The Instrument of Government, the document which ratified the elevation of Oliver Cromwell to the office of lord protector on 16 December 1653, has a distinctive place in English political history. It was the nation's first written constitution. Except for the Humble Petition and Advice, which replaced it in 1657, it has been the only one. Perhaps the term ‘written constitution’, which might have been barely intelligible at the time, will seem too grand for either text, at least if it suggests either a start from scratch or a guarantee of static or permanent arrangements. Both documents took for granted the survival of some familiar constitutional practices. Neither of them questioned the supremacy of parliamentary statute or its capacity to amend the new arrangements. Nonetheless the Instrument's provision for the conduct of government by a single set of rules and procedures, laid down at a single time, was a bold conception. The document drew on two sets of constitutional proposals that had been formulated by the New Model Army in the later 1640s: the Heads of Proposals of 1647 and the Agreement of the People of January 1649. But whereas those texts had been drawn up for submission to parliament, the Instrument was a decree. Audaciously it was imposed not on one nation but on three, even though many of its provisions were irrelevant or ill-suited to the conditions of recently conquered Scotland and Ireland.

In the England of the 1640s, civil war was fought on two fronts: by the sword, and by the pen. The polemicist Marchamont Nedham, a figure with a large part in Andrew Marvell's literary career, remarked in 1652 that ‘in our late wars … the pen militant hath had as sharp encounters as the sword, and borne away as many trophies’. For while the sword may subdue men ‘by force’, ‘the pen it is which manifests the right of things; and when it is once cleared, it gives spurs to resolution, because men are never raised to so high a pitch of action, as when they are persuaded, that they engage in a righteous cause’. In the late 1640s, when the story to be told in this chapter begins, the pen was the principal instrument of defeated royalism, the cause which Nedham, the serial turncoat of the Puritan Revolution, served at that time. During the Second Civil War of 1648, it is true, it was briefly the ally and servant of the sword, but otherwise it was a substitute for it. Never was royalism more buoyant on the page than in the two years that preceded the execution of the king. The royalist cause, like the parliamentarian one, had always been a coalition of principles and temperaments. Royalist writing ranged from piety to hedonism, from Calvinism to paganism, from belligerence to Stoic resignation, from divine-right absolutism to moderate constitutionalism, from unquestioning commitment to the king to doubts about his conduct and policies.

The counselling of rulers is the perennial problem of monarchical or neomonarchical government. The fate of realms depends on the qualities and influence of the advisers who have access to rulers and sway their judgements. Under the Tudors, men looked to ethics and education to mould providers of good counsel. Counsellors, it was urged, should be trained in virtue and wisdom and public spirit and be taught to shun their opposites. Amid the parliamentary conflicts and political emergencies of the early seventeenth century, that ethical approach became subordinate to an institutional one, which had medieval antecedents. Less was now said about the education of counsellors, more about the functioning of the royal, or privy, council. There were mounting pressures to make the king's advisers accountable for their misdeeds. The council, it was thought, should have formal powers to restrain the monarch, and should itself be answerable to parliament, the ‘great council’ of the realm, which should have a say in the council's membership.

Before the civil war that reasoning achieved nothing. Kings chose their privy councillors, and listened to them when and because they wanted to. There was no conciliary machinery to prevent them either from exercising their own wills or from handing power to favourites outside the council-chamber. The Long Parliament resolved to tackle that deficiency of the constitution. In the proposals for settlement that it pressed on Charles I before and during the war, it made two demands. The members of the privy council must be named, or at least approved, by parliament; and the privy council must be made responsible to, perhaps even in some sense representative of, parliament. Those requirements were adapted and developed in the constitutional proposals of the army in 1647–9 and the Rump Parliament in 1653.

The Instrument of Government, the contract by which Cromwell came to power, implemented the cumulative programme of the years 1641–53. At least to appearances, it replaced the rule of royal will by conciliar government. The protector was to administer the government with the council's ‘assistance’, and to rule ‘in all things by the advice of the council’. Only with its ‘consent’ could he ‘dispose and order’ the armed forces, make peace or war, or call parliaments supplementary to the triennial ones stipulated by the Instrument.

There has not been an age so sympathetic as the present to the study of the political content and the political context of Shakespeare's plays. Politics are now everywhere in literary criticism. In Shakespeare's time men followed Aristotle and applied the language of what we regard as private ethics to the conduct of public life: today's critics, when they give currency to a term such as ‘sexual politics’, extend the language of public life to private ethics. Even if we restrict ourselves, as I shall, to a more traditional definition of politics, we notice the transformation of critical approaches that the past half century has brought. Who would now doubt that the behaviour of men in public life was a theme to engage Shakespeare's interest, and to stretch his powers, to the full? Who would assume, as John Palmer did in his Political Characters of Shakespeare in 1945, that Shakespeare was ‘forced’ by the public demand for history plays to ‘take the political field’ (p. vi)?

