Nathaniel Bacon, John Milton, and the idea of an English climate and “constitution”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper seeks, firstly, to reinstate the Suffolk lawyer and MP Nathaniel Bacon (1593-1660) whose ideological as well as political importance has been neglected, and, secondly, to propose that his 1647 tract in support of the parliamentary cause may have been an additional prompt to John Milton’s work on his History of Britain, which dates from this period, and which counters the elder statesman’s view of the Saxons as furnishing a legimitising native model of parliamentary government. In what may, in turn, have been a response to Milton, Bacon, in a “summary Conclusion” to The Continuation of this tract (1651), counters the received view of the English/British as courageous but politically unskilled inhabitants of the cold North, which Milton reiterates, notably in the “Digression” to book 3 of his History. Asserting rather the “middle temper” of the people of England Bacon claims for them a native political wisdom like that of Aristotle’s Hellenic race with whom they share a “consanguinity”, while Milton urges the need to look to continental Europe for political as well as cultural models. The stakes of Bacon’s claims are pointed up by their appropriation to support the opposite cause by monarchists who share his nativist ideology, which is not shared by Milton as it is not shared by the monarchist William Temple whose position with respect to the continent of Europe aligns him rather with Milton. The perceived relation of England to its continental European neighbours thus cuts across the political divide between monarchists and parliamentarians.