Abstract
In the precarious world of political discourse, one of the few constants was the indefensible nature of rebellion and revolt. This had been so, even in the bustling world of Tuscan civic life in which citizens had been so significant. When Dante’s Virgil explains his exile from heaven, he condemns himself by the very use of the term ribellante.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we who dream. Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 1711
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Notes
Dante, Inferno 1. 125, adapted from the prose translation of Charles Singleton, The Divine Comedy (London: Routledge, 1971).
See the valuable discussion by C. Nederman, ‘Bracton and Kingship first visited: The Idea of Sovereignty and Bractonian Political Thought’, Political Science, 88 (1988), pp. 49ff.
John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, P. Laslett (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), II, para. 239.
C. Nederman, ‘The Royal Will and the Baronial Bridle: The Place of the addicio de cartis in Bractonian Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 9(1988), pp. 415–29. The passage Nederman discusses is from G. E. Woodbine and S. E. Thorne (eds), De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968–77), pp. 109–110.
St Thomas More, Utopia, C. Sultz and J. H. Hexter (eds), The Complete Works of St Thomas More, Vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 94.
William Allen, An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland, 1588, in G. Orwell and R. Reynolds (eds), British Political Pamphlets, Vol. 1 (London: Wingate, 1948), p. 46.
Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, 1638, F. Tonnies (ed.), M. M. Goldsmith, Introduction (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 2.3.14.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses on Government, 2nd edn, 1704, Ch. 3.36, p. 376; J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and The Restoration Crisis, 1677–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 260f.
Coluccio Salutati, De tyranno, in E. Emerton (ed.), Humanism and Tyranny (Cambridge, Mass.: Smith, 1964), Ch. 1.
Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–77 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988) p. 56 and Ch. 3.
‘Against Disobedience and Wilfull Rebellion’, in Certain Sermons or Homilies (Oxford, 1683), p. 352 forcibly conveys the commonplace. John Minsheu, Ductor in linguas, 1617, notes that French and English usages both equate rebels and traitors: he follows with a definition of rebellious assembly from the Statute Books; also John Kelsey, A New English Dictionary, 1701, reprinted (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1969) for the synonymity of rebel and traitor. By comparison, Johnson’s Dictionary is mild.
William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, in Works (Cambridge, 1604?), Ch. 10.
John Milton, A Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, 1660, in J. Max Patrick (ed.), The Prose of John Milton (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 543
Philip Hunton, A Treatise on Monarchy, 1643, p. 18; Thoughts of a Private Person, in State Tracts, 1692, p. 466.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 189f
J. H. M. Salmon, The French Wars of Religion and English Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959)
‘Catholic Resistance Theory’, in J. H. Burns (ed.) with the assistance of M. Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Ch. 8; R. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–80’, in ibid, Ch. 7.
C. Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 23, 132f.
The ‘Protestation’, 3 May 1641, in S. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn, revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 155. ‘New counsel’ as a significant variant of evil counsel, suggested both counsel by inexperienced ‘new’ men and innovatory advice which, given so much of it touched on religion, was seen in a very prejudicial light; see below, section 5.8.
Andrew Marvell, An Account of The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, 1677, consciously reiterates the rhetoric of counsel and conspiracy possibly more effectively than anyone; R. Beddard, A Kingdom without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988), Introduction, makes clear both the appeal of the rhetoric of counsel and its difficulties for those who invited William to England.
Anon., An Argument for Self-Defence, Written about the Year 1687, in The Somers Tracts, Vol. 3 first collection, 1748, p. 527. The whole reads like a crib from Locke. For a brilliant and suggestive account of the significance and ramifications of casuistry, see M. Sampson, ‘Liberty and Laxity in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought’, in E. Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 72f.
Alberico Centili, De jure belli libri tres, 1608, reprinted (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933), 1.15
Sir George Mackenzie, Jus regium, 1681, pp. 50, 95–6; Richard Claridge, A Second Defence of the Present Government, 1689; An Enquiry into the meaning of Submission to the Supreme Magistrate, in State Tracts 2, 1688, p. 7; John Wildman (?), Some Remarks Upon the Present Government, in State Tracts 1, (1688–89, 1705), pp. 155–9.
John Wallace, ‘The Engagement Controversy, 1649–52, an Annotated List of Pamphlets’, in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 68 (1964), p. 384
Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: A Quest for a Settlement (London: Macmillan, 1972).
