ABSTRACT
In his study The English Face of Machiavelli (1964), Felix Raab considered how Machiavelli’s writings had been used ‘both in attack and defence of monarchical rule’ during the 20-year period of the English Revolution. The scholar argued that following Charles I’s decapitation, Machiavelli’s works, in particular the Discourses, contributed to the Commonwealth ideology of liberty, virtue, war and love of one’s country.1 Machiavelli’s influence on seventeenth-century English republicanism has subsequently been examined in numerous studies. Following Pocock’s seminal work, The Machiavellian Moment,2 Paul Rahe and Jonathan Scott analysed the relation between the Florentine Secretary and the classical Greek and Roman inheritance, highlighting the elements of discontinuity (Machiavelli’s attention to the institutional aspects of Modes and Orders)3 and continuity (his attempt to rearrange classical experience to fit modern politics). After 1649, the English Commonwealthsmen were inspired by Machiavelli’s theory of government mutability to justify the fall of the monarchy and the creation of the republic ‘without King or House of Lords’.4 On the other hand, in his study on The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, Jeffrey R. Collins emphasized the influence that the Machiavellian conception of religion as an instrumentum regni had on the Erastian debate in England during the 1650s. Collins maintains that authors like Hobbes and Harrington drew principally from Machiavelli the
conviction that ‘Pagan and Jewish polities had successfully controlled religion with ancient prudence’.5
