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‘People who hope only for a change’: Aristocrats, Intellectuals, Clerics and the ‘dirty people of no name’1
IN 1644 NICHOLAS FOUQUET, LATER LOUIS XIV's CHIEF FISCAL OFFICER but then his representative in Valence on the river Rhône, pondered the current unrest among the city's inhabitants. He concluded that, although the origins of the disorders he faced ‘do indeed lie in the misery of the common people, their progress proceeds from the division that exists among the most powerful people, the ones who should oppose them’. A few years later, the marquis of Argyll, a leading protagonist in the Scottish revolution, made the same point in a different way: ‘Popular furies,’ he wrote, ‘would have no end, if not awed by their superiors’.2 In the early modern world, three groups of ‘powerful people’ possessed the power to turn ‘popular furies’ into something that threatened state breakdown – the nobility; literate lay men and women; and the clergy – and every major revolt in the mid-seventeenth century involved at least one of them. Sometimes, however, ‘powerless people’ from humble backgrounds also played important (albeit ephemeral) roles, especially in urban revolts; and they, like their social betters, sometimes developed sophisticated theories and arguments to justify their opposition.
The Crisis of the Aristocracy
Although bitter rivals, Richelieu and Olivares totally agreed on one maxim of state. In 1624 the cardinal (from an aristocratic family) warned Louis XIII that ‘keeping the nobles under the king's authority is the sole pivot around which the State turns’; while that same year the count-duke lectured Philip IV on the necessity of keeping the nobles ‘always reined in without letting any one of them grow too powerful’. Kings must ‘under no circumstances allow noblemen, great or small, to make themselves popular’.3 Over the next two decades both ministers followed their own advice ruthlessly. French aristocrats who openly challenged the government's policies, both domestic (for example, by defying Richelieu's ban on duelling) and foreign (by plotting peace with Spain), went either to the scaffold, to prison, or into exile. Philip IV, for his part, condemned to death the South Netherlands nobles who conspired against him in 1632; imprisoned the duke of Medina Sidonia and executed the marquis of Ayamonte, two of Spain's most powerful aristocrats, after their attempt to create an independent Andalusia came to light in 1641; and ordered the duke of Híjar to be tortured to reveal details of his alleged conspiracy. When Olivares first heard rumours of rioting in Lisbon in December 1640, he professed little concern ‘because the nobles have not declared themselves and, in Portugal, unless the nobles are involved there is no reason to be afraid of the people’. His sole concern was that ‘it is some days since the duke of Bragança wrote’ – and, he added presciently, ‘since he is so close to these disturbances, and since it would be so easy for him to write’, his silence ‘may cause some suspicion’. Just one week had elapsed since Bragança's acclamation as King John IV of Portugal.4
Nobles presented a greater political danger in Europe than elsewhere in the seventeenth-century world, and the continent contained three distinct ‘aristocratic zones’. At one extreme stood areas where noble families made up a substantial proportion of the total population: Castile with 10 per cent, the Polish Commonwealth with 7 per cent, and Hungary with 5 per cent. By contrast, France, the British Isles, the Dutch Republic and the Scandinavian kingdoms belonged to a second zone, in which nobles were relatively scarce: 1 per cent or less of the total population.5 The rest of the continent fell somewhere in between these extremes, but almost everywhere the nobility expanded. Between 1644 and 1654, Queen Christina doubled the size of the Swedish aristocracy; between 1600 and 1640, Kings Philip III and IV almost tripled the number of titled nobles in the kingdom of Naples and almost doubled it in Castile; and James I and Charles I almost quadrupled the Irish peerage and more than doubled that of England.
