Marchamont Nedham and mystery of state

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Foxley, R. (2013) Marchamont Nedham and mystery of state. In: Mahlberg, G. and Wiemann, D. (eds.) European contexts for English republicanism. Politics and Culture in Europe, 1650–1750. Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 49-62. ISBN 9781409455561 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/29473/

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Chapter 3 m o .c te a g h s Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State.a w w w

m o Rachel Foxley c . te a g h s .a w w w

m o .c te a g h It is some measure of the extraordinary qualities of Marchamonts Nedham that he .a w managed to serve virtually all of the political causes and regimesw of two of the most w

m unstable decades of English history, and lived to fight anothero day. Having served .c te both Parliament and king in the Civil Wars of the 1640s, aand charted a precarious g h s but profitable path through the shifting regimes.a and factions of the 1650s,he w w w turned again after monarchy was restored, and just before his death in the later m o 1 1670s was accepting pay for his attacks on Shaftesbury..c His willingness to test the te a g limits of his current political masters with audacioush and provocative journalism s .a was apparently matched only by his aptitude forw slipping across political divides w w to serve new masters when circumstances – personalm and national – demanded it. o .c The brilliance of Nedham’s wit attractedte his paymasters in the political a g h turmoil of the Civil Wars and Interregnum,s and it attracts scholars now. The .a w apparent flexibility of his conscience hasw been more of an embarrassment, and w

m interpretations of his career have triedo to draw out some threads of political .c te a commitment which stayed unbrokeng through at least some of his switches of h s allegiance, pointing to his hostility.a to the Scots and their Presbyterian allies in w w w England, or at the very least to his desire to secure freedom of conscience in m o England, or concern about the. c power of the army. While Jason McElligott has te a g urged us to take seriously Nedham’sh commitment as a supporter of the king and s .a w editor of the royalist newsbookw Mercurius Pragmaticus from 1647 to 1649, most w commentators have seen mNedham as having a deeper commitment to republican o .c te a g h 1 s Joseph Frank, Cromwell’s.a Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont w w Nedham, 1620–1678 (Washington,w DC, 1980), is now supplemented by much recent work,

m including Joad Raymond,o ‘Nedham, Marchamont (bap. 1620, d. 1678)’, Oxford Dictionary .c te a of National Biographyg (Oxford, 2004), hereafter ODNB. For an analysis of some of the h s vicissitudes and .a turning-points of Nedham’s career, see Raymond, ‘“A Mercury with a w w Winged Conscience”:w Marchamont Nedham, Monopoly and Censorship’, Media History,

m o 4 (1998), pp..c 7–18; Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary te a England (Woodbridge,g 2007), pp. 111–26; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: h s Propaganda.a During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 280–87, w w w 291–5. We should not forget that Nedham did not necessarily jump quickly when the m o balance.c of power shifted. McElligott emphasizes the trials he went through before making te a his gpeace with the new regime in 1649; Joad Raymond, ‘The Cracking of the Republican h s Spokes’,.a Prose Studies, 19 (1996), pp. 255–74, aligns him with Milton in holding out w w againstw restoration. © Copyrighted Material 50 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material

2 thought. The plausibility of this rests not only on his parliamentarianism in his m o career up to 1646, which culminated in a series of controversial attacks on Charles.c te a g h I, but also on the quality of his writings under the republic and protectorate:s he .a w seemed keen, at least at times, to offer far more challenging models of republicanw w 3 government than his political masters were willing or able to implement.m Indeed, o .c te compared to the sometimes aristocratic or godly republicanism even ofa his fellow g h s republican theorists in the 1650s, Nedham’s writings seem strikingly.a populist. In w w an influential brief assessment in hisMachiavellian Moment, J.G.A.w Pocock found

m o Nedham’s republican editorials for Mercurius Politicus ‘consistently.c radical and te a democratic’: ‘the first sustained English exposition ofg republican democracy h s 4 .a in classical and Machiavellian terms.’ Many more recent writersw have aligned w w 5 Nedham’s republicanism with radical thought in a similar way. m o .c Nedham’s writings, republican and otherwise, displayte a strand of hard-edged a g h political calculation which makes him an interesting exemplars of the deployment .a w of controversial but increasingly influential contemporaryw modes of thought about w

m politics. Thus his familiarity from early in his journalistico career with the interest .c te theory of the duc de Rohan; his use of Machiavelli, afrom the anonymous Vox Plebis g h s in 1646 to the treatises and newspaper editorials .aof the 1650s; and his willingness w w w to deploy both Grotian and Hobbesian ideas in the cause of the new free state m 6 o have all been noted. All these authors could.c certainly be used to think about the te a g political challenges and exigencies of a newh state, or of changes in the political s .a balance, in ways which might have enabledw changes of allegiance for subjects as w w

m o .c te 2 a McElligott, Royalism, Print and gCensorship, pp. 120–25; contrast Raymond, ‘The h s .a Cracking of the Republican Spokes’, p.w 257. w 3 w On Nedham’s views in his parliamentarian writing to 1646, see Joyce Macadam, m o ‘Mercurius Britanicus on Charles I:.c An Exercise in Civil War Journalism and High Politics, te a g August 1643 to May 1646’, Historicalh Research, 84 (2011), pp. 470–92; Joad Raymond, s .a The Invention of the Newspaper:w English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), w w pp. 42–8, but see Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, pp. 298–300; Jonathan Scott, m o Commonwealth Principles:.c Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, te a g 2004), pp. 241–7; on Nedhamh exceeding his brief in the 1650s, see Peacey, Politicians s .a and Pamphleteers, pp. w291–5; Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings w w of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, m o and Commercial Society,.c 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994), pp. 64–5. te a 4 g h J.G.A. Pocock,s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the .a w Atlantic Republicanw Tradition (Princeton, 1975), p. 382. w 5 Worden,m ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism’, o .c pp. 66–7; Paulte Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under a g h the Englishs Republic (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 198–9, 233–4. .a 6 w Felixw Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation 1500–1700 w

