Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests

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Term s & Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions History of European Ideas, 2015 Vol. 41, No. 4, 489–506, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.926659 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests RYAN WALTER * School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Acton, Australia Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Summary Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state’s true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true interest were high: the survival and prosperity of the state. The dominance of ‘mercantilism’ as a historiographical category has obscured the role of interest in early modern thought. This paper examines the work of one of England’s most prolific interest writers, Slingsby Bethel, to demonstrate the importance of reading interest writings without recourse to mercantilism. The two focuses are, first, how the rhetoric of counsel was used to defend an ordinary subject’s presumption to comment on state affairs and, second, the capacity for interest writers to construe the rise and fall of state power in terms of good laws and statesmanship. Keywords: Balance of power; Europe; interest; mercantilism; Slingsby Bethel; Adam Smith. Contents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bethel and the Uses of Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bethel as Counsellor to the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Preservation of Europe, State Power and Trade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Interest and State Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 . 491 . 498 . 502 . 505 1. Introduction Seventeenth-century writings on state interests deserve more attention than they have received, especially by those writing the history of international thought. Talk of state interests has been described as the ‘major competing approach’ to natural law for understanding politics in the seventeenth century,1 yet our understanding of interest thinking is impoverished by comparison with the attention given to the natural lawyers.2 *E-mail: ryan.walter@anu.edu.au 1 James Tully, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, edited by James Tully (Cambridge, 1991), xiv–xl (xiv). 2 The key accounts of interest are Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic (Cambridge, 1988), chapter 13; J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), chapter 1; Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of raison d’état and Its Place in Modern History (London, 1957), chapter 6. Honourable mentions are more common, such as those given by J. G. A. Pocock to ‘another © 2014 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 490 R. Walter This is curious in view of the power that presentism has exercised over organising the canon of international thinkers, for the routine talk of state interests as conflicting or harmonious, as based in trade or empire, is more easily made to anticipate the contemporary concerns of international thought3 than, for example, the few remarks of Hobbes on inter-state rivalry.4 A positive case for the importance of interest analyses for the historiography of international thought might start by underlining its status as a species of counsel on the highest matters of state—war, peace, treaties, and trade. Such counsel could be portrayed as presumption when it came from ordinary subjects who had no business discoursing on the king’s prerogative, as seen in Henry Stubbe’s declamation that ‘[i]nterests of Princes are not proper subjects for ordinary pens’, where Stubbe’s target was written advice that warned against the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) on strategic and religious grounds.5 But, clothed in the idiom of counsel, writing on state interests not only managed to survive but to open war and peace to systematic public scrutiny and calculation.6 A second reason to study the analysis of state interests is that, if J. G. A. Pocock is right to identify a conservative English Enlightenment, one concerned with protecting civil authority inside a state from erosion by religious authorities, and with safeguarding an emerging system of sovereignties from a return to empire, whether religiously or dynastically conceived, then interest theory provided the intellectual architecture of the external face, and well in advance of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).7 For interest was used to understand Europe as composed of states, principalities, and empires that engaged one another on the basis of the interests that characterised these entities, and authors using this device provided unceasing predictions and advice on the balance of power and its maintenance. Analyses of state interests were therefore one strand of early modern writing on trade and state power, and focusing on them can help to form a rival characterisation of these literatures to Smith’s occluding construction of ‘mercantilism’.8 Seventeenth-century genre of historiography’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols (Cambridge, 1999), II, 276. ‘Interests’ are not given a listing in the index—and only incidental mentions in the text—of David Armitage’s brilliant study of the foundations of international thought; see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013). 3 For key instances of two dominant approaches, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999); Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, NY, 1979). 4 For the difficulties involved in the standard international relations treatment of Hobbes, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), chapter 13; Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, chapter 4. 5 Henry Stubbe, A Justification of the Present War Against the United Netherlands, (1672), preface. 6 Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 2007), 93–94. 7 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’età dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, edited by Raffaele Ajello, Massimo Firpo, Luciano Guerci, and Giusseppe Ricuperati, 2 vols (Naples, 1985), I, 523–62; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking’, Intellectual History Review, 17 (2007), 55–63 (59–61); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: A Eurosceptical Enquiry’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 125–39 (127–30). 8 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, IN, 1981), IV.i–viii. Wealth of Nations is cited by book and chapter and, where relevant, section and paragraph. For the polemical nature of Smith’s construction, see D. C. Coleman, ‘Mercantilism Revisited’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 773–91; Keith Tribe, ‘Natural Liberty and Laissez Faire: How Adam Smith Became a Free Trade Ideologue’, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester, 1995), 23–44; Donald Winch, ‘Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist’, Historical Journal, 35 (1), 91–113. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 491 interest texts regularly make the two great ‘errors’ that Smith used to define mercantilism: a supposed conflation of bullion with wealth, and assuming that a war chest was crucial for maintaining armies overseas. Yet this genre of writing had its own history, precepts, and modes of address that are obscured when they are approached in terms provided by a polemical construction from the eighteenth century. These precepts included the need to govern trade with an eye for what we would call geopolitics, and to build state power for international competition. Consequently, if we look at Smith from the perspective of counsel on state interests, then he appears as naive or reckless. Where interest theory rendered state power intelligible in terms of the decisions and laws that statesmen made amidst a balance of power that developed in response to the relative success of other statesmen’s attempts to grow state strength, Smith portrayed state power as a function of successive forms of human sociality, from hunting to commerce, and a nation’s tax base.9 The advice that Smith consequently gave to statesmen in Wealth of Nations has been summarised as ‘[b]enevolent inaction or negative action’,10 hardly useful in view of the military-mercantile dangers and remedies identified by interest writers as necessary to preserve a non-imperial states system.11 Resting on this case for the importance of interest theory, this paper develops an account of the counselling and geopolitical aspects of interest analysis by examining the work of a prolific writer on England’s interest in the second half of the seventeenth century—Slingsby Bethel. Some preliminarily points follow to first introduce both Bethel and the genre in which he wrote. 