Lawful Resistance

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 2 · 19 January 1989

From George Bernard

In commenting sceptically on the legends surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Blair Worden (25 November 1988) nonetheless lends credence to another legend when he writes of ‘the tradition of aristocratic protest which, over the previous three centuries, had opposed the rise of the Renaissance and Baroque monarchies’. In adopting such a view, he is placing too much weight on the political writings of Algernon Sidney, discussed by Jonathan Scott in one of the books under review, and by Dr Worden himself in an earlier article (‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, xxiv, 1985). Sidney, scion of a noble family, in political exile in the 1660s and 1670s, keen for an insurrection against what he saw as the tyranny of Charles II, used history for his own purposes. In claiming that great baronial families, gallant and heroic, powerful and warlike, had kept would-be tyrannical kings in check, only to destroy themselves in the Wars of the Roses and then to be tamed and seduced by the luxurious and lascivious courts of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, Sidney’s personal interest is obvious. No doubt Sidney saw himself as a modern revival of those vigorous Medieval noblemen curbing royal power. Sidney’s history offered him an explanation, a consolation and a remedy for his personal discontents. But, as history, we should not take it at face value.

His claim that the power of the nobility had declined after the Wars of the Roses and in the Early Modern period is questionable. He offers (as cited by Scott and Worden) little evidence for such a decline. To assert, for example, that Henry VII crushed the nobility will not do. And much of Sidney’s case for a decline rests on a somewhat romantic exaggeration of the earlier power of the nobility. When Sidney suggests that the nature of estate-holding had undermined noble power – ‘those who have estates at rack-rent have no dependents. Their tenants when they have paid what is agreed owe them nothing … they look upon their lords as men who receive more from them than they confer on them’ – he underestimates the continuing power of lordship while exaggerating the earlier dominance of nobles over lesser men, always a two-way relationship, especially when men had to be mobilised for military service.

If the power of the nobility survived into the 17th century, there would have been no need for any continuous tradition of aristocratic protest against the monarchy. Dr Worden’s citation of noble opposition to Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s as an illustration fits poorly, resting on odd views of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 (which the most powerful noblemen helped to defeat), of the so-called Exeter Conspiracy of 1538 (which reflected Henry VIII’s fears, not any serious noble resistance), of the fall of Cromwell in 1540 (in which the Duke of Norfolk is the only nobleman to whom any credible part could be ascribed). Since the nobility in the 1530s, as in the 1640s was not a monolithic block, to invoke a tradition of aristocratic protest, or a common baronial culture, explains very little, especially why noblemen disagreed and took opposite sides.

Most noblemen did not resist strong central royal government since it was so obviously in their interests to maintain the social order and the social harmony on which their privileged position stood. Nor did most noblemen have any continuous desire to take part in day-to-day conciliar government or to hold offices with daily executive responsibilities. The flaw in the Medieval/Early Modern system of royal government, however, was the possible accession of an inadequate ruler. At times of unusually incompetent, corrupt, partial, militarily unsuccessful or weak government, some nobles – and, importantly, others – would understandably, if reluctantly and often in self-defence, criticise and seek changes, not because they were nobles, but because remedies were necessary. Such criticisms, from nobles and non-nobles, might include requests for nobles to hold specific offices, for nobles to dominate the royal council; and such claims might be justified by analogy with the (Medieval) past. But that was not a continuous ‘tradition of aristocratic protest’, however much some of the participants tried to invent one; such claims were rather expedients by which men facing appalling political difficulties tried to resolve them.

George Bernard
University of Southampton