Robert Molesworth, denouncer of Danish tyranny

In 1692 Robert Molesworth was promptly relieved of his duties as William of Orange’s envoy to Denmark. Not for the first time, he had got into a quarrel with a Danish count, this time over the news of Admiral Edward Russell’s victory against the French at La Hogue. Molesworth couldn’t help but rub England’s victory in the face of the Francophile Danish nobleman.  

Molesworth had been sent to Copenhagen in 1689 as William III’s first envoy. He was there to negotiate the use of troops for the king’s ongoing campaign against James II in Ireland, and with more covert instructions to ascertain the extent of French influence at the Danish court. This was not an easy job; Anglo-Danish relations were strained and William feared King Christian V would pull Denmark away from the Anglo-Dutch alliance. Molesworth’s temper did not help.  

Molesworth had a personal stake in the French defeat. A Protestant Irishman, he was a staunch supporter of the ‘late happy revolution’ of 1688, which ultimately brought William to the throne. He grew up on the Molesworth estate in Brackenstown near Swords, County Dublin, and attended Trinity College alongside other 17th-century Irish notables such as the writer and philosopher William Molyneux. He fled to England when James II landed in Ireland in 1688 in an attempt to regain his kingdoms, before taking up his appointment at Copenhagen. When William’s war in Ireland ended in 1691, he was relieved but had suffered significant losses to his fortune. William was not impressed with Molesworth’s conduct in Denmark. If he had expected a chummy appointment upon return, he was disappointed. When he left Denmark in 1692, he was in want of both a pastime and money.  

In 1694 a book appeared. Though published anonymously, it was easily attributable to the scorned diplomat. An Account of Denmark as it was in 1692 stated that, there, ‘Slavery seems to be more absolutely established than it is in France’. Based on his observations and sources from his time in Denmark, the Account described the present condition of the Danes after their nation had succumbed to absolutism in 1660. After the war against the Swedes, general displeasure with the nobles had led to support of the king’s coup. But in the 30 years since, the nobles had lost influence, the king had consolidated his power, and arbitrary taxes were levied to maintain ‘a great standing army’. The people had soon found that ‘the little Finger of an Absolute Prince can be heavier than the Loins of many Nobles’. But the Danes did not object to their condition; they had grown accustomed to their slavery and ‘lost their very taste for Liberty… as Men over-run with the Spleen take pleasure in their Distemper’.  

The bold and undeniably entertaining Account fared well among the educated British elite, who were in a Whiggish mood after the ‘Glorious’ Revolution and increasingly interested in foreign affairs. At the time of publication, it proved more popular than John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, and Molesworth would often be referred to simply as ‘the Author of the Account of Denmark’. 

The Danish government swiftly commissioned other authors among Molesworth’s English intellectual opponents in an attempt to counter his slights. Three were forthcoming. In much less convincing prose, they defended the honour of the Danes: the High Church Tory William King argued that the air quality in Copenhagen was perfectly adequate, and that the windows of Kronborg Castle had certainly not been ‘wall’d up’ so the king could avoid the ‘continual heart-burnings’ caused by the sight of the province of Schonen (Skåne) after it had been lost to the Swedes. The windows were in fact walled up; but that, the king said, was merely to bolster the fortress. The responses were to little avail. Well into the 18th century, Molesworth’s harsh words shaped the perception of the Danish people both in England and abroad; well-travelled Danes would answer to it for years to come.  

Molesworth did not primarily write the Account for the benefit of a Danish audience. He thought Denmark a lost cause in any case: ‘the People may with great difficulty change their Masters, but never their Condition’. Instead, he sought to warn his own countrymen about the ways in which a country descends into absolutism. According to Molesworth, ‘the Pageantry, Luxury, and Licentiousness of the more Arbitrary Courts’ could be seductive: ‘Like Idiots, who part with their Bread for a glittering piece of Tinsel, they prefer gilded Slavery to coarse domestick Liberty.’ Denmark had none of that, and thus the contours of tyranny could be seen more clearly. Moreover, though English Whigs in the run-up to the events of 1688 tended to associate absolutism with ‘popery’, Denmark was a Protestant country. It was therefore a cautionary tale, Molesworth claimed, for the English.

Molesworth was a Whig. His political worldview was shaped by the Exclusion Crisis, during which attempts were made to exclude James, Duke of York, Charles II’s Catholic brother, from inheriting the throne. Even more influential on Molesworth was its aftermath, which saw a tough clampdown on those with Whiggish tendencies. One of his predecessors as envoy to Denmark, Algernon Sidney, was executed in 1683 for writing the unpublished manuscript Discourses concerning Government. In the preface to his Account, Molesworth noted the words Sidney had left in a visitor’s book in the Danish king’s library: ‘manus haec inimica tyrannis Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem’ (This hand, an enemy to tyrants, seeks with the sword peaceful repose in freedom). Catholicisation of Irish government departments and the army under James’ friend and Lord Deputy of Ireland, the Earl of Tyrconnell, made him all the more sensitive to the consequences of James II’s continued rule for the Protestant interest. Molesworth spent many of those years travelling in Europe meeting exiled Whigs.  

