ABSTRACT

English counties were often largely self-governing and can in some ways be seen as gentry republics', while in towns it was not uncommon for people of very humble status' to be involved in government. In the early Stuart parliaments, people often said that royal claims to extra-legal discretionary or emergency powers threatened to reduce the status of free English subjects to that of villeins. English liberties and the institutions that underpinned them in the early Stuart period do not in fact look very neo-Roman. Drawing on Roman law and on the writings of Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, so his case goes, the neo-Romans revived a classical account of liberty and applied it to English politics. According to Quentin Skinner, it was in the early Stuart period that this neo-Roman account of liberty gained currency in England. The idea that people in authority ought to promote the public good, but a commonplace held by virtually everyone.