The historiography of seventeenth-century English republicanism to date has suffered from two major shortcomings. First, historians have to a large extent focused on the secular side of republican thought at the expense of the religious. The Cambridge School represented by the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner in particular has promoted an approach that focuses on the secular ancient sources of seventeenth-century republicans and political concepts such as ‘virtue’ and ‘corruption’ derived from a classical republican discourse rather than theories of government developed in the aftermath of the European Reformations.Footnote 1 Secondly, most historians of political thought have studied English republican thinkers primarily in a relatively narrow national context. Foreign contexts and influences on English republican thought are often reduced to the impact of political thought from ancient Greece and Rome which travelled via the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe, while Pocock and his followers have also drawn attention to the transatlantic legacy of English republican thought in the eighteenth century and its significance for the American War of Independence as well as the development of the US constitution.Footnote 2 Contemporary European influences on and exchanges with English republican thought meanwhile have received comparatively little attention.Footnote 3 This relative neglect of the religious and transnational, or rather transterritorialFootnote 4 elements of English republicanism seems somewhat surprising, given that liberty of conscience for non-conforming Protestants was a key demand on the republican agenda, while a common Protestant cause joined English republicans to their co-religionists across Europe.Footnote 5
However, more recently some significant work on the religious outlook of English republicans has been undertaken by a variety of scholars from different backgrounds inside and outside the history of political thought. Part of this work has been done to complement the work of the Cambridge School,Footnote 6 while an entirely new strand of research focuses on political Hebraism and the influence of the Jewish commonwealth on seventeenth-century republican models of government.Footnote 7 This new interest in republican religion might also be seen as a response to John Morrill's provocative claim, first made in a lecture in 1983, that the English Civil War was ‘not the first European revolution’ but rather ‘the last of the Wars of Religion’.Footnote 8 Morrill thus located civil conflict in the British Isles in the wider context of post-Reformation Europe.Footnote 9 He has been echoed by Jonathan Scott, who goes further to claim that the execution of Charles I in 1649 was not the first act of the English Revolution but the ‘last act of the Thirty Years' War’.Footnote 10 Morrill's and Scott's call for a European contextualization of the English Revolution needs to be followed up further, in particular with regard to transnational networks of like-minded individuals. Such work also needs to take into account other strands of historiography beyond the usual reach of scholars of early modern republican thought, in particular the wider literature on European Protestantism, exile, and diaspora, including work by Ole Peter Grell and David Trim on the Huguenots and transnational Calvinist networks.Footnote 11 While studies of the fate of the English republican exiles who made their way across the Atlantic to become local celebrities or folk heroes has reinforced the significance of the Anglo-American republican tradition,Footnote 12 a more systematic study of the English republican exiles in Europe in particular promises a better understanding of the mutual influences between people of different languages and confessional identities.Footnote 13
While one short article cannot do justice to all these demands, I hope to make a first step towards joining up disparate historiographies in the following case-study of the English republican exile Edmund Ludlow and his attempt to make the cause of the English regicides more widely known to a francophone Protestant audience through the publication of a French translation of a controversial justification of the regicides, The speeches and prayers of some of the late king's judges (1660), which highlights both the religious and transnational nature of English republicanism in its wider context.
I
It is well known that the three volumes of Edmund Ludlow's Memoirs, written in Swiss exile and published under a false Vevey imprint between 1698 and 1699, were the product of John Toland's careful editorial efforts. As Blair Worden has shown in a series of publications, Ludlow's deist editor crafted the Memoirs as whig propaganda during the debates about a standing army in the aftermath of the Nine Years War. Highlighting the despotic rule of Oliver Cromwell and the evils of a standing army, the Memoirs constituted a warning against military tyranny in England.Footnote 14 Ludlow's own original intentions, meanwhile, had been quite different. His original manuscript produced in Switzerland with the working title ‘A voyce from the watch tower’ was a justification of the ‘good old cause’ of the parliamentarians in the English Civil War and the regicide of Charles I in 1649, in which Ludlow had played a part, as well as an attempt to preserve the memory of the republican martyrs executed under the new regime of Charles II. As such, it was as much a religious as a political project, intent on linking the republican cause with a radical Protestant agenda and depicting those who had opposed Charles I as God's chosen people. Yet, the ‘Voyce’, brimming with puritan and providential language, was not the first project of Ludlow's exile period.Footnote 15 His mission to create martyrs found its first expression in the little-known work Les juges jugez, se justifiants, printed in Yverdon in 1663.Footnote 16 The pamphlet confirms Worden's suggestion that Ludlow's republicanism was strictly religious in nature as its language and message accord with the original manuscript of the ‘Voyce’. But it also hints at a broader agenda followed by Ludlow with his strategic publication: he intended to make the suffering of the republican martyrs more widely known around the world for educational as well as missionary purposes, while the publication might also have served the more immediate purpose of rallying Protestant networks in Europe behind the exiles on the run in the wake of a number of arrests and extraditions.
In the first part of this article, I will sketch out Ludlow's Protestant network in Switzerland in an attempt to locate this pamphlet in particular and English republican thought and writing more generally in a wider European context and understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. In the second part, I will then offer a step-by-step analysis of Les juges jugez, se justifiants in its more immediate context of publication. I shall start with Ludlow's stay in Geneva.
