The Past and Present Society

Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century."

Author(s): Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, H. R. Trevor-Roper, E. H.
Kossmann, E. J. Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter
Source: Past & Present, No. 18 (Nov., 1960), pp. 8-42
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649885
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 Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper:
"THE GENERAL CRISIS OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY."

Past and Present invited short Comments from six historians on Pro
Trevor-Roper's article which appeared in our issue of November
We print their Comments below, with concluding observations
author.

PROFESSOR TREVOR-ROPER'S STUDY WILL, NO DOUBT, STIMULATE SOME

historians to elaborate his interpretation, or to advance a new one or
to defend an old. But in my mind, it provokes particular questions
rather than a systematic challenge. There is, in the first place, the
question of dates1: when, approximately, did the general crisis
begin? At one moment (p. 33) Trevor-Roper suggests that about
1600 Europe was still full of confident optimism, despite the upheavals
of the preceding years. At another (p. 31) he finds that since at
least 1618 there was everywhere talk of the dissolution of society or
of the world. Again, there was (p. 34) from I5oo00 to 1650 "one
climate [in Europe], the climate of the Renaissance", characterised
by expansion and extension; and yet (p. 61) the depression of 1620
(why 1620, by the way ?) is reckoned (by a wildly implausible analogy)
as important a turning point as the depression of 1929, and (p. 50)
Europe is said to have entered the Baroque age, a tight, contracted
age, decades before the middle of the seventeenth century.
Secondly, is not Trevor-Roper's argument highly paradoxical?
It seems to me that he first tries to prove, with an impressive array
of facts and words, that there was a "general crisis" and then in effect
proves, with an equally impressive display of learning and insight,
that there was not. For, is the term "general crisis of the seventeenth
century" justifiable if we are to believe that the abuses which are
supposed to have engendered it, had already been redressed, partly in
France, wholly in the Netherlands, half a century before, whereas in
Spain there was not even an attempt at redress ? What weight has
the enumeration of revolts on p. 31 if it is allowed that those in
France and the Netherlands were only of very slight importance ? In
the Dutch Republic nothing very much happened at all. In France
Trevor-Roper sees something of his general crisis; but it is little
enough, with the Frondes reckoned as "a relatively small revolution"
(p. 56) - albeit more profound (p. 33) than that of the French

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 TREVOR ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 9

religious wars of the preceding century, which lasted six times as

long. And so we are left - where surely Trevor-Roper began -
with England which, in the last paragraphs of the essay, seems alone
to suffer from that crisis which had first been proclaimed general to
the whole continent.
Moreover, does not Trevor-Roper's argument demand much more
precision than he gives it ? Which groups or which persons rose in
opposition against the "courts" and their reckless luxury and waste ?
For instance, is the terminology applicable to France ? What is
the French "court"? If the bureaucracy belongs to the "court",
do the Parlements belong to the bureaucracy? If so, how is it
then to be explained that the Frondes, which Trevor-Roper seems to
define as a revolt against the court (be it only a superficial revolt,
since the abuses of the court were slight) are partly - and there
is nothing in his article to challenge this - a conflict between
the Parlements (part of the "court") and the actual govern-
ment (equally a part of the "court")? And does the author
deny that it was the Parlements more than any other body which
tried to force the French Crown to be more frugal and to re-organize
the chaotic financial system? Did not Mazarin indignantly reject
those very demands and attempts, and risk a civil war defending his
own fantastic financial expedients and the financiers who made them
possible ? The conflict of the Frondes is, so it seems, among other
things - for it is an extremely complicated series of events - a
conflict between parts of the bureaucracy and the court; it is not
a conflict between the court and the bureaucracy on the one hand
and the "country" - whatever that may be - on the other.
Moreover, it seems unduly optimistic to regard the French "court"
as "reformed". Contemporaries thought differently when they saw
the enormous fortunes gathered by such reputedly honest
administrators as Sully, Richelieu and Colbert - not to speak of the
most remarkable profiteer of them all, Mazarin. They thought
differently when they saw both the price of offices and the amount
and level of taxation rise during the first half of the century, with (so
they supposed) the proceeds going into the pockets of the financiers.
They were horrified at seeing revolts everywhere, year after year, in
town and country. In fact, was the social, the economic, the political
situation in France better than in England ? Was not the contrary
true ? And was it not precisely this extremely unstable and
threatening situation which made it impossible for the opposition to
risk a real revolution ?2
There is, finally, a fourth set of questions which I should like to

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IO0 PAST AND PRESENT

put. They concern the Dutch Republic. Probably nobody will

disagree with Trevor-Roper's view that the political upheavals in the
Republic during the seventeenth century were of only minor
importance compared with those in England and France. Trevor-
Roper thinks that this can be explained by the fact that the Northern
Netherlands had already in the sixteenth century abolished the
"court", with the result that in the Republic the factors which gave
rise to revolts in the rest of Western Europe were non-existent. If
this is so, it incidentally makes the Revolt of the Netherlands, first
regarded by Trevor-Roper as far less profound than the conflicts of
the next century, really crucial in forestalling a seventeenth-century
Dutch "crisis". Now it is, of course, true that there was in The
Hague no court comparable to the court of Paris or London; it is
equally true that there was no parasitic bureaucracy as in some other
continental countries. But is this explanation of the relatively
harmonious development of Dutch history in the seventeenth
century really adequate? If so, why, in the first place, did the
Southern Netherlands, where the Burgundian court was not
abolished, suffer no greater crises than the Northern Netherlands
where it was ? And, in the second place, how was it that, precisely
after the death of Stadholder William II, when for over twenty years
(1650-72) the court of the princes of Orange exercised hardly any
influence, the Dutch regents, who were the advocates of an almost
unmitigated republicanism, manifested attitudes similar to those seen
in France ? The semi-closed caste of regents began to regard their
offices as their personal property and were not ashamed of making
their profits out of them at the cost of the "country". Obviously
the economic, social and political basis of the patriciate in the
Republic was in many ways different from that of the robe in France.
But on the other hand it is impossible to deny that the oligarchic and,
in a way, parasitic character of both castes made them adopt very
similar attitudes. Thus the "abuses" which were perpetrated in
France by those who in Trevor-Roper's view belonged to the "court",
must in the Republic be attributed to an oligarchy which can never
have been part of a court, and which, in fact, developed its most
typical idiosyncracies thanks to its successful resistance to the
"court" of the Stadholders.

I have put questions. Having put them, I wonder if they do not

suggest an answer, which will probably not satisfy Trevor-Roper,
but which I may perhaps mention without pretending to give, in a
single page, an explanation of such extremely complicated phenomena.

