A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (27 page)

Although the Bohemian armies twice advanced on the imperial capital of Vienna, they were forced to retreat each time, as enemy armies found little obstacle to their own advance through Bohemian lands. Finally, after the Bohemian army suffered a major defeat in 1620 at the Battle of the White Mountain, the Protestant king and the noble generals fled the country rather than fall back on Prague to mount further resistance. The war was lost, not because the Bohemian estates lacked the means to defeat the empire, but because the class interests of their leaders prevented them utilising those means.

Bohemia’s leaders had relied on Protestant rulers elsewhere in Europe leaping to their defence. They were sorely disappointed. The Protestant Union of German princes withdrew from the war before the Battle of the White Mountain. The Dutch and the English governments (the Bohemian King Frederick was married to a daughter of James I of England) refused to begin wider hostilities against Spain. As increasingly successful commercial powers, they put their battles for trade above their supposed religious commitments. Yet keeping out of the Bohemian war did not stop either the German Protestant princes or the Dutch suffering its consequences. The Spanish crown, exultant at its victory, went on to conquer the Palatinate territories which lay between some of its territories and its next goal, the Netherlands. This forced the Dutch and the English to take action of their own—supplying finance and troops to fight in the Palatinate. It also threatened to alter the balance of power of Europe to the detriment of both the German princes and the monarchies of France and Sweden. Hence by the late 1630s Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden were the allies of Calvinist Holland, and they were backed by the pope, who feared growing Spanish influence in Italy as a threat to his own papal territories.

At one point the empire seemed on the verge of victory, with its armies commanded by a Bohemian magnate, Wallenstein, who had converted to Catholicism. But Wallenstein was not just hated by the Bohemian Protestants he had betrayed. He also terrified the Catholic princes of Germany, as he seemed about to establish an empire that would nullify their independent power, and he antagonised the protagonists of complete Catholicisation of the empire, since he resisted their demands to return to the social conditions of 200 years before. His experience in managing the huge estates he had amassed in Bohemia and elsewhere—partly with the help of a Protestant banker of Dutch nationality, De Witte
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—impressed on him the importance of newer forms of economic organisation and, with them, a certain degree of religious toleration.
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He put up resistance, albeit half-hearted, to the demands of the ultras, was twice dismissed as head of the army and was finally murdered by assassins acting for the emperor.
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As Polisensky has noted, ‘In the last analysis it was more than personal hatreds…that lay behind Wallenstein’s downfall: the fundamental issue was his economic system versus the extreme advocates of feudal absolutism’.
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But the methods of the ultras could not lead to victory in the war. It dragged on for another 14 years after the death of Wallenstein, with ever-shifting permutations of alliances increasingly centred around the rival absolute monarchies of Spain and France. By the end of the war few of the active participants could remember its beginning, and even these could hardly recognise any remnant of the original issues. All that was visible was the devastation of Germany and the economic cost elsewhere. Peace was finally agreed through the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, against a background of social and political unrest in virtually all the combatants—a revolt of Catalonia and Portugal within the Spanish Empire, a clash between the Orange prince and the merchants of the northern Netherlands, the beginning of the political revolts in France known as the ‘Fronde’.

The war had damaged both of the initial combatants. Bohemia was subjugated to a devastating and deadening feudal absolutism. The land was now in the hands of lords who cared only for grabbing as much of the produce as possible, regardless of productivity. The interest in new techniques which had characterised the 16th century died as the peasants were compelled to devote up to half their working time to unpaid labour.
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The towns, depopulated by the wars, stagnated under the impact of debt and physical destruction. What had been one of the centres of European culture became a provincial backwater. A symbol of the change was that the Czech language was forced into obscurity for 200 years, hanging on only in the countryside while German came to predominate in the towns.
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The clash between the new ways of making a livelihood and old sets of social relations had been resolved in Bohemia by the forcible and extremely bloody destruction of the new by the old. A terrible price was paid for the failure of revolutionary initiative in the first years of the war.

The Spanish crown also lost much. Even before the war there had been signs of economic deterioration in Castile. But military power seemed to paper these over. By 1648 this was no longer the case. The crown had lost Portugal. It could hold down Catalonia and its empire in Latin America, the Philippines, parts of Italy and the southern Netherlands. But increasingly the benefits of empire flowed elsewhere, while the Iberian Peninsula became one of the backward parts of Europe.

The German princes were among the victors of the war, in that they were able to exercise independent power even more at its end than at its beginning. But the mass of German people paid a price for this. The patchwork of fragmented realms, cut off from each other by customs posts and continually engaged in dynastic plots against one another, provided no basis for overcoming the extreme economic and social dislocation caused by the war. Southern Germany had been one of the most urbanised and economically advanced areas in Europe in the early 16th century—it certainly was not in the late 17th.
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France emerged from the Thirty Years War as it had emerged from the religious wars of the previous century—with its monarchy strengthened (despite the short term turmoil of the Fronde), with a very slow growth of economic centralisation and a snail’s pace adoption of the forms of economic organisation that broke with the old feudal ways. Its rulers gained a little from the war, the mass of its people nothing.

The only real ‘gain’ from the war was that the independent Dutch republic survived and its new ruling class, based upon capitalist methods, thrived. Through all the smoke of a century and quarter of Reformation and the devastation of religious wars and civil wars, one small part of Europe had seen the establishment of a state based upon a new way of organising economic life. As the Peace of Westphalia was signed, a similar transformation was being pushed to completion by violent methods but at far less cost just across the North Sea.

