Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  War makes the most serious inroads upon the resources of the crown, and entails impoverishment and ruin of the subject; and we have learned by experience that no war in past times has brought renown, profit or advantage to king and country, without also exacting large annual expenditure of our resources, and burdening the subject with taxes and conscription … It seems therefore necessary that we make up our minds to a period of peace, and lay aside all thought of war as long as peace is to be had.

  Bonde conceded that recent wars had produced benefits for Sweden, but he still concluded that his colleagues should not

  Direct our thoughts to further wars, and make plans upon the supposition that God will always arrange for a similar outcome to all our actions. We should remember rather that the issue of war is always uncertain, and is frequently most disastrous for those who believe themselves to have the justest cause.56

  Bonde's views prevailed – Sweden remained at peace for another decade – and although most states, including England and Russia as well as Sweden, would fight wars again, they did so with far less frequency than in the preceding half century. In England, for example, as soon as news arrived that Prince William of Orange had landed in southwest England with a powerful army in 1688, King James II and his ministers sent envoys to ask the prince to state his purpose, ‘because they dread the thoughts of a war, for the bloudshed and all other evills that attend it alwaies’. This ‘dread’ helps to explain why the ‘Glorious Revolution’ involved no ‘bloudshed’ in England.57

  One of the ‘evills’ that attended the wars of the mid-seventeenth century was their duration. In Europe, even the negotiations about ending hostilities could last for years – largely because neither side trusted the other. Thus in the summer of 1643 the French and Spanish governments sent ‘Instructions’ to their plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Westphalia that virtually precluded a settlement: ‘Experience has shown that [the other side] does not honour the treaties it makes’ – indeed, the two sides used identical words. Such incompatible views help to explain why it proved impossible to reconcile outstanding differences between these two protagonists at Westphalia (achieved only at the peace of the Pyrenees in 1659).58 Negotiations between the other protagonists dragged on for five years not only through lack of political trust but also through incompatible religious demands. The Protestant and Catholic German delegates agreed on a common formula only in March 1648, and only by agreeing to differ:

  In matters of Religion, and in all other Affairs, wherein the States of the Empire cannot be considered as a single Body, and when the Catholic States and the Lutheran States are divided into two Parties; the Difference shall be decided exclusively by amicable composition, without either side being coerced by a plurality of voices.

  Many wept when the measure passed, because it cleared the path to a final settlement (signed six months later) hailed by later generations as ‘the foremost bulwark of freedom and equality, built with so much blood’. For over a century, armed conflicts between Catholics and Protestants had provided an excuse for foreign states to intervene, and so civil wars often engendered foreign wars. Henceforth, no German ruler could exploit religious divisions to provoke or prolong a war – and neither could foreign rulers.59

  This marked a major step towards restoring stability because, as Thomas Hobbes forcefully stated in 1641: ‘I am sure that experience teaches, thus much, that the dispute for [precedence] betwene the spirituall and civill power has of late more than any other thing in the world bene the cause of civill warres in all places of Christendome.’ Two decades later, John Locke ‘observed that almost all those tragical revolutions which have exercised Christendom these many years have turned upon this hinge’. Indeed, he continued, ‘there hath been no design so wicked which hath not worn the visor of religion, nor rebellion which hath not’ proclaimed ‘a design either to supply the defects or correct the errors of religion’.

  Hence have the cunning and malice of men taken occasion to pervert the doctrine of peace and charity into a perpetual foundation of war and contention, all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions, have been at first kindled with coals from the altar, and too much blown with the breath of those that attend the altar, who, forgetting their calling, which is to promote peace and meekness, have proved [to be] the trumpeters of strife and sounded a charge with a ‘Curse ye Meros’.60

  Locke's citation of a text frequently used by radical preachers during the Civil War to incite political action did not stand alone. Samuel Butler's mock-epic poem Hudibras, ‘written in the time of the late wars’ and first published in 1662, recalled the time

  When civil fury first grew high,

  And men fell out, they knew not why;

  When hard words, jealousies, and fears,

  Set folks together by the ears,

  And made them fight, like mad or drunk,

  For Dame Religion …

  He poured ridicule on those who

  … do build their faith upon

  The holy text of pike and gun;

  Decide all controversies by

  Infallible artillery;

  And prove their doctrine orthodox

  By apostolic blows and knocks;

  Call fire and sword and desolation,

  A godly thorough reformation.

  According to Samuel Pepys, the book enjoyed immediate success – ‘all the world cries up [the poem] to be the example of wit’ – and it went through numerous editions.61

  Although religious differences continued to affect European politics – some rulers expelled religious minorities, as the Catholic Louis XIV did the French Huguenots, while supporters hailed Protestant William III as Gideon and David when he went to war against Louis XIV – the views advanced by Locke and Butler steadily gained ground. Indeed, in 1689 Locke restated his condemnation of faith-based politics more forcefully in his Letter concerning toleration:

  Nobody, therefore, in fine, neither single persons nor churches, nay, nor even commonwealths, have any just title to invade the civil rights and worldly goods of each other upon pretence of Religion. … No peace and security … can ever be established or preserved amongst men, so long as this opinion prevails: that dominion is founded upon grace, and that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.

