PART II. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

Chapter 3. The Rise of Commerce: The Dutch Revolt and Tudor England

Despite the enormous damage that the Reformation wars and the Thirty Years War inflicted on the German-speaking regions of Europe, the social and economic decline of these areas should not be attributed exclusively to military conflict. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, Europe’s historical development shifted by degrees away from the inland areas of the continent and the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast and the northern cities of the continent, particularly to the emerging nation-states of the Netherlands and England. A booming commerce arose, in great part owing to the discovery of the New World and new trade routes along the Atlantic to the Indies. Portugal became a major maritime power for a time, as did Spain, whose cities flourished during the rule of Charles V and Philip II.

In the British Isles the forces that were to prepare a fertile soil for the emergence of capitalism were already at work in the seventeenth century. Yet this capitalist development was by no means inevitable. In terms of sheer wealth and resources, England was no more ripe than Spain, or even France, to move rapidly in a bourgeois direction. Indeed, it might have seemed at first that economic, political, and cultural hegemony in creating European capitalism would fall to Spain. The treasure that the Spaniards looted from their American possessions far and away exceeded that of the British, yet it was not until the twentieth century that capitalism truly gained ascendancy on the Iberian peninsula. The Spanish monarchs frittered away their enormous wealth in wars waged by ambitious kings on the European continent. Their efforts to gain control of the dying Holy Roman Empire and their duels with France eventually impoverished this earliest of European nation-states. Thriving Spanish cities and towns were permitted to languish, and internal as well as external commerce faded away, leaving Spain a historic backwater for centuries. The wastage of material resources in dynastic conflicts seemed almost to doom seventeenth-century France to a similar fate, save for the efforts of Cardinal Richelieu—perhaps the greatest clerical nation-state builder of the era—to transform the country into the major continental power of Europe.

THE DUTCH REVOLT

Among the northern European countries, it was the Netherlands that displaced these earlier powers, where commerce brought Dutch cities enormous material prosperity and fostered a rich cultural development. Commanding the mouth of the Rhine, the Dutch were strategically placed to control the Rhenish trade in the heartland of Germany, and, especially after chronic warfare had weakened the Germans, they began to absorb a great deal of Europe’s commerce, preempting the earlier Baltic trade in which the German Hanseatic League of cities had played so important a part. Indeed, the Dutch and, shortly afterwards, the English were to be the major beneficiaries of the Age of Exploration that Portuguese and Spanish mariners had pioneered.

The involvement of Dutch merchants in the expanding commerce of the late Middle Ages fostered in the Netherlands a strong sense of nationhood and republican unity, as did the resentment that this relatively free people felt toward Spanish interference in their lifcways and religious beliefs. So considerable was the influence of commerce in Dutch life that it is easy to forget that the northern lowlands of the present-day Netherlands—as distinct from Flemish and Frenchspeaking areas of present-day Belgium—were uninhabitable marshy areas that were slowly reclaimed from the sea. Over the centuries a peasantry with spades and windmills managed to open intractable parts of their coastline to agriculture and village settlements supported by modest fishing fleets. More a yeomanry than a servile peasantry, the northern Netherlanders of Holland were notable for their ingrained sense of enterprise, personal independence, and basically heterodox lifeways. As their provinces took form, they retained much of the egalitarian law of their Germanic ancestors and their traditional system of local freedoms. When the dukes of Burgundy united the provinces of both north and south—Flanders and Brabant as well as Holland and Zeeland—under their own Estates General, the dukes, who summoned those bodies, normally permitted them to retain their original rights and traditions.

Ideologically, the Dutch largely reworked and benefited from a new form of Protestantism, notably Calvinism, that Luther had inadvertently stirred up abroad. In its origins in Geneva, Calvinism had seemed like a quietistic doctrine comparable to Lutheranism, sharing Luther’s belief in salvation by faith alone, and personally John Calvin, a noble Frenchman turned theologian, was no less an advocate of obedience to authority than Luther. “The Lord has not only testified that the status of magistrate or civic officer was approved by him and was pleasing to him,” Calvin instructed,

but also he has moreover greatly recommended it to us, having honored its dignity with very honorable titles. For the Lord affirms (Prov. 8:15–16) that the fact that kings rule, that counselors order just things, and that the great of the earth are judges, is a work of his wisdom. And elsewhere (Ps. 82:6–7), he calls them gods, because they do his work. In another place also (Deut. 1:17; II Chron. 19:5–7) they are said to exercise judgment for God, and not for man. And Saint Paul (Rom. 12:8) calls the higher offices gifts of God.[17]

