Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Such fundamental divisions, together with the hardship caused by the Little Ice Age and by the civil war, eventually enabled the crown to present itself as the only alternative to anarchy. As Louis XIV wrote in the 1670s in his Mémoires, as soon as he began to rule: ‘I began to cast my eyes over all the various parts of the state; and not the eyes of a bystander but the eyes of the master.‘69 Mazarin had already shown the way, because peace with Spain enabled the cardinal to eliminate several groups of his domestic opponents. Almost immediately he terminated the assemblies of both the Paris clergy and the Trésoriers de France (whose defiance had started the Fronde), and then he dissolved an association of devout Catholics known as ‘The Company of the Holy Sacrament’. According to the Company's official historian, when Anne of Austria asked Mazarin why he wanted to persecute ‘such good servants of the king’, the cardinal responded that although they had not yet done any harm, thanks to their impressive organization they could present a threat in the future. The legislation that ended the Company's legal existence outlawed meetings of all religious ‘confraternities, congregations and communities’ in Paris or in the provinces, on the grounds that ‘under the veil of piety and devotion’ they might foment ‘cabals’ and ‘intrigues’.70

  After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV continued to eliminate individuals and corporations who offered alternative foci of loyalty, starting with the late cardinal's wealthy and corrupt Finance Minister, Nicholas Fouquet, who had fortified the island of Belle-Île off the Breton coast, where he maintained a large arsenal and a private squadron of warships. Equally provocative, to the ‘eyes of the master’, Fouquet had spent 14 million livres on creating the most extensive and expensive private residence ever built in early modern France, at Vaux-le-Vicomte near Paris, where he maintained a glittering artistic following, including the playwrights Molière and Racine and the poet La Fontaine. A few months after Mazarin's death, Louis XIV arrested and imprisoned Fouquet, charged him with treason, and set up a commission of inquiry to investigate all who had grown rich from lending money to the crown in wartime. The commission eventually convicted almost 250 individuals of defrauding the treasury and collected fines that totalled 125 million livres – almost twice France's annual budget.71

  The commission of inquiry was one of several royal initiatives that corresponded to demands by the Frondeurs. Others included Louis's decision to create fewer new offices, to end the punitive taxation of office-holders and to renew the Paulette automatically. In addition, Fouquet's successor as Finance Minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, paid both loan interest and official salaries punctually and in full; redeemed many costly long-term bonds; and, above all, reduced reliance on direct taxes like the taille (whereas indirect imposts had produced less than 25 per cent of the royal budget in the 1640s, they brought in 50 per cent by the 1670s). Although Colbert's fiscal reforms only raised the crown's notional revenue from 83 million livres in 1661 to 95 million in 1667, they more than doubled the amount that actually reached the central treasury from 31 million to 63 million livres.72

  Louis also excluded from the central government three groups which, he believed, had grown too powerful during the regency: his relatives (even Anne of Austria lost her seat on the council and he never consulted his brother on matters of state); his nobles (in the course of his long reign, he appointed only two to the rank of minister of state); and his prelates (there would be no more Richelieus or Mazarins). Instead, Louis entrusted major tasks to men of relatively humble origins (like Colbert, whose father was a bankrupt provincial draper) with whom he worked diligently, either separately or in council, while reserving all the key decisions for himself. In the provinces, Louis not only restored the intendants abolished during the Fronde but appointed them on a permanent basis with wide-ranging functions (reflected in their full titles ‘Intendants of justice, police and finance’: the ancestors of the modern Prefects). In the Pays d'État, a series of edicts removed the power of the Parlements to challenge royal edicts before registering them, and Louis held no lit de justice after 1675. The local Estates likewise lost their right to present grievances before voting taxes. John Locke (at the time operating as an English spy in France) witnessed a session of the once-powerful Estates of Languedoc in 1676, and observed that the assembly had ‘all the solemnity and outward appearance of a Parliament: the king proposes and they debate and resolve about it’ – but, he continued, ‘they never do, and some say dare not, refuse whatever the king demands’.73 The language of politics in France had shifted from negotiation and compromise to obedience and subordination.

