Tom Burns Organisation and Social Order

ChapterX

SOVEREIGNTYANDINTERESTSI

Despite the arguments advanced on previous pages, there is a remnant of oddness, even perversity, about dating the beginning of modern European history in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. So far as any major political change was concerned during those years, the prospects for the future were almost unrelievedly dire. It looked at first as if the fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled the return of the invasions which Europe had endured during the long centuries after the fall of Rome. Indeed the Balkans did go down piecemeal before a series of Turkish onslaughts, and the eastern borders of Christian Europe were pushed further back still during the first half of the sixteenth century.

Within Europe, whatever the hazards of kingship and the shortcomings of government during the medieval millennium, they are more than matched by the confusion that confronts one at its close: "With hereditary, elective and joint monarchies, with broad-based and narrowly oligarchic republics, with independent and semi-independent confederations, with individual cities that operate as free agents and an emperor whose orders were virtually ignored by the vast majority of his subjects, the variety of ways in which government functioned is bewildering enough, even if we omit such anomalies as the papacy and the areas over which there was, to all intents and purposes, no government at all."1

And this was at the high tide of the Renaissance, whose greatest artifact, Burckhardt claimed, was the State. Many of the political units in existence hardly matched even the minimal definition of a state: a community organised politically and legally for its own government. In the fifteenth century, up to around 1470, there were centrifugal forces at work in Europe which made it look as if large sections of it "were breaking out of the framework of monarchy and church that had been built up in the Middle Ages."2 In some cases, indeed, monarchy became permanently enfeebled. Such hegemony as the Emperors had managed to preserve over subordinate principalities in Germany became an appendage of the Hapsburg dynasty during the sixteenth century and was emptied of any meaning in practical terms during the seventeenth. Further east, the kings of Poland lost all semblance of royal powers, with jurisdiction altogether dispersed among nobles and gentry, and, after 1501, government itself virtually the perquisite of a senate composed of magnate landowners.

1 J.R.Hale, Renaissance Europe, 1450-1520, Fontana, 1971, p. 55. 2 G.Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt, 1320-1450, Fontana, 1975, pp. 14-15.

Within a generation the whole situation had changed completely. What made the change radical, and eventually irreversible, was the advent of the Reformation, a truly revolutionary transformation. It split Europe between north and south, involved the German Empire in a series of major disturbances and wars, and fuelled the rivalries of the major monarchies bent on territorial acquisition. Sheer exhaustion - to the point of bankruptcy in the case of France and Spain - forced a halt in mid-century.

The principle of what was later called cuius regio, eius religio was adopted in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg to settle differences within the Empire (only between Catholics and Lutherans, however; Calvinists were excluded). It was already being matched in England almost, it might seem, to the point of travesty. In less than twelve years the established church in England switched from the modified and anglicised Catholicism of Henry VIII first to outright Protestantism under his son Edward, then back to the Roman Church under his first daughter, Mary, and then, finally, to an anglicised version of Protestantism under his second daughter, Elizabeth. Yet in reality, the settlement in England, as in most other countries, was more or less in accordance with the preference of the people - or at least the most vocal and powerful sections of it. Where it was not, as in the case of France and the Dutch dependencies of the King of Spain, long and bitterly fought wars filled the second half of the sixteenth century.

All in all and in the long run, nevertheless, the wars that filled the period from half-way through the fifteenth century to the third quarter of the sixteenth did serve the claims of absolutist monarchs. The means by which this wholesale changeover from a Europe recognisably medieval, though in dissolution, to one recognisably modern, though in perpetual turmoil, was brought about were, naturally, many and complex; but central to them was the concentration of military resources in the hands of the eventual winners - and this for the most obvious of reasons. The process followed the circular, or spiral, path of resource accumulation since made familiar by capital accumulation, but there was a special factor which acted first as a driving force and then an accelerator: the 'military reformation', as Hale calls it.3

'Military reformations' have been credited with generating, or at least triggering or accelerating, major social and political changes. The predominance of naval warfare and the leading part that the ordinary citizen played in it has been put forward as a major factor in the emergence of participant democracy in Periclean Athens. The short sword which promoted the Roman foot soldier at the expense of the horseman contributed, so it has been claimed, to the political rise of the plebs. After the passing of the Dark Ages, it is said, the man in armour ruled western Europe until the thirteenth century, when the pike, the longbow and, most of all, the crossbow, did something to fortify, even to prompt, pressure from the common people for social and political betterment. Now, late in the fifteenth century, firearms and fortifications and professional armies opened the door to a new style of kingship.

Guns had been manufactured in Western Europe since the fourteenth century, but it was not until towards 1500 that their use revolutionised the conduct of war. One effect was

3 J.R.Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, Fontana, 1985, Chap. 2.

immensely to increase the cost of war. Not only were firearms expensive, but the development of artillery brought with it the need for far stronger fortifications, especially for towns and harbours, for heavier ships and better transport, and, most of all, for specially trained troops. "The new state rested on a new kind of army, and to this the foreign mercenary contributed so much that his services can be regarded as an indispensable condition of what happened.... Since as a rule only the king could afford to hire mercenaries in bulk they strengthened him against his nobles."4

The path to absolutism, it seems, did not lead straightforwardly from the new technology of war. The important point about the whole development was that money had to be found for baggage trains and ships, as well as for the new weapons and mercenaries, because wars were now liable to be protracted by sieges. Finance became the most enduring problem confronting the new monarchies, one which at times proved almost insoluble.

Service in kind by feudatories, already grudging, limited, and often unreliable, had become pointless. Commuting such dues to money payments took on a new urgency, as did taxation. Again, much foreign trade within Europe, as well as internal trade, especially of bulk goods, had been dealt with in 'natural economy' terms - i.e., by exchange or barter, if need be with third parties brought in to effect indirect barter transactions: it was still possible in the sixteenth century for the Swedes to exchange copper and butter in Dantzig for wine from France and Spain and cloth from England. Trade also for the most part was in primary products and half-finished goods rather than luxuries; since what was being sold could be reckoned as surplus, it had made sense to allow imports to come in relatively freely and, for the most part, to tax exports.

With the pressing need for money, fiscal policy took on a new significance and, eventually, was reformulated. Customs duties were especially attractive. Ordinarily, they came under the royal prerogative, since the king was ultimately responsible for building, maintaining and defending harbours and for maintaining order and enforcing regulations, so they were relatively easy to legislate for without reference to parliamentary assemblies and the like. Better still, they could be conveniently farmed out, or used as surety for loans, or (as in most cases) both. Lastly, coining money was a royal monopoly, and debasing the coinage was one easy way out of the worst straits, as was bankruptcy.

