In Our Time - Republicanism

Episode Date: February 3, 2000

Melvyn Bragg examines how English republicanism has developed from Cromwell to the present day. Before the French Revolution, before the American Declaration of Independence, before Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Marx there was the English Revolution. In 1649 England executed its King - Charles Stuart - and declared itself a republic.But was republicanism a reaction to the fact of the dead absolutist king, a pragmatic response to an absence of ruler as many historians have thought, or was there republicanism already embedded as a sentiment deep within the culture of England? And where is it now? From the marching out onto the scaffold in Whitehall of Charles I and the subsequent loss of his head, while England gained a republic - what has republicanism meant for Britain? With Dr Sarah Barber, lecturer in the Department of History, Lancaster University and author of Regicide and Republicanism: Politics and Ethics in the English Revolution 1646-1659; Andrew Roberts, historian, journalist, conservative thinker and author of Salisbury: Victorian Titan.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, before the French Revolution, before the American Declaration of Independence, before Russo, Thomas Payne and Marx,

there was the English Revolution. In 1649, England executed its king, Charles Stewart, and declared itself a republic. But was republicanism a reaction to the fact of the dead absolutist king, a pragmatic response to an absence of ruler as many historians have thought, or was there a republicanism already embedded as a sentiment deep within the culture of England? And where is it now? One of my guests, Dr. Sarah Barber, has challenged some of the received opinions on English republicanism

by arguing for an established English republican tradition in her book Regicide and republicanism. Also with me to discuss the place of republicanism in the history of England is the historian Andrew Roberts, whose latest book is a massive and successful biography of Lord Salisbury. So you're talking about the 17th century, the mid-17th century, those two civil wars kicking off on those four years of a republic, 16409 to 53, followed by the Cromwellian protectorate, and then back came Charles II.

Sarah Barber, why do you think that Republican ideas were embedded, were deep in the British people's thinking, when they seem to have erupted mid-late 40s? 1640s? They erupted in the mid-1640s because of the context of the English Civil War, and I think it's impossible not to suggest that both regicide and republicanism emerge from a context in which suddenly there's the freeing up of the licensing, and people have got an opportunity to speak freely about things.

But the whole point about Republican ideas is that they are believed to be indigenous. So the circumstances of the civil war produce a situation in which people, people are left trying to find a solution to their political problems which makes them self-reliant. Between 1642 and 1646, while the war is actually on, they're living in what is effectively a republican system. They have already isolated the king from the process. And when it comes around to trying to work out a new constitution

that will guarantee English liberties, it proves impossible to work the king back into that process. I can see it in the 1640s. I can see it in 1642 or onwards, I can see the propaganda or good word spread, whichever way I look at, in the army and so on. Much before then, though, if you're saying embedded, you mean sort of the early 17th century, back in the 16th century, where do we see, I don't see it at all, though?

Well, there's a history of people being educated and knowing about a Republican tradition. It wasn't that it was a completely alien notion. You're talking about a republican classical tradition, aren't you, on the whole, saying the republican tradition in ancient Greece and Rome, that sort of tradition, not as applied to English then, let's say English, politics. But then you may as well say that every political idea can be traced back to the classical origins of it, because that's its first statement.

Well, I'm hurrying you, and I'll come back to you. But I would like to ask that question again about, if we're talking about tradition of republicanism to the 1640s, where's the evidence for it? What's your view on this, Andrew Roberts? Well, my view is that the very problems that the Commonwealth had in finding a republican ideology, which didn't go back to the classics, shows how it really wasn't embedded in natural background of English thought. They looked to Venice, didn't they? They had a major problem with what the seal was going to look like, what the oath was going to be and the rest.

