The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney

Abstract

Centenary commemorations can have their ironies. If we look from 1783 to 1883 to 1983, we see a rise in the status of centenaries, and a decline in the status of Algernon Sidney. This is, I think, the first time that a centenary of the Whig martyrdoms has been publicly observed. But it is not the first time one has been noticed. Soon after the first centenary, a play in London by the Irish clergyman Thomas Stratford about Sidney's fellow martyr Lord Russell, apparently a theatrical disaster of some magnitude, remarked on the passage of “one hundred years since godlike Russell bled” and portrayed Sidney as “Brutus of England,” whose “pulse beats with rapture at the sound of freedom.” Eleven years later, in the north German town of Kiel, the eighteen-year-old Barthold Georg Niebuhr—who was to exert so strong an influence on Ranke—celebrated as a “consecrated day” the “anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death.” (He got the day wrong, but that was an error common enough during the process of sanctification that raised Sidney's virtues above the chronological detail in which they had found reflection.) Niebuhr noted gloomily that, although Sidney's name and his “brilliant talents” were widely known, “perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes.” I doubt if there are fifty today.