Global Crisis
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Justifying Disobedience III: Forging New Resistance Theories
When convenient precedents from Scripture, history and the Classics eluded them, and Messianic claims failed to win converts, those in Europe ‘who hope only for a change’ deployed three alternative strategies to justify resistance: creating bogus documents, borrowing arguments used by others elsewhere, and inventing brand-new reasons to resist. Several rebels forged documents that seemed to justify their actions. In 1641, in Ulster, Sir Phelim O'Neill brandished ‘a parchment or paper with a great seal affixed which he affirmed to be a warrant from the King's Majestie for what he did’. The ‘depositions’ of many of the Protestant survivors testified to its effectiveness in fooling them and others.75 In 1647 the duke of Guise used an identical ruse to convince the leaders of the ‘Most Serene Republic of Naples’ that he possessed a letter from Louis XIV promising French support; while both Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Ukraine and Stenka Razin in Russia boasted to their Cossack followers that they possessed royal letters authorizing them to mobilize against their oppressors. Although in each case these documents received wide credence, they were all almost certainly forgeries.76
The second alternative strategy was to appropriate justifications for resistance invented by dissidents elsewhere. Thanks to their verbal diarrhoea, the leading Scottish Covenanters provided the most detailed accounts of this process. Thus in 1638, as the conflict with King Charles intensified, Archibald Johnston of Wariston read the history of the successful Dutch Revolt against the king of Spain written by Emanuel van Meteren and then ‘studied all that week on Althusii Politica’ – a 1,000-page treatise written by Johannes Althusius, which claimed that a contract or Covenant formed the basis of every association of human beings (from families, through professional groups, towns and provinces up to states), and that the representatives of the lower associations could in certain circumstances resist a tyrannical superior. The following year, Wariston ‘began to fall to the hypothesis of resistance in Scotland’ and to clear his mind he ‘epitomized Brutus his reasons’ – a reference to the French Calvinist treatise, Vindiciae contra tyrannos, published 60 years before to justify armed resistance.77 Meanwhile Wariston's university preceptor, Robert Baillie, found justification for resistance in the writings of Martin Luther and other Protestants because they gave ‘leave to subjects, in some cases, to defend themselves where the prince is absolute from any man, but not absolute from ties to the laws of church and state whereto he is sworn, which is the case of all Christian kings now’. Two weeks later, Baillie, Wariston and some radical Scottish clerics debated ‘the lawfulness and necessity of defending ourselves in this case by arms’.78 Alexander Henderson, too, turned to modern Dutch writers when he considered what circumstances might justify opposing the king's commands ‘and taking arms therefore’. From Hugo Grotius's On war and peace, first published in 1625, he borrowed the argument that ‘the great force of necessity’ might ‘justify actions otherwise unwarrantable’. ‘In this extremity,’ he continued, ‘to sit still … waiting for our own destruction’ would be ‘not only against religion, but [against] nature’. There could be, Henderson concluded, ‘no greater necessity’ than the preservation of a country's religion and liberty because ‘Necessity is a sovereignty, a law above all laws’.79
Charles I's English opponents also read and plundered Althusius, Grotius and other apologists of the Dutch revolt against Spain. In 1641 Calybut Downing, a Puritan minister who enjoyed the protection of the king's leading opponents, published a pamphlet that compared the current state of England with that of the Netherlands on the eve of their revolt in the 1560s. In particular, Downing drew a parallel between the duke of Alba, the ‘tyrannical viceroy’ sent by Philip II at the head of a Spanish army to crush his Dutch critics, and the earl of Strafford, widely suspected of planning to bring an army from Ireland to crush Charles's English critics, and concluded that eliminating the ‘tyrannical’ Strafford was the only way to prevent a ‘civil war’ in England similar to the one provoked by Alba in the Netherlands.80
In 1643 the gentleman scholar William Prynne revealed his preferred resistance theory in the title of his best-known book: Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes, wherein the Parliament's present necessary defensive armes against their sovereignes, and their armies in some cases, is copiously manifested to be just. It contained 200 closely printed pages of venomous attacks on King Charles, interspersed with quotations from the Bible, the Classics and modern writers (Catholic as well as Protestant), followed by an appendix of foreign examples of resistance, deposition and regicide from ancient Israel to modern France; the full text of the Act of Abjuration by which the Dutch had renounced their allegiance to Philip II in 1581; and extracts in English from the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (which would soon appear in an English translation with the combative title, A defence of liberty against tyrants).81 For Prynne, England's problem lay not in tyrannical ministers but in its wayward monarch. Therefore, its only chance of salvation lay in creating a Republic.