  Louis tackled with similar vigour another inherited domestic challenge: the Huguenots. He issued a stream of edicts that restricted the religious and personal liberty of France's 250,000 Protestants; he quartered troops on the households of those who refused to convert; and in 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes (page 293 above). The king now ordered the destruction of all Protestant churches, proscribed all Protestant worship, public and private, closed all Protestant schools, and ordered all Protestant ministers either to convert or to leave the kingdom within two weeks. At least 200,000 Protestants followed their pastors into foreign exile, while the rest remained and, at least outwardly, conformed.

  Louis also used force to impose his will on the cities of France, assailing their physical as well as their political strength. He ordered the demolition of almost all fortifications in the interior – including those of Paris, replacing its walls with the tree-lined Grands Boulevards that dominate the right bank of the city to this day. According to a treatise on the administration of the capital, France now enjoyed such security that its capital no longer needed walls to defend it.74 This was no idle boast. Louis's military architects created a ring of artillery fortresses around the periphery of France, christened Le pré carré (the duelling field), designed to prevent any enemy from penetrating to the heart of the kingdom. The king also steadily increased the size of France's standing army. In the 1650s, through desertion and demoralization, the effective strength of France's armies probably did not exceed 150,000 men, and after the Peace of the Pyrenees the total fell to around 55,000. During the 1670s, by contrast, France's armies exceeded 180,000 men in peacetime, rising above 250,000 in wartime – the largest and most expensive defence establishment in Europe. Soldiers became more numerous in France than clerics, and military buildings (barracks as well as fortresses) dwarfed even the largest cathedrals and monasteries.

  ‘Louis le Grand’ (as his sycophants dubbed him) also constructed a vast palace complex at Versailles just outside Paris (using the same team of architects, painters and garden designers who had created Vaux-le-Vicomte for Fouquet), where he took decisions, patronized the arts and, with some secretarial assistance, prepared his Reflections on the Craft of Kingship, in which he justified his claim to exercise absolute power not solely because monarchs were God's lieutenants on earth (although Louis firmly believed that to be true), but because they combined unique benefits of nature and nurture. Inheritance, he argued, gave rulers a superior natural intelligence; but to succeed (like him) they must still work hard at ‘the craft of kingship (le métier du roi)’. Thanks to his own dedication, Louis observed smugly, he now dominated both France and its neighbours.75

  Louis showed the same inflexibility in both foreign and domestic policy. Like Richelieu and Mazarin before him, he viewed Christendom as a hierarchy in which some states naturally played a greater role than others: he therefore believed that an enduring ‘balance of power’ in Europe required France to be pre-eminent, and seemed genuinely astonished that other states would see his kingdom as a dangerous threat to be contained rather than as the vital guarantor of stability. Yet fears of French dominance were already current even when Louis ascended the throne. In 1644 a Swedish envoy at Westphalia remarked to his imperial counterpart that he ‘was not unaware of the fact that [the French] aimed at superiority and at becoming the arbiters of the affairs of the Christian world’, and he indicated that Swed
en would oppose it; while one of his French colleagues observed that ‘In my humble opinion it would be more advantageous to gain less, with the true and cordial affection of the Germans, than to retain more while forfeiting their friendship.’ Two years later another French diplomat warned his government that ‘If Breisach, Pinerolo and Perpignan are not sufficient to secure our frontiers, I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to us as to the Spaniards for wanting to extend their power so far.‘76 Louis paid no attention. Every one of the peace conferences of his reign – the Pyrenees in 1659, Breda in 1668, Nijmegen in 1678, Rijswijk in 1697 and Utrecht in 1713 – convened to end a war that France had begun.

  Plus ça change?