2. Bethel and the Uses of Interest In seventeenth-century England the Italian ragion di stato literature provided one model for applying the notion of interest to political affairs.12 Giovanni Botero, for example, castigated Machiavelli in his Della Ragion di Stato of 1589 because the Florentine ‘bases his Reason of State on lack of conscience’,13 while Botero wanted to harmonise reason of state with the law of God.14 Botero nevertheless maintained that it ‘should be taken for 9 This framing overlaps with Istvan Hont’s account of political economy as responding to a ‘jealousy of trade’ that analytically fused politics and economics; Hume and Smith separated the logics of politics and economy to then describe their interaction; see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nationstate in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), 1–156. A complication is that an interest theorist such as Slingsby Bethel also bemoaned jealousy of trade, understood as English resentment toward Dutch commercial success. But what Bethel could not do was examine trade in isolation from state power, and in this sense jealousy of trade was really jealousy of power, which the balance of power maxim required every statesman to feel. Smith also charged the statesman with security and gave it priority over wealth, and this is manifested in the ‘exceptions’ to free trade that he described in Book IV of Wealth of Nations. In other words, Smith’s arguments substituted a concurrent analysis of strength and wealth for a specialised treatment of wealth, with a policy casuistry providing the links back to strength. This has been obscured by the tendency to accept ‘mercantilism’ as a description of the forms of concurrent analysis. I return to the stakes of this issue in the conclusion. 10 Donald Winch, ‘Scottish Political Economy’, in Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), 443–64 (450). 11 But note that in private correspondence Smith was more prepared to attune himself to the realities of geopolitics or, as Winch put it more expansively, to the ‘Realpolitik decisions facing politicians’; see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 50. 12 Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest, 36; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), chapter 2. 13 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, translated by P. J. and D. P. Waley (London, 1956, first published in 1589), xiii. 14 Robert Bireley, ‘Scholasticism and Reason of State’, in Aristotelismo politico e ragion di stato: atti del convegno internazionale di Torino, 11–13 febbraio 1993, edited by Artemio Enzo (Firenze, 1995), 83–101 (87, 91). Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 492 R. Walter granted that in the decisions made by princes interest will always override every other argument’.15 This reason of state literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was exceedingly diverse and its novelty perhaps lay in the fact that it represented a new genre, not because it was a source of new arguments regarding how to rule a state.16 This literature nevertheless relayed the term ‘interest’ and its use in relation to politics throughout western Europe. Writing on reason of state had roots in the earlier mirror-for-princes literature. The development of this literature accompanied the rise of the signori, typically local elites who gained ground at the expense of republican and communal forms of government.17 Virtue in these rulers was portrayed as a necessary condition for good government, and the Christian and cardinal virtues were extolled.18 This is the genre in which Quentin Skinner has located Machiavelli’s Il Principe, a book addressed to Florence’s recently returned Medici rulers.19 Machiavelli followed a pattern established by earlier advisers when he presented the vir virtutis, the manly man, as needing to cope with the caprices of fortuna, or fortune. But one of Machiavelli’s innovations was to depart from the usual treatment of the core virtues: ‘the concept of virtù is simply used to refer to whatever range of qualities the prince may find it necessary to acquire in order to “maintain his state”’.20 A distinctively English example of the genre is the Mirror for Magistrates, which described in verse the vices of kings and queens and their unfortunate fates, and was published in multiple editions from the middle of the sixteenth to the early decades of the seventeenth century.21 The 1559 edition includes a dedication to officeholders, who are assured that ‘as Iustice is the chief vertue, so is the ministracion thereof, the chiefest office’, and that God punishes those who fall away from this duty.22 The book’s purpose was to forcefully and repeatedly illustrate this lesson so that rulers might be moved to redress to their failings: ‘For here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore’.23 A supplement produced following the book’s success added the tragedies of earlier kings, and the cardinal virtues were listed: temperance (consisting of continence, clemency, modesty), prudence, justice, and fortitude.24 As with the original text, the didactic purpose also worked through 15 Botero, The Reason of State, xiii–iv, 41. Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, edited by J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), 479–98 (483). Conal Condren was more cautious, doubting that this reason of state literature could be described as having assumed a form as stable as a genre; see Conal Condren, ‘Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England: A Question of Ideology?’, Parergon, 28(2) (2011), 5–27 (18). On reason of state see also the treatment in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 11–17. 17 P. J. Jones, The Italian City State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), 519. 18 One might see the mirror-for-princes literature as shading into reason of state in view of Condren’s point that ‘reason of state was most likely to be named when under attack and called something else when being relied upon. Acceptable reason of state (or a narrow sense of prudence, policy, or ancient wisdom) exercised in the interests of the common good, sound rule, and so forth, has its place in the immediate linguistic context of the positive register of the vocabulary of office-holding and is presented as occasional, retrospective, or hypothetical, being largely hidden in the arcana imperii’; see Condren, ‘Reason of State and Sovereignty’, 16. 19 Here I draw on Skinner’s treatment of the advice books; see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), I, chapter 5. 20 Skinner, Foundations, I, 138. 21 Elizabeth M. A. Human, ‘House of Mirrors: Textual Variation and the Mirror for Magistrates’, Literature Compass, 5 (2008), 772–90 (774). 22 The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (New York, NY, 1960), 65. 23 The Mirror for Magistrates, 65. 24 Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (New York, NY, 1946), 32–33. 16 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 493 revealing how princes were undone by their vices, as was King Iago,25 who died of ‘Lethargy’ and enjoined the author to ‘Enregester my mirour to remaine/That Princes may my vices vile refrayne’.26 Both interest and the mirror device were elements of Henri duc de Rohan’s D’Linterest des Princes et des Estats de la Chrestiente, a crucial text for understanding the rise of interest analysis in England. It was first published in France in 1638 and intended for the edification of Richelieu on foreign affairs.27 Rohan was a friend of the Earl of Leicester and his arguments spread amongst Protestants with French Huguenot connections, such as Algernon Sidney.28 Rohan’s text was translated into English as A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome,29 and its English preface declared: ‘THe PRINCES command the People, & the Interest commands the Princes’.30 The idea Rohan conveyed by this phrase is that ‘interest’ indicated the necessary conditions for the survival and prosperity of the state, hence ‘as it is well or ill understood, it maketh States to live or die’.31 France’s interest was to oppose Spain’s bid for greatness and preserve Europe’s balance in doing so. This would require following a ‘counter-course’ of ‘maximes’ to those that guided Spain,32 including opening the eyes of Catholics to Spain’s ambitions, maintaining a presence in Italy, and acquiring power in the form of ‘souldiers, munition, and money’.33 Regarding England, Rohan counselled that England should continue to advance the Protestant religion and predicted that it might become the third power in Europe.34 Having set out the true interest of each major European territory, Rohan proceeded in the second part of his treatise to review the last half century of affairs and show how the ‘ill success’ of various states in recent times was a result of ‘neglecting’ real interests.35 History was thus available to teach kings and queens by example, allowing them to see their actions in a ‘mirror’ and perceive the costs of making decisions not on the basis of ‘reason alone’, which allows true interest to be perceived, but from excessive ambitions, passion, and superstitious opinions.36 Rohan’s interest theory thus offered a mode of making inter-state affairs intelligible—as the result of following and 25 John Higgins, the author of these words, wrote that he had seen a manuscript by Galfridus of Munmouth, which he lost; see Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, 35. The reference is likely to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, where Iago is mentioned in passing as the seventeenth king of the Britons; see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De Gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae), edited by Michael D. Reeve, translated by Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 44, paragraph 33. 