Had there been a great long tradition going back to, say, the reign of Elizabeth I think they'd have probably had these ideas worked out for themselves, as it was. They were really playing it by ear. So you think that it was something that came because of those particular, specific and as it turned out, in unique circumstances? Yes, it came because of the King's 11-year rule,

personal rule, which was considered to fly in the face of the ancient. ancient liberties of the British people and which two years later started a civil war, which the king lost, and without a king, and then of course they beheaded him. And from the moment they beheaded him, they were thrashing around to look to see what they

could put in his place, and they came up with a pretty rickety organisation which only lasted four years. So after this absolutism, they sort of stumbled into republicanism, as you see it. Precisely. Regicide led to ad hoc republicanism. I'd have to come back on that and say

that they didn't start looking to Venice as a possible ideological model for republicanism until well into the 1650s when the Republic is already established. They didn't have trouble in designing a great seal. They had a perfectly clear idea that what constituted the English Republic was a geographical entity of the British English people, so they had a map on one side, and the collective responsibility of the people's representatives sitting in Parliament on the other side.

I think it's a huge leap of faith to think that a group of politicians who have been spending seven years fighting a civil war and a further four years looking for political solutions that would make sure that that war never happened again and would then go to the expense and the effort of judicially executing a person who was previously considered to be the Lord's Anointed would suddenly wake up on the 31st of January 6th, 1649 and go, what have we done? What do we do now? Of course they must have had some idea of what to replace the monarchy with.

From chapter six of your book about the problems with the ideology of the Commonwealth, it seemed to me that they, both with the oath and seal, came up with this idea pretty much on the hoof. Henry Martin jotted it down. It was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, an ad hoc problem that they faced, because many of them didn't want to kill the king in the first place. It was one of the most astonishing things, how tiny the group was that only 59 people signed the death, weren't, only nine people formed a quorum of the Council of State.

It was a minute minority after the purge. Can I come back to a question I rushed you with at the top of the programme, but I'd just like to try to clear it up, and that is, can you point to real steady evidence in let's say the hundred years before 1642, let's say the 50 years before 1642, of a solid, growing, identifiable, and to certainly have got to be influential in some ways,

republicanism in the aisles, as Norman Davis calls them. Can you give us examples that we have, even before then, we have independent people, what tylers and all that sort of thing, with the steady development of a sense of republicanism. What's the evidence for that? It's difficult to pinpoint names to that because whilst republicanism is usually

an anti-establishment tradition most people are writing anonymously there are things like Sir Thomas Smith in the Elizabethan period who's writing about the nature of commonwealths there's the notion of the Elizabethan Commonwealth which admittedly has a monarchical element to it but nevertheless is talking about the res publica

the government of the people There's Henry Martin's statement in 1641. One man is not wise enough to rule us all. There are statements in... But we're in the 1640s already. I mean, we're after 11 years of absolutism and so on there. I would just suggest you, you're the historian, I'm not, that there isn't a lot of evidence there to suggest

there's a real line, a real swell, a real development of an idea that then its time has come onto the scene it bursts. Is it maybe about to look at it as the circumstances themselves provoked what turned out to be a very short-lived republicanism. What's your view on this, Andrew? Well, if it was tremendously popular, then first of all, Cromwell wouldn't have been able to have trodden on it in 1653 with ease that he did. And also, the kingdom would have been invited back in 1660.

And if this was a well spring that came from the innate feeling of the British people and had done for decades, then why was it snuffed out so easy? That's a question that has to be addressed, Sarah Barber. Sorry. It's not, I wouldn't consider it to be a groundswell of huge popular opinion. As you rightly point out, there are a small number of Republican activists who are part of a political elite in the 1640s who have an opportunity to express those views and to work through a practical example of republicanism in the 1640s. Their problem in making it a popular movement is precisely that we have had a thousand years of monarchical rule. And all of the statements that they make are their frustrations, their disappointments, that people are enthrall to monarchy, that the whole idea of this gilded image that has both power and the charm to bedazzle the people, to bewitch the people, is one of the things that makes it so difficult to establish it.

Well, let's put that to one side now and talk about the 1640s for a few minutes, where we have most prominently, the Republican Ali is the levelers, where they confronted Parliament with their large petition in 1647, and the levellers still exist very much so in the minds of historians and thinkers and what they stood for, what they tried to achieve. Can you just give us your view, under Roberts, on the levelers and what force you think they have in this? Well, I think they were very important ideologically,

because of course they brought in the concept of equality and not just regicide and republicanism, but they had an agenda which went far beyond that to redistribution of wealth. And this was one of the reasons why they also were very easily stamped out. It was at Burford in May, 1649 was it, they really were... purged themselves by Cromwell.