But Calvin, far more than Luther, insistently regarded the Church as a higher authority than the state and placed a greater premium on ecclesiastical over secular authority generally. God’s will was absolutely and ultimately sovereign over earthly affairs, he enjoined. “Hence princes and magistrates must think of Him whom they serve in their office,” he asserted, “and do nothing unworthy of ministers and lieutenants of God.”[18] Indeed,

from obedience to superiors we must always except one thing: that it does not draw us away from obedience to Him to whose edicts the commands of all kings must yield. The Lord, therefore, is the king of kings, and, once He has opened his sacred mouth, he must be listened to by all and above all. Only after that, we are subject to men who are constituted over us, but not otherwise than in him. If men command us to do something against him, we must do nothing, nor keep any account of such an order. On the contrary, let rather this sentence take place: that it is necessary to obey God rather than men (Acts 4:19).[19]

Such remarks conferred considerable power on the clergy over the magistrates, kingly or otherwise. After 1541, when the community of Geneva finally accepted Calvin as its spiritual leader, he essentially replaced its unstable political regime with an austere theocracy, subordinating the city to the church, which ruled it with a stern rigor that regulated conduct in all areas of life. Minor infractions of Calvinist notions of appropriate behavior were treated as criminal offenses, and major heresies were punished as capital crimes, often not without torture. Calvin burned the Unitarian Michael Servetus at the stake in 1553, belying later pretensions of much radical Protestantism to a consistently libertarian outlook. Nevertheless, as Calvinism drifted through Europe, it steadily moderated its practices and credo, especially in the Netherlands and England.

Such moderation was all the more necessary because Europe remained largely Catholic, a fact with which Protestants were obliged to reconcile themselves, doctrinally as well as politically. Unlike Lutheranism, Calvinism accepted and even encouraged trade and production, ultimately (but not immediately) becoming an ideological factor in the emergence of capitalism. In fact, by no means was it simply a “bourgeois” religion. Its devotees included nobles as well as merchants and artisans and many of the poorer people of Europe. The acceptance of Calvinism depended as much on the prevailing political conditions in a given locale as on the economic. In France, where the Crown had brought the Catholic clergy into its own service, it feared the Calvinist Huguenots as an aristocratic threat to the nation-state, since many nobles adhered to that faith. Although French kings tolerated the Huguenots initially, they finally and ruthlessly persecuted them in the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and the bloody Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.

In the Netherlands, Calvin’s teachings became an ideological basis for the earliest attempt in northern Europe to achieve a republican, fairly open, and pluralistic society. In 1566, when Philip II, the king of Spain, attempted to bring the notorious Spanish Inquisition into the Lowlands to root out Protestant and other heretical doctrines, Calvinism became identified with a growing nationalist sentiment that permeated Dutch people of nearly all classes and provinces against their militandy Catholic Spanish rulers. A league of some two hundred nobles tried to keep the Inquisition out of the country, but the zealous Philip arrogantly rejected their petition—a highhanded act that incited a popular revolt on the part of wage-earners and poor journeymen, not only against Spanish rule but against Catholicism as a whole. Flanders and Brabant initiated the struggle for independence in 1562, and under William the Silent, the prince of Orange, the conflict assumed widespread and chronic proportions. Northern “sea beggars” or pirates, booty hunters, and patriots raided the Spanish-held coastal towns, followed in turn by ruthless Spanish attacks on Dutch communities.

