Cromwell, and the few others with whom he con-sulted, first considered what was absolutely necessary to their main and determined end; and then, whether it were right or wrong, to make all other means subservient to it; to cozen and deceive men, as long as they could induce them to contribute to what they desired, upon motives how foreign soever; and when they would keep company with them no longer, or farther serve their purposes, to compel them by force to submit to what they should not be able to oppose; and so the one [the Presbyterians] resolved, only to do what they believed the people would like and approve; and the other [Cromwell and the Independents], that the people should like and approve what they had resolved. And this difference in the measures they took, was the true cause of so different success in all they undertook. Machiavel, in this, was in the right, though he got an ill name by it with those who take what he says from the report of other men, or do not enough consider what he says, and his method in speaking: (he was as great an enemy to tyranny and injustice in any government, as any man then was, or now is . . .).
AS THE EVENTS of the English civil war were unfolding, the royalist Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, recorded his thoughts in his History of the Rebellion.1 Reflecting on the struggle for power between Cromwell and the Presbyterians in 1647, after the imprisonment of Charles I in Carisbrooke Castle, Clarendon described Cromwell with a characteristic mixture of appreciation and biting irony. In Clarendon’s judgment, Cromwell was a true Machiavellian: a brilliant tactician who was governed by considerations of necessity rather than morality, and who did not hesitate to use force and fraud to serve his purposes. Those who condemn Machiavelli for recommending such means, Clarendon added, have failed to understand Machiavelli’s rhetoric, “his method in speaking”: Machiavelli was “an enemy to tyranny,” even as he analyzed the realities of de facto political power.
Although defending Machiavelli against the charge of crude Machiavellism, Clarendon went on to describe Cromwell as a stereotypical Machiavel, a hypocritical actor and dissembling rhetorician for whom necessity was as much a matter of design as of circumstance:
Cromwell, though the greatest dissembler living, always made his hypocrisy of singular use and benefit to him; and never did any thing, how ungracious or imprudent soever it seemed to be, but what was necessary to the design; even his roughness and unpolishedness, which, in the beginning of the parliament, he affected . . . was necessary; and his first public declaration, in the beginning of the war, to his troop when it was first mustered, [was] “that he would not deceive or cozen them by the perplexed and involved expressions in his commission, to fight for king and parliament.” (305–306)
Instead, Cromwell told his soldiers that he would charge upon the king “as any other private person,” and “if their conscience would not permit them to do the like, he advised them not to list themselves in his troop, or under his command” (306). Machiavelli may have been “an enemy to tyranny”; whether Cromwell was, nevertheless, a casuistical Machiavel—fraudulently appealing to conscience in order to justify rebellion—is left to the reader to judge.
Clarendon’s description of Cromwell as Machiavellian hypocrite and crafty rhetorician is part of a long Renaissance tradition which is the subject of this book. Taking the rhetorical Machiavel as a point of departure, I argue that this figure is not simply the result of a naive misreading of Machiavelli but is rather attuned to the rhetorical dimension of his political theory in a way that later thematic readings of Machi avelli are not. The aim of the book is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England: one that sees the Machiavel and the republican as equally valid—and related—readings of Machiavelli’s work. In this history, Machiavelli offered a rhetoric for dealing with the realm of de facto political power, rather than a political theory with a coherent thematic content; and Renaissance Machiavellism included a variety of rhetorically sophisticated appreciations and appropriations of Machiavelli’s own rhetorical approach to politics. Once we recover the rhetorical dimension of Renaissance Machiavellism, we are able to understand how Machiavelli came to symbolize a series of tensions within both the humanist rhetorical tradition and contemporary politics—both for those who read him and for those who did not. Machiavellian rhetoric thus refers to Machiavelli’s own rhetorical approach to politics, to the Renaissance association of rhetorical deception with the force and fraud of Machiavelli’s prince, and to the rhetoric of Machiavellism that emerges in Renaissance debates about the nature and limits of political and religious authority.