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" II

In general terms, both in France (in 1649) and in the Repu

1650) it was the prince (or his minister) who opened an attack
oligarchy of the office holders. Why ? The answer may
they suspected the oligarchy of wishing to undermine what i
as the abnormal wartime extension of the princely power.
power had developed, of course, in the face of some resistanc
the office holders. Sixteenth-century rulers had, it is true, at
to neutralise the aristocratic tendencies of society by embeddin
in a new bureaucracy, but about 1650 it became clear tha
attempt had failed. The new peace rendered insupportab
degree of princely power which had been acceptable as an ext
inary wartime measure. Faced with this challenge, the p
could only nervously resort to a coup d'itat or civil war.
although both in France (after the siege of Paris in 1649) and
Republic (after the attack on Amsterdam in 1650) the pa
accepted a compromise, it is obvious that the princes had
moment lost the battle. But they soon resumed their attac
oligarchies - Louis XIV in the 166os, William III in the 16
and could then succeed more easily because once again the
great foreign war. Yet after their deaths, the two great te
of the ancien regime merged; the princes resigned thems
playing the role the aristocratic office holders wanted them t
they became upper-oligarchs. There is, therefore, in Fra
the Netherlands, no real break in the middle of the sevent
century as far as government is concerned. There is noth
an abortive attempt made by a few nervous, frustrated an
autocrats to subdue the most important castes in the gove
These attempts failed. There is here no conflict between
and "country". There is a conflict between small ruling
which, in France, precipitated a long and exhausting civil war
by entirely different factors.
University College, London. E. H.Kossmann

NOTES
1 The "palace revolution" of 1649 in the Dutch Republic (pp. 31, 55) is
presumably the attack of Stadholder William II on Amsterdam in 1650.
2 This point was made by Mr. J. P. Cooper in his excellent paper "Differences
between English and Continental Governments in the early Seventeenth
Century" in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann
(London, 1960), p. 88. See also my article "Engelse en Franse opstandigheid
in de I7de eeuw", Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (1956), pp. 7-8.

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 12 PAST AND PRESENT

II

PROFESSOR TREVOR-ROPER'S STIMULATING ARTICLE TAKES AS ITS STARTING

point a critique of Marxist interpretations of the seventeenth century,

and notably my own articles on the subject in Past and Present Nos. 4
and 5 (1954-5). It is difficult to comment on this critique, for
although Trevor-Roper and I deal with the same phenomenon, we
do so with different objects in view. He sets out to explain the
occurrence of the contemporaneous revolutions of the mid-seven-
teenth century (though in fact dealing only with the English, French
and Spanish ones, omitting for instance the important Ukrainian
upheaval). His object, if I understand him rightly, is to show that
they were not historically inevitable - perhaps that no revolutions
ever are - and that in any case they were irrelevant to the develop-
ment of capitalism. I, on the other hand, was concerned with
economic history, merely drawing attention en passant to certain
political, social and cultural aspects of a major, and hitherto
unexplained, economic phenomenon. If there is any revolution
with which my articles were concerned, it is the Industrial Revolution
of the late eighteenth century, on whose genesis I wished them to
throw some light. Consequently, while Trevor-Roper merely notes
the change from secular boom to secular crisis in the 162os as a factor
precipitating the political crisis which is his subject, my articles are
almost wholly devoted to that change and its economic consequences.
Conversely, while Trevor-Roper devotes almost the whole of a long
and brilliant discussion to the crisis of the Renaissance state, my own
references to politics were cursory. In fact, our articles are
complementary rather than competitive. At all events, I would not
wish to quarrel with his concept of a "crisis of the ancien regime"
which produced the western revolutions of the seventeenth century.
I welcome it.
Our lines of argument join only at one point: in the evaluation of
the English Revolution. Here I take it that we both agree - it is
hardly possible not to - that what happened in England was crucial
for the subsequent development of an industrialised world economy.
Britain was, after all, the basis from which the world was subsequently
revolutionised, and the changes it underwent in the seventeenth
century were far more profound than those which took place among
its rivals. A greater distance separates Defoe's England from
Shakespeare's than separates Sully's France from Vauban's, or the
United Provinces which Maurice of Orange took over from those
which William of Orange left. I think we might also agree that the

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 13

crucial change in the economic position of Britain had taken place

after the Revolution. In the 1630s we did not look like the obvious
contenders for economic supremacy and the power to transform the
world; by the time of Queen Anne we did, at any rate very nearly.
The question is whether this change was "due to" the Revolution.
I do not regard this question as vital to the argument of my articles.
This, as it happens, requires merely that there should exist "countries
capable of wholeheartedly adopting the new - and as it turned out
revolutionary and economically progressive - economic systems".
In other words, the argument requires the existence of "bourgeois"
countries, or at least one "bourgeois" economy large enough for the
purpose required. How they or it became "bourgeois" is not
relevant. In fact there was one such country at the end of the
seventeenth century but not at the beginning, namely England.
However, while it does not greatly matter for the purposes of my
argument precisely how England became a "bourgeois" or "capitalist"
economy, I can see no reason for abandoning the obvious view that
the Revolution had a great deal to do with it.
Indeed, I suspect that Trevor-Roper and I disagree about labels
rather than facts. For much of his article is devoted to the proof
that, while plenty of people (for whatever reasons) advocated the
"right" economic policies in Jacobean and Caroline England, the
nature of the ancien regime prevented their policies from being
applied effectively or at all. In other words, such policies required
the overthrow of the ancien regime; and indeed after the Revolution
we find a very different situation. Admittedly Trevor-Roper
attempts to show that an internal reform of the anciens regimes could
have led to the same results, but in fact he does not prove that it did
so. The Netherlands, for reasons which I not only admit but which
are crucial to my argument, was a "feudal business economy".
Though prosperous and adapting itself to the new economic
conditions in due course, it did not in fact produce the Industrial
Revolution. French mercantilism, the efficiency of which Trevor-
Roper seems to me to overrate, proved no economic match
for Britain, as M. Mousnier showed in his study of French and British
finances during the wars at the end of the century (Revue Historique,
ccix, 1951). The reason, I suggest, is that French governments
did not singlemindedly pursue profit, while British ones came much
closer to doing so. In other words, our argument is a little like some
famous literary debates: Trevor-Roper denies the authorship of
Shakespeare's plays, and I do not; but we both agree that they exist.
This is not to deny the importance of Trevor-Roper's question in

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 14 PAST AND PRESENT

the context of his argument and of general

happened in 1640-60, and how far the
consequences of this (or any other) revo
intended by those who made it - if "made
not negligible problems. Whether this o
"could have been avoided" is a more metap
fact it was not; but it is also worth discu
would prefer to leave to those claiming greater expertise in
seventeenth-century British politics than I can. I would merely
note in passing that those who believe the Revolution to be
"bourgeois" are not as Trevor-Roper says called upon to show that
"the men who made [it] aimed at [capitalism] . . . or that those who
wished for capitalism forwarded the revolution". The gap between
men's intentions and the social consequences of their actions is wide
enough to make this proposition avoidable; even if we suppose - what
is doubtful - that many of them had a sufficiently clear conception
of capitalism to allow us to use such phrases as "wishing for it" or
"aiming at it". Nor are those who believe the Revolution to be
"bourgeois" called upon, unless they feel so impelled, to show that
the only fundamental social transformations possible are in all
circumstances violent revolutions of the classical type. Least of all
are they called upon to identify "the seventeenth-century revolutions
with 'bourgeois', 'capitalist' revolutions, successful in England,
unsuccessful elsewhere". I doubt whether any Marxist has ever
held so implausible a view.
Birkbeck College, London E. J. Hobsbawm

III

PROFESSOR TREVOR-ROPER'S STUDY ON "THE GENERAL CRISIS OF THE

Seventeenth Century" does not merit wholly unqualified praise: how
many exploratory essays ever have ? Here let us first qualify, and
praise later.
On his rather narrow canvas of thirty pages, Trevor-Roper paints
his picture of Europe between 15oo and 1650 with such bold strokes
and so broad a brush that he occasionally obscures rather than clarifies
what went on then. Moreover, he tends to disregard or prescind
from objections which must have occurred to him rather than to
counter them or to rectify his line of argument. For example: is it
really the case that between 1500 and 1650, the court was the primary
drain on the fiscal resources of the Western monarchies, and the

