Читать книгу Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIn the Middle Ages, the feudal monarchy of England was generally far more powerful than that of France. The Norman and Angevin dynasties created a royal State unrivalled in its authority and efficacy throughout Western Europe. It was precisely the strength of the English mediaeval monarchy that permitted its ambitious territorial adventures on the continent, at the expense of France. The Hundred Years’ War, during which successive English kings and their aristocracy attempted to conquer and hold down huge areas of France, across a hazardous maritime barrier, represented a unique military undertaking in the Middle Ages: aggressive sign of the organizational superiority of the insular State. Yet the strongest mediaeval monarchy in the West eventually produced the weakest and shortest Absolutism. While France became the home ground of the most formidable Absolutist State in Western Europe, England experienced a peculiarly contracted variant of Absolutist rule, in every sense. The transition from the mediaeval to the early modern epochs thus corresponded in English history – despite all local legends of unbroken ‘continuity’ – to a deep and radical reversal of many of the most characteristic traits of prior feudal development. Naturally, certain mediaeval patterns of great importance were also preserved and inherited: it was precisely the contradictory fusion of traditional and novel forces that defined the particular political rupture that occurred in the island during the Renaissance.
The early administrative centralization of Norman feudalism, dictated both by the original military conquest and the modest size of the country, had generated – as we have seen – an unusually small and regionally unified noble class, without semi-independent territorial potentates comparable to those of the Continent. Towns, following Anglo-Saxon traditions, were part of the royal demesne from the outset, and hence enjoyed commercial privileges without the political autonomy of continental communes: they were never numerous or strong enough in the mediaeval epoch to challenge this subordinate status.1 Nor did ecclesiastical lords ever gain large, consolidated seigneurial enclaves. The mediaeval monarchy in England was thus spared the respective dangers to unitary government that confronted feudal rulers in France, Italy or Germany. The result was a concurrent centralization, both of royal power, and of noble representation, within the total mediaeval polity. These two processes were, in fact, not opposites but complements. Within the parcellized system of feudal sovereignty, extra-suzerain monarchical power could in general only be sustained by the assent of exceptional vassal assemblies, capable of voting extraordinary economic and political support, outside the mediatized hierarchy of personal dependences. Mediaeval Estates can therefore virtually never, as pointed out earlier, be directly counter-posed to monarchical authority: they were often the precise precondition of it. In England, Angevin royal authority and administration had no exact equivalent anywhere in 12th century Europe. But the personal power of the monarch was soon by the same token followed by precocious collective institutions of the feudal ruling class, of a uniquely unitary character – Parliaments. The existence of such mediaeval parliaments in England from the 13th century onwards was, of course, in no way a national peculiarity. What was distinctive about them was rather that they were both ‘singleton’ and ‘conglomerate’ institutions.2 In other words, there was only one such assembly, which coincided with the boundaries of the country itself, not a number for different provinces; and within the assembly, there was no three-fold division of nobles, clergy and burghers such as generally prevailed on the Continent. From the time of Edward III onwards, knights and towns were regularly represented alongside barons and bishops in the English Parliament. The two-chamber system of Lords and Commons was a subsequent development, which did not divide Parliament itself along Estate lines, but basically marked an intra-class distinction within the nobility. A centralized monarchy had produced a unified assembly.
Two further consequences followed from the early centralization of the English feudal polity. The unitary Parliaments which met in London did not achieve the degree of meticulous fiscal control nor the rights of regular convocation which later characterized some of the continental Estates systems. But they did secure a traditional negative limitation of royal legislative power, which was to become of great importance in the epoch of Absolutism: it became accepted, after Edward I, that no monarch could decree new statutes without the consent of Parliament.3 Viewed structurally, this veto corresponded closely to the objective exigencies of noble class power. In effect, since centralized royal administration was from the start geographically and technically easier in England than elsewhere, there was proportionately less need for it to be equipped with any innovatory decretal authority, which could not be justified by inherent dangers of regional separatism or ducal anarchy. Thus while the real executive powers of English mediaeval kings were usually much greater than those of French monarchs, for that very reason, they never won the relative legislative autonomy eventually enjoyed by the latter. A second comparable feature of English feudalism was the unusual fusion between monarchy and nobility at the local judicial and administrative level. Whereas on the continent, the court system was typically divided between segregated royal and seigneurial jurisdictions, in England the survival of pre-feudal folk courts had provided a kind of common terrain on which a blend of the two could be achieved. For the sheriffs who presided over the shire-courts were non-hereditary royal appointees; yet they were selected from the local gentry, not from a central bureaucracy; while the courts themselves retained vestiges of their original character as popular juridical assemblies in which the free men of the rural community appeared before their equals. The result was to block the development either of a comprehensive bailli system of professionalized royal justice or of an extensive baronial haute justice; instead, an unpaid aristocratic self-administration emerged in the counties, which was later to evolve into the Justices of the Peace of the early modern epoch. In the mediaeval period itself, of course, the equipoise of the shire courts still coexisted with manorial courts and some seigneurial franchises of an orthodox feudal type, such as were to be found all over the Continent.
At the same time, the English nobility of the Middle Ages was fully as militarized and predatory a class as any in Europe: indeed it distinguished itself among its counterparts by the scope and constancy of its external aggression. No other feudal aristocracy of the later mediaeval epoch ranged so far and freely, as a whole order, from its territorial base. The repeated ravages of France during the Hundred Years War were the most spectacular feats of this militarism: but Scotland and Flanders, the Rhineland and Navarre, Portugal and Castile, were also traversed by armed expeditions from England in the 14th century. English knights fought abroad from the Forth to the Ebro in this age. The military organization of these expeditions reflected the local development of a monetarized ‘bastard’ feudalism. The last feudal array proper, summoned on the basis of land tenure, was called out in 1385, for Richard II’s attack on Scotland. The Hundred Years’ War was essentially fought by indentured companies, raised on the basis of cash contracts by major lords for the monarchy, and owing obedience to their own captains; shire levies and foreign mercenaries provided supplementary forces. No permanent or professional army was involved, and the scale of the expeditions was numerically modest: troops dispatched to France never numbered much more than 10,000. The nobles who led the successive forays into Valois territory remained basically freebooting in outlook. Private plunder, ransom and land were the objects of their ambition; and the most successful captains enriched themselves massively from the wars, in which English forces again and again outfought much larger French armies mustered to expel them. The strategic superiority of the English aggressors throughout most of the long conflict did not lie, as a retrospective illusion might suggest, in control of sea-power. For mediaeval fleets in Northern seas were little more than improvised troop-transports; mostly composed of temporarily empressed merchant bottoms, they were incapable of patrolling the ocean regularly. Fighting ships proper were still largely confined to the Mediterranean, where the oar-driven galley was the weapon of real maritime warfare. Running battles at sea were consequently unknown in Atlantic waters in this epoch: naval engagements typically occurred in shallow bays or estuaries (Sluys or La Rochelle), where contending ships could lock together for hand-to-hand combat between the soldiers aboard them. No strategic ‘command of the sea’ was possible in this epoch. The coasts on either side of the Channel thus lay equally undefended against seaborne landings. In 1386, France assembled the largest army and fleet of the entire war for a full-scale invasion of England: defence plans for the island did not even contemplate arresting this force at sea, but relied on keeping the English fleet out of harm’s way in the Thames and luring the enemy to conclusions inland.4 In the event this invasion was cancelled; but the vulnerability of England to maritime attack was amply demonstrated during the war, in which destructive naval raids played a role equivalent to military chevauchées on land. French and Castilian fleets, using Southern-type galleys with their much greater mobility, captured, sacked or burnt a redoubtable list of English ports, all the way from Devon to Essex: among other towns, Plymouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Lewes, Hastings, Winchelsea, Rye, Gravesend and Harwich were all seized or pillaged in the course of the conflict.
