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Pietro Giannone and Great Britain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Hugh Trevor-Roper
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Abstract

Pietro Giannone was a revolutionary thinker who sought in the early decades of the eighteenth century to free Italy from the inveterate, legally entrenched feudal power of the church and then to free Christianity itself from the stifling and corrupting embrace of the political church. This essay tells the improbable story of how his writings were taken up and disseminated in Britain by the non-juring bishop and antiquary Richard Rawlinson, the learned but morally unsound Scottish journalist Archibald Bower, and an odd crew of Jacobites. It is shown that the translations of Giannone got into some very influential hands and represent part of an undervalued Jacobite contribution to the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment and to the thought of Edward Gibbon.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 657 - 675
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Gibbon, E., History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, ed. Bury, J. B. (5th edn, 1909), VII, 296.Google Scholar

2 Arthur, Duck, De usu et authoritate Juris Civilis Romanorum (1653)Google Scholar. Duck was an ecclesiastical lawyer who held office under Archbishop Laud. During the civil war he took refuge in Oxford and wrote his work in the Bodleian Library. Giannone refers to it often, and always with veneration, e.g. Istoria civile, introduction; Via scritta da lui medesimo, ed. Sergio, Bertelli (Milan, 1960), p. 40.Google Scholar

3 Although part of the Triregno was known to Panzini and published in his edition of Giannone's, Opere postume (Naples, 1766)Google Scholar, and a manuscript copy of the whole circulated secretly soon afterwards, the first proper edition of it, edited by Alfredo Parenti, was published at Bari in 1940; on which see Ricuperati, G., ‘Il Triregno di Pietro Giannone’, in his Il senso della storia (Turin, 1948).Google Scholar

4 On the Neapolitan background see Salvo, Mastellone, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del seicento (Messina–Firenze, 1965).Google Scholar

5 The best account of Rawlinson is the MS thesis of Enright, D. J. (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar in the Bodleian Library, which contains Rawlinson's MSS. His travels are recorded in his journal (MS Rawlinson D. 1180–7) of which, however, two volumes, covering the period June to Oct. 1723, are missing.

6 The episode has been described by Franco, Venturi, ‘Giannoniana Britannica’, Bollettino dell'archivio storico del Banco di Napoli, fasc. 8, 1954.Google Scholar

7 Rawlinson's diary shows that he acquired Sebastiano Coleti's Italian translation of Lenglet de Fresnoy's book in Venice in 1722 and translated it during that summer, i.e. before it could contain a reference to Giannone's work, which was not published till 1723. Evidently his translation, as published in 1728, had taken account of the later edition – the same which would so infuriate Giannone when he read it in Vienna in 1730 (see below p. 669).

8 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 551.

9 Panzini's biography of Giannone was published in his edition of Giannone's, Opere postume (Naples, 1766).Google Scholar

10 George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the founder of the family fortune, was the brother of Grandison's great-grandfather Sir Edward Villiers, president of Munster. Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, was his cousin.

11 Presumably the ‘large estate’ of his maternal grandfather, Sir John Fitzgerald of Dromana, county Waterford, which had caused his father to change the family surname from Villiers to Fitzgerald.

12 The two families remained linked in the next generation, when Falkland's son, Lucius Charles, 7th viscount, married, in 1734, the widow of Grandison's son, Lord Villiers.

13 Falkland's secret visit to England (using the names Skinner and Stanley) and his consultations there with Bishop Atterbury, the chief Jacobite conspirator, are revealed in the report of the parliamentary committee which examined the evidence (Reports from committees of the house of commons, I, 1803, 125–7Google Scholar, and Appendices D 27, 40, 41, 42). See also Bennett, G. V., Thetory crisis in church and state 1688–1730 (Oxford, 1975), p. 255.Google Scholar

14 Histoire des troubles de la Grande Bretagne… (Paris, 1649).Google Scholar

15 Remonstrance très humble faite au sérénissime Prince Charles II, Roy de La Grande Bretagne… sur la conjoncture présente des affaires de Sa Majesté (Paris, 1652).Google Scholar

16 Giannone, , Vita, pp. 165–7.Google Scholar

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21 Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, under ‘Ménage’.

22 This point has been made by John Robertson in an essay shortly to be published in this Journal.

23 Giannone's letter to Lenglet is printed in Sergio, Bertelli, Giannoniana (Milan, 1968), pp. 71–2Google Scholar, from the MS in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples.

24 For the jubilation, see the documents published in Bertelli, , Giannoniana, pp. 172–9.Google Scholar

25 In Bibliothèque Italique ou histoire littéraire d'Italie, vols. IV and X (Geneva, 1730–1731).Google Scholar

26 Cf. the letter from Marc-Michel Bousquet, at Geneva, to Giannone in Venice, 29 January 1735, printed in Bertelli, , Giannoniana, pp. 524–5.Google Scholar

27 Robert, Shackleton, Montesquieu (Oxford, 1961), pp. 102–3, 113.Google Scholar

28 For details see Georges, Bonnant, ‘Pietro Giannone à Genève et la publication des ses oeuvres en Suisse au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles’, Annali delta Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecan dell'Università di Roma, Anno III 1963.Google Scholar

29 Vernet's account of the affair is printed in full, from the Archives d'Etat de Geneve in Giannoniana, pp. 573–92.

30 The autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. SirMurray, John (1897), p. 143.Google Scholar

31 Ibid. p. 235.

32 Gibbon made more than 40 notes on Giannone in his commonplace book in 1755. See Craddock, Patricia B., Young Edward Gibbon (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 68–71Google Scholar. He also wrote ‘Critical researches concerning the title of Charles VIII to the crown of Naples’, which were printed by Lord, Sheffield in The miscellaneous works of Edward Gibbon (1814), III, 206–22Google Scholar. Gibbon's debt to Giannone is emphasized by Giarrizzo, G., Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del settecento (Naples, 1954).Google Scholar

33 Low, D. M. (ed.), Gibbon's journal to 28 January 1763 (1929), p. 30.Google Scholar

34 Leopold v. Ranke's earliest work, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1495 bis 1514 (1824)Google Scholar is in fact a history of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII and its immediate consequences for Europe.

35 Bonnard, G., Le journal de Gibbon à Lausanne (Lausanne, 1945), p. 143.Google Scholar

36 Gibbon's views on Naples are expressed in a letter, written after his return to England, to his uncle Sir Stanier Porten, who had previously been British Resident there. See Norton, J. E. (ed.), The letters of Edward Gibbon (1956), pp. 117–18.Google Scholar

37 Decline and fall, II, 322.

38 Ibid. VI, 167.

39 Vita, p. 15.

40 Decline and fall, V, 171.

41 On the ‘Gallicanism’ of Muratori and Giannone, ibid. II, 322, V, 257.

42 The subscriber is named as ‘Edward Gibbon esq.’. In 1729–30 Gibbon's father was an affluent young man who was then still lingering at Cambridge and was about to go abroad before entering parliament. The pupil of the non-juror William Law, he was a tory and, Gibbon insinuates (Autobiographies, p. 294), a Jacobite. Middleton, who subscribed for the book as university librarian at Cambridge, was also, at that time, a tory, and reputed a Jacobite. Incidentally, there were several subscribers from Cambridge – the work must have been well promoted there – but none from Oxford. The only other university from which subscribers came was Marischal College, Aberdeen, in Ogilvie country. But I cannot find a James Ogilvie matriculated there who could be identified with the translator. However, if he was a Roman catholic, it is possible that he studied there without matriculation.