Prynne could choose from two distinct republican visions: a state run by ‘virtuous men’ qualified to rule by their record of proven administrative competence, public service and legal expertise, such as the Dutch Republic; or an oligarchic state in which a few powerful families monopolized all power, as in Venice. Literature extolling both forms of government circulated widely in mid-seventeenth Europe. Above all, the Dutch Elzevier Press used their advanced printing technology, which allowed ‘miniaturization’, to publish a series of cheap volumes in small format that described various republics, ancient and modern: Athens and Sparta; the Hebrews and Rome; Venice and Genoa; the Swiss, the Hanseatic League and the Dutch. Written in a clear Latin, they enjoyed an extraordinary success: all major seventeenth-century libraries seem to have possessed a set, and their size made them easily portable by individuals. Many went through several editions.82
The impact of these and other republican works explains why, when Naples declared itself independent from Spain in 1647, it assumed the form ‘Most Serene Republic’, just like Venice, while the duke of Guise swore to defend ‘the liberties of the Most Serene Republic of Naples just as the prince of Orange does in Holland’.83 Likewise Irish Catholic exiles in the 1620s called for an invasion of their homeland ‘in the name of the liberty of the fatherland’, and the establishment of ‘a Republic, which should be so called on its flags and in its commissions; and all other public ordinances should be in the name of the Republic and Kingdom of Ireland’. Some of the 1641 insurgents claimed ‘that it was the Irish intencons to have a free state of themselves as they had in Holland, and not to bee tyde unto any kinge or prince whatsoever’.84
Such rhetoric alarmed kings and their ministers. In 1646 Cardinal Mazarin drew the attention of a new envoy setting forth for London to ‘the example of the United Provinces of the Low Countries’ which ‘drain their own blood and spend more in one year to sustain war than they would have been willing to spend in fifty, if they had remained under the rule of the king of Spain, whatever war he had wished to wage’. Therefore, Mazarin predicted, a Republic in England would be far stronger than the Monarchy had been, ‘especially if Scotland, a country where warlike and poor people abound, should become a part of this new Republic’.85 Events soon proved the cardinal correct. In 1647 some officers and men of the victorious New Model Army voiced bold egalitarian principles such as ‘The poorest he [male] that is in England has a life to live, [just] as the greatest he’, so that ‘every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own counsel to put himself under that government’, while no one was bound to obey a ‘government that he has not had a voice to put himself under’ (see chapter 12 above). The following year some of those officers, assisted by like-minded politicians, set up a court to try ‘Charles Stuart’ (as they now called him), which condemned him to death and executed him – something never seen before (and rarely since). In the 1650s groups with even more radical programmes proliferated in bot
h kingdoms, from the Levellers and the Diggers, who argued for an equitable division of property, to the Quakers, who claimed that women as well as men should all be equal.
These radical political and social ideas remained confined to Britain in the mid-seventeenth century; and even there, radicalism had its limits. The same army officers who had put the king on trial later crushed the Levellers; while some of the same Members of Parliament who had voted to execute the king also voted to execute the self-styled Messiah James Nayler for blasphemy.86 Moreover, after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, most of England's radical notions disappeared from public view for over a century. Nevertheless, the diffusion of resistance theories in so many parts of the world during the 1640s and 1650s was truly remarkable: never before had political news and ideas spread so far or so fast. Whereas previous opposition movements had involved hundreds, and at most thousands, many of those in the mid-seventeenth century involved a million or more. This transformation in scale rested upon two vital preconditions: both East Asia and Europe boasted not only a large number of eager readers, but also a large volume of printed material for them to read. Whether they appealed to Scripture or the Classics, to Ancient History or the Ancient Constitution, to Covenants or Contracts – the ‘people who hope only for change’ attracted many more followers in the mid-seventeenth century than any of their predecessors because they possessed the means to convey their arguments to audiences of unprecedented size.
19
‘People of heterodox beliefs … who will join up with anyone who calls them’: Disseminating Revolution1
IN THE TIPPING POINT: HOW LITTLE THINGS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE MALCOLM Gladwell evaluated the impact of Paul Revere's ride through Massachusetts on the night of 18/19 April 1775 to spread the word that the following day British troops in Boston would try to arrest the leading American Patriots in Lexington and capture the weapons of the local militia in Concord. The ensuing hostilities on 19 April began the American Revolutionary War. A critical element in Revere's success, according to Gladwell, was his status as a ‘connector’. His work as a silversmith and his frequent business travel had allowed Revere to create a wide network of casual acquaintances, from many different social groups, whose trust he had earned. As opposition to the British grew, Revere frequently carried messages between the Patriot leaders. On the night of 18/19 April, therefore, he knew where to find the boats and horses essential to his journey as well as where to find each Patriot leader – and how to avoid the British patrols – along the way. Revere's role as a ‘connector’ enabled him to spread his news like a ‘virus’, and Gladwell hailed his ride as ‘perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic’.2
