I

On 20 September 1697, William III concluded the Nine Years’ War with the Treaty of Ryswick. But, fearing a Bourbon succession in Spain, William doubted the durability of the peace. His proposal to maintain a substantial peacetime standing army occasioned a pamphlet debate between 1697 and 1699 while parliament reduced the number of troops and disbanded the Dutch Guards. The controversy was a paper war between whigs. Anti-army whigs branded their opponents ‘Apostates’ to the Revolution of 1688.Footnote ¹ But pro-army whigs believed the policy was consistent with the Revolution, since Article VI of the Bill of Rights mandated annual parliamentary consent for a peacetime standing army.Footnote ²

Two opposition pamphleteers, Walter Moyle, MP for Saltash, and John Trenchard, began proceedings in 1697. The Irish freethinker, John Toland, and the clergyman, Reverend Samuel Johnson, joined them in 1698. These men co-operated, using the same printers, frequenting the same coffeehouses, and referring to each other's works.Footnote ³ Separate from the group was the Scot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, an erstwhile cavalry officer of the Monmouth Rebellion (1685). The controversy occasioned Toland's possible publication of Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning government in 1698. That year, Toland published the memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, The life of John Milton, and Milton's Historical and political works. In 1700, he republished James Harrington's The commonwealth of Oceana (1656).Footnote ⁴ The policy's defenders included the lord chancellor, John, Lord Somers, and Daniel Defoe. One anonymous pamphleteer produced A letter to A, B, C, D, E, F, &c., concerning their argument about a standing army (1698), which challenged the claims of the pro-militia pamphleteers about the ancient origins of English government.

Pamphleteers on each side discoursed to influence public opinion and votes in parliament. The whig MP, Sir Richard Cocks, paraphrased Ludlow's memoirs and Moyle and Trenchard's Argument in opposing the policy in the Commons.Footnote ⁵ Since he assumed that a peacetime standing army was an emblem of tyranny and that the county militia would ‘never act against the interest of the country or be out of conceipt with a parliament’, Cocks's diary suggests that parliamentary debates were driven by practical concerns like the relative strength of the European powers and the financial burden.Footnote ⁶ Accounts of parliamentary debates by William Cowper and Salwey Winnington leave a similar impression.Footnote ⁷

The controversy was an episode in the partisan political culture of later Stuart England. The debate unfolded in the social world of the printing press, coffeehouse, and club. Robert Molesworth and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, sat in the Commons during the controversy. In 1709, Shaftesbury wrote to Molesworth of those public men who had ‘a much greater part in the influence of affairs, than Ministers are apt to think; especially those Ministers, who affect a high contempt of Coffee-Houses and Pamphlets’.Footnote ⁸ As Mark Knights has shown, partisan politics were driven by frequent general elections, a huge and growing electorate, the lapse of pre-publication censorship, and the financial revolution occasioned by the Nine Years’ War. Pamphleteers appealed to the public, representing and misrepresenting their opponents’ arguments.Footnote ⁹ As the titles of their pamphlets suggest, the standing army controversialists engaged in the culture of confutation, vindication, and rejoinder. An anonymous pro-army pamphleteer accused Moyle and Trenchard of Jacobite sedition, suggesting that they had misrepresented the seriousness of the French threat.Footnote ¹⁰ Moyle, concerned that ‘Men should dare publickly to avow their Correspondence with our Enemies, to own themselves acquainted with their Designs against us’, replied in kind.Footnote ¹¹

Within intellectual history, scholars characterize the debate by contrasting the classical republicanism of the opposition with the modernism of the proposition.Footnote ¹² For J. G. A. Pocock, the controversy was a civic humanist moment in which ancient ideals collided with commercial inclinations.Footnote ¹³ The debate unfolded as near-constant war necessitated a sophisticated system of public credit. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, the proximity of financial investors with government, and the creation of the National Debt enabled William III to prosecute a costly land strategy.Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas Somers and Defoe claimed that the militia was anachronistic in modern warfare, pro-militia writers connected the military question with patronage, place, corruption, and the alliance between the court and fiscal-military state.

Pocock identified the controversy as a moment when Augustan civic humanists reassessed the relationship between land, trade, and credit in political economy. The development of mobile property threatened civic humanist concern with the foundation of political stability and civic virtue in land, connecting the controversy with the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s, the South Sea Crisis during the 1720s, and the ‘country’ campaign of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, against Sir Robert Walpole during the 1730s. Central to modernizing civic humanist language in a commercial context were Defoe and Fletcher.Footnote ¹⁵ Fletcher helped found a Scottish ‘civic tradition’, Machiavellian, public, and participative in tone, that shaped the militia debate in the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁶

However, in England, classical republicanism and its civic humanist iterations were not the only intellectual resources available to the standing army controversialists. The debate occasioned a recitation of ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism. Pro-militia writers drew on England's Saxon and Gothic past prior to using classical precedents. Pro-army pamphleteers were forced either to engage with ancient constitutionalism or to refute its relevance. Ancient constitutionalism had its roots among Tudor political and legal theorists, led by Christopher St Germain and, later, Sir Edward Coke, in providing a history of English laws and liberties that justified the royal supremacy in an English imperium. It rested on the claim that the common law was legitimate because it was immemorial. Making use of Tactius's Germania (c. 98), ancient constitutionalists argued that the Saxons had imported England's laws and liberties and, in most instances, that the Saxon constitution had continued despite the Norman conquest. Not only did the legitimacy of the common law rest on its customary nature, scholars from the sixteenth century onwards argued that the common law had a basis in reason. Its long existence had produced an evolution, enabling the purge of its imperfections and the emergence of its natural rationality.Footnote ¹⁷