II
The republican Edmund Ludlow had fought in the English Civil War on the side of parliament and both participated in the trial of Charles I and signed his death warrant in 1649.Footnote 17 He was a member of the commonwealth's council of state and in 1650 appointed by Oliver Cromwell as second in command to the army leader Henry Ireton in Ireland, carrying the title of lieutenant-general of the horse. While he initially continued in his post after the forcible expulsion of the Long Parliament, Ludlow turned against Cromwell when the latter assumed the title of lord protector at the end of 1653 and became an active member of the republican opposition against the Protectorate. Ludlow's religion might be described as puritan. More specifically, he was a sectarian Protestant, who based his faith firmly on Scripture reading and favoured a near total separation of state and church, rejected infant baptism, and showed some sympathy for the Quakers without attaching the label to himself.Footnote 18 While agreeing with Cromwell's commitment to liberty of conscience in principle, he nevertheless saw it as a ploy ‘to gull those who would otherwise have opposed him or opposed him earlier’.Footnote 19 After several years in relative obscurity during the Protectorate, Ludlow again assumed several high-profile positions after the restoration of the Long Parliament and was returned to the Convention as an MP for Hindon in April 1660. But his election was declared void in May, when the House of Commons ordered the arrest of the regicides. Fearing further retribution of the Restoration regime, when it was still unclear how the regicides would be dealt with and who would be exempted from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, he left the country.Footnote 20
After his escape from England in the autumn of 1660, Ludlow's first target destination in Switzerland had been Geneva, the Protestant Rome, which he describes as ‘a citty very renowned for liberty and religion’.Footnote 21 There, he lodged with the former soldier Charles Perrot, who had fought as a mercenary on the side of parliament during the English Civil War and was married to an English woman.Footnote 22 Perrot was descended from a French family that had fled to Geneva for religious reasons. His grandfather was another Charles Perrot, a former rector of the Protestant Academy of Geneva and collaborator of Theodore Beza.Footnote 23 Perrot was presumably an existing contact of Ludlow's from the 1640s and might have been informed of the latter's escape before he arrived in Geneva. As grandson of a rector of the Academy and as a member of the city's Council of Sixty, he was well connected among the religious and political establishment of the city, and thus ideally placed to introduce Ludlow to life in his new temporary home and provide him with information and legal advice concerning his refugee position.Footnote 24 For the best part of eighteen months, this arrangement appears to have worked.
Ludlow lodged with Perrot in his house on Rue des Chanoines, centrally located between the town hall and the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, adjacent to the house in which Calvin had lived a century earlier.Footnote 25 He seems to have led a comfortable and rather uneventful existence, enjoying Swiss hospitality and good English beer illegally brewed in the Perrot household.Footnote 26 But when news broke in April 1662 that three further regicides, John Barkstead, Miles Corbet, and John Okey, had been arrested in the Netherlands by the English envoy George Downing and extradited to England, this idyll was under threat.Footnote 27 So Ludlow, together with the regicides William Cawley and John Lisle, who had joined him in Geneva in the meantime, enquired through Perrot what the authorities of Geneva would do if they were issued with a similar demand for extradition.Footnote 28 Ludlow feared that ‘the deportment of the King of France’, who was by marriage related to Charles II, ‘might worke the like effect upon this little Commonwealth’ as it had on the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt in the United Provinces, and that Geneva might be bullied into delivering the regicides. It seemed therefore necessary to Ludlow ‘to get what assurance we could of our safety whilest we stayed here, and if that would not be given us, to make provission for ourselves elsewhere’.Footnote 29
On Perrot's enquiries, the first syndic of Geneva, Jean Voisine, promised the exiles he would inform them of any letter that might come to him before he would put it to the council, and that he would keep their escape routes free. Voisine personally promised to unlock the water gate for them at night, as he was in possession of the key, or, if they had to escape during the day, would grant them free passage through any of the city gates. He also promised to discuss the matter with his fellow syndic Jacob Dupain when the latter returned from business in Bern.Footnote 30 While Ludlow seemed happy with the arrangement, Lisle and Cawley did not trust a personal promise and pressed for a more formal arrangement, leading Perrot to discuss the issue with his cousin Jean Anthoine Dupain, who served as the town's procureur general and was the nephew of the syndic.Footnote 31 They agreed to bring in a petition to the council for the protection of the exiles. However, in the event, the petition was obstructed and Geneva proved unable to offer protection to Ludlow and the other regicides.Footnote 32 Ludlow presents the case as a personalized issue, related to internal divisions among the governing elite, as one of the city's four governing syndics, ‘Mr. Lett’, who can be identified as Odet Lect,Footnote 33 was owed a large debt ‘by the King of England to himselfe in the right of his wife’ and consequently ‘not only obstructed’ the business of the exiles’ protection, ‘but threatened those who had a hand therein, supposing they intended to have surprised the Councell’.Footnote 34 So the consideration of the exiles' matter was deferred, and the business was finally withdrawn ‘before it was publiquely read’.Footnote 35
III
More important than Ludlow's military and civic connections turned out to be his links to Protestant ministers – at least in the long run. These included the radical preacher Jean de Labadie in Geneva, who was known as the city's ‘second Calvin’,Footnote 36 and Johann Heinrich Hummel, the chief minister of Bern,Footnote 37 both contacts of the Scottish Calvinist minister John Dury, who had been a close ally of Cromwell's and a key figure in the pan-European irenic movement.Footnote 38 English contacts to foreign ministers had primarily been established through scholarly exchange and the presence of stranger churches in London, which were gathering places for Calvinist exiles from all over Europe.Footnote 39 The continental connections of English Calvinists meanwhile went back to the Marian exiles who had found refuge in Europe in the 1550s only to return during the reign of Elizabeth I when they came to ‘play a prominent role in the English Church, giving it a distinctly Reformed flavour’.Footnote 40 The puritans of the English Revolution saw themselves in this tradition as part of a European Calvinist or reformed network.