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 15

economic resources of their subjects ? My own candidate would

certainly have been war - foreign and civil - rather than the court.
Whichever it was, the argument requires not categorical pro-
nouncements but hard fiscal data, even though such data be difficult
to come by.
Again, is it really adequate to dismiss Europe's religious civil war
that culminated in the decade between 1588 and 1598 in the following
brief sentences ?
"The religious revolutions of Reformation and Counter-Reformation . . .
however spectacular had in fact been far less profound than the revolutions
of the next century . . . Beneath the dramatic changes of the Reformation
and the Counter-Reformation, the sixteenth century goes on, a continuous,
unitary century, and society is much the same at its end as it is in the
beginning".
Two assumptions seem to underly this peculiar pronouncement:
(I) that no major social change ensued as a consequence of the religious
earthquake of the sixteenth century, and (2) that a revolution which
is not social (whatever, precisely, "social" may mean) is necessarily
"less profound" than one that is. Both these assumptions
provoke doubt. Perhaps the religious revolution of the sixteenth
century was not social in the intent of most of those who brought it
about; but this is to a considerable extent true also of the crisis of
the seventeenth century, as sketched by Trevor-Roper. And a
revolution which in northern Europe resulted in the total
disappearance of monks and monasteries, in the distribution of
their lands among lay landlords, and the general downgrading of the
clerisy in the social hierarchy might be deemed a process of
considerable social significance. So too might Europe's religious
civil war that began in the 156os; it ruined a large segment of the
French nobility and drove that remnant of the great Burgundian
nobility which stood firm in its opposition to Philip II into a position
of relative political obscurity in the northern Netherlands. Moreover
in a century that has witnessed the impact of Darwinian biology,
Freudian psychology, and nuclear physics on Western and indeed
world civilization, the assumption that all important revolutions are
social seems a little strange. Whether or not we describe them as
social, we cannot casually dismiss the series of events that finally and
decisively destroyed the old unity of Western Christendom.
Trevor-Roper is able so to dismiss these events because perhaps
unconsciously he has reversed his perspective in the course of his
essay. Starting out to account for the crisis of the seventeenth
century by means of a survey of the relevant historical changes in
the preceding century and a half, he ends by evaluating those changes

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 16 PAST AND PRESENT

solely from the point of their impact

him. This reversal is both undesirable
occurred between 15oo and 1650, for e
and later, although not closely relate
There was much, too, that was scarcely
rise of modern science; or the persisten
or that more than secular, almost millenial adjustment of a
hierarchical society to alterations in economy and ideology, which
went on, as before, with its curious pattern of shifts within a stable
framework.
So much for qualification.
What sincere praise Trevor-Roper has fully earned by his study
can only be understood if we put it in its proper place in the
development of the writing of history by British academic historians
during the past fifty years or more. That writing might well have
chosen as its shibboleths two great statements by two remarkable men:
"The bourgeoisie historically has played a most revolutionary part . . . The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments
of production . . . It creates a world after its own image".
Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, Section I.

"Abroad is unutterably bloody .. ."

Matthew, Lord Alconleigh, in The Pursuit of Love, p. 113.
The insularity of many British historians and their propensity to
pass off all problems of explanation by incantations about "the rise
of the middle class" has for years been notorious. It may be worth
documenting briefly from the most renowned work of the greatest
and most penetrating scholar of the age that is Trevor-Roper's subject.
Professor Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) starts
on the Continent; in view both of the place of origin of the religious
transformation and of the economic development with which it deals,
it has to start there. But about one-third of the way through, the
scene shifts to England, and at the end of the book we are on
comfortably familiar ground. The general fact of the rise of the
capitalistic middle class is being demonstrated from the sermons of
London preachers of the later 16oos, assuring their grubby mercantile
congregations of the singular sanctity of the high yield of commercial
greed. This propensity to stay near home was very conspicuous in
many British historians, who deserted English history only for the
more bucolic delights of Scottish history, Welsh history or the
history of Weston-super-Mare.
Attitudes now are, of course, not quite what they were in 1926.
Some venturesome historians have cast their eyes towards the

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 17

Continent, and have begun to see Britain as bound to Europe by

something more than a series of naval victories, advantageous peace
treaties, and exhibitions of moral superiority. Yet to a historian
from the United States, the concerns of most English historians still
seem perplexingly parochial.
There has also been some questioning of the concept of the rise
of the middle class as a device of historical explanation, to the point
where the concept has lost a little of the credence and credulity it
used to enjoy. But salutary though the attack has been, it has not
yet penetrated deeply into those subconscious depths where historians
defend their old habits of thought. Moreover, the work has been
primarily destructive, and few academic historians seem ready to
erect new structures over the hole left by the demolition of a cherished
idea.
In his essay Trevor-Roper has made a decisive break with the
historians who still seek to tie the crisis of the mid-seventeenth
century to the rise of the bourgeoisie. He performs this task in a
very few pages with cold economy and crisp dispatch. Even more
remarkable is his insistence on looking not merely at England but at
the whole of western civilization in his investigation of the crisis of
the seventeenth century. For example, he finds the form of the
opposition to the Court-centred civilization of the Renaissance in
"Puritanism":

"In England, we naturally think of our own form of Puritanism . . . . But

let us not be deceived by mere localforms. This reaction against the Renaissance
courts and their whole culture and morality was not confined to any one
country or religion". (italics mine)
Thus briefly is the English Channel reduce
a keep of intellectual isolation to its true g
narrow maritime barrier.
So with easy grace and a degree of intellectual courage for which
he may not receive due credit, Trevor-Roper has soared over the two
most stultifying inhibitions of British historiography. He has done
more than that, however. For with the collapse of the inhibitions
we find ourselves in an odd situation. During the past century
historians accumulated vast masses of data. Mainly by excluding
the data that dealt with other lands and by using the class concept to
organize the evidence that dealt with England, many English
historians have provided themselves with an apparently usable
vocabulary. The trouble is that when one persists in that exclusion
and adheres consistently to that vocabulary, one ends up by talking
historical nonsense. The problem is to begin to talk historical sense.

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18 PAST AND PRESENT

Trevor-Roper goes the right way about c

In the first place he uses with new vigou
terms, which because of the dominance of
class, long lay on the periphery of historica
puritanism, court and country - and see
content. To the extent that he succeeds
them as structural elements in reorganizing
century and a half of the modern era. W
terms; but in this matter Trevor-Toper
right direction. It is refreshing, moreover,
can conceptualize without becoming the s
too often historians sacrifice all that is hum
in history to impersonal abstractions. Bu
made full use of his conceptual apparatus to explain the
seventeenth-century crisis in England, he still finds room in that
explanation for the bottomless stupidity and duplicity of Charles I.
It is not to be expected that, in a brief and challenging essay of
this kind, the author will command - or even deserve - geneial
acceptance on all his points. It is, however, never remarkable when
a pioneer gets something wrong; it is astonishing when he gets
anything right.

