Beginnings of a Constitutional Monarchy
English Economic Life 
1550-1775 Tudors to Stuarts¹

4. Significant Political Questions

4. Relegion

5. Chain of Being Oligarchies

¹ https://www.thegreatcourses.com

Part 1
Economic Overview
Uneven 1525-1600 Population Growth

1) food shortages caused by bad harvests (1540s, 1550s, 1590s, 1620s, and 1650s) caused high prices led to a few famines) and  2) plague epidemics (sweating sickness or influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, and whooping cough. Population still grew from 2.4 million to over 5.5 million.

Economic Structure
1) Nobility (comprising dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons) was expanded from about 40 families in 1485, to about 130 families by the 1640s. They did well economically from rents and sale of produce grown on their land. But, the Tudors had effectively reduced their power by outlawing private armies, replacing great wealth magnates with councils or direct rule, and ruining rebellious peers by attainder, execution, and land confiscation. The sheer expense of aristocratic life ruined many.

4) Husbandmen held up to 30 acres of land made £15 - £30 a year.

Sovereignty of the king in relation to the law and the proper roles of king and Parliament when deciding policy. 132

The British Civil Wars settled none of the long-term tensions that

produced them, but the English ruling elite did learn three lessons

from the wars: England needed both a king and a Parliament. This

did not, however, settle which should be sovereign. Old Royalists favored

the king as the bulwark of order. Old Roundheads favored Parliament as

the guardian of liberty. Puritans were political and religious radicals, to

be watched as closely as Catholics. Finally, the common people were a

dangerous ally. Never again would the English ruling elite enlist them to

effect political or religious change.

The Restoration settlement of the state was a compromise. Charles II

resumed many of the powers wielded by his father. He could make peace

and war. He could call, prorogue, and dissolve Parliament. He could name

government offi cials. He alone could call out the militia. He could dispense

with the law in individual cases and suspend it in times of emergency. He

received a fi nancial settlement intended to yield £1,200,000 a year to run

his government. However, the Convention Parliament contained many

Presbyterians who had fought against Charles I and had no wish to make

his son absolute. Thus, each of these powers was qualifi ed. The king had no

standing army; Parliament would not vote him the funds for one. (The New

Model Army was paid off.) The Triennial Act still required the king to call

Parliament at least once every three years. Parliament could still impeach the

king’s offi cials and many of the prerogative courts by which he imposed his

will (the Star Chamber, High Commission, and others were never restored).

Local nobles and gentry still raised the militia for the king—or not, as they

were tried and executed for his father’s execution, though Cromwell’s body

was exhumed and mutilated. Living Roundheads were often reappointed to

the offi ces they had held under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. But

old Royalists accused the king of forgetting his friends. Charles II was often

disloyal, unreliable, and self-serving. He was also lazy and indecisive. Above

all, he was a cynic who trusted no one. Who could blame him, given his own

history and that of his family?

This goes far to explain the king’s obsession with diversion and the

extravagance and amorality of his court. The Restoration court was the

greatest center of cultural patronage of its day. It gave rise to many new

fashions: the comedy of intrigue; the fi rst stage actresses; the three-piece suit

for men; and in England, champagne, tea, and ice cream. It promoted the

careers of, among others: Dryden, Etherege, Rochester, and Wycherley in

poetry and drama; Purcell and Blow in music; Lely and Kneller in painting;

Gibbons in carving; and Wren in architecture. The court was a great center

of political intrigue, in which politicians, courtiers, and royal mistresses vied

for power. Among the latter were Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine;

Louisse de Kerouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth; the actress Nell Gwyn; and

many others, who produced 14 acknowledged

royal bastards.

The time and money spent by the king on

diversion drained the royal Treasury, and

wounded the dignity of the Crown, but made

the court tremendously attractive for anyone on

the make. Unfortunately, the king’s own wife,

a Portuguese princess named Catherine of

Braganza, was incapable of having children. Her infertility and Catholicism

made her unpopular. They also increased the importance, as heir apparent, of

the king’s younger brother, James, Duke of York. Thus, to England’s other

problems can be added a succession crisis.

