Although these draconian measures temporarily halted collective academic insurrections, some individual intellectuals continued to criticize the policies pursued by the Ming government, while others denounced those who carried them out. Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), who passed all his examinations and began a promising career as an official, resigned at age 47 and devoted himself to writing the celebrated play The Peony Pavilion and several tracts that portrayed his former colleagues in the bureaucracy as corrupt and incompetent pedants. Feng Menglong (1574–1646), who repeatedly failed his examinations, collected and published novels, poetry, jokes and short stories that likewise portrayed scholars and officials as corrupt buffoons. Ai Nanying (1583–1646) achieved fame when his successful juren examination in 1624 was deemed to contain material critical of Wei Zhongzian, who decreed that Ai would have to wait nine years before attempting his jinshi. Ai responded by writing critical essays, letters and poems that proved so popular that ‘Suzhou and Hangzhou booksellers paid him to come and write something – anything – they could publish’. Three editions of his collected works had appeared by the end of the century.
Zhang Tao, a county magistrate who had passed all his examinations, provided perhaps the most damaging critique, in an essay published in a Gazetteer in 1609, comparing Ming China with the four seasons of the year. According to Zhang's scenario, ‘winter’ corresponded with the early years of the dynasty, when ‘every family was self-sufficient, with a house to live in, land to cultivate, hills from which to cut firewood, gardens in which to grow vegetables. Taxes were collected without harassment and bandits did not appear.’ Then came ‘spring’ – roughly the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries – when ‘Those who went out as merchants became numerous and the ownership of land was no longer esteemed. Men matched wits using their assets, and fortunes rose and fell unpredictably.’ This caused the moral order to weaken, as ‘deception sprouted and litigation arose; purity was sullied and excess overflowed’. The process accelerated in the later sixteenth century, the ‘summer’ of the dynasty, as ‘the rich became richer and the poor, poorer. Those who rose took over, and those who fell were forced to flee… Corrupt magistrates sowed disorder… Purity was completely swept away and excess inundated the world.’ Now, in the seventeenth century, Zhang perceived ‘autumn’ all around him: ‘One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich who, though few in number, are able to control the majority… Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure.’17
As public order and economic conditions deteriorated, alienated intellectuals gained confidence when they joined one of the 2,000 or so ‘Academies’ founded under the late Ming, of which the most famous was the Donglin Academy in Wuxi, where officials and candidates for the civil service exams met other intellectuals to discuss current social issues. After the Academy's suppression, many Donglin alumni joined the Fu she (‘Restoration Society’, founded in 1629) or another ‘scholarly society’, where they debated not only literature, philosophy and history but also practical ways of ending government corruption and dealing with threats to the traditional order, both foreign and domestic. Although the leading lights of the Academies and later the Societies managed to introduce their ideas into the curriculum of the civil service examinations, they failed either to halt the corruption or to influence the policies of the central government (see chapter 5), and some therefore defected either to Li Zicheng or to the Qing (and, in some cases, to both). Others formed their own bandit gangs. Thus in 1643 an agent of the dukes of Kong in Shandong who captured a gang of 24 bandits was astonished to find that most of them were graduates of the county academy. The scholars bribed a local official to release them and they returned with 1,000 retainers to the residence of the ducal agent, which they burned down, killing many of his relatives before stealing ‘grain, donkeys, horses, oxen, sheep, all my accumulated savings, along with over eight thousand’ ounces of silver belonging to the dukes of Kong, the most powerful family in the province.18 Thanks to such successes, the graduate gang prospered until the Qing restored order in the province.
The full potential for disruption of the literate elite of Ming China only emerged after the Qing ‘tonsure decree’ of 1645 (see chapter 5 above). Tens of thousands of scholars in southern China, whatever degree they held, now mounted a desperate resistance to the foreign dynasty, in which many perished rather than shave their heads and dress like Manchus. Admittedly, they still failed to force the state to change its policies, but their learning and their shared values served as a ‘force multiplier’ and rendered their political opposition far more formidable.