The French-born Labadie had gained notoriety as a former Jesuit and radical convert of the Calvinist Church. He had worked in Montauban and in the principality of Orange.Footnote 41 After his move to Geneva, he became known for his efforts in the moral reformation of the city, where standards of godliness had markedly dropped since Calvin's times with ‘dwindling church attendance’ and ‘inns open and well frequented at sermon time’.Footnote 42 Ludlow himself found that Geneva had ‘rather gone backward’ since ‘the first Reformation’ and not made much progress in either ‘doctrine or discipline’.Footnote 43 He clearly sympathized with Labadie's clean-up efforts in the city, referring to him as ‘a zealous & faithfull minister of the Gospell’ as well as ‘our true and sincere friend’.Footnote 44 Labadie meanwhile was not just a kind stranger or charitable, like-minded Protestant. He had a long-standing connection to the republican regime in England. When Labadie had to leave the Huguenot refuge of Orange he contacted John Dury in England in search for a new home, and ‘an opening finally presented itself’ in the French church in London, which had experienced a schism in 1642/3.Footnote 45 During the Civil War, the French pastor Jean d'Espagne, who had Independent leanings, demanded the foundation of a separate church at Westminster, claiming the church in Threadneedle Street (in the East End) was too far away. Parliament agreed, and many French as well as English moved to it. Cromwell granted d'Espagne and his followers the use of the chapel of Durham HouseFootnote 46 and from 1651 of the chapel of Somerset House,Footnote 47 and when d'Espagne became too old and sick to carry on his work, the government wrote to Labadie at Orange to take his place. After the death of d'Espagne in April 1659, Ludlow's fellow republican John Milton, in his role as secretary to the council of state, wrote to Labadie after being informed by Dury that he was looking for a position.Footnote 48 Labadie accepted, but when the situation in Orange became tense in June he headed in the direction of Protestant Switzerland, where he was detained and finally accepted a post in Geneva, before he could ever go to England.Footnote 49 The English government was not happy about losing Labadie, but bowed to the authority of Geneva.Footnote 50 Labadie, meanwhile, might have felt indebted to the English republican regime. Thus, Ludlow and his fellow exiles, who had joined him over the course of the past eighteen months, felt safe to turn to Labadie in April 1662, when the recently reported extradition of the regicides from the Netherlands made them fear for their lives.Footnote 51 Labadie meanwhile contacted ‘some whom he had an interest in amongst their Excellencyes of [the Council of] Berne’, whereupon the exiles made their ‘Application to them for their protection, and p[ar]ticcularly for our Naturalisation’.Footnote 52 The minutes of the Council of Bern, the body which granted the exiles permission to settle in their territory, clearly stated it was dealing with ‘Englishmen driven out of their country because of their faith’,Footnote 53 even though it might be suggested that it was more convenient or less contentious for the Swiss authorities in Bern to grant asylum to those persecuted for religious reasons than to be seen as harbouring a group of regicides in a period when Switzerland aimed to maintain amicable relations with the newly restored Stuart regime in England.Footnote 54 The naturalization of the English exiles was never procured, but the exiles were given refuge in Lausanne on Lake Geneva, before – on the advice of Steiger, the treasurer of the Council of Bern – moving to the quieter Vevey the following year.Footnote 55 Most importantly, Labadie also put the exiles in touch with another key Protestant ally: the chief minister of Bern Johann Heinrich Hummel (often referred to by his Latin name as ‘Humelius’), who was to become an important link between the exiles and the Bern authorities.Footnote 56
Hummel had put in a word for the exiles when they were in need, and he also thanked the Bern authorities on their behalf because they lacked the necessary language skills to do so themselves. For, conveniently, ‘this worthy friend of ours Mr Humelius’, Ludlow writes, ‘having spent some tyme of his Youth in England’, had ‘attained to the knowledge of our Native Languadge’ as well as meeting a variety of Protestants.Footnote 57 Indeed, Hummel had studied in London, where he met the minister of Rotherhithe, Thomas Gataker, who was to become a moderate Presbyterian member of the Westminster Assembly. He visited Oxford and Cambridge and returned to Bern after short stays in France and Geneva. As a leading figure of the canton's reformed church, which was influenced by the teachings of Luther and Zwingli as well as Calvin but distanced itself from the radical Calvinism of Geneva,Footnote 58 he also became an important figure in the irenic movement and a regular correspondent of John Dury, who in turn was a close collaborator of the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib.Footnote 59 Ludlow's Protestant contacts in Switzerland thus could be seen as an outgrowth of his networks in England, extending via Dury and the Hartlib Circle to the pan-European irenic movement for a unity of Protestant churches.Footnote 60
Despite the mutual respect among different types of Protestants, however, Ludlow and his friends would cause consternation among the locals in Vevey in 1668 by refusing to share in the Lord's Supper because they ‘had not a particular satisfaction of a worke of grace in their [neighbours'] hearts’.Footnote 61 In a letter to Hummel, the regicide Nicholas Love, who had arrived in Switzerland in the autumn of 1662 and now lived with Ludlow and the others in Vevey, found it necessary to justify himself for their absence from the communion table, stressing that ‘wee hold and Professe, the same doctrinall points of Christian faith, w[i]th you, and other the best reformed Churches or places in the world doe’, but the exiles also did not receive the Lord's Supper ‘amongst ou[r]selves, for divers reasons, wherei[n] wee may in due tyme, wee hope give you satisfaction’. He then continued to reassure Hummel that the exiles did ‘severall tymes in the weeke, pray w[i]th one another, and speake to one another out of the Scriptures’, and that they had no intention to offend their hosts. In fact, Love then asked Hummel to make their case to the authorities, ‘knowing that you are better able to produce argum[en]ts out of Scripture, and otherways, to this purpose’.Footnote 62 As we do not hear any more of the issue, we can assume that the dispute was smoothed over by Hummel, who understood the exiles' needs and was keen to preserve harmony between his foreign protégés and his own flock. The religious links of the exiles meanwhile were accompanied by political networks.
