¹ Carswell, , Porcupine, p. xiiGoogle Scholar. The tale may be apocryphal, but is characteristic.

² Peter, Laslett (ed.), Patriarcha and other political works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949), p. 39.Google Scholar

³ I evade the question whether the Treatises belong in a canon which includes Locke's philosophical works.

⁴ Carswell, , Porcupine, pp. 213, 221, 226Google Scholar; Scott, , Crisis, pp. 313, 324–5, 327, 329, 335.Google Scholar

⁵ Nelson, , Discourses, p. 7.Google Scholar

⁶ The old cause (London, 1954)Google Scholar; The descent on England (London, 1969)Google Scholar; From revolution to revolution: English society, 1688–1776 (London, 1973).Google Scholar

⁷ Carswell, , Porcupine, p. xi.Google Scholar

⁸ Schwoerer, Lois G., Lady Rachel Russell: one of the best of women (Baltimore, 1987)Google Scholar, a definitive study of both Rachel and her husband William. See also Schwoerer, , ‘William, Lord Russell: the making of a martyr, 1683–1983’, Journal of British Studies, XXIV, 1 (1985), 41–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ Carswell, , Porcupine, p. 253.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Blair, Worden, ‘Classical republicanism and the puritan revolution’, in Hugh, Lloyd-Jones, Valerie, Pearl and Blair, Worden (eds.), History and imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), p. 18Google Scholar; ‘The commonwealth kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, XXIV, 1 (1985), 1–40Google Scholar; ‘English republicanism’, ch. 15 of Burns, J. H. with Goldie, Mark (ed.), The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 443–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ Quoted by Worden, , ‘Commonwealth kidney’, p. 25.Google Scholar

¹² Pocock, , ‘Clergy and commerce: the conservative enlightenment in England’, in Ajello, R. (ed.), L'Età dei Lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, 1985), I, 523–62.Google Scholar

¹³ Scott, , Republic, pp. 17, 22–3, 28, 51–4, 187.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Guy, J. A., ‘The Henrician age’, in Pocock, , Schochet, and Schwoerer, (eds.), The varieties of British political thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Greenberg, Janelle R., ‘The confessor's laws and the radical face of the ancient constitution’, English Historical Review, CIV (1989), 611–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Weston, Corinne C., ‘Holy Edward's laws: the cult of the confessor and the ancient constitution’, in Schochet, Gordon J. (ed.), Restoration, ideology and revolution (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990), pp. 307–26Google Scholar, consider the role of those baronial apocrypha the Mirror of justices and the Modus tenendi parliamentum.

¹⁶ Judson, Margaret, The political thought of Sir Henry Vane the younger (Philadelphia, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Armitage, David, ‘The Cromwellian protectorate and the languages of empire’, Historical Journal, XXV, 3 (1992), 531–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁷ Hill, , Milton and the English revolution (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Martin, Dzelzainis (ed.), Milton: political writings (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Nicholas, von Maltzahn, Milton's history of Britain: republican historiography in the English revolution (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Perez, Zagorin, Milton, aristocrat and rebel: the poet and his politics (Rochester, NY, 1992).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, p. 28 n. 56.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Pocock, (ed.), The political writings of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 108–10, 111–13.Google Scholar

²⁰ Scott, , Republic, pp. 115–16.Google Scholar

²¹ Scott, , ‘The rapture of motion: James Harrington's republicanism’, in Nicholas, Phillipson and Quentin, Skinner (eds.), Political discourse in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), esp. p. 160.Google Scholar

²² Pocock, , The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975), pp. 391–3Google Scholar; Political writings, pp. 70–2.

²³ Davis, J. C., ‘Pocock's Harrington; grace, nature and art in the classical republicanism of James Harrington’, Historical Journal, XXIV, 3 (1981), 683–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ Scott, , ‘The rapture of motion’, passim, pp. 139–63.Google Scholar

²⁵ Pocock, (ed.), Harrington: the commonwealth of Oceana and a system of politics (Cambridge, 1992), pp. xxi–xxivGoogle Scholar; Phillipson and Skinner, pp. 402–7.

