The legacy of the early Stuart MP Sir John Eliot (1592–1632) has been subject to markedly different interpretations in the centuries since his death, representing a pressure point for competing accounts of the period more generally. Writing in the early eighteenth century, the historian and Tory sympathizer Laurence Echard castigated Eliot for helping ‘to blow up such a flame in the House, as was never extinguished: a remarkable consequence of a restless and indefatigable malice, when mix'd with the plausible appearance of a public good’.Footnote 1 Yet in the nineteenth century, Eliot became a focus for so-called ‘whig’ interpretations of the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, inspiring reverence in historians for whom he had led the Commons in safeguarding English liberties against the ‘despotic’ tendencies of Charles I.Footnote 2 From the 1970s, this whig portrayal of Jacobean and early Caroline politics as an increasing, ideologically driven struggle for power between king and parliament began to be challenged by an emerging school of revisionist historians. It was now argued that, far from being beset by division and opposition on legal and constitutional issues, early Stuarts were in fact in fundamental agreement on the majority of ideological questions. Most MPs were accordingly motivated not by principle but by a desire to protect and advance their local or factional interests, and Eliot's career was presented as having been no exception.Footnote 3
This article takes as its focus a less-well-documented aspect of Eliot's life and career: his composition and circulation of political texts. In particular, it will examine his most extensive treatise, The monarchie of man. As one of the few parliamentary leaders of the 1620s to commit his views to formal political writing, these works not only offer insight into Eliot personally, but present an opportunity to assess the character of political thought in early Stuart England. Eliot's transition from prominent MP to political author was, in some senses, an enforced one. Having been imprisoned at various junctures throughout the decade for pursuing policies against the wishes of the king – the impeachment of the duke of Buckingham, his resistance to the Forced Loan – Eliot was again committed to the Tower of London in 1629, this time for his part in the riotous protests that accompanied the dissolution of the parliamentary session at the beginning of March. Although the other ringleaders were freed in the following months, Eliot would remain incarcerated until his death on 27 November 1632.
While imprisoned, Eliot continued to correspond regularly with his friends and parliamentary allies, leaving a letter-book amongst his papers that enables a vivid reconstruction of the wretched conditions that he endured in the Tower. Moreover, like so many other prisoners in early modern England, he spent his time reading, writing, and translating.Footnote 4 His Negotium posterorum provides an account of proceedings in the Commons during the 1620s, while a thinly veiled defence of his case, and his reasons for denying the judicial authority of the King's Bench, is supplied by the Apology for Socrates.Footnote 5 However, the two texts that have understandably attracted the most scholarly attention are those containing a coherent and systematic political theory: The monarchie of man and De jure majestatis. The latter, as will be seen, is a problematic text: though previously considered an original composition, J. H. Salmon was the first to recognize it as a translation of a treatise by the German theorist Henning Arnisaeus (1570–1636).Footnote 6 The monarchie of man, however, is undoubtedly Eliot's own composition.
In more recent years, historians have increasingly challenged and refined the revisionist picture of consensus and co-operation in early Stuart politics.Footnote 7 A particularly interesting development in this respect, epitomized in the work of Noah Millstone, has been the greater appreciation of manuscript sources as forms of political engagement.Footnote 8 Despite this general historiographical trend, however, the foremost accounts of Eliot's political works remain those offered or developed by revisionist historians. This article therefore attempts to revisit Eliot's thought in light of the more recent historical literature on political culture prior to the Civil War. A number of common positions on the works composed by Eliot will be addressed here. The first is shared by several commentators, including R. W. K. Hinton, J. N. Ball, and, more recently, Kevin Sharpe, and represents the most frequently rehearsed understanding of Eliot's political thought.Footnote 9 On this reading, Eliot came while imprisoned in the Tower to acknowledge and articulate the necessity for government by absolute rule, and his written works are correspondingly held to reveal an absolutist conception of monarchical power. Characterized by a Bodinian account of sovereignty, they grant the king wide discretionary powers and assign representative bodies such a limited role that Eliot endangered the very future of parliament.
These claims are premised on two assumptions. The first is that, although it is a translation of Arnisaeus, De jure should nonetheless be taken as a summation of Eliot's own political beliefs; the second, that the central tenets of De jure are entirely consistent with the views propounded in Monarchie of man. Here, I challenge both these assumptions. Instead, it will be argued that De jure and Monarchie of man assume contradictory positions on fundamental political questions, such as the nature of law, the king's relationship to it, and the place and purpose of parliaments in an ideal commonwealth. There is therefore a tension between the two texts that requires explanation, and I argue that this is provided by considering in detail the manuscript histories of the respective texts. In formulating their interpretations of Eliot, historians have never considered the form and circulation of either De jure or Monarchie of man. However, by paying attention to the material instantiation of these works, it becomes clear that De jure should be regarded as a fundamentally different kind of exercise to Monarchie of man. While it will be shown that the latter was intended for wide public circulation – and therefore that its arguments represent an attempt to intervene politically – there is no evidence that De jure was conceived as a similar project. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. I will suggest therefore that Eliot translated Arnisaeus, not because he endorsed his theories of royal power, but because these views in fact represented the kind of absolutist notions that Eliot was attempting to dismantle with his own work.
A distinct, but related, strain of interpretation has characterized The monarchie of man specifically as an uncontroversial and conventional text, which refuses to engage with its contemporary political context. Margaret Judson, for instance, claims that ‘Eliot seems to ignore the problems and issues of his own day and to philosophize in literary clouds where true harmony prevailed.’Footnote 10 Conrad Russell agrees, describing the work as ‘a straightforward great chain of being work setting forward ideas of order, harmony, and correspondence’.Footnote 11 In fact, Monarchie of man engages very deliberately with what Eliot perceives as the maladies currently afflicting the commonwealth, and the treatise needs to be understood primarily as a response to the constitutional crisis of the late 1620s.
