Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (19 page)

Not all the lawyers, of course, would have approved. Lincoln’s Inn, in particular - where admirers of Sir Edward Coke abounded - would no doubt have fought a rearguard action against any judicial decisions which confirmed the crown’s right to impose levies without parliamentary assent. Viewing the legal profession as a whole, however, a king victorious in 1639 would have been unlikely to face serious resistance from the bar. Lawyers, like politicians, are notorious toadies to power; and, had Charles’s regime prospered beyond 1640, there seems little doubt that more than enough of them would have reconciled their consciences to the new fiscal expedients to ensure their success. Selden - the friend of Laud, and whose
Mare Clausum
was so much admired at court during the 1630s - would probably have served a victorious Caroline regime as devotedly as he served Parliament during the 1640s.
¹¹⁶
And for every rebarbative lawyer like Oliver St John or William Prynne, there was always an oleaginous Bulstrode Whitelocke ready to ingratiate himself with the regime of the day.

Indeed, during the Personal Rule, the legal profession had adapted with its usual flexibility to government without Parliaments, exploiting procedures (such as the collusive action) which in most cases circumvented the need for legislation. By 1640, Professor Russell has observed, the naturalisation of aliens and the changing of parish boundaries were almost the only things ‘the lawyers had found themselves unable to achieve without statutory assistance’.
¹¹⁷
Dispensing with Parliament’s function as a ‘point of contact’ between government and subject would prove more difficult. Yet, it is not inconceivable, in the absence of further Parliaments, that the county assizes - those regular meetings of the circuit judges and each county’s nobility and gentry - would have assumed a far more assertive role in articulating local grievances, much as France’s provincial
parlements
did after the demise of the Estates General in 1614.
¹¹⁸

Had Charles I lived as long as his father, he would have died in 1659. Much was uncertain; but there was at least the possibility that Charles I could have bequeathed his son a powerful, well-funded, centralised kingdom, where the last few veterans of the 1629 House of Commons would have told tales by the fireside of its tumultuous final days, now thirty years before; and where historians would have written - with the glib confidence of hindsight - of the inevitability of Parliament’s demise. Whether such a state could usefully be called ‘absolutist’ must remain highly dubious. In practice, Charles’s power would have been limited - as was Louis XIV’s in France - by the extent to which local elites were willing to cooperate with the crown. And in England, as in France, the possibilities for localised obstruction were legion. Yet, even without a standing army, by the end of the century there would have been the possibility of creating an English state far closer to Louis XIV’s France than to the ‘mixed monarchy’ - in which sovereignty was shared between king, Lords and Commons - that Charles I had inherited from his father in 1625.
¹¹⁹
(Even at their worst, Charles’s prospects of salvaging a strong royal government during 1639 were never as bleak as Louis’s were to seem during the Fronde.)

But it was not just kings whose careers might have taken very different trajectories. How many of those who became parliamentarians during the 1640s would otherwise have become the loyal servants of a monarchical regime? In most cases this must remain an open question. However, of one, at least, there seems little doubt. In the 1640s, Sir Thomas Fairfax (b. 1612) was hailed as the ‘champion’ of Parliament: the commander of the New Model Army; the architect of the decisive victory over the royalists at Naseby in 1645; the general who had ensured Parliament’s survival.
¹²⁰
But in 1639 Fairfax championed the King. He was among the most zealous enthusiasts for the anti-Scottish cause; raised a troop of 160 Yorkshire dragoons; and earned his knighthood as one of the handful of officers whose services in that campaign were singled out by Charles I for particular reward. It is not the least of history’s ironies that had the cause which Fairfax served so devotedly in 1639 prospered, it would probably have put an end to Parliaments in England for decades - possibly for centuries. Perhaps, even, until 1789?

J. C. D. Clark

I think I can announce it as a fact, that it is not the wish or interest of that government [Massachusetts], or any other upon the continent, separately or collectively, to set up for independency.... I am as well satisfied as I can be of my existence that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented.