26 Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, 236. 27 Rohan was addressing Richelieu in an idiom the Cardinal used himself in his Testament Politique, where the notion of state interests was also used to make politics intelligible, centred on the premise that only ‘the monarch and his advisors can perceive the public interest; and it is the business of the king to ensure that this prevails over others at all times’; see Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 175. See also J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Rohan and Interest of State’, in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France, edited by J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1987), 98–116. 28 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207. 29 Henri duc de Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome Written in French by the Duke of Rohan, translated by Henry Hunt (London, 1641). 30 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface. 31 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface. 32 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 18. 33 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 23. 34 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 59. 35 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part II, preface. 36 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part II, preface. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 494 R. Walter neglecting interest—and for recounting its history in these same terms as a pedagogical and counselling service for princes. Note how the crucial accompaniment to princely success has passed from virtues to true interest, which does not sit in the prince’s moral person but is ‘raised above’ him.37 Rohan enjoyed good standing in England as a Huguenot general, and his message that England must defend Protestantism enjoyed a welcome reception.38 His approach to interest was energetically adapted for use in civil war debates over the source of legitimate public power. One of these uses was to assert that only in the person of the monarch were private and public interests united, while the republican martyr Algernon Sidney made the conventional claim that one who abuses their office cedes the title and status attaching to that office.39 Sidney wrote that a ‘natural body is homogeneous’, hence ‘[t]he head must be of the same nature’, but if a prince ‘sets up an interest in himself distinct from, or repugnant to that of the people’, then such a prince effectively loses the ‘title or quality of their head’.40 Using interest to not only circumscribe royal authority but to attack it, Marchmont Nedham argued that the sword is ‘the foundation of all titles to government in England both before and since the Norman conquest’,41 and because the English monarchy had passed through its fatal period it must now ‘resign up her interest to some other power’,42 namely, the new rulers of the English Republic on whose behalf Nedham was writing. Having in principle opened the door to violent overthrow of the new regime, Nedham shut it by showing how the various groups who were claiming an ‘interest’ in England and who might aim at its overthrow—such as the Scots, English Presbyterians, and the Levellers—were unlikely to succeed, would cause great inconvenience, and pursued forms of government inferior to the new ‘Free State’.43 Nedham’s use of interest to taxonomise rival groups was earlier carried off by Christopher Feake, a Fifth Monarchist preacher who published A Beam of Light in 1659. His text tabulated the different interests that had ‘been upon the publick stage, since 1640’.44 Feake was not using interest to convince his readers to accept the new regime, as Nedham did, nor to counsel princes on relations between states, as Rohan did, but to reveal to his fellow ‘Fifth-Kingdom-men’ the rival interests with which they needed to contend in attempting to realise the kingdom of Christ. Feake’s predication of interest is worth underlining. The ‘Interest of Parliament’ in 1640 was to recover the people’s liberties, and it was opposed to the ‘Interest of Court-Tyanny [sic]’.45 Oliver Cromwell’s ‘proper Interest’ was said to be usurping and then securing the civil power by imprisoning and murdering his rivals, whether or not they were friends to the Commonwealth.46 By contrast, for the ‘True Commonwealthsman’ the ‘Proper Interest, is to preserve, defend, 37 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface. J. A. W. Gunn, ‘“Interest Will Not Lie”: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 551–64 (552–54). 39 A. C. Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 80–81. 40 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, edited by Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), 538. 41 Marchmont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, edited by Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville, VA, 1969, first published in 1650), 25. 42 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, 13. 43 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England. This is the subject of the second half of Nedham’s work. 44 Christopher Feake, A Beam of Light, Shining in the Midst of Much Darkness and Confusion (1659), 54. 45 Feake, Beam of Light, 53. 46 Feake, Beam of Light, 56. 38 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 495 and promote the PUBLICK’ against the ‘private Interest’ of the Cromwell and Stuart families.47 In this they will be ultimately aided by the power of God, as the ‘Cause and Interest of our dearest Redeemer’ will destroy all contrary interests and usher in Christ’s kingdom.48 What should be noted in Feake’s usage is that even an illegitimate interest such as Cromwell’s can be predicated as ‘proper’, while at other times ‘proper’ does seem to distinguish good from bad (‘private’) interest. More plainly, Feake seems to have been willing to discuss interests as attaching to certain groups or individuals without always feeling the need to indicate whether or not they are legitimate interests. The fact that even Jesus had an interest should alert us to how different this usage is from our contemporary understandings of interest as material advantage or preferences in a utility function. Conal Condren has suggested that interest developed from and with the notion of office but, crucially, interest also ‘allowed for forms of explanation independent of any ethics of office’, and this trend contributed to the decline of office as a presupposition of early modern argument.49 This is a crucial transition to bear in mind for at least two reasons. First, as Jonathan Scott indicated, once interest is seen to be ‘autonomous’ in this way it could be used in morally sceptical analyses.50 Second, and of direct relevance for our discussion of Bethel, interests could be derived for states based on their geographical and commercial situation, independent of the sovereign. This led to corrosive effects for what we might call normative constitutional theory, perhaps analogous to the effects that arose from Mandeville’s egoism for theories of moral personality,51 since the ideal form of government for a state was to be derived not from natural reason or revelation but from reflection on something as banal as the types of trade in which a nation was engaged. This is exactly what Pieter de la Court did, and Bethel followed his lead when he approached states as possessing objective interests. De la Court was Johan de Witt’s ideologue, and in this capacity he wrote Het Interest Van Holland in Dutch in 1662, then revised the text in 1667 and 1668.52 It was not published in English until 1702, as The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland.53 Bethel was exposed to de la Court’s text as a member of Algernon Sidney’s circle in Rotterdam in the early 1660s, and Bethel ‘took it and its economic preoccupations over wholesale and transported it to England’, especially through his arguments regarding the trade interest and liberty of conscience.54 The text’s stated aim was to discover the ‘true Interest and Maxims of our Republick’, using ‘experience’ and ‘reason’, so that those concerned in its government could deliver ‘preservation and prosperity’.55 The English version of 1702 runs to over 500 pages and consists of three parts. In the first part the true interest of Holland is deduced from the nation’s situation and characteristics, ultimately, to 47 Feake, Beam of Light, 57. Feake, Beam of Light, 58. Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, 2006), 344. 50 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207. 51 See Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996), 69. 52 Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland (London, 1702), 487. 53 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 211. The text circulated earlier in England in manuscript form, while John Locke owned a copy of the Dutch edition; see Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age (Leiden, 2012), 352. 54 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 214. 55 de la Court, The True Interest, ix. 48 49 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 496 R. Walter nurture fishing, manufactures, traffic, and shipping. These activities are said to flourish under a general toleration and low taxation, along with other specifics of policy. In the second part de la Court turns to foreign policy, insisting that the Republic should generally steer clear of wars and alliances, since the former ruin trade and the latter will likely see Holland fight for another nation’s benefit. The final part then demonstrates that a nation with these interests will be best governed as a republic. One of the frank arguments that de la Court used was that the interests of Holland’s rulers and people are aligned under a republic, because a republic must support the families of so many magistrates, whose salaries are so meagre, that these families can only be supported by their own participation in the dominant commercial activities—fishing, manufactures, traffic, and shipping. It is therefore the interest of rulers to see that these activities prosper. Under a monarchy, by contrast, there is only the royal family and a handful of courtiers, who can be supported by simply pillaging the state.56 If the preceding will serve to indicate the intellectual sources and context surrounding the early use interest in seventeenth-century England, then it is now time to turn to Bethel and his writings. Baptised in 1617, Bethel left England at 20 for Hamburg and returned in 1649.57 He was a member of the parliament that met in 1659, following Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, and Bethel opposed Richard Cromwell’s attempt to succeed his father.58 It is in this context that Bethel published A True and Impartial Narrative, which described the parliamentary debates of the early months of 1659 and was published in the same year.59 Bethel described the ‘old Monarchy’, House of Lords, Bishops and Presbyterians as each having their ‘Interests’, just as Feake had done in the same year in A Beam of Light. And, as with Feake, Bethel oscillated between sometimes predicating interests as ‘private’ or ‘publick’, and sometimes not.60 The manner of using interest changed in Bethel’s next publication, in 1668, The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell.61 World’s Mistake is a mix of state interests, political arithmetic, and character assassination. The lesson is that Cromwell’s mistakes in foreign policy brought England low after the Long Parliament had fostered its world standing through judicious policy. In the same year as World’s Mistake, Bethel published Et à Dracone, a pro-toleration tract that called for the confiscation of church lands, and a relevant context here is the discussion in 1667 of the Conventicle Act of 1664 that was due to expire, an Act which provided for fines and imprisonment for those attending nonconformist services.62 Bethel’s argument was pragmatic: toleration is good for trade; it was also self-interested, since he came from a family of merchants and was a nonconformist. The argument for toleration because of its effects on trade did follow de la Court’s line, but it is important to note that Bethel’s argument drew its power from an analysis of circulation of the highest sophistication for the period, absent from de la Court.63 56 de la Court, The True Interest, 368, 377. Gary S. De Krey, ‘Bethel, Slingsby (bap. 1617, d. 1697)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2303 (accessed 20 May 2014). 58 Robert W. McHenry, ‘Dryden’s History: The Case of Slingsby Bethel’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 253–72 (257–58). 59 Slingsby Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative of the Most Material Debates and Passages in the Late Parliament (1659). 60 Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative, 14. 61 Slingsby Bethel, The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (1668). 62 Anne McGowan, ‘The Writings and Political Activities of Slingsby Bethel, 1617–1697’ (Cambridge University, M. Litt dissertation, 2000), 43. 63 Slingsby Bethel, Et à Dracone, or, Some Reflections Upon a Discourse Called Omnia à Belo Comesta (1668). 57 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 497 Bethel’s best known work is The Present Interest of England Stated, a leading example of interest analysis that drew a response from the then Privy Councillor George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham,64 with whom Bethel had family connections,65 and to whom he responded anonymously.66 On the eve of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), in which England joined with France to destroy the Dutch Republic and claim its maritime trade,67 Bethel identified France as threatening to achieve universal monarchy and the Dutch as England’s natural allies. Bethel reflects on the nature of interest analysis, with an emphasis on the virtues of counsellors, and returns to the link between freedom of religion and trade. In short, Protestants are industrious and only a foolish state will weaken its own trade and hence power by intruding on conscience.68 It is an argument from consequences first, and from the principles of legitimate government only second. Bethel co-opted interest language to develop a standard line in counsel on trade as indicated by the title, An Account of the French Usurpation Upon the Trade of England, published in 1679, and again the trade-strength nexus is the focus.69 He was no stranger to trade and politics, having represented trading interests to the Council of State in 1652,70 and then participated in ‘factory schemes’ while in Holland, which were intended to create a rival production centre for linen to weaken James II economically.71 Bethel’s The Interest of Princes and States reproduces the genre pioneered by Rohan’s A Treatise of the Interests of Princes. Bethel’s text offered a survey of Europe, portrayed as a collection of states with interests and governed by rulers who perceive these interests more or less clearly, and pursue them more or less earnestly. The former is connected with errors in statecraft, and the latter with failures of office. Bethel seems to have followed Rohan in assuming that one did not normally need to ‘remount very high’ into past history, but ‘only take the standing of the present affaires’.72 Occasionally, though, the origins of a government are noted, and Bethel could also enter the mode of neoclassical history to recount the deeds of statesmen and their personal virtues.73 Here we see Bethel’s concern with the link between virtuous counsellors and the state, which he examined with a view for whether a state provided mechanisms for a worthy counsellor to rise or if its institutions blocked the way. A late text is The Providences of God, where Bethel combined providential history with state interests to narrate the wrongs of the Stuarts and their climax in arbitrary government, only to be undone by God’s action to preserve the ‘Protestant interest’ through the Glorious Revolution. The enduring lesson, however, is that there are still ‘bigots’ in the Church of England, and reform is needed if God’s punishment is to be avoided.74 64 Slingsby Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated (1671); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, One of His Majesties Privy Council, Upon the Reading of a Book Called The Present Interest of England Stated (1672). 65 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 38. 66 Slingsby Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, Upon the Reading of a Book Called The Present Interest of England Stated Written in a Letter to a Friend (1673). Authorship has also been attributed to François Paul, baron de Lisola. 