“Be it Declared and Enacted by this present Parliament, and by the authority of the same, That the People of England and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and are hereby Constituted, Made, Established, and Confirmed to be a Commonwealth and Free State; and shall henceforward be Governed as a Commonwealth and Free State by the Supreme Authority of this Nation, the Representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers for the good of the People, and that without any King or House of Lords.”
Act of Parliament, 19 May 1649
I went to a seminar at the start of the week which looked at the historical development of the terms ‘state’ and ‘commonwealth’ in early modern France. (There was a lot about Jean Bodin.)
Coincidentally, the meaning of the latter term has come up during two of the breakfast tours of the gallery this week, as the section ‘Parliament and People’ is stuffed with documents talking about the Commonwealth – that is, the name for the republican government in England following the execution of Charles I in 1649, rather than the modern-day association of former dominions, colonies and dependencies.
It’s one of those words that have a long history, with subtle and important shifts. It originated in the medieval period as a term for the ‘common good’, meaning a body politic or community whose ultimate purpose is the creation of the conditions that lead to a life of virtue.
In such an environment, private interests are secondary to those of the wider public – but if people are virtuous then they will happily coincide. Under the Tudors, dissent could be suppressed as running counter to the ‘commonwealth’. By the end of the 16th century, the term also implied a society made up of freemen, as Sir Thomas Smith suggested in 1577: ‘A common-wealth is called a society... of a multitude of free men, collected together, and vnited by common accord and couenants among themselues.’
Around this time, the term could also suggest a community that was governed by the consent of the people, or, as Walter Ralegh put it, ‘Government of the whole Multitude of the base and poorer Sort’. The people were sovereign.
With these ideas in mind, the victors of the Civil Wars declared England to be a Commonwealth in 1649 (the original of the text quoted above is on display in the exhibition).
It is perhaps easy to understand why the term carried on in the North American colonies, as in the Commonwealths of Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where ‘sturdy commonwealths… sprung from the seed of the Mayflower’ (James Russell Lowell), but following the Restoration in 1660, you’d have thought the term would have been retired from public use given its regicide associations. Instead, it was adopted by various groups, particularly thinkers and writers who were inspired by classical republican virtues (if not republican government), and participated in what they imagined as a ‘commonwealth of letters’.
In the 19th century, constitutional theorists write about the United Kingdom’s ‘kingly commonwealth’ and Lord Roseberry is happily talking about the British Empire as a ‘commonwealth of nations’ during a speech in Adelaide. It was found to be a handy term during the First World War for the relationship between Britain and the self-governing dominions (with their potential recruits to the field of battle). By 1940, Churchill is working the term into his ‘This was their finest hour’ speech.
Finally, and on a different note, the artwork Entropa has caused some embarrassment in Prague. One of our exhibition's interactive questions asks what sculpture should be placed on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I wonder what David Černý would propose?