Political Storytelling and Propaganda: William Prynne and the English Afterlife of Tommaso Campanella
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Political Storytelling and Propaganda: William Prynne and the English Afterlife of Tommaso Campanella Andrew Manns Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London March 2019 1 I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed: Andrew Manns 2 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my gratitude to Tony Grafton, Catherine Charlton and the rest of the staff at The Warburg Institute and Senate House for their continued support and advice. I am also deeply grateful to my advisers, Jill Kraye and Guido Giglioni for guiding me on this journey and for their thoroughgoing and keen-eyed insights and input into the present work. Lastly, I am greatly indebted to my long-suffering wife, Marjolaine, who has given me unbounded encouragement and inspiration every step of the way. 3 Abstract Political Storytelling and Propaganda: William Prynne and the English Afterlife of Tommaso Campanella Although there has been extensive scholarship on the pamphleteering practices and political activities of the dissident moralist and lawyer William Prynne, scant material exists on the narrative mechanism underlying Prynne’s persuasive storytelling. This dissertation argues that Prynne was the source of the literary archetype concerning the ‘Jesuit’ Tommaso Campanella diffused during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ideas of the Italian Dominican Campanella (1568-1639) had a certain impact on the philosophical, theological and political panorama of early modern England. The study of this impact is an area that is still largely unexplored. Using Prynne’s apocryphal Campanella as an interpretative lens, my dissertation compares and analyses the anti-Catholic myths elaborated by Prynne and proposes that he devised a fictional Campanella in tandem with his exposition of the fictitious plots of Adam Contzen, Cardinal Armand Richelieu, and Robert Parsons. In doing so, it specifically postulates the existence of a narrative continuity in the way in which Prynne articulated his conspiratorial political tales and charts their evolution. Overall, it posits and shows how these figures and their associated plots emerged consecutively out of Prynne’s reactionary propagandistic efforts against what he believed were two ideological mentalities: on the one hand, the Arminianism of the English prelature, on the other, the allegedly insurrectionary and sectarian Jesuitism of the New Model Army, the radical Independents party, the anti-royalist proponents of the Good Old Cause, and the Quakers. 4 Table of contents Introduction 6 Chapter 1 28 Setting the Conspiratorial Scene: Universal Monarchy, the ‘Jesuit’ Campanella and the Good Old Cause Chapter 2 53 The Enduring Appeal of the Campanella Plot in England Chapter 3 65 The Arminian Conspiracy and the Emerging of Prynne’s Foundational Myths Chapter 4 92 The Unholy Mix of Politics and Religion: Prynne’s ‘Machiavillian State-Religion’ Chapter 5 100 Prynne and the Laudian Plot Chapter 6 117 Prynne’s Anti-Jesuit Stance Chapter 7 136 Prynne and the Ancient Plot Chapter 8 145 How the Ancient Plot Metamorphosed during the Interregnum Conclusion: Conspiratorial Likelihood 170 and the Limits of Prynne’s Narrative Inquiry Bibliography 190 5 Introduction In 1964, Richard Hofstader (then professor of history at Columbia University) published ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ in Harper’s Magazine. In the essay, Hofstader surveyed and critiqued the multifarious expressions of conspiratorial thinking that had shaped and were continuing to affect the language of political discourse in American culture. Among other things, he identified four prejudices that frequently appeared in what he deemed the American ‘paranoid style’: the fear of the Catholics, the fear of the Communists, the fear of the Masons, and the fear of racial and religious minorities.1 In discussing these primal fears and the effects that they had on United States demagoguery and public policy, Hofstader highlighted the actions and reputation of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957). McCarthy was at that time seen by many to have been the major proponent of anti- Soviet sentiment, chiefly because of his inquisitorial and high-profile investigations into the personal and professional lives of American citizens.2 McCarthy invoked a fiery rhetoric which cited age-old stereotypes of American exceptionalism and traditionalism to broadcast his moral reform politics. He publicly characterized the Soviets as immoral subversives who were infiltrating the State Department and threatening Christian society.3 The situation therefore called for extreme measures: the Communists and their sympathizers and abettors needed to be cast down from the high places, disenfranchised, imprisoned, and exiled in order to show the Soviet Union that America had the upper hand. Thus, McCarthy somehow managed to appear as if he was sounding the alarm against the forces of evil. He gave himself the responsibility of standing (to use the words of William F. Buckley) ‘athwart history’, in attempting to ensure the future prosperity and liberty of the American people.4 Hofstader found in McCarthy an exemplar of the ‘paranoid spokesman’. This figure, he wrote, sees: 1 R. Hofstader, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Harper’s Magazine (Nov., 1964), pp. 77-86. A recent survey of Hofstader’s thesis can be found in T. Aistrope, Conspiracy Theory and American Foreign Policy, Manchester 2016, pp. 17-22. 