ABSTRACT
Anthony Ascham was one of the principal non-republican supporters of the Commonwealth. In his works Ascham did not demonstrate any enthusiasm for republican government, declaring, in Discourse and in Confusions and Revolutions of Governments, that he preferred monarchy. The assumption was that the defence of liberty, whose preconditions were internal and external conflict and the alternation of government, was also the main aim of the republican Machiavelli. The eclecticism of these English writers was not simply a juxtaposition of ideas, but rested on the rediscovery in Machiavelli, Grotius and Hobbes, of arguments on conflict, liberty and war, useful in facing the question of the best constitutional and social order of the republic in a historical moment characterized by extreme instability and great expectations of reform. The presence of Grotius's and Hobbes's doctrines of the state and of natural rights, alongside Machiavelli, strongly modified the meaning attributed to the Florentine.
