The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• The Thomas Hollis Library
• Introduction
• Robert Molesworth and Gothic Liberty
• The Life
• The Ideas
• The History and Reception of the Texts
• Editorial Apparatus
• Bibliographical Descriptions Editions, Translations, and Extracts, 1694–1789
• English Editions
• European Editions 1
• Textual Policy
• Italics
• Spelling and Footnotes
• List of Sources
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• An Account of Denmark
• The Preface
• Chapter I: Of the Territories Belonging to the King of Denmark, and Their Situation
• Chapter II: Of Denmark In Particular, and the Island of Zealand
• Chapter III: Of the Sound
• Chapter IV: Of the Other Islands, and Jutland
• Chapter V: Of the Rest of the King of Denmark’s Countries
• Chapter VI: Of Their Form of Government
• Chapter VII: The Manner How the Kingdom of Denmark Became Hereditary and Absolute
• Chapter VIII: The Condition, Customs, and Temper of the People
• Chapter IX: Of the Revenue
• Chapter X: Of the Army, Fleet, and Fortresses
• Chapter XI: Of the Court
• Chapter XII: The Disposition and Inclinations of the King of Denmark Towards His Neighbours
• Chapter XIII: The Manner of Dispossessing, and Restoring the Duke of Holstein Gottorp
• Chapter XIV: The Interests of Denmark In Relation to Other Princes
• Chapter XV: Of the Laws, Courts of Justice, Etc.
• Chapter XVI: The State of Religion, of the Clergy, and Learning, Etc.
• The Conclusion
• Francogallia, Or an Account of the Ancient Free State of France
• The Preface to the Reader 1
• The Translator’s Preface 3
• A Short Extract of the Life of Francis Hotoman, Taken Out of Monsieur Bayle’ S Historical Dictionary and Other Authors.
• Explication of the Roman Names Mention’d By Hotoman
• The Author’s Preface
• Chapter I: The State of Gaul, Before It Was Reduced Into a Province By the Romans
• Chapter II: Probable Conjectures Concerning the Ancient Language of the Gauls
• Chapter III: The State of Gaul, After It Was Reduced Into the Form of a Province By the Romans
• Chapter IV: Of the Original of the Franks; Who Having Possessed Themselves of Gallia, Changed Its Name Into That of Francia, Or Francogallia
• Chapter V: Of the Name of the Franks, and Their Sundry Excursions; and What Time They First Began to Establish a Kingdom In Gallia
• Chapter VI: Whether the Kingdom of Francogallia Was Hereditary Or Elective; and the Manner of Making Its Kings
• Chapter VII: What Rule Was Observ’d Concerning the Inheritance of the Deceased King, When He Left More Children Than One
• Chapter VIII: Of the Salick Law, and What Right Women Had In the King ’s Their Father’s Inheritance
• Chapter IX: Of the Right of Wearing a Large Head of Hair Peculiar to the Royal Family
• Chapter X: The Form and Constitution of the Francogallican Government
• Chapter XI: Of the Sacred Authority of the Publick Council; and What Affairs Were Wont to Be Transacted Therein
• Chapter XII: Of the Kingly Officers, Commonly Call’d Mayors of the Palace
• Chapter XIII: Whether Pipin Was Created King By the Pope Or By the Authority of the Francogallican Council
• Chapter XIV: Of the Constable, and Peers of France
• Chapter XV: Of the Continued Authority and Power of the Sacred Council, During the Reign of the Carolingian Family
• Chapter XVI: Of the Capetian Race, and the Manner of Its Obtaining the Kingdom of Francogallia
• Chapter XVII: Of the Uninterrupted Authority of the Publick Council During the Capetian Race
• Chapter XVIII: Of the Remarkable Authority of the Council Against Lewis the Eleventh
• Chapter XIX: Of the Authority of the Assembly of the States Concerning the Most Important Affairs of Religion 97
• Chapter XX: Whether Women Are Not As Much Debarred (by the Francogallican Law) From the Administration, As From the Inheritance of the Kingdom
• Chapter XXI: Of the Juridical Parliaments In France
• Some Considerations For the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor
• To the Gentlemen of the Honourable House of Commons of Ireland
• Some Considerations For the Promoting of Agriculture, Etc.
• Appendix 1
• Selected Sources Cited In Francogallia
• Loeb Classical Library
• Appendix 2
• Ordonnance Pour Les Rangs Du Royaume De Danemarck

