State and Commonwealth: The Theory of the State in Early Modern England, 1549-1640
280
State and Commonwealth: The Theory of the State in Early Modern England, 1549-1640
280Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
State and Commonwealth presents a new theory of state and society by expanding on the usual treatment of "commonwealth" in pre–Civil War English history. Drawing on works of theology, moral philosophy, and political theory—including Martin Bucer's De Regno Christi, Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum, John Case's Sphaera Civitatis, Francis Bacon's essays, and Thomas Hobbes's early works—Noah Dauber argues that the commonwealth ideal was less traditional than often thought. He shows how it incorporated new ideas about self-interest and new models of social order and stratification, and how the associated ideal of distributive justice pertained as much to the honors and offices of the state as to material wealth.
Broad-ranging in scope, State and Commonwealth provides a more complete picture of the relationship between political and social theory in early modern England.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691170305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2016 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
State and Commonwealth
The Theory of the State in Early Modern England, 1549â"1640
By Noah Dauber
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17030-5
CHAPTER 1
THE REFORMERS' COMMONWEALTH
You see, moreover, what a great difference there is between Scripture's view of man and that of philosophy or human reason. Philosophy looks at nothing except the external masks of men; the Holy Scriptures look at the deepest, incomprehensible affections. Since a man is governed by these, the Scriptures judge the acts according to the motivation behind the affections. ... And as far as those who live outwardly good lives are concerned, is not one man drawn to these ways by an aversion for human affairs, another because [of] the fear of fate, another by ambition, and another by a love of tranquility? For these have been the causes for a better outward life formerly in the case of philosophers and they are now for many men.
— Philipp Melanchthon, Loci Communes Theologici
The mid-Tudor upheaval has been described as part of the transition from a medieval to a modern economy. It had several elements: the change from hereditary forms of tenure to contracts; depopulation; a transformation from an agricultural economy to an economy based on trade in wool; inflation, especially in the prices of foodstuffs; and the rise of a new class. These changes were collectively discussed as the problem of "enclosure," which more specifically referred to the practice of landowners enclosing fields (with hedges for pasturage) that had previously been under cultivation. These issues were the subject of discussion and proposed reform from the 1530s onward.
With the death of Henry in 1547 and the coronation of nine-year-old Edward VI, the son of Jane Seymour, not only was economic reform given new impetus, but it was revisited in a new ideological context in which the social basis of participation in government — of the sort that Starkey was interested in investigating — became an open question. Edward's uncle Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, became the Duke of Somerset and was named as lord protector of England by the executors of Henry's will. During Edward's minority, Somerset combined an aggressive foreign policy with a politics of "popularity" at home, in part, it seems, "to compensate for his structurally weak position as Lord Protector" and in part out of genuine conviction. In 1547, he began an invasion of Scotland, which drew England into war with France as well. The methods of funding the wars were in tension with the popular politics of relieving the poor through various methods of price control. The Somerset government oversaw the passage of laws regulating the production of leather, malt, and steel; it combated fraud in the wool industry through the specification of measures; and it controlled the export of commodities. It also took steps to relieve the poor, doing away with compulsory purveyance, which required the provision of goods for the use of the military, and transferring tax revenues from town fee-farms to poor relief. A tax on sheep and woolen cloth combined both agendas of the government, raising revenue for the wars and serving as a disincentive for pasturage and enclosure. In general, however, these popular measures were in tension with the chief method of raising revenue, the debasement of the currency. This was offset to some extent by the revenue raised through the sale of church and chantry lands.
Somerset's measures did little to calm the tensions in the countryside or to resolve the issues of land tenure. In fact, the appointment of enclosure commissions in 1548 and 1549 and the rhetoric of the commonwealth men that preceded the commissions may have only fanned the flames of rebellion. In the 1530s, tenant farmers had begun speaking of the commonwealth in the manner that had been preached to them. They worried that their relatively independent way of life was under attack and that the better sort was willing to countenance "the destruction of another one of the orders — that of the commons." John Hales's 1548 bill on the enclosures set out the theory in its classic form:
for dyvers of your graces subiectes, called to the degree of nobilitie not considering that it hathe pleased almightie god to ordeyn them so farre to excell the comen sorte of people in the comen wwalthe as shepardes to the shepe, and to be particuler serveiours and overseers undre your maiestie of us your graces subiectes, to see that we shuld lyve here in this worlde a godlie and a quyet life, according to goddes worde and your graces Lawes, and to geve them sufficient possessions & revenuesfor that purpose, by the rentes wherof they might quyetly and without bodely labour lyve and attend therunto, but thinking themselfes onelye born to themselfes and little remembryng that these honours estates & degrees cannot be mayneteyned and preserved wihout your poore subiectes, have somoche neglected ther vocations that they be become grasiers shepemasters and Toilours of the earthe having pulled downe a greate many Townshippes villages & houses of husbandrie and converting the ground which was wont to be occuped in husbandrie and tillage into pasture.
