Henry Neville, the author of Plato Redivivus: or, A Dialogue concerning Government (1681), is one of the best-known English republican thinkers of the seventeenth century. The history of English republicanism has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent decades. Yet, until now there has been no book-length treatment of Neville. This is an important, well-researched, and lucidly written work that not only adds greatly to our knowledge of Neville but also contributes significantly to ongoing debates about republicanism, civic humanism, patriarchalism and anti-patriarchalism, and neo-Harringtonian thinking, among much else. The book is based on an impressive array of primary sources, including many manuscripts that have rarely been used before.

Mahlberg begins with an introduction that maps some of the main historiographical currents connected with her subject. She talks about many of the main ideas on republicanism of J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Patrick Collinson, and others, and discusses the impact of the New Historicism in literary studies. She then turns to the biography of Henry Neville. He was born into one of the leading gentry families in Berkshire and was the grandson of the well-known Jacobean politician Sir Henry Neville. Henry the republican was born in 1619 and educated at Merton College, Oxford, though he left without taking a degree. He traveled in France and Italy between 1641 and about 1645. After his return, he was appointed to one of the parliamentary committees that governed Berkshire and befriended another committee member, the regicide Henry Marten. With the support of his second cousin—and fellow republican—Algernon Sidney, Neville secured election to the Rump Parliament in 1649 (sitting for Marten’s old seat of Abingdon). He also became a member of the Council of State. After Oliver Cromwell closed down the Rump, Neville continued to be politically active and became a close associate of James Harrington, the major republican thinker, and author of Oceana (1656). In 1659 Neville was a member of Richard Cromwell’s short-lived parliament. In it, he argued for arrangements that went some way toward combining Harrington’s republican principles with the old English constitution of a single person and a bicameral legislature. His later major work, Plato Redivivus, proposed a similar settlement. Mahlberg plausibly argues that republicanism was the main ingredient in his proposals, though he gestured toward the ancient constitution. Others have taken his constitutionalism more seriously. The Rump, of which Neville was a member, was briefly revived in 1659 and again in the winter of 1659–60, but with the restoration of monarchy in the spring of 1660, Neville permanently lost political power. He was imprisoned on suspicion of plotting in 1663–64 and then spent four years in Italy. After the Rye House Plot in 1683, he was in some danger in England, and his Italian friend Cosimo de’ Medici (Prince of Tuscany) invited him to Florence, but Neville stayed in England, where he died in 1694.

An interesting chapter on republicanism as anti-patriarchalism pays especial attention to Neville’s fictional account of The Isle of Pines (1668). This narrates the adventures of George Pines, who in Elizabethan times was shipwrecked with four women on an idyllic island that was so fertile that food could be grown there with no effort. Within three generations the island became well populated—some have suggested that the name Pines is an anagram, alluding to George’s procreative prowess—but the inhabitants lost all their technical knowledge, and civil war broke out among them. Order was finally restored with the arrival of some (republican) Dutch sailors. Mahlberg reads the work as a satire on patriarchal political theory but does not quite clinch the argument at this point. Filmer’s Patriarcha was not published until 1680, and there is no reason to think that Neville had read it in manuscript. It is unclear what other patriarchalist work might have been in Neville’s sights. Moreover, Filmer and other patriarchalist thinkers said little in favor of polygamy, which is a key source of conflict in the Isle, since the four women give rise to four distinct tribes. Licentious monarchy is a more plausible candidate than Filmerian theory as the target of Neville’s book, especially since the merry monarch Charles II was king.

Neville’s ideas were close to those of Harrington on many key points. A chapter on “Harringtonianism” provides a judicious survey of this topic and shows that whereas Neville remained true to much of Harrington’s constitutional theory, he parted from his friend in allowing a single person, or monarch, to play a permanent role in politics, provided that such a person had no discretionary power. Mahlberg also argues effectively for the idea that Neville merged liberal with republican views, endorsing recent work that challenges the idea that republicanism and liberalism were rigidly demarcated ideologies. A final chapter, on “Religious Reputations,” discusses the interesting question of Neville’s religion and his views on church-state relations, concluding that he was an Erastian who favored toleration of a wide set of religious beliefs provided that their adherents did not attempt to subvert the state. This is a notable first book, and it deserves a wide readership.