In Europe, as in China, the methods adopted by the state to produce highly educated officials also produced highly educated critics and opponents. By the 1620s, European men could study at almost 200 institutions of higher education, some of which were surprisingly large (Fig. 49). The student population of Naples University numbered about 5,000, and that of Salamanca University around 7,000. Almost 1,200 students graduated from Oxford and Cambridge Universities each year during the reign of Charles I, while several hundred more studied law at the Inns of Court. In the 1650s, according to the Scottish visitor James Fraser, ‘the number of the Inns of Court students and Gentlemen are at present computed to a 1,000 or 1,200’, while Cambridge ‘could boast of 3,200 students and above’, and Oxford (‘much decayed of late’) had somewhat fewer.19
In most European states, the student body included many aristocrats. In Bavaria, almost one-fifth of those who matriculated at Ingolstadt University between 1600 and 1648 were nobles; and by 1620, one-half of the Protestant nobles of Lower Austria had acquired higher education. In England, according to James Fraser, ‘all Gentlemen and a considerable number of ye higher Nobility’ were ‘versed and accomplished here in rhetherick, logick, arithmetick, mathematicks, the French to argue, and Latin’. The majority studied law – albeit, according to Fraser, they only ‘learn[ed] so much of it as may be necessary to preferre their estates and to make themselves accomplished and polished in such qualeties as are necessary for Gentlemen’.20
In Spain, too, many students came from noble families and studied law. Don Gaspar de Guzmán, the future count-duke of Olivares, arrived at Salamanca University aged 14 to study canon law. He attended both morning and afternoon lectures, studied his lecture notes at night, and also memorized six new legal precepts and their glosses daily. In his third year, his fellow students elected Don Gaspar their rector, and he seemed set to enter the Church after graduation, but his older brother died and his father summoned him to court. Had Don Gaspar persevered with his clerical career, he might have pursued advanced studies at one of Castile's Colegios Mayores (graduate colleges), which prepared men not only to be bishops and abbots but also to fill senior administrative and judicial positions in Castile and its American colonies. As Richard Kagan remarked in his classic study of the universities of Habsburg Spain, ‘no other occupation or career offered such possibilities for economic and social advancement’.21 Even Wang Daokun might have felt a twinge of envy.
49. Universities founded in Europe, 1600–60.
Although the expansion of institutions of higher education in Europe slowed after 1600, the following decades also saw numerous foundations, particularly in areas where Catholics and Protestants struggled for control. Some institutions did not last long: the university college founded at Durham in 1658 closed its doors the following year.
By the 1630s, perhaps one young Englishman in forty, and perhaps one young Castilian in twenty, attended university – proportions that would remain unequalled until the later twentieth century. In addition, perhaps one-third of all adult males in England acquired direct experience of law enforcement at some level, whether as magistrates, constables or jurors – a remarkably high participation ratio. As in Ming China, their learning and their shared values served as a ‘force multiplier’ that rendered their political opposition far
more formidable; also as in Ming China, no European government managed to employ all the alumni of its institutions of higher education. By the 1630s, perhaps 300 graduates left Oxford and Cambridge each year for a church living and another 200 went on to practise medicine or law – but this left some 700 others with no secure employment. The situation in Spain and other countries was similar: although many graduates entered the Church and a few became university professors, many more left university without a job.
