With her previous work, Gaby Mahlberg has distinguished herself as a fine scholar of seventeenth-century English republicans, and especially of Henry Neville and James Harrington. The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration is more distinguished still, offering an original and richly detailed account of the movements, networks, and writings of three republicans who fled England after the Restoration: Neville, Algernon Sidney, and Edmund Ludlow. This book follows their various paths and brings to notice their archival traces in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Italy.
Mahlberg begins by considering the mainland European “networks and communities” (41) in which these exiles took part (chapters 1 and 2). Clearly they had friendships on which they could rely for some measure of protection, including fellow English exiles, often formed on predictable political and religious lines. Dutch and Swiss affiliations figure prominently, especially for Sidney and Ludlow, the latter of whom was classified as a “religious refugee” upon his arrival in Bern (27). But even when living among confessional allies, safety could be precarious. Despite having an official letter of protection in Lausanne, Ludlow moved on to the “quieter and safer” Vevey in spring 1663 (75). In a way somewhat surprising, Italy proves to be an inviting refuge. Neville seems to have been quite comfortable in Tuscany, where he was a protégé of Ferdinando II and a friend of his son Cosimo. Other considerations could determine where the exiles chose to dwell: Sidney simply preferred Rome to Hamburg, where he felt he could not find decent entertainment or company (61), and he enjoyed rubbing elbows with the Vatican's movers and shakers. He spent some time in Rome before moving on to the Huguenot south of France.
Opposition to the restored monarchy could take complex forms, as Mahlberg details in chapters 3 and 4. Despite his brief arrest after the Northern Rising of 1663, Neville seems to have been most inclined to work on behalf of the restored monarchy and became Clarendon's informant on Italian affairs (67). Immediately after the accession of Charles II, Sidney remained in England, apparently receptive to holding a position in the new regime. When that did not happen, he fled the country and became the exile most involved in active plotting against the king. At the height of his efforts in 1665–66, he sought Dutch and French support for an invasion that would make England a commonwealth once more. But Sidney needed a military leader for this military venture. As Mahlberg carefully details, the effort ran aground partly due to a failure to free Lambert from prison in Guernsey and a failure to secure the participation of Ludlow, who had grave reservations about the trustworthiness of the Dutch. Ludlow also had reason not to invite further threats to his safety: as a signatory of Charles I's death warrant, he was the exile with the largest target on his back. Neville returned to England in 1666, Sidney in 1677. Ludlow attempted to return to England after the Glorious Revolution but was rebuffed and went back to Vevey, where he died a few years later.
Across several chapters, Mahlberg explores the exile writings of her three subjects, which are often focused on events of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (chapters 5 through 7). In taking up Ludlow's writings, Mahlberg focuses on the manuscript “Voyce from the Watch Tower” rather than on the published Memoirs. The Memoirs was carefully edited by John Toland as an intervention on debates about standing armies in the 1690s. “A Voyce,” by contrast, is more directly a product of Ludlow's exile in Switzerland—the full manuscript, covering 1660 to spring 1677, is housed in the Bodleian Library, with a portion of it, covering 1660–1662, edited by Blair Worden for the Camden Fourth Series in 1987. Ludlow sought to control the narrative regarding the execution of his fellow regicides with his 1663 tract Le juges jugez, se justifiant (the judged judges justifying themselves), a translation and expansion of the anonymous pamphlet The Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King's Judges (1660). Both “A Voyce” and Les juges jugez were likely written, Mahlberg emphasizes, with a godly audience in mind.
Godly republicanism is also a key theme in the chapters on the writings of Sidney and Neville. Mahlberg follows Michael Winship and Jonathan Scott in seeing Sidney's Court Maxims as an intensely religious republican text, while also suggesting that its focus on the balance of power in Europe marks it as a work of exile. Sidney's later Discourses, Mahlberg argues, tends to eschew a language of religious zeal that had fallen out of favor. While Neville's writings are less direct an articulation of political principles, they do evince a running concern with liberty of conscience. Through its use of travel narrative, satire, and utopian writing, The Isle of Pines remarks upon the restored monarchy and Anglo-Dutch relations during the conflict of 1664–1667. It is also “an exile work” addressing “key themes such as travel, distance, alienation, loss and a sense of being lost” (232–33). While some readers have seen race as a fluid category in the text, Mahlberg, following the work of Amy Boesky, more persuasively argues that Blackness is presented as “disruptive to social cohesion throughout” (254).
The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration is an excellent book that will be valued by all scholars of seventeenth-century English republicanism. Mahlberg revises work on the republicans in two principal ways: by showing that religious concerns were very much a part of their political program; and by showing that English republicanism was an international phenomenon, with significant support from mainland European sympathizers and from English merchants living abroad. Despite the secular focus of many of the foundational studies of English republicanism—such as those of Quentin Skinner and David Norbrook—the first of these points has now been fairly well established. The second point, on the transnational character of this republican moment, is the more original contribution, and it points to important directions currently emerging among historians and scholars of literature.
One must finally note a curious proximity between scholar and subject: Mahlberg declares this to be her “very own Brexit book,” the bulk of it having been written following her 2015 return to Germany, as England was gearing up for its “fateful referendum,” and while her journalism found her increasingly focused on the current plight of migrants in Europe (ix). We must be grateful that through it all Mahlberg, like the exiles she has so ably studied, remains committed to the Good Old Cause, promising at the end of this book a further one focused on the broadly European legacy of English republican writings.