It is important to clarify at the outset what I mean by the term rhetoric. I use the term generally as the humanists did, to refer to a repertoire of means of persuasion ranging from the figurative language and formal organization of a text to the ethos and pathos of the speaker. These means are ideally in the service of the good but are also available for evil purposes. Thus a tension exists within the humanist tradition between rhetoric conceived as an activity of ethical deliberation, which is a good in itself, and rhetoric conceived as an instrument or a neutral technique of argument. Of particular relevance to my argument in the latter case are the Ciceronian notions of the topic and the commonplace: the first is a way of structuring an argument according to the formal relationship between two terms (e.g., greater to lesser, cause to effect); the second a common opinion that can serve as the basis of an argument or practical syllogism, and that can be easily abstracted from a text and put to new uses. As we will see, Renaissance readers read Machiavelli both topically and as a storehouse of commonplaces or maxims; and in the course of the sixteenth century, Machiavellism developed into a rhetoric with its own specific topics and commonplaces—some of which Clarendon invokes in the passage above.
I also use the term rhetoric in opposition to thematic or positive argument. Here I am interested in how specific rhetorical techniques—topics, maxims, commonplaces, and, in particular, argument on both sides of a question—fragment, subvert, or otherwise qualify the literal sense of a text. Clarendon’s remarks, for example, suggest that he perceived a certain doubleness—which we would call irony—in Machiavelli’s “method of writing.” Rhetoric in this sense can be usefully equated with dialectical thinking when it involves the internal critique and negation of positive claims to authority. While Renaissance writers do not describe their texts in these terms, such a description is often implicit in their own rhetorical analysis and in their anxieties about rhetoric’s power to subvert the status quo.2
Here one needs also to remember that many Renaissance humanists saw a homology between politics, as the contingent realm of human affairs, and rhetoric as the study of arguments from probability, as a logic of persuasion rather than of apodeictic certainty. As Eugenio Garin has argued, humanist rhetoric entailed a theory of historical change and of the kinds of knowledge most appropriate to civic or political life. Renaissance treatises on imitation and on the education of a prince often imply a similar homology between literary imitation and politics. And they acknowledge that just as rhetoric and imitation can be used and abused in the case of poetry, so they are similarly helpful or harmful in the sphere of politics. For all these reasons, a consideration of Machiavellian rhetoric will of necessity be concerned with the uses of imitation—which writers such as Clarendon called “sembling” and “dissembling”—and with their political consequences.3
In proposing a rhetorical analysis of Machiavelli and of Renaissance Machiavellism, I take issue with the usual accounts by historians of political thought and by literary historians. Historians of Renaissance political thought have defined Machiavelli and the correct reception of his work in terms of secular political analysis or classical republicanism.4 They have thus tended to dismiss the rhetorical Machiavel as the creation of an uninformed or unsympathetic public, particularly in the sixteenth century. According to this argument, as long as theology remained the dominant language of political discussion, Machiavelli was condemned as irreligious and immoral.5 In contrast—so the argument runs—seventeenth-century Englishmen were well positioned to appreciate the author of The Prince and especially the Discourses. Thus in his important history of English Machiavellism Felix Raab stressed the continuities in the reception of Machiavelli as a secular thinker and analyst of the “politick” use of religion from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, but he also charted a move away from the religious condemnation of Machiavelli to an appreciation of Machiavelli the republican thinker. According to Raab, the crisis of sovereignty leading up to the civil war signaled a crisis of theological justifications of political authority and allowed for the emergence of a more fully secular understanding of politics. Sympathetic readers now read Machiavelli as a dispassionate political observer or republican theorist, rather than as the diabolical Machiavel. In the end, while Raab admitted that the same individual was capable of reading Machiavelli in both ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he tended to see the correct reading of Machiavelli as one that subordinates his rhetoric to his secular political analysis, and he argued that such a reading was most likely to appear in the seventeenth century.