m (London,o 1964), pp. 159–64; Marco Barducci, ‘Machiavelli nella Cultura Politica Inglese’, .c te in Alessandroa Arienzo and Gianfranco Borrelli (eds), Anglo-American Faces of Machiavelli: g h Machiavellis e Machiavellismi Nella Cultura Anglo-Americana (Milan, 2009), pp. 193–8; .a w w wRahe, Against Throne and Altar, pp. 175–244. © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 51 © Copyrighted Material

well as offering controversial prescriptions for rulers; and there is no doubt thatm o .c te they all contributed significantly to the distinctive character of Nedham’s thought.a g h s Nedham’s range of reference, however, is much broader than this. His ause of . w w classical authors in citation and quotation, and his references to a wide rangew of

m more modern authorities, have facilitated his adoption into the canon of o‘classical .c te a republicanism’ and elicited a (cautious) admiration for his learning andg the base h s .a of reading on which he built his topical and versatile political argumentation.w His w w sources did not, of course, predetermine the direction of his political argument. m o .c As Blair Worden once nicely put it, Nedham’s arguments had ate habit of ‘turning a g h on their footnotes’: the same material might be marshalleds for or against a .a 7 w proposition as circumstances demanded. We should certainlyw never expect w

m Nedham’s relationship to his sources to be simple. Nonetheless,o it is perhaps .c te surprising that so little attention has been paid to Nedham’sa ‘footnotes’ – the g h s marginal citations which appear only in a couple of his.a publications in the early w w w Commonwealth period – as they turn out to tell us some surprising things about m o the way in which he wrote and the reading matter to.c which he most readily turned te a g in the process of composition. h s .a The two works which used marginal citationw of authorities to bolster their w w arguments were Certain Considerations Tenderedm in all Humility, to an Honorable o .c Member of the Councell of State (1 August 1649)te and the much longer and better- a g h known Case of the Commonwealth of England,s Stated, published in May 1650. .a w Both were concerned with the problems wfaced by governors and people under the w

m new regime of the Commonwealth. Theo first, a 14-page pamphlet, offered some .c te a advice to the Council of State on howg to manage its potential opponents – advice h s which Nedham advertised as drawn.a out of ‘the Opinion and Practice of many w w w the most [sic] eminent Statesmen ’, but which was skilfully oriented towards the m o lenient treatment of Nedham himself.c (he had been thrown into prison) as well as te a g the potential success of the newh regime. The second, Nedham’s ‘job application’ s .a 8 w to his employers in the neww regime, used brutal de facto arguments justifying w the power of the sword asm the only title to government, as well as analyses of the o .c te ‘interest’ of the differenta groups which found themselves in opposition to their g h s new governors, and finally.a a classicizing peroration on the superiority of ‘free w w states’ to monarchies,w to try and induce the new regime’s unwilling population

m to offer it their obedience.o Both texts cited an impressive mixture of ancient and .c te a modern texts in theirg marginal notes. There is little scholarly comment on Certain h s .a Considerationsw , but Joad Raymond finds it ‘significant for its extensive use of w w Roman precedent’, and suggests that it prefigures Nedham’s phase of classical m o .c republican te writing. Joseph Frank commented on its ‘outpouring of classical a g h s .a w 7 w Blairw Worden, ‘“Wit in a Roundhead”: The Dilemma of Marchamont Nedham’,

m in Susano Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in .c te a Earlyg Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester and New h s York,.a 1995), p. 301. w w 8 w Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, p. 213. © Copyrighted Material 52 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material

9 allusions’ and pronounced the tract ‘judicious and learned’. Nigel Smith notes m o its ‘solid references’ to Seneca, Suetonius and Livy, and entertains the thought.c te a g h that it was the result of Nedham’s reading of classical sources in prison, markings .a w the ‘emergence of the republican theory’ which Nedham was then to developw w 10 in his editorials for Mercurius Politicus. The Case of the Commonwealthm has o .c te received more scrutiny, and Philip Knachel’s 1969 edition completeda Nedham’s g h s citations and attempted – sometimes in vain – to collate them with the.a works cited. w w Knachel noticed some inaccuracy in quotation, lamented Nedham’sw ‘casual habits’

m o in citation and suspected him of ‘short cuts’, asking, ‘Had he actually.c read each of te a the authors he quotes?’ – a suspicion presumably fostered by theg incidences noted h s .a in the footnotes where Knachel found citations of other worksw lifted from Gregor w w Richter’s Axiomatum Politicorum of 1604 (Görlitz). Nonetheless, he concluded m o .c that Nedham’s more obscure citations ‘must have requiredte some hard searching, a g 11 h which does suggest that he had read widely.’ More recents scholars, not forced to .a w do such painstaking editorial work, have tended to lookw directly to the classical w

m authors cited in the margins, and to pick out a fewo canonical names from early .c te modern political thought, ignoring the rest of the scholarlya trappings. g h s This is a mistake, as it turns out that Richter’s.a Axiomatum was not the only w w w Latin textbook by a German author that Nedham had on his desk as he wrote – or, m o in some cases, compiled – his tracts. Nedham .cseems to have been inordinately fond te a g of the genre, and two other systematic and compendioush treatises lie behind a large s .a number of his citations. One is Arnold Clapmar’sw De Arcanis Rerum Publicarum, w w first published posthumously by hism brother in 1605 (Bremen). This influential o .c book took up many of the ideas of thete Italian reason of state tradition – Clapmar a g h had been a correspondent of Scipiones Ammirato and was particularly heavily .a w w indebted to him – and repackagedw them under the notion of ‘arcana imperii’,

m transforming ‘reason’ of state intoo ‘mysteries’ of state. Among the authors who .c te a followed Clapmar’s lead in thisg analysis was the jurist Christoph Besold, whose h s .a short De Arcanis Rerum Publicarumw Dissertatio was appended to some editions of w w 12 Clapmar’s work, including, I suspect, the one which Nedham used. The second, m o .c te a g h s .a w w 9 w Raymond, ‘Nedham’, ODNB; Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, p. 73. m o 10 .c Nigel Smith,te Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and a g h London, 1994), pp.s 32–4. .a 11 w Marchamontw Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, ed. P.A. w