  Louis's ignorance reflected his education. Even before he became the royal preceptor, François de La Mothe le Vayer had written: ‘One cannot deny that the art of governing people and subjugating enemies, which is the true vocation of princes, consists primarily of action rather than thought'; and that ‘One of the great maxims of politics is that a king must wage war in person, because someone who is only king in his palace runs the risk of finding his master on the battlefield.’ By the age of 13, when his practical military education began, Louis had already translated the whole of Caesar's Commentaries from Latin into French; and he spent the next five years learning how to fight with pike and musket, how to attack and defend fortresses, and how to command. The one exception was arithmetic, which La Mothe le Vayer considered a matter for merchants and ‘something inappropriate for a king’ – thus depriving Louis of a vital tool for assessing the costs of his policy decisions.77

  Just like Richelieu and Mazarin, however, Louis XIV fought his wars at a time when climatic adversity reduced the available resources. Tree-ring data from western France show a long period of cooler and drier weather in the later seventeenth century, with several years of extreme adversity. The year 1672, when the Dutch war began, saw the worst harvest in a decade (thanks to drought followed by torrential rain), and those of the two succeeding years were scarcely better. Then came 1675, a ‘year without a summer’, almost certainly reflecting the powerful eruption of two volcanoes in Southeast Asia. In July, in Paris, Madame de Sévigné complained to her daughter that ‘we have the fires lit, just like you.’ Her daughter lived in Provence, where a diarist lamented that ‘the seasons were so disorderly that all the crops were incredibly late’ and predicted that they would not be harvested until late October, ‘something never before seen here’. He was right: the grape harvest of 1675 ripened later throughout France than in any other year since records began in 1484. In Languedoc, John Locke noted that ‘the rents of land in France [had] fallen above one-half, in these [last] few years by reason of the poverty of the people and want of money’, while ‘merchants and handicrafts men pay above half their gain’ in taxes.78

  Admittedly, Louis took some steps to ameliorate the adverse effects of climate change. During the famine of 1661 he bought grain in Aquitaine, Brittany and the Baltic and brought it to the capital – something neither Richelieu nor Mazarin had attempted – and this became standard operating procedure for the French central government in times of dearth for the rest of the ancien régime and beyond. Elsewhere, however, the king showed little concern and so each period of climatic adversity produced not only famine but also a spike in popular rebellions. At least 300 revolts broke out in 1661–2, a few of them suppressed only after troops arrived; and 1675 saw popular protests in western France from Bordeaux to Nantes. Those in Lower Brittany reached the scale of earlier uprisings. Louis had introduced several new indirect taxes to fund the Dutch war – notably a duty on all products made of tin, a state monopoly on tobacco and a stamp duty on all legal documents – and obliged the Parlement to register them. As before, raising taxes in a time of climatic adversity produced cries of ‘Long live the king – without excise taxes’. Several Breton cities saw assaults on the offices that issued stamped paper, while peasants stormed and sacked the mansions and castles of their lords. By September 1675 the movement had a leader, the lawyer Sébastien Le Balp, a collective name (Les bonnets rouges: ‘The red bonnets’) and several printed lists of grievances; but it collapsed when a nobleman managed to murder Le Balp, and regular troops entered the duchy to carry out systematic reprisals. Louis signed a general amnesty in February 1676 that excluded more than 150 people (including 1 gentleman, 1 notary and 14 priests) in order to concentrate on the next campaign.

  The ‘year without a summer’ thus produced consequences that resembled those that followed climatic disasters in the first half of the seventeenth century; but there were also three differences. First, the revolts of 1675 neither produced sequels nor did they attract aristocratic involvement. Louis XIV would face no more Frondes. Second, they left a permanent visual legacy. The king ordered his troops to ‘decapitate’ the church steeples in Brittany whose bells had summoned insurgents, and some of the truncated towers still stand as a stark reminder of the revolt and its consequences. Finally, as already noted, the record cards (fiches) compiled for each of the thousands of men who enlisted in the French army reveal an average height of only 5 ft 3 inch) for those born between 1666 and 1694; and of those, the shortest of all, standing at 63 inches, were born in 1675. Moreover, among that disadvantaged group, those born in the west of France, the areas that had rebelled, were the shortest cohort of Frenchmen ever recorded.79 This vindicates the claims made by some of Louis's subjects, from Madame de Sévigné to Sébastien le Balp, that the conditions they faced were ‘without parallel in past centuries’. Even the Sun King was no match for the Little Ice Age.