There were other, more far-reaching, consequences of the 'military reformation', which relate to the move accomplished by Western Europe as a whole from an almost permanent posture of isolationism and defensiveness vis-a-vis the world outside to one of extensive exploration and aggressive imperialism. Explanations of how and why what is called 'the European Miracle' occurred vary from a need to outflank the Turkish blockade of the route to the East, which drove the 'Great Navigators' around the Cape and across the Atlantic, to the extension to the whole world of the 'systemic' trading invented by the countries around the North Sea; from the Black Death to the fall of Constantinople, from the spread of commutation (the substitution of money payments for feudal service) and 'the rise of the bourgeois merchant class' to the spread of literacy and the consequent end of cultural and intellectual hegemony by the church; from the raising of the normal age of

4 V.G.Kiernan, "Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy", Past and Present, no. 11, 1957

marriage, and the consequent marginal gain in economic independence among 'the people'. A rather less flattering explanation for the 'European miracle' makes it a protracted episode of military and economic imperialism set going by the superiority in armed force which the use of gunpowder in firearms had given to kings and princes over insubordinate nobles and communities and which now, with the development of the gunned ship, gave to Europeans in general over the indigenous people of the East and West Indies.5

II

The 'centrifugal forces' mentioned earlier have familiarly been interpreted as the death-throes of feudalism (although such pronouncements tend to lose their force once the notion of feudalism as a comprehensive cultural, economic and political system is discarded). Historians who claim the title 'Marxist' have, some of them, seen absolute monarchy as tertium gaudens, exploiting the new balance of power between aristocracy and bourgeoisie; others have seen it as the "redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses into their traditional social position"6. It is the 'formal' changes, it seems, which distinguish the absolutist state from its predecessor, but these, it also seems, are fairly extensive. "The Absolute monarchies introduced standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy, national taxation, a codified law, and the beginnings of a unified market. All these appear to be pre-eminently capitalist."

If one begins at a more specific (and perhaps more realistic) level, one can see the disruptions of the fifteenth century as marking the culminating episode of the centuries-old struggle between kings and their enemies at home and abroad. The focus of struggle differed from country to country. In England, which had long been the most clearly defined monarchy in Europe, the 'centrifugal forces' were deployed in the contests between rival claimants, backed by loose consortia of leading families and lesser nobles, to the throne itself; in less than a hundred years, the title of king was forcibly removed four times from one royal line of descent to another. In France, the focus of struggle lay in putting an end to the English occupation and driving back the encroachments of Burgundy, while in Spain it was the final expulsion of the Moors. In both France and Spain it was the monarchy which took the lead, and won the power and the authority which success brought. In Germany, the central issue was the renewed claims of the Hapsburg dynasty to imperial powers over subordinate principalities and to independent autocracy by their rulers.

Congruent with the new alignment of king vis-a-vis nobles, church and commons, also, was a sizeable expansion in the sheer apparatus of kingship. This was directly visible as ostentatious display, pageantry and inflated rhetoric, but it also involved a much bigger entourage, new assertions of monarchic rights and powers, a large increase in the number of officials whom kings needed, or wanted, to have at their disposal - and a lot more money.

5 C.M.Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, Collins,1965. 6 P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, NLB, 1974, p. 18.

All this had its effect on the institutional matrix of society and on the organisational framework according to which political, social and economic affairs were ordinarily conducted. Nevertheless, any shift in the weight or significance attaching to the main features of social structure occurred gradually - almost unnoticeably, it seems, in some countries. (As late as 1789, the members of the National Assembly took 'feudal' to be the appropriate label for the social and political system they sought to dismantle.) Ownership of land remained fundamental not only to the extent to which individuals could satisfy their needs and appetites but also to their legal rights and entitlements, their authority over others, their political power and influence and their prestige and social standing. Money values began to intrude, but money came into it mostly as a way of buying - or marrying - one's way into a more advantageous social situation. The usefulness of money as a social escalator was much enhanced when it became possible to purchase entitlement to office and nobility, and to the privileges which went with them. Clientage reappeared as a powerful instrument of political power as dependency relationships shed many of the attachments and legalistic appurtenances which had belonged to 'feudalism.'

The inflation of sovereign rights met with growing resistance from the sixteenth century onwards, especially in defence of proprietorial entitlements but also in the matter of 'freedom of worship' and in notions of citizen rights. A constitutional right to representation when it came to taxation survived from medieval times in a number of countries, although the form of representation and the categories of people qualifying for representation varied considerably over time and place. With the development of a new and overriding claim to absolute sovereignty, though - and, with it, demands for more and heavier taxes - rights to representation took on a new aspect of opposition to monarchic authority and to the privileged few who benefited from it directly.

The conflict between claims to sovereignty and 'natural rights' was fought in a succession of arenas: king and court versus regional magnates; established churches versus catholic or protestant dissidence; royal prerogative versus constitutional entitlements; royal command and royal favour versus established privilege and corporate rights and properties; the right to rule by dynastic succession and the right to rule by consent of the ruled. Such disputes led to civil war from time to time, but were also fought over by riot and rebellion, by conspiracy and attempted coup, through individual protest and legal process, and amid a perpetually renewed torrent of published argument and polemic. At various points during this multi-dimensional conflict there developed loosely connected sets of ideas which became reference points for experiments and trial runs in the organisation of the political units we can now call 'states', since the term begins to lose its anachronistic taint after the sixteenth century.

III

The emergence of the so-called 'absolute' monarchies in Europe, although signaled clearly enough at the outset by the gestures of personal aggrandisement made by rulers in the form of display, propaganda, and titles like "Most Christian Majesty" and "Defender of the Faith," was a hesitant, lengthy, and doubtful process. France was subjected to a whole series of conflicts, with the civil war that did break out occasionally never far distant at

other times, and it was not until 1660 that monarchism was established on a reasonably stable footing. In England, the Tudors attained a dominance which was close to autarchy, although it was qualified by the care they took to have Parliament go along with them. Sovereignty over the Holy Roman Empire escaped the Emperors altogether, although it was established in most of the hundreds of principalities, great and small, into which Germany had become divided. Even so, most German rulers - emperor, electors, dukes and prelates - found themselves constantly embroiled in wars and popular uprisings during the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War awaited them and their subjects in the seventeenth.

However, the central political problem - that of sheer survival - appeared to be settled by the end of the fifteenth century. And, for a short spell, it was. The new-style monarchies quickly outmatched their domestic nobilities in military strength and financial resources, but this was not all. Concurrently with the integration of kingdoms under their Hapsburg, Tudor, Valois and other dynasties, there had been a rapid acceleration in the process of erosion - through schism, corruption and recurrent heretical movements and uprisings - of the authority, and the political power and influence, of the Pope. These two developments, of militant monarchy and papal decline, moving together, did most to make the claim of absolute sovereignty and repudiation of the Pope's supremacy feasible enough for bolder spirits to attempt and almost, during the first decades of the sixteenth century, to achieve.

Asserting as it did the union of power and authority within the state in a single person, absolutism is best construed as a composite dogma which, as it gathered strength by argument and repetition from its propagandists, became the ideology of the establishment throughout western Europe. Curiously enough, in view of what happened later in the Netherlands, France, Germany and England, there was to begin with little disagreement in this regard between Protestant and Catholic. "I will side always, "wrote Luther, as early as 1520, "with him, however unjust, who endures rebellion and against him who rebels, however justly."7

It is in Luther's writings that the clearest expression of the absolute sovereignty of kings and princes is to be found. The welfare of the people might be the supreme law, but the supremacy of the sovereign takes precedence over, or, as Bodin put it later, is the necessary foundation for, the welfare of the people.