Despite the disagreement between London and Geneva over the appointment of Labadie, relations between Interregnum England and Switzerland had been largely amicable, and plans had been underway for a closer alliance. In fact, as a political agent for the Cromwellian Protectorate, the mathematician John Pell had been sent to the Protestant cantons of Switzerland in the 1650s to explore the possibilities for closer co-operation.Footnote 63 Like Dury, Pell was a member of the Hartlib Circle, and both were engaged by Cromwell in a joint mission to win both the Protestant states and the Protestant churches of Western Europe for an anti-popish (or anti-French) alliance. The status of the exiles in Switzerland after 1660 was thus subject to wider diplomatic considerations and depended on the strength of the Protestant cantons to assert themselves against their Catholic neighbours, especially Savoy, but also France and the Habsburg territories. In the event, Bern proved to be stronger and more independent than Geneva, and Ludlow and his fellow exiles depended very much on the goodwill of the local council to provide access to protection. The exiles' closest friends and allies among the Excellencies of Bern were the Säckelmeister or treasurer Steiger and Colonel Weiss, who is often mentioned alongside Steiger as a contact.Footnote 64 They also appear to have been on good terms with the president of the council, Avoyer Anton von Graffenried.Footnote 65 Thus, it was due to the exiles' networks in their local community and their good relations with Protestant ministers and the local officials that they survived, despite offers of money from Charles II's sister Henrietta, duchess of Anjou, to those who would attempt to ‘destroy’ Ludlow and his friends. As Ludlow put it, it was assumed that ‘we were too much owned by the Magistrates, & too well beloved by the people to have any such thinge offerted on us, and that it was a vaine thinge for any to Imagine the accomplishing thereof’.Footnote 66 This was before Lisle was killed by a Savoyard assassin on his way to church in Lausanne.Footnote 67
More importantly, it was during this time, after the exiles had been granted religious refuge, that Ludlow decided to return to his project to have a pamphlet published on the execution of several regicides and remind Protestant Europe of their debt towards the republican martyrs.
IV
Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663)Footnote 68 is a pamphlet drawn from a number of different English- and French-language sources, collectively reporting, or rather narrating, the story of fourteen regicides and other parliamentarians executed between 13 October 1660 and 14 June 1662 after being excepted from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) and tried for treason.Footnote 69 The first part of the pamphlet was commissioned by Ludlow during his stay in Geneva, which dates the origins of the work back to the period between late October or November 1660, when Ludlow might first have heard of the executions of his former allies, and April 1662, when he moved to Lausanne.Footnote 70 Ludlow was deeply affected by the death of those who had fought with him for a common cause, and in his own words
being convinced with Mr [John] Carew,Footnote 71 one of our first ten Martyrs, that the faithfull witness they bore to the Kingly Office of Christ would be of great use & advantadge to the Churches of Christ beyond the Seaes, I looked upon it as my duty, that their occationall speeches which they spake to friends a little before their Execution, together with those which they spoake at the place of their Execution, and the breathing of the Spirit in their prayers might be made publique, for the conviction, conversion, edification & strengthening of others, and therefore having whilest I was at Geneve procured them to be translated into the French Languadge, I did what I could to get them printed.Footnote 72
The original text on which Ludlow's commissioned translation was based was a copy of The speeches and prayers of some of the late king's judges (1660).Footnote 73 The pamphlet itself was contentious, published clandestinely in London in at least four editions under slightly varying titles. It was among the works seized in various printing shops around London during Sir Roger L'Estrange's clampdown on the opposition press after the passage of the 1662 Licensing Act and singled out as ‘Treasonous and Seditious’ in the new press surveyor's Considerations and proposals in order to the regulation of the press (1663).Footnote 74 The Speeches and prayers would also play a role in the arrests made in the context of the northern risings against the Stuart regime of 1663.Footnote 75 It contains narratives of the final days of several of the regicides responsible for the trial and execution of Charles I after the English Civil War and now condemned to death for treason by the Restoration regime of Charles II, together with several speeches and prayers and some miscellaneous material, such as letters to friends and family or, in one case, a sermon preached shortly before their death. The regicides are named on the title page of the pamphlet as Major General Thomas Harrison, John Carew, Justice John Cook, Hugh Peters, Thomas Scott, Gregory Clement, Colonel Adrian Scroop, Colonel John Jones, Colonel Daniel Axtell, and Colonel Francis Hacker.
The emphasis of the text under examination is on the suffering of the regicides, dying as ‘martyrs’Footnote 76 for the ‘cause’Footnote 77 of religious and political liberty they had fought for, and their readiness to die in the knowledge that they might be considered guilty by human law, but justified in their actions by God. Individual passages said to have been spoken by the convicted traitors repeatedly refer to the justice of their cause and their willingness to die in the knowledge that they would soon be reconciled with their creator.Footnote 78
Modern historians have primarily been concerned with the authenticity of the Speeches and prayers, with the majority taking them at face value,Footnote 79 while others have argued that they were forgeries.Footnote 80 But the question of their genuineness seems mal posée, as contemporaries appear to have been aware of their (at least partially) fictitious nature. In the pamphlet itself, we find phrases, such as he ‘uttered words to this Effect’, indicating that the text rendered the sense rather than the exact words of what had been said.Footnote 81 What counted to contemporaries, including Ludlow, was that the Speeches and prayers represented what the regicides and the other convicts would have said, thus very much adopting a similar approach to Thucydides when relating public speeches of military leaders in his History of the Peloponnesian War, emphasizing that he was reproducing the general idea of what would have been said rather than giving a verbatim account.Footnote 82 Thus, Ludlow points out that his printer at Yverdon had added to the official news account of Henry Vane's dying hour ‘the substance of what he would have spoake at the tyme of his Execution had he not bin hindred’, and that this addition of what must be purely fictional material had ‘in some measure done him right’.Footnote 83 Of course, it is impossible for us to ascertain what the men sentenced to death for treason actually said before they died. The importance of the Speeches and prayers meanwhile lies in their propaganda value,Footnote 84 and it is to be expected that they were carefully edited for effect by supporters of the cause as were the narratives of suffering of the Marian exiles in John Foxe's Book of martyrs, to which they are often compared and on which the Speeches and prayers might in fact have been modelled.Footnote 85 This propaganda value was also clear to Ludlow, who was determined to make the texts more widely available to a greater audience beyond the English.
