Algernon Sidney – Discourses Concerning Government Excerpts (1680-1683)

Introduction

Thomas Jefferson was asked shortly before his death where he learned the principles that he laid out in the Declaration of Independence. He replied “All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c. …”The first two of these were of course ancient Greek or Roman philosophers. Locke and Sidney both lived in the late seventeenth century and wrote against the absolute power of monarchs. Both were responding to the ideas of Sir Robert Filmer but also to the practices of Stuart kings, and their support for absolute monarch and slavery. 

Below are selections from two documents about Sidney: one recounts Sidney’s trial, where evidence from his Discourses was used as evidence to convict him of treason. The other is an excerpt from his Discourses themselves (the passages used to convinct him are missing and were never restored to his manuscript). “An exact account of the tryal of Algernoon Sidney” was a pamphlet published shortly after Sidney’s trial and execution.  Born the son of Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, and Dorothy Percy, the daughter of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, Sidney was raised under the influence of two powerful families. During the Civil War he served in the Parliamentary forces as colonel in the Earl of Manchester’s regiment of horse, though he later refused a position in the New Model Army on account of his health. Sidney served as a MP for Cardiff, where he opposed the execution of the king saying that: “Cromwell using these formall words (I tell you, wee will cut off his head with the crowne upon it) I … immediately went out of the room, and never returned,” though he later called regicide the “justest and bravest act … that ever was done in England, or anywhere.” Sidney greatly disliked Cromwell; in 1683, the last year of his life, he declared: “you need not wonder I call him a tyrant, I did so every day in his life, and acted against him too.”

By the time he was executed in 1683 at the age of sixty, Sidney had weathered the English Civil War, the execution of the King, and the Restoration of his son, Charles II, to the throne. After the Restoration and distressed at the growth of what he viewed to be an absolute monarchy, Sydney began to write Discourses Concerning Government. Discourses was a response to Robert Filmer’s defense of divine right monarchy, Patriarcha. In Discourses, Sidney emphasized the need for subjects to rise up against oppression, advocated for principles of liberty, virtue, and reason, and championed the viewpoint that subjects had a right to form their own government. In addition to his writings, Sidney, was accused of engaging in treasonous talks with Lord Howard, the younger John Hampden, the earl of Essex, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Russell, and was implicated in a plot to overthrow the Stuart Monarchy by encouraging an uprising in both England and Scotland. The plot was known later under the broad term “the Rye House Plot,” however historians disagree as to what extent the plot was real. Nevertheless, on June 25, 1683, Sidney was arrested. It was only upon Sidney’s arrest, when his house was raided, that the manuscript of Discourses was discovered and confiscated. Lacking the second witness that was necessary under English law to convict, the trial was postponed for several months. In October of 1683, the presiding judge, the staunch royalist Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys famously ruled that Discourses– Sidney’s own words– could be used as the second witness, saying ‘Scribere est agere’: “to write is to act.” Despite the fact that Sidney had not published the work during his lifetime, it provided the key witness that led to his downfall. After his death, Sidney, whose ideas were known by the Whig community, was regarded as a hero and a martyr.  Below is the pamphlet that was circulated after Sidney’s death which gives an account of the trial and concludes by calling Sidney “a perfect monarch hater.” The use of Sidney’s own words against him illustrates the near absolute nature of royal power in this time period. 

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