Nor can the text be dismissed as uncontroversial. Eliot demonstrates a subversive willingness to ascribe tyrannical characteristics to Charles I personally, a willingness reflected not only in the direct discussions of tyranny in the text, but in the very modes of discourse and argumentation Eliot adopts throughout. With any hopes of parliament meeting again seemingly extinguished by the time Eliot came to write, and with the king perceived as unwilling to act within the confines of established law, arguments based on custom and precedent lose the purchase they had once had. Instead, he expounds an ethical theory, inspired by classical sources, and designed to safeguard the common good and keep the king from tyrannical courses. The monarchie of man therefore represents a response to the perceived growth of tyranny, the recent failure of counsel, and the unsettling prospect of ‘politics without parliaments’.Footnote 12
I
Although it contains no chapter or title-breaks in its surviving manuscript, Monarchie of man can be divided into two broad parts. In the first – making up roughly a third of the work's 70,000 words – Eliot considers explicitly political questions. He seeks to determine the forms and processes of government that are necessary to maintain a just and harmonious polity. Following convention, he at no point mentions England (or any contemporary government) specifically, instead drawing on a host of classical and biblical precedents to make his points. Similarly, texts and authorities from Eliot's own day are rarely invoked in the text: Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Cicero are the authors most extensively cited. In the second section, Eliot seeks to establish the means of self-government that promote felicity, and it is to this aspect of his project that his title refers: the ‘monarchie of man’ is the rule we institute over ourselves – our passions and desires – in order to achieve true happiness. Richard Tuck, and more recently Ethan Shagan, have shown that the need for self-government to moderate and bridle the passions was axiomatic in early modern ethical discourse, and Eliot's preoccupation is in this respect no means novel.Footnote 13 As will be argued, however, his ethical discussion is not simply introspective, but designed to remedy the political maladies of the commonwealth. The two sections of the text are therefore importantly linked.
Dating the composition of Monarchie of man precisely is problematic, not least because Eliot rarely identifies his works by their final titles in his correspondence. Letters exchanged with John Hampden hint that Eliot may have begun working on it as early as May 1630, although it was not until April 1631 that Hampden received the first part of the treatise.Footnote 14 By the early months of 1632, the completed Monarchie of man was circulating more widely amongst friends and correspondents, with Eliot keen to elicit comment and criticism of it. Richard James, the librarian of Sir Robert Cotton, sent a list of factual details for amendment on 15 January, while ten days later Eliot asked Sir Oliver Luke to return the manuscript ‘with the correction of your judgement’.Footnote 15 That both friends were apparently in possession of the treatise near-simultaneously suggests, significantly, the production of multiple copies, a conclusion corroborated by surviving manuscript evidence. As well as a less neatly transcribed and incomplete version among Eliot's papers,Footnote 16 a fair copy in Eliot's hand exists in the Harleian Collection of the British Library.Footnote 17 This bears the armorial bookplate of John Holles, 1st duke of Newcastle (1662–1711), presumably having passed into the possession of the Holles family through Denzil Holles (1598–1680), friend of Eliot and fellow participant in the protests that ended the 1629 parliamentary session.Footnote 18 An elegant and ornate title-page precedes the Harleian copy, which is written out in a careful, consistent hand.
Furthermore, certain textual details reveal a concern with the book's reception and interpretation. For example, Eliot devised a foreword for Monarchie of man addressed, not to a patron or associate in particular, but to ‘the reader’ in general. He also consistently demonstrates an awareness of the potential hazards that he faces should his words be misconstrued. The king's prerogative, for instance, is described as ‘a point so tender it will hardly bear a mention, we may not therefore handle it with any roughness, least it reflect some new beame of terrour on ourselves’.Footnote 19 With regard to the ‘art and rule’ of government in general, Eliot observes that ‘no small controversies have been mov'd, & such ill spirits raised…like that great Dragon in the Scriptures, that even our thoughts are dangerous’.Footnote 20
This all indicates that Eliot envisaged his treatise reaching a literate audience beyond his immediate close circle of sympathizers. In this, he again received encouragement from his correspondents, with Richard James stating his desire to see the work ‘printed for the use of our countrie, peradventure it would raise them to somme apprehension of equanimitie, magnanimitie and justice’.Footnote 21 Crucially, however, both James and the MP Thomas Hatcher recognized the difficulty and danger in publishing the work, and the consequent need for anonymity: ‘if you shall be of mind to let it come forth silently, the intimation of the author twice given, may be easily altered’.Footnote 22
During the 1620s, Eliot had shown himself consistently willing to utilize manuscript circulation and commercial scribal networks in order to advance the various causes he pursued in the House of Commons. His membership of the intellectual and political circle that centred on Sir Robert Cotton is here significant.Footnote 23 Employing professional scribes like Ralph Starkey to copy out items from Cotton's library, this group frequently circulated speeches, petitions, and other political texts in manuscript.Footnote 24 Eliot's Petition from the gatehouse, for instance, detailing his reasons for refusing the Forced Loan in 1627, was widely circulated as a ‘separate’. The petition survives in at least twenty manuscript copies and was reported to be ‘wandering among the subjects in Cornwall’ shortly after its production.Footnote 25 Similarly, numerous copies of Eliot's ‘protestation’ of 2 March 1629, which declared any counsellor advising the imposition of levies on Tonnage and Poundage to be ‘a capital enemy to the kingdom’, were transcribed and ‘spread abroad rapidly’.Footnote 26
This is important for our understanding of The monarchie of man because it establishes Eliot as someone well practised in disseminating political texts amongst a wider audience, as a means of supplementing or – post-1629 – replacing the means of political engagement open to him as a leading MP in the Commons. It reinforces the impression gleaned from his correspondence and his manuscript production, that Eliot's treatise was intended as a potentially public document, designed to challenge and persuade, to make an intervention politically in spite of his personal circumstances. The text's content is not simply aimed at personal solace or satisfaction, but is premised on a wide and diverse readership. This is essential to bear in mind and should shape both our interpretation of Eliot's particular arguments and how we evaluate their significance in relation to broader themes in the historiography of early Stuart political thought and culture more generally.
