State+Formation+in+Europe+(1066-1688)

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=**State Formation in Europe, 1650-1775**=

__Terms to know:__

absolute central power /Absolutism Louis XIV Bishop Jaques Bossuet Thomas Hobbes //Leviathan// (published 1651) Cardinal Richelieu King Louis XIII Louis XIV Jules Cardinal Mazarin Versailles Enlightened Monarch King John I William the Conqueror Runnymede //Magna Carta // King Henry VIII Elizabeth I Puritans James VI of Scotland The Church of England Oliver Cromwell New Model Army William of Orange Constitution of 1688

Discussion Question: How did Enlightenment thinking justify the development of absolute power for some European monarchs? How did it encourage constitutional systems?

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Absolutism in Europe

After the Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648, European political power structures moved in two different directions. The first we'll talk about, though not the first to appear, was **absolute central power**, based on the French model developed under **[|Louis XIV]**. The second, and earlier form, was that of limited central power, the chief examples of which are the Netherlands and Great Britain.

Absolute central power, or **Absolutism**, seems to have gained its popularity as a means to restore order and security after the era of religious warfare, in a way similar to the popularity of legalism in China at the end of the period of civil wars. The classic statement of absolute central power came from France's **[|Bishop Jaques Bossuet]** (Catholic Bishop, orator, and court preacher 1627-1704), who as a part of his three volume analysis of the workings of Creation and the relationships between God and humans noted that God works through a number of intermediaries in this world, that one of those intermediary positions is that of ruler, or king, and since kings are thus appointees of God, they are therefore working at God's purpose and should be understood to hold their power from God.

Contrary to Bossuet's reasoning, **[|Thomas Hobbes]** (1588-1679), an Englishman, had reasoned that absolute central power came from the governed. In his book **//Leviathan// (published 1651)** Hobbes argued that humans in the state of nature were violent and acquisitive. Their lives, characterized by competition for resources and relationships, were, as he put it, "nasty, brutish, and short." Because of the violent nature of human competition and conflict over material possessions, people, Hobbes said, had created societies as agreements amongst themselves to preserve lives and opportunities. To do this, Hobbes thought, people had agreed to give up all of their rights to a central authority (a king) who would then delegate rights and authority back to people as he/she found fit to do so, and would use the power acquired to force humans to behave within a certain set of rules (laws). Hobbes believed, then, that society, and absolute central authority, were human creations, but he also believed that there was no way out of this system. Once a society had been established and authority given to the ruler, it could not be taken back for any reason. Rebellion or revolt would in themselves constitute the kind of acts that the ruler's power was supposed to prevent, and so would, and should, be put down.

Hobbes' grim reasoning was, as one might imagine, rejected by kings seeking to rationalize their legitimacy in favor of the much more optimistic, and difficult to circumvent, rationale provided by Bossuet of the divine right of kings. But these kings had already accrued a tremendous amount of power before either Hobbes or Bossuet arrived to rationalize it for them. So we also need to go into the political development of absolute central authority.

One of the key political goals of French kings between 1500 and 1750 was to consolidate and centralize their authority over all of France. During the later part of the Reformation period, **Cardinal Richelieu** (1585-1642 French Cardinal and advisor to **King Louis XIII**) had reduced the power of French nobles and the independence of Protestant cities within France such that the king could claim control over every part of France. **Louis XIV** (1638-1715), with the help of **Jules Cardinal Mazarin** (Chief Minister to Louis XIV, 1602-1661), Richelieu's handpicked successor, began the process whereby he would project the image of himself as the "Grand Monarch," and created a system whereby he had absolute power within France. To do this, the king promoted a theory of rule in which the king made all major decisions, whether they had to do with legal, judicial, military or administrative matters. The king then funneled his power through a priviledged aristocracy. In this system, Louis and his aristocratic administrators worked to ensure that peasants paid dues and services to their landlords, and that commoners paid taxes to the king to finance wars, the extravagant court life of the king (including the building of the palace at **Versailles**, which became the stage for this absolutist drama), and other government activities. Aristocrats were encouraged to refrain from interfering with the king's decisions in part through a promise that they would not be required to pay taxes at all.

At this point, is seems rather clear why kings like Louis XIV might prefer Bossuet's ideas about the divine right of kings over the ideas of Hobbes in which power comes from the people - Bossuet's thought makes the argument for absolute power that much less questionable, and that much more honorable.