During the early seventeenth century, English parliamentarians and common lawyers deployed ancient constitutionalism against the alleged abuses of Jacobean and Caroline monarchy.Footnote ¹⁸ The language was pervasive during the Interregnum and Restoration and it had a long career in eighteenth-century England and America.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Convention Parliament and beyond, mainstream defenders of the Revolution of 1688 presented it as a restoration of the ancient constitution following the innovations of James II.Footnote ²⁰

Similarly, the English opposition argued that the standing army proposals contravened the laws of ‘the old English Constitution’ and threatened a reversion to Stuart tyranny.Footnote ²¹ They believed that the genius of the ancient constitution lay in its capacity to prevent monarchical tyranny. But, if the court used bribes, place, and patronage to secure majorities in the Commons, its troops might enforce unpopular land taxes. Moyle and Trenchard complained that ‘we have enough to do to guard our selves against the Power of the Court, without having an Army thrown into the Scale against us’.Footnote ²² These pro-militia writers also relied on ideas of Saxon and Gothic liberty to advance republican institutions and citizenship. Trenchard claimed that the constitution had never enabled a monarch ‘to have a Mercenary Army to frighten’ nor ‘Place or Revenues great enough to bribe’. Thus, ‘the Government of England continu'd from the time that the Romans quitted the Island, to the time of Charles the First’.Footnote ²³

Although Pocock published the first extensive analysis of the common law mind and ancient constitution in 1957, he referred briefly to the English standing army controversialists in a retrospect appended to its reissue thirty years later.Footnote ²⁴ In The Machiavellian moment, Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland mattered as revisers of Harrington's claims in Oceana that the ancient constitution had expired during the 1640s and that it had always been unstable and unfree. Neo-Harringtonians adapted the Polybian idea of the mixed and balanced constitution of the one, few, and many from the ancient world into England's Gothic past.Footnote ²⁵ But the marriage between Harringtonian republicanism and ancient constitutionalism was not an easy one and scholars have tended to emphasize the differences between these two modes of political thought. Possibly, the contrast lies in Pocock's characterization of common law ancient constitutionalism as prescriptive and constant and his civic humanists’ insistence on the possibility of sudden change and innovation in politics.Footnote ²⁶

The ancient constitutionalism of the pro-militia pamphleteers ran deeper than adapting Harrington's republicanism to the realities of the restored Stuart crown. Not only did Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland argue from ancient constitutional principles, they studied the Saxon and Gothic ages on humanist terms because they believed that these ages had provided them with republican virtues and institutions. The classical republics gave them political exemplars, but the laws and liberties of the Saxon republic had carried into the seventeenth century. Further, the example of Johnson demonstrates the differences between neo-Harringtonianism and ancient constitutionalism. Johnson's Saxon republicanism was a product of his ancient constitutionalism and not his reading of Harrington, whose authority Johnson rejected along with the exemplars of the ancient republics. Institutionalized by the Saxons, Johnson wrote, English laws ‘passed thro all the British, Roman, Danish, Saxon, and Norman times with little or no alteration in the main’.Footnote ²⁷ Participative and martial, the Saxons had bequeathed the values and structures necessary to resist tyrants at home and abroad. Thus, Toland drew on the ‘Germans in Courage or Conduct’.Footnote ²⁸ But Toland's Saxon republicanism contrasts with that of Johnson. Toland approached the militia issue from Harringtonian assumptions, using Saxon examples as much as those from Greece and Rome.

Before pursuing these claims, three qualifications are necessary. First, that pro-militia writers were Saxon republicans and ancient constitutionalists does not mean that their arguments were narrow. Blair Worden has shown that their intellectual resources were as eclectic as other seventeenth-century English republicans.Footnote ²⁹ Second, reliance on ancient constitutionalism, at one level, was a matter of convenience and, as Worden has also suggested, Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland ‘genuflected’ to their audience.Footnote ³⁰ When they made suggestions to reform the county militia to meet the changing demands of war, they did not use ancient constitutional authorities or Saxon republican precedents because these did not lend themselves to the practical realities of modern warfare. Third, the controversy was not an occasion for a full-scale recitation of ancient constitutionalism. Though they drew on a legalistic tradition, the pamphlets of Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland contain few references to specific laws and ancient constitutional authorities. They rehearsed ancient constitutionalism insofar as it related to the military issue. They were less concerned by jurisprudence than the relationship between the armed subject and king. The controversy allowed English anti-army pamphleteers to develop the Saxon republican potential of ancient constitutionalism.

