Mercenary

The English word ‘mercenary’ is derived from the Latin mercenarius, a hireling or someone who is paid for work. The original etymology of the mercenarius is rooted in two other Latin words: mercari, to trade or exchange, and merx, commodity or merchandise. That wider meaning was frequently associated in general usage with faithlessness and greed or desire, as when the Earl of Essex, writing to Elizabeth I, professed that ‘the two ends of my life have been, the one to please you, the other to serve you’, positioning these aspirations against ‘mercenary or self-loving respect’. ¹ The pejorative dimension of ‘mercenary’ made the word a recurrent rhetorical weapon to attack the loyalty, legitimacy or credibility of political rivals or religious groups. ² The civil lawyer Walter Haddon attacked the ‘mercenary ear confession’ of the Counter-Reformation Portuguese humanist Jerónimo Osório's letter to Elizabeth I. ³ The Puritan Henry Barrow, in his A brief discoverie of the false church (1591), accused the Church of England of being formed by ‘hireling Lecturers, vagrant & mercenary Preachers’ who, for preserving ‘Romish brawling bawdy court, with all their popish canons, customs’, were nothing more than ‘mercenary Romish Doctors, pleaders, proctors &c. which are to couller & plead the most vile hateful causes which a Christian's ear abhorred to hear of, or by such wicked blasphemous customs, othes, purgations &c’. ⁴ Similarly, the idea of writing for hire – the ‘mercenary pen’, ‘[t]hese mercinary pen-men of the Stage’ – reduced the dignity of authorship to a base desire to benefit from the marketplace of print. ⁵ It is an association that would later surface repeatedly during the English Civil War, due to the increased use of printed polemic to bolster both royalist and parliamentary causes. The equating of ‘mercenary’ with trade or exchange, as well as self-serving covetousness, was not always gender specific. ‘A whore that is mercenary’, wrote Thomas Gainsford, ‘will hardly be drawn from her filthy life, she is so fast linked to the love of money’. ⁶ And a ‘[m]ercenary Woman’, warned the satirical writer Ned Ward in Female policy detected (1695), would ‘submit to your Pleasure’ for ‘a splendid Maintenance’ of silk and satin, only to build ‘a Provision for her self out of the Ruins of your Fortune’. ⁷