ABSTRACT
I n the century and a half which lay between the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530 and the Glorious Revolution, it could be argued that the states of Tuscany and England moved in opposite directions — something of an irony in that much of the ideology motivating British politicians throughout this period was Florentine in origin. With the waning of the Renaissance, Florence drifted from republican prosperity, through intermittently effective and decreasingly democratic duchies and grand duchies towards the oppressive and superstitious régime of Cosimo III, who was finally granted ‘royal’ status in 1695. During the same century and a half, England lurched or, as Whigs and Marxists would have it, ‘progressed’ from the megalomaniac monarchy of Henry VIII, through Reformation, Civil War, regicide and Restoration, to settle for the ‘mixed’ (republican-influenced) constitutional government of the ‘doge-like’ William III, whose regal powers were strictly rationed by Parliament. Meanwhile, the British economy had so far flourished, and the Florentine so far declined, that although our monarchs had for centuries been obliged to borrow money from private citizens in Florence, by the 1670s new-rich British citizens could outbid the Grand Duke himself for works of art in Italian auctions. 1
