An Account of Denmark. Robert Molesworth

a key player in the republican refurbishment of Whig ideology after 1689. As an active diplomat and politician in Westminster and Dublin, he both engaged in practical politics and developed an ideological account of republican traditions adapted to present circumstances. He was the backbone of the “true,” “old,” and “real” Whiggism, which as M. A. Goldie has put it, “remained consistently committed to a fundamental redistribution of constitutional power.”⁴¹ Molesworth’s works—both the Account of Denmark and his edition of Francogallia —combined to provide eighteenth-century British, European, and North American audiences with a robust and authoritative account of the institutional and historical origins of liberty in the West.

      Building on traditions that drew from Tacitus’s Germania and a variety of ancient constitutionalisms, Molesworth provided a comparative account of both the flourishing and the corruption of political liberty. The historical cast of the ancient freedoms of the Franks recorded in the edition of Hotman was balanced by the analysis of a contemporary sociology of liberty in the Danish example. Molesworth’s project was not naively nostalgic, but sought to establish the existence of living traditions in modern institutions and to nurture such traditions where they already existed. As he explained, in translating the account of the “ancient free state” of Europe, he desired to instruct “the only Possessors of true Liberty in the World, what Right and Title they have to that Liberty.”⁴²

      Many historians have engaged with the political uses of the past in the early modern period. Accounts of the complex historical relationships between the ancient constitution, the feudal law, the so-called Gothic bequest, and the Norman Conquest, all had contested consequences for contemporary political society.⁴³ As J. G. A. Pocock has underscored, “to understand the role of historical argument after 1688–89, we must understand that the Gothic liberties and the Norman Yoke, as well as the ancient constitution and the feudal law, persisted into the coming century.”⁴⁴ Although not explored by Pocock, Molesworth’s writings were the starting point for the continuation and repositioning of this earlier discourse. His encounter with the Gothic past operated in a more profound way than simply the invocation of perdurable historical precedent. Far from declining as a way of engaging with the present, the events of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and the 1701 Act of Settlement, prompted a renegotiation of past and present. These “Gothic” claims—articulated powerfully by writers like Nathaniel Bacon and Algernon Sidney—were distinct from the immemorialism of legal mindsets articulated earlier in the seventeenth century, which proclaimed the precedence of common law. A core value, and one fundamental to Molesworth’s account, was that any crown was held conditionally by consent of the people. Molesworth’s decision to redeploy the Gothic model described in Francogallia for eighteenth-century readers meant that those who encountered the text had to establish for themselves the pertinence of sixteenth-century arguments for their own contemporary contexts.⁴⁵

      The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw very different (and competing) historical constructions of these “Gothic” traditions. Some recovered fundamental constitutions; others explored the history of the elective crown in Saxon history. Historical inquiries into the nature of the Norman Conquest, into the origins and authority of Parliament (or more specifically into the rights and privileges of the Commons), were frequently influenced by accounts of these continental “Gothic” experiences. Indeed, the permeability of this pan-European constitution implied that nationally specific experience was potentially comprehended from these broader traditions. Molesworth’s writings are a classic expression of this. In the Account he delivered an analysis of Danish tyranny; in his edition of Hotman he presented the glories of Frankish liberty. Both of these works were regarded as having specific pertinence to the contemporary British experience, and British readers were expected to make sense of these nonindigenous traditions and apply them to their own circumstances.

      The strength of Molesworth’s writing was that, as Colin Kidd has noted, it delivered a “robust science of society,” which resonated with a variety of powerful anti-absolutist discourses exploring the ethnic and institutional dimensions of liberty. After Molesworth, “in France as well as England, Denmark had become a byword for modern despotism.”⁴⁶ More important, Molesworth’s Account delivered a method as well as a message. As emphasized in his preface, the examination of a “constitution” (whether physical or political) was a matter of natural observation. By observational experience, gathered from the rational study of history or derived from traveling, it was possible to know “experimentally” the causes of the decay of liberty and health.

      This empirical dimension to Molesworth’s work was recognized by contemporaries—indeed, extracts and abridgements from the Account were included in collections of travel and ethnographic writings in the 1740s and 1760s. A member of the Royal Society, Molesworth was adept at reading the political consequences of cultural practices, as his collaborative annotation with Toland of Martin Martin’s Western Isles demonstrated.⁴⁷ Core to this method was the principle of a good education calculated to liberate the mind from dependence on “slavish opinion.” As Molesworth insisted, “good learning as well as travel is a great antidote against the plague of tyranny.” Here his polemic was directed against even the Protestant churchmen of his time who, in their stranglehold on the universities, were perceived as the main corruptors of the “public spirit.” For Molesworth, since tyranny began in the mind, the principles of liberty and the free state needed to be promoted by a philosophical education. The monkish bigotry of the pulpit taught only “servile opinions” in place of the principles of rational liberty.

      Whig political thought in Molesworth’s time was a complex mixture of contract, resistance, and ancient constitution—in effect a blend of history and theory. A common assumption underpinning this complexity was that liberty had premodern origins: “I conceive the original of the subject’s libertie was by those our forefathers brought out of Germany.”⁴⁸ For many, the Saxon origin of such Gothic liberty was “a matter of fact” for opponents of such historical assumptions like the Tory Brady, this was “meer Romance.”⁴⁹ The source most commonly associated with this account was Tacitus’s Germania, which represented a primitive Gothic honor and simplicity against a vision of Roman urban luxury and moral torpor. As one commentator noted in 1689, “some have sent us to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English Constitution.” The assumption promulgated by Molesworth was neatly summarized and shared even by court Whig John Oldmixon in 1724: “no nation has preserv’d their Gothic constitution better than the English.”⁵⁰ Written in the 1690s and 1700s in the context of the Hanoverian succession, Molesworth’s defense of an anglia libera, prompted by a Tacitean reading of Frankish liberty, provided a British readership with a non-Roman and anti-Gallic source of constitutional legitimacy.⁵¹

      The political context for Molesworth’s contributions was not simply domestic but European: internally the war against popery and arbitrary power in the guise of Tory Jacobitism was rendered more complex by the threat of Louis XIV’s foreign policy. The fragility of the Revolution settlement and, especially after 1700, the insecurity of the succession of the Hanoverian line meant that Molesworth’s polemic against Danish absolutism was a stalking horse for the indictment of latent tyranny at home and practical despotism abroad. The lamentation for the loss of Danish freedom was tuned to English, French, and Dutch ears. Great attention was paid to the preparation of the many French editions of the Account. The inclusion of maps and emblematic frontispieces representing Danish liberty is evidence of this concern to ensure an engaged readership. Later French editions also included useful indices drawing the attention of the reader to significant themes: for example, “Absolus. Les Princes n’ont pû acquerir legitiment le droit d’être absolus” “Governement Anglois, trop parfait pour recevoir aucun amendement” and “Prêtres, ont beaucoup contributé à render le gouvernement de la Russie et de la Muscovie tirannique” “Les païsans de la Zelande y sont aussi esclaves que les negres dans les Barbades.”⁵² It is clear that the Huguenot diaspora of the 1690s would have valued the anti-absolutist thrust of the Account; what is more significant is that twenty years after its initial publication (alongside the edition of Francogallia) French audiences found it a useful resource for engaging with the Ludovicean regime.⁵³ Certainly