II

For pro-militia pamphleteers, the significance of William III's proposals lay in its European context. They believed that England had been unique in preserving its ancient constitution against the rise of monarchical absolutism.Footnote ³¹ French universal monarchy had been a perennial whig fear since the discovery of Charles II's secret negotiations with Louis XIV and would continue long into the eighteenth century.Footnote ³² Moyle and Trenchard believed that ‘most Nations in Europe’ had been ‘over-run with Oppression and Slavery’. But, in England, the ‘Constitution is a limited mix'd Monarchy’. It was ‘an Empire of Laws, and not of Men’. The genius of England's constitution meant that Englishmen ‘enjoy a Liberty scarce known to the antient Greeks and Romans’.Footnote ³³ Toland enthused about the inheritance of ‘our own Original Constitution in the Saxon time’.Footnote ³⁴

It might seem surprising that three followers of Harrington were so exuberant in defending ‘the Heart's-blood of our Constitution’.Footnote ³⁵ In Oceana, Harrington had argued that the Roman republic provided the best exemplar for any commonwealth. He claimed that ‘ancient prudence’ had created ‘the empire of laws and not of men’. The public good was the centrepiece of the Roman republic, whose laws guaranteed its longevity. The Saxons had been one of the forces that imported ‘modern prudence’ to Europe. Modern prudence had begun ‘with the arms of Caesar’ and grew by ‘those inundations of Huns, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Saxons which, breaking the Roman Empire, deformed the whole face of the world’. The ancient constitution institutionalized modern prudence, ‘an art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a city or nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest’. Although ancient constitutionalists believed that their system had maintained ‘the sovereignty of a prince and the liberty of the people’, it had been ‘no other than a wrestling match’ in which powerful barons had fought private battles and determined succession disputes.Footnote ³⁶ It had been unstable and unfree.

Harrington also argued that the first two Tudor monarchs had set modern prudence on the path to decline. They had created a ‘dissolution of this government’. Henry VII broke the feudal baronage by handing many of its lands to the commons. Henry VIII destroyed the medieval church by selling its properties. The result was an imbalance between the structures of property and power. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the commons grew aware of their wealth and made louder claims against the prince and nobility that ended in the civil wars. The commons became ‘apt to see their own strength, should be put to feel it, when a prince, as stiff in disputes as the nerve of the monarchy was grown slack, received that unhappy encouragement from his clergy which became his utter ruin’.Footnote ³⁷

Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland were neo-Harringtonians.Footnote ³⁸ Whereas Harrington had equated the Polybian mixed and balanced constitution of the one, few, and many with the Roman republic, neo-Harringtonians identified it with the Gothic system. Stable and free, the ancient constitution had been regulated by the king, lords, and commons. Harrington's Roman citizen became the whig's Saxon freeholder. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Molesworth, author of An account of Denmark (1694), contrasted the ‘Nominal’ with the ‘real’ whig in his translation of the Huguenot François Hotman's work of French ancient constitutionalism Francogallia (1573). The ‘real Whig’ supported ‘the Strictness of the true old Gothick Constitution under the Three Estates of King (or Queen), Lords and Commons’. The real whig believed that, in parliament, these three estates were ‘accountable to the whole body of the people’ who comprised a ‘whiggish army’ of ‘all the freeholders of England’.Footnote ³⁹

Whereas Harrington's medieval barons had been tyrannical, neo-Harringtonians believed the second estate had prevented the crown from becoming arbitrary and the people from descending into licentiousness. Moyle and Trenchard claimed that it was ‘the Wisdom of our Ancestors’ to institute a ‘middle State’, whose object was to ‘skreen the People against the Insults of the Prince, and the prince against the Popularity of the Commons’. The meeting of these ‘three States in Parliament’ was what ‘we call our Government’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Further, seventeenth-century county militias were led by lord lieutenants from the nobility and deputy-lieutenants from leading gentry. Moyle and Trenchard argued that ‘there can be no danger from an Army where the Nobility and chief Gentry of England are the Commanders, and the Body of it made up of the Freeholders’.Footnote ⁴¹ Moyle appealed to ‘all the Antient Nobility and Gentry, who know any thing of the Affairs of their own Families’.Footnote ⁴² The second estate was central to Toland's reformed militia, commanding regular musters and camps.Footnote ⁴³

III

The arguments of the pro-militia writers ran deeper than adapting Harringtonianism to the restored monarchy or genuflection to a Gothicist audience. By the pen of Johnson, neo-Harringtonianism collapsed under the weight of the ancient constitution. Unlike his neo-Harringtonian peers, Johnson believed that ‘English Government…falls under no Rules nor Terms of Art.’ It was ‘not borrowed from Aristotle or Plato, or any of those Platform Men’. In opposition to Charles I's attempt, in his Answer to the nineteen propositions (1642), to syncretize Polybian mixed constitutionalism with ancient constitutionalism, Johnson claimed that English government had not been ‘moulded by our Ancestors out of a mixture of Absolute Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Johnson put his arguments expressly in opposition to those of Harrington and Henry Neville, who had observed the effects of Jacobean and Caroline ‘Scotch King-Craft’, ‘which is worse than no Government at all’, and ‘imputed those Corruptions and Disorders to the English Frame of Government’. They lapsed ‘into the waking Dreams of Oceana's, [sic] and I know not what, for want of understanding the True of English Government’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Johnson took the truth of the English constitution to lie in the Saxon contract between rulers and ruled with rights of resistance.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘The English Government is upon Covenant and Contract’ and ‘it is needless in Leagues and Covenants to say what shall be done in case the Articles are broken’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Invoking the authority of Andrew Horn's fourteenth-century The mirror of justices, which had been translated into English in 1646 and become a standard text of radical ancient constitutionalism, Johnson claimed that the Saxons had chosen a king ‘from among themselves’. Since the king lacked peers, parliament could, as in 1688, pass judgement on him.Footnote ⁴⁸ Further, Johnson invoked the name of Sir John Selden to show that ‘for a King of England to have standing Forces, or Men at Arms, is contrary to the English Constitution’. Johnson referred to Nathaniel Bacon's An historical discourse of the uniformity of the government of England (1647–51).Footnote ⁴⁹ The passage in Bacon's radical ancient constitutional treatise discussed Henry VII's guard of fifty archers, which was ‘a Ceremony of State brought from the French Court’ that ‘went so well down with a Free People’ because it was ‘the King's good hope to have all taken in the best sense’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Magna Carta, having confirmed the original Saxon constitution, provided evidence that no king could maintain foreign guards. All strangers could be removed from the kingdom. He ‘who has the Original Magna Charta with K. Iohn’s Seal to it, may find there, if he pleases to look into it, this Original English Right’.Footnote ⁵¹ Johnson's use of ancient constitutional authorities was capricious, since Selden had doubted the authenticity of the Mirror, upon which Bacon and other radical ancient constitutionalists relied, in recounting Saxon laws.Footnote ⁵² But Johnson's aim was to bring the weight of ancient constitutionalism to bear on the military question rather than to engage in its legal complexities.