Washington University, St. Louis J. H. Hexter

IV

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE TO READ PROFESSOR H. R. TREVOR-ROPER'S

brilliant essay, so sparkling with intelligence. To reduce his rich
and luxuriant elaborations to a few dry propositions is to run the risk
of distorting his ideas. But in a brief comment, the risk must be
taken. According to Trevor-Roper, between 1640 and 166o Europe
witnessed a series of political revolutions. Whether successful or
not, they mark a watershed: on the one side is the Renaissance and
on the other the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed these revolutions
are themselves the apogee of a prolonged crisis in the structure of
society. The Renaissance State, with its Court and its bureaucratic
apparatus of officials remunerated in part by their own hands, laid
too heavy a burden on society. This burden became unbearable
during the economic recession of the seventeenth century, when
different social groups tried to throw it off through revolt and
revolution. The Stdnde rose against the Court. The Court not
only tried to quell the rebellions, but also to suppress their cause

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 19

by adjusting through mercantilism the levies of the bureaucrats to

the resources of the country.
Let us examine the validity of these suggestions in the case of
France.
Now Trevor-Roper has grasped a vital point: that there was a
general crisis in the seventeenth century. I have discussed this
crisis in various books and articles published since 1945.
Trevor-Roper does not quote them; and since many readers of Past
and Present probably do not know them either, I may perhaps be
forgiven for quoting a few in the footnotes; as far back as 1953, I
devoted the second part (208 pages) of the fourth volume of the
Histoire Gtndrale des Civilisations (3rd edn. in the press) to the European
crisis of the seventeenth century.
How far is it true that the revolts of the seventeenth century and
the revolution of the Fronde can be interpreted in France as a rising
of the country against the Court and against the bureaucratic apparatus
of the State ? It is clear that the office-holders provoked discontent.
Throughout the troubles, nobles and bourgeois complained of the
pullulation of office-holders and of the way they drained the public
revenues. But they complained just as loudly of the excessive price
of offices and the difficulty of acquiring them. They regarded
offices as an evil, but strove to lay hands on one. However it must
be pointed out that the office-holders helped to provoke the revolts
and also played an outstanding part in the attempted revolution of
the Fronde. And this seems to me to go directly against the theory
of Trevor-Roper.
The part played in the Fronde by the Parlements and by certain
groups of office-holders is already well known.' In a recent article2
and more lately I have analysed the movements of peasant revolt, so
numerous in France, from about 1625 until the Fronde and beyond.
Broadly speaking, this is what seems to have happened in most cases:
the landlords, whether gentry or royal officials or municipal
magistrates, incited the peasants not to pay the tailles or the numerous
new taxes imposed by the government, because if the peasants paid
these royal taxes they would be unable to pay their feudal dues or
their rents, and also because it was a lord's duty to protect his
peasants; the peasants then violently drove off the bailiffs with their
warrants or the agents of the tax farmers; the government sent
commissaires to obtain payment; officials and gentry stirred up the
peasantry; gentry joined together to help their peasants to resist;
in the towns, the royal officials and the dchevins provoked risings
among the urban population to help the peasants by paralysing the

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20 PAST AND PRESENT

movements of the royal com

Croquants of Villefranche-d
movements, the peasants sent
the royal officials made the pe
make up bands or companies
Fronde, in Aix and elsewhere;
seized a town. Thus in most cases we do not find a revolt of the
country against an oppressive public service, but the revolt of a public
service which considered itself oppressed and which dragged in its
wake those social groups over which the structure of society gave it
influence. Is not this exactly the opposite of what Trevor-Roper
thinks ?
What did the office-holders complain of? That they contributed
too much to the expenses of the State; that they were being deprived
of their power. It is a theoretical concept to think of this bureaucratic
structure of office-holders in terms of pure gain. Sometimes the
King made new offices so that existing office-holders would have to
buy them up in order to keep away eventual competitors, or would
have to pay for their suppression. Sometimes the King decreed an
increase in the salaries and fees of officials, but only in return for a
cash sum which constituted the capital of which these benefits were
merely the interest. The officials often had to borrow the money at
interest from others, in which case the whole operation merely turned
them into intermediaries in the movement of money, without any
personal benefit accruing.3 Moreover after 1640 the King gradually
reduced the salaries and many of the fees of his officials, who
now were only getting a minute interest or none at all, in return for
a capital investment which was immobilised, or lost. The Elus, who
were finance officers, alleged in 1648 that they had paid over 200
million livres since 1624, including 60 million paid since 1640 "for
confirmation of an imaginary right or grant of a fictitious increment" .
The officials considered themselves robbed.
On the other hand, in the throes of the Thirty Years' War the
government found their administrative routine too slow. It accused
them of favouring in the assessment of taxes their lessees and share-
croppers and those of their relatives, associates and friends, and of
causing deficiencies by shifting the burden on to others. The
government farmed out to traitants or partisans, not only the aides,
but also the direct taxes such as the tailles. It handed over to
commissaires, of whom the most important were the intendants, not
only the supervision of officials, but also often the execution of their
duties5. At the same time, when dealing with corporate bodies

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS") 21

of officials the royal government increasingly ignored the remo

which traditionally they were in duty bound to present to th
for the better ordering of the service. Wounded in their
their prestige and their interests, the officials revolted. Are T
Roper's views really in keeping with these facts ?
Can one say that this bureaucratic apparatus of officers i
an unbearable burden on the country? Trevor-Roper should
have distinguished more clearly between the great officers of the
Crown and the courtiers, some of whom became very rich thanks to
the privileges of their offices or their relations with tax-farmers, and
those officials who were not of the Court but who nevertheless held
a high rank in society and exercised important functions: members
of the sovereign courts (Parlements, Chambres des Comptes, Cours des
Aides, Grand Conseil); officials of the Presidiaux, the baillages and
the senichaussdes; Tresoriers Ge'nedraux de France, Elus, etc. In spite
of what Trevor-Roper believes, these officials were on the whole men
of simple tastes, who had nothing to do with the opulent way of life
of princes and a handful of great courtiers. Plain practitioners
learned in the law and in the rules of their profession, rarely humanists
and with little interest in the arts, save perhaps at the third generation6,
they made their money less as office-holders than as landowners
and feudal lords, as money-lenders and creditors of peasants and
artisans. Their salaries and fees, the fortunes built up by the
courtiers, could have upset the balance neither of the budget nor of
society. In seventeenth-century France the expenses of the Court
never represented more than a small fraction of the expenses of the
State. The same applies to the salaries and fees of the office-holders.
The sums levied by officials in the form of judicial bribes, fees,
taxes de finances, does not strike me as affecting more than a modest
part of the resources of the King's subjects. The great expenses of
the State, the heavy burdens on the unprivileged were those of
the army and of war, pay, munitions and billeting for the troops.
It would therefore be necessary to prove that these huge armies,
these long wars, were merely of interest to the Court, and not to the
nation, and this would be a difficult task.
Would it be possible however to say that in fact this opposition on
the part of the office-holders was an aspect of the struggle of the
country against the Court ? On the one hand there were the officials,
owners of their offices, irremoveable, given security of tenure by
the Paulette, landowners and often feudal lords in the district where
they practised, linked with many local families, themselves with
local roots, convinced that if office demanded fidelity to the King, it

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22 PAST AND PRESENT

required them equally faithfu

rights of the King's subjects; th
representing the districts and
King, and instruments of the
were the commissaires used b
Court. Is it not then a struggle
than (as in Trevor-Roper's view
and its bureaucratic apparatus ?
But one cannot simplify things
came from the same social strat
requites was also an official. B
been conseiller au Parlement.
the sovereign courts. The Kin
powerless in the provinces if
officials, judges to help him pas
him with their technical skill, a
Public Prosecutors. Nor must w
worst revolts occurred. It was
the King's brother, or Cond6, a
from the Court and rallied their
took a particularly serious turn.
the Court and the rest of the co
answer that what matters is not so much the origins of the
commissaires and those who helped them as their obedience to the
will of the King, in his Council, in his Court.
But what did all their followers want? Monsieur and Cond6
wanted to turn absolute monarchy to their own ends. They wanted
an aristocratic monarchy, not a standestaat. Other princes and
other magnates dreamed of a quasi-independence in their provinces
and in their seigneuries, of a return to the French institutions of the
time of Hugh Capet "and better still if possible". They were
followed by many feudal lords, many towns, many provinces, who
looked back with regret to their days of autonomy or independance,
and feared their increasing subjection. As contemporaries saw
very clearly, in most of France it was undoubtedly a struggle of
feudal elements against the State.7 It was less an opposition between
the country and the Court, than between what remained feudal in
society and what was new, itatique, progressive, "modem" in
the King's Council and its dependent organs." Since the time of
Henry IV, it was lawyers and no longer landed gentry who formed
the majority in the King's Council. If we ask to what extent the
Council was part of the Court we raise yet another question: to what