"Luther's lasting contributions to politics," in J.N.Figgis's words, were his assertion that the "texts about non-resistance to authority" were to be taken literally, and "his insistence on the unity and universality and essential rightness of the sovereign territorial state." Luther became, Figgis goes on, "more and more hostile to any claim to limit princely power. It was by transferring the notion of non-resistance from the Imperial to the princely, and from the ecclesiastical to the lay power, that Luther gave to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings such universal and enduring prevalence."8

7 J.W.Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, (rev. edn.), Methuen, 1957, p.19. 8 J.N.Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, C.U.P., 2nd. edn., 1931, p.70.

In 1539, Luther's pronouncements were echoed by Calvin: "Though there be divers forms and kinds of rulers, yet they differ not in this, that we must take them all as ministers ordained by God." And that form, he added, "which is the least pleasing to men is particularly and above all others commended to us, that is the lordship and domination of a single man.... If there be in the State some fault needing correction, the private person must not agitate about it or take any public action or in any way put his hands to the work."9 Later in the century, essentially the same point was made by Jean Bodin, though in less drastic terms: "The chief point of sovereign majesty and absolute power lies principally in legislating for his subjects in general, without their consent."10

The difference between the kingship of the Middle Ages and the monarchism of the Renaissance state can be expressed, as it is by Figgis, as a function of the development of the concept of absolute sovereignty in terms of constitutional theory; after all, this interpretation of what was happening is what one finds in the writings of the best contemporary minds. But it is difficult to see the outcome as a victory for ideology, even when the leading figures of reformed religion announced their support of it.

It could well be that kingly power filled the political space left vacant by the defeat or decline of the great territorial magnates and kingly authority expanded at the expense of the Pope's. All the same, the 'absolutism' which made its appearance during the Renaissance and lasted until the French Revolution was much more insubstantial in terms of the power and authority exercised in practice by kings - even Henry VIII, or Philip II, or Louis XIV - than it was made out to be in the writings of theologians and reformers or in the theoretical models constructed by Renaissance political philosophers.

First and, almost everywhere, foremost, kingdoms and principalities were landed possessions. They were inherited (or usurped), from predecessors, or acquired by marriage, to be passed on to heirs. Such possessions were also extensible or reducible by conquest, of course. England lost most of its French possessions during the fifteenth century. Poland and Hungary were elective monarchies, but a marriage briefly joined them together, to form, along with Lithuania, a vast dominion stretching from the Baltic to within a short distance of the Black Sea, and from Bohemia almost to Smolensk. The last Duke of Burgundy inherited the wealthiest territories in Europe, acquired large sections of the Rhineland by conquest, and promptly lost them - together with Burgundy itself. The remaining possessions, Flanders and the Netherlands, went to the Hapsburg who married his daughter. For the Hapsburgs, this marked the start of a bargain-hunting romp through the lineages of the kings and princes of Europe. It culminated, by 1500, in the Hapsburg Charles V, Emperor of Germany, Duke of Flanders and of Austria, Styria and Carinthia, Count of the Tyrol, King of Castile, of Aragon, of Navarre, Sicily, Naples and Sardinia, and ruler of the territories of the Netherlands.

We are still dealing, manifestly, with command societies, but they are command societies with a difference. Rule by right of inheritance was part of the similarity with what had gone before, of course, not of any difference. Nevertheless, dynastic possession, as was

9 J.W.Allen, op. cit., p.54. 10 ibid., p.412.

made all too clear from the challenges to it which came first from the Dutch and which built up to major wars in the eighteenth century, is an indicator of the way in which the new constitutional, political and religious framework differed from the old. The factors which make up the difference are interrelated, though in rather intricate fashion, and in ways, too, which can be seen sometimes to reinforce, sometimes to undermine, each other.

The most striking difference lay in the fact that power and authority were now combined in the claim to sovereignty, personal and monarchic. For the Middle Ages, sovereignty is a virtually meaningless term. One can look back, as we have done, and see it as split into power and authority. Power belonged, certainly, to emperors, kings and princes, but it also belonged to their feudal subordinates. Authority came from two sources. There was in the first place the authority conferred by God's will and God's blessing, and was therefore claimed by the Church as its own. Popes and bishops might remit this authority to temporal kings, but the could also, on occasion, deny or withdraw it. There was also, in the second place, the authority contained in the law, and kings were held to be subject to the law - even in England, where the king's jurisdiction had established itself as over and above, and not merely separate from, seigneurial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.

There had been, it is true, occasions on which monarchic power and ecclesiastical authority each asserted its right to dominate the other, but, in general, a distinction was observed between those things which were matters of temporal power and those which were disposed of by the spiritual authority of the church. More broadly, one may look on the sovereignty which had belonged in earlier times to the Emperors of Rome as scattered, or parceled out, during the medieval millennium, among popes, kings and princes, ecclesiastical and territorial magnates, and thousands of princelings, barons, clerics and city councils. Now, over most of Europe, territorial dominions were, geographically and in many other ways, almost happenstance assemblies of lands and peoples with precious little in common apart from their presumed allegiance to the same individual ruler and their liability to pay taxes to him. "Even France," G.R.Elton observes, "remained in a way a conglomeration of fiefs and territories. Though policy and lucky accidents made possible the absorption of many of the great fiefs ...... the kingdom remained a gathering of diverse provincial and social organisations, customs, and rights to which the monarchy gave unity by something like a series of contracts. But this diversity and confusion was simplicity itself by the side of Charles V's empire."11

While it was one and indivisible, and the rightful possession, the attribute, of a single person, the sovereignty claimed on behalf of, or by, the kings and princes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was heavily qualified. For instance, the sovereign was said to be 'absolutus legis' (i.e., absolved from or, more familiarly, above the law), but the theologians, legists and ministers who articulated the claim frequently went on to make two further assertions which seem irreconcilable with the first. God's commandments were accepted by all as the essential foundations of justice and morality, and were incorporated in law. The king, absolute monarch though he might be, was appointed by God. As such, and as God's representative, it followed that the king was required to

11 G.R.Elton, "Constitutional Development and Political Thought in Western Europe", New Cambridge Modern History, Vol.II, C.U.P., 1975, p. 440.

uphold 'the law', which meant not simply the law of the land but the divine law on which it was ultimately dependent. In England, 'the law of the land' was the common law; for the French, it was the various systems of law which obtained in the different regions of France and, more specifically, the ancient, unwritten, constitution. So, although it was the king, rather than the pope, who now held unchallenged supremacy as the representative of God to those who were his subjects, his commitment to divine law and to customary law, as embodied in the law of the land, might be supposed to be even stronger and more binding on him than on his medieval predecessors. It was, therefore, as much a limitation on arbitrary rule as a reinforcement of the royal prerogative.

'Qualified absolutism', the term often used, is in fact a rather unsatisfactory label for the formula worked out in Western Europe as the constitutional structure which followed the command systems of the feudal period. There was a fundamental contradiction in it, which has presented historians with something of a problem.

