A History of the World (52 page)

This noble family was the product of exuberant match-making rather than territorial coherence. Originally from Switzerland, during medieval times they had expanded their power across central Germany and became rulers of Austria. For centuries the Habsburgs were just another of the competing European dynasties, alongside the Luxembourgers, the Jagiellons and many more. But through luck, a little war and a lot of marriage they eventually engulfed Burgundy, the Low Countries and quite a speckle and splatter of central Europe. Above all, from 1438 for almost exactly three hundred years the Habsburgs provided all the Holy Roman Emperors, those would-be Germanic Caesars. In just a few years around the end of the fifteenth century they acquired their Spanish and Hungarian lands and expanded into Italy too, becoming the most important source of power in Europe other than the papacy itself.

Hapsburg rule was not, however, full-blown absolutism. It had grown out of the tangled family politics of the Middle Ages, and had never developed a theory of state power in any modernizing sense. Its imperial headquarters, the vast stone expanses of the Escorial palace in Madrid, and the later grandiose palaces of Vienna, lacked the grip on either the pockets or the imaginations of Germans or Spaniards or Dutchmen that the Bourbons had on the French. The Habsburgs were fighting on too many fronts and across too many territories to
establish a single imperial idea. In the sixteenth century the Habsburg line split into the Spanish monarchy, which with its American empire and its control of the Netherlands was the more important, and the Austro-Hungarian line, which sprawled across Eastern Europe.

Consequently, Habsburg rule was never uniform: imperial power in New Spain was a different proposition from its counterpart in Holland. The role of the emperor in Turk-challenged Hungary was more direct than in the German cities and states whose ‘electors’ and princes selected him. Habsburg rule was a mishmash of political and military power, rarely financially stable, and it came at a terrible genetic cost. The principle of endless interbreeding among the family so as to maintain their possessions demonstrated the sense of the incest taboo – a toll of dead children, and deformed and incapable adults. The physical oddness of the later Habsburgs, pop-eyed, with huge lower jaws and jutting lips, is well recorded by their braver court painters.

The worst of the line was perhaps the wretched Charles II of Spain, who drooled, believed himself possessed of the devil, was unable to chew, liked to observe the exhumed corpses of his relatives, and was – perhaps thankfully – impotent too. His death in 1700, terminating one branch of the family, produced the War of the Spanish Succession, followed in 1740 by the War of the Austrian Succession when that branch died out. This shows just how brittle dynastic politics remained, as late as the eighteenth century; though both wars were in reality less about Spain or Austria than about containing the most vigorous and expansive example of European absolutism, the Bourbon monarchy of France.

The Bourbons had emerged as a cadet, or junior, line of the ancient Capetian dynasty, who traced their roots back to Paris in the 800s. They had emerged out of Navarre (roughly speaking, today’s Basque country, on the French–Spanish border) and were on the Protestant, Huguenot, side during the French wars of religion, which ended in 1598. The first Bourbon king of France, Henry IV, was the first to convert back to Catholicism, allegedly remarking that Paris was worth a mass, but he had later been assassinated. The real founder of Bourbon absolutism was Cardinal Richelieu, France’s chief minister for two decades from 1624. Richelieu had been a soldier before joining the Church, partly to protect family interests, and had risen to power through the dangerous corridors of a court then in the hands of the
young King Louis XIII’s mother, Marie de Médicis, before becoming an essential aide and minister to the monarch himself.

Richelieu’s strategy was to create a single, forceful authority in France by defeating any internal opposition – he had the aristocrats’ castles demolished and crushed the Huguenots – while expanding France’s external position against the Habsburgs.

Under Richelieu the Thirty Years War, which had been essentially one of religion, devastating Germany as Protestant fought Catholic, subtly mutated into a war about France’s role in Europe. The Habsburgs, in Spain and Germany, appeared to have France encircled; and the family had ambitions to gain papal approval as a kind of universal European monarchy. So forcing the Habsburgs back until they were virtually broke put a newly unified France into a key position as the major power in Europe. As a result, after Richelieu’s death, when the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin succeeded him as chief minister, the way was clear for Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, to rise above the horizon with a special glow.

