It was therefore vital to preserve the European balance, if need be by active intervention; and this ‘continental commitment’ continued until the early seventeenth century, at least in a personal form, for many English troops stayed on when the expeditionary force was merged into the army of the United Provinces in 1594.
In performing the twin function of checking Philip II’s designs on land and harassing his empire at sea, the English made their own contribution to the maintenance of Europe’s political plurality. But the strain of supporting 8,000 men abroad was immense. In 1586 monies sent to the Netherlands totalled over £100,000, in 1587 £175,000, each being about half of the entire outgoings for the year; in the Armada year, allocations to the fleet exceeded £150,000. Consequently, Elizabeth’s annual expenditures in the late 1580s were between two and three times those of the early 1580s. During the next decade the crown spent over £350,000 each year, and the Irish campaign brought the annual average to over £500,000 in the queen’s last four years.68 Try as it might to raise funds from other sources – such as the selling of crown lands, and of monopolies – the government had no alternative but to summon the Commons on repeated occasions and plead for extra grants. That these (totalling some £2 million) were given, and that the English government neither declared itself bankrupt nor failed to pay its troops, was testimony to the skill and prudence of the monarch and her councillors; but the war years had tested the entire system, left debts to the first Stuart king, and placed him and his successor in a position of dependence upon a mistrustful Commons and a cautious London money market.69
There is no space in this story to examine the spiralling conflict between crown and Parliament which was to dominate English politics for the four decades after 1603, in which finance was to play the central part.70 The inept and occasional interventions by English forces in the great European struggle during the 1620s, although very expensive to mount, had little effect upon the course of the Thirty Years War. The population, trade, overseas colonies, and general wealth of England grew in this period, but none of this could provide a sure basis for state power without domestic harmony; indeed, the quarrels over such taxes as Ship Money – which in theory could have enhanced the nation’s armed strength – were soon to lead crown and Parliament into a civil war which would cripple England as a factor in European politics for much of the 1640s. When England did re-emerge, it was to challenge the Dutch in a fierce commercial war (1652–4), which, whatever the aims of each belligerent, had little to do with the general European balance.
Cromwell’s England of the 1650s could, however, play a Great Power role more successfully than any previous government. His New Model Army, which emerged from the civil war, had at last closed the gap that traditionally existed between English troops and their European counterparts. Organized and trained on modern lines established by Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus, hardened by years of conflict, well disciplined, and (usually) paid regularly, the English army could be thrown into the European balance with some effect, as was evident in its defeat of Spanish forces at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. Furthermore, the Commonwealth navy was, if anything, even more advanced for the age. Favoured by the Commons because it had generally declared against Charles I during the civil war, the fleet underwent a renaissance in the later 1640s: its size was more than doubled from thirty-nine vessels (1649) to eighty (1651), wages and conditions were improved, dockyard and logistical support were bettered, and the funds for all this regularly voted by a House of Commons which believed that profit and power went hand in hand.71 This was just as well, because in its first war against the Dutch the navy was taking on an equally formidable force commanded by leaders – Tromp and de Ruyter – who were as good as Blake and Monk. When the service was unleashed upon the Spanish Empire after 1655, it was not surprising that it scored successes: taking Acadia (Nova Scotia) and, after a fiasco at Hispaniola, Jamaica; seizing part of the Spanish treasure fleet in 1656; blockading Cádiz and destroying the flota in Santa Cruz in 1657.
Yet, while these English actions finally tilted the balance and forced Spain to end its war with France in 1659, this was not achieved without domestic strains. The profitable Spanish trade was lost to the neutral Dutch in these years after 1655, and enemy privateers reaped a rich harvest of English merchant ships along the Atlantic and Mediterranean routes. Above all, paying for an army of up to 70,000 men and a large navy was a costly business; one estimate suggests that out of a total government expenditure of £2,878,000 in 1657, over £1,900,000 went on the army and £742,000 on the navy.72 Taxes were imposed, and efficiently extorted, at an unprecedented level, yet they were never enough for a government which was spending ‘four times as much as had been thought intolerable under Charles I’ before the English Revolution.73 Debts steadily rose, and the pay of soldiers and sailors was in arrears. These few years of the Spanish war undoubtedly increased the public dislike of Cromwell’s rule and caused the majority of the merchant classes to plead for peace. It was scarcely the case, of course, that England was altogether ruined by this conflict – although it no doubt would have been had it engaged in Great Power struggles as long as Spain. The growth of England’s inland and overseas commerce, plus the profits from the colonies and shipping, were starting to provide a solid economic foundation upon which governments in London could rely in the event of another war; and precisely because England – together with the United Provinces of the Netherlands – had developed an efficient market economy, it achieved the rare feat of combining a rising standard of living with a growing population.74 Yet it still remained vital to preserve the proper balance between the country’s military and naval effort on the one hand and the encouragement of the national wealth on the other; by the end of the Protectorate, that balance had become a little too precarious.
This crucial lesson in statecraft emerges the more clearly if one compares England’s rise with that of the other ‘flank’ power, Sweden.75 Throughout the sixteenth century, the prospects for the northern kingdom looked poor. Hemmed in by Lübeck and (especially) by Denmark from free egress to western Europe, engaged in a succession of struggles on its eastern flank with Russia, and repeatedly distracted by its relationship with Poland, Sweden had enough to do simply to maintain itself; indeed, its severe defeat by Denmark in the war of 1611–13 hinted that decline rather than expansion would be the country’s fate. In addition, it had suffered from internal fissures, which were constitutional rather than religious, and had resulted in confirming the extensive privileges of the nobility. But Sweden’s greatest weakness was its economic base. Much of its extensive territory was Arctic waste, or forest. The scattered peasantry, largely self-sufficient, formed 95 per cent of a total population of some 900,000; with Finland, about a million and a quarter – less than many of the Italian states. There were few towns and little industry; a ‘middle class’ was hardly to be detected; and the barter of goods and services was still the major form of exchange. Militarily and economically, therefore, Sweden was a mere pigmy when the youthful Gustavus Adolphus succeeded to the throne in 1611.
Two factors, one external, one internal, aided Sweden’s swift growth from these unpromising foundations. The first was foreign entrepreneurs, in particular the Dutch but also Germans and Walloons, for whom Sweden was a promising ‘undeveloped’ land, rich in raw materials such as timber and iron and copper ores. The most famous of these foreign entrepreneurs, Louis de Geer, not only sold finished products to the Swedes and bought the raw ores from them; he also, over time, created timber mills, foundries, and factories, made loans to the king, and drew Sweden into the mercantile ‘world system’ based chiefly upon Amsterdam. Soon the country became the greatest producer of iron and copper in Europe, and these exports brought in the foreign currency which would soon help to pay for the armed forces. In addition, Sweden became self-sufficient in armaments, a rare feat, thanks again to foreign investment and expertise.
