5 - The King is a Thing

Summary

'What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ The Tempest, 1.1.15-16

I

IN his strictures in Leviathan (1651) on the dangers of ‘Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans', Thomas Hobbes suggests an association between republicanism and linguistic shifti- ness:

From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latine writers, in their books, and discourses of Policy, make it lawfull, and laudable, for any man so to do; provided before he do it, he call him Tyrant. For they say not Regicide, that is, killing of a King, but Tyrannicide, that is, killing of a Tyrant is lawfull. From the same books, they that live under a Monarch conceive an opinion, that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves.

Political interventions are supported by judicious acts of mis-naming. What Hobbes scornfully named ‘popular government’ could be justified, under the tutorship of Aristotle and Cicero, by calling it ‘liberty'; and monarchy could be ‘disgraced by the name of tyranny'. The use of an inaccurate name was for Hobbes an abuse of language and rhetoric, an act of redescription that reflected the speaker's passion rather than the thing itself. Calling a ‘king’ a ‘tyrant’ was a nonsense, but it could lead to regrettable effects by influencing other men's passions, and perverting the application of the law. Though killing a king was unlawful, it could be given a semblance of lawfulness by facilely redescribing it as ‘tyrannicide'; Hobbes is not only describing a disease, he is mocking its symptoms. Such paradiastole prevented ratiocina- tion and communication, and threatened linguistic anarchy. In case of dissent over the true meaning of words – ‘heresy’ and ‘opinion', ‘king’ and ‘tyrant', ‘liberty’ and ‘slavery’ – all subjects had to bow to the arbitration of the sovereign authority.

The English Parliament had defined their king as a tyrant (as well as a traitor and a murderer) early in 1649. Having executed him they then set themselves up as the arbitrators of language.