The Sinews of Power

War, Money and the English State 1688-1783

John Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134998517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1989. `The book is a distinguished work - of importance to students of governmental development generally. It is written in a fluent, non-technical manner that should reach a wide audience.' American Historical Review.

Part One
Before the revolution: the English state in the medieval and early modern era

1
Contexts

To understand the particular form that the fiscal-military state assumed in England after the Glorious Revolution we need to examine not only the proximate circumstances of 1688 but also the long-term evolution of the English state before its transformation under William and Mary. Though the fiscal-military state emerged as a result of a particular political crisis, it had to exploit and accommodate itself to existing institutions. These, in turn, owed their distinctive configuration to three earlier developments in the English state: its centralization in the period between the tenth and thirteenth centuries; its escape from involvement in the major international conflicts that occurred in Europe between the mid-fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries; and its success in avoiding the development of a substantial administration populated by venal office-holders.

The early centralization of the English state

Though commentators on the early modern English state have often emphasized its weakness, medieval historians have long regarded the English case as exemplifying a state well equipped with strong, uniform and centralized institutions. State-building, moreover, began at an early date—some would say before the Norman Conquest—and had gone far to create a united and coherently administered polity by the end of the twelfth century. Nowhere else in Europe was the monarch so successful in harnessing feudal overlordship and transforming it into an effective system of royal administration.

The strength of England’s emergent national institutions was partly attributable to the weakness of regionalism and particularism. The early date of political consolidation, at a time when local privilege, law and custom enjoyed only a precarious existence, meant that there were few obstacles to the growth of a national system of law and governance. The local unit of the county, into which England was divided during the Anglo-Saxon period, proved too small to sustain a local assembly or produce powerful regional loyalties.¹ Nor were provincial magnates and local lords a major threat to centralized power. Successive conquests and invasions—by Danes and Normans—had undermined or eroded their authority. The Norman and Angevin monarchs, moreover, adopted a deliberate policy of undercutting regional loyalties by employing notables to manage the local workings of a national scheme of justice, a ‘common’ law. The overall effect of these developments was to create a single layer of governance which embodied (even if it did not always reconcile) national and local interests. As Alexis Tocqueville remarked with pardonable exaggeration on his journey to England in 1835, ‘the English… [were] the first people who ever thought of centralising the administration of justice’.² This enduring structure was to remain the form of English regional government and national administration until the nineteenth century. The administrative hierarchy may have changed with the rise of justices of the peace and the appointment of lord lieutenants and have been replaced during the civil conflicts of the seventeenth century by a bureaucratic and military regime, but the units of government were astonishingly resilient until the great reforms of the industrial era.³

As early as the thirteenth century feudal suzerainty in England had come to resemble royal sovereignty. The royal courts handled almost all important legal cases, the royal writ ran throughout the land, the monarch had established one of the most sophisticated financial systems in Europe centred on the royal exchequer, and the crown exacted taxes from the entire realm.⁴ The king could claim with some justice to be a public figure, the head of a community whose interests he undertook to guard, the ruler of a realm whose safety he had sworn to protect. An emergent national identity became associated with a single, powerful ruler. Authority was concentrated and public; particularism harnessed or eclipsed.

The emergence of a powerful, centralized monarchy was accompanied by the development of a strong national parliament. Monarchs like Edward I wanted an effective parliament whose members had full authority (plena potestas) to bind their constituents to whatever they agreed with the king. Parliament, in this sense, was an adjunct of royal power. But it also provided an institutional focus for opposition to the crown. As a result, the institution became a place for negotiation between the monarch and his subjects. By the fourteenth century parliament had begun to transcend (though it never entirely lost) its original judicial functions and was becoming a political body. Not only did it provide a forum for the expression of competing interests but it also claimed the sole right to approve the levying of taxes and full power to speak for the entire ‘community of the realm’. The fiscal requirements of the crown during the Hundred Years War—between the reigns of Edward I and Edward III royal revenue doubled in real terms—only served to enhance the estates’ bargaining power.⁵ The monarch’s dependence on taxes—notably those on wool—which affected both landowners and merchants, together with the presence of knights and squires in the same assembly as burgesses, helped create a politically unified body. Parliament, of course, was always at risk from the crown. It could be dispensed with and had no title to perpetuity,⁶ but it also had certain recognized powers that the monarch could ignore only at his peril, and no regional or local estates challenged its national authority.