Knachel (Charlottesville,m 1969), pp. v, xxxiii, 10, 11, 13. o 12 .c te Nedham’sa citation of this as a ‘dissertatio’ points towards an edition such as Arnold g h Clapmar, sDe Arcanis Rerum Publicarum Libri Sex … Accessit Chr. Besoldi De eadem .a w materia wDiscursus (Leiden, 1644) rather than the Elsevier edition (Amsterdam, 1644), which w

m also includeso the Besold tract but refers to it as a ‘discursus’ rather than a ‘dissertatio’. I will .c te cite athe Leiden edition for both texts. The Camena project at Heidelberg and Mannheim g h hass made this volume available conveniently online: http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/ .a w w camenahtdocs/camenahist.html.w © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 53 © Copyrighted Material

longer treatise used heavily by Nedham was Besold’s own Synopsis Politicaem o 13 .c te Doctrinae. a g h s Nedham’s use of these texts was intensive, and to a modern reader coulda seem . w w dishonest. Certain Considerations is effectively a tissue of material translatedw out

m of both Clapmar’s and Besold’s texts on the arcana, plus Clapmar’s Conclusioneso , .c te a also in the same volume, held together in some places by only the mostg tenuous h s .a connective phrases of Nedham’s own. Nedham, of course, contributedw his own w w unmistakable brio to some of his more paraphrastic translations, and to some m o .c extent reshaped his material by inserting notions which were notte necessarily there a g h in the original. He certainly drove home the message that theses lessons were of .a w paramount importance to the rulers of new states, and free states,w altering not only w

m the terminology of translations but also the wording of someo of his Latin quotations. .c te But in other respects he engaged in surprisingly little selectiona or reshaping: whole g h s strings of references and quotations follow in a sequence.a which is almost identical w w w to the original, so that in places a paragraph of Nedham can be traced directly to a m o page or two of Clapmar or Besold. The pamphlet is .clarded with marginal citations te a g from learned authors, but Clapmar, to whom Nedhamh was most indebted, did not s .a appear among them. Besold’s De Arcanis was atw least cited more than once, but w w in very small proportion to the amount of materialm which Nedham mined directly o .c from it. The Case of the Commonwealth is a morete considered piece and is certainly a g h not as reliant on a dense use of second-hands sources as the shorter pamphlet, .a w but sections of it are similarly derivativew in the citation of authorities, exploiting w

m Besold’s Synopsis Politicae Doctrinaeo as well as the arcana texts and evidently .c te a Richter. Thus the section on the Levellersg illustrates the evils of extreme democracy h s 14 with the help of references lifted directly.a from Besold’s section on this. w w w Of course, these compendious Latin texts were partly designed to be used m o in such ways. Books like Besold’s.c Synopsis served in the realm of politics the te a g same kind of purpose as the h reference books and compendia discussed by Ann s .a w Blair, offering ‘a stockpile ofw notes ready for use without the difficulties of taking w 15 them directly’. Nedham mwas not unusual, either in making use of these treasure- o .c te troves of thematically organizeda classical and modern quotations, or in failing to g h s acknowledge them. Nonetheless,.a this does put Nedham’s working methods, and w w his notoriously opportunisticw use of his sources, in a new light. Scholars have

m tended to assume thato Nedham’s quotations from the central classical authors, at .c te a least, reflected someg genuine influence from the thinking of those authors. When h s .a we find, in Certainw Considerations, that a string of classical references – Cicero, w w Aristotle, Tacitus and Juvenal – has in fact been mined directly from Clapmar with m o .c te a g h 13 s Christoph.a Besold, Synopsis Politicae Doctrinae: Editio Sexta (Amsterdam, 1648). w 14 w wFor examples, references to Bodin, Pierre Gregoire, Contzen and Polybius

m (Nedham,o Case of the Commonwealth, ed. Knachel, pp. 101, 103–4) are taken from Besold, .c te a Synopsisg Politicae Doctrinae, pp. 125–7. h s 15 .a Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern w w Agew (New Haven, 2010), p. 4. © Copyrighted Material 54 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material

