Lehal Library

As the years passed and the high tension of Jacobean tra- gedy relaxed into the comedies of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, the evil Machiavel became a pathetic fail- ure whose complacently wicked designs inevitably and reassuringly led to his making a fool of himself. Fading out of British drama in the ­mid-­seventeenth century, this stock figure is still resurrected from time to time, most recently and hilariously in Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, a charac- ter who adds a visceral cowardice to the already long list of Machiavel’s vices. To a great extent, no doubt, it was this identification of Machiavelli’s name with everything that was evil which kept The Prince in print and guaranteed that, despite the papal ban, it would be widely read. But there was more. As medieval Christianity and scholasticism sank into the past and science and reason made their slow, often unwel- come advances, as Europe got used to religious schism and competing versions of the truth, the overriding question for any modern ruler inevitably became: how can I con- vince people that I have a legitimate, reasonable right to hold power and to govern? In England Charles Stuart would insist on the notion that kings had a divine right, this at a time when so many English monarchs had seized their crowns by force and cunning. Curiously enough, Charles’s great antagonist Cromwell felt that he too had a direct line to God and legitimacy, but through belief and piety rather than family and inheritance. Officially a ­parliamentarian, Cromwell frequently governed without