Despite rejecting neo-Harringtonianism, Johnson was a Saxon republican. He believed that a central component of the ancient constitution was its militia. In the Saxon world, ‘every Hundred in a County being subdivided into Decennaries or Tythings, and these consisting of Men that were all bound for one another’, there were ‘mutual Pledges for the good behaviour of each other, and every Master of a House answerable for his whole Family’. This was ‘the Perfection of the English Constitution both in the Saxon and Norman Times, which rendered it the most united Nation under Heaven’. Only native Englishmen understood their constitution and had the valour to defend it. Englishmen had not come by the ‘Birthright of England, and the Inheritance of Magna Charta’ easily and ‘the transmitting of them down to Posterity has been a business of much toil and sweat, and much blood’. Men fighting for their liberty with their own arms were superior to standing or mercenary armies. When men ‘fight for a Country and a Constitution there is no out-living’, he explained, ‘and Death it self is the less damage of the two, they are ready to sacrifice themselves for it’.Footnote ⁵³

IV

The category of Saxon republicanism shows how Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland moved beyond adapting Harringtonianism to the restored monarchy. They treated the Saxon republic as a greater exemplar than ancient Greece and Rome. As Mark Goldie has suggested, Saxon republicanism was an English expression of civic and participative politics.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the patchwork of early modern England's parish commonwealths, rural and urban, ancient constitutionalism and Renaissance humanism flourished together.Footnote ⁵⁵ During the 1690s, the humanist ideal of the participative citizen-militia was more Saxon than Roman. The Gothic valour of the Saxons protected the English commonwealth from the internal tyranny of tyrants and the external domination of invaders.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland studied the Saxon republic on humanist terms, assuming fundamental continuities in civic life across all ages of history. The claim that universal principles informed politics across time underpinned Moyle and Trenchard's claim that ‘the same Causes will produce like Effects in all Ages’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In his proposal that ‘the forces of every hundred assemble at the capital thereof four time a year, both for publick exercise, and the dispute games and prizes’, Toland equated ‘our Hundred, Cantred, or Wapentake’ with the Roman ‘Centuria’.Footnote ⁵⁸

But Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland took themselves to thrive under the Saxon constitution. Although Paul Rahe has argued that Harrington and his followers turned from classical to modern republicanism by replacing the language of virtue with that of interests and institutions, Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland studied the laws and virtues of the Saxon world equally.Footnote ⁵⁹ Somers's claim that it was ‘no more possible to make a Government immortal, than it is to make a Man immortal’ allowed Trenchard to cast his argument as the latest effort to defend England's constitution from tyranny. He wrote of ‘Men who were such wonderful Patriots…in the last Reigns’ who ‘act the same part now as much as in them lies, as the others are said to have done formerly’. There was ‘Virtue enough yet in England to preserve our Constitution’ because ‘we have a happy Government’ in which ‘All Title arises upon an equal distribution of Power.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Generations of liberty-loving Englishmen had taken arms to preserve Gothic liberties, laws, and institutions. The Revolution had been the latest restoration of the balance by which the king acted as general, the lords as commanders, and the freeholders as soldiers. The ‘Sword and Soveraignty always march hand in hand’. It had been the genius of ‘the Institutors of this Gothick Balance’ across Europe that the militia consisted ‘of the same Parts as the Government, where the King was General, the Lords by virtue of their Castles and Honours, the great Commanders, and the Freeholders by their Tenures the Body of the Army’.Footnote ⁶¹ In making these arguments, Saxon republicans supposed that the Norman conquest had not extinguished Saxon laws and liberties. Johnson put it explicitly, declaring that ‘in this last Norman Revolution King William the First (falsely and flatteringly called the Conqueror) swore to the inviolable Observation of them under this Title, of the Good, Antient and Approved Laws of the Realm, and particularly and by name K. Edward’s Laws’.Footnote ⁶²