Spelling and Footnotes

This edition has preserved the irregular orthography of Molesworth’s day, including that of proper names and place names, except where there are clear mistakes (and these have been silently corrected). Spellings in old style have been retained: for example, chuse, compleat, shew, publick (and other –ck endings); similarly, words with contracted –ed endings have been retained, but those like rendred have silently become “rendered.”

Other silent adjustments to spelling and grammar have been made for clarity’s sake: for example, square brackets denote the inclusion of footnotes and words not in the original. Latin phrases have been reproduced as in the original (also italicized).

In this edition of Francogallia all instances of “Capevingian” have been replaced with the more modern “Capetian,” and “Carlovingian” with “Carolingian.”

Unless stated otherwise, all translations are by the editor.

LIST OF SOURCES

Where possible, all sources used by Molesworth in the Account of Denmark have been identified in appropriate footnotes. In Molesworth’s edition of Hotman’s Francogallia, he meticulously reproduced, generally in the main body of the text, references from the original editions that he had consulted (the 1576 Latin and French versions rather than the 1574 edition). The present edition has preserved this aspect of the translation. As Giesey and Salmon establish in their parallel Latin and English edition, Hotman identified his citations by italics (although not all such passages were direct quotations, sometimes being condensed or partially adjusted). The modern Cambridge University Press edition supplies precise pagination in accessible editions for these original sources. Readers who wish to explore the erudition at play in the work should consult the 1972 apparatus.

This Liberty Fund edition includes footnotes to identify sources where either Hotman or Molesworth failed to give a bibliographical reference. In general, references to classical sources will give author, title, book, and chapter or paragraph in standard style. A full and precise reference can be gathered from consulting Giesey and Salmon’s edition. A selected account of sources available to Hotman and Molesworth has been included in Appendix 1 for cross-reference to available sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed editions. Because the most commonly used editions for reference purposes are the volumes from the Loeb Classical Library, citation to these volumes will simply be “Loeb” and the appropriate page number, or the volume and page number of a specific author’s work. Thus Suetonius, Caesar 25 (Loeb 1:32) is Loeb’s Suetonius, vol. 1, p. 32. Full references to cited classical sources are listed in the section “Loeb Classical Library” in Appendix 1.