Still, he sought to define tyranny beyond the confines of mere ‘popery’ and, as the dust of 1688 was settling, he worried that James II would not have met nearly so much opposition if he had not imposed his Catholic faith. The enemy of liberty was not popery in itself ‘but the doctrine of blind Obedience in what Religion soever it be found’. Early on, he was challenging the uneasy truce between Whigs and Tories after the revolution. The shared enemy of James II had made Whigs complacent about the Anglican and Tory influence both in Parliament and particularly on the education of the young.  

Much of the Account is spent detailing the influence of the Lutheran church on education in Denmark. Had the Danes ‘committed the Government of their Youth to Philosophers instead of Priests’, they might have been able to withstand the outward imposition of tyranny. He blamed the king for his greed, and the nobility for not living up to their duties, inviting their own disenfranchisement. In Denmark, the acquiescence to absolutism was ultimately the result of ‘enslaving the Spirits of the People, as a preparative to that of their Bodies’. 

In the 1690s, the political distinctions between Whigs and Tories were far from settled. The aftermath of 1688 may have been swift and peaceful, but it overrode the political distinctions that had reigned since the Exclusion Crisis. The Whigs had got rid of the Catholic monarch, and the Tories had lost the argument on hereditary, divine-right monarchy. New political faultlines were emerging in response to new developments – principally the growing interest in foreign affairs and the establishment of the Bank of England, alongside the rise of the ‘monied interest’.  

These did not straightforwardly map onto old coalitions. William’s reign saw the rise of the Whig Junto, a group of establishment figures who rejected the old Whig commitment to Parliament against the crown. Some of those associated with these ‘country’ Whigs in the early days of William’s reign would later go on to be Tories – Robert Harley headed the Tory ministry under Queen Anne. The deist philosopher and friend of Molesworth’s, John Toland, accurately described the function of political labels in the 1690s: ‘according to your predominant Passion, he’s a Whig whom you love, and he that you hate’s a Tory; and so on the contrary, as you happen to be engaged in either Party’. 

Molesworth insisted on the term ‘Whig’. Both at the Grecian coffee house in London and on his estate in Dublin, he was at the centre of a social circle of country Whigs, which included Toland and other figures, such as John Trenchard and Walter Moyle. They read the political philosophers James Harrington, author of Oceana, and Henry Neville, and adapted the republican tradition to a new era. Toland published Sidney’s Discourses, and edited and republished tracts from the time of the Civil War. They were avid pamphleteers and contributed to many ongoing political debates – in 1697 Trenchard and Moyle fired the opening anti-army shot in the pamphlet war over William III’s maintenance of a standing army. In 1721, Molesworth published a new preface to his translation of Francois Hotman’s Francogallia, in which he wanted to offer his ‘Notion of a Whig, I mean of a real Whig’.  

This preface, as Molesworth saw it, was necessary in light of the many meanings attributed to the names Whig and Tory, and he saw fit to make a ‘publick Profession of my Political Faith’. The principles of a Whig as he saw them were simple: affirmation that ‘our Constitution is a Government of Laws, not of Persons’, support for frequent Parliaments, and toleration of those who differ in religious opinions so long as they do not – as ‘real Papists’ did – answer first to a foreign jurisdiction. He was against the raising of a standing army, unless it was absolutely necessary for the defence of liberty. Molesworth was most suspicious of those who were Whigs in name but without commitment to these core principles, for ‘the Nominal are worse than any Sort of Men’. 

The ‘Principles of a Real Whig’ were soon published separately from his translation, and became a focal point for ‘true Whigs’ on either side of the Atlantic well into the 18th century. Molesworth was one of the most widely quoted and referenced Whig thinkers throughout the century, even if he has now fallen into obscurity. In the 1970s, Hugh Trevor-Roper, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, advised against the purchase of Molesworth’s private papers by the Bodleian library, as he was considered a second-rate historical figure.  

Over the centuries, Molesworth’s reputation has suffered from being primarily of interest to Danes. He did also have a temper, and some have ascribed his relatively modest political success to this fault. His interventions against ‘priestcraft’ were bombastic and, after he lost much of his money in the South Sea Bubble, he fronted the campaign to hold the company’s directors to account. Supporting a large family, and not always lucky with his financial ventures, he was low on funds. But his character and financial travails need not keep us from recognising the fine mix of principle and pragmatism which animated his work. 

Molesworth was most active politically in three tumultuous decades of public life. The ‘Principles of a Real Whig’ bear the mark of someone with an acute sense of the political questions and uneasy alliances that were characteristic of his time. He thought the English constitution the most perfect in the world, and thought this all the more reason to remain vigilant of the pitfalls that could befall such a nation. He was not afraid to criticise his allies; his obituary in the Dublin Weekly Journal noted that he always defended the cause of liberty, even when it was disagreeable to those around him, but had ‘been applauded by all Parties in their Turn, as soon as the warm Fit was over, and the Humours of the Nation had settled’. 

Among the Danes he found ‘no Enthusiasts, Mad-men, Natural Fools, or fanciful Folks’ and, he said, ‘everyone keeps to the ordinary beaten road of sense’. It was not a compliment. In Dublin and in London, he cultivated an eclectic circle of friends interested in making sense of the tumultuous times they lived through. He was often in the company of more radical political thinkers than his parliamentary record would suggest. Many of his friends and allies thought the political labels that had shaped the previous century were unfit for the changing times. Molesworth, however, thought there was something in the name ‘Whig’ worth fighting for. Perhaps he offers a lesson for liberals today.