Markku Peltonen's important new book provides a welcome challenge to tired narratives about the kingless free state of 1649–1653 being an unforeseen expedient, cobbled together after Charles I's execution and justified only in defensive or apologetic terms. While some scholars, including this reviewer, have already pushed back against those assumptions by suggesting that the abolition of monarchy was not a pis aller, Peltonen now reveals that there were plenty of works published both before and during the free state that acclaimed a shift to kingless rule in terms that were vociferously republican. Indeed, the originality of this book rests as much in its source base as in its argument. While the period's most famous authors, including Hobbes, Milton, and Nedham, receive attention, they sit alongside an impressive range of lesser-known, sometimes anonymous, pamphlets that praised, or denigrated, the nascent free state.

Although it feels an exaggeration to say that the political thought of the free state has received “scant scholarly attention” (1), previous studies have concentrated largely on the “de-facto” arguments used to defend the kingless regime in essentially negative terms during the so-called engagement controversy, often, if not entirely, ignoring those other justifications that Peltonen makes his focus. Chapter 1, for instance, examines the positive case for change: the idea that the people, or their representatives, were free to alter the form of government as they saw fit, bolstered by underlying assumptions about popular sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy. Chapter 2 explores anti-monarchism, a term that encompasses a range of opinions, from those who talked about monarchy in relative terms, as a legitimate but severely flawed form of government, through to those who rejected kingly rule absolutely as inherently tyrannical and essentially idolatrous. Quite rightly, Peltonen dispels the claims of those who suggest a lack of anti-monarchical opinion during the republican era, but in doing so maybe overplays the strength of the extremist position, particularly when emphasis is placed on hostile commentators who were predisposed to presume the most rabid anti-monarchical tendencies in their adversaries (72, 74–76, 86–87). At other times, the distinction between the relativist and extremist positions is elided to accentuate the latter, such as Peltonen's suggestion that the 1649 Act abolishing the kingly office stated that “monarchical government … meant that the people were slaves.” While Peltonen substantiates this by citing the Act's text that “‘the Regal power and prerogative’ had been used ‘to oppress, impoverish and enslave the subject,’” he omits the critical clause from the beginning of the quotation: “for the most part …” (83). Saying that monarchy tended toward slavery is not quite the same as saying it was inherently a state of slavery. Indubitably, anti-monarchical sentiments were more ubiquitous than scholars have allowed, but they were not always quite as emphatic as Peltonen would have them.

Anti-monarchism represented only one side of republican discourse, however. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, plenty of writers went beyond merely denigrating monarchy to extol the various liberties and material benefits that a free state afforded. Peltonen shows how the “protagonists of the free state were not reluctant to speak its name” (123), but they did not do so with a united voice, with some invoking republican arguments to offer the regime constructive criticism or outright hostility rather than unqualified support. This tension is demonstrated further in Chapters 4 and 5, which explore works that sought to define the free state as either an aristocracy or democracy. This literature reveals disagreement not only about the form of the kingless regime but also over the very meanings of aristocratic and democratic government. As Peltonen observes, one of the novelties of this period of parliamentary rule was a growing tendency to couch democracy or “popular government” in representative terms rather than as direct rule of the people, which was essentially equated with anarchy.

Unquestionably, The Political Thought of the English Free State is essential reading for scholars and students of the period, but it still leaves questions unanswered. While Peltonen suggests that collectively the works he explores constitute the “intellectual mainstream” of political thought during the free state, some currents were surely stronger than others (11). Most compelling are those occasions when Peltonen shows the influence and connections between the Rump Parliament's official pronouncements, particularly its Declaration of March 1649, and the many other publications that evoked its arguments or riffed on its themes. Much of the time, however, the relative impact, as well as likely audience and reception of each printed work, is given rather less attention. Among the “widely shared assumptions” that Peltonen sets out to dismiss is that popular attachment to monarchy was such that “the free state must have been deeply unpopular and that there were hardly any genuine republican arguments put forward for it” (2). Yet, challenging the latter point, as Peltonen surely does, hardly dispels presumptions regarding the lack of wider enthusiasm for the free state or monarchy's continued hold over the popular political imagination. Even if Peltonen disagrees that the free state's “ignominious failure” is sufficient proof of monarchy's popularity, some explanation is needed both for why few people mourned the regime's passing in 1653 and why pseudo-monarchical forms were adopted soon after under the Cromwellian Protectorate. Perhaps the works and ideas that Peltonen explores made little real impression or failed to chime with public opinion, affirming that only a minority ever bought into the idea of kingless government. Even those who made the case for the regime in genuinely republican terms came to lament the gross disparity between the theory of the free state and its reality: government by a torpid, self-serving, and thoroughly unrepresentative representative of the people. As Peltonen suggests, over time the regime's “intellectual supporters were dwindling, and there seems to have been much fewer republican arguments” by 1652 (149). Ultimately, it would seem the republican arguments advanced for the free state did not make that regime any more popular; rather, they foretold, and maybe even hastened, its demise.