The locus classicus for the discussion of the problem is the joint paper presented to the Tenth International Congress of Historical Sciences by two distinguished historians, German (F.Hartung) and French (R. Mousnier): "Some historians," they say, "assert, purely and simply, an equivalence between absolutism on the one hand, and despotism, tyranny or even totalitarianism on the other. There are certain other historians who adopt, as a definition of absolutism, the extreme concept of a few theorists who push the idea to its logical limits, and are unwilling to see absolutism existing except where, according to the ideas of Macchiavelli and Hobbes, the king has the power to make laws without reference to any eternal law, ideal principles, without the intervention of any authority external to the State and without restriction by any other person, group or constitutional body within the State. Is it surprising, then, that the idea of absolute monarchy disappears altogether?"12

The solution they offer is that 'absolutism was never despotism'. Unless one reels off, in mute parenthesis, all the disclaimers and qualifications they discuss (and there are many they don't), this seems a distinction without a difference; it preserves the contradiction without resolving it.

IV

The explanation, rather than the solution, of the problem seems to lie in the fact (which is well enough attested) that the idea of absolutism which was propounded by monarchs and their apologists during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was conceived, apart from a few extremists like Hobbes, as a way of putting an end to the medieval political system, with its dissemination of power and of jurisdiction in each kingdom among a multiplicity of lesser lords and authorities, and of denying any political authority to the Pope. The sovereignty which had been parceled out among kings, the church, parliaments, royal councils, seigneurs, the municipalities and all the other individuals and groups with some claim to power or to authority (which Montesquieu labeled 12 F.Hartung and R.Mousnier, "Quelques problemes concernant la monarchie absolue," Relazione del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, 1955, Vol. IV, p.4.

'intermediate powers') was henceforth to be regarded as concentrated in the person of the king.

Yet the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the claim to absolute sovereignty was being put forward in so many different countries and underwritten by leading religious, legal and political figures, were filled with protest, rebellion and civil war. There were no more than two isolated instances of thoroughgoing absolutism: Piedmont and Bavaria. A standing army in the first and a vast clerical establishment in the other acted as instruments of suppression. Elsewhere, there were powerful interests, like princes of the royal blood, great noble families, and rich cities; there were corporate bodies and institutional arrangements embedded in tradition and in the legal and administrative structure, like the English Parliament, the Cortes in the different provinces of Spain, the French parlements, the 'States' (representative bodies of delegates from clergy, nobility and towns, though not democratically chosen) in all the provinces of the Netherlands and the Reichstag in the Empire; and, increasingly, there were militant groups of Protestants or Catholic recusants. All of them were ready and at times able to circumscribe the authority and even challenge the power of kings and princes.

So, even though the theological and political writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are filled with eminently portable quotations on which the doctrine of absolutism might be securely based, they are equally full of qualifications and ambiguities. These spring from the inescapable need to acknowledge God's supremacy - and the rule of God's law - over all earthly kings and princes, and of the equally inescapable obligations and constraints laid upon sovereigns by the weighty and complex fabric of law and custom on which, as they were reminded often enough, entry into their own inherited sovereign realm had depended, as would the secure succession of their heirs. Even the social inequality which was still part and parcel of social organisation - now a societe d'ordres - and which was almost universally acknowledged and defended as either the inevitable consequence of human nature or as divinely ordained (and usually both), was being challenged. As Hurstfield remarks, "The Anabaptists, the Family of Love, the Levellers and the Diggers did not grow up out of nowhere; and they held some unconventional views about who gave consent" [to the rule of sovereigns] "and on behalf of whom."13

At a more mundane level, while they accepted, for the most part, the overall authority of their king, there was no question of princes of the blood royal, powerful dukes, barons, cities and other corporate bodies being bereft of all the rights and privileges they had enjoyed, and which they regarded as their rightful possessions. The one group that did suffer dispossession of much property and some rights and privileges was the Church - in France and Spain as well as in England and Scotland. Indeed (especially in the light of what happened to the Church), it could be said that acquiescence in the king's claim to absolute sovereignty was the price paid by individual subjects and corporations for increased security in their own possessions. Rights and privileges were becoming 'things', along with real and movable property, and it was these which it was the law's (and therefore the king's) prime duty to preserve and protect.

13 J.Hurstfield, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England, Cape, 1973, p.14

There are many and good reasons why the age of monarchism gave way, or gave rise, to the age of capitalism. The growth of property-mindedness, and hence acquisitiveness, mediated the transition. Capitalism had already proved itself a useful auxiliary to medieval kings and princes; it provided not only the same kind of service to the new monarchs (some of their principal creditors in Augsburg and Antwerp were ruined when they went bankrupt, just as the Bianchis had been in the fourteenth century), but went beyond it. The Fugger family bought the votes from the electors which made Charles V emperor; they leased copper mines in the Tirol from him, lent him very sizeable sums on the security of revenues from the great ecclesiastical orders of knighthood in Spain; and on many other ways proved themselves to be reliable, steadfast - and indispensable supporters.

Given the circumstances of the time, interests - in rights, privileges and possessions - which stood over against absolute sovereignty, proved in financial and religious practice to be a necessary counterpart to it. Not surprisingly, the absolutism which became conceptually fully-fashioned in the sixteenth century took shape with a mirror-image: the idea of 'natural rights'. Although it was not articulated properly until the seventeenth century (by Grotius), the idea is discernible in sixteenth century writings, especially those of the Huguenot opposition in France.

The origins of the idea of 'natural rights' being inherent in 'natural law' are traceable back to Marsiglio's Defensor Pacis, which appeared in 1324. After Aquinas, natural law had been envisaged and discussed as the worldly and therefore defective reflection of divine law; even so, it could be, and was, invoked so as to act as a brake on overweening power, especially when it was shuffled together with the 'law of the land' and 'immemorial custom'. From the sixteenth century on, however, natural law came more and more to be articulated as constituting the 'inalienable' natural rights of people, collectively and individually.14 The idea of natural (as against constitutional) rights has of course been challenged - and restated - time and again, ever since Bentham called the idea nonsense - 'nonsense on stilts'. For examples of the contemporary debate, see M.Macdonald, "Natural Rights", Proc. Aristotelian Soc., N.S., Vol. 47, pp.225-250, and A.MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, esp. pp.66-7.

The two interpretations of natural law are not incompatible, of course; the second may be understood as comprehended within the first (and, it has been argued, was so understood by Aquinas himself). But there was a change of emphasis, and it is this, and the political objectives for which the appeal to natural law was made, which are important. Even the qualification of 'divine' which was added to the affirmation of absolute sovereignty carried with it the implication that the 'right of kings', without that qualification, was disputable; and it virtually guaranteed, as the Reformation gathered momentum and other voices were added to Luther's and Calvin's, that it would be disputed. In so far as the absolute sovereignty of kings became a goal or aim of policy, in so far as 'raison d'etat' was advanced as grounds for government action, was something only the king could assert or define, and was identified by him with his own interest, all other members of society could find at least one potential interest in common - that of contesting the absolute power

14 See O. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (tr. E. Barker) C.U.P., 1924, pp. 44-50 ("People and Ruler as separate personalities").

and authority of the sovereign. So, as it turned out, the interests of individuals, groups and corporate institutions were often enough arrayed in direct opposition to the king's will.

The contradiction contained within 'absolutism,' then, resolves itself into a dualism of sovereignty and interests, king and kingdom - a dualism which turned easily into an opposition of principle, which could be carried to the point of political contention and, in some instances, to open warfare. Major instances were the war between Philip II and the territorial and urban magnates of the Netherlands, out of which was born the Dutch Republic; the war between Charles I and Parliament, out of which emerged the Commonwealth and the Protectorate; and the wars of the Fronde, out of which absolutism escaped with Louis XIV's prerogative strengthened and his sovereignty even more solidly based than his father's.

