Sidney's New Arcadia and the decay of Protestant republicanism.(Critical essay)

 
  [H]is intent and scope was to turn the barren philosophy precepts 
  into pregnant images of life, and in them, first on the monarch's 
  part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of 
  princes, change of government and laws, vicissitudes of sedition, 
  faction, succession, confederacies, plantations, with all other errors 
  or alterations in public affairs; then again, in the subject's case, 
  the state of favour, disfavour, prosperity, adversity, emulation, 
  quarrel, undertaking, retiring, hospitality, travel and all other 
  moods of private fortunes or misfortunes. (1) 

Despite sixteenth-century political-theological discourses on obedience and subjection, recent historians of the Tudor polity have suggested that republican citizenship remained a viable mode of political activity. To use Patrick Collinson's memorable phrase, "citizens were concealed within subjects." (2) Sixteenth-century humanism played an important role in the inculcation and maintenance of a civic consciousness that went far beyond the commonplaces of Tudor subjection and the mystifications of political theology. As Markku Peltonen has shown, many Tudor writers betrayed a preference for a mixed constitution, one that would bridle the excesses of an increasingly centralized monarchy. For example, Sir Thomas Smith, in his 1563 text De Republica Anglorum, nominated Parliament (which incorporated the king) as "[t]he most high and absolute power of the realme of Englande ... which representeth and hath the power of the whole realme both the head and the bodie." (3) A. N. McLaren has traced a similar vocabulary in John Aylmer's 1559 response to John Knox, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects, which countered Knox's attack on female rule by emphasizing that England was a mixed monarchy, in which Parliament restrained the monarch's will. (4) John Hooker's 1572 book, Of the Order and Usage of the Keeping of a Parliament in England, specifically calls Parliament a "Senate," and in his introduction locates the English assembly in the history of classical, and specifically republican, representative institutions. (5)

The emphasis on Parliament's advisory role accords with the Tudor reception of Ciceronian humanism, which for much of the century dominated humanist political discourse. William Cecil was famously reputed to carry his copy of De Officiis with him in his coat pocket. (6) In a letter to Edward Denney, Sir Philip Sidney recommends "an hour to your Testament, & a piece of one to Tully's [Cicero's] Offices, & that will be study," and in his Defense of Poetry, he cites Cicero, who "make[s] us know the force love of our country hath in us." (7) As John Guy has argued, Cicero's De Officiis, with its explicit advocacy of the vita activa over the vita contempliva, could usefully be conflated with the traditional advisory role associated with the feudal nobility--and, increasingly, with Parliament. (8) For example, a speech intended for delivery at the 1566 Parliament defends the Commons' traditional privilege of free speech by appealing to Cicero's De Officiis: any infringement of this liberty would, according to its anonymous author, prevent Parliament from exercising its traditional and humanist role of counsel. (9) In fact, a certain set of "republican" or civic humanist ideas could be rendered quite compatible with monarchy, as Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour demonstrates. (10) Protestantism only abetted these republican developments. As Stephen Alford notes, Cecil, faced with the demise of a Protestant queen, actively planned for the translation of the Crown's sovereign authority to representative bodies and the Privy Council. (11) Cecil's commitment to Protestantism, his "world-view" that England and the godly were constantly threatened by external Catholic enemies, generated a hypothetical protorepublicanism. Though counsel might remain a duty and not a right, Cecil posited that in certain circumstances the Privy Council could function autonomously even if the throne was empty. Of course, since Elizabeth survived both illness and the Catholic threat, Cecil's constitutional proposals remained largely private.

As Blair Worden, Alan Stewart, and others have detailed, it is clear that Sidney's less-than-stellar political career and all-too-brief military career were driven by this intersection of forward Protestantism and Ciceronian republicanism. (12) But though the succession obviously remained a problem until the end of the reign, Sidney was faced with a profoundly different, if related challenge. Cecil's adherence to Protestantism had generated his willingness to endow, even hypothetically, the Privy Council with the Crown's authority so as to escape the threat of Mary Queen of Scots. The late 1570s and early 1580s saw Elizabeth toying with the idea of marrying the Catholic due d'Alencon (later d'Anjou), as well as the efforts of forward Protestants such as Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester to convince the queen to aid the Dutch rebels. For Sidney, the Alencon marriage was unacceptable. (13) Furthermore, as all of Sidney's biographers have noted, Elizabeth refused to further the career to which Sidney and his friends thought him suited. For these reasons, Sidney's loyalty to an international Protestant movement, and his conflict with a queen jealous of her prerogative, resulted not in a proposed constitutional arrangement but rather a reconsideration of the role of counsel in a monarchical republic, and more specifically, the political effects that followed from the prince's failure to follow "good" counsel. What does the citizen-subject do when the prince is singularly uninterested in counsel? Can republican discourse be expanded to legitimate the political actions of those courtiers and magistrates who were not always interested in strict obedience or courtship? Who qualifies as a citizen?

These questions mark the Arcadia at all levels, from the myths of its very genesis, to the political readings that critics such as Worden have contributed. In the New Arcadia, Sidney pushes republican discourse to its limit. Basilius's pastoral retreat exemplifies an infamous rejection of the active life in favor of the contemplative life and prompts others (Pyrocles, Musidorus, and Amphialus) to do the same and therefore to replace more explicit forms of republican citizenship with subterfuge and, eventually, rebellion. But the New Arcadia also represents a heroic-epic ideal, as embodied most obviously in the former careers of Pyrocles and Musidorus, that increasingly tends toward horrific violence. Despite Sidney's own adherence to a medieval-chivalric ideal (that saw warfare as the province of nobility), the violence that this ideal occasions in book 3 reveals the limits of warfare as a form of political action. In other words, the New Arcadia depicts a crisis of the political, insofar as it depicts the limits of the various modes of political action--counsel and warfare--open to men of Sidney's ilk. Hence Sidney's juxtaposition of pastoral retreat and rebellion, two (non)events that constitute a symptomatic response to the decay of a republican ethos.