Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

RACHEL HAMMERSLEY

nation, the representatives of the people in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as officers and ministers under them for the good of the people’. 30 By contrast, according to the Instrument of Government, which was instituted in December 1653, the ‘supreme legislative authority’ of the nation was said to ‘be and reside in one person, and the people assembled in Parliament’. 31 Macaulay definitely favoured the former. As has already been shown, her hostility to Cromwell stemmed from her sense that he had acted in his own interests rather than in the public interest. Moreover, she seems to have believed that, however honest an individual was on assuming power, they would – once in power – be tempted to further their own interests. On this basis she was hostile to the very idea of single-person rule. As she noted in her sketch of a constitution for Corsica, only a ‘democratical’ republic, ‘rightly balanced’, offers ‘impassable bars to vicious pre-eminence’. 32 Despite addressing her sketch to the Corsican leader Pasquale Paoli, Macaulay was not suggesting that he take on the role of sole ruler of the island. Rather, she urged him to act as a legislator. On this point Macaulay was drawing on the ideas of James Harrington. Harrington had argued that since invention is ‘most perfect in one Man’ that governments were best instituted by a sole legislator. 33 On this basis in The Commonwealth of Oceana he presented the Lord Archon as the ideal legislator, enacting the role that Oliver Cromwell should have performed after dissolving the Rump Parliament in April 1653. In A Short Sketch , Macaulay offered Paoli the same opportunity: The necessity of having an unrestrained power lodged in some person, capable of the arduous task of settling such a government as the above described, is too visible to need any recommendation; nor is it less so, that there is no person so capable of this high employment as Signior Paoli, who, having long directed the councils of a brave people in the glorious struggle for liberty, should finish his career by making that liberty beneficial and permanent. 34

30 ‘An Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth’, in ed.S.R.Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (3rd edn, Oxford, 1906), p. 388. 31 ‘The Instrument of Government’, in ed.Gardiner, Constitutional Documents , p. 405. 32 Macaulay, Political Writings, p. 103. 33 James Harrington, Aphorisms Political, in ed.J.G.A.Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington , (Cambridge, 1977), p. 777. 34 Macaulay, Political Writings , pp. 107-8.

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