Clearly, Charles II was ill-fi tted to solve the problems that had led to the

Civil Wars. On sovereignty, he was an absolutist at heart. He admired his

cousin, Louis XIV, who ruled France absolutely. On fi nance, Charles could

not rule without Parliament, or raise an army to intimidate it, such as Louis

had at his disposal, because he spent money on other things. On religion, the

king’s Anglican subjects worried about his apparent tolerance for Catholics

and Dissenters. In fact, although Charles II was impressed by Catholicism’s

emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, he was careful to remain a public

Anglican. But by the early 1670s, just as it became obvious that the king and

his Catholic queen would have no legitimate heir, the Duke of York, next in

line for the throne, began to worship openly as a Catholic.

On foreign policy, early in the reign, England’s principal enemy was the

Dutch Republic. The Dutch were aggressive traders seeking to break the

Navigation Acts and, thus, into England’s overseas empire. The result was

the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1664–1668. The war began well with

the capture of New Amsterdam, renamed New York, in 1664. It ended

disastrously when Charles II laid up the fl eet to save money, allowing the

Dutch to sail up the Medway, burning English shipping. The war brought

down Lord Chancellor Clarendon and disgraced the new Restoration regime.

Beginning around 1670, Charles II and his new ministry would try to solve

his constitutional, fi scal, religious, and foreign policy problems with a series

of bold strokes.

page 186

At the end of the Glotous Revolution the ruling elite moved quickly to maintain order. In 1688, 300 former MPs and civic leaders concurred. This group agreed to elections for another Convention Parliament, which met on 22 January 1689.

The Revolution of 1688–1689 was thought of as “glorious” by the Protestant

ruling elite, at least. No blood was shed. Unlike the period 1642–1660, the ruling elite was able to engineer a political revolution without a social one. This time, the lower orders did what they were told. This might cause us, from the viewpoint of the 21st century, to ask what was so glorious about a revolution that did nothing for the great mass of the people and was perpetrated to preserve religious

The Revolution of 1688–1689 can still be regarded as glorious

because it offered progressive answers to most of the questions that had beset

the Stuarts for nearly a century.

On the question of sovereignty, clearly, Parliament was sovereign. When

William and Mary and Anne and George proved unable to have living

children, Parliament would once again draw the succession to its liking in the

Act of Settlement of 1701. The English king remained powerful, with most

of his executive powers intact. But his fi nancial and diplomatic situation

would dictate that he could no longer rule without Parliament. That meant,

Despite William’s victory in Ireland, the overall situation in 1690–1692 remained grim. Louis XIV’s armies were victorious on the Continent. In June

1690, Louis’s navy beat an Anglo-Dutch fl eet at Beachy Head, thus opening England to invasion. Parliament launched a series of divisive inquiries into the course of the war and how the money allotted for it was being spent.

These inquiries and the conduct of the war pointed out a fundamental shift in the respective roles of the parties after the Revolution.

a Parliament, which only reluctantly voted him a land tax of four shillings in

the pound in 1693. This source was estimated to yield £2 million a year, at

most. Because it was assessed and collected by the landowners themselves,

it never actually reached the estimated yield. Montagu’s idea was to tap

England’s growing commercial wealth. He established a fund out of the land

tax to service loans made to the government, thus initiating England’s funded

national debt. He offered government annuities at 14 percent interest in return

for loans of quick cash. (The principal would be paid back only in peacetime.)

He established government-sponsored lotteries. He established the Bank of

England, which acted as an investment opportunity for subscribers, a source

of loans for the government, and a sort of federal reserve to regulate the

money supply.

The resultant Financial Revolution had far-reaching effects. To secure

Parliamentary approval for these initiatives, William had to make

concessions: In 1691, he agreed to a parliamentary Commission of Accounts

to examine his expenditure. In 1694, he agreed to another, stricter Triennial

Act. In 1701, he agreed to limitations on royal power in the Act of Settlement

(see below). Thus, the Financial Revolution helped advance the work of the

Glorious Revolution in making England a constitutional monarchy.

The Financial Revolution enriched its investors, creating a new class of

“moneyed men” who made money from credit. They embraced the Whigs

and their very profi table war. Tories saw them as parasites, not least because

the security for their speculative endeavors was the land tax. Thus, the

Financial Revolution was yet one more force in English society destroying

the Great Chain of Being.