The tenant farmers were especially concerned that their traditional rights to the use of the commons were being eroded and that the landlords were beginning to raise rents at the expiration of copyhold contracts. They saw these developments in light of the commonwealth ideal that had been preached to them. The self-interest of which they accused the landlords was just what Hales, the instigator of the plan for the enclosure commissions, had suggested was the object of the commissions, namely, "to remove the self-love that is in many men." These anxieties led to a series of revolts in England, the best known of which is Kett's Rebellion in July 1549 in Norfolk. The rebellion began after a festival celebrating St. Thomas à Becket, when a mob began to pull down the enclosures of an unpopular lawyer, John Flowerdew, who then bribed them to destroy those of Robert Kett instead. Kett, acquiescing to the destruction of the enclosures on his land, became the rebels' leader, ultimately heading an encampment of thousands on Mousehold Heath. After various statements of demands and discussions with the authorities, the rebellion was crushed by John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, and some 3,500 rebels were killed.
It is clear that Kett's Rebellion was a crisis for Somerset, who fell from power in its wake, but it is less obvious precisely what about his policies was so objectionable and the extent to which these objections reflected a rejection of the ideal of commonwealth. Many have interpreted the comments of William Paget and the Privy Council in the fall of 1549 as a crisis of the commonwealth ideal generally. Some of the complaints preceding the fall of Somerset, especially those of Paget, suggest that the protector was too sympathetic to the people, that it was his policies, principally that of the enclosure commissions but also his liberal use of pardons throughout the crisis, that fueled the fires of rebellion. According to a statement of the Privy Council in the fall of 1549, it was the protector, "mynding to follow his owne fantasyses," that had led to the uprisings, and William Paget reported to Somerset that some had been saying "that youe haue some greater enterpryse in your hedde, that leane so muche to the multitude."
When these complaints are read along with the pamphlets and sermons exhorting obedience during and immediately after the rebellions, it seems that there was a new anxiety to reinforce hierarchy and to put forward a "vision of the body politic which was composed of interdependent but unequal parts." Social commentary now stressed that it was the covetousness of the people that was the problem; Latimer and Lever, among others, worried that many were now reaching beyond their degree in dress and consumption. Lever preached that "dyvers members in dyvers place[s], having dyvers duties" should have "dyvers provision in feedyng and clothyng." For many scholars, especially economic, social, and political historians, such comments amounted to a critique of the commonwealth ideal. A new "realism" has been perceived in Smith's writing above all. Thus, for Hindle, "[i]n the years after Kett's rebellion in particular, the government sought to distance itself from what Sir Thomas Smith could by 1565 regard as the facile communism of the 'feigned commonwealth' Utopia 'such as never was nor never shall be.'"
The new social history of politics has tended to identify commonwealth thinking with the policies of the Somerset regime in 1548–9 and the social commentary of those years that advocated for those policies. On this view, the council perceived such thinking to be a dead end and chose to pursue instead paternalistic policies that "were palliative rather than ameliorative, their fundamental objective — social control rather than social justice." These historians see an expansion of government under Elizabeth both in the expansion of statute to the regulation of personal conduct (the reformation of manners) and in the explosion of rates of participation of the middling sorts in government. These trends combined to constitute social control, because the policing of manners was effected by converting the middling sorts' desire for distinction into a willingness to regulate their own behavior and to police the lower sorts.
Yet studying the political thought of the mid-Tudor period — in preambles, draft bills, and full treatises — shows that the attempt to respond to the desire for distinction and the impulse to reform manners were both imagined within the context of the commonwealth, a classical ideal of society. The crisis of 1549 was not a crisis for the overarching goal of commonwealth, which was shared broadly, but for a specific version of commonwealth as championed by Hales, Bucer, and Somerset himself, in which it was attempted to give the state a larger role through the active use of magistrates, who were imagined as custodians of the divine law.
THE CONSERVATORS OF THE COMMONWEAL
Talk of the classical ideal of the commonwealth began to develop rapidly in England in the 1520s and 1530s as the Henricians began to think about the role of the nobility in the English commonwealth, which was inspired by a rush of Italian writing with classical overtones on the subjects of courtesy, true nobility, and gentlemanliness. This in turn generated a small flood of English publications and translations on the subject. The experience of Reginald Pole, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas Starkey in Padua yielded Lupset's An Exhortacion to Yonge Men and Starkey's A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset in 1529, though Starkey did not present his work publicly for some years. Sir Thomas Elyot published The Gouernour (1537), Of the Knowledge That Maketh a Wise Man (1533), a commonplace book (1534), and a Latin-English dictionary (1539). Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528) was imported from Italy and was being read in London by 1530. There were also plans for a more institutional approach to the education of the nobility: Thomas Denton, Nicholas Bacon, and Robert Carey drew up an (unrealized) proposal for an academy for noblemen, which would teach them the law along with Latin and French.
