Popular Politics

1. Popular Politics Mark Knights

2. Picking up and introducing themes • Last week: Humfrey Butters authority; Beat on republics • And looking ahead: • Next week: Political Thought • The following week: Absolutism and its alternatives

3. The separation and convergence of social and political history • High political concern with certain institutions of the state • Social history’s recovery of the world of the everyday. • Trevelyan: social history as history with the politics taken out. • Manning: early modern English rioters ‘devoid of political consciousness’ [Villlage Revolts 1509-1640 (1988)] • But investigation of crowd activity in C18th (Rudé, Thompson) suggested otherwise. • Calls for their reintegration in 1990s. Patrick Collinson called for ‘a new political history, which is social history with the politics put back in, or an account of political processes which is also social’.

4. What is politics? • If we escape the narrow definition of politics as being about courts, ministers, foreign policy and parliaments, how do we define it? • We could say it has to do with power and power relationships – this is the thrust of gender history • But a danger we might see power everywhere. Adrian Leftwich: ‘Politics is a defining characteristic of all human groups, and always has been’. • Is religious conflict inherently political? • Or is politics to do with the state and authority, conceived in new ways?

5. What type of state? Our view of the state changes according to how we approach it: Two models: • power/might that uses coercion; In this model popular politics is resistance to the state. • consent, collaboration or legitimated authority. In this model popular politics is negotiation with, even participation in, the state We thus get two very different and conflicting concepts of the state

6. Power and might model of the state This could be approached in at least two ways a)Top down: the history of the state is the history of its central institutions. b) Bottom up Marxist thinking: • This places most emphasis on state as force. Political power is the organised use of force to bring another class into subjection. Stress on class frictions. • 1626 Austrian peasants sang : The whole country must be overturned For we peasants are now to be the lords It is we who will sit in the shade • 1651 Fronde in Bordeaux said that ‘the real cause of sedition and political strife is the excessive wealth of the few’

7. Re-thinking the early modern state • But 1980s forced rethinking – were states very strong, even if they seemed to be?

8. Was the strength of a state in fact determined by the extent to which central government co-operated with local power brokers and when they had popular legitimacy? In this scenario, legitimate authority is what is important rather than power. • "If you have fortresses and yet the people hate you they [the fortresses] will not save you; once the people have taken up arms they will never lack outside help." Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

9. Legitimacy – political and religious • How coercive could the early modern state be? • The problem of voluntary office-holders in an era without a police force. • Where was the state? Was the centre in the localities? • The problem of the composite state.

10. Elite vsPopular? • Process of negotiation (concessions or attempts to influence policy and practice). • Local brokers: the ‘better sort’? Importance of office-holders: in GB not just deputy lieutenants, JPs, town magistrates, sheriffs and grand jurors, but also constables, beadles, tithingmen, nightwatchmen, vestrymen and churchwardens, overseers of the poor, petty jurors, local courts. • Mark Goldie: c. 1700 about 1/20th of the adult males in England were ‘governing’ in some sense. And because many were rotated frequently this meant very large scale inclusion.

11. Wayne Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700: ‘it is useful to regard politics as an ongoing bargaining process between those who claim governmental authority in a given territory (rulers) and those over whom that authority is said to extend (subjects)’.

12. Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003): ‘Popular politics simply refers to the presence of ordinary, non-elite subjects as the audience for or interlocutors with a political action …What defined popular politics, then, was not the social class of the people politicking, but rather the extent to which the governed played a role in their own governance. Popular politics presumed, in practice if not in theory, that issues of substantial importance to the life of the nation would be discussed and debated in public, and popular politics accepted, again in practice if not in theory, that those debates would significantly affect how the issues were decided’.