English dominance throughout most of the Hundred Years’ War, which dictated that the permanent battle-field – with all its train of damage and desolation – should be France, was thus not a result of seapower.5 It was a product of the far greater political integration and solidity of the English feudal monarchy, whose administrative capacity to exploit its patrimony and rally its nobility was until the very end of the war much greater than that of the French monarchy, harried by disloyal vassals in Brittany or Burgundy, and weakened by its earlier inability to dislodge the English fief in Guyenne. The loyalty of the English aristocracy, in its turn, was cemented by the successful external campaigns into which it was led by a series of martial princes. It was not until the French feudal polity was itself reorganized under Charles VII, on a new fiscal and military basis, that the tide turned. Their Bur-gundian allies gone, English forces were thereafter relatively soon evicted by larger and better equipped French armies. The acrid aftermath of the final collapse of English power in France was the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses at home. Once a victorious royal authority no longer held the higher nobility together, the late-mediaeval machinery of war turned inwards, as brutalized retainers and indentured gangs were unleashed across the countryside by magnate feuds, and rival usurpers clawed for the succession. A generation of civil war eventually ended with the foundation of the new Tudor dynasty in 1485, on the field of Bosworth.
The reign of Henry VII now gradually prepared the emergence of a ‘new monarchy’ in England. During the later Lancastrian regime, aristocratic factions had prominently developed and manipulated Parliaments for their own ends, whereas Yorkist rulers had striven amidst the prevailing anarchy to concentrate and strengthen the central institutions of royal power again. Himself a Lancastrian by connection, Henry VII essentially developed Yorkist administrative practice. Before the Wars of the Roses, Parliaments were virtually annual, and during the first decade of reconstruction after Bosworth they became so again. But once internal security improved and Tudor power was consolidated, Henry VII discarded the institution: from 1497 to 1509 – the last twelve years of his reign – it only assembled once again. Centralized royal government was exercised through a small coterie of personal advisers and henchmen of the monarch. Its primary objective was the subjugation of the rampant magnate power of the preceding period, with its liveried gangs of armed retainers, systematic embracery of juries, and constant private warfare. This programme was applied, however, with much greater persistence and success than in the Yorkist phase. Supreme prerogative justice was enforced over the nobility by the use of the Star Chamber, a conciliar court which now became the main political weapon of the monarchy against riot or sedition. Regional turbulence in the North and West (where marcher lords claimed rights of conquest, not enfeoffment by the monarch) was quelled by the special Councils delegated to control these areas in situ. Extended sanctuary rights and semi-regalian private franchises were whittled down; liveries were banned. Local administration was tightened up under royal control by vigilant selection and supervision of JPs; recidivist usurper rebellions were crushed. A small bodyguard was created in lieu of armed police.6 The royal demesne was greatly enlarged by resumption of lands, whose yield to the monarchy quadrupled during the reign; feudal incidents and customs duties were likewise maximally exploited. By the end of Henry VII’s rule, total royal revenues had nearly trebled, and there was a reserve of between one and two million pounds in treasure.7 The Tudor dynasty had thus made a promising start towards the construction of an English Absolutism by the turn of the 16th century. Henry VIII inherited a powerful executive and a prosperous exchequer.
The first twenty years of Henry VIII’s rule brought little change to the secure domestic position of the Tudor monarchy. Wolsey’s administration of the State was marked by no major institutional innovation; at most, the Cardinal concentrated unprecedented powers over the Church in his own person, as Papal legate in England. Both king and minister were mainly preoccupied with foreign affairs. The limited campaigns fought against France, in 1512–14 and 1522–, were the main events of this period; to cope with the costs of these military operations on the continent, two brief bouts of parliamentary convocation were necessary.8 An attempt at arbitrary taxation by Wolsey thereafter aroused sufficient propertied opposition for Henry VIII to disavow it. There was no sign yet of any dramatic development in the drift of royal policies within England. It was the marriage crisis of 1527–8, caused by the king’s decision to divorce his Spanish wife, and the ensuing deadlock with the Papacy over an issue that affected the domestic succession, that suddenly altered the whole political situation. For to deal with Papal obstruction – inspired by the dynastic hostility of the Emperor to the projected remarriage – new and radical legislation was needed, and national political support had to be rallied against Clement VII and Charles V.
Thus in 1529, Henry summoned what became the longest Parliament yet to be held, to mobilize the landed class behind him in his dispute with the Papacy and the Empire, and to secure its endorsement of the political seizure of the Church by the State in England. This revival of a neglected institution was, however, far from a constitutional capitulation by Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell, who became his political planner in 1531: it did not signify a weakening of royal power, but rather a new drive to enhance it. For the Reformation Parliaments not only greatly increased the patronage and authority of the monarchy by transferring control of the whole ecclesiastical apparatus of the Church to it. Under Cromwell’s guidance, they also suppressed the autonomy of seigneurial franchises by depriving them of the power to designate JPs, integrated the marcher lordships into the shires, and incorporated Wales legally and administratively into the Kingdom of England. More significantly still, monasteries were dissolved and their vast landed wealth expropriated by the State. In 1536, the government’s combination of political centralization and religious reformation provoked a potentially dangerous rising in the North, the Pilgrimage of Grace, a particularist regional reaction against a reinforced royal State, of a type that was characteristic of Western Europe in this epoch.9 It was rapidly broken, and a new and permanent Council of the North established to hold down the lands beyond the Trent. Meanwhile, the central bureaucracy was enlarged and reorganized by Cromwell, who converted the office of royal secretary into the highest ministerial post and created the beginnings of a regular privy council.10 Soon after his fall, the Privy Council was formally institutionalized as the inner executive agency of the monarchy, and henceforward became the hub of the Tudor State machine. A Statute of Proclamations, apparently designed to confer extraordinary legislative powers on the monarchy, emancipating it from reliance on Parliament in the future, was eventually neutralized by the Commons.11 This rebuff did not, of course, prevent Henry VIII from conducting sanguinary purges of ministers and magnates or creating a secret police system of delation and summary arrest. The State apparatus of repression was steadily increased throughout the reign: nine separate treason laws had been passed by the end of it.12 Henry VIII’s use of Parliament, from which he expected and received few inconveniences, was confidently legalistic in approach: it was a necessary means to his own royal ends. Within the inherited framework of the English feudal polity, which had conferred singular powers on Parliament, a national Absolutism was in the making that in practice seemed to bear comparison with that of any of its continental counterparts. Throughout his life, Henry VIII’s actual personal power within his realm was fully the equal of that of his contemporary Francis I in France.
