Cardinal Richelieu on the Common People of France
Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was the effective ruler of France from 1624 until his death in 1642. His Political Testament was assembled after his death from historical sketches and memoranda of advice which he prepared for King Louis XIII, the ineffectual monarch whom he ostensibly served. This book was eventually published in 1688, during the reign of Louis XIV.
Ll students of politics agree that when the common people are too well off it is impossible to keep them peaceable. The explanation for this is that they are less well informed than the members of the other orders in the state, who are much more cultivated and enlightened, and so if not preoccupied with the search for the necessities of existence, find it difficult to remain within the limits imposed by both common sense and the law.
It would not be sound to relieve them of all taxation and similar charges, since in such a case they would lose the mark of their subjection and consequently the awareness of their station. Thus being free from paying tribute, they would consider themselves exempted from obedience. One should compare them with mules, which being accustomed to work, suffer more when long idle than when kept busy. But just as this work should be reasonable, with the burdens placed upon these animals proportionate to their strength, so it is likewise with the burdens placed upon the people. If they are not moderate, even when put to good public use, they are certainly unjust.
I realize that when a king undertakes a program of public works it is correct to say that what the people gain from it is returned by paying the taille [a heavy tax imposed on the peasantry]. In the same fashion it can be maintained that what a king takes from the people returns to them, and that they advance it to him only to draw upon it for the enjoyment of their leisure and their investments, which would be impossible if they did not contribute to the support of the state.
Source: The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, trans. Henry Bertram Hill (Madison, WI: 1961), pp. 31-32.
Questions for Analysis
1. According to Cardinal Richelieu, why should the state work to subjugate the common people? What assumptions about the nature and status of "common people" underlie this argument?
2. What theory of the state emerges from this argument? What is the relationship between the king and the state and between the king and the people, according to Richelieu?
Parliament’s leaders and force his own agenda. When he failed in this, he withdrew from London to raise his own army. Parliament responded by mustering a seperate military force and voting itself the taxation to pay for it. By the end of 1642, open warfare had erupted between the English king and the English government: something inconceivable in neighboring France, where the king and the government were inseparable.
Arrayed on the king’s side were most of England’s aristocrats and largest landowners, many of whom owned lands in the Atlantic colonies as well. The parliamentary forces were made up of smaller landholders, tradesmen, and artisans, many of whom were Puritan sympathizers. The king’s royalist supporters were commonly known by the aristocratic name of Cavaliers. Their opponents, who cut their hair short in contempt for the fashionable custom of wearing curls, were derisively called Roundheads. After 1644, when the parliamentary army was effectively reorganized, the royalist forces were badly beaten, and in 1646 the king was compelled to surrender. Soon thereafter, the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England was abolished and a Calvinist-style church was mandated throughout England and Wales.
The struggle might have ended here had not a quarrel developed within the parliamentary party. The majority of its members were ready to restore Charles to the throne as a limited monarch, under an arrangement whereby a uniformly Calvinist faith would be imposed on both Scotland
CHARLES I. King Charles of England was a connoisseur of the arts and a patron of artists. He was adept at using portraiture to convey the magnificence of his tastes and the grandeur of his conception of kingship. ¦ How does this portrait by Anthony van Dyck compare to the engravings of the "martyred" king on page 480 in Interpreting Visual Evidence?
And England as the state religion. But a radical minority of Puritans, commonly known as Independents, insisted on religious freedom for themselves and all other Protestants. Their leader was Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), who had risen to command the Roundhead army, which he had reconstituted as “the New Model Army.” Ultimately, he became the new leader of Parliament, too.
Seized control of the government. In order to ensure that the Puritan agenda would be carried out, he ejected all the moderates from Parliament by force. This “Rump” (remaining) Parliament then proceeded to put the king on trial and eventually to condemn him to death for treason against his own subjects. Charles Stuart was publicly beheaded on January 30, 1649: the first time in history that a reigning king had been legally deposed and executed. Europeans reacted to his death with horror, astonishment, or rejoicing, depending on their own political convictions (see Interpreting Visual Evidence on page 480).
After the king’s execution, his son (the future King Charles II) joined with the remaining royalist forces in an attempt to restore the monarchy. But he was defeated by Cromwell’s army and fled to France. With the heir to the English throne in exile, Cromwell and his supporters abolished Parliament’s hereditary House of Lords and declared England a Commonwealth: an English translation of the Latin res publica. Technically, the Rump Parliament continued as the legislative body; but Cromwell, with the army at his command, possessed the real power and soon became exasperated by legislators’ attempts to enrich themselves by confiscating their opponents’ property. In 1653, he
OLIVER CROMWELL AS PROTECTOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH. This coin, minted in 1658, shows the lord protector wreathed with laurel garlands like a classical hero or a Roman consul, but it also proclaims him to be "by the Grace of God Protector of the Commonwealth." ¦ What mixed messages does this coin convey?
