Chapter 3 revisits the republicanism of the free state. Historians have disagreed about the extent and nature of republican thinking during the free state. Some historians have attached little importance to republicanism, claiming that it was inconspicuous, that ‘republican ideology played only a minor role’ and that it only properly emerged after the free state. Other historians have challenged such arguments and have accentuated the republican arguments in favour of the free state. Taking its cue from such historians, the chapter demonstrates that republican defences of the free state were loud and clear from the beginning of 1649 until 1652. It was repeatedly argued that only a free state could guarantee liberty. The chapter also points out the seriousness with which many royalists, Presbyterians and other enemies of the free state took its republicanism. They questioned every aspect of republicanism; for them, a free state was a disastrous form of state and, more importantly, the idea that it safeguarded liberty was a hollow sham.

When England was declared to be governed as a free state, parliament stopped short of defining its precise constitutional form. Although historians, once again, had paid almost no attention to it, there was a lively debate amongst the supporters of the free state about its precise constitutional form, whether it was an aristocracy or democracy. Chapter 4 explores the aristocratic arguments for the free state. The aristocratic defenders of the free state, following a traditional line of argument, argued that, whereas a democracy denoted the direct rule of all the people, in an aristocracy sovereign power was in the hands of the few. Since in the English free state sovereign power was exercised by the House of Commons, it was, for these aristocrats, in the hands of a few, and the free state was, accordingly, an aristocracy. However, the free state was also presented by Ephraim Elcock as an Aristotelian politeia, a perfect mixture of oligarchy and democracy. According to Elcock, in the free state, ‘the peoples election of their Delegates is Democratical, the Government of these Deligates is Oligarchical, they being chosen out of the wealthiest of every County’.

Chapter 5 turns to the democratic defences of the free state. Whereas the aristocratic portrayals began immediately after the establishment of the free state, a democratic argument for the free state started to be developed only towards the end of 1649. Soon, however, numerous pamphleteers argued that the free state was a democracy, and, for them, it was a good thing too. This is one of the first times in early-modern European political thought that democracy was openly defended as a viable constitutional form. The aristocrats saw the free state as a golden mean between monarchy and democracy, but the democrats distinguished between a good and bad democracy and argued that their constitutional preference was a good democracy, which was a mean between monarchy and a bad democracy or anarchy. Moreover, both sides wrote in support of the free state and thus defended the supremacy of a unicameral representative institution. For the democrats, a bad democracy was the people’s direct rule, but a good democracy was based on a representative institution. The upshot is that this was the first time in the history of political thought that democracy was conceived in representative terms.

The central theme of Chapter 2 is anti-monarchism. The chapter shows that during the free state monarchy was widely thought to be the worst form of government. Monarchy entailed tyranny and the concomitant slavery of the people. However, an even more powerful anti-monarchical argument rose to prominence during the free state. Based largely on 1 Samuel 8, numerous advocates of the free state maintained that monarchy was against God and thus both idolatrous and sinful. Already in early December 1648, a radical pamphlet, Light shining in Buckingham-shire, equated kingship with the devil. But the argument that monarchy was a sin and idolatry became particularly vociferous during the Engagement controversy. It was argued repeatedly that monarchy, as a form of government, was against God’s express will. Such an argument led to the conclusion that monarchy was finished in England and would soon be so elsewhere in Europe as well.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that a key argument in justifying the establishment of the free state was the claim that the people or their representatives were entitled to alter the form of government. Earlier historians had paid no attention to this argument. The chapter first discusses the emergence of this argument in pre-revolutionary England and then traces its development in the 1640s. The question of the people’s, or their representatives’, right to change the form of government was thrown into sharp relief in late 1647 when the Levellers put forward their proposal for a novel constitution. The question was discussed in the famous Putney debates, and an argument for the right to alter the constitution was widely advanced from the autumn of 1648 onwards. It was based on the idea of popular sovereignty, that all public authority emanated from the people and that whoever exercised that authority only held it by trust. Some protagonists argued that the people could change the form of government when the king forfeited his trust, but many others insisted more radically that the people could do the same whenever they so wanted.

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) shared an interest in late medieval Burgundian art. My essay reads Auerbach’s famous Mimesis (1946) as addressing one of Huizinga’s most pressing concerns, namely periodization, not only as he articulated them in Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), but also as they dominated several of his (Huizinga’s) less well-known texts on the Renaissance that challenged the Burckhardt-inflected way both periods were understood at the time. Auerbach’s reception of Huizinga’s understanding in Autumn of late medieval realism in particular in a series of texts beginning in 1921 and running up through 1946 rattled at the foundation of the assumption that periodization was a relevant way of looking at cultural history at all. The alternative represented by his Mimesis focuses, rather, on what Auerbach describes in the “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1954) as the “existential realism” he finds in texts from across the ages.

Literary practice is a distinctive form of historical thinking and early medieval culture is an important component of literary creativity and innovation in the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter examines the opportunities early medieval English poetry afforded writers and scholars in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern writers in this period negotiated the medieval past in their work in different ways. Outright hostility sits alongside an awareness that thinking of the medieval is a necessary component of modern culture. To give a sense of this literary engagement, this chapter offers an account of Old English at the mid-century in relation to four profoundly different writers, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Gavin Bone (1907–1942), Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894–1983), and Angus Wilson (1913–1991). The work of these writers and scholars demonstrates that early medieval culture is part of a broader post-War inquiry into society, culture, sexuality, race and ethnocentrism.