Nevertheless, the new Tudor monarchy operated within one fundamental limitation, which set it apart from its equivalents abroad: it lacked a substantial military apparatus. To understand why English Absolutism took the peculiar form that it assumed in the 16th and early 17th centuries, it is necessary to look beyond the indigenous heritage of a law-making Parliament to the whole international context of Renaissance Europe. For while the Tudor State was being successfully constructed at home, the geopolitical position of England abroad had swiftly and silently undergone a drastic change. In the Lancastrian epoch, English external power could match or overtop that of any other country in the continent, because of the advanced nature of the feudal monarchy in England. But by the early 16th century, the balance of forces between the major Western States had totally altered. Spain and France – each victims of English invasion in the previous epoch – were now dynamic and aggressive monarchies, disputing the conquest of Italy between them. England had been suddenly outdistanced by both. All three monarchies had achieved an approximately comparable internal consolidation: but it was just this evening-up which permitted the natural advantages of the two great continental powers of the epoch to become for the first time decisive. The population of France was four to five times that of England. Spain had twice the population of England, not to speak of its American Empire and European possessions. This demographic and economic superiority was heightened by the geographical necessity for both countries to develop modernized land armies on a permanent basis, for the perpetual warfare of the time. The creation of the compagnies d’ordonnance and the tercios, the utilization of mercenary infantry and field artillery, all led to a new type of royal military apparatus – far larger and more costly than anything known in the mediaeval period. The build-up of their troop-strengths was an indispensable condition of survival for the Renaissance monarchies on the mainland. The Tudor State was subtracted from this imperative, because of its insular situation. On the one hand, the steady growth in the size and expense of armies in the early modern epoch, and the transport problems of ferrying and supplying large numbers of soldiers across the water, rendered the mediaeval type of overseas expedition in which England had once excelled, increasingly anachronistic. The military preponderance of the new land powers, based on their much greater financial and manpower resources, precluded any successful repetition of the campaigns of Edward III or Henry V. On the other hand, this continental ascendancy was not translated into any equivalent strike-capacity at sea: no major transformation of naval warfare had yet occurred, so that England conversely remained relatively immune from the risk of a maritime invasion. The result was that at the critical juncture of the transition towards a ‘new monarchy’ in England, it was neither necessary nor possible for the Tudor State to build up a military machine comparable to that of French or Spanish Absolutism.
Subjectively, however, Henry VIII and his generation within the English nobility were still incapable of grasping the new international situation. The martial pride and continental ambitions of their late-mediaeval predecessors remained a living memory within the English ruling class of the time. The ultra-cautious Henry VII himself had revived Lancastrian claims to the French monarchy, fought to block the Valois absorption of Brittany, and actively schemed to gain the succession in Castile. Wolsey, who directed English foreign policy for the next twenty years, posed as arbiter of European concord with the Treaty of London, and aimed for nothing less than the Italian Papacy itself. Henry VIII, in turn, entertained hopes of becoming Emperor in Germany. These grandiose aspirations have been dismissed as irrational fantasms by subsequent historians: in fact, they reflected the perceptual difficulty of English rulers to adapt themselves to the new diplomatic configuration, in which the stature of England had in real terms so much diminished, just at a time when their own domestic power was sensibly increasing. Indeed, it was precisely this loss of international standing – unseen by native protagonists – which lay behind the whole miscalculation of the royal divorce. Neither Cardinal nor King realized that the Papacy was virtually bound to submit to the superior pressure of Charles V, because of the dominance of Habsburg power in Europe. England had been marginalized by the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy: an impotent onlooker, its interests had little weight in the Curia. The surprise of the discovery was to propel the Defender of the Faith into the Reformation. The misadventures of Henry VIII’s foreign policy, however, were not confined to this calamitous diplomatic setback. On three occasions, the Tudor monarchy did attempt to intervene in the Valois-Habsburg wars in Northern France, by an expedition across the Channel. The armies dispatched in these campaigns of 1512–14, 1522–5, and 1543–6, were necessarily of considerable size, composed of English levies bulked up with foreign mercenaries: 30,000 in 1512, 40,000 in 1544. Their deployment lacked any serious strategic objective, and yielded no significant gains: English departure from the sidelines of the struggle between Spain and France proved both expensive and futile. Yet these ‘aimless’ wars of Henry VIII, whose absence of any coherent purpose has so often been remarked, were not a mere product of personal caprice: they corresponded precisely to a curious historical intermission, when the English monarchy had lost its old military importance in Europe but had not yet found the future maritime role awaiting it.
Nor were they without fundamental results in England itself. Henry VIII’s last major act, his alliance with the Empire and attack on France in 1543, was to have fateful consequences for the whole ulterior destiny of the English monarchy. Military intervention on the continent was misconducted; its costs escalated greatly, eventually totalling some ten times those of the first French war of his reign; to cover them, the State not only resorted to forced loans and debasement of the coinage, but also started to unload on the market the huge fund of agrarian property it had just acquired from the monasteries – amounting to perhaps a quarter of the land of the realm. The sale of Church estates by the monarchy multiplied as war dragged on towards Henry’s death. By the time peace was finally restored, the great bulk of this vast windfall was lost;13 and with it, the one great chance of English Absolutism to build up a firm economic base independent of parliamentary taxation. This transfer of assets not only weakened the State in the long-run: it also greatly strengthened the gentry who formed the main purchasers of these lands, and whose numbers and wealth henceforward steadily grew. One of the drabbest and most inconsequential foreign wars in English history thus had momentous, if still hidden consequences on the domestic balance of forces within English society.
The dual facets of this final episode of Henrician rule, indeed, presaged much of the evolution of the English landowning class as a whole. For the military conflict of the 1540’s was in practice the last aggressive war fought by England on the continent for the rest of the century. The illusions of Crécy and Agincourt died away. But the gradual disappearance of its traditional vocation profoundly altered the cast of the English nobility. The absence of the constraining pressure of constant potential invasion allowed the English aristocracy to dispense with a modernized apparatus of war in the epoch of the Renaissance; it was not directly endangered by rival feudal classes abroad, and it was reluctant – like any nobility at a comparable stage of its evolution – to submit to the massive build-up of royal power at home that was the logical consequence of a large standing army. In the isolationist context of the island kingdom, therefore, there was an exceptionally early demilitarization of the noble class itself. In 1500, every English peer bore arms; by Elizabeth’s time, it has been calculated, only half the aristocracy had any fighting experience.14 On the eve of the Civil War in the 17th century, very few nobles had any military background at all. There was a progressive dissociation of the nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the mediaeval social order, much earlier than anywhere else on the continent; and this necessarily had important repercussions on the landowning class itself. In the peculiar maritime context, derogation proper – always linked to an intense feeling for the virtues of the sword, and codified against the temptations of the purse – never appeared. This in turn allowed a gradual conversion of the aristocracy to commercial activities long before any comparable rural class in Europe. The prevalence of wool-farming, which had been the growth sector in agriculture in the 15th century, naturally accelerated this drift greatly, while the rural cloth industry which was contiguous with it provided natural outlets for gentry investment. The economic path which led from the metamorphoses of feudal rent in the 14th and 15th centuries to the emergence of an expanding rural capitalist sector in the 17th century was thus laid open. Once it was taken, the legally separate character of the English nobility became virtually impossible to sustain.
