Sovereigns and estates

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.