67 C. R. Boxer, ‘Some Second Thoughts on the Third Anglo–Dutch War, 1672–1674’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 19 (1969), 67–94 (70–71). 68 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 16–17. 69 Slingsby Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation Upon the Trade of England (1679). 70 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 31. 71 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 142. 72 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface. 73 See especially Bethel’s treatment of Genoa under Andrea Doria in Slingsby Bethel, The Interests of the Princes and States of Europe (1681). 74 Slingsby Bethel, The Providences of God, Observed Through Several Ages, Towards this Nation (1691). 498 R. Walter Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Viewed as a whole, then, Bethel’s writings move across internal and external interest, a distinction which he articulated at times by equating internal interest with the ‘frame of government’, and the external with foreign affairs. It turns out, however, that what Bethel primarily had in mind when he used the expression ‘frame of government’ was the laws and practices that regulated trade, and the only truly constitutional issues related to the indulgence of nonconformists. Yet because governing trade involved internal policy so extensively, the boundary between internal and external interest was highly porous. The counsellor on interest could thus counsel on all affairs of state even when their ostensible object was external interest, and they could do so with a conceptual vocabulary that challenged existing forms of argument, and which could be used to portray leaders as inept or corrupt. Attention now turns to the ways in which one could soften the tone of such a potentially jarring idiom. 3. Bethel as Counsellor to the State As Rohan stated, the correct understanding of interest was almost everything for a state: ‘as it is well or ill understood, it makes States to live or die’.75 The importance of interest therefore did much to justify the presumption of subjects to write on its nature, for public counsel could remove ignorance as a cause of costly mistakes, as Bethel’s discussion of Cromwell reveals. Bethel begins by asserting that under the Long Parliament ‘the Kingdom was arrived at the highest pitch of Trade, Wealth, and Honour’.76 Signs of this grandeur included the high price of land and native commodities, the public stock standing at £500,000 in ready money, and the army paid two to four months in advance. Another mark of England’s power was the fact that the Dutch sued desperately for peace after the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) while other neighbours also courted England for treaty negotiations.77 Cromwell squandered this position by making peace with the Dutch on equal terms and launching a war on Spain that tipped the balance of power toward France. Cromwell claimed that his actions were in the interests of the Protestant cause, yet Bethel says this must be a lie or is evidence that Cromwell was ‘ignorant in Forreign affairs’.78 Ignorance emerges as the primary reason once we notice the multiple flaws of the decision. Above all, the Protestant interest would have been best served by maintaining the balance between France and Spain. Secondly, Cromwell’s war against Spain was intended to gain for England the territories of Ostend, Nieuwpoort, and Dunkirk, but the Spanish king had better possessions, and those named would always have been liable to be lost to France given its proximity.79 In this regard, Bethel held to the common wisdom that because England was separated from the continent by sea it was ill-suited to acquiring foreign territories and only needed a navy for defensive security.80 This failure to correctly judge and respond to the balance in Europe is the first ‘error in State’ that Bethel identified in Cromwell’s reign.81 A further error related to a local balance of power between Sweden and Denmark. By siding with the Swedes, Cromwell endangered open access to the Baltic, an issue of ultimately European significance, because if one state controlled the Baltic it also 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 Rohan, Bethel, Bethel, Bethel, Bethel, Bethel, Bethel, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 3. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 3. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 4. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 4–5. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 7–8. The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 5. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 499 controlled the supply of vital naval stores, making it possible for a single power to ‘lay up the shipping of Europe’. For this reason, it had long been a ‘maxim’ to keep control of the Baltic divided between both nations, and thankfully the Long Parliament cleaved to this rule after Cromwell’s death and prevented any mischiefs arising from either Sweden or Denmark controlling the sea.82 Unfortunately for England, Cromwell’s war with Spain was not averted and the consequences of this error were disastrous. The most important result was to turn the balance of power to France. But in addition, the peace with the Dutch was so hastily agreed that the full suite of trading advantages were not secured, and then once the war with Spain began this profitable trade passed to the Dutch. Further, the war saw England lose 1,500 ships, the public stock was exhausted and an enormous debt was accumulated.83 In short, by failing to correctly perceive and act on England’s interest, Cromwell undermined its trade, hence its strength too, and aided France in its designs for universal monarchy. To prepare the forthcoming discussion of mercantilism, it is worth pausing to underline the complexity of state power and its government. Consider the basis for Bethel’s assessment of Cromwell as mismanaging the English nation: power should be directed with a view for the European balance; foreign strategy needs to take account of a nation’s situation (England’s island location is suited to a trading but not to a military empire); power advantages in war need to be converted to trade advantages in treaties; strategic supplies need to be secured (hence the Baltic maxim); and public stock and debt must be kept at appropriate levels. The statesman’s task is difficult; but it can be aided by counsel that mobilises enumerative techniques, estimates of where the balance lies and forecasts regarding its likely movement given various scenarios, and maxims for foreign affairs. The statesman’s action will need to cover a range of domains. To draw on just one of Bethel’s texts, the list of the statesman’s tasks includes ensuring English goods are well made, protecting merchants abroad, streamlining the customs office, and discouraging bad customs, such as feasting.84 To perceive this set of domains as disparate is probably to view them from our perspective. The figure of the statesman functions in these texts as both the recipient of counsel regarding state administration and the projected agent who will act on counsel. The statesman thus provides a uniting trope for a number of topics of counsel, and a likely effect would have been to inhibit intellectual specialisation.85 We must therefore distinguish between the literal statesmen and counsellors who served England—whether by sitting in Parliament, producing pamphlets, or whatever—and the statesman-counsellor couple as an accommodating discursive figure that legitimated these real-world actions more or less effectively and even lent them prestige in a neoclassical society.86 82 Bethel, The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 5–6. Bethel, The World’s Mistake in Cromwell, 11. 84 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 9–16. 85 By analogy with Conal Condren’s argument in relation to the ‘promotional rhetoric’ of office; see Conal Condren, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early Modern England’, in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge, 2006), 66–89 (72). For the interaction between conceptions of counsel and office holding, see Condren, Argument and Authority, 162–71. 86 This suggestion to foreground the statesman-counsellor couple might be an alternative to multiplying the species of counsel with reference to intellectual lineage, such as humanist, ecclesiastical, feudal-baronial. For this approach, see Jacqueline Rose, ‘Kingship and Counsel in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 54 (2001), 47–71, which builds on John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, edited by Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), 291–310. 