This concern with why kings were obeyed is a relatively recent phenomenon. Earlier historians were generally content to talk vaguely of ‘strong’ kings, leaving it to be assumed that what mattered was the power of the king’s personality (which may indeed have been part of the story) and his willingness to use force. Implicit in this interpretation was the belief that the king’s relationship with his leading subjects was an adversarial one. Power was seen to be finite, so if one side had more the other would inevitably have less. A ‘strong’ king (the term was generally used with approbation) was one who would assert his own strength by limiting the power of his nobility. Conversely, the nobility would be swift to take advantage of a ‘weak’ king to claw back power for themselves.
The abandonment of this model has been one of the major historiographical shifts of the last fifty years. The emphasis now is on consensus and reciprocity. The king and his leading subjects needed each other. The king was the bulwark of public order, not just in the general sense discussed above but also in his role as arbiter. The king was the one man who could impose dispute resolution on the great men of the realm, not so much because he had the muscle to enforce his judgements as because his authority as king meant that submission to him entailed no loss of face. But equally the king needed the nobility. They were his chief advisers, his military commanders, his most powerful agents in the localities. It followed, therefore, that each not only needed the other, but needed the other to be powerful. Power, in other words, was not a finite resource (like a cake to be distributed between guests at a party). The conventional rhetoric of fifteenth-century peerage creations emphasized that in bestowing honour (for which one can read power) the king increased his own. As Edward IV knew, a powerful, obedient nobility would enhance, not diminish, the power of the crown. Equally, an ineffective king was not an opportunity to be gleefully exploited by the nobility but their political nightmare.
This shift of emphasis has had a profound impact on historians’ interpretations of the middle ages as a whole. Within this period it has meant that Richard II, for instance, is no longer seen as hostile to ‘the nobility’, although he was undoubtedly on bad terms with individual noblemen. But its most dramatic manifestation has been the reinterpretation of the reign of Henry VI, which brought the country to civil war. Henry succeeded his father in 1422 aged just nine months. During his minority he apparently showed some eagerness for power, but once he came of age his reign was marked by ineffectuality and muddle. Historians have divided on whether the problem was that the king did nothing or, on the contrary, demonstrated a capacity for maladroit and intermittent intervention which may have been harder to cope with than total inertia. But in either case he was demonstrably failing in his public duty as king. The Tudor view (wonderfully captured in Shakespeare’s trilogy) was that Henry was a sort of holy fool - too innocent to cope with the machinations of his power-hungry nobility. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that historians such as Wolffe became less tolerant of a king who was so signally failing to do his job, and began to see the nobility less as exploiters than as victims, driven to war more or less in self-defence when central authority failed to protect their interests. The most recent reading by Watts goes beyond this to argue that, as Henry’s incapacity became manifest, the nobility struggled to preserve the appearance of royal authority. Ultimately they failed, both the attempt and its failure testimony to the inability of political life to function without effective royal authority.
This view of king and nobles as forming a sort of joint stock company should not be pushed too far. There were always individuals prepared to rock the political boat. It is clear, though, that such behaviour was not sympathetically regarded by contemporaries, and needed to be camouflaged with appeals to a higher good. Richard, duke of York, in the 1450s and his son Richard, duke of Gloucester, in 1483 both claimed to be motivated by the need to establish good rule at a time when it was under threat, but in neither case was their claim universally accepted. Similarly, the king’s likes and dislikes, however moderated by social or political conventions, remained a force to be reckoned with. The relationship of Richard II and his uncle Thomas of Woodstock was clearly a disaster, for instance. Such prejudices on the king’s part were probably regarded as inevitable. On the whole royal hostility, which only threatened an individual, was tolerated better than favouritism, which threatened to skew the whole political process. But both are a reminder that the shared interests of king and nobility did not preclude tensions within the elite.
The abandonment of the adversarial view of the relationship of king and nobility has also had consequences for historians’ interpretation of the political role of the gentry, the lesser landowners. When king and nobility were seen as rivals it was assumed that they would seek allies, and the usual candidate for this role was the gentry, whose alliance with the crown, in the traditional scenario, allowed the king to bypass the nobility by offering him an alternative source of support. The attraction of the gentry, on this interpretation, was that their power, unlike that of the nobility, was dependent on royal favour, and they thus offered a more unconditional obedience than the great men of the realm. The importance of this dependence was stressed by exponents of the concept of the ‘new monarchy’, until recently a central element in many discussions of the later middle ages. What was ‘new’ was thought to be a deliberate effort by the king to draw the threads of government into his own hands. In other words, power was being centralized, and that, as mentioned above, was equated with modernization and hence with the transformation of the medieval polity. It was a reading of events that focused historians’ attention not only on the use of the gentry by the crown but on the development of central agencies of government, such as the royal council. What these developments were thought to have in common was that they were facets of the emergence of the royal court as the principal source of political influence, with advancement to be sought in the king’s service rather than in the possession of territorial power blocs. A touchstone of these changes was thus the degree of self-consciousness manifested by the court, and the willingness of magnates to become courtiers.
Initially the ‘new monarchy’ was taken to be an early Tudor phenomenon - an expression of Henry Vll’s desire to break the remaining power of the ‘feudal’ nobility. By the mid-twentieth century, however, it had been pushed earlier, into the reign of Edward IV, who was coming to be acknowledged as the progenitor of many Tudor developments. Edward is still often seen in these terms, presiding over a growth in the royal household and the development of the chamber as a financial agency, leaving the exchequer as largely a supervisory and auditing body, for instance. But the origins of the ‘new monarchy’ itself are no longer securely assigned to his reign. The reigns of Richard II and Henry VI both have their advocates as significant turning points, while the building of bridges between king and gentry has now been pushed back at least as far as the twelfth century.
This chronological fragmentation is a warning of the unlikelihood of there being a single period of dramatic change in which the monarchy was transformed. Contemporary ideology itself militated against such a possibility. The middle ages looked to the past to legitimate the present. ‘Novelty’ was a term of criticism rather than approval. This did not, of course, mean that nothing ever changed, rather that one can usually identify change by the very urgency with which it was presented as a return to the good old days. No new king, especially a usurper anxious to assert the validity of his title, would wish to be associated with radical change. What usurpers offered was reformation: the sweeping away of the corruption of the recent past and a return to the traditions of good governance. In that sense there were plenty of new monarchs, but much less obviously a new monarchy.
If in practical terms the idea of a new monarchy now looks less plausible than it once did, much of its conceptual underpinning is also discredited. As indicated above, the need for a new monarchy was predicated on the belief that the king must rein in the nobility if he was to be master in his own kingdom. The current orthodoxy, by contrast, stresses the value to the king of a powerful nobility, and their willingness to serve the crown. It accordingly presents gentry service as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, that of the nobility. The idea of a new monarchy also took for granted the polarity of central and local power structures, seeing one as controlled by the king and the other, by implication, as lying outside his control. This was coupled with a powerful, if often unstated, sense that centralization is ‘good’, localism ‘bad’. This value judgement has been explicitly challenged in recent years, particularly by legal historians such as Powell who have argued that, on the contrary, central intervention in local affairs could be less effective than relying on the knowledge and connections of the local elite. More fundamentally, the polarity of central and local authority has been denied. Instead medieval kings are seen as operating within a single power structure which embraced both. This becomes clear if one considers, for instance, a royal command to arrest a Cornish malefactor directed to a local landowner who was also a member of the king’s household. Asking whether this was a manifestation of central or local government is meaningless.
World History