As Ludlow reports in the ‘Voyce’, his plan to publish the Speeches and prayers in French met with considerable opposition by one of his fellow exiles, who unfortunately is not named; but Ludlow saw it nevertheless as his ‘duty in relation to God, the deceased Martyrs & witnesses, to the faithfull that remained, & to our selves’ to go ahead with his project, and ‘prevailed to have that worke goe on’, even though ‘for peace sake’ he ‘gave way that some thinges should be omitted which in my opinion were very proper to have bin Inserted’.Footnote 86 That is, Ludlow exercised a certain degree of self-censorship in his defence of the regicides and their cause. Moreover, the work's printer would make further editorial interventions, which Ludlow perceived as a dilution of his message. To understand the rationale of the omissions and changes and the nature and purpose of the work that eventually emerged, we need to have a look at the French translation.
V
The first part of Les juges jugez, se justifiants was a close literal translation of the English Speeches and prayers, although the French grammar and sentence structure would make the text somewhat longer. The pamphlet's size was also inflated by the choice of a larger font type and additional paragraph breaks, which (despite some cuts and omissions I shall outline below) roughly doubled the part of the text based on the Speeches and prayers alone.Footnote 87 Besides, the typography appears overall more careful, as passages of direct and indirect speech are rendered in italics throughout – more consistently than in the English original.Footnote 88 The printer also tidied the structure of the pamphlet, moving Justice Cook's ‘Letter to his Daughter’ forward from page 82 in the English to pages 83 to 85 in the French version to follow his scaffold speech, while the other letters by Cook addressed to various friendsFootnote 89 and to his wifeFootnote 90 have been moved to the back of the French version – between pages 177 and 220 – with a note that these might also be printed if the present letter was well received.Footnote 91 The note, however, is ambiguous, not making it entirely clear if these letters had originally been intended for inclusion in the volume at all. They were most likely moved because the part dealing with Cook took up comparatively more space in the English version than was devoted to the other martyrs and might have tested the readers' patience.Footnote 92 Unlike the original English pamphlet, the French version also has a table of contents in the back to make it easier for the reader to find their way around the text.
The omissions Ludlow had concededFootnote 93 included a sermon preached by Hugh Peters on Psalm 42, which is briefly referred to in the narrative, but not quoted in full as in the original English text,Footnote 94 and the last part of Scott's narrative, consisting of a prayer as well as six lines from another of Scott's prayers.Footnote 95 Both were presumably removed because they digressed from the description of events or might have gone too far into religious exegesis for a wider audience. Several passages from pages 80 to 81, containing some miscellaneous material relating to various regicides, have either been re-arranged, moved elsewhere, or omitted entirely.Footnote 96 Further omissions were of a comparatively minor nature, sometimes only a few lines of text at a time,Footnote 97 and it is not clear if they were taken out because the printer took offence at them, or whether they did not fit with the layout, as they do not appear significantly different in tone from the remaining text.Footnote 98 However, Ludlow did have several specific complaints about unauthorized changes the printer made to the text, which he referred to as ‘many gross mistakes’ which tended ‘to the disadvantadge of the worke’.Footnote 99 Thus, he points out that ‘in the Epistle to the Booke, the first reason mentioned for the publishing thereof being to prevent the wrong which might be done to the deceased, by false & Imperfect Coppyes (& more especially to the Name of God)’Footnote 100 was dropped by the printer, as was ‘the fourth reason’, which had also offended L'Estrange, ‘that men may see what it is to have Interest in [Christ] in a dying hower, … and to be faithfull to his cause’.Footnote 101 And these named errors and omissions were only ‘a taste of the rest’.Footnote 102
Thus, Ludlow complains that the printer had rather toned down the anger Chief Justice Cook expressed in his letter to a friend concerning several traitors or turncoats ‘who had once owned the Cause, & now betrayed it’. The original English letter says that ‘they will wish at the last day, they had bin Jewes, Turkes & Indians, for that the more of light, the greater their Apostacy & Ingratitude’, but the following words are omitted: ‘and sure they will have a peculiar Judgement by themselves, for they doe openly prefer the Cause of Barrabas, before the Cause of Jesus’.Footnote 103 Ludlow complains further that
in the Narrative of Colonell Axtell & Colonell Hackers being drawne to Tiborne, after the relating of the Ropes being tyed about their Necke, & a burning fire kindled before their faces, these wordes are omitted, and being there ready to receive that sentence which Nature would have sunke under, if grace had not supported.Footnote 104
The missing part refers to the extraordinary courage the regicides had displayed in the face of death, which was considered a sign of God's grace in them. Ludlow's final criticism of the French text relates to the closing passage of the English pamphlet which reports on the hanging of Axtell and Hacker. The Speeches and prayers remark on the extraordinarily civil and respectful behaviour of the onlookers. Only two people in the crowd shouted at the hangman to pull away the cart quickly to speed the death of the two ‘Rogues, Traytors, [and] Murtherers’. But the two voices were silenced by a man in the crowd who asked for their respect of the situation; and after listening to Axtell's ‘speech and prayer’ they were so moved that they withdrew to cry. Ludlow, however, complained that the final part of the sentence was missing which described how ‘that man who before desired them to be Civill, went after them, and beheld them to his great admiration, as himselfe reported’.Footnote 105 Again, the omission, in Ludlow's opinion, takes away some of the emotive force of the scene described and thus the impact the regicides' words had on the people. Ludlow clearly thought that the various mistakes and missing (half) sentences weakened the message of the pamphlet and the symbolism of the martyrs' actions. In short, what eventually came off the press in Yverdon was significantly different from what Ludlow had initially intended, and he was not all happy with the changes. Evidence of how much the affair rankled with him is provided in the manuscript of his memoirs, where Ludlow feels once more compelled to express his displeasure.
