An Account of Denmark. Robert Molesworth
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An Account
of Denmark
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Introduction, editorial additions, and index © 2011 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
This eBook edition published in 2013.
eBook ISBNs:
Kindle 978-1-61487-623-6
E-PUB 978-1-61487-250-4
CONTENTS
The Thomas Hollis Library, by David Womersley
Introduction, by Justin Champion
Bibliographical Descriptions: Editions, Translations, and Extracts, 1694–1789
Francogallia, Or an Account of the Ancient Free State of France
Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor
Appendix 1: Selected Sources Cited in Francogallia
Appendix 2: Ordonnance pour les Rangs du Royaume de Danemarck
Thomas Hollis (1720–74) was an eighteenth-century Englishman who devoted his energies, his fortune, and his life to the cause of liberty. Hollis was trained for a business career, but a series of inheritances allowed him to pursue instead a career of public service. He believed that citizenship demanded activity and that it was incumbent on citizens to put themselves in a position, by reflection and reading, in which they could hold their governments to account. To that end for many years he distributed books that he believed explained the nature of liberty and revealed how liberty might best be defended and promoted.
A particular beneficiary of Hollis’s generosity was Harvard College. In the years preceding the Declaration of Independence, Hollis was assiduous in sending over to America boxes of books, many of which he had had specially printed and bound, to encourage the colonists in their struggle against Great Britain. At the same time, he took pains to explain the colonists’ grievances and concerns to his fellow Englishmen.
The Thomas Hollis Library makes freshly available a selection of titles that, because of their intellectual power, or the influence they exerted on the public life of their own time, or the distinctiveness of their approach to the topic of liberty, constitute the cream of the books distributed by Hollis. Many of these works have been either out of print since the eighteenth century or available only in very expensive and scarce editions. The highest standards of scholarship and production ensure that these classic texts can be as salutary and influential today as they were two hundred and fifty years ago.
David Womersley
Robert Molesworth and Gothic Liberty
Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) famously diagnosed the causes of a disordered commonwealth in the much reprinted and translated An Account of Denmark (1694).1 His works connected the three ages of revolution between 1649 and 1776.2 According to his insights, manners and customs were shaped by the experience of the institutions and laws of a nation: liberty was cultivated by the land. Through his writing, his parliamentary career, and his stewardship of his own country estates in England and Ireland, Molesworth embodied republican ideals of the industrious and independent gentleman, stalwart in defense of public liberty, hostile to tyranny, yet dynamic in nurturing improvement.
A consistent defender of “civil rights,” Molesworth conceived his political career as defending the continuing liberty first manifest in the “ancient free state.” He hoped “that my friends, relations and children, with their posterity, will inherit their share of this inestimable blessing, and that I have contributed my part to it.”3 A defense of this vision was the consistent pattern of his post-1689 life. The edition of the radical Calvinist writer François Hotman’s Francogallia (1574) executed in 1705, first published in 1711 and republished in 1721, is testimony to this durability of political commitment and indeed to Molesworth’s political imagination in reconfiguring Hotman for an eighteenth-century readership.
John Cannon has dismissed Molesworth’s legacy as one of “bookish radicals with antiquarian tastes” whose “scale of operations was small, their impact on important politicians slight, and their influence on the public at large negligible.”4 This volume aims to provide evidence to the contrary.
Unlike many modern historians, Molesworth perceived no discontinuity between the commonwealth ideologies of the 1640s and the 1700s: the core principle of this ideology was that “the Good of the Whole is taken care of by the Whole.”5 Importantly, this made the question of whether a monarchy existed constitutionally irrelevant; as he put it,