Martyr for Liberty

Would you like to know about Algernon Sydney, the republican aristocrat? Well, here is a little elegy that sums up his spirit, and his ideas, very well indeed;

But where's the wandering spirit gone,
Since here he suffered martyrdom?
To heaven? Oh!, it cannot be,
For heaven is a monarchy.
Where then I pray? To purgatory?
That's an idle Romish story.
Such saint as he can't go to hell?
Where is he gone, I prithee tell,
The learned say to Achipotel.

Sidney was executed in December 1683 because the seventeenth century English state allowed for only two things: loyalty and still more loyalty. He was among the first to challenge the contention that opposition to the crown was treason. More than this, it was he, and those who followed in his path, who gave shape to a new and radical truth; that there were circumstances in which the crown itself could behave in a 'treasonable' way towards greeter notions of the public weal. This was the whole point of Discourses Concerning Government, the text for which Sydney lost his life.

For Sydney absolute monarchy, in the form practiced by Charles II, was a great political evil. His Discourses was written during the Exclusion Crisis, as a response to Robert Filmer's Patriarcia, a defence of divine right monarchy, first published in 1680. Sydney was appalled that a free-born Englishman could ever have compiled such a work, a defence of despotism. It was Filmer's business, he wrote, "to overthrow liberty and truth." Patriarchal government was not 'God's will', as Filmer and others contended, because the "Civil powers are purely human ordinances."

In countering the Hobbesian argument that the coercive power of the monarchy was necessary to prevent the return of the Civil Wars, Sydney invoked Tacitus, the Roman historian, saying that the pax Romana, the Imperial peace, was the 'peace of death.' Rebellion may have dangerous consequences but;

They who are already fallen into all that is odious, and shameful and miserable, cannot justify fear...Let the dangers never be so great, there is the possibility of safety while men have life, hands, arms and courage to use them but that people must surely perish who tamely suffer themselves to be oppressed.

All of his life Sydney had been consistent in his support of liberty. He had served in the New Model Army, though he opposed the decision to execute Charles I. In the end Cromwell's absolutism was little better for Sydney than that previously practiced by the king. His dismissal of the Long Parliament in 1653 was the act of a Caeserian dictator, subverting the republic and the constitution. In retirement Sydney was bold enough to outrage the Lord Protector by putting on a performance of Julius Caesar, with himself in the role of Brutus; and Brutus he was to remain.

A republican by deep conviction, he was abroad when the monarchy was restored in 1660, choosing to remain in exile for some years. He was only to return in 1677, almost immediately becoming involved in the growing opposition to rising forms of Stuart absolutism. When Charles dismissed his final Parliament in 1681, saying he would have no more, Sydney united with Shaftesbury and others in plotting against the perceived royal tyranny, of a 'force without authority.' Sydney was later to be implicated in the Rye House Plot, a scheme to assassinate Charles and his brother, though on some very suspect evidence.

Unable to support the indictment against him by any normal legal process, Sydney's writings were produced in court, as a 'false, seditious and traitorous libel', an argument for the people, so said the Solicitor General, to rise up in arms. In response Sydney said that it was easy to condemn him by quoting his words out of context "If you take the scripture to pieces you will make all the penmen of the scripture blasphemous; you may accuse David of saying there is no God and of the Apostles that they were drunk." But for the crown 'to write was to act.'

Sydney maintained faith to the end, declaring on the scaffold "We live in an age that makes truth pass for treason."

Finding the Ancient Mariner

A Shropshire writer has discovered the real Ancient Mariner in what must count as a first class piece of historical detective work! Robert Fowke’s findings are now published in The Real Ancient Mariner. The mariner himself, the man who inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write one of the most memorable poems in the English language, vivid in word and image, was Simon Hatley, born in Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

Coleridge is thought to have come up with the idea for the poem about a sailor who is becalmed at sea after shooting an albatross in 1797 while walking with William Wordsworth in the hills above his home in Nether Stowey, Somerset. Fowke says;

Scholars have always known what gave Coleridge the idea for the poem because Wordsworth said they had talked together about a book by Captain George Shevelocke during their walk, but nobody has ever taken up the story.

It seems such an incredible oversight, that over the years nobody has seen fit to take up this lead. But there it is, in A Voyage round the World by way of the Great South Sea written by Captain George Shevelocke and published in 1726. Sailing in the Speedwell around Cape Horn, Captain Shevelocke logs the following incident:

We observed that we had not had the sight of one fish of any kind since we came into the southward of the streights of le Maire, nor one sea-bird except a disconsolate black Albatross, who accompanied us several days, hovering above us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley, my second Captain, observing in one of his melancholy fits, that the bird which was always hovering near us, imagined, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen…he after some fruitless attempts at length shot the Albatross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it…

Fowke, tracing Hatley through some other contemporary sources has pieced together a remarkable picture. At one point he was lost at sea and rescued by a Spanish ship which took him to Lima in what is now Peru. There he was tortured, possibly by the Inquisition, the author surmised, so off he went to Madrid to check the records. He found reference to one Simon Hatley born in ‘Yudstock’ which he took to be Woodstock. Now back in England, he discovered an entry in the register for Simon Hatley born in the parish in 1685.

Interest in Haley goes beyond the albatross incident, for there are other remarkable incidents in his life. Amazingly, as Fowke has discovered, on another voyage he sailed with Alexander Selkirk, whose story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, and with William Dampier, an adventurer and author whose work inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels. A fascinating life; a fascinating story.