II
The conception of monarchy Eliot initially advances in The monarchie of man is decidedly uncontentious. Because they come closest to embodying ‘that great Monarchie & Kingdome, quod sub Jove nomen habet’, he declares that, ‘of all Governments, Kingdoms are the best’.Footnote 27 It seems, however, that forms of government, for Eliot, are only divinely sanctioned in as far as they continue to secure and advance the common good – something he tacitly acknowledges even monarchies may cease to do: ‘no virtue in operation is so sacred but Circumstance may corrupt it’.Footnote 28 If princes were originally endowed with a divine quality separating and raising them above the rest of humanity, this has since ceased to be the case, having ‘contracted a corruption…by which they lost that pristine state of excellence’ after the Fall.Footnote 29
Crucially, this opens up the possibility that the king could stray from the path of righteousness, and for this reason other earthly institutions are required, which ensure that the common good is preserved and promoted: ‘because now Princes have lost of that perfection, it is necessary…lawes should be prescribed, that, by that form and rule, all Judgements might be regulated and each mans right squared out by the Diameter’.Footnote 30 Parliament is similarly integral to achieving balanced and harmonious government. Eliot consistently presents an idealized, if familiar, conception of parliament as an essential mediator between the king and his people, and a source of honest counsel. ‘A senate’, he explains, is ‘as necessary in the government as the mind in the body, that does illuminate & informe it: which shows both the excellence & necessity, that a state cannot be well, nor hardly be without it.’Footnote 31
Moreover, since the laws of the realm are described as providing a crucial safeguard against the development of tyranny or misrule, Eliot is eager to stress at every turn that the law is superior to the king and restricts his powers significantly – he is not to be left ‘arbitrary & at large’.Footnote 32 He insists that ‘the law is Rex Omnium, as Pindarus says, the king and governor of all kings’, and therefore ‘in right…Princes are to be regulated by the lawes, and the lawes have an operation on the Prince’.Footnote 33 Eliot gives no indication in Monarchie of man that the king could alter the laws. Instead, the law is portrayed as an external standard to which the monarch is kept, an ‘impartial arbiter of governments’ as Eliot succinctly styled it in his petition to the king while imprisoned in 1627.Footnote 34 In this, he reflects a conception of law shared by many early Stuarts, particularly Eliot's fellow MPs. The difference between this understanding and, say, a Bodinian notion of law as the command of the sovereign was brought into focus during the parliamentary debates over the Petition of Right in 1628. Sir Dudley Digges epitomized the ancient constitutionalist mindset when he described the laws of England as ‘so ancient that from Saxon days notwithstanding the injuries and ruines of time, they have continued in most part the same’.Footnote 35 In the committee responsible for drawing up the petition, Edward Alford mentioned Bodin's specific use of the term sovereignty as ‘an absolute and perpetual power of the commonwealth’. To this, Sir Edward Coke notoriously responded: ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that will have no sovereign.’Footnote 36 Although it will be shown that Monarchie of man significantly refrains from engaging in ancient constitutionalist arguments invoking custom and precedent, the conception of law Eliot presents is consistent with the assertions of Digges and Coke: law exists independently of the king's will, and the king is not able legitimately to alter or override the law.Footnote 37 This will be an important distinction to consider when situating Eliot in relation to Bodin and Arnisaeus.
How exactly was the king to be kept to the law? This is not a question Eliot deals with explicitly. Nor should his failure to do so surprise us. This was a text intended for public consumption and there were few surer ways of having a book suppressed or provoking the ire of authorities in Jacobean or Caroline England than proffering an extended meditation on the question of resistance to unlawful rulers.Footnote 38 In fact, as will be shown, Eliot's proposed remedy for deficiencies in government is more nuanced than simply encouraging sedition or active resistance. At the same time, Eliot is clear that monarchical commands contrary to established law do not need to be obeyed by the subject: ‘if any command be given’ by the prince, which is ‘contrary to the lawes, they [i.e. his subjects] should in no case observe it’.Footnote 39
In these respects, Eliot's theory on the origins of power and on optimum government seems calculated to respond to a very particular strand of monarchical thought, which had been utilized in support of Charles's extra-parliamentary levies in 1627. In particular, the royalist clerics Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Manwaring both preached sermons that became the subject of intense controversy in print and parliament.Footnote 40 For both preachers, any act of disobedience against the divinely appointed sovereign – be it active or passive – constituted a violation of God's will: ‘he that resisteth the Prince resisteth the power and ordinance of God, and consequently shall receive damnation’.Footnote 41 Furthermore, because God committed power ‘onely and immediately to his own Viceregents’, other earthly institutions were necessarily subordinate to the king's will. Laws, Manwaring argued, ‘take their binding force from the supreme will of the liege lord’, while Sibthorpe likewise insisted that it was ‘the King's duty…to direct and make laws’.Footnote 42 As Archbishop Abbot pointed out when refusing to license Sibthorpe's sermon, this implied that parliament had no role to play in the process.Footnote 43 Both Sibthorpe and Manwaring maintained therefore that the subject had no right to withhold taxation from his sovereign: any laws safeguarding property could be abrogated when the king's will or necessity demanded.
Such brazenly absolutist arguments inevitably met with intense hostility from MPs. In 1628, the Commons charged Manwaring with ‘a wicked and malicious intention to seduce and misguide the conscience of the King…touching the observation of the laws and custome of this kingdom, and the rights and liberties of subjects’.Footnote 44 For someone like Eliot – imprisoned for refusing the Forced Loan and consistently committed to defending parliament's role in government – absolutist clerics like Sibthorpe and Manwaring represented a dangerous antithesis to his own conceptions of power and law. This is something he seems to acknowledge explicitly in Monarchie of man when he observes how ‘there is such a confluence of flatterie conducing to our prejudice, such labour to make Monarchie unlimited, an absoluteness of government without rule, so much affection or corruption rather specified, such distortion & perversion of Authorities to that end’. He then singles out the clerical exponents of these theories more directly, denouncing how ‘learning [has been] made prostitute to fallacie, Religion turn'd to pollicie, Heaven brought downe to earth, light transformed to darkness, as to attempt against it is now to row against the tide’.Footnote 45
In establishing his theory on the origins and nature of political power, Eliot thus not only seeks to emphasize the pre-eminence of law and parliament in a harmonious polity, but actively identifies, and distinguishes himself from, those contemporary viewpoints that sought to reserve vast resources of discretionary power for the monarch, at the expense of other institutions.
