The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought PDF
Preview The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought
THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS IN ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS IN ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT BY J. H. M. SALMON OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 19 5 9 Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI ACCRA © Oxford University Press 1959 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN OKULP Political institutions are seldom constructed from a system of abstract beliefs: rather do they grow from the countless responses which individual men are compelled to make to the demands of transient situations. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to affirm that in their reactions to the practical problems which confront them men are uninfluenced by political principles. There can be no fixed boundary line between theory and event. The terms in which the last political crisis has been rationalized are the pre¬ suppositions which are brought to the solution of the next. In this study I have often been unable to distinguish between political theory and political history. I have been less concerned with the logical development of political doctrines than I have with the varying mood in which Englishmen employed French precedents and principles to interpret their own predicaments. For this reason I have examined the appearance in English politics of the ideas and models provided by the French Religious Wars chronologi¬ cally, rather than by the logical juxtaposition of French and Eng¬ lish concepts. At the same time I have endeavoured to draw such logical conclusions as seem to be justified. The theme of the influence of the Wars of Religion in English politics would, perhaps, be more manageable if it were restricted to a more limited period than that which is here surveyed. Yet this would distort the conclusions in which it issued. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the English attitude to the Religious Wars varied in direction and intensity, and it is not to be properly understood in any one phase in isolation from its antecedents and consequences. To attain this wider perspective it has been necessary to draw upon a variety of sources uneven in quality and dissimilar in tone. Some of these have not, to my knowledge, been discussed in works concerned with the history of political thought. Many are, of course, familiar texts. The V 33139 PREFACE originality of this study does not lie in the discovery of new sources, but in the cumulative weight of evidence which demon¬ strates the extent to which seventeenth-century Englishmen con¬ sciously adapted French theory and example to their own needs. I wish to record my thanks to those with whom I have discussed certain aspects of this book. They include Mr. Peter Laslett of Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. Charles Parkin of Clare College, Mr. K. D. McRae of Carleton University College, Ottawa, and Professor Myron Gilmore of Harvard University. J. H. M. S. VI Contents chapter 1. Introduction 1 chapter 2. The Elizabethan Reception 15 CHAPTER 3. The Intermediaries 39 CHAPTER 4. Prelude to Civil War 58 CHAPTER 5. The Civil War 80 CHAPTER 6. Regicide and Interregnum 101 CHAPTER 7. Restoration and Exclusion Crisis 123 CHAPTER 8. Revolution and Aftermath 147 CHAPTER 9- Conclusion 163 appendix A. A List of Trench Works Published in England 1560—98 171 appendix B. Some Personal Links between English Statesmen and French Theorists 181 BIBLIOGRAPHY 186 INDEX 199 vii CHAPTER 1 Introduction T O Voltaire English conflicts in the seventeenth century differed from those of the French Religious Wars as the principles of reason differed from the blight of superstition. French rebellion was based in purposeless faction and resulted in the increase of arbitrary government. English revolution had pursued a more reasoned course and preserved the national heritage of political liberty. The French assassinated their kings: the English judged them. Why was it, asked Voltaire, that the English were more fortunate in their politics than other peoples?1 More than a cen¬ tury later an eminent Cambridge historian suggested an answer in a lecture entitled 'The Growth of the French and English Monarchies Compared’: To the question of Voltaire, then, why has England so long and so successfully maintained her free Government and her free institu¬ tions? I answer, because England is still, as she always has been, German; because her national franchises are the spontaneous and legitimate fruit of her national character; of that character, dutiful, serious, persevering, reverential and hopeful, which has been trans¬ mitted to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and which it now remains for us to transmit to our remotest descendants.2 When Voltaire asked his rhetorical question he had already received this answer from his English friends. A legend had been established. The tumultuous half century preceding the Revolu¬ tion of 1688 had issued in a solution achieved by the national political genius. It was this English genius, this Anglo-Saxon genius, which had preserved the spirit of liberty throughout the ages. Elsewhere Voltaire was more sceptical of English liberty. 1 Letters concerning the English Nation, 1733, letter viii. 2 Sir James Stephen, in Lectures on the History of France, 1851, vol. ii, p. 495. 6109 1 B INTRODUCTION He was delighted to learn that a boatman who had extolled English freedom as he rowed him across the Thames had subse¬ quently been taken by the press-gang. Yet Voltaire accepted the complacent and insular Whig rationalization of the past. In the eighteenth century English experience appeared to be so unlike European experience that the theory of the Glorious Revolution was represented as a purely English phenomenon, an extraneous contribution to European thought. It has been regarded in this light ever since. It has become fashionable to be sceptical of Whig political history, but its Liberal counterpart in the history of political ideas still dominates English thinking. This attitude assumes that seventeenth-century dissensions in England prompted the expres¬ sion of the English genius in its modern form, and thereby dis¬ seminated a specifically English liberalism throughout Europe. The course of English history alone is thought to have shaped the political philosophy with which the makers of the Revolution of 1688 were to endow the West. The Lockian version of indivi¬ dualism permeated European thought and enabled it to break with the continuity of the past, because English political expe¬ rience had been so different from French or German or Dutch that it only required the interpretation of Locke and the final example of 1688 to bring it forcibly to the attention of continen¬ tal thinkers. This is the popular Liberal distortion of the history of ideas.3 Nothing demonstrates its falsity so clearly as the reflec¬ tion of the French Religious Wars in English political thinking throughout the seventeenth century. Both the French civil wars of the last four decades of the six¬ teenth century and the crises which divided seventeenth-century England produced a mass of political speculation comparable in bulk and in variety. There have been several penetrating sugges¬ tions that some special relationship exists between theorists in the two fields, and between the political problems which they faced.4 3 e.g. Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1929, p. 32; L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, pp. 51, 52. 4 e.g. G. P. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898, p. 29, suggesting that Huguenot resistance theory was intimately 2
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