During the later Middle Ages, England had experienced – in common with most other countries – a marked trend towards a formalized stratification of ranks within the aristocracy, with the introduction of new titles, after the original feudal hierarchy of vassals and liege-lords had been eroded by the onset of monetarized social relations and the dissolution of the classical fief system. Everywhere, new and more abundant tables of rank were felt necessary by the nobility, once personal dependences had generally declined. In England, the 14th and 15th centuries had seen the adoption of a series of novel grades – dukes, marquesses, barons and viscounts – within the nobility, which, with devices to ensure primogeniture of inheritance, for the first time separated out a distinct ‘peerage’ from the rest of the class.15 This stratum henceforward always comprised the most powerful and opulent group within the aristocracy. At the same time, a College of Heralds was formed which gave legal definition to the gentry by confining it to armigerous families, and setting up procedures for investigating claims to this status. A tighter, two-tiered aristocratic order, legally demarcated from roturiers below it, thus might well have developed in England, as it did elsewhere. But the increasingly non-military and proto-commercial bent of the whole nobility – stimulated by the land sales and agrarian boom of the Tudor epoch – rendered the concomitant of a derogation bar impossible.16 The result was to render the strict armigerous criterion itself largely inoperative. Hence the peculiarity emerged whereby the social aristocracy in England did not coincide with the patented peerage, which was the only section of it with legal privileges, and untitled gentry and younger sons of peers could dominate a so-called House of Commons. The idiosyncrasies of the English landowning class in the epoch of Absolutism were thus to be historically interlocked: it was unusually civilian in background, commercial in occupation and commoner in rank. The correlate of this class was a State that had a small bureaucracy, a limited fiscality, and no permanent army. The inherent tendency of the Tudor monarchy was, as we have seen, strikingly homologous to that of its continental opposites (down to the personality parallels, often noted between Henry VII-Louis XI-Ferdinand II and Henry VIII-Francis I-Maximilian I): but the limits of its development were set by the character of the nobility that surrounded it.
The immediate legacy of Henry VIII’s last incursion into France, meanwhile, was sharp popular distress in the countryside as monetary depreciation and fiscal pressures led to rural insecurity and a temporary commercial depression. The minority of Edward VI thus witnessed a swift regression in the political stability and authority of the Tudor State, with a predictable jockeying between the largest territorial lords for control of the court, in a decade punctuated by peasant unrest and religious crises. Rural risings in East Anglia and the South-West were crushed with hired Italian and German mercenaries.17 But soon afterwards, in 1551, these professional troops were disbanded to relieve the exchequer: the last serious agrarian explosion for nearly three hundred years had been suppressed by the last major force of alien soldiery to be at the domestic disposal of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the rivalry between the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, with their respective patronage of lesser nobles, functionaries and men at arms, led to muffled coups and counter-coups in the Privy Council, amidst religious tension and dynastic uncertainty. The whole unity of the Tudor State apparatus seemed temporarily threatened. However, the danger of a real disintegration was not only cut short by the death of the young sovereign; it was unlikely ever to have developed into a full-blown facsimile of the aristocratic conflicts in France, because of the lack of client troops at the disposal of the contending magnates. The upshot of the interlude of rule by Somerset and Northumberland was merely to radicalize the local Reformation and fortify monarchical dignity against the greater nobles. The brief passage of Mary, with its dynastic subordination to Spain and ephemeral Catholic restoration, left little political trace. The last English toe-hold on the continent was lost with the French reconquest of Calais.
The long reign of Elizabeth in the latter half of the century thereafter largely restored and developed the domestic status quo ante, without any radical innovations. The religious pendulum swung back to a moderate Protestantism, with the establishment of a domesticated Anglican Church. Ideologically, royal authority was greatly enhanced, as the personal popularity of the queen rose to new heights. Institutionally, however, there was comparatively little development. The Privy Council was concentrated and stabilized under the long and steady secretaryship of Burghley in the first part of the reign. The espionage and police networks – mainly concerned with suppression of Catholic activity – were extended by Walsingham. Legislative activity was very reduced by comparison with Henry VIII’s reign.18 Factional rivalries within the higher nobility now mainly took the form of corridor intrigues for honours and offices at court. The final, guttering attempt at an armed magnate putsch – the rebellion at the end of the reign by Essex, the English Guise – was easily put down. On the other hand, the political influence and prosperity of the gentry – whom the Tudors had initially sponsored as a counter-weight to the peerage – was now an increasingly evident stumbling-block to the royal prerogative. Summoned thirteen times in forty-five years, largely because of external emergencies, Parliament now started to evince independent criticism of government policies. Over the century, the House of Commons grew greatly in size, from some 300 to 460 members, of whom the proportion of country gentlemen steadily increased, as borough seats were captured by rural squires or their patrons.19 The moral dilapidation of the Church, after the secular dominance and doctrinal zigzags of the previous fifty years, permitted the gradual spread of an oppositional Puritanism among considerable sections of this class. The last years of Tudor rule were thus marked by a new recalcitrance and restiveness in Parliament, whose religious importunity and fiscal obstruction led Elizabeth to further sales of royal lands to minimize reliance on it. The coercive and bureaucratic machinery of the monarchy remained very slim, compared with its political prestige and executive authority. Above all, it had lacked the forcing-house of warfare on land which had speeded the development of Absolutism on the Continent.
The impact of Renaissance war, of course, by no means passed Elizabethan England by. Henry VIII’s armies had remained hybrid and improvised in character, archaic aristocratic levies raised at home mingled with Flemish, Burgundian, Italian and ‘Allmayne’ mercenaries hired abroad.20 The Elizabethan State, now confronted with real and constant foreign dangers in the epoch of Alva and Farnese, resorted to illegal stretching of the traditional militia system in England to assemble adequate forces for its overseas expeditions. Technically supposed to serve only as a home guard, some 12,000 or so were given special training and mostly kept for defense within the country. The remainder – often rounded up from the vagabond population – were empressed for use abroad. The development of this system did not produce a permanent or professional army, but it did provide regular troop-flows, on a modest scale, for the numerous foreign commitments of the Elizabethan government. The lords-lieutenant of the shires acquired greater importance as recruiting authorities; regimental organization was slowly introduced, and fire-arms overcame native attachment to the long-bow.21 The militia contingents themselves were typically combined with mercenary soldiers, Scots or Germans. No army sent to the continent ever numbered more than 20,000 – half the size of the last Henrician expedition; and most were considerably smaller. The performance of these corps, in the Netherlands or Normandy, was a generally bedraggled one. Their cost was disproportionately high in relation to their utility, discouraging any further evolution in the same direction.22 The military inferiority of English Absolutism continued to preclude any expansionist goals on the mainland. Elizabethan foreign policy was thus largely confined to negative aims: prevention of Spanish reconquest of the United Provinces, prevention of French installation in the Low Countries, prevention of the victory of the League in France. In the event, these limited objectives were attained, although the role of English armies in the outcome of the tangled European conflicts of the period was very secondary. The decisive victory of England in the war with Spain lay elsewhere, in the defeat of the Armada: but it could not be capitalized on land. The lack of any positive continental strategy inevitably resulted in the wasteful and pointless diversions of the last decade of the century. The long Spanish war after 1588, which cost the English monarchy dearly in domestic wealth, ended without acquisitions of territory or treasure.
