March 5/12, 1657) to 355 (March 26/April 2, 1657).

29. Ibid., no. 352, p. 7644.

30. The phrase occurs in the document itself; see text in Kenyon, J. P., The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966), p. 353Google Scholar.

31. Rutt, J. T. (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell, from 1656: now first published from the original autograph manuscript, with an Introduction containing an account of the Parliament of 1654, from the journal of Guibon Goddard, Esq., M.P. (London, 1828)Google Scholar, is in need of revision. Rutt's footnotes are an entertaining anthology of the republican sentiments of George IV's reign.

32. Rutt, , Burton, II, 22Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., II, 299.

34. Weston, Corinne C., English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords, 1556-1832 (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

35. For this see Pocock, J. G. A., “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the 18th Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, XXII (1965), 549–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” Il Pensiero Politico, I (1968), 172–89Google Scholar; Kramnick, Isaac F., Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar.

36. Rutt, , Burton, III, 349Google Scholar (Drake-Cromwellian-royalist); 368 (Baynes-Harringtonian); 406-08 (Kelsey-Cromwellian); 414 (Wroth-republican); 533 (Fowell-royalist); 538 (Chaloner-regicide); IV, 13 (Colonel West-Cromwellian); IV, 27 (Trenchard-republican); 35 (Scot-republican) 39-40 (White-republican); 49 (Swinfen-crypto-royalist); 472 (Neville-Harringtonian).

37. Toland, , Oceana and Other Works, pp. 59, 63, 65Google Scholar. These are the crucial passages from the “Second Part of the Preliminaries” to Oceana, after which the doctrine recurs at intervals throughout Harrington's writings.

38. Rutt, , Burton, IV, 76Google Scholar.

39. Ibid., II, 389.

40. Ibid., p. 391.

41. Ibid., p. 437.

42. Ibid., p. 133 (Neville); pp. 147-48 (Baynes); p. 331 (Neville); p. 365 (Jenkinson); p. 404 (Stephens); p. 408 (Kelsey); p. 410 (Colonel Thompson); p. 538 (Chaloner); IV, p. 24 (Neville); p. 31 (Baynes); p. 89n (extract from Slingsby Bethel); p. 357 (Scot).

43. Trevor-Roper, H. R., The Gentry 1540-1640 (Cambridge, England: Economic History Review Supplements, I, 45–50)Google Scholar. He describes the strategy of debate much as I have stated it here.

44. Rutt, , Burton, III, 87–105Google Scholar; especially 87-89, 97-99, 101-102.

45. e.g., his words in Rutt, , Burton, III, 133Google Scholar. See Woolrych, , “The Good Old Cause,” Cambridge Historical Journal, XIII, 154–55Google Scholar, far Vane's position on this matter, which separated him from both Harringtonians and republicans.

46. Rutt, , Burton, II, 390Google Scholar (Scot); III, 31 (Baynes); 133 (Neville); 145 (Ludlow); 147-48 (Baynes); 168-69 (Major General Packer); 189-90 (Lambert); 205 (Reynolds); 217 (Baynes); 238 (Ludlow); 330-31 (Neville); 360-61 (Colonel Bennett); 413 (Young); 414 (Wroth); IV, 8-9 (Colonel Kenrick); 10 (Archer).

47. Toland, , Oceana and Other Works, p. 442Google Scholar.

48. Rutt, , Burton, III, 338Google Scholar (Lenthall); 342-43 (Northcote); 349 (Drake); 350 (Edgar); 360-61 (Colonel Bennett); 413-14 (Young); 421 (Gott); 513-25 (Colonel Terrill); 533 (Fowell); 536 (Bacon, Francis?); 592 (Annesley); IV, 11-12 (Stephens); 27 (Annesley); 29-30 (Bennett); 38 (Bodurda); 49 (Swinfen); 65 (Sir George Booth); 81-82 (Haselrigg); 353 (Starkey).

49. Ibid., III, 31 (Baynes); 168-69 (Major-General Packer); 190 (Lambert); 205 (Reynolds); 217 (Baynes); 283 (Ludlow); 342-43 (Northcote); 543 (Hobart); IV, 8-9 (Kenrick); 10 (Archer); 11-12 (Stephens); 25 (Neville); 33 (Northcote); 35-36 (Scot); 39-40 (Morrice); 78 (Haselrigg); 452 (Maynard); 474 (Knightley).

50. Ibid., III, 189.

51. In Pocock, , “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies,” William and Mary Quarterly, XXIIGoogle Scholar.

52. Text in Robbins, Caroline (ed.), Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, England, 1969)Google Scholar.

53. E.g., Toland, , Oceana and Other Works, p. 441Google Scholar.

54. Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 1969)Google Scholar.