Marvell’s Dread of the Sword

For Marvell sovereignty names the brutal core of political order, where a single ruler, or body of rulers, decides on the state of exception. This recognition is visible in the early, middle, and late stages of his career, from The Picture of Little T.C. and the Villiers elegy, to the Protectorate poems, to the Advice to a Painter poems and An Account of the Growth of Popery. The last of these is illumined by consideration of the case of Shirley v. Fagg (1675); for all that Marvell aligned himself with Shaftesbury, they take different views of the case reflecting their different views of constitutional order. In his mature thought especially, we see Marvell’s impulse to advance the legal rights of the subject and so limit the damage that can be done by the sovereign wielding the power of the sword. This impulse is brought into conversation with Schmitt’s thought on the nature of the pluralist state, which he offers through a critique of Harold Laksi.

Provincializing Romance

This chapter begins with Coke’s and Selden’s speeches on liberty of person in the wake of the Five Knights’ Case (1627). Here civil law and supra-legal principles, or the national and the universal, converge, in a way running parallel to the period’s engagements of the romance tradition, which historically claims common cultural ground for Western Christendom but becomes dominated in the seventeenth century by narrower concerns. This shift is visible in John Barclay’s Argenis, effecting an unlikely marriage of romance and raison d’état. That proves to be an influential model in the prose romances of the 1650s—considered most closely are Theophania and Sir Percy Herbert’s Cloria and Narcissus. In a way recalling Arendt’s remarks on nomos, likely a response to Schmitt, these romances of the 1650s solidify the social ties of a disempowered elite while displaying a unique and fleeting posture of openness on the question of sovereignty.

Introduction

A modern politics attaching itself to the state must adopt a position sovereignty, by which is meant the political settlement in which potestas and auctoritas are aligned. Three competing forms are identified: unitary sovereignty, divided and balanced sovereignty, and the view that sovereign power must be limited by universal principles. Each of these forms can be divided into “red” and “black” varieties, depending on the imagined relationship between sovereign power and modern conditions of flux. A chapter outline introduces the figures who will be explored in the book as a whole: Thomas Hobbes; William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele; John Barclay and the romance writers of the 1650s whom he influences; John Milton; and Andrew Marvell. Also described is the book’s sustained engagement of Carl Schmitt, and the ways in which his thought on sovereignty is an example of the competition amongst the concept’s three competing forms.

Epilogue

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt identifies Hobbes as the theorist of the protection–obedience axiom par excellence. That identification informs his later critique in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, which seems to break with Hobbes in part because his formulation of protection and obedience fails to account for the possibility of the sovereign’s betrayal of a loyal subject. But we do see Hobbes hint at this recognition through the story of Uzzah, which he mentions in both Leviathan and Behemoth. His reading of the would-be rescuer of the Ark who is struck down by God is placed alongside others in the period, notably those of Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Donne. For Hobbes, as with Schmitt, personal experience reveals hard lessons on the ways in which obedience is not always repaid with protection.

The Crown as Machine

It is a commonplace to describe the modern state as one where sovereign power is depersonalized by mediating bureaucracies. This chapter offers tangible instances of this phenomenon in early modernity: the Court of Wards and Liveries, through which the crown exercised its feudal rights; and the colonial corporation, which limited the sovereign’s otherwise unfettered power abroad. The political philosophy of Hobbes is set in this context, showing its desire to translate feudal obligation into a modern idiom, one influenced by raison d’état, and to cast the sovereign as akin to the corporation. The career of William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele is also set in this context, but his is a markedly different response, being consistently committed to the principle of divided sovereignty. The chapter closes with consideration of the mechanization of the state as it appears in Schmitt’s writings, and in Leo Strauss’ famous critique of them.

Milton’s Unitary Sovereignty

This chapter complicates the received image of Milton as firebrand republican, showing a consistent sympathy in his thought with “red” unitary sovereignty. That sympathy displays itself differently at different points in his career, from an early acceptance of royal prerogative in the Ludlow Maske, to mid-career arguments for the sovereignty of Parliament, to a late godly republicanism anticipating the rule of a spiritual elect. Illumining these developments of Milton’s thought are, respectively, the precarity of the Council in the Marches of Wales, of which Milton’s patron the Earl of Bridgewater was president; a Tacitist approach to liberty and prudentia; and the manuscript writings of Sir Henry Vane, the younger, which include a lengthy commentary on the Book of Job. In closing, the role of the “people” in popular sovereignty is considered, as the category appears in Milton and in Schmitt.