This divorce of rhetoric and politics, religious condemnation and secular appreciation, governs J.G.A. Pocock’s analysis of Renaissance Machiavellism as well. Like other historians of political thought, Pocock equates Machiavellism with the revival of secular, classical republicanism, which he defines as a set of ideas about a mixed constitution, a citizen militia, and individual virtù. Although Pocock allows that the rhetoric of civic humanism contributed to the emergence of Renaissance republicanism through its emphasis on dialogue and debate, he argues that Machiavelli, with his critique of the pieties of civic humanism and his insistence on the brutal realities of contemporary politics, most fully represents the secular republicanism of Renaissance political theory. In defining Machiavellism in this way, Pocock discounts the other reception of Machiavelli in the Renaissance: the reading of Machiavelli as the Machiavel, a figure of force and fraud, coercion and deceit, and—related to these—rhetorical skill. In Pocock’s view, this reception of Machiavelli is simply incorrect—which is not to say it did not take place but that it was naive—a misreading dictated by the inability of Christian believers to see anything positive in Machiavelli’s secular political theory. Like Raab, Pocock argues that it took the crisis of sovereignty during the English civil war, and the corresponding crisis of the usual theological modes of political explanation, for the real—secular, republican—Machiavelli to be discovered and appreciated by seventeenth-century Englishmen. In this account, James Harrington is the exemplary Machiavellian.
This bifurcation of the sixteenth-century Machiavel and seventeenth-century republican is endorsed by some literary historians as well. While devoting considerable attention to the Machiavel, literary historians also describe the recovery of a more sophisticated understanding of Machiavelli in the seventeenth century: the stage Machiavel, a figure of rhetoric, cunning, and hypocrisy, is increasingly accompanied by allusion or direct reference in the poetry and political tracts of the 1640s and 1650s to Machiavelli the republican analyst of virtù and author of the Discourses. As with the accounts of Raab and Pocock, here too the narrative tends to be one of progressive enlightenment regarding the republican content of Machiavelli’s work by his readers—among whom we find Milton, Marvell, Robert Overton, George Wither, Algernon Sydney, Henry Neville, and Marchamont Nedham. Although some sixteenth-century readers appreciated Machiavelli’s pragmatic political advice, and though many seventeenth-century authors still used Machiavel as a term of abuse, the general trend is away from moral and religious condemnation toward an appreciation of Machiavelli as a student of both de facto political power or “delegitimized politics,” and secular republicanism.6
Note that what happens in these histories of Machiavellism is that theology and rhetoric appear on one side, the languages of republicanism and secular political analysis on the other. The reading of Machiavelli as rhetorician and Machiavel (dominant, according to Raab and Pocock, in the sixteenth century though still present in the seventeenth as well) is equated with the theologically rooted misunderstanding of Machiavelli, whereas the modern recuperation of Machiavellian discourse is defined in thematic terms as a set of ideas about sovereignty, agency, and the mixed constitution. And although civic humanist rhetoric is seen as contributing to the development of a republican sensibility, it is gradually superseded by the discourse of republicanism per se. Note also that writers such as John Milton, who was both a radical puritan and republican thinker, fall aslant this divide.7
This is now the dominant account of Machiavellism in the Renaissance but it is to my mind insufficiently flexible to make sense of the variety of languages—and of their rhetorical instantiation—in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political debate. Attention to the lessons of humanist rhetoric suggests in contrast that a given language or idiom—such as Machiavellism—may serve competing interests at the same time, that languages may be used in utramque partem. This in turn means that the language of Machiavellism cannot simply be equated with secular, classical republicanism since it was available and used for sectarian religious purposes as well. The larger point I am making is not simply that historians of political thought have chosen to focus on one strain of Machiavellism rather than another, but that this choice is symptomatic of a methodology that locates ideological conflict between, rather than within, individual discourses. It analyzes competing discourses—such as secular republicanism versus the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Elect Nation—but pays insufficient attention to the fact that each of these discourses is itself an object of competition, capable of serving a variety of rhetorical interests.8 In contrast, a serious consideration of the ties between humanist rhetoric and political theory requires that we analyze the rhetoric of political theory. When we do we emerge with a revised account of the relation of rhetoric and political thought in the Renaissance, one that has implications for both literary and political texts.
In taking up Machiavelli’s relation to and revision of the humanist rhetorical tradition and the reception of Machiavelli’s work, this book thus necessarily engages two important debates in Renaissance historiography, the first concerning the relationship of humanist rhetoric to republicanism in the Italian Renaissance, the second concerning the association of Machiavellism and republicanism with the increasing secularism of Renaissance culture. In contrast to many of the standard scholarly works, part 1 argues that Machiavelli does not supplant rhetoric with a more realistic view of politics but rather makes politics more deeply rhetorical than it had been in the earlier humanist tradition. One surprising consequence of this argument is that the Machiavel emerges as an intelligent representation of and response to Machiavelli’s work. A second consequence is that an informed response to Machiavelli can no longer be simply equated with a secular, republican approach to politics, both because republicanism is espoused by religious as well as secular thinkers in this period, and because republicanism is not the only legitimate construction of Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics.