George Lawson, Politica sacra et civilis, ed. C. Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially Ch. 15.
Lawson, Politica, Ch. 15.8. Foolishly, when I had simply assumed Lawson’s work to be a straightforward piece of resistance theory, I remarked upon his failure to argue for resistance coherently, pointing to such passages as irrelevant to the resistance theory he should have been advancing. See’ sacra before civilis: On the Ecclesiastical Politics of George Lawson’, The Journal of Religious History, 11 (1981), pp. 524f.
L. Anderton, Remarks on the Present Confederacy, 1693, in The Somers Tracts, Vol. 3 first collection (1748); pp. 548 and 568 on the collapse and arbitrary use of the distinction between submission and obedience; p. 545 on false names. His discussion of William’s reign is hardly immune from his own strictures. Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 31, seems to assume that there was a correct description of what had happened which contemporaries attempted to conceal. It is a difficult conclusion to avoid but it seems to me that the principal issue in debate is precisely how to describe what had happened. Concealment presupposes an agreed knowledge; matters were not that simple, perceptions not that uniform.
David Hume, ‘Of Passive Obedience’, in C. W. Hendel (ed.), Political Essays (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), p. 67. By the end of the century, Joseph Priestley in his Political Dialogues, 1793, could write of the people revolting in extremis.
D. Bolinger, Language, The Loaded Weapon (New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 72–5; see above, section 2.5. John Withers, A History, p. 584 argues that ‘to assist’ can be tantamount to meaning ‘to resist’. His tactic is to make resistance (as self-defence) so extensive that to some degree it must have been defended by the Church of England.
Hence Tully’s attempt to rescue Locke from Macpherson’s capitalist reading by suggesting that Locke meant to (should have?) distinguished service from labour. J. Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 136f.
W. B. Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature (New York: Johnson, 1972 edn), p. 12, Ch. 8.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (1690), III.xi.3, though the acceptance is reluctant and carries perhaps the trace of a philosophical sneer.
S. Letwin, ‘David Hume: Inventor of a New Task for Philosophy’, Political Theory, 3 (1975), p. 151 remarks on Hume’s terminological looseness, and this would help place him in a conflationary tradition, but Letwin’s specification of the new task, puts him also in line with Montaignesque preoccupations, though it is her purpose to tie Hume to Oakeshottean philosophy.
Jean Elshtain, ‘Political Language and Reality’, PS, 1 (1985), p. 26, commenting on Orwell’s famous ‘Politics and the English Language’ which, without the philosophical underpinnings, rehearses the same distempers as are found in Locke, Hobbes and Bacon.
See e.g. N. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)
R. Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), especially pp. 42f. In all these works (Waswo is the most specific) there does seem to be a confusion between constituting as creating and restructuring; so the ambiguity of Renaissance understandings of the word are carried through into the commentaries.
Robert Lowe declaimed in Sydney, ‘Just as in America oppression was the parent of independence — so it will be in this colony — so will injustice and tyranny ripen into rebellion and rebellion into independence.’ The People’s Advocate, 16 June 1849, cited in M. McKenna, ‘Tracking The Republic’, unpublished MS, p. 4; Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 95 and 17.
R. S. Peters, Hobbes (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1967 edn), p. 32.
J. Tully, ‘Current Thinking about Seventeenth Century Political Thought’, Historical Journal, 24 (1988), p. 483
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 222–3
L. J. Macfarlane, Modern Political Theory (London: Nelson, 1970), p. 230
J. H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Pegasus, 1969 edn), p. 39 describes the Vindiciae contra tyrannos as ‘an exhortation to rebel’.
Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and The Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (1980), pp. 486–9; J. Greenburg, ‘The Confessor’s Laws and the Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), p. 611.
It is symptomatic of this exaggeration that the Cambridge History of Political Thought covering the period has two chapters on resistance theory and nothing on the more prominent means of ensuring limited obedience. People get into such chapters by having their vocabularies redescribed, as Professor Franklin revamped the Vindiciae (see note 74). By such means Lois Schwoerer is able to label so much as resistance theory even when restricting herself to whig writings: see ‘The Right to Resist: Whig resistance theory, 1688–1694’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 232ff.
J. H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 53ff.
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© 1994 Conal Condren
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Condren, C. (1994). Resistance and Rebellion. In: The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23566-7_5
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