In search of Britain’s Brutus

By Ben Dupré

The past few months have seen eager battalions of monarchists and republicans rushing out to do battle, each side unshakable in the justice of its cause. The problem is, neither side seems quite so sure – beyond the platitudes – what it is fighting for. History can offer some clues.

The idea that enemies of republicanism are unwilling or unable to say what they don’t like is as old as (modern) republics. Thomas Paine, veteran of both American and French revolutions, carped at those who were quick enough to ‘abuse something which they called republicanism; but what republicanism was, or is, they never attempt to explain’. It is more surprising, perhaps, that the proponents of republics often seem no less hazy about their ambitions. The requirement that the monarch be replaced by an elected head of state may look like a good place to start. But historically, at least, monarch-removal was certainly not considered sufficient to realize a republic; some didn’t even think it necessary.

As a matter of historical fact, modern republics have tended to replace monarchies, often violently. Such, of course, was the case with Britain’s disgruntled colonists in 18th-century North America; so too a few years later in France, when the Bourbon dynasty came to its bloody end. Given the history, it is no surprise that overbearing monarchs, such as George III (the ‘Royal Brute’) and Louis XVI, loom large as the bogeymen of republican folklore. But American and French revolutionaries were clear that the problem was not monarchy as such but what it generally stood for: absolute power, arbitrarily exercised. And they were no less certain about the solution: the rule of law; or as second US president John Adams put it, a government in which ‘masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws’.

‘In America the law is king,’ wrote Paine. ‘For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king.’ And provided that the law is king – and the king is subject to the law – it is not impossible for a republic to have a monarch. Adams, indeed, was a firm admirer of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Britain, he observed, is ‘nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate … an empire of laws, and not of men’. The Americans’ grievance was not with the British system; their gripe was that they were themselves denied ‘the basic rights guaranteed to all Englishmen, and which all free men deserved’.

The principal inspiration for later republicans was the Roman republic. The spell cast by Rome did not much concern its suppression of tyranny, however, far less the detail of its constitutional arrangements. Rather, the attraction was romantic, inspired by the indomitable spirit of Rome’s great heroes and, in particular, the dutifulness (pietas) shown by its champions: the tyrant-slaying Brutuses and the austere Catos, who showed unstinting and selfless devotion to public service.

It was Roman pietas that underlay the civic virtue that became the hallmark of American republicanism, where the essential quality in the upstanding citizen was a willingness to step forward in the service of the state and to place the common good before any partisan interest. And it was from this source that flowed the idealised image of the republican as free man: citizen not subject, master of his own destiny, at liberty to live his life according to common laws and to look others in the eye without fear or deference.

Whatever the attractions of such a picture, there are aspects that might not be quite so palatable to today’s republican. For one thing, the idealised republican was unequivocally a free man, the master of his own destiny. Active civic participation meant having a stake in society and an education that allowed reasoned debate among intellectual equals. That immediately disqualified women and unpropertied workers (and of course slaves), who were expected to rely on the virtuous (male, white) elite for their protection.

Modern republicans no doubt see themselves as fighting a battle for greater democracy, but republicanism and democracy haven’t always been comfortable bedfellows. Most early republicans, indeed, were wary of the tyranny of the masses, believing democracy to be little better than mob rule. Nor do republicanism and liberalism necessarily make an ideal couple. Certainly, the kind of public-spirited republicanism that values selfless participation in civil society does not sit easily with the brand of liberalism that insists on a strictly limited role for the state.

Over the last century much of the battle for Britain’s ideological heart has been fought under the banners of individual rights and communal duties. Republicanism, historically, has come down decisively on the side of the latter, in favour of what might perhaps be called the big society. Who in Britain, on this propitious day, might step forward to champion such a cause?

Ben Dupré’s latest book, 50 Political Ideas You Really Need to Know is available from Amazon, and all good book shops.