James Harrington (& Matthew Wren) The Prerogative of Popular Government 1658

Harrington & Wren were political economists, and as economists they necessarily disagreed. The first use is in Wren’s work criticising Harrington’s Oceana, from which Harrington quotes at length in order to refute it. Wren suggests that Harrington plans for an agrarian economy would leave “a commonwealth of cottagers” at “the beggars bush”. He is clearly not referring to an actual place, but to a state of poverty and powerlessness. Harrington clearly recognises the phrase and expects his readers to understand it, as he quotes it back in his response.  Both usages show the wide distribution of the phrase.

Matthew Wren

Considerations upon Mr. Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana 1657

quoted in James Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658) p.278

“An equal, if not greater incommodity to Oceana, would be created by the agrarian, which making Emporium a city of princes, would render the country a commonwealth of cottagers, able to dispute precedence with the beggers bush.”

James Harrington 

The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658) p.279

“ . . . the more mouths there be in a city, the more meat of necessity must be vented by the country, and so there will be more corn, more cattel, and better markets; which breeding more laborers, more husbandmen, and richer farmers, bring the country so far from a commonwealth of cottagers, that where the blessings of God, thro the fruitfulness of late years with us, render’d the husbandman unable to dispute precedence with the beggers bush, his trade thus uninterrupted, in that his markets are certain, goes on with increase of children, of servants, of corn, and of cattel: for there is no reason why the fields adjoining to Emporium, being but of a hard soil, should annually produce two crops, but the populousness of the city.”

Matthew Wren (1629–1672)

Wren was a political writer and politician. He was born in Cambridge, the son of  Matthew Wren, Master of Peterhouse and Bishop of Ely. While his father was imprisoned John Wilkins, the Master of Wadham College and the future bishop of Chester directed Wren’s attention to Oceana. Wren wrote Considerations upon Mr. Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana (1657) and in his own name, Monarchy Asserted: in Vindication of the Consideration upon Mr. Harrington’s Oceana (1659). Wren published only one other work.

After the Restoration he was secretary to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor. He was associated with the Royal Society, became an MP and was interested in several trading ventures. On Clarendon’s fall in 1667 he became secretary to the Duke of York, and through naval affairs is mentioned in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Wren, no seaman, accompanied the Duke York to sea 1672 and was wounded at the battle of Sole Bay, dying at Greenwich a week later.

James Harrington (1611–1677)

Harrington was a political theorist. He was born at Upton, Northamptonshire, part of the ancient and far-flung Harrington family, in which most eldest sons were unhelpfully called either James or John. He was not the James Harrington who was a prominent parliamentarian MP, military commander and member of a parliamentary commission that supervised the captivity of Charles I.

This James spent some of his childhood at the family’s manor at Rand, near Lincoln, and attended Trinity College, Oxford, before inheriting his father’s estates. He spent some time fighting, unsuccessfully, in the Netherlands, and with the Elector Palatine in Denmark, before travelling in the Netherlands and in Germany, France, and Italy. He lived on his estates and, from the mid-1650s until his death, in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, where he reputedly retired to his library for years on end. He only married ‘old sweetheart’ in 1675. He was reckoned very good company, an excellent conversationalist, amiable, and generous. He had many devoted friends, no personal enemies and was highly gregarious, including amongst his friends the diarist John Aubrey.

In contrast to his later writings he was personally devoted to Charles I. As a gentleman groom of the royal bedchamber, he attended on the King during his captivity, and was said by John Aubrey to have fallen ill as a consequence of the King’s execution.

Harrington was later associated with Levellers and radicals. His political theory was a complex mixture in which freedom and political stability depended the separation of tasks between the natural aristocracy who could debate and advise, and the people who had the exclusive right to decide on law and policy, but without discussion. He decried the myth of the balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, whose failings he thought had been disguised during Queen Elizabeth’s reign by her ‘love-tricks’ with her people. Only an ‘equal commonwealth’ offered a stable political order, but it was also expansionist and martial. The scheme relied not on a natural virtue but on forcing the people to be well behaved. The executive of the commonwealth was to be elected by and from the senate for one-year terms, and all administrative and judicial officials for local government were also to be elective. All public offices were to be salaried and subject to rotation. Underpinning the whole order was his ‘Agrarian Law’ limiting how much property any individual might acquire or inherit, in order to prevent excessive concentrations of property. He presented himself as an aggressive advocate of popular government (even democracy) and equality at a time when these were virtually synonymous with disorder. However his use of these terms was idiosyncratic and perhaps deliberately provocative.

‘Oceana’, his main work, was published in 1656, and provoked much reaction.Some of his ideas seem to have been adopted in the plantation of Jamaica, where there is a Beggars Bush site.

Harrington’s ideas were both controversial and of immediate relevance after the death of Cromwell. In 1659 Harrington formed the ‘Rota’, a select debating society that was significant enough that Samuel Pepys, always ambitious but cautious, was prepared to pay to become a member. In 1660 he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plot with, amongst others, Praisegod Barebone, leatherseller, radical preacher and MP. He was imprisoned without trial in the Tower of London and then spirited away to St Nicholas Island, off the coast at Plymouth to avoid a writ of habeas corpus. He was released to the fort at Plymouth because of his failing mental and physical health, where it was further damaged by treatment with guaiacum, an addictive drug in vogue at the time. He lived in London suffering periodic mentally illness until his death.

Although after the Restoration he was ‘reputed no better than a whimsical and crack’d brain’d person’ in the eighteenth century Harrington became one of the principal authorities in England and especially in America for schemes of Commonwealths. Part of the first draft of the French constitution of 1799 were modelled on ‘Oceana’. He then fell out of favour until his works were republished in the 1970’s and since then has become popular in some circles in the USA.

Further Reading & Text

DNB

Pocock, J.C.A., (ed) (1977) The political works of James Harrington

The Prerogative of Popular Government

I have not found an online editions of Wren.

Posted: April 10th, 2011 | Filed under: Writers | Tags: Jamaica, James Harrington, Literary, Matthew Wren, St Thomas in the Vale | No Comments »