In addition to all of this, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were in full swing by the end of Louis XIV's reign. The ideas of a rational world that could be explained through reason and science that these two intertwined movements spoke of inspired Louis XIV. He moved to rationalize his government, as he "rationalized" the gardens at Versailles (which have been redesigned and landscaped since) to reflect the order that French scientists and thinkers claimed was in the world. Louis established an academy of sciences (which, conveniently, also did research into new weapons technologies, among other things), and set about centralizing his control over the laws of France, as well as over the system of taxation and finance. He redesigned parts of Paris to reflect his power and the centralized authority he claimed over the kingdom, and to make communication and the movement of armies more direct and speedy. He became, as it were, an "**Enlightened Monarch**" - a king who ruled according to the new logical principles of the day, and thus in accord with the rational order of nature.

One of the key realities of the enlightenment movement, however, has always been the fact that it preserves an honorable place for disagreement and argument. No point is easily settled, and that was certainly true as it pertained to the question of the most rational form of government. For the Philosophes, the great thinkers and writers of the enlightenment period, the ideal system of government seemed to be that of the benevolent dictatorship. However, rulers like Louis XIV often adopted and adapted that idea to fit the fact of an existing monarch by claiming to be enlightened rulers themselves. Some rulers, though, found that their project of centralization foundered on the rocks of the ambitions of aristocrats within their kingdom, whose goal was to preserve their own powers, and who also effectively use the logic of the Enlightenment to make their case for limited power in central government.

One such case, perhaps the best example in 17th century Europe, was England, the story of whose development of limited central rule begins as early as 1215, with **King John I**, heir of Richard the Lionheart, who had squandered his treasury in the Fourth Crusade, then come home to promptly die and leave John holding an empty treasury and heavy expenses. John proved to be creative, if overbearing, in his solutions to his financial problems.

For John, like French Kings, the reality was that taxes could not be taken from most common people without the help and consent of the aristocracy, and there was no legal tradition of taking taxes annually - taxes were raised on an occasional basis when the need to pay for war arose. John therefore had to find a way to rebuild his treasury, and pay his normal expenses, including those of administering his government, such as it was, by means other than the annual income and property taxes that we are used to in the United States today. Some of John's solutions to this problem included rather obvious ideas such as taxes on imports and exports. He also required claimants at court to pay court fees, which accrued to the king. He made specific claims on land in England, requiring payments for confirmation of inheritance of land and title. In the case of widows whose husbands had maintained land titles from John, the king required the widow to make payment of a certain fee, based on property and husband's former title and rank, to the king in order to maintain the property and administer it on her own. In the absence of such a fee payment, the king would sell the right to marry the widow, and to gain title to her lands, to the highest bidder.

None of these policies particularly endeared John to his subjects, especially since his predecessor, Richard, had been gone so often, and spent so much more often than he tried to earn, that his kingship was remembered in great contrast to John's. Worse, at this point, in about 1199, the King of France used a number of his soldiers to confiscate the lands, in Normandy, that had since **William the Conqueror** had crossed the English Channel in 1066, traditionally been the fief of the Kings of England, held as vassals of the King of France. The loss of these lands was a great blow to the prestige and income of the English Crown, and John was determined to get them back. On several occasions, he raised an army and taxes to go and attack the French King's soldiers and win Normandy back. On each occasion, he lost, and had to return to England empty-handed and embarrassed. In 1215, John I began preparations for another attempt on Normandy, and ordered his aristocrats to bring knights and funds for the new war, and to meet him on the field at **Runnymede** to prepare to embark. When he arrived, however, he found his aristocrats well-armed and ready for battle - with him. Recognizing he was outnumbered and outfoxed, John I agreed to sign a contract with the English aristocrats, now known as the **//[|Magna Carta]//**, or "Great Charter" in which he agreed to a number of things - but in particular, John promised never to raise taxes without the consent of a majority of the aristocrats meeting together.

In essence, what the aristocrats had done was to force upon John I a social contract, very much like the one that John Locke would argue was the de facto basis for any society, whose terms were essentially economic in nature, and which governed the degree to which both government and subjects had the right to accumulate wealth and form relationships with others, and to what degree government could limit those rights. This contract was specifically between John I and his barons, but kings after him tended to show their good will by pledging to abide by it, and so its many provisions became a part of English governing tradition. The provision allowing for a meeting of aristocrats who could agree or not to the ruler's request for taxes would become the tradition that eventually led to the formation of parliament, though this group was neither identified as parliament, nor did it have the broad spectrum of powers and responsibilities that parliament has come to have in the modern world.