III
Eliot's fierce assertions denouncing the strain of royalist thought that had become increasingly strongly developed during the debates of the late 1620s are hard to reconcile with the opinion shared by scholars such as Hinton, Ball, and Sharpe, among others, that his political works reveal an absolutist conception of monarchical power. Hinton's hypothesis regarding a broad trajectory in the history of political thought rested in no small part on such a view of Eliot: ‘in the history of our constitutional theory from Sir John Fortescue to Sir John Eliot, we may observe a switch from the theory of mixed government to the theory of absolute government under the rule of law’.Footnote 46 For Sharpe, Eliot came during his time in the Tower to concede ‘that parliament had only a limited place in the government of England’ and to ‘define monarchical authority in a manner which might have served to destroy the independence of parliament’.Footnote 47
Both Hinton and Sharpe, however, base their evidence almost entirely on De jure, the problems and implications of which will shortly be addressed. Ball, on the other hand, interprets The monarchie of man itself as an absolutist text, claiming that ‘it contains nothing which is in conflict with the De jure majestatis’.Footnote 48 Citing Eliot's use of Arnisaeus and Bodin in the text, he argues that ‘Eliot had no doubt that sovereignty existed, nor that in England it lay with the king.’Footnote 49 Ball's argument rests heavily on his contention that Eliot recognizes ‘the necessity for prerogative power in the monarch’, and grants ‘“mysteries of state” and arcana imperii to kings’.Footnote 50 Nowhere in the treatise, however, is there any indication that Eliot allows the necessity of arcana imperii for kingship. His only use of the phrase comes when he discusses the question of ordering one's emotions and attitudes, i.e. the processes of self-government.Footnote 51
Moreover, while Eliot certainly does grant the monarch a discretionary power, this is severely limited and entirely consistent with his view of the monarch as beholden to the law. Eliot concedes that the prerogative is necessary in order to prevent ‘those evils, which the law by power or terrour cannot reach, be it either forraigne or domesticke’, and proceeds to give numerous examples, all relating to defence and foreign policy.Footnote 52 However, although many early Stuart Englishmen granted the king ‘a right to act in areas outside the jurisdiction of English common law’ it was by no means ‘the case that the absolute prerogative could be used to contravene positive (or common) law’.Footnote 53 Indeed, Alan Cromartie has argued that the prerogative was interpreted by many (most obviously Sir Edward Coke) as being simultaneously discretionary and restrained by law: ‘the right of making war and peace, for example, was exercised at the pleasure of the king, but this discretionary power did not prevent the judges from deciding “whether the war be foreign or domestical, invasive or defensive”, and making these distinctions based on a number of decisions’.Footnote 54 Eliot grants the king a prerogative only in a very limited sphere in which the common law happens to have no jurisdiction – dealing with alliances and enemies abroad or with domestic insurrection. It is certainly not the extensive, absolutist prerogative Ball seems to envisage. Nor is it consistent with a strict Bodinian conception of sovereignty since, for Bodin, the prince can override or change positive law – something Eliot's king remains emphatically unable to do, in spite of this prerogative.
In fact, far from supporting the thesis that Eliot was an exponent of Bodinian sovereignty, his selective use of Bodin actually serves to highlight how far removed the two men were in their conceptions of power and government. For example, he declares that ‘the argument of Bodin…shall be a Colophon to the point: That conformitie to Lawes is noe dishonour to a Prince has a large evidence and testimonie (besides what formerly wee have touched) in both reason & authority’.Footnote 55 This is used to support his conclusion, ‘not onely that all Princes are subject to the lawes, but that it is their majestie, their honour & exaltation soe to be…the law is the ground of all authoritie; all authoritie and rule a dependent of the law’.Footnote 56 For Bodin, although a king may in fact abrogate the law as he chooses, it is both noble and advantageous for him to abide by the laws.Footnote 57 For Eliot, a monarch is actually bound by the law and cannot alter or override it. He nonetheless uses a maxim of Bodin's out of context to demonstrate that this does not in any way diminish the king's majesty.Footnote 58
Ball's rendering of Monarchie of man as a text defending Bodinian sovereignty is therefore unconvincing. The primary reason, however, for the attribution of absolutist ideals to Eliot by historians has been the existence of another treatise among Eliot's private papers: the De jure majestatis. Although Hinton, along with early biographers like Forster and Hulme, believed this to be Eliot's own work, J. H. Salmon's research first demonstrated that in fact the text is not original, but an abridged translation of a Latin treatise by Henning Arnisaeus of Helmstedt, published in 1616 and likewise entitled De jure majestatis.Footnote 59 Forster, Hulme, and Samuel Gardiner were all understandably puzzled by the treatise. It undeniably presents a political theory at odds not only with the central tenets of Monarchie of man, but with Eliot's parliamentary career as a whole: ‘virtually none of the ideas Sir John was developing between 1625 and 1629 are to be found in this treatise…[he] becomes a scholar to whom the present is of no importance or significance’.Footnote 60
Indeed, to a considerable extent, De jure gives the appearance of being an absolutist manifesto. As Hulme tellingly observes: ‘the treatise which resembles the De jure majestatis most closely is the True law of free monarchie by James I’.Footnote 61 Supreme power, the text declares, lies with the king alone. Only he can make civil law and, should circumstances dictate, he is legitimately able to dispense with it. The king is therefore ‘not bound by the decrees of his antecessor’. The familiar caveat, that the sovereign is required to adhere to natural and divine law, is insisted on, although ‘if he does not, he is not to be judged by human laws’.Footnote 62 Directly contradicting Eliot's parliamentary plea that the Commons must have a role in deciding religious matters, De jure asserts that the king ‘must have the charge of religion’.Footnote 63 Elsewhere, De jure attacks those who seek to enlarge powers of representative bodies more generally: ‘it is a foolish conceit of some, that the Court of Parliament of Paris is of greater authority than the Kinge, because they doe & have examined some of the Kings Edicts’.Footnote 64
How is one to resolve these apparent contradictions? Glenn Burgess's contention that a ‘mundane human capacity to think on two levels’ accounts for Eliot's ‘busy epitomizing of the ideas of Arnisaeus while in the Tower of London’ seems less than satisfactory.Footnote 65 For Russell, it is the passages of De jure dealing with the relative power of kings against the papacy that hold the key to understanding the work and Eliot's intention in translating it. The work is ‘designed to defend national sovereignty against claims of pope and emperor to supra-national jurisdiction. This leads to a standard anti-papal polemic.’ As a defence of national sovereignty against the pope, De jure ‘has no logical connection with any particular view on royal sovereignty against the parliament. Taken with Eliot's familiar ideas on ministerial responsibility, it is entirely consistent with his political career.’Footnote 66 Certainly, as Russell suggests, anti-papal polemic was a well-established genre in early Stuart England, and arguments against papal supremacy constituted an important focus for university theology in particular. Furthermore, the years spent in the Tower saw an intensification of Eliot's personal Protestant zeal, which may have served to increase his interest in anti-Catholic literature.Footnote 67 Yet Russell's argument does not entirely convince either: too much of De jure is directly concerned with establishing the nature and extent of the king's domestic power for it to be dismissed as logically unconnected to the issues that concerned Eliot during the 1620s and which find expression in Monarchie of man. Indeed, the number of passages dealing explicitly with the question of papal power is comparatively small.