There were also Tacitean strains within these arguments. Somers had argued that ancient Roman standing armies had successfully subdued the world ‘as long as they were kept under Discipline’. However, ‘when all the order of War was broke, and they became a Militia, the Northern Nations in Europe, as well as the Saracens in the East’, overran the Roman empire.Footnote ⁶³ Trenchard responded by arguing that when the Romans ‘sought by a Militia, they conquer'd the whole World’. But ‘afterwards in the time of the Emperours, when they kept up Standing Armies of three hundred and sixty thousand Men, as Tacitus reckons them, they were overrun by every Barbarous Nation that invaded them’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Johnson claimed that ‘the Saxons helped the Brittains with a Land Force’ against the Romans, ‘but they helped them too much’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Toland's The milita reform'd provides a valuable case-study of late seventeenth-century Saxon republicanism. The pamphlet is replete with classical references. But, on the final three pages, Toland turned to the Saxons. To conclude his argument for ‘arming the whole Free People of England’, he referred to ‘our Ancestors in Germany’, who, during the Roman empire, ‘always came arm'd to their Publick Assemblies’. Quoting Tacitus, Toland argued that a German youth attained citizenship once the community, led by a dignitary of the public assembly or the youth's father, gave him a shield or spear. So much was clear from ‘our antient Customs and Writings’. Like Johnson, Toland referred to the ‘laws’ of Edward the Confessor, a source of radical ancient constitutionalism, and added that ‘upon a Day and Place appointed, all that ow'd Suit and Service to any Hundred came to meet their new Governor, who stuck his Lance in the Earth, and then took Fealty of them’. As ‘the Germans us'd to give their Assent by clattering their Arms’, the Saxons would touch ‘the Governor's Lance with their own’. Wherever that meeting place was, ‘it is now in some of the Northern Parts of England, call'd a Wapentake, from the touching of their Weapons’.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the metropolitan book trade, the republication of Sidney's Discourses occasioned a full restatement of radical ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism.Footnote ⁶⁷ The ‘Gothick polity’, Sidney argued, ‘grew famous by the overthrow of the Roman tyranny’. It delivered ‘the world from the yoke which it could no longer bear’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The ‘German nations’ had instituted a contract ‘for the publick good’ between kings and subjects.Footnote ⁶⁹ Norman kings, like their Saxon predecessors, had been ‘obliged to swear they would govern according to the laws’ and the constitution survived the Norman invasion.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Toland's possible rendering, Tacitus had extolled the German ‘power, virtue, and love to liberty’.Footnote ⁷¹ Concerned for the laws, Saxons and Normans ‘received no kings but such as swore to observe them, and deposed those who did not well perform their oaths and duty’.Footnote ⁷²

Sidney's arguments appeared as a call for militia reform. He believed that Gothic monarchy in England had descended into effeminate tyranny.Footnote ⁷³ A martial baronage had supported Gothic kings, but modern monarchs sought to corrupt nobles by effeminate luxury. In ‘all the legal kingdoms of the North’, ‘the strength of the government has always been placed in the nobility’. Martial virtue had ‘ennobled’ men. The nobility had become so numerous because ‘the Northern nations, who were perpetually in arms, put a high esteem upon military valour’.Footnote ⁷⁴

But Sidney did not hope to revive Gothic monarchy. He believed, in neo-Harringtonian language, that the ‘balance by which it subsisted was broken’ and it was ‘impossible to restore it’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The title of noble now belonged to ‘such gentlemen and lords of manors, as we now call commoners, together with the freeholders, and such as in war were found most able to be their leaders’. In the Saxon age, it was of these men, Sidney concluded, that ‘publick assemblies’ like the witengamot had been composed.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the context of the standing army controversy, Sidney's argument appeared less as a call for the inheritors of Gothic baronages to revive their historic role. The term ‘noble’ had had its roots in all the freemen of Saxon England. With the Saxons rather than the Romans as his example, Sidney's argument appeared as an appeal for a popular martial republic.

V

Not all opponents of the standing army grounded their arguments in ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism. Fletcher rejected the English disposition of his fellow-pamphleteers. Though Fletcher drew on Scotland's clannish past, the country lacked England's history of local militias and trained bands. Further, unlike England, a standing army had already subjugated Scotland. By the Scottish Militia Act (1663), royal authorities had quelled Scottish Covenanters. Fletcher's election to the Scottish parliament in 1678 coincided with the efforts of John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale, to enforce taxation using a standing army.Footnote ⁷⁷ Initial Jacobite success during the Wars of the British Succession preceded a series of military reprisals until the Treaty of Achallader (1691).Footnote ⁷⁸ The parliamentary debate proceeded differently in Scotland where William was keen to avoid controversy and focus his efforts on the English parliament. In 1698, the court pressed ahead in Scotland for supply for the standing army, but, led by James Douglas, duke of Queensberry, came to offer extensive concessions in return for 3,000 troops until 1 December 1702.Footnote ⁷⁹

Fletcher developed a different form of neo-Harringtonianism that, while respecting the achievements of Gothic government, rendered them irrelevant to modern politics. He disagreed with Harrington's characterization of the Gothic constitution. Across Europe, between the fall of the Roman empire and the dawn of the sixteenth century, Gothic constitutions ‘kept those governments steady’. The system of feudal land ownership meant that ‘there was no longer any standing army kept on foot’ and that ‘when the defence of the country required an army, the king summoned the barons to his standard, who came attended with their vassals’. The ‘freedom of those governments’ was secure because Gothic constitutions had ‘put the sword into the hands of the subject’.Footnote ⁸⁰

However, as Fletcher had written in his first pamphlet of 1697, ‘I do less pretend that the present Governments can be restored to the Constitution before-mentioned.’Footnote ⁸¹ Fletcher's interpretation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history marked him out from him English peers. Following Francis Bacon, Fletcher argued that the recovery of ancient learning alongside the invention of the compass, printing press, and gunpowder had generated processes of economic specialization that enabled the rise of luxury in Europe. These four changes, which had begun ‘about the Year 1500’, produced ‘a total alteration in the way of living, upon which all government depends’.Footnote ⁸² Financial relationships based on debts and rents replaced feudal dues. Subjects became willing to pay monarchs a revenue for mercenaries and standing armies and, eventually, monarchs levied taxation to fund them. All that was left of the Gothic constitution were ‘the antient terms and outwards forms’.Footnote ⁸³