And had they also, in the same way, had gone deep into the sort of psyche of the British people, they would have lasted longer as well. What's your view of that, Dr? It wasn't so much the leveller movement that was quashed at the mutiny at Burford. It was expressions of a particular political point of view within the army. The levellers are not a homogenous movement,

and they weren't particularly calling for a redistribution of wealth. They weren't particularly calling for equality. That was a label that was attached to them by their opponents. They were accused of levelling all men's estates. If you were to try and sum up what the disparate groups of levellers were standing for, it was the rights of English people to hold the property that they had. It was the right of English people to express their rights through the law. and it was the right of English people to have the opportunity to voluntarily place themselves under a government of their choosing,

and that's where the Republican element comes in. Do you think the ideas of the leveller has continued and for the next centuries, and there's a thread which becomes a rope and so on from the levelist to today? Do you think the ideas, they in the mid-1640, is fed in ideas which did grow? The levellers and other movements. There is a continuous thread. It's about establishing several. political motifs which keep reoccurring. They're established in the 1640s. I would argue that

they're probably pre-existent before the 1640s, but there's an opportunity in the 1640s to establish them. They're re-established in the mid-18th century into the 1790s. They're re-established at the end of the 19th century. The right of people to voluntarily place themselves under a government, the right of a direct representation between the people and the people's governors, direct accountability, representation, the idea of a circularity of government. Andrew Roberts, do you see this line coming from the levellers? I don't know that there's that much of a gap between the 1640s and the 1790s, but sorry, there's that much of a link.

There is a gap. But I think those ideas, certainly the first two ideas about representation and about the rights of property effectively are the rights to hold your estate. I mean, they're Tory ideas now. they're not considered to be dangerous, whereas the levellers were a revolutionary force. So I think that, in fact, they must have stood for more dangerous things than just the desire to hold your property on an equitable footing. How far, before we move away from this to later Republicans,

can I ask you two questions, really. How far did the person of Charles Stewart himself, his arrogance, conceit, ineptitude and absolutism, a figure in the civil war. It was just against this particular person who might have been charming and liked his dogs

and commissioned painting and so and so forth, but as a rule of obnoxious to what had happened in Britain for a long time. A, and B, how far was the revolt against him, part of a continuing, strange, feeling, not strange, but odd to track feeling from 1066 against the Norman yoke. There became the feeling that this was yet another foreign imposition. I think that Charles I was absolutely crucial to this.

I think without Charles I had a king who had half of Charles I first's son's sense of what was possible and what wasn't in politics, you wouldn't have had a civil war. and had you not had a civil war, you certainly wouldn't have had a regicide in republicanism. So this does all come, I think, down to the obstinacy and stupidity of this particular man. On the second of your questions, I think that it's important to bear in mind what's happening religiously,

the fanaticism of people, each side believing that they are doing God's will. I don't think that this is hypocrisy here. I do think they genuinely did believe that they were doing God's will. And of course you have the Scots and the Irish problems where they're both English people that are terrified of invasion from huge Irish forces. They're scared of Catholicism,

the wars of religion are going on in the continent at the time. there's a constant fear of invasion. And so as a result, you've got a very fetid political process, and this leads to paranoia. What about just briefly, Sarah, it is completely against the tradition of 20th century, is that a single person, with a possible exception of Fittler, is regarded as someone who can play a big part.

But it does seem to me that, as Andrews said, if it had been his son and not him, that he himself, Charles Stewart, polluted the waters to such an extent that this happened. And that sort of proof is that of that, is after a few years of republicanism, Cromwell came in as a quasi-monic, and after a few years of Cromwell,

and then his son, there was a redidre principal to work there, Charles II came back as a real monarch. That's precisely the point that demonstrates the difference between regicide and republicanism. at their trials, most of the people who were tried for their so-called crimes during the Civil War specifically made the point that they had no personal grudge against Charles Stewart

and it couldn't possibly to save their skins because they were going to hang anyway or they were going to be convicted anyway, but they all made this particular point that it wasn't about the person of Charles Stewart. You either have a civil war process in which eventually you come to the conclusion that the person who is responsible for the bloodshed is that particular king, in which case getting rid of that particular king, you can then replace him by a more worthy king, a more just king, or that the institution itself is such that any person placed in that amount of power is liable to abuse it.

