Absolutism
Among European states of the High Renaissance, the republic of Venice
provided the only important exception to princely rule. Following the
court of Burgundy, where chivalric ideals vied with the self-indulgence
of feast, joust, and hunt, Charles V, Francis I, and Henry VIII acted
out the rites of kingship in sumptuous courts. Enormous Poland,
particularly during the reign of Sigismund I (1506–48), and the
miniature realms of Germany and Italy experienced the same type of
regime and subscribed to the same enduring values that were to determine
the principles of absolute monarchy. Appeal to God justified the
valuable rights that the kings of France and Spain enjoyed over their
churches and added sanction to hereditary right and constitutional
authority. Henry VIII moved further when he broke with Rome and took to
himself complete sovereignty.
Rebellion was always a threat. The skill of Elizabeth I (1558–1603)
helped prevent England being torn apart by Roman Catholic and Puritan
factions. Philip II (1555–98) failed to repress the continuing rebellion
of what became a new state formed out of the northern Burgundian
provinces. Neither Charles IX (1560–74) nor Henry III (1574–89) could
stop the civil wars in which the Huguenots created an unassailable state
within France. The failure of Maximilian I (1493–1519) to implement
reforms had left the empire in poor shape to withstand the religious and
political challenges of the Reformation. Such power as Charles V
(1519–56) enjoyed in Germany was never enough to do more than contain
schism within the bounds confirmed by the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555.
Most of Hungary had been lost after the Turkish victory at Mohács in
1526. Imperial authority waned further under Maximilian II (1564–76) and
Rudolf II (1576–1612). The terms of Augsburg were flouted as further
church lands were secularized and Calvinism gained adherents, some in
restless Bohemia. In these ways the stage was set for the subsequent
wars and political developments.
With the tendency, characteristic of the Renaissance period, for
sovereigns to enlarge their authority and assume new rights in justice
and finance, went larger revenues, credit, and patronage. Princes fought
with as little regard for economic consequences as their medieval
precursors had shown. Ominously, the Italian wars had become part of a
larger conflict, centring on the dynastic ambitions of the houses of
Habsburg and Valois; similarly, the Reformation led to the formation of
alliances whose objectives were not religious. The scale and expertise
of diplomacy grew with the pretensions of sovereignty. The professional
diplomat and permanent embassy, the regular soldier and standing army,
served princes still generally free to act in their traditional spheres.
But beyond them, in finance and government, what would be the balance of
powers? From the answer to this question will come definition of the
absolutism that is commonly seen as characteristic of the age.
The authority of a sovereign was exercised in a society of orders and
corporations, each having duties and privileges. St. Paul’s image of the
Christian body was not difficult for a 17th-century European to
understand; the organic society was a commonplace of political debate.
The orders, as represented in estates or diets, were, first, the clergy;
second, the nobility (represented with the lords spiritual in the
English House of Lords); and, third, commoners. There were variations:
upper and lower nobles were sometimes divided; certain towns represented
the Third Estate, as in the Castilian Cortes; in Sweden, uniquely, there
was an estate of peasants, whose successful effort to maintain their
privilege was one component of Queen Christina’s crisis of 1650. When,
as in the 16th century, such institutions flourished, estates were held
to represent not the whole population as individuals but the important
elements—the “political nation.” Even then the nobility tended to
dominate. Their claim to represent all who dwelled on their estates was
sounder in law and popular understanding than may appear to those
accustomed to the idea of individual political rights.
In the empire, the estates were influential because they controlled
the purse. Wherever monarchy was weak in relation to local elites, the
diet tended to be used to further their interests. The Cortes of Aragon
maintained into the 17th century the virtual immunity from taxation that
was a significant factor in Spanish weakness. The strength of the
representative institution was proportionate to that of the crown, which
depended largely on the conditions of accession. The elective principle
might be preserved in form, as in the English coronation service, but
generally it had withered as the principle of heredity had been
established. Where a succession was disputed, as between branches of the
house of Vasa in Sweden after 1595, the need to gain the support of the
privileged classes usually led to concessions being made to the body
that they controlled. In Poland, where monarchy was elective, the Sejm
exercised such power that successive kings, bound by conditions imposed
at accession, found it hard to muster forces to defend their frontiers.
The constitution remained unshakable even during the reign of John
Sobieski (1674–96), hero of the relief of Vienna, who failed to secure
the succession of his son. Under the Saxon kings Augustus II (1697–1733)
and Augustus III (1734–63), foreign interference led to civil wars, but
repeated and factious exercise of the veto rendered abortive all
attempts to reform. It required the threat—and in 1772, the reality—of
partition to give Stanisław II August Poniatowski (1764–95) sufficient
support to effect reforms, but this came too late to save Poland.
At the other extreme were the Russian zemsky sobor, which fulfilled a
last service to the tsars in expressing the landowners’ demand for
stricter laws after the disorders of 1648, and the Estates-General of
France, where the size of the country meant that rulers preferred to
deal with the smaller assemblies of provinces (pays d’états) lately
incorporated into the realm, such as Languedoc and Brittany. They met
regularly and had a permanent staff for raising taxes on property. With
respect to the other provinces (pays d’élection), the crown had enjoyed
the crucial advantage of an annual tax since 1439, when Charles VII
successfully asserted the right to levy the personal taille without
consent. When Richelieu tried to abolish one of the pays d’état, the
Dauphiné, he met with resistance sufficient to deter him and successive
ministers from tampering with this form of fiscal privilege. It survived
until the Revolution: to ministers it was a deformity, to critics of the
régime it provided at least one guarantee against arbitrary rule. The
zemsky sobor had always been the creature of the ruler, characteristic
of a society that knew nothing of fundamental laws or corporate rights.
When it disappeared, the tsarist government was truly the despotism that
the French feared but did not, except in particular cases, experience.
When, in 1789, the Estates-General met for the first time since 1614, it
abolished the privileged estates and corporations in the name of the
freedom that they had claimed to protect. The age of natural human
rights had dawned.
The experience of England, where Parliament played a vital part in
the Reformation proceedings of Henry VIII’s reign and thus gained in
authority, shows that power could be shared between princes and
representative bodies. On the Continent it was generally a different
story. The Estates-General had been discredited because it had come to
be seen as the instrument of faction. Religious differences had
stimulated debate about the nature of authority, but extreme
interpretations of the right of resistance, such as those that provoked
the assassinations of William I the Silent, stadtholder of the
Netherlands, in 1584 and Henry III of France in 1589, not only exposed
the doctrine of tyrannicide but also pointed to the need for a regime
strong enough to impose a religious solution. One such was the Edict of
Nantes of 1598, which conceded to the Huguenots not only freedom of
worship but also their own schools, law courts, and fortified towns.
From the start the Edict constituted a challenge to monarchy and a test
of its ability to govern. Richelieu’s capture of La Rochelle, the most
powerful Huguenot fortress and epicentre of disturbance, after a
14-month siege (1627–28) was therefore a landmark in the making of
absolute monarchy, crucial for France and, because of its increasing
power, for Europe as a whole.
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