This double concentration of power in king and parliament meant that from a very early date political conflict in England was highly centralized. Serious rebellions, though they might be regional in origin, were not separatist in intent. They were designed either to seize control of a national institution or to secure redress of grievances by a central authority. Control of the main institutions of government conferred great powers because their legitimacy was acknowledged throughout the land. Regionalism was not absent but it lacked any institutional focus to challenge the authority of the central state.

Seen, therefore, from an English point of view the state was extremely powerful; viewed from a British perspective it was rather less so. In neither Scotland, Wales nor Ireland was overlordship transformed into full sovereignty. Scottish kings may have held English estates, paid homage to English kings and attempted to copy aspects of their administration, but they and their subjects retained much autonomy. Edward I might enforce his lordship through brutal conquest, but only at the expense of provoking rebellion and resistance which continued for more than a century. The Scots kept the English at arm’s length, never allowing them total control, though rarely able to deny some degree of subordination or to prevent English military superiority on the borders. The forms of fealty were there but not the substance. Scottish integrity remained intact.

The same could be said of Ireland. Henry II established Norman lordship of the country, but conquest was never translated into effective control. The conquered land lacked any kind of central apparatus which could be used to develop strong feudal suzereignty, which was also hampered by the presence of numerous independent warlords and grandees. Particularism was never defeated, a fact recognized by the contraction of effective English monarchical authority to an area known as ‘the English land’ or ‘the English Pale’.

Only Wales was subject to any significant incorporation within the English state apparatus. Edward I’s conquest, his garrisons and castles and the Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), which brought the Welsh English law, have all been seen as the end of any Welsh independence. Yet even here much autonomy remained. Welsh law was not entirely abolished and Welsh abhorrence of the English regime was amply demonstrated in the decade-long struggle against English rule led by Owain Glyn Dwr, who called the first and only parliaments of Wales.

There was certainly an English medieval state, made from a Norman template, but not a British one. Though English interests, both monarchical and baronial, penetrated much of Britain, just as they penetrated much of France, they lacked the permanence, legitimacy and institutional structure necessary to secure a durable or unified polity. Nevertheless the English core of what was eventually to become the British state was both geographically larger and better administered than its French equivalent in the Île de France across the Channel. In consequence powers peripheral or adjacent to England were weaker than those which abutted the French domain.

The comparison between England and France, between the two greatest rivals in medieval western Europe, emphasizes the remarkable degree of institutional uniformity and centralization achieved by the island kingdom. The French state developed somewhat later than its English counterpart and its emergence was more gradual. As late as the end of the twelfth century the effective power of French royal institutions did not extend beyond the royal domain of the Île de France. Not until the late fifteenth century did the bulk of France come under the control of the Valois monarchy. As the state expanded it was confronted by a highly developed and intractable regionalism institutionalized in the form of local law and regional assemblies and sustained by powerful local notables. It could only superimpose its control on a number of entrenched and thriving institutions. This was achieved both by manning local forms of authority with royal officials loyal to the central state and by creating further administrative layers to supervise local government. Notables from Normandy or Poitou were not to be trusted, because their attachment to the regional practices, law and custom from which they derived their authority was likely to override their allegiance to the central government. This compromise between regional and state power produced a many-layered administration linking disparate provincial practices to a national system of government. Particularism was built into the French state apparatus. This ‘mosaic state’, to use Strayer’s phrase,⁷ was therefore much less centralized but much more administratively encumbered than its counterpart across the Channel. From its inception, and even before the proliferation of offices through their sale by the crown, the French state was heavily populated with administrators and bureaucrats.

If the French reached a modus vivendi with regionalism and local law, a national French representative—the estates-general—was unable to transcend particularism. First called in 1302, the estates-general never overcame the entrenched regional powers of such provincial estates as those of Languedoc, Normandy and Champagne. In consequence, it failed to establish a plausible claim to speak, like the English parliament, for the entire ‘community of the realm’, nor was it able to establish a monopoly of approval for taxes.