More importantly, however, Russell – like other commentators – does not engage with the text's manuscript history, or questions of its form and circulation. These, I believe, have a crucial bearing on how we interpret De jure in relation to Eliot's other expressions of political thought. Unlike Monarchie of man, there is no suggestion that Eliot ever intended to circulate De jure, even amongst his close friends. There is no mention in his correspondence that he was engaged in the translation, let alone any discussion of its arguments or the practicalities of publication. Significantly, there is only a single surviving copy of the treatise that dates from the timeFootnote 68 – suggesting no attempt was made to reproduce it for wider circulation – and this is now among the collection of Eliot's private papers, having been discovered ‘completely transcribed by him at his death’.Footnote 69 Unlike Monarchie of man, there is therefore no evidence that De jure was viewed by others or entered into their possession at any stage. Furthermore, the extant manuscript presents a clear and important contrast with the fair copy of Monarchie of man: in rapid, rather than formal, hand with cramped letter forms and irregular spacing – in short, far less neatly transcribed – it indicates that Eliot did not take the time and care over presentation befitting a document intended to reach a more public audience.Footnote 70
This suggests that the translation of De jure was fundamentally a private exercise and not an attempt to intervene politically in the way that Monarchie of man was. However, this invites the question of what Eliot was doing by translating a text apparently so much at odds with his political opinions. I propose that the translation was part of a programme of reading and self-education he undertook while in the Tower, as a way of formulating and refining political arguments for the composition of his own treatise. He identified and sought to understand Arnisaeus, not as somebody he agreed with, but as somebody who epitomized ‘the labour to make Monarchie unlimited’ that he sought to resist in Monarchie of man.Footnote 71
Eliot was a voracious reader of a wide range of literature while imprisoned. His letters frequently mention the exchange of books with friends, though titles and authors are seldom discussed.Footnote 72 However, we know, for example, that Richard James sent Eliot a copy of Lipsius's De constantia and a work by Girolamo Cardano (very possibly De consolatione).Footnote 73 English translations of both these works had been produced in the sixteenth century; Eliot would not have needed to make a translation himself in order to understand and master their arguments. However, since Arnisaeus was not available in English, he produced a translation.Footnote 74 Eliot then drew selectively on Arnisaeus's arguments when formulating his own treatise, while seeking to challenge the view of royal power advanced in the work as a whole. His use of Arnisaeus in Monarchie of man is therefore similar to that of Bodin, discussed above. Eliot attempts to exploit the arguments insisting on the honour and virtue that attends a king who submits himself to the law. ‘Arnisaeus does inferre’, he observes, ‘[that] it is noe prejudice to Majestie that limitts are prescribed it.’Footnote 75 Likewise, Eliot invokes Arnisaeus to demonstrate that honour for princes is to be gained not by birth but in virtuous actions: ‘to receive that birth-right without vertue, as Arnesaeus does expresse it, makes the man that has it but nobile portentum, a monster of nobilitie’.Footnote 76
There was clearly significant polemical value in portraying the most extreme and authoritative proponents of opposing positions as actually conceding the point one wished to make. Indeed, this strategic co-opting of apparent adversaries can be observed elsewhere in the seventeenth century: during the Civil Wars, for instance, Henry Parker purported to show that Arnisaeus, along with the famous Scottish absolutist William Barclay, had acknowledged that kings in mixed monarchies like England's were less absolute than kings in pure monarchies.Footnote 77 Later in the century, John Locke, in his Second treatise of government, would himself quote extensively from Barclay to show that even ‘the great champion of absolute monarchy’ had agreed that there were certain cases in which a king might legitimately be resisted.Footnote 78
At the same time, certain passages in Monarchie of man clearly indicate an attempt on Eliot's part to distance himself from those strains in Arnisaeus's arguments that attributed to the king an unacceptable degree of discretionary power, demonstrating that he represented an ideological adversary for Eliot. For example, De jure declares that ‘Majesty having no superior uppon earth, can neither be judged, punished, brought into order, deposed, &c; of any, but of God alone, to whom only he is to make his accompt, ergo, saith David to God, Tibi Soli Peccavi.’Footnote 79 Intriguingly, by contrast, Eliot specifically rebukes in Monarchie of man those who ‘inferre from the concession made by David, against thee onely have I sinned; that princes offend not men, and therefore have a liberty upon them to do what acts they please, which judgements we shall rather pittie than contest’.Footnote 80 Another point of divergence explicitly acknowledged by Eliot centres on the controversial discussion of kingship in 1 Samuel 8. This was a well-known and widely debated passage in early modern Europe, and commentators interpreted Samuel's speech in a variety of ways.Footnote 81 For some, it gave kings divine sanction to carry out the litany of oppressive actions described by Samuel; for others, it was an account of tyranny. Arnisaeus adopted the former position in De jure, arguing that kings do have the right to act in these ways, even if they should only do so in cases of emergency.Footnote 82 It is therefore of great interest to find Eliot lamenting how ‘some insinuate from that dehortation of the Isralytes in the affectation of their King, a warrant & authoritie for the extension of that power, & what then was said in terrour, they now make it a conclusion of the right’.Footnote 83
