The Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Webster’s Flamineo in The White Devil , or Shakespeare’s Iago, there is also an undercurrent of excitement at the thought that it might be possible to take life entirely into one’s hands, manipulate people and circumstances at will and generally pursue one’s selfish goals without a thought for moral codes or eternal damnation: in this sense the Machiavellian villain looks ahead to the worst of modern individualism.
    Then there was also, of course, the contrasting pleasure of seeing the clever schemer ‘hoist with his own petard’. As the years passed and the high tension of Jacobean tragedy relaxed into the comedies of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries, the evil Machiavel became a pathetic failure 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 character 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 unwelcome 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 convince 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 parliament or elections for fear the people might not see things God’s way.
    Meantime, across Europe, the princes and princesses of ancient noble families took to marrying and remarrying each other in an ever-thickening web of defensive alliances, as if density of blood and lineage might offer protection against the threat of usurpers or, worse still, republicanism and democracy. No family was more practised at this up-market dating game than the Medici, who, partly thanks to an extraordinary network of connections, would hang on in Florence in a client-state twilight lasting more than 200 undistinguished years. Meantime, from Paris to Madrid to Naples, the court clothes became finer, the statues and monuments more pompous and the whole royal charade more colourful and more solemn, as though people might somehow be dazzled into believing that a king or a duke really did have a right to rule. Many prestigious works of art were commissioned with precisely this idea in mind.
    But most of all Europe’s rulers worked hard to put a halo round their crowned heads, to appear religious and at all costs to uphold the Faith, sensing that this too would bolster their position and draw attention away from the mystery of their privileges. Later still, particularly after the French Revolution had destroyed any illusions about the rights of monarchs, the rather desperate card of ‘respectability’ was played. Members of court, Napoleon ordered, shortly after usurping power, must attend soirées with their wives , to appear respectable and avoid gossip. ‘The death of conversation’, Talleyrand opined. Certainly, when a leader has to rely on appearing respectable to claim legitimacy, he is on thin ice indeed.
    To this long-drawn-out conspiracy of pomp and pious circumstance, Machiavelli’s