The Fall of Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth
Taking advantage of the dissension within the ranks of his opponents, Charles renewed the war in 1648. But he was forced to surrender after a brief campaign, and Cromwell
Marched a detachment of troops into the Rump Parliament and disbanded it.
The short-lived Commonwealth was thus replaced by the “Protectorate,” a thinly disguised autocracy established under a constitution drafted by officers of the army. Called the Instrument of Government, this text is the nearest approximation to a written constitution England has ever had. Extensive powers were given to Cromwell as Lord Protector for life, and his office was made hereditary.
The Restoration of the Monarchy
Many intellectuals noted the similarities between these events and those that had given rise to the Principate of Augustus after the death of Julius Caesar (Chapter 5). And among the people, Cromwell’s Puritan military dictatorship was growing unpopular, not least because it prohibited public recreation on Sundays and closed London’s theatres. Many became nostalgic for the milder and more tolerant Church of England and began to hope for a restoration of the old royalist regime. The opportunity came with Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son Richard had no sooner succeeded to the office of Lord Protector when a faction within the army removed him from power. As groups of royalists plotted an uprising, a new Parliament was organized, and, in April of 1660, it declared that King Charles II had been the ruler of England since his father’s execution in 1649. Almost overnight, England became a monarchy again.
Charles II (r. 1660-85) revived the Church of England and was careful not to return to the provocative religious policies of his father. Quipping that he did not wish to “resume his travels,” he agreed to respect Parliament and to observe the Petition of Right that had so enraged Charles I. He also accepted all the legislation passed by Parliament immediately before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, including the requirement that Parliament be summoned at least once every three years. England thus emerged from its civil war as a limited monarchy, in which power was exercised by “the king in Parliament.” It remains a constitutional monarchy to this day.
The English Civil War and the Atlantic World
These tumultuous events had a significant influence on the development of a new political sensibility within England’s Atlantic colonies. The English landed aristocracy had sided with the king during this conflict, but many in the colonies had sympathized with Parliament in its claims to protect the liberties of small landowners, who also bore a disproportionate share of taxation. Even after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, many colonial leaders retained an antimonarchist and antiaristocratic bias.
The fact that the royal government had been almost entirely concerned with the business of putting down rebellion at home also meant that England’s colonies became used, at an early stage, to a large degree of independence. As a result, once government was restored, all of Parliament’s efforts to extend more control over the colonies would result in greater and greater friction (see Chapter 15). Slogans declaring the rights of “free-born Englishmen” would echo among farmers, while “free trade” became a rallying cry against royal interference in colonial commerce. The bitter religious conflicts that had divided the more radical Puritans from the Church of England also forced the colonies to come to grips with the problem of religious diversity. Some, like Massachusetts, took the opportunity to impose their own brand of Puritanism on settlers. Others experimented with forms of religious toleration that sometimes went beyond the forms of religious freedom that existed back in England.
Paradoxically, though, the spread of ideas about the protection of liberties and citizens’ rights coincided with a rapid and considerable expansion of unfree labor in the colonies. Prior to the 1640s, the English colonies in North America and the Caribbean had been assured of a steady stream of immigrants, like the Puritan Pilgrims of Massachusetts in 1620. The outbreak of war in 1642 and the subsequent triumph of the Puritans under Cromwell caused a drop in this migration, since many who might have thought of emigrating decided to stay in England. In North America, the decline in the arrival of new settlers was so sudden that it caused a depression in local economies.
Meanwhile, the demand for labor was increasing rapidly owing to the expansion of tobacco plantations in Virginia and sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica, which the British captured from the Spanish in 1655. These plantations, with their punishing working conditions and high mortality rates from disease, were insatiable in their demand for workers. Plantation owners thus sought to meet this demand by investing ever more heavily in forms of unfree labor, including indentured servants and African slaves. The social and political crisis unleashed by the English Civil War also led to the forced migration of paupers and political prisoners, especially from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; and this pattern continued during Cromwell’s reign. These exiles, many without resources, swelled the ranks of the unfree and the very poor in England’s Atlantic colonies, spurring the formation of new social hierarchies as earlier arrivals sought to distance themselves from newer immigrants they regarded
World History