In time, the revolt opened a cleavage between the nobility of the region and the lower classes. The nobles, fearing social unrest among their underlings, were often ready to come to terms with Philip, and the struggle might have easily turned into a class war, redolent of the artisanal uprisings of the early Flemish “proletariat” centuries earlier. Instead, it became a sweeping national war that reunited virtually all social strata against the Spaniards, owing in great part to Spanish arrogance and stupidity, particularly when the Duke of Alba—the Spanish equivalent of Truchsess Georg von Waldburg—was unleashed upon the Lowlands. Alba was utterly unconcerned with class distinctions. Not only did he butcher thousands of people of the lower classes, but he freely confiscated noble estates and imposed heavy taxes on the well-to-do, whose support he might have easily gained with a lenient policy. By 1576, after William the Silent successfully drove out the Spanish garrisons, all seventeen of the Lowland provinces had united in a common league to struggle resolutely to expel the Spaniards from their territory.

Following a more conciliatory policy after the removal of Alba, the Prince of Parma, who became governor-general of the Netherlands in 1578, managed to divide the union by winning over the support of the largely Catholic southern provinces. The Spanish governor Alessandro Famese eventually reconquered the southern provinces, which remained Spanish possessions, and the Protestants among them were gradually reconverted to Catholicism. In 1581 the seven Protestant northern provinces—Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Friesland, and Groningen—established a permanent union of their own: the United Provinces of the Netherlands, or the Dutch Republic, which declared its definitive independence from Spain. The conflict continued well beyond the lifetime of its initiators and original participants; indeed, not until 1609 was the Dutch Republic legitimated by a twelve-year truce. The conflict revived during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), upon whose conclusion the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 finally recognized the independence of the United Provinces.

The Dutch revolt has not found its proper place in the history of European revolutions. As a revolt against Spanish rule, it was one of the earliest revolutions to raise the image of the “nation” as a motive force for rebellion, a word that in the seventeenth century denoted a people, not merely a sovereign territorial entity. Patriotism, in turn, meant devotion to one’s free “nation,” rather than nationalistic chauvinism as we know it today. But the revolt had further implications as an effort to create a new kind of society. In the United Provinces the “nation” did not become a pretext for royal absolutism; quite to the contrary, it served to weaken statist elements of the kind that the great monarchies of Europe were then forging. Nor did Dutch patriotism serve to subvert local and provincial freedoms. Rather, it became the basis for a confederal republic, one that conjoined provincial customs and local autonomy with national unification. Indeed, the Dutch Estates General were composed of seven delegates from each of the seven provinces that constituted the republic, which was actually more of a confederal cantonal system than a centralized republican one.

Headed by the highly prestigious but unpretentious princes of Orange, the society of the United Provinces did not fully shed all its feudal traits, such as the authority that guild masters held over journeymen; nor did the higher social status that aristocrats enjoyed over merchants disappear. Large differences in wealth surely existed, yet moderate and humane Calvinists regarded extravagant displays of wealth and the extremes of exploitation as virtually sacrilegious. Distinctions in social strata were as much a matter of personal and family prestige as real economic power, perhaps even more so.

Still, the civilized Dutch burgher republic was unabashedly commercial. Like the figures painted by Vermeer and Rembrandt, commoners were concerned with trade, tidiness, domesticity, artisanship, and the rewards of banking. A Dutch commercial empire began to emerge even before the 1609 truce, with the formation of the Dutch East India Company seven years earlier; and if the formerly prosperous port of Antwerp languished under Spanish rule, Amsterdam and other Dutch ports—given control over the Scheldt River by the Treaty of Westphalia—became supreme in Dutch trade, bringing the burghers immense prosperity.

Which is not to say that the Dutch revolt was a “bourgeois revolution”; indeed, quite to the contrary. The revolt was led by the noble House of Orange, and Holland’s prosperity rested primarily on the ownership of land. At the same time, “bourgeois” urban centers of the Lowlands either did not participate in the struggle, hesitated to do so, or remained loyal to Spain. Amsterdam, the most “bourgeois” of the Dutch cities, initially refused to join the uprising, while Antwerp, the most important northern European banking city, retained its allegiance to the Spanish crown in the long run, owing to the fear of the popular unrest that had been aroused in the northern provinces. Nor did religious allegiances strictly follow class lines. The most prosperous areas, and in many respects the most “bourgeois” of the Spanish Netherlands, adhered to Catholicism, which remained the preferred religion of the upper classes and burgher patricians, while Calvinism appealed in great part to the lower classes.