As we will see, Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics dramatized a tension between a technical and prudential conception of rhetoric that is at the heart of Renaissance humanist culture. On the one hand, rhetoric in this period was conceived of as an ethically and ideologically neutral technique of argument; on the other hand, rhetoric was seen as the embodiment of a faculty of practical reasoning or prudential deliberation that is tied to ethical norms. If the first technical conception of rhetoric gave rise to considerable anxiety concerning the immoral ends to which rhetoric might be put, the second prudential conception offered the response that the good orator is of necessity a good man. Though Renaissance humanists regularly acknowledged the possible abuse of rhetoric, they just as often attempted to define rhetoric in the prudential terms that would preclude such immorality. Machiavelli borrowed from the humanist notion of prudential rhetoric at the same time that he criticized such rhetoric for its subordination to ethics, that is, for not being practical enough. In making of virtù a faculty of practical reasoning and action that is not constrained by ethical norms, Machiavelli attempted to make rhetoric and prudential deliberation generate a new set of priorities in the domain of politics. Yet, in taking the generative possibilities of a practical conception of rhetoric more seriously than did the humanists themselves, Machiavelli paradoxically appeared to realize the humanists’ worst fears about a technical or instrumental conception of rhetoric: its ethical indeterminacy, its concern with success, its use for the purpose of force and fraud, violence and misrepresentation.
Machiavelli’s Renaissance readers understood his complicated relationship to the humanist tradition. Specifically, they saw that Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics engaged a constellation of topics that epitomized the tensions within humanist rhetoric: the relation of imitation to misrepresentation, persuasion to coercion, means to ends, intention to effect, demonic flexibility to allegorical stability, and virtue or virtù to success. These topics amounted to a questioning of the Ciceronian ideal of harmony between the honestum and the utile (the good and the useful); they registered a tension between these terms, and an anxiety that the good might be sacrificed to the expedient or that rhetoric might become an instrument of force and fraud.9 Interpreted in one way, such topics articulated the perception that rhetoric can be used for evil as well as good purposes; interpreted in another way, they implied that the rhetorician is inherently unreliable or unethical. In reading Machiavelli in terms of these topics, Renaissance readers registered their fears concerning the divorce of ethics from rhetoric and politics, and they ranged in their interpretations from the simple condemnation of Machiavelli as Machiavel to the recognition that the Machiavel is only one aspect—though a crucial one—of Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics. Similarly, in articulating their fears about rhetoric in terms of Machiavelli, Renaissance readers offered a spectrum of interpretations from the simple identification of Machiavelli with the abuse of rhetoric, to the perception that rhetoric is Machiavellian because it presupposes a flexible faculty of judgment for dealing with contingent affairs, one that draws its arguments from the topics outlined above. In Machiavelli’s own work and in Renaissance Machiavellism, these topics thus articulated a crisis in the assumptions of humanist rhetoric.10
This crisis was caused in part by a series of political crises, which brought home the role of force and fraud in the sphere of politics and the realities of de facto political power. For Machiavelli, the crises were the French invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494 and the fall of the Florentine republic in 1512.11 For Englishmen, the crises included Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, the conflict between Anglicans and dissenters throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English civil war, and the Engagement Controversy. And for Counter-Reformation figures such as Botero, the crisis was the Reformation itself. Just as Machiavelli exposed the inadequacy of humanist assumptions for dealing with the political crisis of 1494 and after, so Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics offered many writers of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a more adequate mode of conceptualizing recent political events than had the assumptions of humanist rhetoric. Machiavelli’s work was not the only or even the main channel of such rhetorical politics in the Renaissance; other sources—such as rhetorical handbooks, manuals of courtliness and casuistry, the “adiaphora” argument disseminated in political treatises, and the writings of Tacitus and Guicciardini—were important conduits of this conception of politics; and in many cases, as we shall see, they merged with the rhetoric of Machiavellism. But Machiavelli’s work invested rhetorical resourcefulness and its ethical instability with clear conceptual lineaments, giving the double face of rhetorical politics a single name, so that its name came to signify two-facedness.12
It is this two-facedness of Machiavellian rhetoric that helps us rehabilitate the Machiavel. For if Machiavellism is a rhetoric for conceptualizing and responding to the realm of contingency, it includes not only republicanism but also tyranny; it involves the use of force and fraud not only to advance one’s self interest but also to serve the commonwealth. In this light, the Machiavel should not be simply dismissed as the theologically determined misunderstanding of Machiavelli, for the problem of de facto political power to which Machiavellian republicanism responds in the seventeenth century is the problem the sixteenth century represented in the rhetorical Machiavel. The identification of the rhetorical Machiavel with force and fraud is thus not simply antithetical to the republican Machiavelli, just as The Prince is not simply antithetical to the Discourses. Rather, both are available and often compatible “arguments” in the political rhetoric Machiavelli was expounding.
