Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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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.