These four evolutions had sunk Europe into ‘an abyss of pleasures; which were rendered the more expensive by a perpetual change of the fashions in clothes, equipage and furniture of houses’. Men changed ‘from their frugal and military way of living’ to a luxurious style of life. Consumption and the pursuit of luxury enabled men to cultivate their intellects and their tastes, shedding Gothic traits of arms-bearing and self-defence. Fletcher owned that the Gothic way of life had ‘had some mixture of rudeness and ignorance in it’. But Gothic martial subjects ‘did not consider the unspeakable evils that are altogether inseparable from an expensive way of living’.Footnote ⁸⁴

In Fletcher's analysis, militia reform must recognize the nature of modern politics. The development of commerce and luxury led men to choose lives of cultivation over valour. In tones of the political economy that became integral to the Scottish Enlightenment, he was concerned that Scotland's size and relative poverty would prohibit a standing army.Footnote ⁸⁵ He proposed a system of military training for all freemen to provide an education in civic virtue so that they would choose the defence of their liberties by arms.Footnote ⁸⁶ He had little time for the claim that England had avoided the absolutist trap of the continent. Scotland had already fallen victim to a standing army and he believed that the multiple monarchy belonged to a larger European commercial trend that had witnessed the collapse of each of the continent's ancient constitutions. Rejecting Gothic liberty as a lost phenomenon, Fletcher hoped to gear civic republicanism for modern politics.

VI

Pamphleteers who defended William III's proposals faced a choice. As whigs, they must either justify the standing army on ancient constitutional principles or dismiss their relevance altogether. Defoe and Somers pursued the latter strategy. Defoe claimed that Moyle and Trenchard had misrepresented England's Gothic past. With Harrington, Defoe believed that the Gothic constitution had been unstable and unfree. But, whereas Harrington had described a wrestling match between barons and kings, Defoe blamed instability on baronial tyranny over tenants. When ‘this Service by Villenage and Vassalage began to be resented by the People, and by Peace and Trade they grew rich, and the Power of the Barons being too great, frequent Commotions, Civil Wars, and Battels, were the Consequence, nay sometimes without concerning the King in the Quarrel’. The result of noble oppression was that ‘the People obtain'd Priviledges of their own, and oblig'd the King and the Barons to accept of an Equilibrium’. This institution ‘we call a Parliament’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Liberty was a modern invention. It had emerged in the same commercial world as the trade of warfare. Parliament balanced the constitution by preserving liberty and controlling supply to fund a standing army. This ‘Due Ballance’ was ‘the Foundation on which we now stand’. Defoe appealed ‘to all men to judge if this Ballance be not a much nobler Constitution in all its Points, than the old Gothick Model of Government’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Meanwhile, due to the rise of commerce, ‘War is become a Science, and Arms an Employment, and all our Neighbours keep standing Forces.’Footnote ⁸⁹ Liberty and virtue were coterminous with the trade of warfare. Thus, Defoe appealed ‘to the Honest well meaning English-Freeholder, who has a share in the Terra firma, and therefore is concern'd to preserve freedom’. He addressed himself to ‘the Inhabitant that loves his Liberty better than his Life, and won't sell it for Money’. These were the men who had ‘the most reason to fear a Standing Army’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Somers made a similar argument. He responded to those who ‘will urge the Roman and Lacedemonian States for our Militia’ that it was ‘a wrong way of arguing, to apply the Precedent of any one Time to another, unless all Things in both Times did agree’. Spartans, lacking commerce and luxury and enjoying ‘neither Arts nor Learning’, ‘bred their Youth to nothing but War’. Romans ‘were but a little distinguished from them’. These examples ‘can never suit our times, unless we could change our whole Constitution at home, as well as the State of Affairs abroad, and banish from us not only Luxury but both Wealth and Trade’.Footnote ⁹¹ Complex financial relationships were the basis of liberty while parliament controlled supply and voted annually to renew the standing army.

Having dismissed classical liberty, Somers dealt likewise with the Saxon republic. How the Englishman's ‘Ancestors not only defend[ed] our Countrey, but render[ed] it terrible to all about it’ was merely ‘a Topick that may furnish a great deal of popular Eloquence, and may impose upon such as are proud of the Valour of their Countrey’. But, in the Saxon world, ‘all Nations were equally ignorant of War’ and ‘in those short Wars that broke out, the braver Nation always had the better’.Footnote ⁹² The need did not impress itself upon Somers to refute the charge of apostacy because he believed that Saxon republicanism was as irrelevant to modern military affairs as classical politics.