Eliot seems to take further exception at the use, or rather misuse, of classical authors in order to establish ‘an absoluteness of government without rule’: ‘The Heathens likewise, both Greekes & Latines, have been sack't to have their attestations for this sence.’Footnote 84 He thus undermines these misappropriations by rendering the arguments of the authorities in question more faithfully, and immediately seeks to reclaim Pliny the Younger as an advocate of the rule of law. Pliny, Eliot contends, ‘in direct termes averrs, non est princeps Supra leges sed leges Supra principem; noe Prince is with out regulation of the law, but they [i.e. the laws] are free above the authoritie of Prince’.Footnote 85 This again runs directly counter to Arnisaeus's arguments in De jure. Here, Pliny is cited to demonstrate the freedom from the laws that sovereignty affords the prince, with his own will providing the only legitimate constraints on his action: ‘it is a most excellent saying of Plinius Secundus…as Sovereigntie p[er]mitts a prince to doe as much as he will, soe sobrietie & true greatnes allowes him to will no more than he may doe’.Footnote 86
Incidentally, a similar charge would be levelled against Arnisaeus in Lex, rex, a treatise of 1644 by the Scottish Presbyterian minister Samuel Rutherford.Footnote 87 Rutherford observes how ‘Arnisaeus is not ashamed to cite Aristotle…that he is not a true and absolute king who ruleth by the laws. The point blank contrary of which Aristotle saith.’Footnote 88 Arnisaeus represented a primary focus for Rutherford's anti-absolutist tract more generally, with the title page declaring his intention to supply ‘a scripturall confutation of the ruinous grounds of W. Barclay, H. Grotius, H. Arnisaeus…and of other late anti-magistratical royalists’.Footnote 89 Like Eliot, he took aim at Arnisaeus's reading of 1 Samuel 8, which Rutherford took to imply that ‘Kings may take their subjects vineyards, and their goods, so they erre not in the manner and way of the act.’Footnote 90
Rutherford therefore provides another instance of an anti-absolutist writer taking Arnisaeus as the epitome of the positions he is trying to attack. It is my contention that Eliot's translation of De jure is the product of a similar approach to the German theorist. As Robert von Friedeburg observes, at the time Eliot was writing ‘Arnisaeus's book was without doubt one of the best-known accounts on the nature and rights of monarchical government.’Footnote 91 Eliot studied and translated the work, not because it outlined a similar political theory to his own, but because it represented the kind of absolutist arguments he was seeking to counter in Monarchie of man.
IV
As well as establishing Eliot's ideological opposition to contemporary absolutist theories, however, Monarchie of man seeks to diagnose the causes of the fractious politics that had characterized the late 1620s, and to supply remedies. Eliot places new and evil counsels at the very heart of recent tensions, but – more subversively – is also now willing to apportion blame to Charles personally, and to voice anxieties regarding his tyrannical tendencies. This further undermines the assertions of some commentators, that Eliot's text is ‘straightforward’, uncontroversial, and unresponsive to contemporary political context.
The rhetoric of evil counsel was a persistent feature of medieval and early modern political discourse.Footnote 92 Furthermore, Noah Millstone's recent work has shown how the belief that Charles I's privy council ‘had been captured by a cadre of sinister figures bent on personal enrichment and treason’ was central to the parliamentary speeches and scribal output of the Cotton–Eliot circle specifically during the 1620s.Footnote 93 These evil counsellors were apparently attempting to persuade the king to abandon parliamentary government, subvert the fundamental laws of the land, and instead rule using force. It is no surprise then to find that anxieties about counsel permeate Monarchie of man. Eliot is clear that the king's counsellors present a grave threat to the ship of commonwealth: ‘the leaks are infidelitie & treacherie of ministers…the Pyratts are the false & subtill underminers, that would robb & steale away all law, libertie, & religion’.Footnote 94 Dangerous counsellors are wont to prioritize their own self-interest and advancement above the common good, and influence the king to this end. Their ‘secret whisperings & flatteries mollifie the affections of the Prince, that they may insinuate to his favour & by that Arte work advantage to themselves, though in prejudice to the publicke’.Footnote 95
However, alongside this emphasis on the machinations of evil counsellors is a far more subversive and dangerous tendency to suggest that Charles I also bears a degree of personal responsibility for recent political tensions. This marks a change from the thrust of Eliot's Petition from the gatehouse in 1627, for instance, which had steadfastly refused to assign Charles any degree of culpability.Footnote 96 In fact, the discussion of tyranny that concludes Eliot's account of kingship in Monarchie of man is far more accusatory in its attitude to Charles I than any of his texts or speeches composed during the 1620s. This shift can be explained partly with reference to the assassination of the duke of Buckingham by John Felton on 23 August 1628.Footnote 97 Like so many others in late Jacobean and early Caroline England, Eliot had come to identify Buckingham as one of the principal causes of misgovernment and a barrier to reconciliation between king and parliament. As a result, his death was celebrated by some within Eliot's close circle of acquaintances. In 1628, Richard James was questioned in connection with verses on the duke's assassin entitled Felton commended, which eulogized Felton as a ‘patriott’ who had preserved ‘our auntient English libertie’.Footnote 98 However, when the unwelcome political tendencies associated with Buckingham continued unabated after August 1628, it became increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that Charles I himself was culpable.