FURTHER READING

• Bond, William Henry. Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn: A Whig and His Books. Sandars Lectures in Bibliography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Brown, Michael. “Francis Hutcheson and the Molesworth Connection.” Eighteenth-century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr 14 (1999): 62–76.
• Champion, Justin. Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
• ———. “Enlightened Erudition and the Politics of Reading in John Toland’s Circle.” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 111–41.
• Ellis, Harold A. “Genealogy, History, and Aristocratic Reaction in Early 18th Century France: The Case of Henri de Boulainvilliers.” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 414–51.
• ———. Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in EarlyEighteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
• Goldie, Mark. “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets on the Allegiance Controversy.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980): 473–564.
• ———. “The Roots of True Whiggism 1688–94.” History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 195–236.
• ———. “The English System of Liberty.” In The Cambridge History ofEighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, 40–78. The Cambridge History of Political Thought series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Hayton, D. W. “The Personal and Political Contexts of Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark.”; In Northern Antiquities and National Identities: Perceptions of Denmark and the North in the Eighteenth Century, edited by K. Haakonssen and H. Horstboll, 41–67 (text) and 311–16 (notes). [Copenhagen]: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2008.
• Hotman, François. Francogallia. Edited by Ralph E. Giesey. Translated by J. M. H. Salmon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Kelley, Donald R. François Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Kenyon, J. P. Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Kidd, C. “Northern Antiquity: The Ethnology of Liberty in Eighteenth Century Europe.” In Northern Antiquities and National Identities: Perceptions of Denmark and the North in the Eighteenth Century, edited by K. Haakonssen and H. Horstboll, 19–40 (text) and 307–11 (notes). [Copenhagen]: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2008.
• Klaits, Joseph. Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion: Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
• Marshall, Peter. “Thomas Hollis (1720–74): The Bibliophile as Libertarian.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 66 (1984): 246–63.
• O’Kane, Finola. Landscape Design in Eighteenth Century Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2005.
• Olden-Jorgensen, S. “Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark: A Political Scandal and Its Literary Aftermath.” In Northern Antiquities and National Identities: Perceptions of Denmark and the North in the Eighteenth Century, edited by K. Haakonssen and H. Horstboll, 68–87. [Copenhagen]: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2008.
• Patterson, Annabel. Early Modern Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• ———. Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
• Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Reissued 1987.
• ———. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History,Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Pocock, J. G. A., ed. The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800. With the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Robbins, Caroline. “Library of Liberty: Assembled for Harvard College by Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn.” Harvard Library Bulletin 5 (1951): 5–23, 181–96.
• ———. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II Until the War with the Thirteen Colonies. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1959. Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
• ———. “The Strenuous Whig, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn.” William andMary Quarterly 7 (1950): 406–53.
• ———. “Thomas Brand Hollis, 1719–1804, English Admirer of Franklin and Intimate of John Adams.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97 (1953): 239–47.
• Rudolph, Julia. Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Salmon, J. H. M. The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
• Scott, Jonathan. Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Stewart, M. A. “John Smith and the Molesworth Circle.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr 2 (1987): 89–102.
• Worden, Blair. “Republicanism and the Restoration, 1660–1683.” In Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776, edited by David Wootton, 139–93. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
• ———. “The Revolution of 1688–1689 and the English Republican Tradition.” In The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, edited by Jonathan Israel, 241–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• ———. Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil War and the Passions of Posterity. London: Penguin, 2002.
• ———. “Whig History and Puritan Politics: The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Revisited.” Historical Research 75 (2002): 209–37.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to David Hayton, Blair Worden, and David Womersley for their direct help and advice in the preparation of this edition, both for pointing me toward items I certainly would have missed and for general and specific comment. I am also exceptionally grateful to Rachel Hammersley, who very generously allowed me to read a draft of her important monograph The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press, 2010), which explores in much more detail the broader influence of the English commonwealth tradition. Patrick Eyres offered wise advice and copies of key articles. My colleagues at Royal Holloway, Sandra Cavallo and Hannes Kleinicke, gave very helpful assistance with some of the Italian and Latin sources. Polly Bull assisted with a forensic eye in the preparation of the source texts and bibliographies.

An Account of Denmark

AN

ACCOUNT

OF

Denmark

AS

It was in the Year 1692.

Pauci prudentiâ, honesta ab deterioribus,

utilia ab noxiis discernunt;

plures aliorum eventis docentur.

Tacitus, lib. 4 Ann.1

Vincit amor patriae.

Virgil, Aeneid.2

The Third Edition Corrected.

london:

Printed for Timothy Goodwin, at

the Queen’s Head against St. Dunstan’s

Church in Fleetstreet. 1694.

[1. ]“Few men distinguish right and wrong, the expedient and the disastrous, by native intelligence; the majority are schooled by the experience of others.” Tacitus Annals, bk. 4, chap. 33 (Loeb 4:57).

[2. ]“The love of country will be victorious.” Virgil Aeneid 6, 823.