  According to Heinz Schilling, an eminent historian of religion, ‘The end of confessional Europe, properly speaking, came around 1650’ through ‘the internal dissolution of orthodoxy and through the state's deconfessionalization of politics and society’; while, as his distinguished colleague Philip Benedict noted, ‘religious conflicts spaced themselves out over time with diminishing frequency’.62

  Signing a peace treaty after a prolonged war nevertheless marked just the beginning of efforts to heal the scars, end the fears and create a climate of trust. Many authorities prohibited any discussion of the recent contentious past. In 1648 the peace of Westphalia forbade ‘any person to impugn in any place, in publick or in private, by preaching, teaching, disputing, writing or consulting, the Transaction of Passau [of 1552], the Peace of Religion [of 1555], and, above all, the present declaration or transaction; or to render them doubtful’. Already in London, the group of scholars who would later become the first Fellows of the Royal Society had resolved upon a similar accommodation: from its ‘first ground and foundation’ in 1645, at their weekly meetings, members ‘barred all discourses of divinity, state-affairs, and of news … confining ourselves to philosophical inquiries’.63 Fifteen years later, on his return to England, Charles II followed their wise example and signed legislation that forbade the law courts to hear any suit arising from things ‘counselled, commanded, acted or done’ during ‘the late distractions’. He also issued a temporary prohibition on even speaking about the recent past: ‘If any person or persons, within the space of three years next ensuing, shall presume maliciously to call, or allege of, or object against any other pers
on or persons any name or names, or other words of reproach, any way leading to revive the memory of the late differences, or the occasion thereof’, the offender must pay a fine ‘unto the party grieved’. He held those who served him to a higher standard. A naval lieutenant who in 1665 taunted his captain and another officer ‘with their having been rebels and served under Cromwell's commission’ was brought before a court martial chaired by Charles's brother, the future James II, in person:

  For which offences [the lieutenant] was adjudged to be cashiered from his employment in the fleet. His Royal Highness [James] very graciously was pleased to express the King's Majesty's and his own displeasure against recounting of former differences and parties. Said that all of the commanders were equally esteemed good subjects and officers, and he doubted not but they would so approve themselves in all occasions, and he would severely reprehend any expressions of past divisions.

  The impact of this policy of forced reconciliation may be seen in the careful phrasing of the petitions by royalist veterans seeking compensation for losses and injuries during the war (they studiously avoided terms like ‘rebel’ and ‘rebellion’), as in the requests of scientists like Samuel Hartlib for government funding (see chapter 22 below), who when explaining the delay in completing a project always referred to ‘the troubles’.64 Thus did England heal herself after almost two decades of war.

  Her success was remarkable because, as Sir John Plumb pointed out, ‘by 1688 conspiracy and rebellion, treason and plot, were a part of the history and experience of at least three generations of Englishmen’; and yet, ‘by comparison, the political structure of eighteenth-century England possesses adamantine strength and profound inertia’. Plumb stressed that political stability (which he defined as ‘the acceptance by society of its political institutions, and of those classes of men or officials who control them’) did not become a common political phenomenon until relatively recently. Moreover, stability ‘often happens to a society quite quickly’; and ‘when achieved, it has seldom lasted’.65 Plumb attributed the growth of political stability in England to three structural changes in the wake of the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century: a transition from population loss to population growth; the resumption and diversification of economic activity; and the decision of governments to invest both their attention and their resources in welfare instead of (or as well as) warfare. His model works not only for England but also for other states in the northern hemisphere where, taken together, the same three changes ended the fatal synergy that had first produced and then prolonged the crisis.

  21

  From Warfare State to Welfare State

  The Phoenix Effect

  HANS JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL VON GRIMMELSHAUSEN CHOSE A STRIKING IMAGE for the frontispiece of his 1668 novel, The adventures of a German simpleton: a phoenix, pointing to an open book that contains images of war (Plate 23). The verse below the engraving began:

  Like a Phoenix I was born in the fire;

  and continued with the question:

  What often grieved me, and seldom brought joy?

  What was it? I've written it down in this book.

  Grimmelshausen's studied use of the past tense, and his image of a bird that rises from its own ashes, exuded confidence that the ‘fire’ was over; likewise the way his ‘German simpleton’ interspersed events from ‘our German war’ with those from Classical authors and the Bible implied that the age of wanton destruction of people and property had passed.