13. Choices and strategies • Varieties of resistance: • Riot [religious policy, taxation, foreign affairs] • Revolt [General crisis of mid C17th. Britain; France; Naples and Palermo in Italy; Portugal; Muscovy; Switzerland] • Rebellion • Seditious words

14. But also varieties of dialogue and debate • Print

16. Petitions, addresses, oaths • Humble request or supplication that could carry popular demands or express popular loyalism; oaths of loyalty • 5209 in GB 1660-1715; 500 associations • 426 associations signed in 1696 – Norwich’s two rival texts (with only one word different) carry 6875 signatures, almost the entire adult male population • Process of dialogue within state

17. Loyalism as a form of popular politics • Rather than assuming politics is always about contest we can see it can also be about the process of creating loyalties to regimes and institutions • Though loyalty was a contested term – loyal to what? To the old or new church? To the monarch or the church? To the monarch or custom? • Questions of authority and legitimacy created moral dilemmas – a series of choices requiring compliance or resistance - amongst the people. Do you take down an image when the government tells you to, or resist? Do you initiate the process of taking down the image? ie can you co-opt state power to do what you want?

18. Women and popular politics • Religion could give women a role to intervene politically • Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent. Executed 20 April 1534 with five associates for blasphemy. She had visions believed to be direct revelations from God and these took a political turn. An angel commanded her to tell a monk ‘to ‘that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’. This was treason to king – even if loyal to her idea of God. • 1705 Coventry election crowd contained many women and was addressed by a speech from one Captain Kate who, slapping one of the Tory candidates on the back, proclaimed, ‘now, boys, or never for the Church’

19. Unintended consequences • The need to secure legitimacy and collaboration could also have the unintended consequence of creating a public debate and a popular politics. • Even absolute kings needed to display their power to the people

20. Conclusion • What is politics? • Different ways of conceptualising the state • Coercive power or consensual/negotiated authority • How does that process of dialogue work? • Was popular politics always radical?

21. And who who were the people? And widening gap between them? Middle peasants disappeared, as land was consolidated. In village of Manguio in Languedoc in 1595 there was only one estate exceeding 100 hectares; in 1635 there were 3; by 1770 there were 8. Extension of serfdom in eastern Europe. • The prevalence of the bourgeois and the oligarchs. Dutch oligarchy. Sale of offices. some sale of offices – begun in Spain in 1540; by 1600, municipal office accounted for ¾ of all offices sold. This process often reinforced oligarchies who bought them. Josep Orti, secretary to the Estates of Valencia, reported in 1696 that his family had held the post for over 200 yrs. Sale of office in France was also a problem. Loyseau estimated that in second half of C16th about 50,000 new offices had been created, though many were absentees. The bourgeoisie, he said, put purchase of land first but ‘office next, for in addition to the profit they gave rank, authority and employment to the head of the family and helped him maintain the other property’. • The encroachment of the centralising state – decline of representative institutions: after 1614 France had no Estates General until the revolution of 1789 and the parlement of Paris silenced in the 1660s and provincial estates in the 1670s; Diet of Brandenburg lost power after 1653; Estates of Prussia after 1663; the last Zemsky Sobor met in Russia in 1653, the last Danish parliament in 1660; Castile had no Cortes after 1665; Sweden and Piedmont in 1680s. But also growing bureaucracies supplementing or replacing self-governance. Were there fewer opportunities for popular politics by 1720?

22. Riot, revolt, rebellion and sedition • actions of state could also have impact on people, who accordingly had a view about religious policy, taxation, foreign affairs. • Continuous low-level violence (374 disturbances in Provence 1596-1715; 500 in Aquitaine over same period) • General crisis of mid C17th. Britain; France; Naples and Palermo in Italy; Portugal; Muscovy; Switzerland • Religion as contested or empowering: Captain Pouch in 1607 Midland revolt claimed ‘he was sent of God to satisfie all degrees whatsoever, and that in this present work hee ws directed by the lord of Heaven’. • Tax: waves of revolt under Richelieu’s France when tax burden doubled 1630-50 eg in 1636 at Périgord nearly 60,000 people cried ‘Vive le roi sans la gabelle! Vive le roi sans la taille!’ Similarly 1647 at Palermo there were shouts of ‘Long live the king and down with taxes and bad government!’. Tax collectors often victims of violence. In 1635 one at Agen was castrated. • Billeting of soldiers also caused great unrest e.g Catalonia 1640 • Food shortage was often behind many of the revolts e.g 1580s and 90s, 1640s. • But were revolts attempts to open dialogue? Desire for justice rather than to kill – 1648 Spanish risings did not kill anyone.