GEORGE WASHINGTON TO CAPTAIN ROBERT
MACKENZIE, 9 October 1774
¹

History labours under a major handicap in societies suffused with a sense of their own rightness or inevitability. Whether driven by secular ideologies, shared religious beliefs or consensual optimism, such societies devise intellectual strategies to blot out their earlier sense of the paths that were not taken, their number, their feasibility and their attractiveness to those who, knowingly or unknowingly, with foresight or without it, made the fatal choices. Although England has been archetypal in all these ways, no Western culture has been more systematic and more successful in this retrospective reordering than the United States. American exceptionalism is still a powerful collective myth, and one whose origins can be traced to the experience of the founding. It is not surprising that so few American historians have ventured seriously to question the ‘manifest destiny’ of the United States with counterfactual enquiries. Those few writers who have imagined American history without independence have tended to treat the idea as a joke.
²
The early American historians of the new republic at least tried to escape from the sense of inevitability created by the role of divine providence in their Puritan heritage, and to give proper attention to the importance of contingency; but the attempt did not last. The pressure to celebrate the manifest destiny of an independent United States made impossible any serious respect for the two greatest counterfactuals of modern Western history. For without the American Revolution, and the financial burden placed on the French government by its participation in the American war, it is unlikely that the old order in France would have collapsed as it did in 1788-9, and with widely acknowledged finality. What is at stake in the re-creation of the counterfactuals of 1776 is less the flattery of injured British sensibilities than the possible avoidance of that sequence of ‘great’ national revolutions of which 1789 was rightly seen as the second instalment, and which devastated the culture of the
ancien régime
across Europe. Their adopted role of celebrating this sequence of collapsing dominoes gave European historians no reason to question the inevitability of the American episode that triggered the sequence.

The lack of intellectual challenges to American self-sufficiency from outside the American republic is thus one of the French Revolution’s unnoticed legacies. Yet, in the case of Britain’s relations with its former North American colonies, the lack of constructively critical engagement is more remarkable. Partly the cause was definitional: independence in 1783 seemed to remove the American question from its former place as a problem integral to British history and to establish it as a separate subject, with questions and answers relevant only to itself. More importantly, though, the absence of British analyses of American counterfactuals reflected the substantial absence of such analyses within British history itself. Until quite recently, British historians evidently felt little need to consider what might have been when the actual outcomes appeared, from their perspective, to be so agreeable. The teleology built into the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ was entirely congruent with its American counterparts. Whig historians might briefly allow themselves to dwell on the might-have-been, but only in order to highlight its abhorrent and unacceptable nature. With the counterfactual as with the ghost story, Victorians might frighten themselves with the intolerable, safe now in the knowledge of its impossibility.

However, a handful of writers have ventured to reopen the questions which English history has traditionally defined as closed. Geoffrey Parker used a counterfactual framework to set out evidence for the strength of the Spanish land forces in 1588 and the weakness of their English counterparts, and to speculate on the wider consequences of even limited military success had Spanish troops landed in England.
³
A still more provocative reversal of the orthodoxies was provided by Conrad Russell in a parody of an explanation of James II’s victory over William of Orange’s invasion force in 1688 which dismissed short-term contingencies and ascribed the triumph of Catholicism and absolute monarchy in England to deep-seated and long-term causes.
⁴
John Pocock too, examining the ideological consequences of the Revolution of 1688, pointed out that the governing classes would never have consented to James II’s deposition had he not fled the country.
⁵
Such enquiries therefore have their justifications, for if, as Russell has suggested, there was nothing inevitable about the Glorious Revolution of 1688, then we can hardly avoid posing counterfactual questions about the American Revolution too. The term ‘revolution’ confers no special status on the collections of avoidable events to which it is applied.

In the case of America, a counterfactual scenario extending back to the later Stuarts, and including their successors in exile, is necessary if the constitutional setting of Britain’s transatlantic empire is to be established, since one option for a British America in the eighteenth century was as a British possession in an empire still ruled by that strangely fated dynasty. Such an outcome might have embraced either of two quite different constitutional settlements, both of which might have strengthened the long-term coherence of England’s empire. The first would have applied had James II’s plans for the reorganisation of colonial government succeeded, and had he retained his throne in 1688. The second might have obtained had one of his successors regained the throne which James lost, and had the relations between Britain and its colonies thereafter mirrored the constitutional relations between the component kingdoms of the British Isles.