  To test Grimmelshausen's perception, historians can consult quantitative data such as tolls and tax returns, harvest and tithe yields and baptismal registers; but since almost all of them relate to individual communities, they may not be ‘typical’. By contrast the accounts of foreign travellers, though impressionistic, provide eyewitness observations that cover far larger areas. In 1663 Philip Skippon, the son of the eponymous English Civil War general and his German wife, undertook a ‘Grand Tour’ through Germany, Austria and Italy with his Cambridge tutor, Dr John Ray. He was immediately struck by the rapid post-war repopulation and reconstruction of Germany. ‘Since the instrument of peace,’ wrote Skippon (meaning the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), ‘the people of this country have recruited themselves very much’. An anonymous Italian visitor the previous year confirmed this impression: ‘although you see few people of fighting age,’ he observed, ‘there are an infinite number of children’. Skippon and Ray included numerous examples of renewal in their travelogues. For instance, although ‘the wars destroyed all the old town’ of Mannheim (ten miles from Heidelberg), now ‘the streets are designed to be uniform’ with ‘all the buildings alike in broad and straight streets’. They found Heidelberg, too, ‘populous, which is much considering the devastations made by the late wars in this country. The houses are most of timber, yet handsom and in good repair, which argues the inhabitants to be industrious and in a thriving condition’. Vienna likewise impressed both men: Skippon found it ‘very populous’ and its ‘streets (except those at London) the most frequented we yet saw’, while Ray considered it ‘the most frequented and full of people that we have yet seen beyond the seas’.1

  Such urban regeneration was not universal. The anonymous Italian visitor to Germany in 1662 remarked that ‘few towns have managed to recover from the damage sustained during the war, and many of the largest ones remain virtually depopulated’; while the following year Dr Ray considered Augsburg ‘for the bigness, not very populous and [it] is, I believe, somewhat decayed, and short of what it hath been, both as to riches and multitude of inhabitants; which may be attributed to the losses and injuries it susteined in the late wars’. In 1671 the Paris physician Charles Patin still found at Höchst, just outside Frankfurt, many signs of ‘the deplorable consequences of the war. This beautiful city’ was now ‘no more than a village,’ he wrote. Further east, between Jena and Leipzig, scene of several battles, Patin noted that the bodies of the ‘nine or ten thousand men buried there still seems to provide manure for the fields’ and predicted that ‘all the surrounding towns will bear for a long time the sad traces of the war’. He concluded sagely and sadly: ‘War spares nothing.’2

  The rapid recovery of Germany's rural economy also impressed foreign visitors. Thus as he approached Munich in 1658, the itinerant Scots divinity student James Fraser admired the ‘groves, gardins, parks, fertil cornfields and pretty brookes, fish ponds stored with carp and tinch and trout’ all along his route – even though troops had repeatedly ravaged Bavaria during the second half of the Thirty Years War. Similarly, as he approached Regensburg (the scene of a protracted siege), Fraser found a ‘croud of pedlers and pannier-bearers that passe here, selling baken bread, boiled eggs, fruits, stockings, shoes, caps or anything that yow need to the least needle … They are very curteous and discreet, and it's a wonder how cheap they sell those things.’ In 1671, as Edward Brown (an English physician) passed through Hessen, ravaged by war for almost two decades, he found ‘the whole country planted with wallnut trees, vines, corn and in some places with tobacco’. Further east, when Patrick Gordon (another itinerant Scot) and his regiment marched through ‘the villages and little townes’ of Poland, he found that they ‘had abundance of all things – whereat I admired, considering how the countrey had been so often ruined by the enemyes, and no much better used by our owne soldiery’; but he later reflected that ‘albeit many of their houses looke very waist lyke, as being destitute of hangings, standing beds, stooles or pictures … yet there is superfluity of good, well-dressed [prepared] victualls and liquor’. After serving as a battleground for a generation, the Polish population had evidently learned that it made sense to minimize possessions that could be taken as booty and maximize the portable necessities of life.3

  In China, the nature of the surviving evidence complicates efforts to assess the devastation caused by the Ming-Qing transition. On the one hand, ‘official records of harvests, grain prices, rainfall, granary stocks, and the like were carefully kept, but no one counted or recorded th
e number of deaths from disasters’; so there are no estimates of human losses. On the other hand, virtually no Han Chinese artists included military themes in their repertory, while Manchu artists (who did) naturally eschewed scenes of the destruction wrought by their troops. By contrast, as Grace Fong has observed, ‘Chinese poetry from its very beginning has given full expression to the tragedies of war’; or, in the words of the poet Gui Zhuang, who lost one sister-in-law to soldiers and another to bandits: ‘My grief has no outlet. I weep for her with poetry’.4 The mid-seventeenth century crisis generated an outpouring of grief from men and women remarkable for both its intensity and variety. One particularly moving poem came from the pen of the Shanghai poet and Qing minister Li Wen. He became prominent in the Fu she (‘Reformation Society’) and remained in Beijing throughout 1644. When the soldiers of the Dashing Prince murdered his father, Li Wen offered his services to the Qing, and for the next two years he served as Dorgon's secretary, drafting most of the regent's Chinese proclamations and public documents. In 1646 Li requested and received permission to visit his Jiangnan home, and the desolation that he encountered on his journey south left him appalled. He wrote a poem entitled ‘On the road out: gazing in astonishment and seeing places which the bandits have destroyed’:

  … Stark are the thousand miles over which the bandits came,

  Seared are the many hills beneath the sun.