Nor were United Provinces the only republic on the continent: the Swiss, Venetians, and Genoese enjoyed a similar political form. But the Dutch were probably the most tolerant and egalitarian of all of them, with the possible exception of certain rural Swiss cantons, inasmuch as a third of the Dutch were still Catholic, domestic harmony required a more tolerant form of Calvinism than the kind that had existed under Calvin himself. The Dutch Reformed Church never became as intolerant of dissenters, including Catholics, as other Protestant churches, such as the English Anglicans and Presbyterians, despite the fact that the Reformed Church essentially became the Dutch state religion. A decent humanism flourished in the republic, together with a strong burgher sense of duty, responsibility, and moral probity, a signal feature of the Netherlands to this very day. The republic became a refuge for oppressed peoples of all kinds, including Portuguese and Spanish Jews, Huguenots, and sectaries, who enjoyed considerable freedom as long as they did not involve themselves too deeply in the country’s internal affairs.

Finally, the Dutch revolt and the republic that followed from it profoundly affected the Puritan movement on the English side of the Channel, strengthening its militancy and giving it a strong political flavor. Queen Elizabeth’s support for Dutch independence, although guided mainly by realpolitik, greatly consolidated British Protestantism and associated the Tudor monarchy with the Protestant interest in Europe. The moderate, stable, and tolerant Calvinism in the United Provinces, in effect, became a breeding ground for more radical Puritan tendencies that surfaced in the English Revolution. It was in Amsterdam and the Hague that many refugee English Puritans learned republican ideas— ideas that they later brought back home. The freedoms that the Dutch enjoyed, in effect, reinforced desires to expand similar freedoms in England.

TUDOR ENGLAND

Like the Dutch, the English ruling classes benefited in varying degrees from the commercial advances of the Atlantic trade of the sixteenth century. But even more than the Dutch, the English aristocracy was notable for its social and structural weakness. Between 1455 and 1485, the Wars of the Roses had all but exterminated the island’s traditional nobility. Unlike other baronial wars of the time, in which rivals fought to acquire each other’s estates by holding their respective owners for ransom, the Wars of the Roses, in which the houses of York and Lancaster desperately fought each other to acquire the throne, carried the conflict nearly to the point of their mutual physical extermination. The object of conquest was thus control of the emerging nation-state itself, not of a particular landed estate. After the Yorkists temporarily succeeded in winning the throne for Edward IV in 1442, bloody internecine conflicts flared up between the victors. The conflicts continued after Edward’s death in 1483, this time between the future Richard III and the nobles, especially after he murdered Edward’s two young sons, only to be killed in battle in the closing period of the war.

By the time Henry Tudor came to power in 1485, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster with an interdynastic marriage, the aristocracy had been largely exterminated, leaving no powerful nobility that could seriously challenge royal authority. Indeed, great territorial lords like those of seventeenth-century France, who chased the young Louis XIV out of Paris and wrought havoc on the monarchy, were largely unknown in England after the Wars of the Roses. Just as Louis, fully schooled in the dangers of an ambitious nobility, managed with Cardinal Mazarin’s help to forge one of the most centralized states in Europe, so Henry VII and his ministers tried to enlarge and concentrate all power in the monarch’s hands. As the Spanish ambassador to the court of Henry VII ironically observed in 1498, the king “would like to govern England in the French fashion but he cannot.”

This judgment was very astute. All of Henry’s efforts notwithstanding, English society was far from stable or centralized. The English monarchy, in effect, was strikingly unlike the absolutist regimes that were emerging on the European continent; indeed, if anything, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England under the Tudors was perhaps the most socially mobile and least absolutist of any monarchical nation-state in Europe.

Henry VII, as the founder of the Tudor dynasty, depended for his support on the lower gentry and independent squires, who had essentially been bystanders in the interdynastic wars, and on the county governments that they ran, as well as the realm’s free farmers or yeomen. Indeed, a new nobility had been created out of the well-to-do middle classes, whose appetite for the profits of trade far exceeded their desire for the spoils of battle. The king was also obliged to rely for support on a large variety of merchants, artisans, and socially indefinable commoners who had been disgorged by the declining feudal system. As Lawrence Stone observes,

the Crown [became] heavily dependent upon Parliament for political and financial support. The classes represented in the House of Commons were willing enough to give the King their support in his religious and political policies, but only so long as they were left to rule over the countryside and the towns. The Crown was thus in no position to proceed to the next stage in the creation of a strong monarchy, the replacement of the local gentry by paid officials of its own.[20]