Many of the new peers received their title for the traditional reason – to reward outstanding service to the state – but many more became aristocrats either in return for money or services supplied to a monarch unable to reward their services in any other way, or as part of a strategy to empower one group (such as the relatives of the ‘Favourite’) at the expense of others. The new nobles therefore included many bankers, many generals, many lawyers and many people with the same surname (Guzmán in Spain; Oxenstierna in Sweden; and so on). New or old, however, most peers envisaged a threefold political role for themselves. First, they believed they should help the king to govern; second, they tried to bring to the king's attention the needs and interests of their family and followers; third, to preserve the ‘liberties’ won by the blood of their ancestors in the service of the crown to be their birthright, they felt (in the happy phrase of French historian Arlette Jouanna) a ‘duty to rebel’.6
Domineering ministers and Favourites like Richelieu, Olivares and Oxenstierna irritated and eventually alienated their fellow aristocrats in two distinct ways. First, the ministers’ insistence that ‘necessity knows no law’ resulted in the repeated violation of aristocratic immunities by recruiters in search of troops, by tax collectors in search of funds, and by commissioners demanding that nobles document their tax-exempt status. Second, Favourites strove to restrict the king's attention solely to the views and interests of their own followers. Previously the economic health of each noble house had depended upon royal benevolence – the grant of a lucrative state office, or an edict that unilaterally reduced interest rates on their debts and offered protection against their creditors – but now it depended upon the benevolence of the Favourite. At a time of economic adversity and heavy taxation, many peers faced economic catastrophe if the Favourite persuaded the king to withhold his financial favours.7
Nevertheless, slighted nobles could still fight back. The Edinburgh maidservants whose ‘barbarous hubbub’ during a church service in 1637 began the Scottish revolution came from the households of disaffected noblemen who had issued careful instructions on when and how their servants should act. The involvement of the nobles explains not only the maids’ temerity but also the government's decision not to apprehend or punish any of them. In England, formal opposition to Charles I began in 1640 with a petition signed by seven (later over twenty) peers demanding that the king should both ‘remove and prevent’ certain grievances and bring the ‘authors and councillors of them’ to ‘legal trial and condign punishment’. Their actions forced the unwilling king first to convene a ‘Great Council of Peers’, attended by over seventy noblemen, and then to summon Parliament in which the House of Lords played a prominent role in securing further concessions. One-third of the English peerage would eventually fight in the Civil War.
Nobles found it harder – though not impossible – to rebel when they lacked a constitutional forum. In Castile, where the aristocracy had abandoned its right to attend the Cortes, rebellions by individuals (Medina Sidonia and Ayamonte in 1641, Hijar in 1648) came to nothing; but collective action occurred after the surrender of Perpignan (Catalonia's second city) to the French in 1642. The grandees of Castile boycotted the court and made clear that they would continue to do so until His Majesty dismissed Olivares. As the aristocratic ‘strike’ entered its third week, Philip crumbled. Although aristocratic solidarity on such a scale did not recur during the Habsburg period, collective protests by the landed elite persisted at the regional level. Thus four rebellions against the lords of Nájera and Navarrete in 1652 and 1653 involved 33 knights in Castile's Military Orders, and all four rebellions won major concessions (albeit only for the local communities).8
France's nobles, too, lacked a common forum in which to air their grievances. Although several provinces boasted a representative assembly that could meet legally in the absence of the king, affording the nobles of the regions a collective voice, the States-General, where representatives of the whole kingdom gathered, could convene only when summoned by the crown – and the crown issued no summons after 1614. As in Castile, the French nobility attempted to force their views on the
monarch by collective action only once during the seventeenth century. In 1651, after the arrest of the prince of Condé and two aristocratic allies, some 800 nobles from all over France converged on Paris, where for six weeks they demanded the release of their leaders and the redress of their grievances – including a new assembly of the States-General. The government eventually promised to comply and persuaded the nobles to return to their provinces and draw up Cahiers de doléances (the Petitions of Grievance presented at the start of each assembly), but it was a bluff: no States-General met until 1789.