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 23

extent had society ceased to be feudal and become penetrated by

commercial capitalism ?9 This brings us back again to the economic
aspect of the problem.
It is doubtful whether one can say that mercantilism represented
an attempt to adapt the capacity of the country to support the
burdens imposed by the bureaucratic apparatus of officials.
Mercantilism was first and foremost a weapon in the struggle against
the foreigner, a tool of war and of foreign policy. Already a royal
tendency in the days of Louis XI, it became doctrine under
Chancellor Duprat in the reign of Francis I. It was taken up once
more by the States General of 1576 during the great inflation in the
latter half of the wars of religion. In the seventeenth century,
Laffemas, Richelieu, Colbert saw it as a means of ensuring French
hegemony. The great economic recession of the seventeenth
century made it more necessary, without it appearing to be any more
closely tied to internal politics.
Nor does it seem that the revolts and the revolutionary attempt of
the Fronde mark any sort of watershed in France. Political and
social problems are not essentially different before and after. In their
nature, they do not seem to change. All that happened was that,
for a while, the King was the victor. By the end of the century a
process of social change was under way, but this had no connection
with the revolts and revolutions of the mid-century. The wars of
religion of 1572-98 were certainly of greater importance for France.
For these conflicts represent a revolt against the office-holders
on the part of those social groups who were thwarted of office, such
as barristers, doctors, procureurs fiscaux, etc. The victory of
Henry IV was, in part, a victory of those in office.'0 It is perhaps to
the wars of religion that Trevor-Roper's ideas would best apply.
He appreciates, though perhaps without attaching sufficient
importance to it, the strain imposed by the Thirty Years' war,
coinciding as it did with the great economic recession of the century.
It is a pity that he pays no attention to the increase, during the
seventeenth century, in the number of bad harvests, of subsistence
crises, of famines, of plagues, which killed off artisans and peasants,
and begot a long series of cumulative economic crises. They were
so numerous in the seventeenth century that some historians have
thought to ascribe them to a change in the climate, which is
improbable.11 After the plague of 1629-30 two thirds of the kingdom
was in a state of endemic economic and social distress. In these
circumstances it is understandable that the struggle between royal
taxes and feudal dues should have worsened, that peasants and

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24 PAST AND PRESENT

artisans should have been more willing

rid themselves of the agents of the tax-fa
their warrants. A number of revolts co
to subsistance crises.12 Trevor-Roper w
these matters.
Trevor-Roper is aware that the use of the word "crisis" for the
seventeenth century would be less justified if we considered only its
political and social aspects. A great crisis of ideas and feeling, a
revolution in the manner of thinking and of understanding the
Universe, almost an intellectual mutation took place at that time in
Europe. It marks the end of Aristotelianism, the triumph of
quantitative rationalism, of the notion of mathematical function, of
experimental rationalism, with Descartes, the Mgcanistes and Newton;
it is present in the "catholic renaissance" and the mystical movement,
in all that the words classical and baroque signify, in the growth of
witchcraft, and in so many other aspects which would need to be
studied, if we really want to talk of the crisis of the seventeenth
century. None of these matters is totally divorced from politics.
Is it pure chance that in France the Kings were "classical" in taste,
while the rebel Princes favoured the libertins and the baroque ?
If we stick strictly to Trevor-Roper's brief, his point of departure
is a sound one: the political crisis of the seventeenth century represents
a crisis in the relations between the State and society. His attempt
at synthesis seems to me to rest on inadequate analysis, but there is
considerable merit in having presented the problem as a whole.
What emerges is the necessity, which I pointed to in 1958,13 of
studying afresh the revolts and revolutions in seventeenth-century
Europe, through a rigorous social analysis of these movements, which
in turn implies a study in depth of social structures, and methodical
comparisons with the social structures and the revolts of the preceding
and following centuries. Such researches would best be stimulated
and co-ordinated by an international commission. Professor
Trevor-Roper would be the obvious person to launch such a venture.
I am ready to help him and to place at the disposal of such a
commission the Centre de recherches sur la Civilisation de l'Europe
moderne that the Sorbonne has just founded.
Sorbonne, Paris Roland Mousnier

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "'GENERAL CRISIS" 25

NOTES
1 R. Mousnier, "Recherches sur les Syndicats d'officiers pendant la Fron
Tresoriers gnenraux de France et Elus dans la Revolution", XVII' Sie
(Bulletin de la Societe d'Etude du XVII0 Si&cle), no. 42 (1959); "Quelqu
raisons de la Fronde. Les Causes des journ'es r6volutionnaires parisiennes
de 1648", ibid., no. 2 (I949).
2 R. Mousnier, "Recherches sur les soulevements populaires en France
avant la Fronde", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, v (1958).
3 R. Mousnier, La Vinalite des Offices en France sous Henri IV et Louis XIII,
(Rouen, 1945). See pp. 365-386. 4 See note I.
5R. Mousnier, "Etat et commissaire. Recherches sur la creation des
Intendants des provinces (1634-1648)", Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung:
Festgabe far Fritz Hartung, (Berlin, 1958).
6 See " 'Serviteurs du Roi'. Quelques aspects de la fonction publique
dans la societ~ francaise du XVIIo siecle" (Etudes sous la direction de
R. Mousnier), XVIIo Sikcle, nos. 42-3 (1959).
SR. Mousnier, "Comment les Franqais voyaient la Constitution", ibid.,
nos. 25-6 (1955).
8 R. Mousnier, "Le Conseil du Roi, de la mort de Henri IV au gouvernement
personnel de Louis XIV", Etudes d'Histoire moderne et contemporaine (publ.
by "La Societ6 d'histoire moderne"), i (I947).
1 R. Mousnier, "L'opposition politique bourgeoise ia la fin du XVIo si&cle et
au debut du XVIIo. L'oeuvre de Louis Turquet de Mayerne", Revue
Historique, ccxiii (I955).
10 Henri Drouot, Mayenne et la Bourgogne, Etude sur la Ligue (1587-1596),
(These de Lettres, Sorbonne, 1937), 2 vols.
B.E. Leroy-Ladurie, "Climat et r6coltes aux XVII0 et XVIIIo siecles",
Annales (Economie, Societes, Civilisations), xv (1960).
12 R. Mousnier, "Etudes sur la population de la France au XVII0 si&cle",
XVIFI Sikcle, no. 16 (1952). 13 See note 2.

