Machiavelli, Neville and the seventeenth-century English Republican attack on priestcraft

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn a fictitious letter claimed to be written by Niccolò Machiavelli, the English republican thinker Henry Neville warned against the dangers of priestcraft and the clerical conspiracy against mankind. The clergy, he argued, were colluding in the oppression of the people by supporting the cause of divine-right monarchy through their false interpretation of the scriptures. The “Letter” was first published as part of the 1675 English edition of Machiavelli’s Works produced by the opposition bookseller John Starkey. Its most interesting feature is a section calling for rebellion against absolutist rulers, a section which could not be printed with the remainder of the text for its seditious content at a time when the opposition in England feared the rise of popery and arbitrary power; instead it was inserted in manuscript in individual copies supplied to trusted readers, including the Tuscan Grand Duke Cosimo III. While the real Machiavelli had written about the political benefits of pagan religion and had criticised the Christian faith for its lack of virtue, he never wrote about priestcraft as such. Yet, in this piece, Neville turned his fictional Machiavelli into a mouthpiece of late-seventeenth-century anti-clericalism and republicanism, and a proponent of further Reformation for the benefit of the state.