Well, I've got a belt on that because there's one big thing I want to talk about next, which is the late 7090s and 1790s. We have American Declaration of Independence and the Rights of America late 1780s, the French Revolution and so on, A lot of, as it were, Republicans' revolutionaries in loosely in this country, and we can all welcome the revolutions, whether it's Burke or Wordsworth, and so we go on. And then we go the other way. We become the conservative force.

Our republicanism is stamped out sometimes brutally in the 1790s. But there was a real surge towards the republicanism. Can we just talk for a few minutes about that? Andrew Roberts, do you see the war with France? I'm collapsing everything. But listen, the war with France actually being a huge turning point in the way our political system developed in the last 200 years. Yes.

That war with France. Yes, absolutely crucial. There was a Republican movement that was gaining strength until you had the war with France. And with the war with France, and again, just like in the 1640s, the fear of invasion. In fact, in 1797, there were troops landed in the British Shards, a fish guard, wasn't it? Nothing major, but it was a fear. It was a scare. And of course, you had the Irish revolt in the following year, 1798. So there was another sense of fear of foreign influences,

Catholicism as well, there was the religious side of it. And together, instead of going down that route, you wind up with Burke's reflections on the revolution, which is a monarchist document par excellence, and the Pitt government under enormous pressure, financial pressure as well, turns to present itself as the bulwark of monarchism, which is astonishing in many ways, because although Charles James Fox and other people had played with, with French republicanism at the time,

they're suddenly left out to dry politically. They have to come over towards the monarchist movement. It's almost a classic example of nationalism ousting ideology, isn't it? Sarah? It's a different form of nationalism. The Republicans also continued with this strain of an indigenous national movement. Thomas Payne used all the same sort of Quaker motifs

came directly out of the 1640s, Quaker tradition. He talked about the monarchy in the same sort of way, and he rounded up by saying that this sort of institution came into England in 1066 with the Norman Yoke, and now is being exported abroad. Well, he played a part in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and in England he was hounded for treason. Yes, English republicanism is exported abroad in that sense. Well, you say hounded, but I mean, he was a supporter of the American War of Independence. which a lot of his contemporaries in England had welcomed, didn't they?

I mean, intellectually welcomed. Chatham in England. So I just want to get at this again, though, because it's one of the most intriguing parts of our history. We're surging in the late 18th century towards a republican, you could say, maybe not a surge, but an intellectual interest, at least as strong as in other countries we said it.

And then yet another war with France stops us in our tracks, and we become the great conservative bulwark with a small and a large sea, in Europe for the next century or so. I mean, what do you make of that? Just as interesting is the force of ideas against the force of a nation, real politic of a nation?

It's the force of ideas and the force of the implications of those ideas. The backlash in the 1790s into the early 1800s is fear in the same way that there is fear in 1660 about the possible consequences of the movement of ideas moving towards the extreme. You do have the terror, of course. That's the other thing. The French terror does terrify the British middle classes.

And rather like you have again in 1917, the Middle England doesn't like the idea of seeing kings executed and rich people dispossessed. And of course that's going to send you back into what you're most comfortable with, which in Britain was monarchical government. Yes, it's a collapse of the idea again, that it proves possible for conservative forces to show or seem to show

that the automatic consequence of a republican ideology is bloodshed, is war, is the execution of a monarch and so on. But what does it say to you about that phrase? There's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. You would think at the late 18th century the idea of republicanism was beginning to come, but it was checked by this fear you've mentioned necessity to defend. Was that taken advantage of by conservative forces? Yes, of course. I mean, Burke starts off with the terror.

