John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England'

Home , John Eliot (statesman), John Selden, Thomas Coleman, Thomas Erastus

H-Albion Sommerville on Barbour, 'John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England'

Review published on Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Reid Barbour. John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. x + 417 pp. $73.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-8776-8.

Reviewed by Johann P. Sommerville (Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison) Published on H-Albion (February, 2005)

Selden, Secularism, and Judaism

John Selden was one of the most learned and prolific scholars in seventeenth-century England. He wrote on topics including the history of common law, Jewish antiquities, Christian church history, titles of honor, the freedom of the seas, and the gods of the ancient Syrians. He possessed a staggering knowledge of ancient, medieval, and modern sources and languages. He was also an important political figure. In the parliament of 1628-29 he was one of the architects of the Petition of Right. In 1629, he, Sir John Eliot, and others plotted the events which led to the Speaker of the House of Commons being held by force in his chair while three resolutions denouncing recent royal policies were read out. When Charles dissolved the parliament, Selden was imprisoned. Later, he made his peace with the king's regime, was released from prison, and befriended Archbishop William Laud, who found him a seat in the Long Parliament. There, Selden spoke in defense of the bishops, but when Civil War came he sided with parliament. He was appointed a member of the Westminster Assembly, in which he made common cause with other Erastians such as Thomas Coleman, and with Independents, against efforts to establish a rigid, intolerant, and clericalist Presbyterian Church in England. Selden's many other achievements include cataloguing the Arundel Marbles, and writing the official response to Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum, in which the Dutchman had claimed that the seas are free to all who sail in them, and that the Dutch were therefore perfectly entitled to fish herring off the British coast.

Given the vast extent of Selden's learning, and the great range of his intellectual and political activities, it is not surprising that modern scholars have rather shied away from him. A few--Paul Christianson and Richard Tuck, for example--have contributed notably to the study of select aspects of Selden's scholarship, but no one has attempted an overview of all of it. The great merit of Reid Barbour's book is precisely that it attempts to give an account of virtually all of Selden's scholarly output. It will be indispensable reading for everyone who has an interest in Selden but who lacks the time or opportunity to read his writings, for it contains much information on works which are scarcely mentioned elsewhere.

Barbour bases his account on Selden's own works and on modern writings--especially (but not exclusively) those which deal specifically with Selden. He does not employ manuscript materials, and makes only limited use of printed sources on proceedings in parliament. He also refrains from discussing the views of a number of prominent twentieth-century historians on matters highly relevant to Selden and his concerns. This makes it difficult to locate his contentions about Selden

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Sommerville on Barbour, 'John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England'. H-Albion. 03-26-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/reviews/17879/sommerville-barbour-john-selden-measures-holy-commonwealth-seventeenth Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Albion against the background of recent debate on the seventeenth century more generally. Missing from Barbour's bibliography are the writings of Patrick Collinson, Geoffrey Elton, S. R. Gardiner, Jack Hexter, Christopher Hill, Derek Hirst, Mark Kishlansky, Peter Lake, Theodore K. Rabb, Conrad Russell, Nicholas Tyacke, and many others. Moreover, Barbour says relatively little about the ideas of important predecessors and contemporaries of Selden. He dwells at particular length on Selden's views on religion and church-state relations, but his bibliography omits the works of Lancelot Andrewes (a friend of Selden's as well as an important thinker), Bellarmine, Beza, Calvin, Thomas Coleman (with whom Selden allied in the Westminster Assembly, and whom he praised in hisDe Synedriis), Richard Field, George Gillespie (a leading Presbyterian in the Westminster Assembly), and Gillespie's ally Samuel Rutherford, to name only a few. Barbour stresses the influence of Grotius's thinking on Selden, but his bibliography mentions only Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and not his far more voluminous works on religion and church state relations (including the De Imperio Summarum Potestatum circa Sacra, which Selden approvingly referred to in De Synedriis). Barbour has much to say about Selden's Erastianism, and the links between his theories and those of the sixteenth-century thinker Thomas Erastus. Oddly, however, he does not draw on the writings of Erastus himself, which are also missing from the bibliography.