Thus, in The monarchie of man, Eliot insists that the king – and not just his counsellors – has become corrupted. ‘By the change of tymes’, he pessimistically declares, ‘princes are degenerate, soe as that excellence in their persons is rather to be wished than expected’.Footnote 99 He then proceeds to distinguish the hallmarks of tyranny from those of judicious kingship, beginning with a relatively uncontroversial distinction: ‘a Tyrant doth nothing in the public relation of his calling, but with reflection to his private utilitie and respects; but kings, who are the guardians of the people, must guide their actions by an affection of their good under the conduct of the lawes’. However, invoking Cicero, he then argues that tyrants are those who take ‘either of the goods or person of a subject without the judgement of the Senate…or of them who are constituted Judges & have their power but in the interpretation of the law’.Footnote 100 Such statements could not help but evoke memories of the recent controversies over the Forced Loan and Tonnage and Poundage, as well as Darnell's Case and the questions of arbitrary imprisonment it had raised.Footnote 101 The implicit suggestion, therefore, is that these amounted to the policies of a tyrant, a point Eliot then draws out still more explicitly: ‘he is evil who makes license the prerogative of his greatness…he that governs not after the laws & customes of his country is to be held a tyrant’.Footnote 102
Nominally invoking Bodin, Eliot then proceeds to group almost all the grievances raised in the parliamentary sessions of 1628 and 1629 under the banner of tyranny:
The difference…betwixt a tyrant & a King is this, that the law of nature this does reverence, that doth deride it; this doth imbrace religion, faith & Justice, that injury, perjury & impiety; this confers all his studies & endeavours to the publike happiness & weale, that to his private pleasure & comoditie…[a tyrant] houlds the subjects goods his owne & allowes them not propriety in anything.Footnote 103
Clive Holmes has shown how early Stuart MPs increasingly came to regard liberty of property as an abstract right, one which ‘barred the Crown from raising taxes without parliamentary consent’.Footnote 104 Eliot evidently shares this exalted conception of property rights: a good king ‘takes nothing from his subjects but on the publike warrant & necessity’, while a tyrant ‘drinks, carouses in their blood, & does fatt him with their marrow, to bring necessity on them’. Any ruler who takes his subjects’ property without consultation ‘is never to be termed a King or Prince in name, but much more a tyrant and a theefe’.Footnote 105 These are strongly worded statements which, given Charles's recent financial and religious policies, and the fact that Monarchie of man was intended for wider circulation, assume incendiary implications. Indeed, one can begin to understand the insistence of Eliot's friends that the treatise be printed anonymously: though Charles is obviously never referred to directly, it would have been only too clear to contemporaries who was the subject of these passages on tyrannical rule. Monarchie of man is thus a much more oppositional and subversive text than scholars like Russell and Judson have allowed.
V
With the king's tyrannical impulses going unchecked, and the prospects for future parliaments seemingly bleak, Eliot devises a novel solution. Acknowledging that the best way of restoring harmony and justice to the commonwealth now lies in counteracting the problem of evil counsel, he advances arguments influenced by Ciceronian notions of virtue and active citizenship. Eliot's use of Cicero reflects a broader tendency in Caroline literary and political culture to discuss anxieties about the growth of tyranny with reference to the history of ancient Rome. Martin Butler has shown, for instance, how Roman parallels were employed by several dramatists in the 1620s, most notably Philip Massinger in The Roman actor, to formulate critiques of Charles I's absolutist policies, and Eliot himself had briefly been incarcerated when he compared Buckingham to Sejanus in a speech of May 1626.Footnote 106
Tellingly, Eliot begins his discussion of ethics and self-government with the observation that virtuous counsellors provide the best safeguards against tyranny, as the examples of Tarquinius Superbus, Caius, Nero, and Commodus all make clear.Footnote 107 Although Eliot believes that parliament is also a source of virtuous counsel – and this is one reason why he argues on its behalf in the first part of the treatise – he simultaneously acknowledges that, in seeking to preserve parliamentary rule, he is ‘row[ing] against the tide’.Footnote 108 Given this worrying trend, the responsibility of counsel lay with a much smaller and less trustworthy group of people, and it was now paramount that those surrounding the king prove themselves virtuous. Monarchie of man thus articulates and insists on a programme of ethical rejuvenation: the cultivation of virtuous thought and action at an individual level, which will in turn enable the emergence of a new politics capable of preserving the subject's rights and freedoms in the absence of parliaments. It is in this respect that J. N. Ball's characterization of the treatise as ‘ethical rather than political in intention’ is problematic.Footnote 109 This is a false dichotomy where Eliot is concerned, since the restoration of political harmony to the commonwealth is presented as entirely dependent on his programme of ethics.
Richard Tuck has traced the emergence and influence of a ‘new’ humanist philosophy – centred on Tacitus and epitomized by Lipsius – in England from the early sixteenth century.Footnote 110 By contrast, however, it is the ‘old’ humanism, dominated by the ideas and style of Cicero in particular, with which Eliot's ethical thought has most in common. For Cicero, moral and virtuous action consisted in active service to one's commonwealth, and political action should be ranked higher than any other virtuous action. As he explained in De officiis, ‘there is no social relationship more close, none more dear than that which links each one of us with our country’.Footnote 111 The best way to be of service to one's country, moreover, was to cultivate virtue: indeed, Cicero seemed to suggest that there would never be any conflict between one's personal moral obligations and the interests of the state. ‘The occasion cannot arise’, he claimed, ‘when it would be to the state's interest to have the wise man do anything immoral.’Footnote 112
Eliot directly aligns himself with these Ciceronian assumptions about the importance of actively serving the commonwealth, and the best way this can be achieved. ‘The publicke must be preferred before the private’, he stresses, ‘as Cicero has it, a traitor to his Contrey is not lesse honourable than hee that, for his owne Safetie & advantage, deserts the common interests.’Footnote 113 His theory thus constitutes an implicit refutation of the increasingly popular Tacitean notion that self-interest must necessarily govern human political affairs.Footnote 114 It is to this end that he invokes Stoic authorities, using them to show not how to exist in a political world governed by self-interest but rather how that self-interest can be overcome. Explaining the importance of his ethical theory, Eliot observes how ‘the same meanes by which the government is founded may ruine and subvert it’. It is therefore essential to put in place the correct rules for self-government: ‘the lawes look to the inward frame & constitution, to preserve a soundness & integrity at home; that there be no sicknes & distemper in the body, noe leake, or false inlett in the shippe’.Footnote 115 Since commitment to the public good is frequently undermined by the passions, Eliot advances a Stoicism designed to bridle these self-interested impulses. The ‘supreme state of happiness’, he claims, can be ‘found in oneself, so that the highest and lowest can attain it, can be kings’. The ‘summum bonum’ is attained through the cultivation of virtue, which is ‘the rewarde of herself’ and ‘agreeable to nature’.Footnote 116 Like Cicero, he argues that there are four cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude – but each of these ‘must participate of all to make a true vertue’.Footnote 117