The terror is the driving ideological argument that he makes. It's only afterwards that he goes on to try to produce the positive things about monarchy, which with a mad king and a tottering state, weren't very strong. I believe they're an awful lot stronger today, with constitutional monarchies. but at the time it was a weak argument that he was making beautifully, of course his prose helps, but he's helped enormously by what was going on in France.

I mean, the French were not interested in it really in promoting, they couldn't have been interesting in promoting republicanism across the channel, even though they made their declaration that they wanted a universal republics because of the way they behave to their own upper classes. Do you see what was established then, let's say, by the mid-90s about politics in this country vis-à-vis France and to a certain extent America, a straight line from then to now, what was established then is what we've lived under and by since then? Yes, I think the Napoleonic wars, the way British government was undertaken in the Napoleonic wars as a result of those wars is effectively what we have today. Do you agree with that? No, I don't. I think there's a development further of constitutional monarchy.

The idea remains that the monarchy is a constitutional element, which is powerless but also constantly changing. But that still gives the same opportunity for the argument that it remains an anachronism and a set of self-contradictions. But it's those self-contradictions that give it its strength. Let's get about republican for the last few minutes and take it on to an area which you're very, very familiar with, obviously, with this magnificent volume on Lord Salisbury.

Republicanism then, as such, peeps above the trenches at the time of Victoria when she retreats for those 10 years after Albert's death. And it seems to be that when the monarch, as it were, gets out of line, republicanism comes up, doesn't it? That's right. It's bubbling away on a low simmer all the time, but it's only when there's a problem with the king or queen. Queen in this case, that it comes up and starts to threaten the body politic.

And what happened with Queen Victoria is that she really effectively broke her contract with the British people because instead of being around and showing herself and opening Parliament and taking part in processions, she holds herself up in Windsor for 10 years after the death of Albert in December 1861. and by 1871 you're getting quite senior and substantial politicians like Sir Charles Dilk and Joseph Chamberlain actually embracing republicanism as a result of this. The victorious seclusion crisis is a perfect illustration of the way in which the person and the office can be distinguished in monarchy and provides an opportunity for Republicans to point out the anachronism. You get the idea of Victoria not seeing to be doing her queenly duties such as opening.

Parliament and there's the spectacle of the royal robes just lying on the Queen's crown at the opening of Parliament rather than the Queen herself whilst at the same time she's overstepping the bounds of monarchy that's expected of her by personally interfering in things like General Gordon in Khartoum and statements about Ireland. Do you think that finally that, but that went away and then in the 1790s when the monarchy Oh, goodness me. In the 1990, when the monarchy got in all sorts of personal troubles and dilemmas, there was one poll in the mid-90s which said that 40% of people admitted to Republican sentiments. But how strong do you think that was? First of your, Your Honor, Roberts.

Well, I'd be interested in also seeing what was on the front page that day. If it was something to do with the marriage between the Prince and Princes of Wales or some of the shenanigans that the younger royals were getting up to or issues over the Queen paying tax, I reckon that that would have been what the people who were polled would have been thinking about primarily. And when you don't have those sort of problems, which are all of them, very easily resolved one way or another, then republicanism drops away to where it is as a very minority fetish. Are you surprised finally, Sarah, that the republicanism hasn't driven through more lustily

and hasn't made more of a mark and that this 40% in the midnight is as sort of withered away quite quickly as Andrew Roberts said. Does that surprise you? No, it doesn't surprise me. When I started working on republicanism, I really was a lone voice and suddenly five years later people started to talk

as if it wasn't the last taboo political idea. But Republican sentiments are hard work to sustain. They require an enormous amount of work to think through the various Republican options and to take that step of working out a practical Republican solution. And when it comes down to it, the debate has not been sufficiently sophisticated to deal with the different options of republicanism.

And finally, people have retreated back to, oh, this is what we know and this is what we think works. Andrew Roberts, do you think it has much of a chance or a future in this country, republicanism? No, none at all, because it's not just what they know and think works, it's also what they love and believe in. Thank you very much, Andrew Roberts, and thank you very much, Sir Barber, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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