On the face of it, the new political awareness ought to add to our understanding of Shakespeare. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the relationship between literature and politics had an intimacy which the modern world has lost. Writers and politicians were so often the same people. The interaction of political and literary aspirations in the career of a Sir Thomas More or a Sir Thomas Wyatt or a Sir Philip Sidney, or of a John Milton or an Andrew Marvell, is so insistent that we cannot hope to understand the one without the other.

Never has republicanism attracted so much interest among students of seventeenth-century England as in recent years, and never has so much confusion surrounded the word. Terms of ideological description are useful only if there is a common perception of their meaning or meanings. Here I shall examine the principal applications of the word ‘republicanism’ (or ‘republican’) to the period before and of the English civil wars, and test them against the ideas they are intended to describe. Secondly I shall ask how far those usages help us to understand the revolution of 1649 which brought the execution of king Charles Iy and the abolition of monarchy.

No single definition of republicanism can claim historical authenticity for itself. No one in or before the Puritan Revolution called himself or herself a republican. ‘Republican’ and ‘republicanism’ were terms of abuse and caricature. That does not necessarily make them useless to us. ‘Puritanism’ was a smear too, rejected by those to whom it was applied. Yet its usages corresponded, however indiscriminately, to a movement of belief at the centre of the civil wars for which we need a word and for which Puritanism, provided we know what we mean by it, is a good and perhaps the only one. Only the very loosest definitions of republicanism would award it a comparable centrality. Yet that word too, provided we know what we mean by it, has its purpose and perhaps even its necessity.

BEN Jonson lived under three monarchs, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, and sought the patronage of each of them. With Charles, who came to the throne in the autumn of Jonson’s life, too late to be a formative influence on his writing, we are here only peripherally concerned. Jonson’s relations with Elizabeth and James were formative. Elizabeth spurned him. James, save at the beginning and perhaps at the end of his reign, gave him almost uninterrupted favour. The queen’s death in 1603 lifted a burden of bitterness and despair from Jonson. It gave him new hope, both for the condition of the monarchy and for his own fortunes. The hope was not unqualified. It was tempered by circumspection, unease, insecurity. Those attributes would never vanish. Even so the new reign modified his discontent. It also redirected it, so that the crown ceased to be its target.

The change was not sudden. If there is a dividing line in 1603 there is also a later one, in the autumn of 1605, the time both of the publication of his play Sejanus his Fall and of the Gunpowder Plot. Until then his political concerns were essentially the same as in the twilight of the Elizabethan regime. Those concerns are hard to square with some recent assessments of his politics. There is, as Tom Cain has remarked, ‘something approaching a consensus that Jonson’s work celebrates an absolutist political ideology’. That description, Cain sees, will not fit the Elizabethan Jonson. The late Elizabethan regime, like the Jacobean one after it, sought to establish the principle that monarchical sovereignty is absolute rather than mixed. The attempt provoked unease in Jonson’s circle. In the years around 1600 his friends John Donne and Richard Martin voiced fears lest the monarch’s power might be or become ‘unlimited’. The complaint of the Earl of Essex, the patron of many of Jonson’s associates, against Elizabeth – ‘Cannot princes err?’ – reflects the same unease. The warning in Jonson’s play Cynthia’s Revels (1600) against the predilection of courtiers for the maxim ‘all power is just’ (V.iv.630) reflects it too.

Jonson’s interest in such matters was not that of a constitutional theorist. He did not think in the conceptual or legal terms that informed Elizabethan and early Stuart disputes about absolutism (a doctrine which he never ‘celebrated’).

From time to time the anniversary of a historical episode, or of the birth or death of a historical figure, touches a nation's nerve. It answers to perceptions of national identity; or it prompts the invocation of the past for present causes. One such event is the Shakespeare bicentenary of 1764. Another is the centenary of the Glorious Revolution in 1788. No English centenary, however, has produced a more prodigious intensity of sentiment than the three-hundredth anniversary, in April 1899, of the birth of Oliver Cromwell. Across the country there were fervent gatherings of his admirers. In the City Temple in Holborn, which held more than 3,000 people, a series of meetings, from which hundreds had to be turned away, lasted from noon till night. The tercentenary prompted a succession of biographies, most of them deeply felt. There was extensive commentary and debate in the press. The building of a statue of Cromwell at Westminster, which had been demanded and opposed for more than half a century, was finally accomplished.

The years around the tercentenary are the climax of a movement of enthusiasm for Cromwell, even of a cult of him. The movement is essentially a Victorian one. It becomes pronounced at the beginning of Victoria's reign and declines after its end. With its emergence the verdict of previous times was reversed. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it can be broadly said, were hostile to Cromwell. They vilified him on account both of his revolutionary deeds – the regicide, the establishment of a republic, military and sectarian rule – and of his character, which was generally held to have been one of ruthless cunning and ambition and hypocrisy.