This ‘overproduction’ of graduates terrified governments because, in the lapidary phrase of England's senior judge, a graduate of both Oxford and the Inns of Court, ‘learning without a living doth but breed traitors’ and, he opined, ‘we have more need of better livings for learned men, than of more learned men for these livings’. In Spain, the acerbic writer Francisco de Quevedo (a graduate of the Complutense University) also argued that universities undermined rather than strengthened states: monarchies ‘have always been acquired by generals and always corrupted by graduates,’ he wrote. ‘Armies, not universities, win and defend’ states; ‘battles bring kingdoms and crowns while education gives you degrees and pompoms’. In Sweden, the chancellor of Uppsala University complained that ‘there are more men of letters and learned fellows, especially in political matters, than means or jobs available to provide for them, and they grow desperate and impatient’. Emperor Ferdinand II, a graduate of Ingolstadt University, blamed the revolt of Bohemia and Austria against him on the universities, where his noble subjects had, he claimed, ‘in their youth imbibed the spirit of rebellion and opposition to lawful authority’.22
They made a good point: alienated intellectuals took a prominent part in fostering many European rebellions. In Bohemia, the rebel government included a dozen university graduates; in France, the Fronde began with a group of frustrated lawyers (the Maîtres de requêtes) and reached its first crescendo with the imprisonment of an outspoken judge (Pierre Broussel). In Sweden, two university-trained lawyers (the burgomaster and town secretary of Stockholm) and the Historiographer Royal led the opposition to Queen Christina in 1651. Many of Philip IV's leading opponents were also university-trained lawyers (Giulio Genoino, Francesco Arpaja and Vincenzo d'Andrea in Naples; Joan Pere Fontanella, his son Josep and Francesc Martí i Viladamor in Catalonia), supported by university-trained historians (Francesco Baronius in Sicily, Francesco de Petri in Naples and Joan Luis Montcada in Catalonia).23
Most striking of all, almost every one of Charles I's leading opponents – in both the New World and the Old – had attended an institution of higher education. Of the first 24 graduates from Harvard College, no fewer than 14 travelled to England to support Parliament. The architects of the Scottish revolution included Robert Baillie, who taught at Glasgow University; his pupil Archibald Johnston of Wariston; and Alexander Henderson, who studied (and briefly taught) at St Andrews University. In Ireland, Sir Phelim O'Neill (leader of the Ulster rebellion), had studied at the Inns of Court in London, as had about one-fifth of Ireland's Confederate General Assembly; while Lord Maguire (mastermind of the 1641 plot) had attended Magdalen College Oxford. Finally, at least four-fifths of the English House of Commons elected in 1640 had also studied at either a university or the Inns of Court, or both. In Behemoth, a retrospective in dialogue form concerning the causes of the Civil War written in 1668, Thomas Hobbes claimed that Oxford (his alma mater) and Cambridge ‘have been to this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans’ because ‘out of the universities came all those preachers that taught’ resistance. Moreover ‘our rebels were publicly taught rebellion in the pulpits’. Hobbes did not limit his remarks to England. Later on in the dialogue, a crusty survivor of the English Civil War states that ‘The core of rebellion, as you have seen by this, and read of other rebellions, are the universities’, prompting his young interlocutor to reply: ‘For aught I see, all the states of Christendom will be subject to these fits of rebellion, as long as the world lasts’ – and, indeed, every one of the major rebellions of western Europe in the mid-seventeenth century involved a large numbers of graduates.24
The Contentious Clergy of Latin Christendom
The clergy formed the third group of ‘powerful people’ with the capacity to transform popular revolts into revolutions, especially in Latin Christendom. At first sight their role may seem surprising because, as the marquis of Argyll wrote in 1661: ‘True religion is rather a settler than a stickler in politics and rather confirms men in obedience to the government established than invites them to the erecting of a new’ – and, indeed, both the Bible (especially the New Testament) and many religious writers stressed the need to obey. Yet Argyll assuredly knew better. He had seen Scotland's Calvinist clergy use their authority first to denounce the government by law established, then to erect a new one, and finally to compel their king to subscribe to their faith as a condition for allowing him into the kingdom. The Scottish historian (and slave to metaphor) Sir James Balfour did not exaggerate when he denounced the clergy of Scotland as ‘the chiefest bellows that has blown this terrible fire’ of civil war, because ‘the best instruments, misapplied, doe greatest mischieffe and prove most dangerous to aney stait’. And, he continued bitterly, if the clergy chose to