IN HIS DAZZLING AND INGENIOUS INTERPRETATION OF THE CRISIS OF

the seventeenth century, Professor Trevor-Roper calls it "n

a constitutional crisis, nor a crisis of economic produc
"a crisis in the relations between society and the state
context, the point is well worth making, but it does not ta
much further, for what revolution does not represent a "c
relations between society and the state"? The real prob
discover what caused the divorce between the two, and it is in
Trevor-Roper's answer to this problem that the main interest of his
interpretation lies. The clue, he suggests, is to be found in the
expansion and the wastefulness of a parasitic state apparatus; in the
size and cost of the court.
It may be suspected that Trevor-Roper's placing of the problem
of the court at the centre of the revolutionary crisis was originally
inspired by his inquiries into the origins of the English Civil War.
Can the idea be satisfactorily carried across the Channel and still
retain such validity as it may have for England ? Can it, for instance,

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 26 PAST AND PRESENT

help the historian of seventeenth-centu

Catalan and Portuguese revolutions - f
of the exercise is to make these and other
"These days are days of shaking", and eve
virtually disappear from the scene after t
the last to have a better understanding
that shook them.
Trevor-Roper's thesis, applied to Spain, would seem to be that the
court and the state apparatus had become grossly top-heavy by the
end of Philip III's reign; that Olivares tried, but failed, to introduce
the reforms of the arbitristas; that (from this point the stages of the
argument have to be reconstructed by reference to France, England
and the United Provinces) as the result of his failure, "the tension
between court and country grew, and the 'revolutionary situation'
of the 1620s and 1630s developed"; and that the "revolutionary
situation" failed to develop into actual revolution in Castile because
it lacked the organs of effective protest, but did lead to revolution in
Catalonia and Portugal, presumably because they did possess such
organs.
If this summary represents his argument correctly, it raises two
important questions. First, how far did the court and the state
apparatus absorb the royal revenues and divert the national wealth
into unproductive channels ? Second, how far is the problem of an
unreformed court really the "cry of the country" from 1620 to 1640,
and in particular the cry of the Catalans and the Portuguese ?
The first of these questions - as to the real cost of the court to the
country - is virtually unanswerable and is likely to remain so, for,
as Trevor-Roper points out, we see only the sun-lit tip of the
submerged iceberg. Even in the ostentatious reign of Philip III,
however, this is rather less impressive than one might have imagined.
If we take the year 16o8 as being reasonably representative for the
reign of Philip III, we find that ordinary expenditure for the first
ten months of the year is expected to be rather over 7 million ducats.1
Of these 7 million, some I1 are reserved for miscellaneous expenses
and the payment of interest on the Crown's outstanding debts, and
another I1 for the expenses of the court and the salaries of officials.
What happens to the remaining 4 million ducats ? They are all
devoted to military and naval expenditure.
It is, I think, the proportion of revenues devoted to military
purposes - even in the "peaceful" reign of Philip III - rather than
to the expenses of court and government, which is likely to strike
anyone who looks at the papers of the Council of Finance. It is, of

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 27

course, true that real expenditure on the court always exceeded the
anticipated expenditure, since Philip III bestowed an enormous
number of pensions and mercedes which do not appear in the budget
figures. Between I January, 1619 and I December, 1620, for
instance, he gave away something like 400,000 ducats in pensions
and ayudas de costa, besides many other unrecorded gifts.2 Yet
military expenditure was just as likely as court expenditure to outrun
the estimated provisions, as the Council of Finance was always
lamenting.
If the visible cost of court and government is well under half, and
often nearer a quarter, the cost of military and naval preparations,
what of the relative invisible costs to the national economy? In
discussing the burden of the court, Trevor-Roper is presumably
thinking in particular of the diversion of national resources away from
economically productive channels into the stagnant backwater of
office in church and state. Here we are hampered by the lack of
any adequate study of the sale of offices in Spain, but from Mr.
K. W. Swart's comparative study of the sale of offices in the
seventeenth century, it would seem that offices in Spain were not
created and sold on quite the same scale as in France, and that there
was a good deal less willingness to buy.3 My own feeling is that, to
explain the diversion of money away from economically productive
fields of investment, we must look not so much to the sale of offices
as to the crippling difficulties that attended industrial development
and commercial expansion in Castile, and to the growth of the highly
elaborate system of censos and juros which, unlike trade and industry,
provided a safe form of investment and assured rates of interest. In
fact, we are driven back again to the appallingly expensive foreign
policy of the sixteenth-century rulers of Spain - a foreign policy
which led to heavy taxes falling on the most productive members of
the community, and to the creation of a vast national debt, in which
it was easy and profitable to invest.
Naturally, nobody would dispute the enormous weight of a
top-heavy bureaucracy on Castile. This is one of the most frequent
complaints of the Spanish arbitristas. But we must also remember
the burden imposed by Castile's military commitments. One of
the principal reasons for the depopulation of Castilian villages must
be sought in the activities of the recruicing sergeant and the
quartermaster, and I should hesitate to put the scourge of billeting
below the plague of officers among the many misfortunes that dogged
seventeenth-century societies.
In spite of its intolerable burdens, Castile did not revolt.

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28 PAST AND PRESENT

Trevor-Roper attributes this, with a goo

of "effective organs of protest" in Ca
the two parts of the peninsula which
Portugal. How far was the "general gr
rebelled" the "character and cost of the state"? Catalans who
visited Madrid in the reign of Philip III had no illusions about the
"character" of the state, and wrote home the most devastating
accounts of the extravagance and corruption of life at court. The
Catalans could well afford to be critical of the ways of the court, since
they themselves were excluded from all the delights traditionally
associated with living in the royal presence. This ambivalent
attitude - half-hatred, half-jealousy - fits well enough into
Trevor-Roper's general framework. But it is difficult to see that
the Catalans or the Portuguese had any real cause for complaint about
the cost of the state, at least to themselves. They did not pay for
Castile's large bureaucracy or for the lavish court festivities. They
did not even pay for the cost of their own defence, for (like the English
gentry?) they were not over-taxed but under-taxed - at least in
relation to Castile. Between 1599 and 1640 the King received from
the Catalan Corts one subsidy of one million ducats, and no other
taxes except ecclasiastical dues and a number of minor taxes which
did not even suffice to cover the costs of the small viceregal
adminstration in the Principality. Castile, over the same forty
years, was paying over 6 million ducats a year to the Crown in
secular taxes alone. Nor was money raised in Catalonia by the sale
of offices, for the Crown could neither create nor sell offices in the
Principality. As a result, the royal administration in Catalonia
consisted of only a handful of officials, and there simply did not exist
a vast parasitic bureaucracy like the one that lay so heavy on Castile.
We have, then, revolutions in two provinces which admittedly
possess effective organs of protest, but which - since the cost of
court and bureaucracy is hardly any concern of theirs - do not
seem, on the Trevor-Roper principle, to have much to protest about.
Why, then, do they revolt ? For the answer to this, we must look
primarily to the policies of Olivares. Trevor-Roper rightly points
to the "puritanical" character of Olivares' reforming movement in
the 1620s - his anxiety to curb the extravagance of the court, and
cut down on the multitude of mercedes and offices so lavishly
bestowed by the profligate regime that preceded his own. Yet the
problem of the court, serious as it was, can hardly be considered the
Conde Duques's principal anxiety. His real problem was the high
cost of war. With the expiry of the truce with the Dutch in 1621,