Somers did not see fit to reply to Fletcher; Defoe did, but required a different strategy than for Saxon republican pamphleteers. Since Fletcher had accepted the claim that the progress of commerce had wrecked the ancient constitution, Defoe argued that any proposals for a militia were unrealistic. The country was now ‘in sundry Circumstances, different from England formerly, with respect to the Manner of Fighting’. A militia ‘cannot be made fit for the Uses of the present Wars’.Footnote ⁹³ In response to Fletcher's anxiety that luxury had corrupted the modern citizen, Defoe argued that the evolutions in property and power over the previous two centuries had been beneficial. The barons grew ‘poor by the Luxury of the Times’ and ‘the Common People growing rich, they exhang'd their Vassalage for Leases, Rents, Fines, and the Like’. The result was that they became ‘entituled to the Service of themselves; and so overthrew the Settlement, and from hence came a House of Commons’. In ‘this Establishment of a Parliament, the Sword is indeed trusted in the Hands of the King, and the Purse in the Hands of the People’. Whereas ‘the People cannot make Peace or War without the King’, the king ‘cannot raise or maintain an Army without the People’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Unlike Somers and Defoe, the anonymous author of A letter to A, B, C, D, E, F, &c. defended a peacetime standing army on ancient constitutional grounds. Accusing the opposition of misconstruing English history, the pamphleteer examined ‘the supposed Gothick or other balance, by the constitution and the interest of the English monarchy’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The pamphlet drew a distinction between Gothic and Saxon government, siding with the latter. Gothic republicans had claimed ‘Mr Harrington’s Authority, not observing to what end’ he had launched his analysis of Gothic government: to account for the collapse of the monarchy and the unstable tyranny of the baronage.Footnote ⁹⁶

The pamphleteer sided with the Saxon constitution over its Gothic successor, which had resulted from the feudal land reforms of the early Norman kings. Saxon government had been more populist. Power had fallen to its freemen. Thus, ‘our Saxo-British Balance’ was ‘much better, and of greater Antiquity and Security, than your Gothick’. The Saxon constitution rested on ‘neither your Gothick upon Tenures’ nor ‘Mr. Harrington’s Agrarian’. The ‘Liberties of this Nation’ were built around ‘a Free Election of the chief Officers both in Church and State’. By such means, ‘the People of the Land, in whose Hands the true Ballance of Property, has resided’ kept ‘the Ballance of Power in a due libration’, turning it sometimes in favour of the king or the lords, ‘according to present Emergencies: and whatever Shocks may have hapned’.Footnote ⁹⁷

Deftly, the pamphleteer elided Gothic republicanism with Robert Brady's tory attacks on whig ancient constitutionalism. Brady had dismissed the relevance of exclusionist whig arguments by arguing that the Norman conquest had extinguished the Saxon system of government.Footnote ⁹⁸ Though ancient constitutionalists from the Levellers through Restoration whigs like William Petyt and William Atwood to contract theorists like James Tyrrell either minimized the legal impact of the conquest or denied the Norman yoke altogether, the anonymous pamphleteer accused the opposition of falling into Brady's trap.Footnote ⁹⁹ The nobility and gentry ‘are much beholding to you, for your recommending the Re-establishment of the Tenures, which had so long been their Grievance, and the destruction of so many Families’. These ‘feudal Tenures were Badges of a Conquest by the Normans’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The ‘Government you make to consist of three States united by Tenures, for Counsel and Fight’ led the opposition to ‘fall into Dr. Bradie’s Notion of the Tenants in Chief’ which had been ‘first brought in by an absolute Conquest’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Whereas Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland had argued that feudal privileges had enabled nobles to mediate between king and people while commanding the county militia, the anonymous pamphleteer claimed that the lords were not ‘the great Commanders over the Militia, meerly by Virtue of their Castles and feudal Honours’. They held their authority ‘by the free choice of the People’ and ‘those Honours and Authorities which have gone along with Tenure, proceeded from the same Choice’. Without those free elections, ‘the Saxon Kings could not make any Grants of that kind’.Footnote ¹⁰²

The pamphleteer put radical ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism to the service of a peacetime standing army, referring to a charter of Henry II in which the king had confirmed the ‘laws’ of the Confessor. The ‘Inspeximus of a Charter of Hen. II’ noted a transcription of the ‘Domebec, or Book of Judgments, referr'd to in the Laws of Edward, the Son of King Alfred; and the Confessors Law receiv'd, and sworn to by W. I.’. It showed that ‘King Arthur laid the Foundation of the British Monarchy, by providing that there should be a Folcmote, or Assembly of all People and Nations, under the King's Protection and Peace.’ The folkmote would ‘provide for the Indempnities of the Crown of the Kingdom’.Footnote ¹⁰³ The

Ever since Saxon times, parliament had controlled financial supply for the crown.

Invoking the name of Sir John Fortescue, the pamphleteer claimed that ‘this Nation has from before the Entrance of the Romans, been ever Governed by the same Customs, which must be meant of the Fundamentals of Government’. It had been Fortescue's conclusion that ‘therefore they must needs be the most Excellent’. Developing the language of Saxon republicanism, it was both the ‘Excellence of these Laws’ that ‘made ’em worth Fighting for’ and ‘the Valour of the Natives’ that ‘has rarely been wanting in time of need; and the sincerity of their Intentions, was ever Crowned at the end’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was useful for the pamphleteer to invoke the name of Fortescue, since Fortescue had insisted in De laudibus legum Angliae (written c. 1470) that the common law and ancient constitution had been static and unchanging.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Less concerned with the complexities of the common law than marshalling it for the pro-army argument, the pamphleteer's jurisprudence did not run further.

By engaging with ancient constitutionalism, the pamphleteer cast the military issue not as a fundamental constitutional question but as a mere argument about strategy. The proposal was not to disarm English freemen and ‘a Standing Army to be brought into our Constitution, as a continuing part’. The king would keep ‘a Land Force, till the King, and his Great Council, shall think our Religion, Laws, and Liberties, are in a good state of Defence without ’em’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Historians are tempted to prioritize the engagement of Somers and Defoe with Fletcher due to their concern with commercial progress and modernity. But the mainstay of the standing army controversy was an ancient constitutional debate in which the idea of a Saxon republic loomed large.