Indeed, unlike continental monarchs, English monarchs did not erect a local government made up of bureaucracies of professional salaried officials dependent upon the crown. Instead, they had to rely on the prominent families in counties and corporate towns to administer local justice, enforce laws, collect parliamentary levies, and muster the militia, among other functions. Thus, as Stone observes,

There was a tacit agreement to divide responsibility, and the main burden of local administration had to be left in the hands of unpaid gentry and urban worthies, whose loyalty and efficiency was dependent on a careful regard being had for their interests, privileges, and prejudices. So far from being progressively weakened, local particularism grew step by step with the growth of the central government.[21]

While the monarchy failed to gain absolute control over the countryside, the House of Commons really began, in effect, to hold the nation together. Not that Parliament was particularly active during the Tudor era, but the Tudor monarchs—in particular Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth—prudently respected its powers and carefully courted its members. Parliament, in turn, obligingly voted the taxes, when it was summoned into session, needed to support the monarchy. Moreover, the Tudors were shrewd enough to deal cautiously with the citizens of London, the largest and wealthiest of England’s cities and certainly one of its most volatile.

Geography, too, favored both the English monarchy and English localism. With its island location, England was set apart from the devastating conflicts that swept over the Continent. In Tudor times, English interference in European affairs was centered primarily on deflecting the attention of the island’s potential enemies to Continental affairs. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 secured England safety from further invasions, so that the monarchy was now accepted at home as a stabilizing force as well as a guardian of English international interests. Whether because of the country’s geographic insularity or the gentry’s opposition to a strong royal power or both, the Tudor monarchs built neither a standing army nor a costly and far-reaching bureaucracy. The territorial defense of the realm was undertaken by local militias or “trained bands,” while the practical affairs of the realm were handled by the local gentry, whose general interests were expressed in the House of Commons.

By no means, however, were the kings and queens of England willing to accept the monarchy as a passive arbiter in domestic affairs, and their prudence notwithstanding, the most pronounced problems of the Tudor era stemmed from the throne’s insidious efforts to increase its own power at the expense of the squires. Indeed, all the Tudor monarchs tried to be absolute rulers, albeit with limited success. Henry VII left his son, Henry VIII, a considerable financial patrimony, which he rapidly dissipated as much to strengthen his political power as for personal reasons. Although Henry’s tastes were of legendary extravagance, the king, mindful of possible conflicts between nobles and his royal power, also tried to reduce what remained of the warrior nobility to a courtier stratum dependent on the monarchy. To some extent, Henry VIII anticipated Louis XIV’s later policy of collecting the French aristocracy at Versailles, placing English nobles under royal supervision, and virtually divesting them of threatening ambitions. His own ambitions were clear when he declared to the Irish that his “absolute power [was] above the law”; nor did his daughter Elizabeth have less despotic aspirations during the first half of her reign.

In contrast to what happened on the Continent, the power of the English Parliament and the squirearchy for which it spoke held Henry VIII’s aspirations to absolute power carefully in check, forcing all the Tudor monarchs to reach compromises between their own ambitions and the palpable limits placed on their powers by Parliament. The Crown had to conceal its ambitions with largely conciliatory measures and a royal deference to the rights of “freeborn Englishmen.” Parliament, in turn, never surrendered its prerogatives to the king, and each Tudor monarch was obliged to come to terms with the Crown’s dependence on the gentry and the House of Commons. “Country” and “Court,” to use the language of the seventeenth century, thus lived in an uneasy, if symbiotic, relationship with each other. The “Country” formed a parallel power to the “Court,” and a potentially rebellious Parliament could place very serious impediments in the way of an overbearing monarchy—hence the astuteness of the Spanish ambassador’s observations on the limits of the English crown.

ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM

Whether by design or circumstance, the Protestant Reformation in England was initiated largely from the top down, by the monarchy rather than by clerical divines. By 1534 Henry VHI had broken with the Vatican and converted the English Church, Catholic in all respects, into a symbol of national unity and a supine creature of the monarchy. English bishops and prelates, entirely under royal sovereignty, replaced Catholic clerics, and religious doctrine was turned into an ideological prop for the central government. The closing of the monasteries and the expropriation of their vast wealth that followed from Henry’s measures bolstered his shaky financial position for a time and greatly expanded his authority over many aspects of English life that had hitherto been claimed by Catholic ecclesiastics.