If we fast-forward a bit, and move into the 17th century, one of the important developments in English politics was the English rulers' reaction to the Protestant Reformation. The secession from the Catholic Church and establishment of the Anglican Church under the English ruler by **King Henry VIII** was a major change in the notions of the responsibilities and powers held by the English monarch. As head of the Anglican Church, to some degree the monarch's political powers came to rest on the claim, made by Henry VIII, of responsibility for the care not only of the English people themselves, but of their eternal souls as well. The claim that a king's leadership in this world would have a bearing on the success of his subjects in the next meant that the king was laying claim to more than just divine right to rule, but to the status of the Pope and the king at once.

Henry VIII was certainly able to wield this kind of power, as he was a forceful personality and a strong king who had control over most of his courtiers most of the time. His eldest daughter, Mary, who became queen on his death, and was born a Catholic to Henry's first wife prior to the divorce proceedings that were the basic cause of the English Reformation, was a less forceful, but no less stubborn figure, demanding a return of England to the Catholic Church, and attempting to find any way possible to undercut the power and success of English Protestants. Her rule engendered many domestic enemies. That of **[|Elizabeth I]**, one of **[|Henry VIII]**'s younger daughters, which began at the death of Mary, was if anything even more controversial at a critical time in the history of England.

Elizabeth had to bear the full brunt of the Counter-reformation, Protestant as she was, and she was determined not to return to the Catholic Church, but to strengthen the Anglican Church and her rule along with it. This rather nationalist stance made her any number of enemies on the international stage, including the King of Spain, who at one point sent nearly his entire navy to try to destroy the English navy and render the island kingdom defenseless against invasion (the attempt failed). In all of this, Elizabeth required the assistance of loyal aristocrats, both financially and politically.

As the Anglican Church (**The Church of England**) matured, a group of 'radical' protestants emerged within its congregation. These 'radicals' wanted to purge the Anglican Church, which still looked in many ways very much like the Catholic Church in theology and liturgy, of all Catholic influences - to 'purify' the Anglican Church. These radicals came to be known as "**[|Puritans]**" and "dissenters". One of their key goals was to be sure that the head of the Church of England, the ruler, always be a protestant. Thus, when Elizabeth I died without issue (with no heirs) in 1603, her cousin, **[|James VI of Scotland]**, became James I King of England as well, and he also became the first king to unify the rule of both England and Scotland under a single crown.

James asserted the same rights to divine kingship that Louis XIV would assert about a century later. He was a strong advocate of the idea that the king was selected by God, and should therefore be obeyed, and not blocked, even by the aristocrats, who were otherwise his social equals. Eventually, James' son Charles I of England, also intent on establishing unquestioned absolute rule through divine right, would attempt to crush the fledgling Parliament, but would in fact, be crushed by it, arrested, and executed as a traitor to England. Following the death of Charles I, England was, for a short time, without a monarch, and was ruled by the commander of the so-called "**New Model Army**" that had defeated the forces of Charles I and brought him to justice - a Puritan called **[|Oliver Cromwell]**. Cromwell ruled England as virtual dictator until 1658.

Cromwell's rule eventually proved as unpopular as that of Charles I had been, and when Cromwell died, the English crown was offered eventually to **[|William of Orange]**, governor of the Netherlands. William accepted, but he had placed upon him a number of restrictions. No standing army was allowed. The king had to ask Parliament for taxes, and the King and any future kings and queens were to remain protestant forever in order to prevent reversion of the Anglican Church to the Catholic fold. This final document, executed during a series of events known today as the "Glorious Revolution", was an agreement that William and all of his heirs had to obey, forever. The fact that he was willing to sign the document meant that English rulers were now subject to, not above, the law, and so could no longer aspire to become absolutists. The development of parliamentary powers, of the prime minister, and the waning of the ruler's powers was still a long time coming - but the beginnings of a limited constitutional government, upholding, but subject to, the laws of the nation, can be seen for England right here in the **Constitution of 1688**. This document would go on to inspire many American colonists when they began trying to write their own constitution in the 1770's.