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 29

the annual provision for the Flanders army was raised from I- to
31 million ducats, and the sum earmarked for the Atlantic fleet went
up to one million.4 And this was only the beginning. It was
primarily the needs of defence and the cost of war which imposed on
Olivares the urgent need for reform; and this reform necessarily
entailed much more than tinkering with the court or reducing the
number of offices in Castile. It demanded a radical reorganisation
of the fiscal system within the Spanish Monarchy.
It does not, therefore, seem to me that, even if Olivares had
succeeded in doing what Richelieu did in the way of household reform,
he would have gone very far towards solving his fundamental problem
- that of defence (a problem, incidentally, in which the shortage
of manpower was to loom as large as the shortage of money). It was
his determination to solve this problem which led him to devise
schemes for the more effective exploitation of the resources of the
Crown of Aragon and Portugal, and these schemes eventually
brought him into conflict with the Catalans and the Portuguese.
No doubt the knowledge that the court was still spending lavishly on
fiestas strengthened their resolve to refuse payment, but I do not
believe that "the character and cost of the state", in the sense used
by Trevor-Roper, figured very prominently in their calculations.
At the time of their revolutions, the apparatus of the state still lay
lightly on them, and such money as had been squeezed out of them
was being used, not to subsidize the court, but to improve the
very inadequate defences of their own territory. Their principal
purpose in rebelling was to escape the imminent threat to their
national identities and to their economic resources implied in the
Conde Duque's demands that they should play a fuller, part in the war.
While, then, Trevor-Roper has performed a valuable service in
drawing attention to the size and cost of the state apparatus, this
seems to be of use mainly in explaining the troubles of the part of
Spain which did not rebel - Castile. And even here it is very
doubtful whether it should be allowed to occupy the centre of the
stage, for court extravagance and the inflation of the bureaucracy
would hardly seem to rank in the same class among the causes of
Castile's decline as the burden imposed on the Castilian economy
and Castilian society by a century of Hapsburg wars. Indeed, the
proliferation of offices is best regarded, alongside the rise of taxation
or the development of juros, as one among the many natural
consequences of that intolerable burden. To say simply that "war
aggravates" the problem of the growth of a parasitic bureaucracy is
surely rather a remarkable understatement. Admittedly, "the

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 30 PAST AND PRESENT

sixteenth-century wars had led to no such

bequeathed a terrible inheritance to the
on top of this, seventeenth-century wa
different scale. Philip II's army consiste
while Philip IV's was probably at least
scale of warfare created problems of an en
order for the rulers of seventeenth-ce
additional enormous burden on economies
strain.
How was the strain to be eased ? By re
Trevor-Roper says, to its means of livelihood. This meant a
programme of austerity and of "puritanical" reforms; it meant more
rational economic policies. But it also meant extending the power
of the King over his subjects, in order to draw on the resources of
provinces and of social classes hitherto under-taxed or exempt. This
was the acid test that faced seventeenth-century ministers. Richelieu
may perhaps have met with rather more success than Olivares in his
household reforms, but can this really have made any significant
difference to the relative fortunes of France and Spain ? The most
obvious difference stems from the fact that Olivares' fiscal demands
provoked revolution first. Otherwise, it is the similarities not the
differences, that impress. Both Richelieu and Olivares came to
power with the best intentions of putting their own house in order;
these intentions were frustrated by the exigencies of war; both were
compelled by the cost of the war effort to tighten their grip on the
resources of their states, and, in so doing, they unwittingly
precipitated revolution. This, I believe, is the real moral of the story.
The reforming movement of the 1620s, so far from showing the way
of escape from revolution, in fact hastened its approach, because real
reform included a fiscal, constitutional and social reorganization so
radical that it inevitably brought the power of the Crown into head-on
collision with those who had hitherto enjoyed special liberties and
immunities. The essential clue to the revolutionary situation of
the 1640s is, I suspect, to be found in the determination of
governments to exercise fuller control over their states without yet
having the administrative means or fiscal resources to ensure
obedience to their will; and that determination sprang in the first
instance from something which could not be gainsaid and brooked
no delay - the imperious demands of war.

Trinity College, Cambridge J. H. Elliott

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIs" 31

NOTES
'A(rchivo) G(eneral de) S(imancas) Hacienda leg(ajo) 345-474 f. 405.
Relacidn, 22 Dec., 1607.
2 AGS Hacienda leg. 414-573 Relacicn de . . . mercedes (1621).
3 K. W. Swart, Sale of Offices in the Seventeenth Century (The Hague, 1949)
C. 2.

4 AGS Hacienda leg. 414-573 f. 303 Consulta, Io Dec., 1621.

VI

PROFESSOR TREVOR-ROPER'S BRILLIANT SYNOPTIC SURVEY OF THE

European crisis of the seventeenth century rings basically tr

strictly English context. I agree that the challenge to royal
government by the Long Parliament in 1640 was the culmination
of a long-developed resentment of the Country against the Court and
all it stood for. I also agree that there are certain elements in the
Independent programme of the 1640s and I650s that appear to fit
into a decentralising, anti-Court pattern. Whether this analysis
embraces the whole gamut of Independent ideas, and whether
the first civil war itself can be fitted into the mould is another matter.
The initial crisis of 1640, however, was undoubtedly a crisis of
confidence in the Court.
Having accepted Trevor-Roper's main contention, I nevertheless
do not agree with the way in which he has used this conceptual tool
in his analysis of the English revolution. It seems to me that what
was wrong with the English Court and administration was not that
they were too swollen and too expensive, but on the contrary that
they were far too small. Unlike the systems of the Continent, the
ancien regime in England possessed no standing army to provide
employment for the nobility; no paid local officials at all except
feodaries and escheators; and a central bureaucracy which at the
lower levels was not too well paid and was limited in numbers, as
Dr. Aylmer has recently shown.1 No systematic organisation of the
sale of offices was ever put into operation by the Stuarts, whose
half-hearted efforts in this direction did little to further the interests
of the Crown either by increasing its revenues or by swelling the
number of its dependants. If the bureaucracy was small and not
too well rewarded, the Court was certainly large and lavish. But
even here the substantial rewards at the disposal of the Crown were
very unevenly distributed. Thus the capital value of Crown grants
of all kinds to English peers 1558-1641 totalled ?31 m. odd (exclusive
of direct profits from offices so granted, corruption etc.); only 117
of the 380 or so English peers benefited, and of these a mere 26 received

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 32 PAST AND PRESENT

no less than 72%/ of the total. Here as els

regime were restricted to a tiny mino
when it came to the push those on the inside were neither
sufficiently numerous and powerful, nor sufficiently conscious of
a personal stake to be able to resist assault from without. The
Court and central administration of the Early Stuarts aroused the
same hatreds and jealousies as those of the Continent, but failed to
represent a vested interest strong enough to ensure their continued
existence.
Because the beneficiaries of royal government were relatively so
few in numbers, the total cost to the taxpayer - even allowing for
the unwieldy mass of concealed taxation in fees, bribes, sale of titles,
exploitation of monopolies, and so on - must have been small
compared with the burden in France or Spain. In about 1628 it was
reckoned that Normandy alone provided Louis XIII with revenues
equal to the total ordinary income of Charles I.2 But between 1603
and 1641, the English taxpayers were unusually aware of the cost of
the Court and administration because in England - perhaps alone
among the states of Europe - it, rather than the demands of war,
was the main drain on the public revenues. In the 1630s, however,
after the death of the Duke of Buckingham, there was undoubtedly
a decline in the cost of the Court. In particular there was a sharp
reduction to about a fifth of the previous level in the value of grants
and favours. If the primary motive for the attack on the Stuart
monarchy was hatred of the recklessly lavish share-out of tax-payers'
money and Crown resources among a restricted group of courtiers,
one would have expected the revolt to have come in the 162os, not
in 1640.
By 1640 the middle age-group of English country gentry, usually
the bulwark of respectable conservatism in church and state, had
become radicals, even rebels. What drove men like Hampden and
Pym to these lengths was not merely the hateful memory of the 1620S,
when the finances of the State had been the plaything of the Duke of
Buckingham and his clients, nor their dislike of certain aspects of
the 1630s reform policy: it was the combination of both. The ban
on sale of titles, the drive against corruption, the attack on fees, the
shutting down of the flow of favours, the partial clean-up of the
morals of the Court, even perhaps the revival of the Elizabethan
social welfare policy, were all welcomed by the country gentry in the
1630s - even if with a certain cynicism about the sincerity or likely
duration of these measures. On the other hand they disliked the
attempt by the Crown to shift part of the burden of taxation from the