The English Revolution

In January 1649 an executioner’s axe cut off the head of the king of England and Scotland, Charles I. The event shocked the whole of Europe.
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Rulers throughout the continent—Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist—severed diplomatic relations with the English government.
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It had committed sacrilege against a principle they shared—the right of some to rule over others because of an accident of birth.

The men who ordered the execution were far from being extreme republicans. Only 20 months before, their leader Oliver Cromwell had defended the principle of monarchy, saying that ‘no man could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the king had his rights’.
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Now he famously declared, ‘We will cut off his head with his crown on it.’ He was, despite himself, opening the door to a new era, which would question the assumption that some human beings were divinely ordained to superiority over others.

There are fashionable accounts of the English Revolution which see it as a result of mere jockeying for position between rivals within a homogenous ‘gentry’ elite. Such accounts chart the patronage and family connections which tie one upper class figure to another and explain the battles and beheadings as flowing from a process of plotting and counter-plotting which got out of hand.

Such interpretations fail to see that 1649 was not some historical quirk. It was a product of the clash between the same social forces which had been tearing much of Europe apart for a century and a half—forces unleashed as market relations arose out of and transformed the old feudal order. It involved not just rival upper class courtiers and politicians, but merchant interests similar to those prominent in the Dutch revolt; it involved artisans and small traders like those who had carried the Reformation through south Germany or been burned at the stake in France; and it involved peasant protests, much smaller in scale but not different in kind to the German Peasant War of 1525. Binding together the parties in the English Civil War were the rival religious notions thrown up by the European Reformation.

Peaceful prelude

The Reformation in England had, like the ‘princely reformations’ in parts of Germany, been carried through by royal decree. Henry VIII had broken with the Roman Catholic church for diplomatic reasons and bound the majority of the English ruling class to his policy by selling former monastery lands at knock-down prices.

But there was more to the Reformation in England than just princely self interest and upper class greed. It sank roots among all those open to a new worldview which seemed to make sense of the changing society, especially among the trader and artisan classes but also among some of the landed gentry.

The gap which separated the Reformation from above and the Reformation from below in England was blurred through the latter half of the 16th century. The bitter experience of an attempt to reimpose the old Catholicism by force under Mary Tudor (married to Philip II of Spain) caused lordly recipients of church lands to stand shoulder to shoulder with Puritan burghers in support of her successor, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.

This was encouraged by slow but continuous economic change, although England was still one of the more economically backward countries of Europe. The population more than doubled between 1500 and 1650.
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By the end of this period more than one person in 12 lived in towns. The output of handicraft industries—especially textiles—soared, as did mining and iron-making. Many thousands of people came to be employed in rural industries, as well as in the towns, until 60 percent of households in the Forest of Arden were involved in cloth production and there were 100,000 country people engaged in knitting stockings.
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The proportion of land in the hands of the better off farmers, the ‘yeomen’ who supplemented family labour by employing waged labour, grew substantially. And a minority of the gentry began to discover there were better and more secure long term incomes to be gained by granting long leases to yeomen—who would employ waged labour and improve the land—rather than driving small peasants below the subsistence level.

Society still displayed numerous feudal features. Many of the gentry and aristocrats squeezed the peasants dry. Although serfdom had disappeared at the time of the Black Death, they could still extract numerous feudal payments. The bulk of the land was still tilled by small and medium peasants, not by capitalist farmers using waged labour. Artisans, rather than wage labourers, still dominated in most industries. The gentry were still as likely to look to supplement their incomes through handouts from the royal court—which in turn came from taxes—as by improving their landholdings. And the most powerful merchants relied upon monopolies granted by the monarch, which raised prices for everyone else and discouraged other industries. Yet from the mid-1550s to the mid-1610s the arrangements, like those in Bohemia before the Thirty Years War, allowed slow economic advance and, with it, the slow germination of the new capitalist methods.

There were religious rows with political overtones during this period. The last part of Elizabeth’s reign saw the persecution and emigration of some ‘Puritan’ Calvinists, and the advent of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I witnessed an aborted conspiracy (the ‘Gunpowder Plot’) involving some of the rump of large Catholic landowners. But by and large the period was marked by a high degree of consensus between the monarchy, the large landowners, the gentry, the hierarchy of the national church and the merchants. This was expressed by a constitutional setup in which the king appointed ministers to decide policies, but depended for their implementation and financing upon the support of the two ‘houses’ of parliament—the House of Lords, made up of the great aristocrats and the bishops, and the House of Commons, made up of representatives of the landowning ‘gentry’ of each county and the burghers of the urban boroughs.

The state machine was much weaker than in France or Castile. There was no standing army, no national police structure, and only a rudimentary civil service. Real power in each locality lay with the gentry, who administered much of the law, imposed punishments on the labouring classes, ensured most taxes were collected and raised troops when the occasion demanded. The monarchy’s power depended on its ability to persuade or to cajole the gentry to do what it wanted. But this was easily done so long as there was broad agreement on policies to be pursued.

The road to war

Things began to fall apart in the later 1610s under James I and, more seriously, in the late 1620s under his son Charles I. A gap opened up between the demands of the monarchy for money and the willingness of the parliamentary gentry and merchant classes to provide it through taxes. The monarchy further embittered parliament by seeking sources of revenue outside its control—new taxes and customs duties, and the selling of lordly titles and monopolies over certain sorts of trade. Parliament threatened to deny any regular funding until it was granted control over such measures, and the crown tried governing without it, using special courts such as the ‘Star Chamber’ to punish those who resisted. This in turn increased the distrust of the monarchy—or, at least, of ‘advisers’ like Buckingham in the 1610s and 1620s and Strafford in the 1630s.