The history of political thought, at least for the post-medieval period, tends to be overly dominated by jurisprudence, and, even more narrowly, by sovereignty. It asks: What beliefs were held about the final source of legislation, adjudication, and coercion? Not least of the merits of Joanne Paul's Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought is that it places center stage a contrasting and distinctive tradition of counsel. Counsel is prior to command. Virtuous and effective rule requires the wisdom of the counselor. A conceptual history of counsel is less a history of institutions, laws, and arms than of virtue, prudence, and praxis. Paul joins others who have recently illuminated counsel, notably Jacqueline Rose. In her deft and lucid exposition, Paul encompasses much. Her story runs from Erasmus to the Civil War. Though “English” is in the title, a good deal is said about continental authors such as Erasmus, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Lipsius, Montaigne, Botero, Boccalini, Gentillet—rightly, because they were widely read in England. Paul heightens our awareness of the politics of translation and redaction, for example in the case of Robert Johnson's serial editions of Malvezzi's Relationi universali. Likewise, she explains the ubiquitously cited classical sources (Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch). The English writers whom she reviews include More, Starkey, Elyot, Pole, Bacon, Thomas Coryate, Thomas Blundeville, Robert Parsons, Thomas Scott, and William Prynne. There is abundant textual excavation here.

The modulations of counsel are explored. The pursuit of virtue gives way to Machiavellian “reason of state” and the pursuit of effectiveness. The concept of kairos (the opportune moment) is accented. Counsel comes under profound pressure in the reigns of the later Tudor child and female monarchs. (Not least of the value of Paul's book is her engagement with political as well as intellectual historians.) Counsel became informed by the wisdom of travelers, by a new political anthropology, and also by the wisdom of history, the counsel of the dead. The discourse of counsel had its inverse: warnings about the perversion of good rule by evil counsel and the favorite. Such figures as Sejanus and Piers Gaveston (confidants respectively of Tiberius and Edward II) became stock in trade in besmirching the court parasites of an ill-counseled monarch.

Paul follows, perhaps too readily, the current republican paradigm, tending to presume that monarchy was understood as being, of its nature, tyrannical, and that early modern English humanists were implicit republicans. Thus, counsel is construed as a republican mitigation of monarchic tyranny. The humanist committed to the vita activa is said to become a counsellor “where there was no opportunity to establish a republic” (15). This arguably elides republics as a form of regime with republics in the looser sense of orientation toward “commonwealth,” “public good,” and salus populi. The elision tends to suppress the extent to which early moderns regarded monarchy as “closest to nature” (as Ottaviano holds in The Book of the Courtier, quoted at 38).

A central theme in Paul's account is the unavoidable tension between counsel and command. If counsel is ignored, it seems nugatory; if counsel is compulsory, it usurps command. In the latter case, counsel mutates into a constitutional claim. There was always slippage between “counsel” and “council.” Paul argues that this tension reached its final crisis in the 1640s. For Henry Parker, the king must be counseled, and by his parliament. Further, counsel must be public and not clandestine or closeted: Parker railed against the evil of “privadoes.” Hobbes, in riposte, was eager to suppress the claims of counsel: sovereign command nakedly emerges. The Civil War was thus the “death knell for the discourse of counsel” (2).

Reading Paul's book suggests further lines of exploration that a longer, or different book, might take up. First, as well as a humanist tradition, was there not a Thomist, Scholastic tradition, under which counsel was a species of every individual's moral self-rule? Right action requires the union of reason and will, of deliberation and volition. The prince should not act alone, because of the defect of the single intellect. Wisdom, said Aristotle, is collective. “Many eyes see more than fewer” was Parker's rendition of Aristotle's adage (192). God's perfection consists in the perfect union of his intellect and his will: he counsels himself to discover what ought to be done and he commands it. The earthly prince should emulate this. This was the Scholastic parallelism between divine and earthly rule.

Further, what of priests as counselors? In a Christian polity, counselors are as likely to be divines and prelates as humanist laymen. Ecclesiastical counselors kept constantly in mind the archetypal case of Saint Ambrose, who required penance of the Emperor Theodosius. The priest may never coerce a misguided sovereign, but, many argued, he may impose spiritual censures. There is, then, a moral philosophy and theology of counsel to be explained. It is occasionally glimpsed here: Robert Filmer appealed to the “distinction of the schoolmen” in asserting that “the king is free from the coactive power of laws and counsellors, but may be subject to their directive power” (200).

Second, might not Paul's story extend beyond 1651 (the date of Leviathan)? Restoration theorists of absolute monarchy had much to say about counsel, precisely because it lent wisdom to rule without fatally coercing the ruler. That way they could limit monarchy morally, but not constitutionally. Nor does the story end with the Restoration. Paradoxically, John Locke would partially have agreed with his enemies, within the legitimate sphere of the royal prerogative. When, as a counselor to William III in the 1690s, he sat on the Board of Trade and Plantations, the crown routinely gave effect to his advice. The board had no formal powers whatever, yet it governed America through the political alchemy by which merely formal command animated the substance of counsel. Locke, the king's counselor, was not so distant from the humanist tradition.