16 only a slight change of order, the quality of that influence feels rather different. m o Of course, it does not preclude the possibility that Nedham did have a fair degree.c te a g h of familiarity with some of the authors he was citing. He had a classical education,s .a w at the free school in Burford and then at All Souls, Oxford: an education whichw led w him to a job – which he kept patience with for only three years – at the Merchantm o 17 .c te Taylors’ School in London. He worked comfortably from the Latin acompendia g h s and himself undertook a more taxing translation in the service of .athe republic, w 18 w producing an English version of Selden’s Mare Clausum. We cannotw be sure

m o what depth of knowledge underlay Nedham’s use of snippets. c of the classical te a and modern texts excerpted in other sources. Mistakes, misattributionsg and h s .a misquotations point in one direction, but are entirely explicablew by Nedham’s own w w 19 purposes and the speed with which he was assembling his materials. They may be m o .c partly counterbalanced by occasions when Nedham replaceste Latin transcription of a g h terms with Greek, or by cases where he seems to be usings a classical text in ways .a w 20 which are more extensive than, or differ from, his usualw sources. When Nedham w

m later set out some of the arcana of rule in Mercuriuso Politicus, he clearly drew .c te on Clapmar in his editorial on the need for educationa appropriate to a free state. g h s Here, however, Clapmar seems to have sent him.a back to the text of Tacitus, as w w w Nedham accurately continued (in translation) the passage which Clapmar quoted m 21 o incomplete. On the other side of the balance,.c Nedham cites three passages of te a g Guicciardini in Certain Considerations andh the Case of the Commonwealth: all are s .a w w w

m o .c te a g h 16 s Nedham, Certain Considerations.a , pp. 2–3; Clapmar, De Arcanis, pp. 307–9. w w 17 w Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent , pp. 5–6. m 18 o John Selden, Of the Dominion,.c or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Marchamont te a g Nedham (London, 1652). h s 19 .a See for example Nedham,w Certain Considerations, p. 8: the words ‘opprobria’ and w w

‘& suos’ are Nedham’s own;m the quotation is from Tacitus, Annals 2.50, not Suetonius; o .c Nedham takes it from Clapmar,te De Arcanis, p. 312. More than once Nedham credits a phrase a g h to the wrong name from as selection cited on that point in his source text; he sometimes cites .a w parts of Clapmar’s or Besold’sw own wording as if they were quotations from another text. w 20 Nedham substitutedm Greek typography for ‘Isonomia’ when following Besold: o .c Besold, Synopsis Politicaete Doctrinae, p. 125; Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, ed. a g h Knachel, p. 98; s in Nedham’s Certain Considerations, the quotations from Seneca are .a w virtually the onlyw Latin phrases which cannot be traced to the Clapmar/Besold volume on w the arcana: Nedhamm was presumably using a different source (whether or not it was the o .c original text)te or working from memory. a g 21 h Mercuriuss Politicus 104 (27 May–3 June 1652), p. 1629. The first part of the .a w passage wfrom Tacitus, Annals 1.3 is quoted in Clapmar, De Arcanis, p. 295, and Nedham is w

m clearlyo following Clapmar’s argument about Augustus’s superior guile compared to Caesar. .c te The afinal part of the passage from Tacitus is quoted in Clapmar,De Arcanis, p. 78; Nedham g h quotess from this page of Clapmar in this editorial, pp. 1625, 1627. The middle part of the .a w w Tacitusw passage is not found in Clapmar and is accurately supplied by Nedham. © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 55 © Copyrighted Material

to be found in Besold, so we have no evidence that Nedham had read Guicciardinim o 22 .c te himself at this point. a g h s In some ways, this insight into Nedham’s way of writing and citing raisesa more . w w questions than it answers: further work will be required to pin down the wbalance

m between sources which Nedham used in the original and those he used oat second .c te a hand. What it does show us, however, is Nedham’s deep familiarity withg a genre of h s .a contemporary political books which have not been linked to Nedhamw in previous w w scholarship. This is interesting because it puts the more canonical contemporary m o .c influences on Nedham in a slightly different light. The Germante treatises which a g h shaped so many of the sequences of classical and modern materials which Nedham .a w used in his arguments offered a rather different view of politicalw morality from w

m these more well-known sources, although one which had opoints of contact with, .c te and complicated debts to, Machiavellian thought. They alsoa belonged to a tradition g h s which was not marked by any commitment to republicanism,.a and we should w w w question the relationship between such materials and any republican message that m o Nedham derived from them. .c te a g On the face of it, the mystery of state traditionh might seem to endorse a s .a rather cynical approach to politics, lining up withw the precepts of Machiavelli w w and enhancing our sense of Nedham as a pragmaticm advocate of amoral political o .c rationality. The German mystery of state writers,te like the Italian reason of state a g h theorists on whom they drew, did argue thats rulers sometimes needed to disregard .a w law and morality in defence of their statesw or of their own power. Clapmar grafted w

m the category of ‘arcana’ or ‘mysteries’o onto these notions of reason of state, .c te a interpreting such acts of pragmatic gpolitical calculation as part of a tradition of h s secret political knowledge, hinted at.a in Aristotle’s discussion of ‘sophismata’ and w w 23 w in Tacitus. This gave the practice of reason of state a certain ancient and mystical m o pedigree, and it also brought to.c the fore the element of deception or simulation te a g which might be involved. Clapmar’sh work divided its material up into superficially s .a w systematic, although sometimesw overlapping, categories. The last book was w 24 devoted to a species of them arcana which he called ‘simulacra’. These were ways o .c te in which rulers could createa the illusion of adherence to one constitutional form, g h s even when it had in fact.a been changed for another. This naturally had particular w w relevance to new regimes,w and, arguably, to propagandists, and Nedham was drawn

m to this section of theo book for some of his material in the Certain Considerations. .c te a Even beyondg the tricks classified as ‘simulacra’, however, the theme of arcana as h s .a types of deceptionw was prominent, and the aim was the management of potentially w w troublesome, factious or discontented subjects. For Besold, the enforcement of m o .c te a g h 22 s Besold,.a De Arcanis, p. 22; Besold, Synopsis Politicae Doctrinae, pp. 4–5, 314; w w Nedham,w Certain Considerations, p. 3; Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, ed. Knachel,

