Excellencie of a Free State: Or, the Right Constitution of a Commonwealth (The Thomas Hollis Library) - Tapa dura

May 2012

The republican writings of Marchamont Nedham are a landmark in Western political thought. Writing in the years following the execution of King Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649, Nedham proposed an alternative to the improvised and short-lived constitutional expedients that followed the overthrow of the monarchy. Instead of clinging to remnants of the native constitution, urged Nedham, his countrymen should recover the principles and forms of republican rule that had prospered in classical antiquity. A disciple of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose methods of argument he imitated and whose reasoning he adapted to an English setting, Nedham opened the way for the more searching or learned republican thinking of his contemporaries James Harrington, Henry Neville, and Algernon Sidney. The Excellencie of a Free-State is the most coherent expression of Nedham's republican thought.

Marchamont Nedham (1620-78) wrote The Excellencie Of a Free-State during the only period of republican rule in English history. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, and a sovereign House of Commons governed in the Crown's place. Published in 1656, The Excellencie was based on essays Nedham had printed in the republic's newsbook Mercurius Politicus in 1651-52. Nedham's arguments anticipated those of his friend and literary partner John Milton and of James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and Henry Neville. He was the most influential writer of the first age of journalism, who took advantage of the breakdown of censorship in the civil wars and the ferment of public debate that they provoked.

Until 1649, English political thought had assumed the ancient constitution of King, Lords, and Commons. Nedham advised the English to build afresh and to look for guidance to the political practices and values of republican Rome and other commonwealths of classical antiquity. In his eyes the regime established in 1649 was an oligarchy that prolonged many of the evils of kingly rule. Inspired by the reasoning and the argumentative methods of Machiavelli, Nedham urged his countrymen to create the popular and accountable rule of "a real republic."

The arguments of The Excellencie were discredited by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, yet the republication of the book a century later, in 1767, gave them a new life. Read in the England of George in revolutionary America, and in revolutionary France, Nedham emerged as a kindred spirit of Locke, Milton, and Sidney. Editor Blair Warden's introduction relates the content and purposes of the Excellencie to its political context and then examines the eighteenth-century republication and influence of the work.

This book is part of the Thomas Hollis Library series. As general editor David Womersley explains, Thomas Hollis (1720-774) was a businessman and philanthropist who gathered books he thought were essential to the understanding of liberty and donated them to libraries in Europe and America in the years preceding the American Revolution.