ABSTRACT
The brilliance of Nedham's wit attracted his paymasters in the political turmoil of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, and it attracts scholars now. Nedham's writings, republican and otherwise, display a strand of hard-edged political calculation which makes him an interesting exemplar of the deployment of controversial but increasingly influential contemporary modes of thought about politics. It is some measure of the extraordinary qualities of Marchamont Nedham that he managed to serve virtually all of the political causes and regimes of two of the most unstable decades of English history, and lived to fight another day. On the face of it, the mystery of state tradition might seem to endorse a rather cynical approach to politics, lining up with the precepts of Machiavelli and enhancing our sense of Nedham as a pragmatic advocate of amoral political rationality. Kenneth Schellhase is alone in seeing Clapmar as an unapologetic user of Machiavellian principle via his endorsement of Tacitus.
