John Trenchard (writer)
John Trenchard (1662 – 17 December 1723) was an English writer and Commonwealthman. He is best known for writing a series of 144 essays with Thomas Gordon entitled Cato's Letters (1720–23), condemning corruption and lack of morality within the British political system and warning against tyranny.
Life
[edit]Trenchard belonged to the same Dorset family as the Secretary of State Sir John Trenchard.[1] He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and studied law in London.[1] He was married to Anne Blackett who after his death would marry Thomas Gordon.[2] He leant William III £60,000 in 1689.[1] From 1722 until his death Trenchard was also a member of Parliament for Taunton. He died on 17 December 1723.
Works
[edit]As he inherited considerable wealth, Trenchard was able to devote the greater part of his life to writing on political subjects,
In 1697 he started the Standing Army Controversy by writing with Walter Moyle An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government[3] and in 1698 A Short History of Standing Armies in England[3] which was reprinted in 1731.[4]
His approach was that of a Whig and an opponent of the High Church party.[4] He developed anticlerical lines of argument in The Natural History of Superstition (1709), and The Independent Whig, a weekly periodical published in 1720–21 with Thomas Gordon.[5]
Cato's Letters
[edit]With Thomas Gordon Trenchard wrote from 1720 to 1723 a series of 144 weekly essays entitled Cato's Letters, condemning corruption and lack of morality within the British political system and warning against tyranny. The essays were published as Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, first in the London Journal and then in the British Journal. These essays became a cornerstone of the Commonwealthmen tradition.
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ a b c Schwoerer 1965, p. 189.
- ^ Robbins 1959, p. 115.
- ^ a b Schwoerer 1965, p. 190.
- ^ a b One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Trenchard, Sir John s.v. John Trenchard". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 245.
- ^ The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 780
Further reading
[edit]- Harris, Jonathan (2000). "The Grecian coffee house and political debate in London, 1688–1714". The London Journal. 25: 1–13.
- Jacob, Margaret C. (1981). The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Robbins, Caroline (1959). 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 MA.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Schwoerer, Lois G. (1974). 'No Standing Armies!' The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Schwoerer, Lois G. (1965). "The Literature of the Standing Army Controversy". Huntington Library Quarterly. 28: 189–212.
- Tarantino, Giovanni (2012). Republicanism, Sinophilia, and Historical Writing Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his 'History of England. Brepols Publishers.
External links
[edit]
Works by or about John Trenchard at Wikisource- "John Trenchard at the Online Library of Liberty". Archived from the original on 4 June 2011. Retrieved 12 October 2025.