Given the limitations of the sources which Barbour has used, it is perhaps inevitable that there are problems large and small with his arguments. He adds little to older writings on Selden's biography, and does not provide much information on Selden's role in English politics from the 1620s to the 1650s. We are told that in the 1620s "Selden appears for the most part to have sided with the 'godly' or zealous Protestants in his work for Parliament" (p. 164), and we learn that "there was no question that Selden was an invaluable standard of true religion for MPs condemnatory of creeping popery and Arminianism in the court and church of Charles I" (p. 165), but he brings little evidence to support these contentions. If Selden was an enemy of Arminianism, then it is perhaps odd that Nicholas Tyacke's authoritative work on the rise of English Arminianism classifies Selden as an Arminian, and that in the 1630s Selden befriended Laud, the leading supporter of the Arminians.[1]

Barbour observes that Selden was commissioned by the Commons in 1629 to investigate whether the Arminian Richard Montagu was a lawful bishop. But this does not serve to show that Selden opposed Montagu's Arminianism, or, indeed, that Selden disagreed with Montagu at all. In fact, it is quite likely that Selden did bear a grudge against Montagu, though not about Arminianism. For in 1621 Montagu published an attack on Selden in which he called him (among other things) the "most pernicious underminer of the Church, and of Religion in the Church, that the Prince of darknes hath set on worke to do mischiefe many yeeres."[2] Montagu believed that Selden's ideas undermined the wealth and power of the clergy, and clerics of various theological stripes agreed. Barbour rightly notes that Selden was accused of opposing the clergy and religion, but argues that this was only partially justified, for (he claims) Selden in fact wanted to see a truly religious "holy commonwealth" instituted in England, though he thought that such a commonwealth was too important to be left under the authority of the clergy. Selden "came to be associated with the destruction of the very holy commonwealth that he had laboured so monumentally and inventively to save," Barbour informs us, and he asserts that he in fact dedicated his energies "to the rescue of the holy commonwealth in the face of growing secularism" (p. 19).

According to Barbour, in his later years Selden turned to ancient Jewish religion to provide a model for the holy commonwealth he wanted to see set up in England. In the 1640s, he says, "Selden

Barbour is himself somewhat elusive on what precisely Selden thought his holy commonwealth should be like. He hints that he wanted some or all of ancient Judaism to be revived, but does not tell us exactly which practices he hoped would be resurrected. Did he advocate circumcision, we might ask, or stoning for blasphemy? The answer to these questions seems to be resoundingly negative. Selden's works on Judaism were largely intended as historical accounts of the customs of the ancient Jews. There is little reason to view them as defenses of those practices. He was aware that early Christians had sometimes built on Judaic traditions, and he knew that some of the clergy of his own day grounded their claims to wealth and power in Jewish precedent--for example portraying the Sanhedrin as a clerical institution. He countered these arguments by producing evidence that church and state were not separate in ancient Judaism, that the Sanhedrin was a secular body like the English parliament, and that it governed in both civil and ecclesiastical matters. His message was not that the English should revive Jewish rites, but that they should be ruled by parliament and English law--just as the Jews had been ruled by their own parliament and laws. Since he wanted the secular authorities to rule in England, it makes some sense to view him as an advocate of secularism. Since he held that the clergy were often motivated by self-interest and ambition, we could also reasonably argue that he thought a church run by parliament would be holier than one run by clerics, and in this sense we might portray him as a proponent of a holy commonwealth. But it is easy to see why clerics did not always agree that England would become a holy commonwealth if lawyers and gentlemen like Selden ran religious affairs. From the clerical viewpoint, the contention that Selden regarded religion as too serious a matter to be left to the clergy arguably resembles the claim that Al Capone thought law and order too important to be left to the police.

Barbour does not fully sustain his claim that Selden was an opponent of secularism. There are also a number of minor slips. James Nayler was punished for riding into Bristol (not Exeter) in imitation of Christ. The "Elector Palatinate" (p. 43) should be the "Elector Palatine." We are told that in 1615 Selden was "No doubt already hard at work on De Dis Syris" (p. 64) and also that he wrote it in 1605 (p. 101; this latter statement is incorrect). On the whole, however, this is an interesting and engaging book which contains much useful information not easily available elsewhere.

Notes

[1]. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 145-146.

[2]. Richard Montagu, Diatribae upon the First Part of the Late History of Tithes (London: Felix Kyngston for Matthew Lownes, 1621), p. 20.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=10254

Citation: Johann P. Sommerville. Review of Barbour, Reid,John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10254

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].