William’s government raised fabulous sums of money. This enabled him to

fi eld and supply Continental armies and far-fl ung fl eets. In the long run, this

wealth would make the English Crown (as opposed to the English monarch

himself) fabulously wealthy and make England the greatest military power

on earth. The British army grew to 76,000 men. The central administration

increased from about 4,000 offi ces to over 12,000 between 1688 and 1725.

Faced with fi ghting global wars (in Europe, in North America, and on the

high seas), this administration grew more effi cient and professional.

English monarchs would allow the Protestant-dominated Irish Parliament

to pass a series of harsh laws called the Penal Code. The Catholic Irish

were forbidden from voting, holding offi ce, sitting in Parliament, attending

university, practicing law, purchasing land, bearing arms or wearing swords

(a mark of gentility), and owning a horse worth over £5. They were forced to

divide bequests among all their heirs, thus leading to the gradual elimination

of large land holdings. As a result, by 1727, the Catholic Irish amounted to

four-fi fths of the population but owned one-seventh of the land. No wonder

that William’s victory at the Boyne continues to rankle Catholic Irish even as

it is celebrated by their Protestant countrymen.

Despite William’s victory in Ireland, the overall situation in 1690–

Anne was served by able ministers, for which she deserves some credit. John

Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Anne’s captain-general, was the greatest

military commander of the age. Sidney, Lord (from 1706, Earl) Godolphin,

her lord treasurer, was a fi nancial genius equal to Montagu. Robert Harley,

from 1704, a secretary of state, was

the period’s greatest pure politician

and a born leader of the House of

Commons. Anne needed these men to

act as managers—on the battlefi eld and

in Parliament—with a view to keeping

her from having to give herself over

entirely to the Whigs or the Tories.

She wanted to preserve her freedom of

action by employing the most moderate

men of both parties, whose loyalty was,

ultimately, to her. But the Whigs and

Tories were bent on forcing the queen to

parties in government.

In Parliament, each party sought

Dissenters to remain second-class citizens. Some wanted to roll back the

toleration or pass a bill against occasional conformity. This would hurt the

Whigs, because so many of them were Dissenters. Whigs wanted to extend

the toleration by repealing the Test Act. The war would be determined by

what strategy the allies pursued and how much money England, in particular,

could throw at it.

Whigs were all out for the war. They saw Louis XIV’s France as the chief

danger to the peace of Europe, the Protestant faith tradition, and the English

way of life. They feared that a Bourbon on the throne of Spain would lead to

the subjugation of Europe. They feared that a Catholic Stuart on the throne of

England would undo the Reformation and the Revolution Settlement. Whig

fi nanciers and merchants also benefi ted from

fat war contracts. Thus, Whig ministers and

politicians favored taking the confl ict to Louis

by fi ghting an aggressive—and expensive—

land war on the Continent and supported

the high taxation and fi nancial expedients

necessary to fi ght the war.

Tory politicians and landowners supported

the war reluctantly. They had less fear of

Louis XIV and believed that Dissenters,

not Catholics, were the chief danger to the

Protestant tradition. Their Jacobite wing wanted “James III” restored to the

British thrones. Tory landowners were sick of the land tax and suspicious of a

costly military that seemed to achieve so little. Tory ministers and politicians

preferred, therefore, a “blue-water” naval strategy, which involved attacking

French colonial possessions, to an expensive land war.

Because Anne’s fi rst Parliament and government were dominated by Tories,

the war would start slowly for England. Eventually, the queen would face the

same choice as her predecessor: Temper

The fi nal signifi cance of Marlborough’s victories was that, in convincing

the queen and British voters that the Whigs were right about the war, they

boosted Whig fortunes in government and Parliament. The queen began to

employ more Whigs in offi ce, and they began to win elections. The Tories,

in their frustration, grew desperate in pursuit of their agenda. In 1704,

they offended the queen and nation by attempting to “tack” a bill banning

occasional conformity onto the land tax bill. This attempt to hold funding

for the war hostage to religious intolerance failed miserably. In 1705, they

insulted the queen by moving in Parliament that the Church was in danger

under her administration and that a member of the Hanoverian family

ought to be invited to Britain in case she should grow senile. These moves

convinced Anne that the Tories were irresponsible party ideologues, leading

her to appoint even more Whigs under the ostensibly moderate Marlborough

and Godolphin.