In the absence of a constitutional forum, discontented nobles found other ways to express their grievances. Some stated them in print: almost one-half of the authors of pamphlets published in France between 1610 and 1642 were aristocrats; while during the Fronde, several nobles maintained a stable of writers to propagate their views (Condé also installed a printing press in his Paris mansion).9 Other nobles led local rebellions. Antoine Dupuy, lord of La Mothe La Forêt, recently retired from an active army career, agreed to lead the ‘Croquant’ rebellion of Périgord in southwest France in 1637; two years later, in Normandy, the lord of Ponthébert became ‘General Nu-Pieds’ and commanded an ‘Army of Suffering’. Neither secured lasting concessions, but sometimes grandees achieved greater success. Thus in 1641 the duke of Bouillon ordered that if any royal troops tried ‘to lodge in any parish’ of his territories ‘without an express order from the king, the said parishes should ring the church bells to alert the neighbouring parishes, which are obliged to assist them immediately’ in driving the troops away.10 Only one French noble, Louis de Bourbon, prince of Condé, took the ‘duty to rebel’ to the extremes seen in earlier centuries: he created a national following, sought to become chief minister, and when his attempt failed he entered the service of his country's arch-enemy (Philip IV) to further his cause.
Three considerations explain why Condé's extreme action remained virtually unique in seventeenth-century Europe. First, most attempts to create a ‘national following’ foundered on an intense local hatred of the capital and the court. As an account of the Croquants’ revolt noted, ‘the very name “Parisian” excites such hatred and horror in everyone that just to say it is to risk being killed’. Local rebels, in France and elsewhere, normally ‘resolved not to welcome any prince or lord fleeing the Court’.11 Second, rebellion was so expensive that most dissident nobles lacked the means to sustain their defiance for long: few could resist when the crown offered a settlement that restored their financial solvency. Thus in 1651 Mazarin purchased the allegiance of the duke of Bouillon by recognizing his French possessions as sovereign lordships and granting him extensive royal domains. Third, most of Europe's great noble houses simply had too much to lose by outright defiance of the government. Thus, long before he became king of Portugal, Duke John of Bragança boasted more power than any other Portuguese nobleman, if not more than any other aristocrat in western Europe. His vast revenues maintained not only a household of 400 people, modelled on the royal court; he exercised extensive ecclesiastical patronage; and, unique in all Europe, he could create nobles himself. Duke John therefore stayed out of court politics, because he had nothing more to gain, and instead concentrated on conserving the assets, privileges and pre-eminences which he had inherited. He only abandoned this prudent stance in 1640 because Olivares insisted that he raise and personally lead troops to fight in Catalonia, a venture from which he feared (probably correctly) that he might never be allowed to return – and so he threw in his lot with a group of conspirators who declared him king. His dynasty would rule Portugal and Brazil for almost three centuries.12
Many other magnates besides Bragança placed the preservation of their inheritance at the top of their political agenda, even if it compromised their allegiance. Thus the determination of Randall MacDonnell, marquis of Antrim, to protect intact his extensive lands and interests in Ireland, England and Scotland throughout the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century led him to remain loyal to Charles I until 1645 (no mean feat, in view of the king's frequent changes of policy) and then, once the king could no longer protect him, to make deals with others. He became, in turn, President of the Irish Catholic Confederation, privateer and warlord, a Cromwellian collaborator and, finally, a supporter of the Restoration. Some contemporaries condemned him for ‘pulling down the side he is on’, while others accused him of ‘making poison out of everything’ and thus infecting ‘the greater part of the kingdom’. Yet, as Antrim's biographer Jane Ohlmeyer has remarked, ‘concepts such as “treachery” and “patriotism” meant little in the early modern Gaelic world where a man's first loyalty was to his family and kinsmen, then to his religion, and only finally to his sovereign and country’. ‘Antrims’ emerged in western Europe whenever the changing fortunes of war led aristocrats to make similar compromises in order to preserve their heritage intact.13
In some states, the nobility had already acquired such extensive economic and political powers that they needed to make no such compromises to get their own way – and therefore felt no ‘duty to revolt’. In Sweden, and also in Denmark until 1660, the aristocracy possessed not only vast landed estates but also controlled the royal council, without whose approval the ruler could do little; while the nobles of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth acquired such a stranglehold on the federal Parliament (Sejm) that a single veto could paralyze all business and force dissolution. In Russia, the nobles used their prominent place in the ‘Assembly of the Land’ (Zemskii Sobor) to agitate for legislation that granted them absolute authority over their serfs and shamelessly exploited the wave of popular disturbances that swept the empire in 1648–9 to secure the tsar's compliance (see chapter 6).