83 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 500 R. Walter Giving counsel on matters of state could still be a risky business, and more so when interest theory purported to identify ‘mistakes’ in statecraft, often because non-state interests were being pursued. Here a precautionary move was to locate the source of corruption in the King’s counsellors, and not the King himself. Du Moulin declared this intention in his title: England’s Appeal from the Private Cabal at White-Hall to the Great Council of the Nation.87 The French Huguenot was naturalised by Act of Parliament in 1664, and his skill with languages saw him employed on diplomatic missions in the service of Charles II, under the patronage of Arlington, Secretary of State. Du Moulin ultimately fell from favour with Arlington but, thanks to his knowledge of English politics, later gained employment with William of Orange as an analyst, propagandist, and spy master.88 His pamphlet drew attention to the damage caused to England’s interest by the French alliance at the same time as the key ministers involved were accused of popish conspiracy. Its intent was to dissuade Parliament from granting Charles money to continue the war, thereby forcing England out of the war and allowing the Dutch to focus on combating the French.89 The key claim is that the Cabal had used many arts to ‘deceive his Majesty; And to bring him by degrees into a likeing of their War’.90 That this war was directly contrary to England’s interests is something that Parliament would have gladly advised him of, if the King were not constantly advised against calling the ‘Great Council’ of du Moulin’s title. For its part, Parliament took up the idea of corrupt counsel at odds with the national interest to question the war, and this is the context for Country hostility towards the Catholic influence at Court. Charles thus faced great difficulties in 1673 when trying to secure supply for further campaigning.91 During the recess between March and October the French alliance and the Catholic threat at Court had come to be seen as a pair, thanks at least in part to du Moulin’s clever pamphlet. The result was that Parliament had firmed against the war, and William Cavendish, first Duke of Devonshire, complained that ‘[h]ere is Money asked of us to carry on a war we were never advised about, and what we have given is turned to raising of families […] The nation’s interest is laid aside for private interest’.92 It is clearly one thing for an employee of a foreign prince such as du Moulin to make such charges from abroad (or for residents to pretend to write from abroad); local writers might need to exercise greater caution, as Bethel did in The Present Interest of England Stated, by expressing the dangers of corrupt counsel in more general terms than du Moulin. Bethel starts by underlining the danger of misconstruing interest: ‘the prosperity, or adversity, if not the life and death of a State, is bound up in the observing or neglecting of its Interest’.93 It is therefore a ‘matter of the greatest concernment to a Prince, to studie, and make himself Master of it’.94 A necessary ingredient for this mastery of interest is counsel, but here arises the danger, because a prince’s ‘Counsellors and Ministers of State’ are the ‘managers of their Interests’, such that ‘corrupt Counsellors’ 87 [Peter du Moulin], Englands Appeal from the Private Cabal at White-hall to the Great Council of the Nation, the Lords and Commons in Parliament Assembled (1673). 88 K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–4 (Oxford, 1953), 12–29. 89 Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 88–111. 90 [du Moulin], Englands Appeal, 45. 91 See the discussion in Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, chapter 8. 92 Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, From the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 10 vols (1769), II, 200. 93 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface. 94 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 501 may lead a prince on a course ‘for private ends’ that is ‘destructive to the Interest of his Countrey’.95 For private and worldly interest can be moved by the ‘bribing bounty of other Princes’, hence counsellors should be chosen for their principles as much as their abilities; in fact, given that the ‘art of government, not being so misterious, as State Monopolists would make it’, honesty might be the prized principle in a counsellor.96 Having emphasised the costs and possibility for corrupt counsel at court, Bethel had cleared the way for ordinary but honest subjects such as himself to play a counselling role, and his advice was to perceive France as aspiring to universal monarchy and the Dutch as a natural ally to preserve Europe’s liberties. This tract drew a response from one of the counsellors seemingly within the frame of Bethel’s unflattering portrait of state counsellors—George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham.97 In his reply, Buckingham conceded that he agreed with much of Bethel’s analysis, and all of his treatment of England’s domestic interest, which Bethel examines ‘not only more rationally, but more like a man concerned for the good of England, than he does of our Interests abroad’.98 Bethel’s error on external matters was said to arise from his ‘zeal’ for the Dutch, manifested in his ‘passionate expressions of kindness for the Hollanders; as if our principal design in seeking Foreign Alliances ought not to be the encrease of our wealth and power, but the finding out humors in another Nation that please us’.99 Bethel, in other words, had allowed his partiality for the Dutch to lead his counsel away from the nation’s true interest, ‘the encrease of our wealth and power’. Honesty might be a crucial quality for the counsellor, but so too was unclouded reason. Buckingham closed his pamphlet by acknowledging that the issue of who to make an ally was not ‘as plain, as two and two make four, it being impossible to use that certainty of reasoning in things of this nature’, and that his desire was that the ‘Interest of England may be throughly [sic] seacrh’d out’.100 In the reply to Buckingham for which Bethel has been attributed authorship, the author finishes with an equivalent claim to a virtuous motive, ‘the True Interest of the King and Kingdom’.101 Yet the ‘statists’ are this time seen to provide advice and act on behalf of the commonwealth by negotiating treaties, debating laws in parliament and so on in a way that is not possible for the outer ring of informal counsellors, who are men of leisure and letters, a status that Bethel might have claimed. These secondary counsellors will also produce honest reflections on matters of state, but from a distance and with imperfect information.102 As a consequence, their advice will typically take the form of general principles, or ‘Maxims’. As a part of this differentiation between counsellors with reference to their situation, the leisured commentator’s ‘Censuring any Action of State’ is presented as inappropriate because of the differences in knowledge and office.103 If the text is from Bethel’s hand, then the high ground he claimed from the statists in The Present Interest of England Stated by impugning their 95 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface. Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface. 97 Bruce Yardley argues that Buckingham’s pro-toleration actions can be seen as self-interested and pragmatic, as was Buckingham’s rationale for the war—the Dutch were commercial rivals and hence natural enemies; see Bruce Yardley, ‘George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and the Politics of Toleration’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55 (1992), 317–37 (325). 98 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 4. 99 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 4. 100 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 18–19. 101 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 17. 102 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 6. 103 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 6. 96 502 R. Walter ethics is ceded.104 Even so, this differentiation based on knowledge still preserves a clear role and justification for subjects outside of official counselling roles to discourse on the highest affairs of state. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 4. The Preservation of Europe, State Power and Trade Europe’s liberties must be preserved by blocking any move for universal monarchy. This was a central premise for the advice Bethel unfolded on managing relations with foreign sovereigns.105 In the passage below, Bethel updates Rohan’s account of Europe by positioning France as the aspirant after the decline of Spain, and he then sets out the implications. Formerly the affairs of Christendom were supposed to be chiefly swayed by the two great powers of Austria (wherein Spain is understood) and France: from whom other Princes and States derived their Peace and Warr, according to the several parties they adhered unto. But now the puissance of the former being so much abated, that it deserves no rank above its Neighbours, France of the two, remains the only formidable Potentate, of whose greatness, all Princes and States are much concerned to be jealous, as formerly they were of that of Austria. For, considering the French King, in relation to France, stored with good Officers, Men, Money and Ammunition, to his several augmentations gained from all his Neighbours […] giving him free passage into their several Dominions, and to his present Naval Strength […] he is accommodated for any design […] And thus upon the whole, considering France furnished with a King, not wanting high thoughts or activity, less cannot be expected from him, than to design an universal Monarchy, which consequently makes it the common Interest of all European Princes and States (as they value their own safety) to unite, for the keeping of him within bounds and limits.106 That England had a special role in managing the balance of power in Europe was a common claim. Managing the balance of power required an extensive range of actions beyond simply making alliances and wars because, as noted earlier, state power was analysed as an exceedingly complex phenomenon and its augmentation was accordingly a sophisticated task. The most standard formulation of power was ‘Men, Money and Ammunition’, as Bethel used above, just as Rohan had done, ‘souldiers, munition, and money’.107 But these prized manifestations of state strength could be presented as circulating in the state according to laws, hence the act of siphoning off state power was a delicate art, and circulation emerged as the true object of management. This is the context in which the supposed conflation of bullion and wealth that Smith used to define mercantilism is often encountered, and a brief pause is necessary to set this claim aside. Bethel’s 1668 Et à Dracone was reprinted in 1675 as A Discourse of Trade, reflecting its focus on the circulation of money to reveal the causes of the present ‘consumption in 104 And then asserted again in Providences of God, where Bethel writes that wicked ‘Statists’ have used two notions to justify their positions: ‘calling Knavery Reason of State’ and that ‘Wit and Parts do alone qualifie a person for the service of his Prince’, when the true ‘vertues’ needed of counsellors are diligence, integrity, uprightness, industry, and sincerity; see Bethel, The Providences of God, 24. 105 For this theme more generally see Richard Devetak ‘“The Fear of Universal Monarchy”: Balance of Power as an Ordering Practice of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 190 (2014), 121–37. 106 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface. 107 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 23. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 503 our Purses and Estates’.108 The basic path of money’s circulation runs as follows. A landed gentlemen receives rent from his tenant, the ‘Countryman’, who in turn receives payment for his corn and cattle from a ‘Tradesman’, who himself will receive monies from a ‘Merchant’, who exports the tradesman’s goods. This circulating money, or the nation’s ‘Trading-stock’, is crucial to the ‘Political prosperity’ of the nation.109 Yet the circulation of money through this path is subject to four maladies: it can be exhausted or wasted in the process of circulation, stopped from circulating, diverted into the wrong veins or organs, or circulate too slowly. Bethel treats this schema as the ‘foundation’ upon which he builds an analysis of England’s consumptive state. There has been no confusion between money and wealth, just a description of how money moves around the body politic.110 With his account of circulation established, Bethel mounted his attack on the clergy. First, fines extracted through the ecclesiastical courts are spent on maintenance and are thus returned to the circulation, and though the ‘water runs’ it is ‘through a sink instead of the true Conduit-pipes’.111 The clergy’s intrusions on conscience therefore give rise to a version of the third malady listed above—the circulation is diverted into the wrong path. Further, fines are generally levied on the ‘active trading part of the people’, for whom 10 or 20 shillings is a serious proportion of their revenue. This leads to the second reason why religious intolerance damages the nation’s circulation—persecution is concentrated on the so-called ‘Fanaticks’, who are generally the most industrious tradesmen.112 This persecution involves excommunication, which strips subjects of the legal protections provided for their stock and estates. The straightforward consequence of this treatment is that the industrious sort either leave their trades completely or ‘keep in their pockets both the hands that should be at work’, which produces a ‘dead stock’, the second malady affecting circulation.113 For these reasons, Bethel suggested that his Majesty might order that a list of excommunicates be drawn up in each diocese, so that the number prevented from trading in this way could be known, and his estimate is that it is between 30,000 and 40,000.114 It is these persecuting actions of the ecclesiastical courts before 1640 that drove so many dissenters to Holland and New England, causing lasting damage to the nation’s trading stock. Here we can see how circulation provided the discursive means for imagining the effects of events in a nominally remote field—religious persecution—on trade and hence national power, and this is why circulation was a routine target for governmental action in those species of counsel concerned with state power. 108 Slingsby Bethel, A Discourse of Trade (1675), 1. In the seventeenth century, circulation was a dominant metaphor for conceiving the flow of trade and bullion and goods in the polity, as shown some time ago by Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse (London, 1978), 80–109. One inspiration for physiological analogies was William Harvey’s theory on the circulation of blood, and he claimed to have identified the ‘continuous and uninterrupted movement of blood from the heart through the arteries to the body as a whole, and likewise back from that body as a whole’; William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood, and Other Writings (London, 1963, first published in 1636), 115. 109 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 1–2, 6. 110 Also argued by Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, 88. Smith largely elided the notion of circulation in Wealth of Nations by defining wealth as productive labour and then evaluating uses of capital with reference to the quantity of productive labour that they supported. But circulation still played a part in Wealth of Nations, for example, when Smith wrote that the ‘sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods’; see Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.iii.23. 111 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 11. 112 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 9. 113 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 10. 114 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 10. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 504 R. Walter Returning to the danger of France, if the balance of power is to be adjusted, and power is conceived in relation to the circulation of men, money, and munitions, then we can expect Bethel’s advice on managing state power to involve more than simple recommendations regarding with whom to war or befriend: his advice will need to address the sources of power. This is exactly what is found in An Account of the French Usurpation Upon the Trade of England, published only a few years after France’s near capture of the Netherlands. Bethel began by posing the following question: how had France advanced so rapidly from a ‘weak and feeble’ condition to now being able to stand against ‘the mightiest Powers of Europe’?115 The manifestations of French power that Bethel lists are the ones we have come to expect: the number of ships and land troops, and its supply of treasure. The primary source of this power was not the extent of territory, fertility of the soil, or possession of mines, but the king’s astute management of the balance of trade. The means for this regulation included prohibitions and duties on selected foreign trades, and encouraging France’s domestic production. By these means, the ‘Lord of Commerce’ draws to France 65 million Florens a year.116 Further, because the sovereign power is absolute and the king’s actions were thus unencumbered by constitutional checks, the king