  11

  The Stuart Monarchy: The Path to Civil War, 1603–421

  THE HISTORY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND HAS ALWAYS ATTRACTED controversy. In 1659 John Rushworth published the first volume of a work entitled Historical Collections or private passages of state, dedicated to Lord Protector Richard Cromwell (son of Oliver Cromwell), which charted the origins of the English Civil War from a Republican point of view. Since the 1620s, Rushworth had held a variety of appointments that enabled him to witness events and amass printed and manuscript material (Plate 13). In 1682 James Nalson, a cleric, published a royalist alternative to Rushworth, entitled An impartial collection of the great affairs of state, dedicated, ‘To the king's most excellent majesty’. Although both authors ended with the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, Rushworth started with the revolt of Bohemia in 1618 and the reaction of Charles and his father James I, which (as Nalson pointed out) implicitly saddled the Monarchy with ‘the guilt of all the calamities and miseries of the late rebellion’. Nalson, by contrast, started with ‘the Scotch rebellion’ against King Charles in 1637, a chronological choice that focused blame on the king's opponents, and he accused his predecessor of including only documents that ‘justify the actions of the late rebels’. Rushworth wisely ignored these barbs: ‘Dr Nalson,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘finds fault with me; but I leave it to Posterity to judge.‘2

  ‘Posterity’ can now draw on far more sources than either Rushworth or Nalson. Many of the leading protagonists recorded their innermost thoughts and justified their actions in writing, which historians can link with other written records as well as with sources on the prevailing climate. These data, richer and more varied than those available for any other country in the seventeenth century, make it possible not only to reconstruct just how Charles I and his subjects in Britain and Ireland ‘came to fall out among ourselves’ (as Rushworth put it), but also to study exactly how human and natural causes interacted to produce that outcome. And then we can ‘judge’.

  ‘Great Britain’: A Problematic Inheritance

  The Civil Wars would have been impossible without the creation of a new ‘composite state’ in 1603, when James VI of Scotland inherited England, Wales, Ireland and the Channel Isles from his childless cousin, Elizabeth Tudor. It was an unequal union from the first. Ireland's population in 1603 was perhaps 1.5 million, and Scotland's population was well under a m
illion, whereas England's exceeded four million. The disparity was even greater a century later, when the totals had risen to 2.5, 1 and 6 million respectively. London, with 250,000 inhabitants in 1603 (and perhaps twice as many in 1640) had no equal in the Stuart Monarchy. The contrast overwhelmed King James, who admitted sheepishly to Parliament that ‘my three first yeeres [in England] were to me as a Christmas’ so that it might have appeared ‘that the king had been drunke with his new kingdome’.3

  England and Scotland had spent much of the previous four centuries at war, leaving a reservoir of mutual hatred and suspicion, and the economic, social and political differences of the two kingdoms were exceeded only by their incompatible religious establishments and doctrines, each enforced through a panoply of laws and courts. Although both states were officially Protestant, in Scotland bishops appointed by the king contended with regional assemblies (known as presbyteries) of parish ministers who followed the theology of John Calvin; whereas in England the monarch, who was also the Head of the Church, appointed all bishops and upheld a Protestant theology hostile to both Catholics and Calvinists (normally known as Presbyterians). England's Catholics inspired disproportionate popular hatred and fear, because although they numbered under 5 per cent of the total population, they included many prominent adherents (including the spouses of both James and his son Charles and many of their courtiers) as well as some extremists (such as the group led by Guy Fawkes who in 1605 attempted to blow up the royal family and both Houses of Parliament in the Gunpowder Plot).

  Ireland, too, proved a troubled inheritance. In 1603, after a bitter nine-year struggle, English forces managed to suppress a major Catholic rebellion, supported by Spain, and soon afterwards James confiscated the lands of many former rebels and granted them to settlers from Britain. By 1640 some 70,000 English and Welsh, and perhaps 30,000 Scots, had settled in Ulster (the northern province of the island), mostly in new towns and in ‘plantations’ (lands confiscated from the native Irish and granted to groups of British immigrants). These newcomers joined either the Protestant Church of Ireland (closely modelled on the Church of England, with bishops appointed by the crown) or one of a growing number of Presbyterian communities; but everywhere they remained heavily outnumbered by Catholics obedient to the bishops and abbots appointed by Rome.