Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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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