Yet Henry himself was not fully committed to Reformation ideas; nor did he abandon Catholic rituals. The king replaced the pope with himself as head of the new Anglican Church, ended celibacy, abolished monasteries, and expropriated the Church’s vast material resources. But English Protestants who publicly challenged Catholic doctrines such as the Trinity and transubstantiation were put to death with the same impartiality as Catholics who asserted the authority of the papacy over the monarchy. Henry’s failure to complete the Reformation was itself a potential source of conflict between the monarchy and Parliament, for as long as the Anglican Church was basically a Catholic church tailored to English royal needs, Henry could never gain the full allegiance of his truly Protestant subjects, who were growing rapidly in number. Nor could they, in turn, seriously challenge his rule by abetting the return of Catholicism. Thus, as in the political realm, an uneasy balance of forces prevented either outright Reformation or outright rebellion in the religious realm.

Yet even in its tepid Anglican form, English Protestantism fostered a belief in individuality and its “inner light” over ecclesiastical institutions. Englishmen who were influenced by Calvinism saw themselves less as mere subjects of the Crown and more as members of a godly elite—an “elect” of “visible saints” in an ungodly world. Nor did Anglicanism reduce the individual to a mere member of a corporate estate, as Catholicism did to commoners in France and Spain. Indeed, in counterposition to the despotic proclivities of the monarchy, English commoners became increasingly self-conscious individuals, strident in expressing their views and confident of their own personal judgments. Subdued guilds gave way to raucous merchant adventurers, and placid peasants to an unruly “mobility” that was quick-tempered and ready to interfere in political and religious issues. The House of Gammons, despite its medieval origins in a corporate society, was reinforced by an independent gentry, merchant class, and artisanry and began to regard itself as the authentic voice of the “people”—an ambiguous word at the time—rather than a lowly estate in a feudal hierarchy.

After Henry VIII’s death in 1547, a Council of Regency supervised English affairs on behalf of Henry’s young son, Edward VI. With Henry gone, the Council further loosened English society by increasingly supplanting Henry’s Anglican reformation with a more militant Protestantism—one that continued to plunder the remaining wealth of the Church and widen its distance from Catholicism. Whether this new dispensation was the product of greed or ideology is irrelevant; indeed, both motives were probably involved. But Edward did not live into manhood, and when his half-sister Mary ascended to the throne, religious policy shifted to a flagrantly pro-Catholic extreme. The new queen married Philip of Spain, the monarch of a land that many English people viewed as their country’s most dangerous rival. Quite reasonably, they saw the zealous Spanish king as the standard-bearer of a Catholic orthodoxy bent on an inquisitorial counterreformation: under Mary’s rule, the Mass, which Edward’s regents had discarded, was restored; relations with the Vatican were reestablished; and a furious attack, including numerous executions, was visited upon dissenting Protestants whose views were more radical than Henry’s reformation. “Bloody” Mary’s attempts to restore Catholicism, followed by a disastrous and costly war with France, completely alienated the English people, and when she died in 1558 England’s fortunes and morale had reached their lowest ebb. Fragmented by religious conflicts and burdened by an immense debt, the country was on the edge of civil war.

Anglicans regarded the ascent of the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, as a God-given deliverance—and she largely lived up to their expectations. Although no less imperious than her father, she made earnest attempts to compromise with all the opposing factions and interests that could have undermined the country. Relations with the Vatican were severed completely, and Catholic priests were peremptorily expelled from the country, which did not prevent her from driving radical Protestants or Puritans underground, especially their millenarian conventicles. Basically oriented toward social reforms, Elizabeth and her able advisers stabilized the currency, improved working conditions for the lower classes, and softened long-standing antagonisms between hostile social strata in the realm. The defeat of the Spanish Armada ensured English naval and commercial supremacy, while her rule gave every encouragement to trade, manufactures, and agricultural improvements. The state took over the care of the poor, many of whom were victims of the land enclosures that had been going on for more than a century. Elizabeth came to terms with the gentry to which earlier Tudor kings had to accommodate themselves, and her shrewd policy of compromise with Parliament, the nobility, the gentry, and the merchant class established a period of internal peace. Needless to emphasize, her reign was a time of exceptional literary and cultural achievement: the “Elizabethan Age,” particularly famed for its drama and poetry.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS

The harmony created by Elizabeth’s compromises, however, was in some respects illusory. Commercial life was growing at a disorienting pace. More than any country in Europe, England was undergoing a rapid transition from a feudal to a commercial society. In addition to its growing maritime commerce, the country was by far the world’s greatest coal producer, and to feed a rapidly growing population (which doubled between 1500 and 1660), agricultural output increased enormously through the draining of marshy areas and deforestation.

The improvements that were being made in agriculture, particularly the shift from food cultivation to sheep runs, were to affect profoundly the future of English society. The common lands that the peasantry had traditionally shared for centuries were ruthlessly enclosed in order to create sheep pasture for the growing wool trade. Aside from the large pool of labor produced by the enclosures, the entire landscape of rural life began to change along lines that stood very much at odds with the country’s feudal past. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the English had exported raw wool to the Lowlands across the North Sea, where it was refined and woven into the finest cloth in northern Europe. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Flemish Protestant weavers sought refuge on the island from religious wars, England had grown to ascendancy in the European cloth trade, rivaled only by the Dutch in the production of cloth. By fostering the enclosure of common lands and eliminating many tenant farms, textile production created a nationwide economy rather than one structured around small, isolated regions. As Lawrence Stone has observed, trade in cloth

was a powerful unifying force in society since its prosperity affected the landed classes, who owned the sheep which produced the wool, the poor laborers and their wives and children who spun it, the artisans who wove it, the clothiers who handled it, and the merchants who exported it.[22]

Isolated regions of England were thus brought into a wide-ranging skein of economic interactions that often served to make it a nation as much as did its religious and political institutions.

It is easy to exaggerate the burgeoning English commercialism. Seventeenthcentury England was neither an industrial society nor a capitalist one in the sense that we speak of capitalism today. “England in the seventeenth century remained what it and the rest of Europe had always been,” observes Stone,

an undeveloped society. On the other hand there can be no doubt that it was permeated with small-scale industry and commerce, more market-oriented, and richer than it had ever been before, and more so than any other contemporary society, with the probable exception of the United Provinces.[23]

Stone’s judgment here is sound. The country was still precapitalist, neither fully agrarian nor fully bourgeois; indeed, its Industrial Revolution still lay far ahead, despite the fact that sheep-farming was making agricultural capitalism a relatively widespread phenomenon, unequaled anywhere in the world. But as late as 1688, only a half million out of the five million English people were engaged in trade and craft production, and of these, about half were involved in commercial transactions.

In general, a quasi-feudal sense of obligation to underlings was still more common than the predatory bourgeois mentality that was to be ushered in a century and a half later. During the sixteenth century, to be sure, capitalism was taking a considerable toll on English laborers, and new technologies, while not very revolutionary, were creating serious unemployment. But the monarchy still felt a tradition-hallowed sense of obligation to the lower classes. Typically, as late as the reign of Charles I, the king prohibited the use of a new sawmill that threatened to reduce the jobs of woodworkers, and placed restraints on land enclosures. He even limited rising prices as well as wages to soften the economic dislocations that created hardships for the poor. To what extent such actions were the result of genuine concern for the lower classes or attempts to curry favor with them at the expense of the commercial classes is hard to judge. Later, of course, when capitalism was fully established in England, the neglect that the poor and the proletariat suffered was to be appalling. But the congested, polluted, and disease-ridden England of the Industrial Revolution was not to emerge for some two centuries.

At the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the total population of the country, including Wales, numbered only four and a half million. Apart from London, very few towns exceeded ten thousand inhabitants and most had two thousand or fewer; in fact, England’s second-largest city, Bristol, a lively commercial center, numbered only 48,000 people. The larger towns of England were small merchant and artisan centers, few of whose workers were members of guilds any longer. Indeed, the guild system had almost completely died out in most of the country apart from London, and artisanal production, at least, was largely unencumbered by guild restrictions.