It might be argued that James II’s plans for the American colonies illustrated an inflexible commitment to bureaucratic centralisation and against representative assemblies. This was a considered response to American realities, however, for his involvement in colonial affairs was extensive, and came early. As Duke of York, James was granted the proprietorship of the colonies of New Jersey and New York in 1664 after their conquest in the Second Dutch War. While proprietor of New York, his experience of colonial conflicts made him consistently resist local demands for an assembly: he conceded such a body reluctantly in 1683, and promptly abolished it on his accession to the throne in 1685 when New York was reorganised as a crown colony.
⁶
Massachusetts, equally, lost its assembly when its charter was revoked and reissued in 1684. James then went further still, combining the colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island into a new body, the Dominion of New England, under the control of a governor-general; later it was enlarged to include New Jersey and New York, raising fears that James intended it to be the model for amalgamating into two or three Dominions all the American colonies.
⁷
The suppression of colonial assemblies, and the magnification of the powers of the governor-general, was probably intended primarily to turn the colonies into defensible military units, and only secondarily to impose religious toleration on recalcitrant Congregationalists. But the combined effect of these two implications was to raise in full form the spectre of ‘Popery and arbitrary power’ already familiar in England, and to unleash sudden resistance when news arrived in the colonies of James’s flight in December 1688: America, too, had its Glorious Revolution.
⁸

Without the events of 1688 in England, however, it is not clear that American colonists at their then stage of development could have resisted the centralisation of their governments into three ‘Dominions’ and the elimination or diminution of colonial assemblies. And without the structure provided by those assemblies in the eighteenth century, it is unlikely that colonial constitutional debate would have taken the form it then did. An America effectively subordinated to an English executive at an early stage, and paralleled by a constitutional settlement at home in which the Westminster, Edinburgh and Dublin parliaments - but especially the first - played much lesser roles, would have been an America with a much smaller potential for resistance in the 1760s and 1770s.
⁹

This first alternative, then, assumes - as Whigs at the time firmly believed - that Stuart rule would mean the end of parliaments. This is at least open to qualification: if it was chiefly conflicts over religion that made it so hard for Charles I, Charles II and James II to work with their parliaments, one might frame an alternative scenario in which a compromise on religious questions would have left the Stuarts no more averse to democratic assemblies in practice than other dynasties. Stuart history after 1688 gives some support to this, for James II’s flight in 1688 did not settle the dynastic question. Conspiracies for a restoration ‘were hatched, exploded or investigated in 1689-90, 1692, 1695-6, 1704, 1706-8, 1709-10, 1713-14, 1714-15, 1716-17, 1720-2, 1725-7, 1730-2, 1743-4, 1750-2 and 1758-9. Foreign invasions inspired by the Jacobites were foiled by the elements and the Royal Navy (in almost equal parts) in 1692, 1696, 1708, 1719, 1744, 1746 and 1759.’
¹⁰
These attempts were increasingly accompanied by proclamations from James II, his son and grandson professing elaborate respect for the constitutional forms they had previously seemed to threaten. After 1689, it was supporters of William of Orange, Whigs and Hanoverians in turn who tended to treat representative assemblies with minimal patience, and the Stuarts in exile who came to call for free parliaments, uncorrupted by ministerial largesse.
¹¹
Along with the goal of the liberation of the Westminster, Edinburgh and Dublin parliaments went a legitimist constitutional theory which, by emphasising the monarchy, entailed that the unity of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland was expressed solely in terms of allegiance to a common sovereign. The restored monarchy in 1660 had deliberately undone the Cromwellian unions with Scotland and Ireland; the Stuarts, bidding for Scots support, were committed to undoing the union of 1707 also. Scots Jacobites looked for a restoration of a Stuart dynasty and the Edinburgh Parliament together, and Irish Jacobites anticipated by many decades the arguments most loudly made by Irish Whig politicians in the 1780s about the legislative equality of England and Ireland.
¹²
If James II had not been destroyed by his religious zeal, such a constitutional
modus vivendi
might have been feasible for him also.