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. For the proposal of a privileged legal statute in landed property for the titled nobility, see Holdsworth, A History of English Law, IV, pp. 450–543.
12. Joel Hurstfield, ‘Was there a Tudor Despotism after all?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1967, pp. 83–108, effectively criticizes the apologetic anachronisms in which much writing on the period is still couched. Hurstfield stresses the real thrust behind the Statute of Proclamations, the Treason Acts, and the official censorship and propaganda of the reign. The once received notion that the Tudor monarchy was not a form of Absolutism is given short shrift by Mousnier, ‘Quelques Problèmes Concernant La Monarchie Absolue’, pp. 21–6. Henry’s attitude to Parliament is well conveyed bv Scarisbricke, Henry VIII, pp. 653–4.
13. By the end of the reign, two-thirds of the monastic domains had been alienated; income from sales of church lands averaged 30 per cent above rents from those retained. See F. Dietz, English Government Finance 1485–1558, London 1964, pp. 147, 149, 158, 214.
14. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 265–6.
15. The transition from the early mediaeval baronage to the late mediaeval peerage, and the attendant evolution of knightage into a gentry, are traced by N. Denholm-Young, ‘En Remontant le Passé de l’Aristocratie Anglaise: le Moyen Age’, Annales, May 1937, pp. 257–69. (The title ‘baron’ itself acquired a new meaning as a patented rank in the late 14th century, distinct from its earlier use.) The consolidation of the peerage system is analyzed by K. B. Macfarlane, ‘The English Nobility in the Later Middle Ages’, XIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Vienna 1965, Rapports I, pp. 337–45, who stresses its novelty and discontinuity.
16. It should be borne in mind that the loi de dérogeance was itself a late Renaissance creation in France, which only dates from 1560. Such a legal measure was unnecessary as long as the function of the nobility was unambiguously military; like the graded titles themselves, it was a reaction to a new social mobility.
17. The government could not rely on the loyalty of the shire levies in this crisis: W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, London 1968, p. 467.