V

Sovereignty (as it has been propounded and understood in modern Europe) and interests are complementary. Both in theory and in practice, each assumes the existence of the other. The brief definition of sovereignty gives it as the supremacy within the state of some person, or institution, or group able to impose his or their will, in the last resort, on all other persons and groups. But even in this, the existence of sovereignty implies (though it may not require) the existence also of interests which are divergent from each other and from the interests of the sovereign person, body or group.

Yet it would be wrong to regard the dualism of realm and commonwealth as a perpetual contest, with the two sides locked in the kind of stasis characteristic of the Greek polis and erupting from time to time in open conflict, coup d'etat, revolutionary changes of constitution, wars of independence, and the like. For, in addition to the basic opposition between sovereignty and interests, there was another adversarial pair of elements to complicate the build-up of forces which moulded the polities of 'early modern Europe'. On the one side was 'raison d'etat' (the national interest), by which the interests of the sovereign and those of the community as a whole were, or were presumed to be, one and the same. This was taken to mean, in practice, that the interests of the community could be subsumed under those of the sovereign. On the other stood 'the public good': the principle that government must be conducted according not merely to the rule of law as declared and applied by judicial decision but to what was 'right' - i.e., to the generally accepted canon of public, Christian, morality.

'Raison d'etat' was a key assumption of monarchic sovereignty (as it remained, of course, after the takeover of sovereignty by modern representative government). It was for the ruler to interpret and act on behalf of the common welfare of the body of citizens - nobles, bourgeois, commoners and clergy. His interest was their interest. This meant no more, and no less, than that the governing body of a country, or any other political unit, be it monarchy, republic, despotism or democracy, when it acted in what it saw as its own interests, acted in the interests of all its subjects and citizens. Furthermore, it was taken to mean that the people "constituted a genuine society, with defined rights and obligations, only in so far as they possessed a superior to whose commands they were all obedient and responsive. At the same time it implied that law-making must be the exclusive preserve of

the sovereign."15 Hence, legitimate authority, where it was not that of the sovereign himself, consisted only in that delegated by the sovereign; social rights were only those brought into and kept in being by the sovereign's law.

There was one corollary and one rider. The corollary was to the effect that the sovereign power, acting in its own interests, was acting in the interests of all its subjects or citizens even when it acted against the interests, the welfare, or even the lives and property of individual citizens or groups. The rider, however, familiar as it has since become and demonstrably true as it is of most rulers throughout history, was profoundly disturbing when it was put into words by Macchiavelli. It is that the criterion which ought to be applied to actions by the sovereign is that of expediency. The question which a ruler should put to himself when considering whether a policy should be pursued or some action undertaken is not "Is it right?" but, "Will it work?"

It was an awkward statement to publish in an age which denied any distinction between public and private morality, and in which claims to authority rested, and had to be seen to rest, on conformity with God's commandments and with Christian morality. For, as Isaiah Berlin has pointed out, it was the premise of two moralities, not merely the advocacy of raison d'etat as a moral virtue - as the moral virtue - of princes which so shocked Macchiavelli's readers in the sixteenth century, and later. "Macchiavelli did not originate, nor did he make much use of, the notion of raison d'etat. He stressed will, boldness, address, at the expense of rules laid down by calm ragione." What was really shocking, Berlin goes on, was the 'insoluble dilemma,' the 'permanent question mark' with which he confronted posterity. "It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without the possibility of rational arbitration."16

One might think that the most familiar of these collisions - that between liberty and equality - was not unknown to the classical world. It is also hard to swallow Berlin's subsequent claim that Macchiavelli's 'cardinal achievement' opened the path to pragmatism, pluralism, toleration, compromise. Macchiavelli may have played the part of the boy in the story of the emperor's clothes, but what happened afterwards was not that people - or princes - were seen as going about naked, but that they made over to themselves the monopoly of that particular kind of tailoring trade. For, whether or not Macchiavelli is to be credited with responsibility for it, there is detectable, during and after the Renaissance, an element of self-conscious and self-justifying ruthlessness in the way in which kings and governments behaved towards their peoples and towards each other which is not particularly noticeable before, unscrupulous, cruel, and hypocritical as they undoubtedly had been. Francis I's military alliance with the Ottoman Turks against Charles V is an exemplary instance of the new morality; it may have scandalised Europe, but it did put an end to the 'myth of Christian unity' and the 'common and accepted conventions' which had applied to relationships between the countries of Europe in peace and war. "The point is not whether all these rules and conventions were observed either always or scrupulously, or from conviction; it is that there existed a set of commonly

15 L.J.Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy, C.U.P., 1981, p.23. 16 I. Berlin, "The Originality of Macchiavelli", in Against the Current, Hogarth Press, 1979, p.74.

accepted ideas, vague in parts, on the relations between political communities at peace and war which during the sixteenth century finally lost its hold in European politics."17

Raison d'etat, however, came to have its countervailing thesis in 'the rule of law', so far as the internal affairs of political communities were concerned. Kings were to be ruled by the law. This was no new thing. The Greeks had believed government by the rule of law was superior to government by men, although 'the law', in this sense, referred to moral imperatives of divine origin and binding on the community. Again, "Medieval Doctrine, while it was truly medieval, never surrendered the thought that Law is by its origin of equal rank with the State (sic) and does not depend on the State for its existence"18. Even Gierke's pronouncement is in a milder form than Bracton's, made in the thirteenth century, to the effect that 'The King shall not be subject to men, but to God and the law: since law makes the King.'

While the same principle still held good under the new regime of absolutism and raison d'etat, and coronation oaths remained unchanged, the terms of the proposition had changed. Law had been largely customary. Now, with statute ('positive') law constantly increasing in bulk, however, the question of subjection to the law was becoming subordinate to the question of who made the law. According to absolutist theory, it was obviously the king, for it was held to be self-evident (and not only by Hobbes) that without the presence of the sovereign, there would be no end to disputes. But there were complications. In England, for example, the pass had been sold in the fifteenth century, when the Lancastrian kings conceded, after repeated petitions from Parliament, that the king might either give his assent to, or veto, but not in any way add to, subtract from, or alter, the laws presented to Parliament, which it had discussed, passed, and then submitted to him.

This arrangement, by which legislative supremacy had passed to 'the King in Parliament', was adhered to by the Tudors, who found means to ensure that Parliament was subservient to them. In France, the 'parlements' which existed in Paris and in some regions claimed the right to ratify, or to appeal against, new laws and edicts. Elsewhere, the issue was much more doubtful.

However, legal obstacles to monarchic authority could be dodged. Statute was by no means the only legislative instrument. English kings had the power both to legislate by ordinance and to dispense with laws (i.e., to license individuals to do things forbidden by statute). From the sixteenth century on, French kings had - and freely exercised - powers to legislate by ordonnance, edit, declaration, or lettres patentes. What was involved was what became defined as the royal prerogative, and it was the struggle over the extent and the limits of this which dominated the internal politics of European countries for three centuries and more.

17 G.R.Elton, "Introduction", N.C.M.H., Vol. II, 1975, pp. 11-12. 18 O.Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, p. 74.