m title page,o pp. 100, 117. .c 23te a g Aristotle, Politics, 4.13, for example. h s 24 .a Peter Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge and New York, w w w1988), pp. 113, 121–39. © Copyrighted Material 56 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material legal penalties by lawyers was to be supplemented by politicians’ use of guile and m 25 o ‘persuasiuncula’ to secure subjects’ obedience. Nedham certainly seemed to.c be te a g h comfortable, at least at times, with the culture of political mystery which s these .a w writings promoted. In Mercurius Politicus in October 1651 he endorsed the wRoman w division between people and Senate, which allowed the ‘secrets of Government’m o .c 26 te to be handled by men wise and experienced enough for such ‘State-Affairs’.a A g h s few issues later, he made a similar argument for the Athenians’ placing.a of ‘State w 27 w Transactions’ in the Areopagus. Even while arguing for a form of governmentw by

m o elected legislative assemblies as the shibboleth of a truly free state,.c he reserved a te a place for political wisdom which was not to be found in or sharedg with the people. h s .a This is in sharp contrast with John Streater, the other great populistw republican of w w the 1650s, for whom ‘secret reasons of State’ were anathema, and who argued that m o .c Rome’s greatness was secured only when ‘every member teof that Common-wealth a g 28 h perfectly understood the mysteries of State’. s .a w Streater’s desire to dissolve secrets and mysteriesw into universal knowledge w

m points up the fact that the literature endorsing mysteryo of state was far from .c te populist. In constitutional terms, the theory wasa superficially neutral, and g h s Clapmar’s book was divided into sections which .aexplained in turn how each of the w w w three types of state, or particular regimes of each kind, might preserve themselves m o against threats from the other two types. But Clapmar’s.c assumptions clearly tended te a g against democracy: when he discussed theh ‘flagitia dominationis’, the intolerable s .a crimes which each type of regime mightw use to perpetuate itself, he took care to w w note with Cicero that the people, too, couldm be tyrannical, and argued that in fact o .c 29 the ‘flagitia’ were found far more in tpopulare states than in others. Both in Besold a g h and in Clapmar, the emphasis on governors’s use of various forms of flattery and .a w w deception to keep the people placidw is tinged with a contempt for the ease with

m 30 which the ‘plebs’ can be taken ino by such tricks. .c te a At the time when Nedhamg was making use of Clapmar and Besold in Certain h s .a Considerations and the Casew of the Commonwealth, he was happy to endorse w w such a view of the people. He opened Certain Considerations by explaining to m o England’s new governors.c that they were not to expect a rational or disciplined te a g h response to their currents hardships from the people: ‘It is not in their Power to .a w 31 consider the Circumstancesw of Reason’. Clapmar similarly commented in the first w

m section of his booko that applying laws and philosophical precepts was useless for .c te a g h 25 s .a Besold, wDe Arcanis, p. 7. w 26 w Mercurius Politicus 70 (2–9 October 1651), p. 1111. m 27 o Mercurius.c Politicus 73 (23–30 October 1651), p. 1158. te a 28 g h Johns Streater, A Glympse of that Jewel, Judicial, Just, Preserving Libertie (London, .a w 1653), p.w 1; cf. the same, Secret Reasons of State in Reference to the Affairs of these Nations, w

At the mInterruption of this Present Parliament: Anno 1653. Discovered (London, 1659). o 29.c te Clapmar, De Arcanis, pp. 239, 277–9. a g h 30 s Ibid., pp. 1–4. .a w 31 w w Nedham, Certain Considerations, p. 1. © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 57 © Copyrighted Material

those among whom there was no place for reason (the margin helpfully explainedm o .c te that this meant the people); therefore the plebs were to be handled by using tricksa g 32 h s and obfuscations and images (simulacra). Nedham’s recommendationsa were . w w less explicitly deceptive, recommending instead a certain indulgence andw lenity

m on the part of the new regime, but he was happy to lift from Clapmar Aristotle’so .c te a thought that (in Nedham’s translation) ‘The common people are naturallyg of a h s .a loose disposition, so that if they may enjoy a kind of dissolute liberty,w they like the w 33 w present state of Government whatsoever it be.’ The anti-populist tone continued m o .c in Nedham’s condemnation of the Levellers in the Case of thete Commonwealth, a g h where many of the anti-democratic tropes thrown at the Levellerss were taken .a w from Besold’s account of ‘democratia libera’, the Greek stereotypew of extreme w

m democracy, as discussed in Besold’s Synopsis Politicae Doctrinaeo . Nedham also .c te 34 endorsed Clapmar’s assertion that the ‘flagitia’ flourisheda in democratic states. g h s Even in making an argument for popular, electoral. a government in Mercurius w w w Politicus, Nedham retained some of this attitude, arguing that the people’s power m o was less to be feared than that of kings or grandees, as.c they were so easily contented te a 35 g with ‘Panem, & Circenses’ that they would not runh into excesses of luxury. He s .a had cited Juvenal’s line about bread and circusesw in Certain Considerations two w w years earlier, straight out of Clapmar. Similarly,m later in his great series of editorials o .c defending popular government by successivete assemblies, Nedham countered a g h the objection that popular government wass factious by asserting that the people .a w themselves were ‘purely passive’, merelyw ‘wrought upon by the subtil insinuations w

m 36 of the prime Engineers of each faction’.o .c te a Nedham wrote Certain Considerationsg under severely restricted circumstances: h s either in prison, or recently escaped.a and in hiding. He here publicly addressed a w w w ‘Member of the Councell of State ’, as he was also to do by more personal means, m o 37 eventually securing his release.c after surrendering himself in November 1649. te a g That he apparently drew virtuallyh all of his illustrative material from a single s .a w volume is thus hardly surprising;w but Nedham’s choice of a volume which allowed w him to cite ‘the Opinion mand Practice of many the most eminent Statesmen’ in o .c te manipulating the arcanaa of rule was perhaps pointed when directed at a Council g h s of State whose hold on.a power had immediately become the focus of radical fury. w w w

m o 32 .c Clapmar, Dete Arcanis, pp. 2–3. a g 33 h Nedham, s Certain Considerations, p. 2; Clapmar, De Arcanis, p. 308; Aristotle, .a w Politics, VI.4, onw extreme democracy and the democratic indulgences offered by tyrants. w 34 m Nedham,o Case of the Commonwealth, ed. Knachel, p. 101. .c 35 te Mercuriusa Politicus 84 (8–15 January 1652), p. 1334; the fuller Juvenal quotation g h s is also given.a in Latin on p. 2 of Certain Considerations, from Clapmar, De Arcanis, p. 316. w 36 w wMercurius Politicus 97 (8–15 April 1652), p. 1522.