English Absolutism nevertheless achieved one major military conquest in this period. Elizabethan expansionism, incapable of frontal advance against the leading monarchies of the mainland, threw its largest armies against the poor and primitive clan society of Ireland. This Celtic island had remained the most archaic social formation in the West down to the end of the 16th century, perhaps in the whole continent. The last of the children of Europe’,23 in Bacon’s phrase, had lain outside the Roman world; had not been touched by the Germanic conquests; had been visited but not subdued by the Viking invasions. Christianized in the 6th century, its rudimentary clan system uniquely survived religious conversion without political centralization: the Church rather adapted to the local social order in this distant outpost of the faith, abandoning episcopal authority for communal monastic organization. Hereditary chiefs and optimates ruled over free peasants, grouped in extended kin units, and bound to them by ties of commendation. Pastoralism dominated the countryside. There was no central monarchy, and towns were non-existent, although a literary culture flourished during the 7th to 9th centuries – the nadir of the Dark Ages elsewhere – in the monastic communities. Repeated Scandinavian attacks during the 9th and 10th centuries disrupted both cultural life and clan localism in the island. Norse enclaves created the first towns in Ireland; under foreign pressure, a central royal authority eventually emerged in the interior to expel the Viking danger in the early 11th century. This precarious Irish high-kingship soon collapsed again into warring federations, incapable of resisting a more advanced invasion. In the later 12th century, the Angevin monarchy in England acquired the ‘lordship’ of Ireland from the Papacy, and Anglo-Norman baronial forces crossed over to subjugate and colonize the island. English feudalism, with its heavy cavalry and strong castles, gradually established formal control of most of the country, with the exception of the far North, over the next hundred years. But the density of Anglo-Norman settlement was never enough to stabilize its military success. In the later mediaeval period, while the energies of the English monarchy and nobility were overwhelmingly engaged in France, Irish clan society steadily recovered ground. The perimeter of English authority shrank to the small Pale round Dublin, beyond which lay the scattered ‘liberties’ of territorial magnates of Anglo-Norman origin, now increasingly Gaelicized, surrounded in turn by the renascent Celtic chieftainries, whose zones of control covered most of the island again.24 The advent of the renovated Tudor State, at the turn of the early modern epoch, brought the first serious efforts to reassert and enforce English suzerainty over Ireland for a century. Henry VII dispatched his aid Poynings to break the autonomy of the local baronial Parliament in 1494–6. The potentate Kildare dynasty, closely intermarried with leading Gaelic families, nevertheless continued to wield predominant feudal power, accoutred with the dignity of Lord Deputy. Under Henry VIII, Cromwell’s administration started to introduce more regular bureaucratic instruments of rule into the Pale: in 1534 Kildare was deposed, and a rebellion by his son crushed. In 1540, Henry VIII – having repudiated the Papacy, which had originally vested the English monarchy with the lordship of Ireland as a fief of Rome – assumed the new title of King of Ireland. In practice, however, most of the island remained outside any Tudor control – dominated either by ‘Old Irish’ chiefs or ‘Old English’ lords related to them, both faithful to Catholicism while England-underwent the Reformation. Only two counties had been formed outside the Pale down to the time of Elizabeth. Fierce rebellions thereafter exploded – in 1559–66 (Ulster), in 1569–72 (Munster), and 1579–83 (Leinster and Munster), as the monarchy tried to impose its authority and install ‘New English’ plantations of Protestant colonists to re-settle the country. Finally, during the long war between England and Spain, an island-wide insurrection against Tudor oppression was launched in 1595 by the Ulster clan leader O’Neill, appealing to the Papacy and Spain for aid. Determined to achieve a conclusive settlement of the Irish problem, the Elizabethan regime mobilized the largest armies of the reign to reoccupy the island, and Anglicize the country once and for all. The guerrilla tactics adopted by the Irish were met by policies of ruthless extermination.25 The war lasted nine years before all resistance was pulverized by the English commander Mountjoy. By Elizabeth’s death, Ireland was militarily annexed.
This signal operation, however, remained a solitary triumph of Tudor arms on land: won with the greatest exertions against a pre-feudal enemy, it was not repeatable in any other arena. The decisive strategic development of the time for the whole character of the English landed class and its State lay elsewhere – in the slow switch towards naval equipment and expansion in the 16th century. Towards 1500, the traditional Mediterranean division between the ‘long’ oar-powered galley built for war and the ‘round’ sail-driven cog used for trade, started to be superseded in Northern waters by the construction of large war-ships equipped with fire-arms.26 In the new type of fighting vessels, sails were substituted for oars, and soldiers started to give way to guns. Henry VII, creating the first English dry-dock at Portsmouth in 1496, built two of these ships. It was Henry VIII, however, who was responsible for ‘a sustained and unprecedented’ expansion of English naval power;27 he added 24 warships to the navy by purchase or construction in the first five years after his accession, quadrupling it in size. By the end of his reign, the English monarchy possessed 53 ships and a permanent Navy Board, created in 1546. The huge carracks of this phase, with their top-heavy castles and newly installed artillery, were still clumsy instruments. Sea battles continued to be essentially grappling-matches between troops on water; and in Henry VIII’s final war, French galleys still held the initiative, attacking up the Solent. A new dock was built at Chatham during the reign of Edward VI, but there was otherwise a sharp decrease in Tudor maritime strength in the succeeding decades, when Spanish and Portuguese naval design moved ahead of English with the invention of the faster galleon. But from 1579 onwards, Hawkins’s tenure at the Navy Board saw a rapid expansion and modernization of the royal fleet: low-slung galleons were equipped with long-range cannon, making them into highly manoeuvrable gun-platforms, designed to sink enemy craft from maximum distance in a running battle. The onset of a seaborne war with Spain, long rehearsed by English piracy on the Main, demonstrated the technical superiority of these new ships. ‘By 1588 Elizabeth I was mistress of the most powerful navy Europe had ever seen.’28 The Armada was outshot by English demi-culverines, and scattered into the storm and mist. Insular security was assured, and the foundations of an imperial future laid.