He also complained that the printer had made unsolicited additions to the pamphlet that were not part of his original commission. For, as the production process dragged on, it was overtaken by events. Ludlow had commissioned the original French translation while in Geneva, well before April 1662, when only the first set of executions of the regicides had taken place. By the time the printer was preparing the pamphlet for production, the three regicides, Barkstead, Corbet, and Okey, who had been arrested in the Netherlands, too had been tried and executed – at the end of May 1662 – and he might have found it expedient to include their speeches and prayers for the sake of producing both a comprehensive and up-to-date work. Moreover, Major General John Lambert and Sir Henry Vane the younger, both ardent defenders of the ‘good old cause’ though not regicides, had been condemned to death on 14 June 1662, which made them too fit subjects for inclusion.Footnote 106 Not having been provided with any (further) material by Ludlow, however, the printer ‘annexeth to the said Booke, what was taken out of the French Gazet’ concerning the trial of Corbet, Barkstead, and Okey.Footnote 107 The advantage was that the material was already in French and therefore did not need translation. However, the version of events as depicted in the French-language press did not find Ludlow's approval. The Gazette de France was more or less a government organ, likely to favour the position of the English authorities.Footnote 108 It is therefore not surprising that Ludlow found the paper was distorting the account of events. According to the narrative included by the printer, Corbet, Barkstead, and Okey had been watched ‘by the Guards of the King, as well as those of the sheriff, to the End that they might hinder the people from offering up themselves those sacrifices’, whereas ‘the trueth’, according to Ludlow, was that ‘they were so strongly guarded least the people should succour them, they being now generally convinced that they were butchered for having asserted their Libertyes’.Footnote 109 Again, in Ludlow's opinion, the account given does not do justice to the regicides' popularity and their cause.
Finally, the printer took ‘what was writ in another Gazet, touching the Tryall & Condemnation of Sir Henry Vane that renowned Patriot’. However, yet again, Ludlow did not like the way in which this saint had been treated by the hacks. For
his Christian Resolution, his faithfull asserting of the Cause of God, & his Country, his Learned & prudent management of the defense of what he had done for the promoting thereof, are termed prolix repeating of the same thinges, Insolent & Injurious carriadge towards his Judges, & ground of a new accusation against him, & he charged with falling into disgressions very extravagant.Footnote 110
However, Vane, ‘as he then evidenced wanted not couradge to owne a good Cause, so at all tymes his greatest Enemyes could not but acknowledge, he was qualified with partes to manage it to the best advantadge’.Footnote 111 To redeem himself, however, the printer – presumably in response to Ludlow's protest – ‘in his Preamble to a more Exact relation of that affaire which [had] come from London in a Publique manuscript, & was printed by him in the End of the said Booke’ together with Vane's scaffold speech, had done the right thing by the great republican hero and saint, so that Ludlow was content he should ‘make no further mention thereof, but leave it to the Lord to cleare up the Innocency of his witnesses’.Footnote 112 Aside from the additional content, the printer also increased the size of the publication in other ways – through font size and layout. The fact that a larger font type was chosen which inflated the size of the pamphlet seems counter-intuitive from a merely economic point of view as paper was the ‘most costly element in book production’ and given that the money for the printing would have to be found.Footnote 113 However, the increased size of the volume would not only have raised its material value but also the pamphlet's physical presence and thus added to its perceived significance. The physical presence of the pamphlet or book thus complemented the weight of its contents, and there is no reason to doubt the commercial nature of the motive behind this decision. For the marketing of the pamphlet, meanwhile, the title page and the title itself were probably the most important elements.
VI
Unlike the English title page, the French version has neither the names of the regicides nor their dates of execution, presumably because the English names would have meant little to a francophone audience, which might not have known individual regicides. At the same time, the regicides' execution dates were removed since the events strictly speaking were no longer ‘news’ by the time the translation was ready for distribution. Thus, the pamphlet was transformed from a hastily put together underground news publication into a more timeless work. It dealt less with issues of the hour and spoke more to the ages. In the process, the most important of all changes was made to the title itself.
The rather neutrally descriptive The speeches and prayers of some of the late king's judges in French became Les juges jugez, se justifiants Footnote 114 – a title putting the emphasis on justice and the concept of ‘justification’ in all its semantic breadth and ambiguity in a legal as well as religious context. For ‘justification’ could here be understood both as a defence of the regicides' actions and the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Ludlow himself elaborates at length on the rationale for the title chosen. Again, it was the printer who took the initiative, having his own business in mind. As Ludlow notes: ‘under pretence that it was necessary to annex a Title for the better sale of the Booke, & because none was sent him, we thinking it not necessary, he intitles it Les Juges Jugez’.Footnote 115 This title, according to Ludlow, was ‘thought a high Reflection upon those faithfull witnesses who had made their Appeale to the great Tribunall’. Yet, the regicides ‘being satisfied in their owne Conscience, as to the Justice of what they had done and for which now they suffered, and being also cleared in the Judgements of all unbyassed & disinterested persons’ it was initially thought ‘that it ought rather to be intituled Les Juges Jugez & Justifiez’.Footnote 116 But as ‘more was to be said in their Justification, it was thought fit rather that to Les Juges Jugez should be added se Justifians’.Footnote 117 This seemed to Ludlow an appropriate title (not least because he attempted to help along the convincing work the regicides yet had to do in the light of the outrage their actions had caused across Europe),Footnote 118 and the printer too seemed ‘well satisfied with the amendment’. However, Ludlow had expected the extended title to be ‘inserted in the Topp of every leafe,’ while ‘instead thereof it was only added to the Leafe which was the frontispeece of the Booke, which might be added, or not, at pleasure’.Footnote 119 Ludlow obviously thought the extension to the title was crucial to the understanding of the pamphlet and ensured the reader would be reminded on every page that the king's judges might have been judged by a human court, but were also able to justify their actions with the help of God. The insistence on this arguably minor change of the title is significant, because it adds weight to the regicides' cause.