m 37 o .c The Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 1642–1670, ed. Dorothy Gardiner (London, te a 1937),g p. 161; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, h s 2007),.a pp. 45–7 on Bradshaw; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, p. 283 on Nedham w w appealingw to Thomas Scot. © Copyrighted Material 58 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material

Equally sly was Nedham’s use of the arcana of rule. His condemnation of informers m o – naturally harsh, as it was just such an informer who had put him in prison – was.c te a g h facilitated by the inclusion of the use of informers as one of the impermissibles .a 38 w ‘flagitia’ characteristic of kingly rule by Clapmar. Virtually the whole of wthe rest w of the pamphlet’s more positive prescriptions from Clapmar, however, werem drawn o .c te rather tellingly from Book 6, which dealt with ‘simulacra’. Specifically,a they were g h s drawn from the sections which discussed the simulacra of democratic.a rule, that w w is, the ways in which a regime could make itself seem more democraticw than it

m o was. The democratic arcana were designed to pacify the people,.c by making the te a constitution seem more oriented towards their needs and desiresg than it really was. h s .a In Certain Considerations, Nedham called on the democraticw arcana from w w Clapmar, along with more general material from Besold’s De Arcanis, in order to m o .c argue that a degree of indulgence towards the people was necessaryte for the regime. a g h Emphasizing the precarious position of new regimes, hes argued that the people – .a w who were irrational but responsive to their immediate painsw and pleasures – should w

m be treated gently. Drawing on Besold’s De Arcanis, heo suggested that governments .c te would do best to secure the love of their subjects,a rather than punishing them g h 39 s over-harshly. This apparently disinterested advice.a led into the core of Nedham’s w w w pamphlet, in which he pleaded the case for the tolerance of critical speeches and m o publications against the government, and argued.c that ‘Pasquils and Pamphlets’ te a g should be allowed to circulate. Nedham’sh personal interest here is obvious: he s .a wanted the authorities to overlook his publicationw of opposition newsbooks and w w endorse his release from prison, and hem was making the case for his own trade. o .c Nedham’s political position here, however,te is far less clear. Nigel Smith finds the a g h pamphlet troublingly noncommittal sand contradictory, an effect exacerbated when .a w w 40 reading it in the light of its opportunisticw mining of the volume on the arcana.

m However, some of the material othat Nedham used in Certain Considerations did .c te a point forward in intriguing waysg to the later concerns of his more republican h s .a newsbook editorials: not in thew simple use of certain classical sources, on which far w w too much weight has been placed as a marker of ‘classical republican’ sympathies, m o but in Nedham’s hints about.c the complicated play of forms, names and reality. te a g h Nedham was awares that he was counselling a regime which claimed to have .a w founded a ‘free state’.w Condemning the ‘flagitia’ characteristic of monarchy was w

m straightforward: theo Commonwealth authorities should surely want to distance .c te themselves from asuch practices. But Nedham did not generally choose his positive g h s recommendations.a from those suited to popular or even aristocratic governments. w w Rather than wadvising the Council of State on how to implement and defend

m o popular government,.c he explained how it could disguise the regime as a popular te a g government.h Allowing free speech, and accepting that ‘rumusculi & pasquilli’ (as s .a w w w 38 m Nedham, Certain Considerations, pp. 12–14; Clapmar, De Arcanis, pp. 267–9; The o .c Oxindente and Peyton Letters, pp. 160–61. a g h 39 s Besold, De Arcanis, pp. 18–22. .a w 40 w w Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 32–4. © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 59 © Copyrighted Material

Clapmar calls them) could not be suppressed, were ways in which rulers couldm o .c te persuade a people that they were living in a more popular state than they reallya g h s were. The examples with which Clapmar illustrated this section of his booka were . w 41 w largely taken from Rome after the fall of the republic. Nedham slyly appliedw them

m to exactly the opposite constitutional situation: the replacement of a monarchyo by .c te a a supposedly ‘free state’. He covered his back, saying ‘If Emperors theng allowed h s .a so great a liberty of writing and speaking, much more may it be expectedw in a free w 42 w State and Common-wealth.’ But within a few lines he slipped back away from m o .c the notion of real freedom, and wrote that ‘this licence is to bete reckoned inter a 43 g h simulacra libertatis’. In a phrase which he did not translate intos the vernacular, .a w Nedham thus slyly drew attention to the provocative suggestionw that the new w

m regime had no desire to bring about true liberty. Nedham odid not declare that he .c te was prescribing the deliberate simulation of democratic a government, and he did g h s not disclose his source. But an alert reader, particularly one.a with the minimal Latin w w w required to pick up the hint about simulated liberty, would surely notice that it was m o odd to advise a state which had just thrown off monarchy.c by recommending the te a 44 g wiles of Augustus, Tiberius and Lorenzo de’ Medici.h s .a None of this shows, of course, that Nedham atw this stage wanted a truly popular w w government rather than a simulation; or on them contrary that he positively wanted o .c what on the face of it he recommended: a stablete new regime which did just enough a g h to seem like a free state. His slowness to abandons the royalist cause and make his .a w peace with the new regime may suggest wthat he merely noted a certain hypocrisy w

