16th century, provoked both by rapid demographic growth and the advent of American bullion and trade, eased credit for European princes, and allowed great increases in outlay without a correspondingly sound expansion of the fiscal system, although there was a general intensification of taxation: this was the golden age of the South German financiers. There was a steady growth of bureaucratic administration, but it was typically everywhere prey to colonization by grandee houses competing for the political privileges and economic profits of office, and commanding parasitic clientages of lesser nobles who were infiltrated into the State apparatus and formed rival patronage networks within it: a modernized version of the late mediaeval retainer system and its conflicts. Factional feuds between great families, each with a segment of the State machine at their behest, and often a solid regional base within a tenuously unified country, constantly occupied the front of the political stage.7 In England, the virulent Dudley/Seymour and Leicester/Cecil rivalries, in France the murderous three-cornered war between the Guise, Montmorency and Bourbon lineages, in Spain the brutal backstairs struggle for power between the Alva and Eboli groups, were a keynote of the time. The Western aristocracies had begun to acquire university education and the cultural fluency hitherto reserved for clerics:8 they were by no means yet demilitarized in their private life, even in England, let alone France, Italy or Spain. The reigning monarchs generally had to reckon with their magnates as an independent force, to be accorded the positions appropriate to their rank: the traces of a symmetrical mediaeval pyramid were still visible in the approaches to the sovereign. It was only in the second half of the century that the first theorists of Absolutism started to propagate divine right conceptions that elevated royal power totally above the limited and reciprocal fealty of mediaeval kingly suzerainty. Bodin was the first and most rigorous of them. But the 16th century closed in the major countries without the accomplished form of Absolutism in existence anywhere: even in Spain, Philip II was impotent to send troops across the border into Aragon without the permission of its lords.
Indeed, the very term ‘Absolutism’ was a misnomer. No Western monarchy ever enjoyed an absolute power over its subjects, in the sense of an untrammelled despotism.9 All were limited, even at the height of their prerogatives, by the complex of conceptions designated ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ law. Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, which dominated European political thought for a century, eloquently embodies these contradictions of Absolutism. For Bodin was the first thinker systematically and resolutely to break with the mediaeval conception of authority as the exercise of traditional justice, and to formulate the modern idea of political power as the sovereign capacity to create new laws, and impose unquestioning obedience to them. ‘The principal mark of sovereign majesty and absolute power is essentially the right to impose laws on subjects generally without their consent. . . . There is indeed a distinction between justice and law, for the one merely implies equity, while the other implies command. Law is nothing other than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his power.’10 Yet while enunciating these revolutionary axioms, Bodin simultaneously upheld the most conservative feudal maxims limiting the basic fiscal and economic rights of rulers over their subjects. ‘It is not within the competence of any prince in the world to levy taxes at will on his people, or seize the goods of another arbitrarily’; for ‘since the sovereign prince has no power to transgress the laws of nature, which God – whose image he is on earth – has ordained, he cannot take the property of another without a just and reasonable cause.’11 Bodin’s passionate exegesis of the novel idea of sovereignty was thus combined with a call for the reinvigoration of the fief system for military service, and a reaffirmation of the value of Estates: ‘The sovereignty of a monarch is no way altered or diminished by the existence of Estates; on the contrary, his majesty is the greater and more illustrious when his people acknowledge him as sovereign, even if in such assemblies princes, not wanting to antagonize their subjects, grant and permit many things to which they would not have consented without the requests, prayers and just complaints of their people. . . .’12 Nothing reveals more clearly the real nature of Absolute Monarchy in the later Renaissance than this authoritative theorization of it. For the practice of Absolutism corresponded to Bodin’s theory of it. No Absolutist State could ever dispose at will of the liberty or landed property of the nobility itself, or the bourgeoisie, in the fashion of the Asian tyrannies coeval with them. Nor did they ever achieve any complete administrative centralization or juridical unification; corporative particularisms and regional heterogeneities inherited from the mediaeval epoch marked the Ancien Régimes down to their ultimate overthrow. Absolute monarchy in the West was thus, in fact, always doubly limited: by the persistence of traditional political bodies below it and the presence of an overarching moral law above it. In other words, the sway of Absolutism ultimately operated within the necessary bounds of the class whose interests it secured. Sharp conflicts between the two were to break out as the dismantling of many familiar noble landmarks by the monarchy proceeded in the next century. But throughout them, it should be remembered that just as no absolute power was ever exercised by the Absolutist State of the West, no struggle between these States and their aristocracies could ever be absolute either. The social unity of the two determined the terrain and temporality of the political contradictions between them. These, however, were to have their own historical importance.
The next hundred years witnessed the full emplacement of the Absolutist State, in a century of agrarian and demographic depression and downward-drifting prices. It was now that the effects of the ‘military revolution’ made themselves decisively felt. Armies rapidly multiplied in size, becoming astronomically expensive, in a series of ceaselessly expanding wars. Tilly’s operations were not so much larger than those of Alva; they were dwarfed by those of Turenne. The cost of these massive military machines created acute revenue crises for the Absolutist States. Tax pressures on the masses generally intensified. Simultaneously, the sale of public offices and honours now became a central financial expedient for all monarchies, and was systematized in a way that it had not been in the previous century. The result was to integrate a growing number of arriviste bourgeois into the columns of State functionaries, which became increasingly professionalized, and to reorganize the links between the nobility and the State apparatus itself.
For the sale of offices was not merely an economic device to raise revenue from the propertied classes. It also served a political function: by making the acquisition of bureaucratic position a market transaction, and vesting ownership of it with rights of inheritance, sale of offices blocked the formation of grandee clientage systems within the State dependent not on impersonal cash equivalents, but on the personal connections and prestige of a great lord and his house. Richelieu stressed in his Testament the critical ‘sterilizing’ role of the paulette in putting the whole administrative system beyond the reach of tentacular aristocratic lineages like that of the House of Guise. Of course, one parasitism was only exchanged for another: instead of patronage, venality. But the mediation of the market was a safer one for the monarchy than that of the magnates: the Parisian financial syndicates who advanced loans to the State, farmed taxes and bought up offices in the 17th century were much less dangerous to French Absolutism than the provincial dynasties of the 16th, who not only had sections of the royal administration beholden to them, but could field their own armed troops as well. The augmented bureaucratization of office in its turn produced new types of ruling administrators, normally recruited from the nobility and expecting the conventional benefits of office, but imbued with a rigorous respect for the State as such and a fierce determination to uphold its long-term interests against short-sighted cabals of ambitious or disaffected grandees. These were the austere reforming Ministers of the 17th century monarchies, essentially civilian functionaries, with no autonomous regional or military base, directing the affairs of State from their cabinets: Oxenstierna, Laud, Richelieu, Colbert or Olivares. (The complementary type in the new era was the feckless personal intimate of the reigning sovereign, the válido of whom Spain was to be so prodigal, from Lerma to Godoy; Mazarin was a strange mixture of the two.) It was these generations which extended and codified the practices of bilateral 16th century diplomacy into a multilateral international system, of which the Treaty of Westphalia was the founding charter, and the magnified scope of the wars of the 17th century the material crucible.
Escalation of war, bureaucratization of office, intensification of taxation, erosion of clientage, all led in the