²⁶ Pocock, , ‘James Harrington and the good old cause; a study of the ideological context of his writings’, Journal of British Studies, X, 1 (1970), 30–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Woolrych, Austin F., ‘The good old cause and the fall of the protectorate’, Cambridge Historical Journal, XIII, 2 (1957), 133–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ Carswell, , Porcupine, pp. 223–4Google Scholar; Scott, , Crisis, pp. 330–1.Google Scholar

²⁸ John, Aubrey, Brief lives, ed. Oliver Lawson, Dick (London, 1958), p. 126.Google Scholar

²⁹ Scott, , Republic, p. 81.Google Scholar

³⁰ Political writings, pp. 158–60, 168–9. cf., however, Armitage, ‘Languages of Empire’.

³¹ Hill, , The experience of defeat; Milton and some contemporaries (London, 1984), p. 206.Google Scholar

³² Scott, , Republic, p. 133 and no. 30Google Scholar. It is also necessary to the scansion which establishes that Sidney's words form a truncated elegiac couplet. Carswell, (Porcupine, pp. 110–11)Google Scholar gets it right. The misspelling ‘einse’ recurs in T. G. West's introduction to the Liberty Classics Discourses (p. xvi).

³³ For Sidney's letter to the earl of Leicester, dated 12/22 December 1660, see Scott, , Republic, p. 155Google Scholar, and Arthur, Collins, Letters and memorials of state (1746), II, pp. 701–2Google Scholar. The work is Istoria del Concilio di Trento, scritta dal Padre Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesu, ove insieme rifiutasi con autorevoli testimonianze un' Istoria falsa divolgata nello slesso argomento sotto nome di Pietro Soaue Polano (In Roma MDCLVI). The copy in the Folger Shakespeare Library has the signature ‘Leycester’ on the title page, and on the reverse the bookplate of the fifth earl (1704). Dr Germaine Warkentin (Victoria College, Toronto) informs me that there exists a Sidney library catalogue in which Pallavicino's book is entered in the hand of the second earl (Algernon's father), which is that in which the signature ‘Leycester’ is written. The probability that the Folger copy is that sent by Sidney from Rome seems strong.

³⁴ He would know enough theology not to suppose with Scott that Scotists and Thomists were disputing over the ‘divinity’ of the Virgin, Mary (Republic, p. 157)Google Scholar. The letter just quoted correctly reports that the issue was her immaculacy.

³⁵ Carswell, , Porcupine, pp. 141–8Google Scholar; Scott, , Republic, pp. 173–85.Google Scholar

³⁶ Greaves, Richard L., Deliver us from evil: the radical underground in Britain, 1660–63 (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar

³⁷ Worden, Blair, ‘Edmund Ludlow: the puritan and the whig’, Times Literary Supplement, 3904 (7 01. 1977), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

³⁸ Jones, J. R., The first whigs: the politics of the exclusion crisis, 1678–1683 (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar. Scott, , Crisis, p. 12Google Scholar, says this work ‘has never’ – till now – ‘been seriously challenged’. It is hard to imagine any thesis about Restoration politics which has not been challenged; they are contestable by nature.

³⁹ Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary politics and Locke's two treatises of government (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Scott, , Crisis, p. 21.Google Scholar

⁴¹ ‘The real exclusion crisis was in 1688’ (Scott, , Crisis, p. 8)Google Scholar. What of the long-established insistence that the succession of Mary and her husband could be made to appear legitimate, whereas that of Monmouth could not?

⁴² Scott, , Crisis, p. 80.Google Scholar

⁴³ Scott, , Crisis, p. 109.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Scott, , Crisis, p. 87.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Scott, , Crisis, pp. 28–39, 38–43, 100–8Google Scholar; with emphasis on the wrongness of conceiving English history in ‘national’ terms.