m in a government whose crackdown ono opposition in print was at odds with its .c te a profession to be a free state. Nedhamg was adding his own gloss to Clapmar’s and h s Besold’s material when he pointed.a out that ‘above all others’ the governors of a w w w free state ‘must bear with these things, and take heed of crossing the people in this m 45 o licentious humor’. Why was the.c new free state so frightened of its own people? te a g As he established himselfh as an indispensable servant of the new regime, and s .a w as that regime established itselfw more securely in power, Nedham offered a far less w ambiguous commentary onm the shadow and substance of liberty, and the appearance o .c te and reality of constitutionala forms. His vocabulary and some of his material show g h s that in his republican editorials.a for Mercurius Politicus Nedham was still drawing w w on the mysteries andw simulacra of rule derived from Clapmar and Besold, although

m 46 the direct influenceo of Machiavelli also became more prominent. In a series of .c te a g h s .a 41 w Clapmar,w De Arcanis, pp. 309–12, naturally drawing heavily on Tacitus. w 42 Nedham,m Certain Considerations, p. 9. o 43 .c te ‘[A]monga the simulacra of liberty’. Nedham, Certain Considerations, p. 10. g h 44 s Ibid.,.a pp. 8–9. w 45 w wIbid., p. 8; cf. Clapmar, De Arcanis, p. 312; Besold, De Arcanis, pp. 42–3.

m 46 o .c Nedham’s use of Clapmar’s terminology: ‘flagitious Enormities’, Mercurius te a Politicusg 100 (29 April–6 May 1652), p. 1572; ‘inter flagitia Dominationis … one of the h s peculiar.a enormities, that attends the Lordly interest of Domination’, Mercurius Politicus 96 w w w(1–8 April 1652), p. 1506. © Copyrighted Material 60 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material editorials beginning in the autumn of 1651, he set out to show that liberty would m o be best preserved by the people electing their own successive assemblies. When.c te a g h he came to refute objections, one urgent task was to answer the objections that .a w ‘Arcana Imperii, secrets of State’ could never be effectively handled by thew mass w of new members elected to each new successive assembly. Rather than mrejecting o .c te the need for the arcana, he agreed that they were ‘of a nature remote froma ordinary g h s Apprehensions’, but argued that they could safely be entrusted .a to a council w 47 w answerable to the sovereign legislative assembly. Alongside this wdefence of the

m o necessity of arcana, remade as executive power and integrated into.c his argument te a for the separation of powers, Nedham used the analytical toolsg offered by the h s .a mystery of state tradition to understand the mistakes of previousw regimes and the w w ways in which anti-popular interests would try to practise upon the people. Indeed, m o .c he argued that these arcana had to be divulged in order forte the people to defend a g h their liberty: ‘the mysteries of domination have been stills kept under Lock and .a w Key’. In a rare allusion to his reading of these texts, he wclaimed to have ‘made brief w

m Collections out of the monuments of this kind of learning’o which he would now .c 48 te expound. He duly proceeded over a series of editorialsa to analyse ‘those Rules, g h s which have been practised in time past by divers.a Nations, for the keeping of their w w w Freedom when they once had gotten it’, alongside the errors which other nations m o had made in not sufficiently warding off threats.c to liberty from others’ practice te a 49 g of such arcana. Unsurprisingly, much of hthis material came from Clapmar, and s .a while Nedham still drew from various sectionsw of the work, he recommended not w w the ways in which other regimes could simulatem democracy, but the ways in which o .c democratic and aristocratic regimes couldte preserve themselves against the threat a g 50 h of monarchy. s .a w w In his attempt to avert threatsw to the republic, Nedham returned constantly

m to the danger that liberty mighto become ‘a meer name and shadow’ – language .c te a which comes directly from Clapmar’sg discussion of the nature of simulacra – or h s .a that absolute monarchy mightw lose ‘its own Name’ in the ‘shifting of Forms’ while w w 51 ‘the Thing in it self’ persisted in disguise. Here Nedham’s reading of Clapmar m o appears to be fused with.c the notions of Machiavelli and Tacitus, which fed into te a g h the reason of state traditions which Clapmar drew on, and with Livy’s analysis of .a w early Roman history,w upon which Machiavelli had offered his famous commentary w

m o .c te a g h s 47 .a Mercuriusw Politicus 94 (18–25 March 1652), p. 1474. w 48 w

Mercuriusm Politicus 101 (6–13 May 1652), pp. 1585–6. o 49 .c Mercuriuste Politicus 102 (13–20 May 1652), p. 1593. a g 50 h Mercuriuss Politicus 101, pp. 1586, 1588–9; 102, p. 1594; cf. Clapmar, De Arcanis, .a w pp. 82–3w (aristocratic arcana), 88–90 (democratic arcana). w 51 m o Mercurius Politicus 110 (8–15 July 1652), p. 1725; cf. Clapmar, De Arcanis, pp. .c te 284–5;a Mercurius Politicus 100 (29 April–6 May 1652), p. 1570. Joad Raymond, ‘The g h Kings Is a Thing’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds), Milton and the Terms of .a w w Libertyw (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 69–94. © Copyrighted Material Marchamont Nedham and Mystery of State 61 © Copyrighted Material

