Libertarian humbug

A. L. Rowse

Absolute Liberty: Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins Edited by Barbara Taft (Archon Books $27.50)

T n a lifetime of teaching, research and 'writing, Caroline Robbins has marked out an interesting and significant stretch of historical territory for herself. It is best summed up in her fine book, The Eight- eenth Century Commonwealth Man, which describes the tradition of quasi-republican doctrinaires coming down from the English Civil War to that other civil war, the American Revolution.

Now, as a tribute to her work, her pupils have brought together a selection of her studies, with a generous foreword by Dr J.H. Plumb, and it makes a distinguished book, giving us something new.

Professor Robbins is an authority on Andrew Marvell, but tells us that as yet there is no academic consensus as to what his political thought added up to. 'Marvell's often boisterous polemics perhaps concealed a philosophy of tolerance, but hardly a political theory.' What does that matter? I am very sceptical about political theory: it usually means mere generalising, and putting forward as abstract 'truth' one's own interests, wishes or prejudices.

Professor Robbins sees in some of these more interesting thinkers — sceptics and ra- tionalists like Selden, Anthony Collins and Toland, — 'forerunners of the modern religious spirit'. She has a good point there, since they were tolerationists, anti- authoritarian, upholders of the spirit of free inquiry.

The political thinkers in this tradition were eventually more influential — spec- tacularly with the American Revolution. For the Founding Fathers of the United States were well-read in the works of subversives like Milton, Harrington and the intolerable Algernon Sidney. Indeed John Adams, who knew well, said that the American Revolution was made in men's minds before ever a shot was fired. In the minds of a determined minority, of course, for the trouble makers are always a minori- ty.

The propaganda of these doctrinaires of liberty fell on fertile soil. A certain amount of liberty is a good thing, I suppose — but one can have too much of a good thing. One sees this everywhere in the world to- day, except under Communism; but no one can suppose that a vast agglomeration of peoples and territories like the USSR could hold together except under authoritarian rule (Lenin on that subject: 'Liberty? What for?' He was a proper Russian).

The centre-piece of these studies is that propagandist of liberty, Thomas Hollis, and a fascinating portrait it makes. The descendant in a line of Dissenting business men, and pretty rich, he was able to spend a fortune on propagating liberty in various forms. He sent hundreds of volumes to Harvard Library, all the anti-monarchical, republican books he could gather; not con- tent with that, he sent classic cameos with their message, medals and libertarian prints. To Protestant Switzerland he sent a vast collection of anti-Jesuit literature; to New England a large collection to counter Canadian Catholicism. Professor Robbins thinks that his efforts were rewarded by the encouragement of classic New England Unitarianism — from the bleakness of which T.S. Eliot understandably reacted in- to 17th-century Anglicanism.

One of the protests of the Continental Congress revolutionaries was directed against George III's Quebec Act, giving security and liberal treatment to the French Canadian Catholics. A fat lot of liberty they would have got if the Americans had

conquered Canada! French Canada understood that, and much preferred the monarchy of George Ill to American 'liber- ty'. A second protest by the revolutionaries was made against the home government's attempt to protect the Indians' right to their territories in the Middle West. The best thing I know about Harold Nicolson is his reply to the American do-gooder who kept interrupting his lecture to question British treatment of Indians under the Raj. Harold answered sweetly: `Do you mean our treat- ment of our Indians or your treatment of your Indians?'

Hollis was rich enough to send his liber- tarian books all over the world; he must have done a good deal of damage one way or another. Though a Dissenter who disap- proved of the poor old Church of England, he was handsomely interested in tithes in Dorset. The historian is often made aware of the element of humbug in Dissent. Samuel Butler pinpointed it in Hudibras:

Did not our Worthies of the House. Before they broke the Peace, break Vows?

For having freed us first from both The Allegiance and the Supremacy Oath, Did they not, next, compel the nation To take, and break, the Protestation? To swear, and after to recant, The Solemn League and Covenant?

To take the Engagement, and disclaim it?

Enforced by those who first did frame it. These puritan revolutionaries were the precursors of the American revolutionaries; Professor Robbins is the historian of the notable line that leads from one to the other.

She gives us a charming picture of Thomas Hollis at home on his broad acres in Dorset. Here he was friendly with the great Pitt, until he was shocked by the Great Commoner taking a peerage. But, of course, Pitt for all his populist appeal was bent, like everybody else, on founding a grand political family anchored in the peerage.

Hollis, for his part, was content to name his fields and pastures after the heroes of liberty: Milton and Algernon Sidney, John Knox (not much liberty there!), and the horrid Attorney General Coke, who fabricated the history of English law to suit the Parliamentarian book. One of these in- land fields was named Oceana, after Harr- ington's doctrinaire treatise. Hollis regard- ed the republic depicted in it as a model of the perfect state. It would never have work- ed for a moment, of course.

Many more such names were applied to the inoffensive fields. One wonders what the Dorset yokels made of it all; they would probably not have been surprised to learn that Harrington went off his head. And actually we learn that Hollis suffered from halucinations over a period of five years. Evidently too much liberty is apt to go to people's heads.

I cannot claim to be in love with the liber- tarian Dissenting tradition of Professor Robbins's forbears; I am all the more pleas- ed to pay tribute to her life's distinguished work.