VI

"We often speak of the Renaissance state. How can we define it?"19 There are in fact three answers to Trevor-Roper's question, and he gives all three of them - but conflates them within one sentence as if they were one and the same. "We find that it is, at bottom," he goes on, "a great and expanding bureaucracy, a huge system of administrative centralisation, staffed by an ever-growing number of 'courtiers' or 'officers'."

The recourse to 'bureaucracy' as an explanatory term, tiresome as it is to find it recurring yet again, need not delay us long. As a concept and as a working description of the machinery of government in the historical past, 'bureaucracy' raises problems of the same weight as those concerning the true nature of absolutism, although they seem to be largely unrecognised. The term has been freely applied not only, as we have seen, to the idiosyncratic system of personal rule contrived by Roman emperors but also to the apparatus of servants, officials, clergy, seigneurs and courtiers employed by popes and medieval kings to attend to vaguely defined sectors of their financial, legal, diplomatic and military affairs. Now, it is pressed into service yet again as an omnibus designation for the complicated amalgam of court, councils, jurisdictions and armed forces with which Renaissance princes and absolutist monarchs equipped themselves. Without presuming to legislate about usage, or, for that matter, accepting his analysis, it seems best to reserve the word for modern bureaucracy of the kind identified in Max Weber's analytical account. The word itself does not make its appearance until the eighteenth century, at the very earliest. One useful mark by which the distinction may be registered, and one which is directly relevant to the present discussion of administration, is the adoption under bureaucracy proper of impersonal (not necessarily impartial or 'objective') criteria in recruitment and promotion in place of appointment to public office as a matter of birthright, privilege, patronage or purchase.

Both the political theory and the administrative practices of the sixteenth century are better regarded as marking a stage in a more comprehensive process, by which constitutional structures, political institutions, and administrative arrangements were adapted or invented to accord with new aspirations, new routines of everyday social and economic life, new relationships of command and dependency. It is a process not easy to define, certainly not by terms like 'bureaucracy' and 'absolutism,' which mask rather than account for it.

Power and authority, in becoming attached, in principle, to a single ruler had become detached from possessions (especially of land), suffrage (especially of the nobility), and sanction (especially by the Church). Power and authority could thus (again, in principle) be allocated by the sovereign, delegated to office-holders and so dispersed throughout the realm. The machinery of government of the monarchist state was a great chain of command - not of duties, the cement of 'feudalism' - originating in the sovereign and delegated as and when he saw fit downwards and outwards through members of his court and his household as well as councils, secretaries, ministers, courts of law, and their officials and subordinate officers.

19 H.R.Trevor-Roper, "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century", Past and Present, no.16, 1955.

This is the point at which the second of the three answers contained in Trevor-Roper's response to his own question - centralisation - comes in. And this, I'm afraid, calls for another bout of conceptual disentangling.

One thing on which virtually all historians seem to be agreed (taking their cue from Tocqueville) is that all the changes through which the monarchies of the 'ancien regime' passed from c.1500 to c.1800, whatever form they took, were moves in the direction of increased centralisation.20 But 'centralisation' in fact turns out to be a concept just as amorphous, slippery, or simply inappropriate in this period and in this connection as 'bureaucracy.' True, monarchic rule did become increasingly salient as the international federations of church authorities and the regional and local centres of landowner magnate power were demolished or reduced, medieval relics as these were, but other constellations of power and authority soon replaced them.

What undoubtedly did happen, and fairly soon - in the sixteenth century, in fact - was that the preconditions for the inner cohesion and centralised government of the modern, post-1800, state were established by the firming of boundaries between countries and the agglomeration of monarchic possessions into coherent territorial dominions, a development which, after an initial spurt, was held in suspension for two hundred years, until the entry of Prussia and Russia into the arena of war and diplomacy. The motor of this development was increasing international rivalry, a rivalry which found its first expression in display and war, and then also in diplomacy and in imperialist and mercantilist policies. In the end, centralisation did occur, and this did mean bureaucracy - but only after the demise of monarchism. Bureaucracy as we know it (i.e., what Weber calls 'modern' bureaucracy), certainly did not exist in the sixteenth century or in the seventeenth; even the large-scale administrative reconstruction carried through by the Kings of Prussia in the eighteenth century hardly warrants the designation of bureaucracy it has often been accorded. Although the seed - the concept of omniscient and omnicompetent, as well as omnipotent, sovereign, power - was sown early in the eighteenth century by Frederick William of Prussia and his son, the true beginnings of centralised administrative control and therefore of modern bureaucracy had to await the aftermath of the French Revolution.

It took fully three hundred years for the sovereignty of the impersonal state to emerge into full meaningfulness out of the claims and counter-claims of 'absolutist' monarchy and political and economic interests. Until then, it is almost as if the old conflicts of king v. barons and king v. church had been translated into one of king, or 'court', v. interests, or 'country.' The political situation within most countries at the beginning of the sixteenth century (after the extinction of all but one of the Italian republics) had much in common, but thereafter became increasingly diversified until well into the nineteenth century. For

20 The simplest way of making clear the kind of problem I have in mind is to refer to a collection of essays, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. C.Tilly, (Princeton Univ. Pr. 1975), the product of several years' work, individually and in concert, by a group of distinguished American and European historians and political scientists. The opening essay, by the editor Charles Tilly, contains this sentence: "The state-makers only imposed their wills on the populace through centuries of ruthless effort." The pronouncement epitomises an approach which not only dominates his own essay but embodies the general tenor of the whole collection.

the whole early modern period (from the last quarter of the fifteenth century to the last quarter of the eighteenth), the situation in major political units of German like France, most European states, and England, is best envisaged as a gradual polarisation of social, political and economic forces and resources: one pole represented by the king and his ministers and the enormous powers of patronage which control over official appointments gave them; and its polar opposite consisting of landed interests, privileged groups, innumerable corporations and ad hoc consortia of political and economic interests.

What is truly remarkable about countries like France and England during the three hundred years of monarchist rule, compared with what prevailed afterwards, is how little control their rulers seemed able to exercise over people and events within their boundaries. When the crunch came, as it did in swift and wholesale fashion in France during the 1790's, or more slowly and piecemeal in England after the American War of Independence, centralisation and bureaucracy followed the suppression of one or other of the two contending sides: the royal court and all it stood for in France and England, the 'country' in Prussia and, for a time, other European states.

On the other hand, what is of course discernible from the early sixteenth century on is the gradual enlargement of the scope of government activity, if not the control it exercised. The part played by government was extended in three directions:-

First, in accretions of power and authority by a few individuals, groups, institutions, or corporate bodies in payment for services rendered or promised. The sale of monopolies and patents (or grants of them in return for a share in the proceeds) and the sale of titles and offices are only the more obvious of the constant bargaining and continually re-negotiated contractual relationship between monarchy and particular interests - individual, collective and corporate.

Second (a reflection of the first), it shows up in the absorption of politics into the central area of confrontation between monarchy and particular interests - usually, but not always, different from those involved in the first set.

Lastly, there is a notable expansion not so much of the responsibility of government for collective action, military, diplomatic and economic, vis-a-vis other countries, for that had always been there, as of the variety and importance of the activities carried on under those headings.