The estates-general also failed to become an effective arm of royal government. The growth of the parlements, the development of an independent system of royal finance and the refusal of local assemblies and communities to be bound by its decisions made the estates-general a weak instrument of royal authority. Squeezed between a national ruler and powerful regional institutions the estates-general was eclipsed by the crown as the institution which gave the nation its emergent identity, and brushed aside in the negotiations for revenue the monarch conducted with numerous local bodies and provincial interests. The parlous position of the estates-general is epitomized by the emergence in the late fifteenth century of the distinction between the pays d’états and the pays d’élections. In the former provinces—Burgundy, Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, Guyenne and Normandy—taxes were negotiated with the regional estates; in the latter, in the heart of the realm, they were collected directly by royal officers. The estates-general was redundant. Politics became a struggle between a national administrative apparatus presided over by the king and the well-entrenched forces of particularism. In consequence domestic conflict revealed the French state’s inherently fissiparous tendencies.

On the margin: the English state’s absence from the great wars of Europe, c. 1450–1689

If the first important feature of the English state was its early centralization, the second was its decline as a European military force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries England was one of the most effective states in Europe, with a much-feared army and the military capability to command a sizable ‘empire’ on the Continent. But from the mid-fifteenth century, when the artillery of Charles VII won the decisive victory of Castillon and drove the English out of almost all of France, to the year 1558, when England lost her last continental foothold at Calais, British military might underwent a marked decline. Between the end of the Hundred Years War (1453) and the outbreak of hostilities with Louis XIV in 1689, England ceased to be a major military power in Europe. With the exception of Henry VIII’s delusions of grandeur at the beginning and end of his reign, English military activity for a period of more than two hundred years consisted largely of naval warfare, civil war and the occasional (all-too-often unsuccessful) expedition to the aid of a friendly continental power. Elizabeth’s succour to the Netherlands, James I’s support for Count Mansfeld’s disastrous expedition of 1625, Buckingham’s catastrophic attempt to relieve La Rochelle, the Protectorate’s altogether more successful contribution to the capture of Dunkirk in 1658 and Charles II’s regiments raised for French service during the Third Dutch War are typical of the military activities of what can only be described as a marginal power in the great European struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a period of ferocious and continuous warfare, England was remarkable for its lack of participation in international conflict and for its many years of peace. England, in other words, was not a major participant in the so-called ‘Military Revolution’ of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe.⁸ Only after 1688, when she embarked on the second Hundred Years War with France, did she again become a major force.

Historians have argued that the ‘military revolution’ changed the character of warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. New tactics, involving greater manoeuvrability and linear formations on the one hand, and less mobile siege warfare on the other, were developed by Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus, Baron von Coehoorn and Sébastien de Vauban. Campaigns became more complex and protracted. The emphasis on drill and co-ordinated movement required well trained and properly disciplined troops. In consequence more and more states acquired standing armies. English military men were not ignorant of these changes. They could read about them in any of a number of military manuals which were circulated throughout Europe and translated into several languages. The new tactics were even put into practice by Cromwell’s armies. But when it came to the most important change in European warfare—its increased scale—English forces lagged behind those on the Continent.

The essence of the military revolution was the astonishing increase in the size of national armies and in the number of troops deployed on the field of battle. In the space of some two hundred years these increased tenfold. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Spanish army consisted of 70,000 troops, the Dutch of an astonishing 110,000, the French 120,000, the Swedish 63,000 and the Russian army of 130,000. In contrast the British army had only 15,000; it was smaller than it had been in 1475.⁹ For most of the period before the Glorious Revolution, the English army boasted fewer troops than it had during the Hundred Years War. The numbers exceeded 30,000 only during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when civil conflict and an exchequer filled with revenues from sequestered royalist lands made a large army both politically necessary and financially possible, and during the last years of James II’s reign.

For much of the period between the late fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries England lacked a standing army. While other European nations acquired such forces, the English state relied increasingly for domestic defence on a militia or trained bands. Only foreign expeditions—the militia could not legally serve abroad—were manned with professional soldiers, drawn from bodies either of paid retainers or of foreign mercenaries.

The militia and trained bands, though they came to be better trained, were hardly the stuff of which great armies are made. But the men who might have made up a powerful English army—and had indeed done so in the fourteenth century—were deliberately kept in check by the Tudor monarchy. During the Hundred Years War English monarchs, unable to oblige their subjects to serve abroad, had manned their forces through contract armies, raised for hire by magnates and landowners, who brought with them a retinue of their own retainers. No longer employed by the second half of the fifteenth century in campaigning in France, these aris...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Before the revolution: the English state in the medieval and early modern era
• Part 2 The contours of the fiscal military state
• Part 3 Political crisis: the emergence of the fiscal-military state
• Part 4 The state, war and economy
• Part 5 The state and civil society: The clash over information and interest
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index