The ultimate results of the new marine mastery won by England were to be two-fold. The substitution of naval for terrestrial warfare tended to specialize and segregate the practice of military violence, safely extruding it overseas. (The ships which carried it were, of course, floating prisons in which press-ganged labour was exploited with notorious cruelty.) At the same time, the naval focus of the ruling class was preeminently conducive to a commercial orientation. For while the Army always remained a single-purpose institution, the Navy was by its nature a dual instrument, bracketed not only on war, but on trade.29 In fact, the bulk of the English fleets throughout the 16th century still remained merchant ships temporarily converted for battle by the addition of cannon, and capable of reverting to commerce afterwards. The State naturally promoted this adaptability by premia for merchant design that conformed to it. The Navy was thus to become not only the ‘senior’ instrument of the coercive apparatus of the English State, but an ‘ambidextrous’ one, with profound consequences for the nature of the governing class.30 For although higher per unit,31 the total costs of naval construction and maintenance were far below those of a standing army: in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, the ratio of expenditure was 1:3 on them. Yet the yields throughout the next centuries were to be far higher: the British colonial empire was to be the sum of them. The full harvest of this navalism was yet to be seen. But it was in large measure because of it that already by the 16th century, the landowning class could develop not in antagonism, but in unison, with mercantile capital in the ports and shires.
The extinction of the Tudor line in 1603, and the advent of the Stuart dynasty, created a fundamentally new political situation for the monarchy. For with the accession of James I, Scotland was for the first time joined in a personal union with England. Two radically distinct polities were now combined under the same ruling house. The Scottish impact on the pattern of English development appeared initially very slight, precisely because of the historical distance between the social formations; but in the long-run it was to prove critical for the fortunes of English Absolutism. Scotland, like Ireland, had remained a Celtic fastness beyond the bounds of Roman control. Receiving an admixture of Irish, Germanic and Scandinavian immigration in the Dark Ages, its variegated clannic map was subjected to a central royal authority, with jurisdiction over the whole country except for the North-West, in the 11th century. In the High Middle Ages the impingement of Anglo-Norman feudalism here too recast the shape of the indigenous political and social system: but whereas in Ireland, it took the form of a precarious military conquest that was soon awash with a Celtic reflux, in Scotland the native Canmore dynasty itself imported English settlers and institutions, promoting intermarriage with the nobility to the South and emulating the structures of the more advanced kingdom on the other side of the Border, with its castles, sheriffs, chamberlains and justiciars. The result was a much deeper and more thorough feudalization of Scottish society. Self-imposed ‘Normalization’ eliminated the old ethnic divisions of the country, and created a new line of linguistic and social demarcation between the Lowlands, where English speech came to stay, together with manors and fiefs, and the Highlands, where Gaelic remained the language of a backward clan pastoralism. Unlike the situation in Ireland, the purely Celtic sector was permanently reduced to a minority, confined to the North-West. During the later mediaeval period, the Scottish monarchy in general failed to consolidate royal discipline over its dominions. Mutual contamination between Lowland and Highland political patterns led to a semi-seigneurialization of Celtic clan leadership in the mountains, and clan infection of Scottish feudal organization on the plains.32 Above all, constant frontier warfare with England repeatedly battered the royal State. In the anarchic conditions of the 14th and 15th centuries, amidst ceaseless border turmoil, barons seized hereditary control of sheriffdoms and set up private jurisdictions, magnates wrested provincial ‘regalities’ from the monarchy, and vassal kin-networks proliferated under both.
The successor Stuart dynasty, dogged by unstable minority and regency governments, was unable to make much headway against the endemic disorder of the country in the next hundred and fifty years, while Scotland became increasingly tied to diplomatic alliance with France, as a shield against English pressure. In the mid 16th century, outright French domination through a Guise regency provoked an aristocratic and popular xenophobia that provided much of the driving-power for the local Reformation: towns, lairds and nobles revolted against the French administration, whose lines of communication to the continent were cut by the English navy in 1560, ensuring the success of Scottish Protestantism. But the religious change, which henceforward set Scotland off from Ireland, did little to alter the political complexion of the country. The Gaelic Highlands, which alone remained loyal to Catholicism, became even wilder and more turbulent in the course of the century. While glass-paned country mansions were the new feature of Tudor landscape to the South, massively fortified castles continued to be constructed in the Border country and the Lowlands. Private armed feuds remained rife throughout the kingdom. It was not until the assumption of power by James VI himself, from 1587 onwards, that the Scottish monarchy seriously improved its position. James VI, employing a mixture of conciliation and coercion, developed a strong Privy Council, patronized and played off the great magnates against each other, created new peerages, gradually introduced bishops into the Church, increased the representation of smaller barons and burghs in the local Parliament, subordinated the latter by the creation of a closed steering committee (the ‘Lords of Articles’), and pacified the border.33 By the turn of the 17th century, Scotland was apparently a recomposed land. Its socio-political structure nevertheless remained in notable contrast to that of contemporary England. Population was thin – some 750,000; towns very few and small, ridden by pastors. The largest noble houses comprised territorial potentates of a type unknown in England – Hamilton, Huntly, Argyll, Angus – controlling huge areas of the country, with full regalian powers, military retinues, and dependent tenantries. Seigneurial lordships were widespread among the lesser baronage; justices of the peace cautiously sent out by the king had been nullified. The numerous class of small lairds was habituated to petty armed disputes. The depressed peasantry, released from serfdom in the 14th century, had never staged a major rebellion. Economically poor and culturally isolated, Scottish society was still heavily mediaeval in character; the Scottish State was little more secure than the English monarchy after Bosworth.
The Stuart dynasty, transplanted to England, nevertheless pursued the ideals of Absolutist royalty that were now the standard norms of courts all over Western Europe. James I, inured to a country where territorial magnates were a law to themselves and parliament was of little account, now found a realm where grandee militarism had been broken and failed to see that parliament, on the other hand, represented the central locus of noble power. The much more developed character of English society thus for a time made it appear delusively easier for him to rule. The Jacobean regime, contemptuous and uncomprehending of Parliament, made no attempt to assuage the growing oppositional temper of the English gentry. An extravagant court was combined with an immobilist foreign policy, based on rapprochement with Spain: both equally unpopular with the bulk of the landowning class. Divine Right doctrines of monarchy were matched by High Church ritualism in religion. Prerogative justice was used against common law, sale of monopolies and offices against parliamentary refusal of taxation. The unwelcome trend of royal government in England, however, did not encounter similar resistance in Scotland or Ireland, where the local aristocracies were coaxed with calculating patronage by the King, and Ulster was colonized by a mass plantation from the Lowlands to ensure Protestant ascendancy. But by the end of the reign, the political position of the Stuart monarchy was dangerously isolated in its central kingdom. For the underlying social structure of England was sliding away from beneath it, as it sought to pursue institutional goals that were nearly everywhere being successfully accomplished on the Continent.