The country followed the queen’s lead, returning Whig majorities in the

elections of 1705 and 1708. Led by Marlborough and Godolphin, who

began to work closely with the Junto, these Whig Parliaments achieved

some notable legislation. They avidly funded the war, thus making possible

Marlborough’s victories. In response to the Tory suggestion of a Hanoverian

visit, the Whigs passed the Regency Act of 1706. This act decreed that

Parliament would remain in session after the death of the queen, and a

Regency Council, composed of Hanoverian supporters from both parties,

resigned en masse, the government would have been paralyzed and Anne

would govern the nation until the arrival of the Elector. It also repealed much

of the anti-monarchical legislation of the Act of Settlement: The Whigs

expected to be in power under a Hanoverian and they did not want to weaken

the executive.

To ensure a Hanoverian succession in both kingdoms, they secured an Act

of Union with Scotland in 1707. The Scots, angry at their second-class

treatment from London, in particular, their exclusion from the trading system

established by the Navigation Acts, threatened in 1703 to name the Pretender

as their next sovereign. When union was proposed, they were reluctant to

give up their national sovereignty, but trading privileges and bribes made the

deal palatable. The result was a new state:

Great Britain.

The Act of Union was the high water mark

of Whig fortunes under Queen Anne. As the

decade drew to a close, the overconfi dent

Whig ministry began to offend both the

queen and the electorate. First, Anne and her

subjects began to wonder why Marlborough’s

recurring victories did not lead to a peace.

The harvests of 1708–1709 were so bad that

the French peasantry could no longer pay taxes and, in March 1709, Louis

sued for peace. He was willing to concede nearly all the allied demands:

Spain, Italy, the West Indies, fortress towns on the Dutch border, and the

Hanoverian succession. But when the Whig diplomats demanded further

that Louis use his own troops to dislodge “Felipe V” from Spain, he decided

that he would rather continue fi ghting the British. The queen and her people

began to believe Tory charges that the Whigs were prolonging the war to

enrich the Duke of Marlborough and government contractors and maintain

a standing army.

The Whigs further offended the country when, in 1709–1710, they prosecuted

an Anglican clergyman, Rev. Henry Sacheverell, on a charge of seditious libel

for an intemperate sermon attacking the Dissenters, the existing government,

the Mediterranean; Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson’s Bay in

Canada; St. Kitts in the Caribbean; the asiento, that is, the exclusive right

to sell slaves to the Spanish New World; and recognition of the Hanoverian

succession by Louis XIV.

The Whigs believed that these paltry acquisitions after the expenditure of so

much blood and treasure would impeach Oxford in the next reign. But, in

fact, the Treaty of Utrecht was a masterstroke of diplomacy, ensuring British

superiority in Europe and beyond for a generation. It did not matter that a

Bourbon sat on the throne of Spain, because both Spain and France were

exhausted, fi nancially and militarily, after so many years of warfare. Louis

XIV would never again challenge for European supremacy or pose a threat

to the Hanoverian succession.

Britain’s territorial acquisitions sealed her status as the wealthiest trading

nation on earth: Gibraltar ensured strategic control of the Mediterranean

and its trade. The Canadian territories provided furs and Grand Banks fi sh to

clothe and feed Europe. Britain’s Caribbean possessions and dominance of

the slave trade ensured control of the notorious “triangular trade” in slaves,

tobacco, and sugar from the New World. As a result, the British would be

the wealthiest and most powerful nation in Europe: British trade produced

money, which produced military superiority, which produced victory,

which produced colonies, which produced more trade. In other words,

the Commercial Revolution begat the Financial Revolution, which begat

Blenheim, which begat the Treaty of Utrecht, which begat an empire, which

begat more commerce. Eventually, the profi ts from this process would be

invested in the fi rst Industrial Revolution, thus further extending the British

lead. The French never fi gured this out, which explains why they lost or drew

six of seven wars against Britain between 1688 and 1815. It should never be

forgotten that these policies also begat the misery of the Irish people and the

atrocity of the slave trade