But certain feudal traditions still existed in the countryside. Well over four million people were still working in agriculture or agriculture-related tasks, and the majority lived in villages as copyholders, whose families held lifetime feudal claims to their parcels of land. Still, new economic developments were subverting traditional agrarian lifeways. More and more cottagers became involved in the production of cloth, generally for “factors,” as their employers or contractors were called, who supplied them with wool and rented them hand-operated machines. Still others were servile tenants who could easily be dispossessed from the land to make way for sheep runs, while a minority of the rural population were independent yeomen, who proudly owned their own farms.

Serfdom had long disappeared from the realm, unlike on the Continent, where it was still dying out in Western Europe and was retained or firmly restored in the east. Still, as late as the end of the seventeenth century, by far the majority of England’s growing five and a half million people lived in villages and hamlets, followed by less than a million in large and small towns, and approximately a half million in London. Numerous paupers lingered in English towns and villages, subsisting on pitifully small food allotments or drifting aimlessly from the countryside to London, where they increased the capital’s unruly multitudes.

Normally obedient when the nobles and gentry dealt with them paternalistically, husbandmen could become almost insurrectionary when their overlords threatened to dispossess them of their smallholdings. Adding fuel to their volatility in times of uncertainty, growing sectarian religious differences increasingly fragmented England; indeed, the most materially dependent tenant might break away from the most caring landlord if the tenant was a radical Puritan and the landlord a conservative Presbyterian. With the onset of the revolutionary period, which can be dated back to the death of Elizabeth in 1603, these varied differences sharpened into social turmoil and, in the early 1640s, exploded into open revolution.

Surprisingly, even the aristocracy, the ruling elite of England, was still small in the 1630s. It consisted of only 122 peers and 26 bishops, to which can be added some 300 eldest sons of peers and newly created baronets. The nobility had suffered losses in prestige and wealth over the years and no longer enjoyed their high status as energetic warriors of medieval times. Their status in the social hierarchy was further eroded when the financially burdened Stuart monarchs who succeeded Elizabeth, the last of the Tbdors, sold titles (especially the newly created status of baronet) to raise cash for the spendthrift throne. Unlike the lesser gentry, the titled nobility gravitated toward the lively court life in London and became absentee landlords, retaining little or no contact with their rural clients.

The real structural base of England rested on the local gentry, who may have numbered 1,800 knights and 9,000 squires at the most, while a lesser gentry of 14,000 gentlemen, that is to say, landed property owners (who enjoyed a status somewhat higher than yeomen), as well as well-to-do merchants, professionals, academics, and officers of the crown. Taken as a whole, it was these men who held England together, filling the county offices of the realm as sheriffs, justices of the peace, and commanders of the militia. From among the poorer gentry— men who barely qualified as “gentlemen”—the county recruited its constables, overseers of the poor, churchwardens, and parish clerics. Thus, the aristocratic elite, including its “gentlemen,” and the country gentry accounted for one out of every twenty-five people. Moreover, together with freeholders who could claim to earn twenty-five shillings a year—not a trivial sum in those days—the elite and the gentry constituted the principal qualified voters in parliamentary elections, leaving a large part of the population disenfranchized.

The men who actually held seats in the House of Commons were the merchants, gentry, academics, and lawyers of the country. The House spoke for the materially well-to-do and prestigious part of the population, clearly not for the majority of the people. Given the property restrictions of the time, perhaps one in ten Englishmen was qualified to vote, and of these voters, a much smaller number were likely to run for the House of Commons. Of the House’s five hundred members, about three-quarters were from the gentry and only a quarter from the merchant and professional strata.

Like all leaders in later revolutions, when the Commons finally confronted the king in armed conflict Parliament spoke in the name of the “people” to legitimate its claims. But who were the “people” in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England? The mixed economy and society made a dear answer to this question difficult to formulate, and as new economic developments created new disparities of wealth, these ongoing changes would lead to major divisions within the “Country” forces themselves—and ultimately to movements toward a third revolution. But before these movements arose, the “people”—in the sense of the majority of the House of Commons—had waged an earnest campaign to restrain new monarchical claims to absolute authority over that aborning entity, the nation-state.