In the century after the dissolution of the monasteries, while the population of England doubled, the size of the nobility and gentry had trebled, and their share of national wealth increased more than proportionately, with a particularly notable climb in the early 17th century, when rent-rises overtook price increases, benefiting the whole landowning class: the net income of the gentry perhaps quadrupled in the century after 1530.34 The triadic system of landlord, farmer and agricultural labourer – future archetype of the English countryside – was already emergent in the richer parts of rural England. At the same time, an unprecedented concentration of trade and manufactures had occurred in London, some seven to eight times larger in the reign of Charles I than that of Henry VIII, making it the most dominant capital city of any country in Europe by the 1630’s. By the end of the century, England would already form something like a single internal market.35 Agrarian and mercantile capitalism had thus registered more rapid advances than in any other nation except the Netherlands, and major swathes of the English aristocracy itself – peerage and gentry – had successfully adapted to it. The political refortification of a feudal State thus no longer corresponded to the social character of much of the class on which it would inevitably have to rest. Nor was there a compelling social danger from below to tighten the links between the monarchy and the gentry. Because there was no need for a large permanent army, the tax-level in England had remained remarkably low: perhaps a third to a quarter of that in France in the early 17th century.36 Little of this fell on the rural masses, while the parish poor received a prudential charity from public funds. The result was a relative social peace in the countryside, after the agrarian unrest in the mid 16th century. The peasantry, moreover, was not only subject to a much lighter tax burden than elsewhere, but was more internally differentiated. With the gathering commercial impetus in the countryside, this stratification in turn made possible and profitable a virtual abandonment of demesne cultivation for leasing of land by the aristocracy and gentry. The result was the consolidation of a relatively well-off kulak stratum (yeomanry) and a large number of rural wage-labourers, side by side with the general peasant mass. The situation in the villages was thus a reasonably secure one for the nobility, which did not have to fear rural insurrections any longer, and therefore had no stake in a strong central coercive machine at the disposal of the State. At the same time, the low tax-level which contributed to this agrarian calm checked the emergence of any large bureaucracy erected to man the fiscal system. Since the aristocracy had assumed local administrative functions since the Middle Ages, the monarchy was always deprived of any professional regional apparatus. The Stuart drive for a developed Absolutism was thus very handicapped from the start.
In 1625, Charles I conscientiously, if in general ineptly, took up the work of constructing a more advanced Absolutism with the unpromising materials available. The variant auras of successive court administrations did not help the monarchy: the peculiar combination of Jacobean corruption and Caroline censoriousness – from Buckingham to Laud – proved especially jarring to many of the gentry.37 The vagaries of its foreign policy also weakened it at the outset of the reign: English failure to intervene in the Thirty Years’ War was compounded by an unnecessary and unsuccessful war with France, the confused inspiration of Buckingham. Once this episode was terminated, however, the general direction of dynastic policy became relatively coherent. Parliament, which had vigorously denounced the conduct of the war and the minister responsible for it, was dissolved indefinitely. In the succeeding decade of ‘personal rule’, the monarchy tended to draw closer to the higher nobility once again, reinvigorating the formal hierarchy of birth and rank within the aristocracy by conferring privileges on the peerage, now that the risk of magnate militarism in England was past. In the cities, monopolies and benefits were reserved for the topmost stratum of urban merchants, who formed the traditional municipal patriciates. The bulk of the gentry and the newer mercantile interests were excluded from the royal concert. The same preoccupations were evident in the episcopal reorganization of the Church effected under Charles I, which restored the discipline and morale of the clergy, at the cost of widening the religious distance between local ministers and squires. The successes of Stuart Absolutism, however, were largely confined to the ideological/clerical apparatus of the State, which under both James I and Charles I began to inculcate divine right and hieratic ritual. But the economic/bureaucratic apparatus remained subject to acute fiscal cramp. Parliament controlled the right to taxation proper, and from the earliest years of James I resisted every effort to bypass it. In Scotland, the dynasty could increase taxes virtually at will, especially on the towns, since there was no strong tradition of bargaining over grants in the Estates. In Ireland, Strafford’s draconian administration reclaimed lands and revenues from the carpetbagger gentry who had moved in after the Elizabethan conquest, and made the island for the first time a profitable source of income for the State.38 But in England itself, where the central problem lay, no such remedies were feasible. Hampered by earlier Tudor profligacy with royal estates, Charles I resorted to every possible feudal and neo-feudal device in the quest for tax-revenues capable of sustaining an enlarged State machine beyond Parliamentary control-revival of wardship, fines for knighthood, use of purveyance, multiplication of monopolies, inflation of honours. It was in these years, especially, that sale of offices for the first time became a major source of royal income – 30–40 per cent – and simultaneously remuneration of office-holders a major share of State expenditure.39 All these devices proved inadequate: their profusion only antagonized the landowning class, much of it gripped by Puritan aversion to the new court and church alike. Significantly, Charles I’s final bid to create a serious fiscal base was an attempt to extend the one traditional defense tax which existed in England: the payment of ship money by ports for the maintenance of the Navy. Within a few years, it was sabotaged by the refusal of unpaid local JPs to operate it.
The selection of this scheme, and its fate, revealed en creux the elements which were missing for an English version of Versailles. Continental Absolutism was built on its armies. By a strange irony, insular Absolutism could only exist on its meagre revenues so long as it did not have to raise any army. For Parliament alone could provide the resources for one, and once summoned was soon certain to start dismantling Stuart authority. Yet for the same historical reasons, the rising political revolt against the monarchy in England possessed no ready instruments for an armed insurrection against it; gentry opposition even lacked any focus for a constitutional assault on the personal rule of the king, so long as there was no convocation of Parliament. The deadlock between the two antagonists was broken in Scotland. In 1638, Caroline clericalism, which had already threatened the Scots nobility with resumption of secularized church lands and tithes, finally provoked a religious upheaval by the imposition of an Anglicanized liturgy. The Scottish Estates united to reject this: and their Covenant against it acquired immediate material force. For in Scotland, the aristocracy and gentry were not demilitarized: the more archaic social structure of the original Stuart realm preserved the warlike bonds of a late mediaeval polity. The Covenant was able to field a formidable army to confront Charles I within a few months. Magnates and lairds rallied their tenantry in arms, burghs provided funds for the cause, mercenary veterans of the Thirty Years’ War supplied professional officers. The command of an army backed by the peerage was entrusted to a general returned from Swedish service.40 No comparable force could be raised by the monarchy in England. There was thus an underlying logic in the fact that it was the Scottish invasion of 1640 which finally put an end to Charles I’s personal rule. English Absolutism paid the penalty for its lack of armour. Its deviation from the rules of the late feudal State only provided a negative confirmation of their necessity. Parliament, convoked in extremis by the king to deal with military defeat by the Scots, proceeded to erase every gain registered by the Stuart monarchy, proclaiming a return to a more pristine constitutional framework. A year later, Catholic rebellion erupted in Ireland.41 The second weak link in the Stuart peace had snapped. The struggle to seize control over the English army that now had to be raised to suppress the Irish insurrection, drove Parliament and King into the Civil War. English Absolutism was brought to crisis by aristocratic particularism and clannic desperation on its periphery: forces that lay historically behind it. But it was felled at the centre by a commercialized gentry, a capitalist city, a commoner artisanate and yeomanry: forces pushing beyond it. Before it could reach the age of maturity, English Absolutism was cut off by a bourgeois revolution.
1. Weber, in his analysis of English mediaeval towns, notes among other things that it is significant that they never experienced guild or municipal revolutions comparable to those of the continent: Economy and Society, III, pp. 1276–81. There was briefly an insurgent conjuratio in London in 1263–5, for which see Gwyn Williams, Mediaeval London. From Commune to Capital, London 1963, pp. 219–35. But this was an exceptional episode, which occurred in the wider context of the Barons’ Revolt.
