The Commonwealth of Oceana | Page 5

was required of him that he would not assist in, or conceal
knowledge of any attempt to procure, the King's escape. He would not
take the oath; and was this time not only dismissed from the King's
service but himself imprisoned, until Ireton obtained his release. Before
the King's death, Harrington found his way to him again, and he was
among those who were with Charles I upon the scaffold.
After the King's execution, Harrington was for some time secluded in
his study. Monarchy was gone; some form of commonwealth was to be
established; and he set to work upon the writing of "Oceana," calmly to
show what form of government, since men were free to choose, to him
seemed best.

He based his work on an opinion he had formed that the troubles of the
time were not due wholly to the intemperance of faction, the
misgovernment of a king, or the stubbornness of a people, but to
change in the balance of property; and he laid the foundations of his
commonwealth in the opinion that empire follows the balance of
property. Then he showed the commonwealth of Oceana in action, with
safeguards against future shiftings of that balance, and with a popular
government in which all offices were filled by men chosen by ballot,
who should hold office for a limited term. Thus there was to be a
constant flow of new blood through the political system, and the
representative was to be kept true as a reflection of the public mind.
The Commonwealth of Oceana was England. Harrington called
Scotland Marpesia; and Ireland, Panopea. London he called Emporium;
the Thames, Halcionia; Westminster, Hiera; Westminster Hall,
Pantheon. The Palace of St. James was Alma; Hampton Court,
Convallium; Windsor, Mount Celia. By Hemisna, Harrington meant the
river Trent. Past sovereigns of England he renamed for Oceana:
William the Conqueror became Turbo; King John, Adoxus; Richard II,
Dicotome; Henry VII, Panurgus; Henry VIII, Coraunus; Elizabeth,
Parthenia; James I, Morpheus. He referred to Hobbes as Leviathan; and
to Francis Bacon, as Verulamius. Oliver Cromwell he renamed
Olphaus Megaletor.
Harrington's book was seized while printing, and carried to Whitehall.
Harrington went to Cromwell's daughter, Lady Claypole, played with
her three-year-old child while waiting for her, and said to her, when she
came and found him with her little girl upon his lap, " Madam, you
have come in the nick of time, for I was just about to steal this pretty
lady." "Why should you?" "Why shouldn't I, unless you cause your
father to restore a child of mine that lie has stolen?" It was only, he said,
a kind of political romance; so far from any treason against her father
that he hoped she would let him know it was to be dedicated to him. So
the book was restored; and it was published in the time of Cromwell's
Commonwealth, in the year 1656.
This treatise, which had its origin in the most direct pressure of the

problem of government upon the minds of men continues the course of
thought on which Machiavelli's " Prince " had formed one famous
station, and Hobbes's Leviathan," another.
Oceana," when published, was widely read and actively attacked. One
opponent of its doctrines was Dr. Henry Ferne, afterward Bishop of
Chester. Another was Matthew Wren, eldest son to the Bishop of Ely.
He was one of those who met for scientific research at the house of Dr.
Wilkins, and had, said Harrington, " an excellent faculty of magnifying
a louse and diminishing a commonwealth."
In 1659, Harrington published an abridgment of his Oceana as "The Art
of Lawgiving," in three books. Other pieces followed, in which he
defended or developed his opinions. He again urged them when
Cromwell's Commonwealth was in its death-throes. Then he fell back
upon argument at nightly meetings of a Rota Club which met in the
New Palace Yard, Westminster. Milton's old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was
one of its members; and its elections were by ballot, with rotation in the
tenure of all offices. The club was put an end to at the Restoration,
when Harrington retired to his study and amused himself by putting his
" System of Politics" into the form of " Aphorisms."
On December 28, 1661, James Harrington, then fifty years old, was
arrested and carried to the Tower as a traitor. His Aphorisms were on
his desk, and as they also were to be carried off, he asked only that they
might first be stitched together in their proper order. Why he was
arrested, he was not told. One of his sisters pleaded in vain to the King.
He was falsely accused of complicity in an imaginary plot, of which
nothing could be made by its investigators. No heed was paid to the
frank denials of a man