Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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– 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