Crucially, however, given Eliot's desire to foster a new kind of politics, these virtues must ‘be profytable to many: not to our selves alone, not to the advancement of our families, not to our friends & allies…but generally to all for the common benefitt & commoditie, the publike utilitie & good’. Eliot is thus not merely offering a means of personal solace and happiness, but encouraging the active implementation of virtues in the service of the state. Cicero, he notes approvingly, had described as ‘optimates & nobles’ any citizens who ‘defend their Contrey to the utmost of their powers, those that are ready to rescue from all dangers the Commonwealth’.Footnote 118 It is worth noting here the radical courses of political action that Cicero had sanctioned when performed for the safety of the commonwealth. As Peter Stacey has shown, ‘an integral part of Cicero's account of republican virtue in De officiis is the unrelentingly scathing denunciation of the military dictatorship of Julius Caesar…accompanied by an impassioned defence of his assassination two years earlier in 44 as tyrannicide’.Footnote 119 Given how John Felton had been depicted by some – most notably Eliot's friend and correspondent Richard James – as a virtuous patriot who acted out of a Ciceronian concern for the common good, it is surely possible to read Eliot's acclamation of public virtue as an implicit endorsement of Buckingham's assassination, as well as a solution to ongoing political problems.Footnote 120
Eliot's adoption of this Ciceronian discourse undoubtedly marks a striking departure from the form and content of his earlier written works and speeches: in the 1627 Petition from the gatehouse, for example, he had relied on ancient constitutionalist arguments, tactfully seeking to draw the king's attention to a variety of medieval and legal precedents.Footnote 121 Monarchie of man, by contrast, advances a Ciceronianism focused on the ethical duties of the subject, and his active role in political life. This again reflects Eliot's increasing pessimism after Buckingham's death regarding Charles's character and his perceived lack of respect for parliament and the rule of law. Arguments on the basis of the ancient constitution could hold sway only if all parties were in fundamental agreement that custom and precedent had normative implications. For Eliot, Charles had shown himself since 1627 singularly unwilling to respect established law and was now pursuing tyrannical policies without parliament. In this altered context, a new audience needed to be addressed and a new form of argumentation employed. If the ship of commonwealth was to be steered to safer waters, the promotion of active virtue on the part of its citizens – particularly those in positions of political influence – was now imperative.
VI
This article has sought to revise existing interpretations regarding the thought and writings of a crucial figure in early Stuart politics. In particular, it has attempted to dispel notions that Sir John Eliot's political works ever reveal him to be a proponent of absolute royal power, demonstrating instead his vigorous, and indeed increasing, opposition to such theories. It has done so partly by proposing a revised interpretation of the character, context, and intention behind the De jure, thus undermining the primary basis for existing accounts of Eliot's political thought.
Furthermore, it has been argued that, far from being the anodyne and unremarkable text some scholars have dismissed it as, Monarchie of man can only be understood in relation to the political context of the late 1620s, and that in this context many of its passages assume subversive and incendiary implications. Hence, for example, counsellors surrounding the king are no longer exclusively apportioned blame for recent political tensions, and Eliot comes perilously close to accusing Charles of turning tyrant. Indeed, the meaning and application of Eliot's comments would surely have been clear to his contemporaries, and it is partly this that explains the need for anonymity when circulating the text that friends highlighted in their letters. This context of tyranny, evil counsel, and rule without parliaments necessitates a new approach to political argument and a new audience for Eliot's views. Now it is the virtue of subjects themselves, and particularly those in power, that must be insisted on if harmony is to be restored to the commonwealth and the king steered from tyrannical courses. Eliot's work is thus an intriguing early response to the problem of how to conduct politics in the absence of parliaments that, as Esther Cope has shown, vexed Englishmen during the 1630s.Footnote 122
This interpretation of Eliot's political works also has implications for the historiography of early Stuart political thought more generally. In particular, it confirms and develops some of the critiques of the revisionist paradigm that have been offered in recent years. Eliot's treatise demonstrates a real fear of conspiracy and tyranny, of absolute rule and constitutional change: he is convinced that the role of parliament in government – essential for maintaining just and balanced rule – is being threatened and undermined by machinations at court. The work therefore suggests that these were not, as has occasionally been claimed, anachronistic concepts imposed on the period by later, ‘whiggish’ interpreters.Footnote 123 Similarly, Monarchie of man challenges the view that factional disputes, local concerns, and occasional bouts of religious zeal governed the actions of MPs in this period, rather than any coherent principles or continuous constitutional agenda. Eliot's treatise would seem in fact to indicate that at least some MPs conceptualized their differences with the king and elements at court on an ideological and national level. Eliot is, after all, consistently concerned with protecting the rights of the subject in general against encroaching royal prerogatives. Just as importantly, he identifies the existence of ideological adversaries who stand in fundamental opposition to his opinions on power and government: if some later commentators have presented early Stuart Englishmen as fundamentally in agreement on important ideological questions, Eliot himself evidently does not take this to be the case.
At the same time, the nature and trajectory of Eliot's thought is testament to the nuance that is needed in constructing post-revisionist analyses of early seventeenth-century political thought. For example, Eliot's use of Ciceronian ideas reminds us that Tacitism, though extremely influential, was not the only way in which early Stuart Englishmen approached and engaged with politics: to use Tuck's phraseology, the ‘old’ humanism retained a force and purchase alongside the ‘new’. Similarly, Monarchie of man perhaps suggests a need to qualify those recent accounts that emphasize the prevalence and continuity of ancient constitutionalist thinking in the period.Footnote 124 Eliot moves away from the kinds of legalistic arguments and towards a political thought influenced by classical ethics, and, in doing so, he reminds us that ancient constitutionalism was only one of a number of political languages available to Englishmen before the Civil War.
Finally, the way this article has attempted to resolve apparent inconsistencies in Eliot's thought highlights the need for careful consideration of the genre, circulation, and material history of political texts. It is not always enough to analyse and deconstruct the arguments in a work in order to appreciate how it was supposed to function or intervene in a particular context: close attention should therefore be paid to the production, circulation, and intended audience of texts, as these in turn can help to shape and inform our understanding of the significance of their theoretical content.