As Andrea McKenzie has pointed out, last dying speeches have commonly been considered as holding up established authority as convicts confessed to their deeds, showed remorse for their actions, and thus acted as a deterrent for other criminals as they faced their just punishment. But the convicts' speeches, prayers, and comportment at their scene of execution, in particular the ‘discourse of divine judgement’ could also be used in a subversive way to challenge secular authority, as was the case with the regicides, who acknowledged ‘no King but Jesus’.Footnote 120 Republicans frequently drew on the Old Testament Book of Samuel to make this point: God had been angered by the Israelites' request for a king because it constituted a rejection of his authority over them.Footnote 121 The regicides' political actions, in contrast, had been guided by God's will. Both the Speeches and prayers and its French translation highlighted the fact that the regicides – in fulfilling God's will – were not afraid of death. The friends who came to visit Harrison in prison in the days before his execution ‘found him full of the Joy of the Lord’,Footnote 122 and he ‘parted with his wife and friends with great joy, and chearfulnesse as he did use to doe when going some journey or about some service for the Lord’.Footnote 123 Likewise, Cook was ‘preparing himself for his Suffering, with such a chearfulnesse, as an Astonishment to the spectators’.Footnote 124 Such a ‘chearfull countenance’ in the anticipation of death was usually seen by contemporaries as a sign of innocence and affirmed the belief that God gave the righteous extra strength in their suffering.Footnote 125 Thus, John Carew noted: ‘I can doe nothing of my selfe, but my strength is in the Lord of Hosts, who hath helped me from my beginning to this day, and will help me to the end.’Footnote 126 He was equally sure that ‘[t]hough man have Condemned yet the Lord hath and doth justifie’.Footnote 127 Similarly, Cook told his friends that ‘it matters not who condemns, when God justifies’.Footnote 128 On being reminded by some ‘disaffected’ that ‘the Jesuits’ also ‘suffered cheerfully and confidently’, however, Cook is said to have replied that his justification was ‘not built upon the merits of Works, but alone upon Grace in the bloud of Christ’, thus asserting the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.Footnote 129 In his ‘Speech upon the Ladder’, Harrison also showed himself confident, citing Scripture, that his God, ‘the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords’ would ‘never leave those that truly trust in him, unto whose Glory I shall surely go, and shall sit on the right hand of Christ in Heaven, it may be to Judge those that have Unjustly Judged me’.Footnote 130 Of course, Harrison here also recalls the words of Christ in his sermon on the mount: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’, warning his disciples against rash judgement of their neighbours.Footnote 131 Harrison meanwhile could die in peace because he had God on his side, and while a worldly court had ‘unjustly’ found him guilty, God had reserved his place in heaven.
The same pattern was followed by the execution narratives of Corbet, Barkstead, Okey, and Vane, added to the French translation. Although the accounts are comparatively much shorter than those of the other martyrs and patched together from a variety of other publications, they were fitted into the same format of events leading up to the execution, ‘occasional speeches’ and ‘dying speeches’, including the stage-acting performances.Footnote 132 If the regicides and Vane were able to walk towards their death with confidence and a cheerful disposition, this was proof of their innocence because God had given them the gift of his grace.Footnote 133 But the regicides and saints were not just judged by a human court. At the same time as being tried and resisting worldly authority through their strength, they were also witnesses to the kingdom of God and his cause, as John Carew pointed out in his scaffold speech:
I desire to bear witness to the true Magistracy, that Magistracy that is in the Word of the Lord. And that true Ministery, which is a Ministery from the anointing; that doth beare witness to the Lord Jesus, and hath his holy Spirit. That testimony I desire to bear, and that destimony [sic] I desire to stand faithfull in, with integrity to the Lord Jesus, as King of Saints, and King of Nations.Footnote 134
Scot's prayer went: ‘thy poor and unworthy Creature comes now to bear his Witness in this great Spectacle, before Thee, Angels and Men’.Footnote 135 As models of human virtue chosen by their creator to spread his word even in their hour of death, the martyrs had fulfilled their purpose, while their speeches and prayers, published and immortalized in pamphlet form, could serve as an evangelization tool. In this way, the Speeches and prayers and their French translation were similar to other works of Protestant hagiography and martyrology, including exemplary ‘lives’, that were often circulated after the Restoration in print or manuscript form ‘for the encouragement of the Saints’.Footnote 136
Despite Ludlow's many criticisms of the translation and its various omissions and expansions, it could be argued that its evocative title and emphasis on justification made the French pamphlet much clearer in its message than the various texts on which it was based and thus open in its purpose. And, as Ludlow himself conceded, the printer was sympathetic to their cause, albeit more mindful to his profit, and thus intent on producing a work that would sell as well as deliver a message.Footnote 137 The pamphlet was ‘calling God to witness’ and a witness to God.Footnote 138 Thus, as the pamphlet was translated, edited, and modified for a new audience, the regicides were turned into timeless witnesses of God's cause. And as the need for a translation of their justification indicates, the English or British context was not wide enough. But who was the translation intended to reach?