VII

The relationship between history and modernity in the militia issue was not the sole preserve of the 1690s. At the turn of the eighteenth century, English opponents of a standing army might join Fletcher by engaging with the problem of commerce. Although Shaftesbury neither wrote nor spoke against the standing army proposals during the 1690s, his name featured as an opponent in a list of 1698, whose compilers canvassed MPs about the standing army.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He moved in circles now associated with ‘country’ whiggism, including Moyle and Trenchard. Shaftesbury developed a strong political and literary affinity with Toland during the late 1690s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Shaftesbury, like Moyle, Trenchard, and Toland, had been influenced by Molesworth's Account of Denmark, which had strong ancient constitutional and Saxon republican flavours.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In a letter to Molesworth, Shaftesbury wrote that his correspondent had ‘long had my Heart, even before I knew you personally’. Molesworth's Account had made him Shaftesbury's ‘Oracle in publick affairs’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Unlike these whig ancient constitutionalists, in Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times (1711) Shaftesbury agreed with Harrington that, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the unfree and unstable ancient constitution had become moribund. Shaftesbury took ‘the liberty to say I think Old England to have been in every respect a very indifferent country and that Late England, of an age or two old, even since Queen Bess's days, is indeed very much mended for the better’. At the start of the reign of Henry VII, England was ‘under a sort of Polish nobility and had no other liberties than what were in common to us with the then fashionable monarchies and Gothic lordships of Europe’. But in late England, the people ‘flourish, our name or credit have risen, our trade and navigation, our manufactures or our husbandry been improved’.Footnote ¹¹² The growth of commerce had occasioned the development of polite liberty.Footnote ¹¹³ In the age of Walpole, Shaftesbury's argument found echoes in the courtly whiggism of the likes of John, Lord Hervey, whose Ancient and modern liberty stated and compared (1730) showed that English liberty had emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Yet, in eighteenth-century England, Saxonism flourished alongside modernism. Often with reference to the debates of the 1690s, Saxon republican defences of a militia recurred frequently. In the attempt to unite a ‘country’ campaign against Walpole, Bolingbroke wrote of the Saxons that they were ‘far from giving up the freedom of their Gothic institutions of government’. Their generals, the ‘Saxon heretoges’, were elected ‘only to conduct them in war, not to rule over them in war and peace’. Those generals became kings in their conquered lands and ‘the supreme power centred in the micklemote, or wittenagemote, composed of the king, the lords, and the Saxon freemen, that original sketch of a British parliament’. If the king did not defend Saxon liberty, ‘he should lose even the name of king’. The ‘principles of the Saxon commonwealth were therefore very democratical’ and they ‘prevailed through all subsequent changes’. The Anglo-Norman constitution was ‘a rough building raised out of the demolitions which the Normans had made, and upon the solid foundations laid by the Saxons’. The ‘whole fabrick was cemented by the blood of our fathers’, for British liberties ‘are not the grants of princes’ but ‘original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative, and coaval with our government’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In the context of late eighteenth-century reform, James Burgh and Major John Cartwright made similar arguments. In Political disquisitions (1774–5), Burgh engaged with Sir William Blackstone's Saxonist defence of a militia put in light of the militia reforms of William Pitt, earl of Chatham, during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In Commentaries on the laws of England (1765–9), Blackstone drew on the ‘laws’ of the Confessor and discussed the custom ‘of our Saxon ancestors’ that ‘the military force of this kingdom was in the hands of the dukes or heretochs, who were constituted through every province and county in the kingdom; being taken out of the principal nobility’. The Saxons ‘had their dukes, as well as kings, with an independent power over the military, as the kings had over the civil state’. King Alfred ‘first settled a national militia in this kingdom, and by his prudent discipline made all the subjects of his dominion soldiers’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Similarly, Burgh observed that ‘in the Saxon times, the military force was under the absolute command of the dukes, or heretochs, who were elected by the people’. Any Englishman would conclude an armed force safer if it were ‘a number of subjects elected by the people’ than ‘in the hands of a king’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In An appeal, civil and military, on the subject of the English constitution (1799), Cartwright elided the differences between Fletcher and his English fellow pamphleteers by invoking Fletcher in his claim that the ‘military branch’ was ‘the chief part of the constitution of any free government’. Any state must possess its ‘law and its liberty…at the discretion and good pleasure of those who bear the sword’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Concerned with the development of modernity in the Enlightenment, historians are apt to dwell on the arguments of Fletcher, Defoe, and Somers that commerce had rendered the ancient constitution and Saxon republic as mirages. In the Scottish Enlightenment, the militia question would take a modernist course in the hands of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson. Edward Gibbon handled the question similarly in the Hampshire militia.Footnote ¹¹⁹ However, ancient constitutionalism and Saxon republicanism survived long into the eighteenth century. By the pens of the likes of Josiah Quincy, the Saxonist arguments of the standing army controversy were rehearsed to defend citizen-militias in Revolutionary America. They reappeared, in the early republic, in the writings of John Taylor of Caroline.Footnote ¹²⁰ Although Enlightenment thinkers questioned the relevance of the Saxon republic and ancient constitution in modern politics, they were major features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English political thought. Their decline was long in the making.