As a landed gentleman and a private scholar, James Harrington was everything that Marchamont Nedham and Thomas Hobbes were not. Like John Milton, he possessed a competence. He was independent in spirit as well, and his pen was always his own. Since he was never a hireling, he could always speak his mind. Prior to the autumn of 1656, it would have been easy to take him for a royalist. He was not a member of Parliament before or after Pride's Purge, and he made his first undoubted appearance on the public stage when he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles I in the time of latter's captivity, less than two years before the Stuart monarch's execution. That he came to be personally favorable to the captive monarch there can be no doubt. He left the king's company only when barred from further attendance by the commissioners in charge, who thought him too partial to Charles.

We are told two stories concerning the genesis of James Harrington's most famous work. According to John Toland, Harrington fell prey to melancholy after the death of the king; found consolation in pursuing his studies, especially as they pertained to the causes of the English monarchy's demise; and then began to write.