⁴⁶ In the introduction to his excellent The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the glorious revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, Jonathan Israel considers it ‘parochial’ in the present reviewer to have presented the revolution in its ‘British’ and not its ‘European’ (i.e. its Franco-Netherlandish) setting. ‘English history’, it may be replied, takes place in ‘English’, ‘British’, ‘European’, and other settings, each of which should enjoy parity of esteem, and no one of which is more ‘parochial’ than any other. What is ‘parochial’ is to be forever beating the bounds of any one of them, or supposing that it includes all the rest.

⁴⁷ Scott, , Crisis, pp. 24–5.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Scott, , Crisis, p. 27.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Blair, Worden, The Rump parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ West, pp. 9–10, 51–3, 88, 409–10, 534.

⁵¹ Scott, , Crisis, pp. 11, 16–17, 106.Google Scholar

⁵² Worden, , ‘Commonwealth kidney’Google Scholar, continues to be accepted as the definitive dating of the work.

⁵³ West, , Discourses, p. 11.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Peter, Laslett (ed.), John Locke: two treatises of government (Cambridge, 1990), p. 143.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Mark, Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican royalism’, Political Studies, XXII (1988), pp. 61–85Google Scholar; Marshall, John W., Resistance, responsibility and religion: John Locke in context (Cambridge, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Goldie, Mark, ‘The civil religion of James Harrington’, in Anthony, Pagden (ed.), The languages of political theory in early-modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Priestcraft and the birth of whiggism’, in Nicholas, Phillipson and Quentin, Skinner (eds.), Political discourse in early modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 209–31.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Discourses, ch. 1, sections 7, 8, 13; ch. 2, section 9.

⁵⁸ Discourses, ch. 3, sections 1–7.

⁵⁹ Nelson, , Discourses, pp. 30–61Google Scholar; Scott, , Crisis, pp. 214–28.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Scott, Crisis, ch. 11, and ‘The law of war: Grotius, Sidney, Locke and the political theory of rebellion’, History of Political Thought, XIII, 4 (1992), 565–85.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Nelson, , Discourses, pp. 104–15.Google Scholar

⁶² West, , Discourses, p. 365.Google Scholar

⁶³ West, , Discourses, pp. 571–2.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ West, , Discourses, p. 216.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Discourses, ch. 2, section 16.

⁶⁶ I pass over Sidney's insistence that governments are seldom perfect and may always be improved when circumstances change, because I think Scott's contrast with Harrington here is misconceived. See notes 24 and 25 above.

⁶⁷ West, , Discourses, pp. 429–30Google Scholar; Discourses, ch. 3, section 18.

⁶⁸ Mark, Goldie, ‘The roots of true whiggism’, History of Political Thought, I, 2 (1980), 195–236.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ West, Discourses, 485–93, 524–7; Discourses, ch. 3, sections 28, 37; Scott, , Crisis, pp. 245–7.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Scott, , Crisis, pp. 313–16Google Scholar; Carswell, , Porcupine, pp. 184, 219–20.Google Scholar

⁷¹ This seems to be the difficulty with Richard Ashcraft's contention (Revolutionary politics and Locke's two treatises of government, passim) that a political text must be read in its practical context. The text may say much although its practical intention is irrational.

⁷² Scott, , Crisis, pp. 275–91.Google Scholar

⁷³ For what there is, see Houston, , Algernon Sidney, pp. 171–73Google Scholar; it is in Discourses, ch. 2, section 23, and is Machiavellian but neither Harringtonian nor post-Harringtonian. Houston thinks this proves me wrong about something.