Thomas Cromwell, the secretary of the Privy Council, at much the same time found the discussion of the commonwealth useful for justifying the legislative agenda of the government in social and economic policy, and he employed or encouraged several writers who made the improvement of the commonwealth their main theme, including Thomas Starkey, John Rastell, William Marshall, and Clement Armstrong. Starkey's Dialogue, a fictionalized discussion between Pole and Lupset, was not published until the nineteenth century, but it circulated in manuscript and was echoed in several proposals and other works on the English commonwealth.
Much attention has been paid to Starkey's scheme for national government, but he held his ideas about local government to be essential for the realization of the commonwealth. At the national level, Starkey's vision can certainly be characterized as monarchical republicanism, mixed monarchy, or aristocratic republicanism. In the 1520s Pole, Lupset, and Starkey had all been in Padua, which was then part of the republic of Venice, and at the heart of the Dialogue was an adaptation of the contemporary call for the rehabilitation of the Venetian nobility in the wake of recent defeat. The goal of the Dialogue was to call on the nobility to take up their proper role in government, with the more particular goal of urging Pole to take up the royal service being offered by Henry VIII. This was to be achieved in England above all by the adoption of a system of councils similar to those in Venice, which dampened ambition and promoted quietness through bridling the prince.
But local government, which was essential for the realization of Starkey's vision of the commonwealth as a populous and materially flourishing society, was almost lordship. Commonwealth required that everyone share their labor, abilities, and resources with everyone else. But the overcoming of self-love could not be achieved by persuasion or exhortation alone; it required either the fear of punishment or the promise of reward, which Starkey maintained was consistent with classical ideas of the commonwealth, including Plato's. Tranquility would be achieved in England when everyone was convinced that everyone else was acting for the common good by fulfilling their vocations energetically.
In this regard, Starkey broke with More's Utopia, though he had followed the diagnosis of the ills of England presented there quite closely. He accepted the policies of the Utopians in some respects, but also modified them, considerably changing the character of the relationship of the state to commonwealth. More had suggested that it was crucial for productivity in the commonwealth for everyone to be assigned to the vocation that best suited their talents. Starkey agreed with this, but his understanding of "vocation" differed. More's vision of vocation, drawing on the Ciceronian idea of the genus vitae, was voluntary, and it was the interest and pleasure that stemmed from the choice of occupation that was clearly the engine of productivity in Utopia (along with the curtailment of unnecessary needs). The genus vitae was "the private determination of a career consistent with [one's] own nature, aptitude, and constitution" and harmonized with the good of the commonwealth. As Cicero wrote in De Officiis, and as was echoed by Erasmus and More, such a career was to be carefully chosen in line with one's own particular character or ingenium and lived with constancy, so that one's choices were a reflection of one's appreciation of one's own character.
Starkey's vision of vocation was far more coercive, more in line with the recent municipal programs of poor relief in Ypres and Rouen, which distinguished between idleness and productivity and accordingly instituted greater penalties for begging. Starkey recommended in the Dialogue that England implement the Ypres program, and unlike More's Utopia, he specified that "every man that contentyth not hymselfe wyth hys owne mystere craft & faculty" must be punished. Idleness was to be punished by banishment, while negligence in one's occupation was to be fined. Under these conditions, the lower sorts would be productive and provide sufficient material goods for everyone, while the nobility would ensure justice for everyone. The ecclesiastical courts were too lax, and thus penal laws — including the regulation of personal conduct, such as drunkenness and gaming — needed to be upheld. While regular lawsuits would be presided over by the nobility and gentry acting as justices of the peace (JPs), the supervision of occupations and personal conduct would be performed by new local officers, called the conservators of the commonweal and modeled on the Roman censors. There were some rewards for good actions. Starkey proposed that the councils distribute honors to placate the populace, and to promote productivity, rewards would be offered for excellent work in the crafts, as More suggested. There was, however, no provision for conciliar government at the local level; participation as under-officers was implied but not emphasized.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from State and Commonwealth by Noah Dauber. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction: State, Repu blic, and Commonwealth 1
Chapter 1. The Reformers’ Commonwealth
Visions of Commonwealth in the Reign of Edward VI 27
Chapter 2. A Society of Orders
Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum 81
Chapter 3. The Monarchical Repu blic
John Case’s Sphaera Civitatis 114
Chapter 4. The Private and the Public
The Aphorisms and Essays of Francis Bacon 153
Chapter 5. The Penal State and the Commonwealth of Conscience
Thomas Hobbes and The Elements of Law 189
Conclusion: The Legacy of Commonwealth 229
Bibliography 235
Index 253
What People are Saying About This
"State and Commonwealth offers a stimulating and highly original rereading of English political thought from the reign of Edward VI to the onset of the Civil Wars. This quietly brilliant book takes readers to familiar texts by unfamiliar ways, linking social and intellectual history with great effect. Dauber treads an illuminating path entirely his own."—Annabel S. Brett, author of Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law"This attractively written book describes and analyzes the political thought of the ‘commonwealth' tradition that flourished in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. State and Commonwealth is a significant contribution to the field. I know of no other book on the market like it."—J. P. Sommerville, author of Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640