In the following chapters I challenge the bifurcation of the rhetorical Machiavel and the republican first in Machiavelli’s own work and then in the reception of that work on the continent and in Renaissance England. In part 1 I argue that Machiavelli’s political thought is inseparable from his rhetorical or internal critique of humanism, and that we cannot understand his political thought without analyzing his rhetorical practice. In particular, once we see that virtù revises the humanist concepts of imitation and prudential rhetoric, we understand why Machiavelli should not be chiefly read as a theorist of republicanism but rather as a proponent of a rhetorical politics, one that proceeds topically and dialectically, and that can be used by tyrant and republican alike. In the final chapter of part 1 I briefly consider the Counter-Reformation reception of Machiavelli, and argue that Botero and his contemporaries were particularly attuned to the ways in which Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics could be appropriated for the purposes of a Christian reason of state.
In part 2 of the book I explore the reception of Machiavelli by critics and admirers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and argue that both are informed by a rhetorical understanding of Machiavellism. For both, Machiavellism offered a new rhetorical approach to politics that was equally relevant to contemporary theological and political debate. Chapter 4 presents a series of case studies, focusing on the reading of Machiavelli by Stephen Gardiner, Sir Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare. Chapter 5 takes up the topics of Machiavellism as they appear in the debate over Henrician policy and in subsequent debates concerning the relationship between church and state, sovereignty and de facto political power. Finally, in part 3, I analyze Milton’s reception of Machiavelli and the tradition of Renaissance Machiavellism in Areopagitica, Comus, and Paradise Lost.
In all these cases, attention to the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric revises the usual polarized accounts of Renaissance Machiavellism in terms of the popular and learned reception, the Machiavel and the republican, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, it allows us to displace these distinctions from the plane of the temporal or developmental to the rhetorical: for there is a crucial ambivalence at the heart of all that was understood as Machiavellism from the 1530s through the 1660s. Machiavelli did not simply signify the threat of rhetorical manipulation in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and classical republicanism in the mid- and late seventeenth century but also the unstable relationship between intention and effect, rhetorical persuasion and coercion, in the related spheres of religion and politics. My aim in proposing a topical account of Machiavellism is neither to deny that Machiavelli was often interpreted simplistically nor to deny that many seventeenth-century Englishmen were particularly drawn to Machiavelli the republican theorist; rather, my intent is to argue that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric can tell us much about the anxieties and concerns, as well as the conventions of interpretation, that were characteristic of Tudor-Stuart political, literary, and religious culture. The recuperation of the Machiavel and of Machiavelli the theorist of force and fraud is not intended to replace the republican theorist, but rather to complement and complicate our sense of what Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics offered his contemporaries.
Above all, once we see that the Machiavellian moment of Renaissance culture was a rhetorical moment, we see that Machiavellian rhetoric could be used not only pro and contra republicanism but pro and contra secular thought. The most insightful readers of Machiavelli in the Renaissance are those who, like Milton, do not simply reject the rhetorical Machiavel for Machiavelli the republican, or the diabolical Machiavel for the theorist of mixed government, but rather see the inseparability of these two aspects of Machiavelli’s thought. In contrast to the usual histories of Machiavellism, theology proves to be a link between the rhetorical and republican Machiavelli, while rhetoric is the link between the Machiavelli who appears in theological debates and the republican Machiavelli of Renaissance political theory.