Articles:
The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made by Philip Bobbitt

He had a lot going for him, did young
Niccolo’ Machiavelli: born into the throbbing, prosperous heart of the
Renaissance in 15^th-century Florence; a successful rise as a
diplomat; a skillful navigation of turbulent political times as the city-state
is buffeted between the powerful Medici and Borgia families; then in 1513 when
his name appears on a list of possible conspirators against the latest Medici
potentate, he gets a spot of gardening leave (well, after a spot of torture) during
which he writes some plays but also a book, later called “The Prince”, which is
still being read and talked about 500 years later.

The one thing he
lacked, however, was a spin doctor. If this brilliant writer about statecraft
and political science, known later as “the prince of darkness”, had had his own
prince of darkness acting as his media chief—such as, perhaps, our recent bearer
of that nickname, Peter Mandelson—then he could have avoided his name entering
the English language as a synonym for cunning, unscrupulous, even evil
behaviour.

For had history
and the book’s reputation—mangled as it was in England by Elizabethan
propagandists—turned out differently the term “Machiavellian” might instead
have become associated with the pioneering definition and establishment of
constitutional legitimacy in a post-feudal state. Had his advice been taken by
his contemporary Italian potentates, his name might even have been associated
with the creation of a unified Italian nation-state three centuries earlier
than it actually happened. Machiavelli could have been, in other words, a blend
of our own Walter Bagehot and Count Camillo di Cavour, the first prime minister
of Italy in 1861.

This is far from
the first attempt to rescue Machiavelli from the adjective derived from his
name, but it is an especially convincing one. In part, this is because Philip
Bobbitt is an especially convincing fellow. An American historian and
constitutional expert at Columbia University, one of his previous books, a bit
of a doorstop called, intriguingly, “The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the
Course of History” (2002) may be one of those on your shelves that you admire
and are proud to display, but have not necessarily read. Like Mr Bobbitt, it is
distinguished and serious and independent-minded.

“The Garments of
Court & Palace” is a slimmer work than “The Shield of Achilles” or its
equally intimidating successor “Terror and Consent” (2008), but it is just as
serious and thoughtful, even if it too is not an easy read. What it mainly
makes the reader think about is the way in which, at Machiavelli’s time in
history, the nature of the European state was changing. And it also makes you
think about how, in the ferocious, chaotic but also extraordinarily creative
atmosphere of 16^th-century Italy, history really could have turned
out differently.

Machiavelli
became associated with immoral, anti-religious behaviour, of “ends justifying
means” because this was a time when the nature of power and legitimacy were
shifting from the Church and from monarchs claiming divine rights to states
built on law, order and structures built to endure beyond the lives of powerful
individuals or their dynasties. Italy, with its spectacularly wealthy
republican city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Siena and indeed Florence, had
already pioneered law-based, quasi-democratic forms of government. But raw
power, of money and military strength, kept on disrupting those republics, as
did recurrent threats from foreign potentates commanding larger swathes of
territory, particularly the kings of France and Spain.

Two books to
have in mind when considering Bobbitt’s thesis are, in fact, novels: Hilary
Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” and “Bring on the Bodies”. Historians blench at her
interpretation and depiction of Thomas Cromwell, and not just with jealousy
about her book sales. They argue that she has cleansed the bloody hands of
Henry VIII’s henchman, who was in truth a ruthless torturer, and has thus
distorted historical truth in pursuit of a happier story—or, some say, simply
to counter Hollywood’s equally misleading depiction of Cromwell’s rival, Sir
Thomas More, by Robert Bolt in “A Man for All Seasons”.

Yet the
statesman that Mantel describes in her Booker-prizewinning blockbusters is
actually the genuinely Machiavellian figure that Bobbitt outlines. If Cromwell
was cunning and unscrupulous, it was not for personal gain, on Mantel’s account.
He played a big role in turning England into a sustainable, durable state, one
less likely to repeat the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, and one (marginally)
less likely to be invaded and overwhelmed by the greater powers of France,
Spain or the Holy Roman Empire.

What Machiavelli
was seeking to do was to define how a “principality”—ie, a territory ruled by a
prince, and indeed the original title of his book, ‘The Prince”—could be run
according to a constitutional order and law that would endure after that
particular prince had passed on, that would be accepted by those who served whatever
previous prince had ruled the territory, and that stood a chance of being
strong enough to withstand invasions by rival states. His crucial distinction
was between the interests of the individual and those of the state or
principality he ruled, and therefore also between the moral codes that an
individual should follow and those of a state.

The ambiguity,
and thus the enduring interest, of the Tudor England of Thomas Cromwell, lies
in this very tussle between the personal interests and morality of King Henry
and those of the still wobbly state over which he reigned. In his pursuit of a
male heir, and of resources and power independent of the Roman church, was he
serving himself or England? Did Cromwell’s use of torture and deception break
the law or establish its later legitimacy?

Since Cromwell
himself spent a formative part of his life working in Renaissance Florence, it
is tempting to dream of a conversation between him and Machiavelli. And for
Italians to wonder whether a Florentine Cromwell might have succeeded in
achieving the ambition of the final chapter of “The Prince”, namely the
creation of a single, powerful nation of Italy.