VII

There is, fortunately, a way out of the confusion sown by talk of bureaucracy and centralisation - and a clue to it is contained in Trevor-Roper' own reference to the 'ever-growing number' of courtiers or officers.

Disseminating power and authority through the many chains of command of an administrative system multiplies that power and authority. But the multiplier effect is something we tend to lose sight of. There are elements of deception and of self-deception about this. It is the concentration and consolidation of power, or authority, or both, into

the hands of a single person or a small group which is the target of criticism or the object of fear or suspicion. Hence the talk of 'centralisation' and 'bureaucracy.' But such concentration would be pointless and impotent without the ability to transmit commands and directives through lieutenants, agents, messengers and delegates. As the concentration increases, so is the system of subordinate officers enlarged; and since the specific portion of power and authority (the 'powers') allocated to each lieutenant and agent is subject to the original limitation, further division and subdivision become necessary. All this is commonplace enough, but what escapes notice is that, in the process, power is multiplied.

This special kind of socio-political myopia perhaps owes something - along with much else - to our Roman inheritance. Imperium, to repeat what was spelled out earlier, was conceived of as a single entity which could be, and was, split into distinct pieces, each of which carried a specific, almost measurable, portion of the total. All the different pieces, when put together, could represent no more - as they could assuredly represent no less - than the authority and command over power which, in the earliest days, were vested in two praetors, and then two consuls, for a year.

During the thousand-year interval since the fall of Rome, the exigencies - technical, economic, political and social - of medieval life, had obstructed the development of extended hierarchical systems of power and authority in economic and political (though not ecclesiastical) affairs. Now, when at long last the multiplier effect could come into fuller force, sovereignty took on the deceptive cloak of imperium. It is at this point that deception is added to what I have called the myopia of self-deception. For, as Niklas Luhmann - who has made this particular theme his own - points out, the multiplication of power has been accompanied by (and, to a large extent, accomplished through) such political and administrative devices as "representation, transfer or delegation, which quite innocently suggest that the power which is being exercised remains what it was, while they actually multiply its effectiveness."21

A second multiplier enters in when sophistication about the uses of power and influence reaches the point at which positions of derived power and authority are seen to be useable as resources of personal power.

The total power in any social system can never be treated as constant: "A zero-sum premise ... lies at the root of hierarchic fictions of unity, representation, and of many variants of classical political theory, especially of the concepts of strategy, and ideas about the balance of power embodied in them. The zero-sum premise is, however, unreal - or, rather, can only be realised approximately by means of quite specific institutional procedures ... To apply power to the reinforcement of power amplifies the total power available in a social system, by means of a sort of relay technique. It is possible for a small amount of power to control a great deal of power, and thus to exercise it at will, provided that there is provision for reflexive institutional arrangements. This means that the ability to magnify power is not something confined to the head of a hierarchy."22

21 N.Luhmann, "Reflexive Mechanismen", Soziale Welt, Vol. 17, 1966. p.7. 22 ibid.

As soon as this situation becomes actual and apparent, opportunism comes into play.23 Office-holders may decide to serve their own interests, or those of people other than their official superiors. They find that they may do so by concealing or distorting the information on which their superiors, and other parts of the system, depend, or by making false promises about their future actions, or by taking advantage of information to which they are privy, and so on. In this way, an administrative organisation, while never ceasing to be tributary to its constitutionally designated chief - be it king, representative assembly, the community of the people, or else company chairman or chief executive, board of directors, shareholders, membership, and so on - may expropriate (embezzle) more and more of his, or its, power and authority. Information is the key.

VIII

A second clue to an understanding of what lies concealed under the 'centralisation' and 'bureaucracy' of the monarchist state is provided later in the same essay by Trevor-Roper, but it is best prefaced by a sidelong reference to what Clifford Geertz has to say about what I have called 'the politics of magnificence.' He begins the last chapter of his study of pre-conquest Balinese politics, of which the focal point is what he labels "the ordering force of display, regard and drama", by observing that the 'master-noun' of political discourse: the state: derives from three etymological roots. They are status, pomp, and statecraft.

"Each of the leading notions of what the state 'is' that has developed in the West since the sixteenth century - monopolist of violence within a territory, executive committee of the ruling class, delegated agent of the popular will, pragmatic device for conciliating interests - has had its own sort of difficulty assimilating the fact that this force" ('the ordering force of display, regard and drama') "exists. None has produced a workable account of its nature. Those dimensions of authority not easily reducible to a command and obedience conception of political life have been left to drift in an indefinite world of excrescenses, mysteries, fictions, and decorations. And the connection between what Bagehot called the dignified parts of government and the efficient ones has been systematically misconceived."24

The kings and princes of the Renaissance and, later, the absolutist state, set out as a matter of conscious policy to clothe themselves in pomp and circumstance. Cities turned themselves into enormous stages for the ceremonial entries of princes and their consorts; elaborate processions marked the royal as well as the Christian calendar; spectacular pageants celebrated royal accessions, marriages and births. "The most original and complex essay in the pageant medium ever presented in England,"25 was devised by the City of London to celebrate the arrival of the Prince of Wales' bride, Katherine of Aragon, in 1501. Tournaments, which had begun as competitive displays of martial arts, became staged occasions for royalty (fatally, in one case); "The growth in theatricality.... reflected rather the ability of the form to respond both to the evolution of the aristocrat as courtier

23 See O.E.Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies, Free Press, 1975, p.7. 24 C.Geertz, Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton Univ. Pr., 1980, pp. 121-2. 25 S.Anglo, Spectacles, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy, O.U.P., 1969, p. 58.

and to the demands of nationalistic chivalries, which focused the loyalties of knights on the ruling dynasty, be it Valois, Hapsburg or Tudor."26 It was the same everywhere in western Europe, the component elements becoming as standardised as the topoi of court poetry: "we encounter the same archways across city streets, assemblages of peasants, castles, genealogical trees, tabernacles, mountains, fountains and gardens, and the same groups of allegorical personages."27

In terms of the conception of the Machtstaat which western European countries have inherited (and grossed up) from the nineteenth century, the extent of the power and authority exercised by absolutist monarchs was fairly limited, and their conception of sovereignty inherently flawed. What they did achieve is an image of statehood more complete, more potent - and more openly admired - than anything that has followed. It was the blatant contrast between image and reality that also made the claim to sovereignty more openly challenged when religious difference was added to that between sovereignty and interests - first in Holland and France, then in Germany and England.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the whole monarchist period is the revival of monarchist claims after the disasters of the Wars of Religion and the Fronde in France, the Thirty Years War in Germany, and the Great Rebellion in England. Once again, the operative factor was imagery, but this time it was the image of the monarch that became the focus of display and celebration.

