Clarendon, Tacitism, and the Civil Wars of Europe

• Published in: The Huntington Library quarterly 2005-03, Vol.68 (1-2), p.289-311
• Main Author: Seaward, Paul
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ambition; Civil war; Civil wars; Cultural history; European history; Historians; Hyde, Edward (1st Earl of Clarendon) (1609-74); Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Kings; Language history; Military history; Narrative history; Political attitudes; Political history; Politics; Social history; Tacitus, Cornelius (56-120); Translation; United States History; War
• ISSN: 0018-7895; 1544-399X
• DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2005.68.1-2.289

Paul Seaward assesses the complex but consistent engagement of Clarendon with Tacitist politics and themes. In the 1620s and 1630s, he does not seem to have shared in the anti-Tiberian politics of Jonson's circle; how his views evolved may be better gauged from his comments on Sarpi and Commynes. The late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century works by Italian historians, including Strada, Bentivoglio, and Davila, form an important intellectual context for Clarendon's writings. Davila was the most Tacitist of these historians, emphasizing the role of factional interest and personal ambition in the politics of rebellion, while Strada and Bentivoglio took as their target the politic interest in the practically possible rather than what was right according to divine and human law. Clarendon's circumstantial and knowing account of the politics of the royal court may be said to be Tacitist in approach; he went further than the Italian historians in exposing the dangers of Tacitist politics, however, showing that secrecy and dissimulation were antithetical to the values that should be central to royal government in England.