could draw much of this wealth into his revenues. With this supply of treasure secured, France could support its armies when the treasuries of other princes were exhausted by war, obliging its enemies to sue for peace.117 What England needed was new ‘Maxims’ and ‘Measures’ to reduce the power of France: ‘Enfeeble the Trade of France, and money will fail, and by consequence its potency will become impotent; for Trade is the fountain from whence its Riches spring, and Money is the basis of its greatness and strength’.118 This was the basis on which Bethel recommended a raft of programmes to weaken France and strengthen England through trade, from restoring wool exports and sumptuary laws to establishing His Majesty’s Royal Fishery to train ‘Seam-men for his Royal Navy’ and thereby ‘increase his Royal Power’.119 One of the effects of this concurrent analysis of trade and power was that forecasts of future trade patterns were at the same time forecasts of the balance of power. For example, the fact that the English and Dutch were together the unassailable ‘Masters of Naval strength’ meant that France could never achieve universal monarchy while a ‘true intelligence’ was maintained between the two maritime powers, since together they could always reduce France at sea and therefore in commerce, abating its land power in consequence. If, however, France were to gain the ports and provinces of the Netherlands, they would obtain the strength and position to achieve universal monarchy.120 Elsewhere, Bethel made the same bleak prediction, this time conditional on the French establishing a strategic position in the Northern Seas.121 Trade and security were tied together by the very nature of state power. The dense nexus between trade and strength and their cognates licensed arguments of this form: fishing (trade) produced food (wealth) and sailors (strength); or, employment (fishing) attracted men (strength) and both elements fostered trade (wealth). Once one also remembers the role of the statesman as the unifying addressee for counsel and the presumed agent for its realisation, it was a tight 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1. Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1–2. Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1–3. Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 7. Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 12. Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 27–31. Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 11. Slingsby Bethel’s Analysis of State Interests 505 Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 knot that would need to be unpicked before the study of wealth could be isolated from the study of power. 5. Conclusion: Interest and State Power In 1750 John Campbell published The Present State of Europe. Explaining the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its Several Powers. It is an updated version of Bethel’s The Interest of Princes and States, and in his preface Campbell declared that he had consulted ‘Treatises of the same Nature’ by Rohan, Bethel, and Pufendorf.122 Bethel’s companions are far better known, and further research will be necessary before judgements can be made on the relative merits of his writings on state interests in the context of the seventeenth century. But hopefully enough has been said here to make the case for the importance of the analysis of state interests. The uncertain name has probably been one of the obstacles to greater recognition and study. Jonathan Scott discussed a ‘political language of “interest”’123 but also ‘interest theory’124 and ‘an economic interest analysis’.125 J. A. W. Gunn had earlier discerned a ‘genre of “interest of England” works’, by which he meant the more focused concern with external interest that was Campbell’s register.126 Here the equally imperfect ‘analysis of interest’ has largely been used, in an attempt to indicate the calculative ambition found in Bethel’s writings in relation to state behaviour and geopolitics. Perhaps the most important reason for the relative neglect of interest has been the preponderance of ‘mercantilism’ as a category for grouping and understanding early modern writing on trade and state power. A welcome intervention in this regard has been made by Steve Pincus, who argued that there was no mercantilist consensus in early modern Britain but instead ongoing dispute rooted in party contest.127 Yet Pincus relied on ‘political economy’ or ‘political economic thinking’ to describe what was once called ‘mercantilism’, and the necessary additional step is to recover the idioms and forms of calculation in which these disputes were conducted. Doing so will make it possible to observe clashes and accommodations between idioms, sometimes incidental and sometimes intentional, as their users developed the tools with which empire and state power were made conceivable and hence tractable to legal, military, and mercantile action. To put the same point another way, the idioms themselves were an influence on outcomes and hence an object of contest. Given that Smith coined ‘mercantilism’ for polemical purposes, and in doing so helped today’s historians pass over the ways in which trade and state power were actually understood by those labelled mercantilists, it is worth noting a case where Smith was forced to contend with the interest idiom in Wealth of Nations. In the context of an attack on the balance of trade doctrine, Smith argued that trade ‘naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to 122 John Campbell, The Present State of Europe. Explaining the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its Several Powers (1750), ix. 123 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207. 124 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 209. 125 Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), 328. 126 Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest, 3. 127 Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 69 (2012), 3–34. Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:47 09 June 2015 506 R. Walter both’.128 By ‘advantageous’ Smith was referring to the fact that any trade freely conducted by self-loving individuals would support some productive labour.129 If England traded East-India goods for French wine, then a greater quantity of productive labour was maintained in France (in agriculture) than in England (in the carrying trade), because in agriculture there is an additional labourer who works for free: ‘nature labours along with man’.130 On the basis of Smith’s system, the fact that France derived a greater benefit from this trade was not an issue if England had come to direct capital to the carrying trade as a result of the natural progress of opulence. Such an analysis was woefully out of touch with the fierce conflicts between France and England that had marked the eighteenth century in Smith’s lifetime, and which would explode again after the French Revolution. Smith’s ‘natural progress’ not only sanctioned a losing trade with a mortal enemy, but would even dissolve the rivalry between France and England by transforming commerce into a ‘bond of union and friendship’.131 As soon as Smith made this claim, however, he acknowledged that the wealth of a neighbour may enable it to ‘maintain fleets and armies superior to our own’, and hence it was only in peace that an unfettered trade with France could be celebrated.132 Free trade was thus the ‘real interest’ of both nations, but it was obscured by ‘modern maxims of foreign commerce’, and could not be achieved because ‘being neighbours, they are necessarily enemies’.133 Smith was thus obliged to concede to the conclusions of interest analysis in the middle of his attack on the mercantile system. But he demurred from setting out its steps and precepts in favour of his caricature ‘mercantilism’, and his concession was accompanied by a redefinition of the core concept, ‘real interest’, to mean peace and free trade. This was an attempted untying of the knotty relationship between wealth and power that was a premise of interest analysis. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Alex Cook, Keith Tribe, and the referees for insightful comments. Special thanks are due to Conal Condren for generous assistance in thinking through the interestoffice relationship. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE130101505). 128 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.2. The best discussion of this aspect of Smith is Keith Tribe, ‘Reading Trade in the Wealth of Nations’, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), 58–79. 130 Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.v.12. 131 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.9. 132 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.11. 133 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.11–13. 129