Louis reigned from 1643 to 1715, an astonishing seventy-two years, though his personal rule began only in 1661 after Mazarin’s death. By that time France had grown – to the south, to the east, to the north. Richelieu had established a new system of tax-collectors, had centralized power at the court, and had promoted early industrial developments, from canals to tapestry-works. Under Richelieu and Mazarin fortresses were built to protect the new France, and ambitious plans were hatched for a French empire in North America. Once Louis was ruling France himself, he continued the policy of relentless hostility towards the Habsburgs, determined to establish himself as the dominant European prince. His court, with its elaborate public rituals, its lavish entertainments and its scandalous gossip, transfixed educated people throughout Europe.

Soon, it seemed that absolute monarchs could come in almost any religious colour – Lutherans and Calvinists in Germany and Scandinavia, Orthodox in Russia, Catholic in Spain and Portugal. Despite Scandinavia’s later reputation as a pioneer of democratic thinking, Denmark–Norway (under Frederick III in the 1660s) and Sweden (under the personal rule of Charles XI from 1672) saw early and aggressive forms of absolutism. They had had long traditions of powerful kings and incompetent or divided state councils and were often
engaged in bloody wars, which tended to concentrate power in the hands of rulers who were also effective military commanders. This was a time when, after the rampages of its best-known ruler Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden seemed more likely to emerge as the key northern European power than either Prussia or Russia. There, Peter the Great, who came to power in 1682 and ruled for nearly forty-three years, would base his own radical changes on the same mixture of centralization, anti-feudal modernization and rationalism as had been pioneered in France.

For Louis XIV, the price of the extra fortresses and armies was higher taxation, and in 1649 Paris came close to a first French revolution after the second bout of uprisings known as the Fronde (the name refers to the catapults used by children to hurl stones at the houses of the rich). A system of war based on carefully drilled blocks of soldiers firing muskets, the use of cannon and fortresses, was a powerful bias in favour of a centralized tax authority, but this in turn depended on effectively squeezing town and countryside without at the same time provoking constant revolts. The basic mechanics of taxing, imposing laws and keeping order with quill-pens and mounted messengers were difficult to administer. The absolute monarchs tended to build their dreams in stone – at Versailles, St Petersburg or Potsdam – while fantasizing that their writ ran across hundreds of miles of peasant farms, forests and muddy tracks way beyond. For of course, a lot of Europe was still a complicated patchwork of territories well outside the effective rule of the grand monarchs, bleeding away their authority in endless wars against one another.

Monarchical power was never entirely secure, a message soon being heard with uncomfortable volume from the direction of the United Kingdom. Because Britain during this century lurched into civil war and regicide, it is sometimes seen rather separately from the European age of absolutism; in fact, these northern islands were closely knitted into the tensions and dilemmas of the mainland. They had fallen under the control of another dynastic sprawl, this time a Scottish royal house which, in the shape of our tobacco-hating James, had succeeded to the English throne. The Stuarts, like the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, had risen from relative medieval obscurity – in their case during the 1300s – providing nine monarchs, some wise, some foolish,
for their small nation. Once in London, the Stuarts were sucked into the maelstrom of the European dynastic rivalries, trying to form marriages and alliances with both Habsburgs and Bourbons, and intervening militarily – though ineffectively – in the continental wars.

The Stuarts soon demonstrated what could happen when a would-be absolutist was unable to raise the money needed for war. Charles I had no Richelieu. His favourites were altogether less effective and less visionary. Unlike Louis XIV’s Estates General, Charles’s main Parliament, the English one, obstinately refused to be ignored. His system of personal tax-gathering was based not on a network of professional collectors, but on medieval laws that had been half forgotten and were everywhere resented. In France, it was possible to bring an end to the internal religious wars by repressing the Protestants; in Scotland and England, this was impossible. The unintended consequences of this British dynastic failure would be huge, not just for Britain but for the history of Europe and America, because they showed the way forward towards a new kind of government.