52 in the Discorsi. His view of a political world full of disguises was not purely them o .c te creation of the German mystery of state tradition. How to operate in that worlda g h s was the key question, to which Machiavelli and subsequent writers had offereda . w w slightly differing answers. Nedham had a double strategy, of exposing thew arcana

m of monarchy and domination while exploiting the arcana of successful resistanceo .c te a against the return of monarchy. But how far did the German tradition ofg the arcana h s .a shape Nedham’s view of political morality, and how far could the requirementsw of w w the state – or of a free state – justify the exploitation of the tricks of the mystery of m o .c state tradition, or its Italian cousin, reason of state? te a g h For all their discussion of apparently amoral strategiess for deceiving .a w and manipulating the ruled, the reason of state and mysteryw of state traditions w

m set themselves in conscious, and sometimes over-protesting,o opposition to .c te Machiavelli. According to Donaldson, the reason of statea authors were always g h 53 s concerned to justify the exercise of reason of state; and.a that meant that categories w w w of morality and divine law could not be sidestepped completely in the name of m o preserving the state or the ruler’s own power. Reason.c of state or the arcana imperii te a g were deviations from human laws and from the ordinaryh prescriptions of morality, s .a but they were deviations in fulfilment of higherw laws. Besold characteristically w w upheld Clapmar’s limits to the arcana – religio,m fides, pudor – against Machiavelli’s o 54 .c willingness to dispense with them. Clapmarte accepted Frachetta’s original a g h distinction between good and bad reason ofs state, adopting Ammirato’s Tacitean .a w term of ‘flagitia’ for the ‘cattiva ragion diw stato’, and devoted a book of his treatise w

55 m to these illegitimate arcana. While othero scholars have emphasized the political .c te a morality already there in the Italian reasong of state writings, Richard Tuck has seen h s this reinforced in Clapmar and Besold.a through a distinctive recombination of the w w w 56 Tacitean tradition with a more conservatively Aristotelian viewpoint. Kenneth m o Schellhase is alone in seeing Clapmar.c as an unapologetic user of Machiavellian te a g 57 principle via his endorsementh of Tacitus. s .a w Nedham’s dependence won these writings points towards a less aggressive w disregard for political moralitym than we might expect from his apparently pre- o .c te existing engagement witha Machiavelli. Yet Nedham shared his contemporaries’ g h s caution about Machiavelli,.a rejecting his counsel on the need to be dishonest in a w w perfidious world as w‘a sad inference, and fit onely for the practice ofItaly where he

m wrot [sic] it’. He drewo a distinction between Machiavelli’s ‘many noble Principles’ .c te a g h s .a 52 w Niccolòw Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella w and Peter Bondanellam (Oxford, 1997), pp. 79-80, book I, ch. 25. o 53 .c te Donaldson,a Machiavelli and Mystery of State, pp. 111–12. g 54 h Besold,s De Arcanis, p. 10; Clapmar, De Arcanis, p. 187. .a w 55 w w‘Bad reason of state’; Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State, pp. 112–13,

m 118–21.o .c 56te a g Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 124–7. h s 57 .a Kenneth Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago and w w wLondon, 1976), pp. 154–5. © Copyrighted Material 62 European Contexts for English Republicanism © Copyrighted Material of popular liberty and the ‘pernitious sprinklings’ of such cynical policy to be found m 58 o in his work, particularly ‘in that unworthy Book of his entitled The Prince’. Paul.c te a g h Rahe expresses surprise that Nedham, who had ‘long championed raison d’état’,s .a w should ‘shy away’ from recommending Machiavelli’s political techniques alongsidew w his republican principles. Smith, too, sees Nedham’s repudiation of Machiavellim o .c te in Certain Considerations as disingenuous in a thoroughly Machiavelliana text. g h s Yet the sentiments which Rahe quotes from Nedham’s Excellency of.a a Free State w w (already expressed in Mercurius Politicus) are precisely those ofw the reason of

m o state/mystery of state tradition, rejecting ‘that reason of state’ which.c arises from te a the statesman’s personal ambition, will and lust, while acceptingg some elements h s 59 .a of the reason of state tradition. Theorists of reason or arcanaw of state insisted w w that – although the ruler’s survival was a legitimate aim, alongside the survival of m o .c the form of government – the ultimate end for which (legitimate)te reason of state a g h was practised was the good of the state and not the ruler’ss private good. Nedham’s .a w concern for effective political technique, not tied in exceptionalw times to ordinary w

m courses (as he argues at the end of the Case of the Commonwealtho ) might still be .c te 60 tempered by an ethical sense of what the ultimate endsa of these actions were. g h s In one sense, Nedham’s use of the German authors.a on mystery of state places w w w him exactly where we knew he was already – in the reason of state tradition, as a m o sharp calculator of political rationality attracted.c to new theories of the operation te a g of interest in politics. But it also casts a newh light on these allegiances, showing – s .a both in his alignment with the mystery of statew material and his divergences from it w w

– something of his political assumptionsm as well as his constitutional preferences. o .c Nedham was deeply influenced by thiste tradition, but he exploited its conventions a g h and assumptions rather than being bounds by them. He was, of course, personally .a w w involved in the exercise of these wpolitical arcana as a paid propagandist. He had

m read the textbook, but he proceededo both to copy from it and to play with it. .c te a g h s .a w w w

m o .c te a g h s .a w w w

m o .c te a g h s .a w w w

m o .c te a g h s .a 58 w wMercurius Politicus 112 (22–29 July 1652), pp. 1753–4; 113 (29 July–5 August w

1652),m p. 1769. o 59.c te Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, p. 243; Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 34; a g h Mercuriuss Politicus 108 (24 June–1 July 1652), p. 1690; Besold, De Arcanis, pp. 9–13. .a w 60 w w Nedham, Case of the Commonwealth, ed. Knachel, pp. 126–7. © Copyrighted Material