⁷⁴ Pocock, , ‘The fourth English civil war: dissolution, desertion and alternative histories in the glorious revolution’, Government and Opposition, XXXII (1988), 151–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Partially reprinted in Schwoerer, Lois G. (ed.), The revolution of 1688–89: changing perspectives (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 52–64.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Pocock, , ‘The significance of 1688Google Scholar; some reflections on “whig history”’; in Beddard, R. A. (ed.), The revolutions of 1688: the Andrew Browning lectures, 1988 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 271–92Google Scholar; ‘Standing army and public credit: the institutions of Leviathan’, in Hoak, Dale F. and Mordechai, Feingold (eds.), The revolution of 1688–89; Anglo-Dutch perspectives on the world of William III and Mary II (Stanford, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Scott, , Crisis, p. 144Google Scholar. It is still some distance from Halifax (d. 1695) to Toland, but the latter displayed enterprise in getting hold of manuscripts.

⁷⁷ Worden, , ed., Edmund Ludlow: a voyce from the watchtower, part 5, 1660–62 (London, 1978; Camden Fourth Series, Royal Historical Society, vol. XXI).Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Pocock, , Virtue, commerce and history (Cambridge, 1985) p. 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The ancient constitution and the feudal law (Cambridge, 1987), p. 348Google Scholar; Worden, , ‘Commonwealth kidney’Google Scholar, Appendix; Scott, , Crisis, p. 202.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Pocock, , The political works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), pp. xi–xiii, 118–19.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ His The militia reformed… was published in the same year.

⁸¹ Pocock, , The Machiavellian moment, chs. XII–VGoogle Scholar; Virtue, commerce and history, chs. 5–6.

⁸² For Harrington's role in the controversy and in Toland's projects, see Pocock (1977), pp. 138–43. The probably unauthentic Sidney's letter against bribery and arbitrary government was published in 1697; see Worden, , ‘Commonwealth kidney’, p. 29 and n. 150.Google Scholar

⁸³ Jacob, Margaret C., ‘John Toland and the Newtonian ideology’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXII (1969), 307–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The radical enlightenment: pantheists, freemasons and republicans (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Sullivan, Robert E., John Toland and the deist controversy: a study in adaptation (Cambridge, MA, 1982)Google Scholar; Daniel, Stephen, John Toland: his methods, manners and mind (Kingston/Montreal, 1985)Google Scholar; Iofrida, Manlio, La filosofia di John Toland: Spinozismo, scienza e religione nella cultura europea fra ’600 e ’700 (Milan, 1983).Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Sensabaugh, G. F., That grand whig Milton (Stanford, 1952).Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, pp. 28 n. 53Google Scholar and 56, 44 n. 113, 45 n. 117, 114 n. 68, 128 n. 123.

⁸⁶ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, pp. 4 n. 6, 7–8 n. 15, 120 n. 93 (particularly enigmatic), 125 n. 111, 172–73. The issue is whether I am de-emphasizing ‘liberalism’ at the expense of ‘republicanism’, or (as I supposed) arguing that history is falsely stated in terms of a competition between the two. Those with a deep commitment to ‘liberalism’ sometimes fail to distinguish between these positions.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, p. 268.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, pp. 257–67.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Houston, , Algernon Sidney, p. 276.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Scott, , Crisis, pp. 106–7.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Catharine, Macaulay, History of England from the accession of James I to that of the Brunswick line, V (London, 1771), pp. 94–107, 108–15Google Scholar; History of England from the revolution to the present time (London, 1778), pp. 3–6, 78–83Google Scholar; History of England from the accession…, vol. VIII (London, 1781), passim.Google Scholar

⁹² History of the commonwealth of England (London, 1824–1828).Google Scholar

⁹³ John, Morrow, Coleridge's political thought: property, morality and the limits of traditional discourse (London and New York, 1990)Google Scholar; ‘Coleridge and the English revolution’, Political Science, XL (1988), 128–41Google Scholar; ‘Coleridge and the national church’, in Schochet, Gordon J. (ed.), Empire and revolutions (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1993), pp. 333–49.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ Worden, , ‘Commonwealth kidney’, pp. 35–7.Google Scholar