Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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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