Elizabeth of England cannot be said to have pioneered the practice, but her own use of portraiture, her 'royal progresses' and sheer sense of occasion makes her the true exemplar of what royalty was meant to represent. The annual celebration of the anniversary of her accession, which included the tilt-yard displays of manhood by courtiers, the celebrations, theatricalities, and feasts over the twelve days of Christmas, and the almost devotional panegyrics addressed to 'Gloriana' by poets, playwrights, clergymen and courtiers all have the appearance of simply acknowledging her own superlative qualities. The 'fabrication' of Louis XIV, the 'Sun-King' was a much more extravagant and organised business. (The patronage system which was responsible for most of the 'fabric' was organised by ministers, the most successful being the war-minister, Louvois). It was also more imitable; Versailles was copied, Louis' pose in the portraits imitated, the court rituals replicated in Spain, Russia, Austria and Sweden.28

It is the imagery, the theatricality, of the monarchist state, which makes its ethos, and the kind of organisation-building to which it leant itself, sui generis. This makes it misleading, for example, to treat the 'machinery of government' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in abstraction from the court. The court was incomparably bigger and more elaborate than anything that had gone before or that came later.

Trevor-Roper has provided a portrait of Renaissance absolutism which conveys something of its strength and magnificence - almost, its aesthetic quality. Having defined "the

26 R. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650, Boydell & Brewer, 1984, p. 12. 27 S.Anglo, op. cit., p. 6. 28 See P.Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Yale Univ. Pr., 1992.

Renaissance state" as a "huge system of administrative centralisation, staffed by an ever-growing multitude of 'courtiers' or 'officers'", he continues:

"The 'officers' are familiar enough to us as a social type. We think of the great Tudor ministers in England, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the two Cecils; or of the latrados of Spain, Cardinal Ximenez, the two Granvilles, Francisco de los Cobos, Antonio Perez; and we see their common character: they are formidable administrators, macchiavellian diplomats, cultivated patrons of arts and letters, magnificent builders of palaces and colleges, greedy collectors of statues and pictures, books and bindings. For of course these men, as royal servants, imitated their masters, in lavishness as in other matters. But what is significant about the sixteenth century is not merely the magnificence of these great 'officers', it is the number - the ever-growing number - of lesser officials who also, on their lesser scale, accepted the standards and copied the tastes of their masters. For all through the century the number of officers was growing. Princes needed them, more and more, to staff their councils and courts, their new special or permanent tribunals which were the means of governing new territories and centralising the government of old. It was for this reason that the Renaissance Princes and their great ministers founded all those schools and colleges. For it was not to produce scholars, or to advance learning or science, that old colleges were reorganized or new founded by Cardinal Ximenez or Cardinal Wolsey, by Henry VIII of England or John III of Portugal, or Francis I of France. The new learning, it is notorious, grew up outside the colleges and universities, not in them. The function of the new foundations was to satisfy the royal demand for officers - officers to man the new royal bureaucracies - and, at the same time, the public demand for office: office which was the means to wealth and power and the gratification of lavish, competitive tastes."29

This was the broad front of the Renaissance and absolutist court. But the court was much more, and somewhat less, than an apparatus of government, bureaucratic or not. Many office-holders had no place at court, or even near it. The king and his council, not the court, had charge of government. On the other hand, while Parliament, Estates General, parlements and Cortes were never reckoned to be part of the court or of the administration, they were at times much concerned with government.

The achievement of monarchism lay in the reduction and eventual obliteration of all objects of political loyalty other than the crown. This purpose was realised - all but - in England under the Tudors and in most other kingdoms and principalities of Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. It was attendance on the king that placed men and women at the centre of affairs. In England, as G.R.Elton remarks, "the politics of the sixteenth century - personal or national, principled or merely ambitious - of necessity 'happened' in the confines of the Court."30 Moreover, as he goes on to say, the court was also the centre of social and cultural life and, to a large extent, of ecclesiastical and economic affairs. Worldly advancement was almost entirely dependent on royal favour, even if at one or more removes. All appointments to office over the king's signature or

29 H.R.Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p.95. 30 G.R.Elton, "Tudor Government: The Points of Contact. III, The Court", Proc. Royal Historical Society 19....,p.213.

seal, and by far the largest number of offices were contained, still, within the royal household.

The patrimonial organisation of monarchist government was altogether different from what we know as the fully-fledged bureaucracy of the modern state. It was a much more arbitrary affair. The powers and the kind of derived authority attached to an office might be designated with great precision or with much verbal formality, but they were far more negotiable and elastic; they were also capable of being trumped by the powers conferred on some newly designated functionary. When ministers fell, their subordinates could go out of office with them, and although wholesale changes were rare, and the advantages of continuity perceived and appreciated, the threat was always there, and necessarily so, for monarchist patrimonial organisation in its creation, maintenance and expansion, was founded on patronage.

Ministers and office-holders were rarely salaried - or, if so, only in what was regarded as a trivial sense. They were paid, or paid themselves, out of the profits to which their office gave them entitlement. These profits were fees and fines paid into courts of law; sums exacted for favours; personal returns which came to them from public money they invested on their own behalf in the interval between receiving it and paying it into the treasury; payments made to them for awarding contracts, for appointments - for everything, in short, for which their powers to act 'in the king's name' had been granted.

In this, office-holders at all levels could plead in their defense, if necessary (but it never was), that they had but conformed to the best, the sovereign, model of conduct. For the king himself had recourse to the same means for increasing revenue beyond customary and designated taxes.

There was a price to be paid for internal pacification and the assumption of sovereignty. The monarchs of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries, armed with their new-found sovereignty and both upheld and guided by raison d'etat though they were, were confronted by overriding needs for more money, needs which appeared to put their sovereignty and the interests of their subjects inevitably and constantly at odds with each other. Not only did it take an inordinately long time for kings to establish their supremacy. The foreign wars generated by international rivalry seemed to develop a momentum of their own; Francis I and Maximilian competed in the spoliation of Italy, and even Henry VIII attempted to emulate his ancestors' exploits in France (with rather ignominious results). What is more, the next generation of rulers of the countries had to turn, once again, to repel the Turks; most of the fighting took place at sea, and "Between 1534 and 1573" (just after Lepanto) "naval armaments tripled, even by conservative estimates."31

Equipping and paying armies and navies never cost less than a fifth of the revenue of any state, even when the country was at peace; during wars it could amount to four-fifths. And the three centuries usually labeled absolutist were centuries of almost incessant warfare. Moreover, some time during the fifteenth century, the costs involved in making war had begun to rise very sharply. When Louis XII was preparing the invasion of Milan in 1499

31 F.Braudel, The Mediterranean, p.841.

he asked Trivulzio, a Milanese exile whom he had appointed to command his forces, how he could ensure success; "Most gracious king,' Trivulzio replied, "three things are necessary: money, more money and still more money."

At the same time, war became much less rewarding, either in the crude terms of loot, which had in former times at least been hoped for, or in the slightly less crude terms of commercial advantage, which did become attractive in the eighteenth century. Philip II of Spain, which was the richest of all European countries, 'went bankrupt' in 1557, and Henry II of France was not much better off; Elizabeth of England managed comparatively well, but even so had to sell estates of her own to make good the unpaid debts of Henry of Navarre.

It was their desperate need for money that both exacerbated dissension between monarchs and their subjects and fostered the growth of interest groups, and of combinations of interest groups, among the latter. Even on the rare occasions when Parliament or comparable assemblies were persuaded to vote new taxes, the problem remained of how to collect them. In France and Spain the problem was eased politically, though in the long run hardly solved, by a system which exacted the largest proportion of regular taxes from those least able to resist - which also meant least able to pay - i.e., the peasantry. It was in England, where the poorest were exempt from direct taxation, that resistance was strongest.