VII
Naturally, the people of Geneva and French-speaking Switzerland would be Ludlow's most immediate audience. But given that the exiles were trying to keep a low profile – being on the run from the English king with a premium on their heads and threatened by various assassination attemptsFootnote 139 – it seems unlikely that Ludlow was targeting a local readership, unless it was in an attempt to get fellow Protestants to rally behind the regicides for their protection.Footnote 140 That such a network of Protestants, primarily Calvinists but also including other varieties of reformed Christians, existed and had been built up from the mid-sixteenth century onwards has been demonstrated by Ole Peter Grell, who has tracked the movements and fate of a number of Lucchese families displaced time and time again by surges of religious persecution. Geneva had once been the (spiritual) centre of this network, but was now struggling to maintain this position under pressure from neighbouring states. However, French was not just the language of Geneva, it was also the language of Protestants elsewhere in Europe, first of all of the Huguenots in France, but also in parts of the Netherlands and a great number of Huguenot refugees and their descendants all over Europe.Footnote 141 Over the course of the seventeenth century, French also came to rival Latin – as the language associated with Rome and the papacy – as the new European lingua franca in scholarly discourse.Footnote 142
In this context, the man who printed the pamphlet itself is interesting as Ludlow tells us that he ‘practised physick’ at Yverdon and thus was not strictly a printer by trade.Footnote 143 This description clearly points towards Dominique Chabrey, a Genevan physician who had established himself in Yverdon in 1648 and bought a disused printing press to produce a work on botany he was interested in.Footnote 144 He subsequently appears to have taken on other jobs to supplement his income, but never built up a bigger business.Footnote 145 He remained for a long time the only printer in Yverdon. As the son of a Protestant minister from Geneva, Chabrey might have been sympathetic to Ludlow's cause, but he also needed the money.Footnote 146 Hence, he might have tried to turn Les juges jugez, se justifiants into a viable commercial venture. As Jean-Pierre Perret has pointed out, the printers of Yverdon produced their works not just for the Swiss, but primarily for the French market. Most of the works coming off the press in seventeenth-century Yverdon would be sold in the bookshops of Lyon and elsewhere in France.Footnote 147 However, print runs were relatively small. While Chabrey's predecessor in Yverdon, Candolle, had print runs between 1,000 and 3,000 copies, the average print run was closer to 500.Footnote 148 And there is no reason why Les juges jugez should have been an exception. Presumably, a work like Les juges jugez, se justifiants would be particularly attractive for the Huguenot market across the border and possibly the French-speaking parts of the Netherlands. After all, exporting their works to France and elsewhere had been common of the printers dotted along the Franco-Swiss border since the sixteenth century.Footnote 149 The target audience for the French translation of the Speeches and prayers of the regicides, with its additional material on other saints and martyrs, thus might have been Protestant Europe, and the text of Les juges jugez, se justifiants an appeal to solidarity among Protestants, in particular for their persecuted brothers and sisters. Maybe, it was even an attempt by Ludlow to improve the security of his own situation by turning to popular sentiment and reminding fellow Protestants of their duty to rally behind their co-religionists in times of trouble – just as his own safety had been put at risk.
VIII
Thus, far from being a group of isolated English exiles in a foreign country, Edmund Ludlow and the other regicides who settled in Switzerland during the Restoration were part of a wider European network of radical Protestants and contributed to a discourse of faith and persecution through their translation and publication of the Speeches and prayers of the English republican martyrs. If ‘“A Voyce from the Watch Tower” was clearly written with a nonconformist audience in mind’ and intended ‘to fortify and unite the godly in England’, as Blair Worden contends, then Les juges jugez, se justifiants was published for the godly in Europe.Footnote 150
However, the distribution of their narratives of suffering in Protestant Europe was only the beginning. Ultimately, the regicides wanted the story of their fate narrated around the world, as the passage from Ludlow's ‘Voyce’ indicates, which I quoted earlier in the article. After all, the regicides and republican martyrs saw themselves as members of God's invisible church around the word, and the Speeches and prayers could be used as tools in their evangelical mission. Thus, Ludlow agreed with the regicide and martyr John Carew, that the last words of those who died for the ‘good old cause’ would not just be useful to Protestants at home and across Europe, but also ‘to the Churches of Christ beyond the Seaes’.Footnote 151 Given that the words of the republican martyrs were now available both in English and in French, this might include English puritans as well as French Huguenots in the Americas.Footnote 152 This international nature of Ludlow's republicanism and his faith in the church of all true believers around the world was also confirmed by the motto he had mounted above the door of his house in Vevey: ‘Omne solum forti patria quia patris.’ The motto roughly translates as: ‘To the brave every land is a fatherland because it is of the father.’ The first part is taken from Ovid's Fasti, while the addition ‘quia patris’, which gives it a religious twist, was presumably by Ludlow himself.Footnote 153 Persecution was thus part of a greater divine plan, in which Ludlow willingly played his part because he was prepared to go wherever providence would lead him.
As I have suggested in my introduction, scholarship on seventeenth-century English republicanism could benefit from extending its reach both thematically (into the religious sphere) and geographically (into Europe). Extending our research on seventeenth-century English republicanism to transnational religious and political networks would also provide a crucial link to and shed further light on the emergence and development of a republican legacy in Europe as explored in Blair Worden's Roundhead reputations, Rachel Hammersley's work on the English republican tradition in France, and by Roland Ludwig on the afterlife of the English Revolution in nineteenth-century German historiography and political philosophy.Footnote 154 Through a fuller exploration of religious and transnational networks within Europe we might thus be able to piece together a more coherent, if not a grand narrative of Britain and Europe's shared republican heritage.