In Scotland, where Charles had been born, a Presbyterian revolution was in full flood, displacing a Church of bishops by one of self-governing congregations under church ‘elders’. In England, the ancient Parliament had proved increasingly militant during the reign of Charles’s father James, and was cussedly difficult about authorizing taxes or supporting Charles’s erratic foreign policy. A long, if semi-mythical, tradition of ancient English ‘rights’, going back to a folk memory of Anglo-Saxon times, was invoked against monarchical tyranny. In 1629 Charles suspended Parliament and ruled for eleven years through his own ministers. But again, lacking any system of direct taxation he struggled with money, and struggled to impose his will on religious matters; for any king a severe humiliation.

When Scotland rebelled against his policies under its National Covenant during 1638–9, Charles was quite unable to control his angry subjects. When he finally summoned the English Parliament again in 1640, needing to raise money, MPs proved doggedly hostile and insisted on establishing their rights anew. Charles dismissed them, but then faced another successful Scottish rebellion, which this time reached into northern England. Being defeated by his own subjects, and facing another uprising in Ireland, Charles was forced to try yet again with the English Parliament.

But by now Parliament was determined on political reform. The Commons insisted that in future only MPs, not the king, could dismiss it. Charles, losing face – along with almost every shred of authority – then failed to arrest the leading MPs and withdrew from the capital, which was now enemy territory. From Nottingham, he raised his standard against the Parliamentarians, and civil war broke out at last in the summer of 1642.

Over the next three years, Charles’s armies were comprehensively defeated by the better disciplined and better led troops of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. There was a pause, then the fighting resumed. A complex series of campaigns, involving Protestant Scots, Catholic Irish, the English nobility, armies of townsmen and the increasingly professional Cromwellian regiments, as well as the town bands of English volunteers, ended in total victory for Parliament’s armies. Despite the protests of his brother monarchs, Charles was tried and beheaded in 1649 – the same year that Louis XIV faced the Fronde in Paris. Charles had been as intense a believer in the Divine Right of Kings as any Bourbon or Habsburg. This was not how the Divine Right, or modern absolutism, was supposed to work.

A British Commonwealth had by now been declared, and it managed to govern capably enough for some years, rebuilding a powerful navy and restoring order, before it degenerated into the personal quasi-monarchy of Cromwell himself. The Lord Protector’s Roundhead army plunged into democratic and land-reform arguments far more radical than anything envisaged by Cromwell himself, or by the landowners and generals who formed the core of the republic. Revolutionary libertarians, who seized and ploughed up private land and set up idealistic communities, calling themselves ‘Diggers’, suggested that the political revolution might be followed by a social one. This was all too much for Britain’s new military junta – as it might fairly be styled, after Cromwell too dismissed Parliament – and the radicals were suppressed.

This would hardly be the last time an optimistic revolution, brimming with hope and radicalism, ended up as a military dictatorship. Cromwell’s government lost the affection of both radicals and many of the middling people, who felt their liberties were even more curtailed than they had been by the Stuarts. Puritan edicts banning traditional holidays, including Christmas, as well as popular
entertainments such as the theatre, pleased the godly and disgusted the rest. After Cromwell’s death, and after a very short interval when his son tried to inherit his authority, the Commonwealth was ended when regiments marched on London and invited Charles’s son, Charles II, to return from exile in Holland. Sensibly, the new king limited retribution to all but the obvious regicides, and soon British life seemed to have returned to a version of the European political model. But this is not quite true. Parliament would never be truly quiescent again, and Charles realized that he was going to have to court popularity and public approval in a way French and Habsburg monarchs would have scorned. His modest-sized palace was squeezed into the streets and riverside of London, filled with petitioners and idlers, and he showed himself regularly to the people – a stark contrast to Louis’ glorious isolation well outside Paris at Versailles.

On the continent, the British revolution had been regarded as a bizarre aberration, caused by the odd circumstance of the coming together of a half-breed religion and an incompetent dynasty. Mazarin and Louis XIV, by now growing confidently into his role, thought the Stuarts of London a poor lot. They had been prepared to strike deals with Cromwell’s republic, and had dropped their support for the restoration of Charles II when it suited France to strike other deals. Many British radicals, bitterly disappointed by the Cromwellian junta and then the restoration of the Stuarts, emigrated to the American colonies, where they hoped to form exclusive and ‘pure’ communities of free and God-fearing farmers.