2 For examinations of the pervasiveness and legacy of McCarthyism see R. Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red scare: A Documentary History, Oxford 1997; id., Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, Oxford 1990. 3 E. Shrecker and P. Deery, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents, 3rd edn, Boston 2017, pp. 184-87. 4 A. Felzenberg, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr, New Haven 2017, p. xvii. Buckley had used the phrase to describe the role of the ideal American conservative, who had a duty to be cautious about progressivism. He notoriously defended McCarthy’s intentions in W. Buckley, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, Chicago 1954. 6 the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.5 The paranoid spokesperson was a product of the zeitgeist. The ‘psychic energies’ to which he was privy and by which he was empowered were facilitated by ‘certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations’.6 McCarthy’s conspiracy theories were indubitably influenced by nuclear age hysterias, as well as by the growing pains of America settling into its newfound rivalry with the Soviet Union, the new superpower in Eastern Europe.7 They spoke to a people who had still not recovered from the emotional ravages of the World Wars and who were still unsure about their place in the world. Hofstader concluded his essay with the statement that the paranoiac was a ‘double sufferer’: one who was ‘afflicted not only by the real world’, but also by his ‘fantasies’.8 With regard to the term ‘paranoid’, Hofstader made it clear that he was ‘not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes’. In this way, he employed the adjective to refer to exaggerated ‘modes of expression used by more or less normal people’ who nevertheless see themselves as having larger-than-life roles in the destiny of the world.9 Moreover, Hofstader maintained that the paranoid spokesman also sees himself as a mystical ‘renegade’, one who has seen what others can not or would not: he renegade is the man or woman who has been in the arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world.10 Furthermore, the spokesman mainly interprets events dualistically; his enemies are either ‘totally evil or totally unappeasable’, and for this reason they have to be eliminated completely or removed from the ‘theatre of operations’ on which he is focused.11 5 Hofstader, ‘The Paranoid Style’, p. 82. 6 Ibid., p. 86. 7 J. Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction, Houndsmills 2011, pp. 58-60; K. Olstead, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, Oxford 2011, pp. 84-5, 100-9. 8 Hofstader, ‘The Paranoid Style’, p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 77 10 Ibid., p.85. 11 Ibid., p. 82. 7 Importantly, the spokesperson also suspects his targets of possessing an ‘effective source of power’, such as brainwashing technology and unlimited wealth. This suspicion contributes to his pedantic manner of narrating historical events.12 In many respects, the pre-modern equivalent of McCarthy and a prime example Hofstader’s paranoid spokesman was the seventeenth-century pamphleteer, lawyer, and parliamentarian William Prynne (1600–1669). This comparison has, in fact, most recently been made by David Lowenstein in his book, Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Lowenstein, echoing the opinions of other historians who have also pointed out the similarities between American anti-communism and Caroline anti-popery, likened Prynne’s ‘manipulation of fear and patriot language’ to the fearmongering extremism of McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities Committee.13 Prynne, for his part, claimed to be an avowed patriot and ‘Champion’ against ‘Romish emisseries’.14 At the beginning of the English Revolution and throughout the Interregnum period, he relentlessly promoted his version of the ‘Popish Plot’.15 As Prynne saw it, a covert but vast Jesuit conspiracy was threatening the security of the English body politic. Likening the order to the mythological deity Proteus, Prynne claimed that the Jesuits were the ne plus ultra of villains operating in the Three Kingdoms. With innumerable disguises and contrivances, they had murdered Charles I, fomented wars and rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, and installed and manipulated the New Model Army.