Several European observers in the mid-seventeenth century used similar medical metaphors to describe the remarkable speed with which revolts spread. The Spanish writer Francisco de Quevedo claimed in 1641 that revolts ‘are the smallpox of kings: everyone gets them, and those who survive retain at least the marks of having had them’. A decade later, in his survey of the ‘political uprisings of our times’, the Italian historian Giovanni Battista Birago Avogadro declared: ‘Popular uprisings are like contagious diseases, in which the deadly poison travels from one individual to another; and neither distance nor delay nor diversity of climate nor difference of life-styles can halt the effect of these dangerous contagions.’ In 1676 the Governor of Barbados colony marvelled how the ‘daily devastations of the Indians’ had ‘spread like a contagion over all the continent from New England … to Maryland’. Nevertheless, as Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in his elegant 1957 essay that popularized the term ‘General Crisis’, although ‘the universality of revolution owed something to mere contagion’ nevertheless ‘contagion implies receptivity: a healthy or inoculated body does not catch even a prevailing disease’.3
‘Contagious diseases’ and Composite States
It is noteworthy that both Quevedo and Birago Avogadro drew their examples of ‘contagion’ from a type of polity that showed unusual ‘receptivity’: the composite state. More than half the rebellions that broke out in seventeenth-century Europe occurred in such entities, largely because their governments tried to impose similar policies on communities with different political, fiscal and cultural institutions and traditions. In 1618 Ferdinand II attempted to apply the same religious uniformity he had already imposed in his hereditary lands upon the Bohemian lands he had just gained by election. Eleven years later, he initiated a similar process in the empire via the Edict of Restitution (see chapter 8 above). Shortly after his accession in 1625, Charles I declared that he wanted ‘one uniform course of government in, and through, our whole monarchy’, and he instructed his ministers to ‘unite his three kingdoms in a strict union and obligation each to [the] other for their mutual defence when any of them shall be assailed, every one with such a proportion of horse, foot or shipping as may be rateably thought fit’. Charles modelled his scheme expressly on the ‘Union of Arms’ imposed on the Spanish Monarchy by Philip IV and Olivares.4
None of these ambitious plans prospered, yet they provoked spirited resistance – in part because of the inflexibility of their proponents. When some German Catholics expressed their fears about the risks of imposing the Edict of Restitution on all areas of Germany, Ferdinand II informed them that he was prepared to ‘lose not only Austria but all his kingdoms and provinces and whatever he has in this world, provided he save his soul, which he cannot do without the implementation of his Edict’. A decade later, Charles I likewise protested that ‘So long as this Covenant is in force, I have no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer’; while Olivares exclaimed that ‘If the constitutions [of Catalonia] do not allow this, then the devil take the constitutions!’5
Not only did the proponents of uniformity usually fail to achieve their goals, they also seemed incapable of learning from their failure. In 1646 Don Juan de Palafox, who had served in both Aragon and Mexico (two ‘peripheral’ states of the Spanish Monarchy), observed to a colleague:
Permit me, my lord, to tell you that Portugal was not lost in Portugal, or Catalonia in Catalonia, but rather in the heart of Madrid. And that is where [Spanish America] will be lost, just like [Portuguese Asia], because wherever public scandals receive rewards and honours, that is where the storms gather that later pour down on kingdoms which, through sins, wilful errors [violencias] and tyrannical rule, fragment and separate from the crown.
The same was true in other composite states. Thus despite numerous warnings that imposing on Scotland a Prayer Book modelled on English forms of worship would provoke opposition, Archbishop Laud made plans to impose it on Ireland too; while the failure to subdue the Scottish rebels by force in 1639 did not stop the earl of Strafford and Charles I from trying again in 1640 and, despite being roundly defeated, from contemplating a third attempt in 1641.6
Such obstinacy was dangerous because rebellions not only often began on the periphery of each composite state but also often spread around the periphery. Thus the revolt of Bohemia in 1618 was just the first domino to fall: almost all the other lands ruled by Ferdinand II – Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Upper and Lower Austria – followed suit (see chapter 8 above). Two decades later in France, a judge commented that ‘The news of the disorders that occurred in Lower Normandy’ – the Nu-Pieds revolt – ‘redoubled the courage of the populace in Rouen’, the duchy's capital, so that ‘these disorders became the staple of popular conversation among the common people, who publicized them as heroic actions’. Five days after crowds killed a tax collector in Rouen, the same thing happened in Caen, the second city of the duchy, 80 miles away. In 1640 a French diplomat sent to liaise with the Catalan rebels opined that Portugal ‘would never have dared revolt without the example of Catalonia, fearing that it would be rapidly overwhelmed if it joined in so dangerous a dance alone’. Seven years later, on hearing that rioting had broken out in many towns of Andalucía, and that ‘Sicily was on the brink
of being lost’, a phlegmatic Spanish minister remarked that ‘In a Monarchy that comprises many kingdoms, widely separated, the first one that rebels takes a great risk because the rest can easily suppress it; but the second takes much less risk and from then onwards any others can try it without fear.’7
The ‘connectors’
It is often difficult to reconstruct these ‘dangerous dances’ because those who sought to coordinate insurrections did their best to cover their tracks. The case of Portugal forms an exception. No sooner had Duke John of Bragança been acclaimed king in December 1640 than he sent messengers to foment rebellion elsewhere against his former sovereign. He sent two Jesuits to Barcelona to invite the Catalans to sign an alliance with him against Philip IV, and he sent a fidalgo to ask all parts of Portugal's overseas empire for their allegiance. Such coordination took time: to avoid interception, the fidalgo charged to convey the news to East Asia went first to London and thence took a neutral English ship to Java, where he waited until a Dutch ship took him to Taiwan. From there, the weary ‘connector’ finally reached Macao on 30 May 1642. Thereafter, of the entire Portuguese empire, only the city of Ceuta in North Africa remained loyal to Madrid (as it still does).8