No group of hereditary nobles outside Europe played an important role in the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. Indeed, some states lacked any hereditary nobles. Thus, although the Mughal emperors granted fiefs (jagirs) to their leading followers, the grants never became hereditary; and while the Ottoman sultans also granted fiefs (timars) to their cavalrymen, they never became an ‘aristocracy’ in the European sense. Ming China boasted great landholding families, but most belonged to the ruling dynasty (which paid them lavish allowances). The Ming clansmen remained staunchly loyal because they realized that, without imperial protection, they would lose everything – as indeed occurred in the 1640s, when rebel armies publicly humiliated and executed all the princes they encountered, and then confiscated their goods. Finally, the Tokugawa shoguns deployed a wide range of policies to control the 200 daimyō of Japan: they ordered them to demolish all but one castle in each fief; they demanded huge ‘donations’ to their own construction projects; and they required all daimyō to spend half their time in attendance at Edo, and to leave their wives and children there permanently as a guarantee of loyalty. In addition, until 1651, the shoguns dismissed and occasionally executed daimyō who displeased them, arbitrarily rotated others from one fief to another, and took over direct administration during minorities. Although in 1651, after the death of Shogun Iemitsu, some discontented samurai conspired to overthrow the Tokugawa system, they received no daimyō support (see chapter 16).
Education and Revolution14
In many parts of the mid-seventeenth century world, a second category of ‘powerful people’ (to use the terminology of Nicholas Fouquet) fostered political resistance: literate lay men and women. Ironically, the very systems created by the state to generate highly educated officials also generated highly educated critics and opponents. In China, according to scholar Wang Daokun, most families found the rewards offered by success in the educational system irresistible:
It is not until a man is repeatedly frustrated in his scholarly pursuits that he gives up his studies and takes up trade. After he has accumulated substantial savings he encourages his descendants, in planning for their future, to give up trade and take up studies. Trade and studies thus alternate with each other, with the likely result that the family succeeds either in acquiri
ng an annual income of ten thousand bushels of grain or in achieving the honour of having a retinue of a thousand horse-carriages.15
Wang, the descendant of tradesmen who became a successful bureaucrat, knew well that although trade might bring profit, ‘scholarly pursuits’ brought prestige – and he must also have known how many men were ‘repeatedly frustrated in [their] scholarly pursuits’. The arithmetic was simple: 99 per cent of the 50,000 shengyuan (‘licenciates’) who competed in each triennial provincial juren examination failed it, as did 90 per cent of the 15,000 men involved in each triennial metropolitan jinshi examination (see chapter 5 above). Although the overall population of China may have doubled under the Ming, if one includes all the men who prepared and sat for their examinations but failed, its student population by the 1620s probably reached five million, a twentyfold increase, and some counties boasted over 1,000 frustrated scholars. As the problems that faced the state multiplied, some started to criticize and even oppose the government.
One of the boldest disturbances led by scholars occurred in 1626 in the prosperous Jiangnan city of Suzhou, when the emperor's chief eunuch, Wei Zhongzian, ordered the arrest of one of his critics, Zhou Shunchang, a retired official who had displayed outstanding honesty and (according to one source) ‘hated evil as a personal enemy’. Around 500 licentiates donned their formal attire and gathered in the courtyard of the local magistrate, begging him not to execute the warrant because it had been issued by Wei rather than by the emperor. Although the magistrate hesitated, the guards started to shackle Zhou anyway, and according to an eyewitness this provoked ‘an uprising such as a thousand antiquities never experienced… The affair got completely out of control, so that law and order could not be enforced.’ The scholars beat one guardsman to death and chased away the rest. The riots lasted for three days. Wei later had five of the insurgent Suzhou scholars executed, degraded five more and sentenced several others to hard labour.16
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