2. The initial judicial functions of the English Parliament were also unusual; it acted as a supreme court for petitions, with which the bulk of its work was concerned in the 13th century, when it was mainly dominated by royal servants. For the origins and evolution of the mediaeval Parliaments, see G. O. Sayles, The Mediaeval Foundations of England, pp. 448–57; G. A. Holmes, The Later Middle Ages, London 1962, pp. 83–8.
3. The ultimate significance of this limitation has been underlined by J. P. Cooper, ‘Differences between English and Continental Governments in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in J. J. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (ed.), Britain and the Netherlands, London 1960, pp. 62–90, esp. 65–71. As he points out, it meant that when the ‘new monarchy’ emerged in the early modern epoch, it was limited by ‘positive’ law in England, not merely the divine or natural law of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty.
4. For this revealing episode, see J. J. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377–1399, London 1972, pp. 74–6.
5. See the pertinent comments by C. F. Richmond, ‘The War at Sea’, in K. Fowler (ed.), The Hundred Years’ War, London 1971, p. 117, and ‘English Naval Power in the Fifteenth Century’, History, LII, No. 174, February 1967, pp. 4–5. The subject is only starting to be studied.
6. S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England, London 1966, pp. 56–66, gives a good brief summary of this whole process.
7. G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, London 1956, pp. 49, 53.
8. C. Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments, Oxford 1971, pp. 41–2, states flatly that the English Parliament of this period, with its brevity of assembly and in-frequency of summons, was a declining force; he correctly emphasizes, on the other hand, that the constitutional compact between monarchy and parliament rested on the class unity of the rulers of the country. For the social basis of English Parliamentarism, see the perceptive remarks by Penry Williams, ‘The Tudor State’, Past and Present, No. 24, July 1963, pp. 39–58.
9. There is a sensitive discussion of the implications of the Pilgrimage of Grace, habitually underplayed, in J. J. Scarisbricke, Henry VIII, London 1971, pp. 444–5, 452
10. The exaggerated claims made for Cromwell’s administrative ‘revolution’ by Elton, in The Tudor Revolution in Government, Cambridge 1953, pp. 160–427, and England under the Tudors, pp. 127–37, 160–75, 180–4, have been reduced to more modest proportions by, among others, G. L. Harriss, ‘Mediaeval Government and State-Craft’, Past and Present, No. 24, July 1963, pp. 24–35; for a representative recent comment, see Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments, p. 111.
11. Plans were also mooted at this time for a standing army and a juridically privileged peerage – two measures which, if implemented, would have altered the whole course of 16th and 17th century English history. In fact, neither was acceptable to a Parliament which welcomed State control of the Church and a royal peace in the countryside, but was aware of the logic of professional troops and averse to a juridical hierarchy within the nobility which would have militated socially against many of its members. The draft scheme for a standing army, prepared in 1536–7 and found in the flies of Cromwell’s office, is discussed in L. Stone, ‘The Political Programme of Thomas Cromwell’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XXIV, 1951, pp. 1–18. For the proposal of a privileged legal statute in landed property for the titled nobility, see Holdsworth, A History of English Law, IV, pp. 450–543.
12. Joel Hurstfield, ‘Was there a Tudor Despotism after all?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1967, pp. 83–108, effectively criticizes the apologetic anachronisms in which much writing on the period is still couched. Hurstfield stresses the real thrust behind the Statute of Proclamations, the Treason Acts, and the official censorship and propaganda of the reign. The once received notion that the Tudor monarchy was not a form of Absolutism is given short shrift by Mousnier, ‘Quelques Problèmes Concernant La Monarchie Absolue’, pp. 21–6. Henry’s attitude to Parliament is well conveyed bv Scarisbricke, Henry VIII, pp. 653–4.
13. By the end of the reign, two-thirds of the monastic domains had been alienated; income from sales of church lands averaged 30 per cent above rents from those retained. See F. Dietz, English Government Finance 1485–1558, London 1964, pp. 147, 149, 158, 214.
14. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 265–6.
15. The transition from the early mediaeval baronage to the late mediaeval peerage, and the attendant evolution of knightage into a gentry, are traced by N. Denholm-Young, ‘En Remontant le Passé de l’Aristocratie Anglaise: le Moyen Age’, Annales, May 1937, pp. 257–69. (The title ‘baron’ itself acquired a new meaning as a patented rank in the late 14th century, distinct from its earlier use.) The consolidation of the peerage system is analyzed by K. B. Macfarlane, ‘The English Nobility in the Later Middle Ages’, XIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Vienna 1965, Rapports I, pp. 337–45, who stresses its novelty and discontinuity.
16. It should be borne in mind that the loi de dérogeance was itself a late Renaissance creation in France, which only dates from 1560. Such a legal measure was unnecessary as long as the function of the nobility was unambiguously military; like the graded titles themselves, it was a reaction to a new social mobility.
17. The government could not rely on the loyalty of the shire levies in this crisis: W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, London 1968, p. 467.
18. See the comparative estimates of statutes made by Elton, in ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1956, p. 81.
19. J. E. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons, London 1949, pp. 140, 147–8, 302.
20. C. Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, London 1937, pp. 288–90.
21. C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, Oxford 1966, pp. 12–13, 19–20, 24–30, 51–3, 285.
22. Cruickshank has suggested that the absence of an adult male sovereign, to command field troops in person, for nearly 60 years after Henry VIII, may have contributed to the failure of a regular army to emerge in this epoch: Army Royal, Oxford 1969, p. 189.
23. ‘Ireland is the last ex filiis Europae, which hath been reclaimed from desolation and a desert (in many parts), to population and plantation; and from savage and barbarous customs, to humanity and civility.’ The Works of Francis Bacon, London 1711, Vol. IV, p. 280. For further examples of the same colonial sentiments, see pp. 442–8. Bacon, like all his contemporaries, was keenly aware of the material profits to be derived from England’s civilizing mission in Ireland: ‘This I will say confidently, that if God bless this kingdom with peace and justice, no usurer is so sure in seventeen years space to double his principal, and interest upon interest, as that kingdom is within the same time to double the stock both of wealth and people. . . . It is not easy, no not upon the continent, to find such confluence of commodities, if the hand of man did join with the hand of nature.’ pp. 280, 444. Note the clarity of the conception of Ireland as an alternative outlet for expansion to the continent.
24. For the situation by the early 16th century, see M. MacCurtain, Tudor and Stuart Ireland, Dublin 1972, pp. 1–5, 18, 39–41.
25. For some glimpses of the tactics used to reduce the Irish to submission, see C. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, London 1950, pp. 326–9, 341, 343, 345. The English Fury in Ireland was probably just as lethal as the Spanish Fury in the Netherlands: in fact, there is little sign that it was ever restrained by the considerations which, for example, prevented Spain from destroying the Dutch dikes – a measure rejected as genocidal by Philip II’s government: compare Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, pp. 134–5.
26. For this development, see Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, pp. 78–81; M. Lewis, The Spanish Armada, London 1960, pp. 61–80, who claims a perhaps doubtful English priority in it.
27. G. J. Marcus, A Naval History of England, I, The Formative Centuries London 1961, p. 30.
28. Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, London 1959, p. 175.