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eBook details

Title: Historical and Political Contexts of the Isle of Pines (The Isle of Pines: Milieu)
Author : Utopian Studies
Release Date : January 01, 2006
Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
Pages : * pages
Size : 205 KB

Description

The Isle of Pines (1668) is the work of a political radical in exile, and was written after the English Revolution and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Its author, Henry Neville (1619-1694), was a republican who made his name as a pamphleteer, politician, and philosopher in a long career that connected the earlier and later halves of the seventeenth century. After the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I, Neville became a Member of Parliament and joined the newly established Commonwealth government and its Council of State. Angered and disappointed by Oliver Cromwell's expulsion of Parliament by military force in 1653, Neville subsequently joined the political opposition and became involved in plots against the Cromwellian Protectorate. From the mid- 1650s at the latest, Neville also became an associate of the republican philosopher James Harrington, and aimed to implement part of Harrington's political programme during Richard Cromwell's Parliament in 1659. Neville was active in the political crisis of 1659-1660 and a political exile in Italy in the 1660s. He contributed in print to the debates of the so-called Exclusion Crisis of 1678-1681, in which the parliamentary opposition aimed to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession to the English throne. He also engaged in the debate about religious toleration through his open defence of Catholics which was strongly influenced by his Italian connections. Throughout his career, he used the press in a number of different ways, writing satirical libels, a utopian travel narrative, a weighty political treatise, and even poetry. Neville has also been considered a possible translator of Machiavelli and author of a fictional letter vindicating him. (1) Neville's career was varied. Yet, modern scholarship has focused only on specific parts of Neville's political activity and writing. So, it is difficult but essential to see his life and works in context. Amongst historians of political thought, Neville is best known as a close friend and collaborator of the political theorist James Harrington, whose utopian work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), offered constitutional proposals to the government of Oliver Cromwell. The Oceana is often seen as the key work of seventeenth century republicanism, and Neville is sometimes credited with "a finger in that pye," not least because he defended "Harringtonian" theories in Richard Cromwell's Parliament and was a member of Harrington's famous debating club, the Rota (Aubrey 124). Moreover, Neville's most important work, Plato Redivivus (1681)--written in response to the Exclusion Crisis--and Oceana share the central hypothesis: ultimate distribution of political power is related to the distribution of landed property. (2) As the amount of land belonging to the King and his nobility had been declining from the Reformation to the Civil War and the wealth of the "lesser gentry and the commoners" had been increasing, for both Harrington and Neville the political power of King and nobles also had to diminish in favour of the majority of the people (Neville, Plato 88, 114, 120). The balance of political authority had to shift from the one (monarchy) and the few (aristocracy) to the many (democracy). The Oceana of the Interregnum proposes a kingless government; Neville's later Plato Redivivus suggests constitutional limitations to the powers of the restored Stuart monarchy. Neville thus adapted "Harringtonian doctrine in a form appropriate to the realities of the Restoration," for which John Pocock has labelled him a "Neo-Harringtonian" in what has now become the standard interpretation of Neville (Machiavellian Moment, 406). (3)