Misapplay ther talent and abandon themselves to the spirit of faction, they become the bitterest enimies, the most corroding cankers, and worst vipers in aney commonwealthe, and most pernicious to the prince; in regard that they, having the sway over the conscience, which is the rudder that steers the actions, wordes and thoughts of the rationall creature, they transport and snatche it away whither they will, making the beast with maney heads conceive according to the colour of thesse rods they use to cast befor them.25
Protestant clerics also acted as ‘the chiefest bellows’ of sedition elsewhere. In England, according to a preacher in the 1640s, whereas ‘the Clergy had at first the golden ball of government amongst themselves’, now ‘the interest of the people of Christ's kingdom is not only an interest of compliancy, and obedience, and submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting &c; and let us stand fast in that liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free’. One of his colleagues was more specific: ‘Ministers might by degrees prepare the people’ to participate directly in politics, so that ‘by the Sundayes sermon, or a lecture, they could learne, not onely what was done the weeke before, but also what was to be done in Parliament the weeke following’ and thus prepare their parishioners ‘for comming in tumults to the House [of Commons] for justice’.26 A generation earlier, in the Dutch Republic, Pastor Adriaan Smout of Amsterdam used his sermons to denounce both the city magistrates and the States-General for sending warships ‘to assist the child of destruction, the child of Satan … the king of France, Louis XIII’. Smout's oratory eventually secured the recall of the Dutch ships – shortly before the Amsterdam magistrates expelled Smout from their city in an attempt to silence him.27
Smout's fate was far from unique. A few years before, the Dutch Reformed Church had expelled some 200 ministers because they supported ‘Arminian’ views of which their colleagues disapproved. In Scotland, all the bishops and more than 200 ministers lost their posts after 1638, as did over 300 more after 1660, because they opposed the form of church government (Episcopalian and Presbyterian by turns) decreed by the state. For the same reason, in England, all bishops and almost 3,000 ministers (one-third of the total parish clergy) lost their pulpits in the 1640s, and a further 2,000 ministers lost theirs in the 1660s. These deprived ministers joined others who, though highly qualified, had failed to secure a permanent position: both groups posed a latent threat to public order.28
Catholic clerics, too, frequently fomented discontent. A Spanish propagandist claimed that ‘once the Portuguese people had rebelled, they remained resolute thanks to the persuasion of many clerics who justified their uprising, both with signed opinions and dangerous manifestos … as well as with scandalous sermons’. He was right: in 1637, the Jesuits of Évora (where they r
an the university) openly supported the rebellion against Spain and toured adjacent areas spreading sedition; while in the 1640s, almost 80 Portuguese preachers are known to have delivered sermons that supported the ‘Restoration’. Some called on John IV to rebuild the kingdom of Portugal as Solomon had restored the Temple in Jerusalem, or to lead the Portuguese out of bondage as Moses had led the Hebrews out of Egypt, while others warned their hearers that death would be preferable to ‘returning under the vile yoke’ of Spain, and that death in the Bragança cause would be equivalent to martyrdom. In France the list of persons whom Louis XIV excluded in 1676 from his General Pardon after the ‘red bonnet’ rebellion in Brittany included 14 priests.29
In Catalonia, too, the clergy played a crucial role in legitimizing the revolt against Spain. In 1640 both bishops and Inquisitors excommunicated the king's soldiers who set fire to churches in two villages that defied them; during the ensuing siege of Barcelona, clerics preached sermons, staged processions and heard confessions around the clock to rally resistance; and, as in Portugal, others assured their congregations that to fight Philip IV and ‘die for the Fatherland is to gain eternal life’.30 Seven years later, in Naples, dissident clerics (especially friars) ‘animated the people so that they went freely to fight, and believed they would be martyrs and go to Paradise’, while a group of priests took up arms and formed a regular militia company (they and many other clerics found it prudent to flee when the revolt collapsed). At least three bishops of the kingdom were later charged with fomenting the trouble; and at the provincial town of Nardò, the government executed four cathedral canons for inciting the rebels.31 Even Cardinal-Archbishop Ascanio Filomarino became directly involved in the revolution. In November 1647 he presided at the ceremony in his cathedral at which the duke of Guise became ‘Dux’ of Naples: he listened to the formal reading of the treaty between France and the Republic; he took Guise's oath to serve as perpetual ‘Protector’ of the Republic; and he blessed his ceremonial sword and baton. Then, after celebrating a Te Deum with the new Dux, the two rode through the crowds shouting ‘Long live the king of France’. Although a few months later Filomarino also rode beside Don Juan of Austria when the Spaniards regained possession of the city, at least one chronicler asserted that the archbishop ‘was really a supporter of the popular movement and had little love for Spain’.32
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