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 33

poor to the rich by such devices as enclosure fines, rocketing fines

for wardship, distraint of knighthood, forest fines, the drive for
increased tithes and the attempt at a revival of scutage. It was not
that the gentry were having to witness ever more ostentatious
profiteering at the Court, but rather that they were now being made
to pay an increased proportion of the cost of a less disreputable and
rather more economical institution.
But there was more to it than this. In analysing the Court versus
Country conflict, as much weight must be placed upon imponderable
factors of feeling and emotion as upon purely financial considerations.
The conflict was one of mores, of religious and political beliefs, as well
as one of economic interests. In the early seventeenth century
England was experiencing the full force of the stresses set up by two
cultures, those of the Country, and of the Court: Decker against
Massinger, Milton against Davenant, Robert Walker against Van
Dyck, artisan mannerism against Inigo Jones; suspicion and hatred
of Italy as vicious and popish against a passionate admiration of its
aesthetic splendours; a belief in the virtues of country living against
the sophistication of the London man about town; a strong moral
antipathy towards sexual licence, gambling, stage-plays, hard drinking,
duelling and running into debt against a natural weakness for all
these worldly pleasures and vices; a dark suspicion of ritual and
ornament in church worship against a ready acceptance of the beauty
of holiness advocated by Laud; a deeply felt fear and hatred of
Papists and Popery against an easy-going toleration for well-connected
recusants and a sneaking admiration for Inigo Jones's chapel in
St. James'; and lastly a genuine devotion to the theory of a balanced
constitution, as opposed to the authoritarian views of Charles and
Wentworth.
Psychologically isolated, economically harmful, financially
burdensome, numerically small, the central Establishment lacked the
resources, numbers and nerve to stand up to the attack vwhen it came.
Compared with the Court and administrative structures of the
Continent, those of England were mean and pitiful things. Hence
their collapse in 1640.
Wadham College, Oxford Lawrence Stone

NOTES
1 G. Aylmer, "Office holding as a factor in English History, 1625-42
History, xliv (1959).
2SP 16'126/44.

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34 PAST AND PRESENT

VII

Reply by Professor Trevor-Roper

I CALLED MY ESSAY "THE GENERAL CRISIS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY".
My distinguished commentators make many points, which I shall
try to take up, but only Mr. Kossmann, I think, flatly denies both
the generality of the crisis and its occurrence in the seventeenth
century. The crisis, he seems to say, was not general at all; my
suggestion of a general parallel is "as wrong as can be", and my dates
are wrong too, or, if not wrong, vague, elusive and self-contradictory.
Well, if I am to defend my thesis at all, I had better start by defending
it against this total denial: and I shall defend it by saying that
Mr. Kossmann seems to me to demand from history a chronometrical
precision which it does not possess.
Can we not agree that there are general historical phenomena ?
Are we forbidden to see parallels between the different princely
courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the Enlightened
Despots in the eighteenth, or the Dictators in the twentieth, unless
we can show that they all marched in exact chronological step ? Of
course not. Men proceed by imitation, fashions take time to spread,
a process here may both begin and end later than a process there,
which may nevertheless be comparable with it. Such differences
are not important. What I have tried to do is to detect a general
parallel in the structural crisis of several Western European
monarchies: a crisis which was more acute here than there, and was
acute earlier here than there, but which (whether it caused revolution
or not) was revealed most forcibly in the seventeenth century. I do
not suggest, and do not need to suggest, that in each country the
process was similar or simultaneous, even if the explosion itself was
simultaneous. For I do not believe that revolutions arise merely out
of structural crises. General structural crises may last long; they
may pass their peak without revolution. If structural crises alone
determined revolution, the English revolution would have broken
out in the I620S (I agree with Mr. Stone here). Revolutions occur
because particular political events break the continuity of society at
some point during a time of general structural crisis. My argument
is that, although all the Western European monarchies had not the
same structure or the same time-scale, they had sufficient similarities
and were similarly weakened when general economic and political
troubles, by imposing an additional strain, caused revolution here,
transformation there.
Moreover, I have argued that although such political and economic

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS)" 35

troubles had occurred at other times too, and notably in the later
sixteenth century, the period after 1620 was crucial: it was then that
crisis was felt, not merely by this or that monarchy, but by the whole
system. Mr. Kossmann, if I understand his argument, would deny
this, but I am glad to have the support of M. Mousnier. Although
Holland had, for reasons which I stated, already emancipated itself
from the crisis, it seems to me incontestable that all the Western
European monarchies, in these years, not only experienced the crisis
individually but were aware of it (as they had not been before) as a
general phenomenon, a crisis of society. The Spanish empire may
have faced serious trouble in the sixteenth century, with the Revolt
of the Netherlands, but it was in the last years of Philip III that the
Spanish arbitristas recognised and analysed a crisis of the state and
the Spanish statesmen set up the Junta de Reformacibn to cope with
it. The French monarchy may have been convulsed in the late
sixteenth century, with the Wars of Religion, but it is in the time of
Richelieu that men spoke of a fundamental social crisis needing
drastic reformation. It may well be, as Mr. Elliott says, that the
military or other strains of the sixteenth century had already weakened
the princely states, but the fact remains that it was in the seventeenth
century that these weakened bodies were exposed to the general and
in many cases decisive challenge which revealed their weakness:
the economic challenge of the depression of 1620, the military and
political challenge of the Thirty Years' War. To which I would
certainly agree with M. Mousnier in adding the physical challenge
of exceptional dearth and plague.
In some ways, in my essay, I have doubtless sacrificed clarity to
brevity. Let me try to reverse the process by some further
explanations. First, let me make it clear that by the words "office"
and "court" I have never meant only the offices directly under the
Crown, or the court in its narrow sense, as the group of metropolitan
officials and courtiers around the sovereign. By "office" I mean all
the offices, metropolitan and local, which formed the bureaucratic
machine of government, including offices in the law and the
state-church; and by "court" I mean the sum of such offices.
Consequently any reform of the system was not merely "household
reform", it was social reform. Secondly, when writing of the cost
to society of such offices, I am not referring merely to the cost paid
by the Crown out of taxes but to the whole cost of maintaining this
apparatus, the greater part of which fell not on the Crown but
directly upon the country. I think that I may have made this
latter point more clearly than the former, but some of the criticisms

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36 PAST AND PRESENT

now made suggest that I did not make either of the

For instance, Mr. Stone's references to the narrow circle of noble
court pensionaries seems to me to prove nothing: such pensionaries
were a mere fragment of the system, and their pensions a mere
fragment of its cost. Nor do I agree with Mr. Stone that in England,
in the 1630s, "there was undoubtedly a decline in the cost of the
court". I am well aware of the difficulties of calculation in such
matters, but my belief is that, in a less spectacular way, the burden of
the court, as I understand that term, was probably greater in the
163os than in the 1620s.
The same distinction must be made in Spain. Mr. Elliott quotes
Mr. K. W. Swart's view that offices were not created and sold in
Spain on the same scale as in France. This may be so - although
until someone gives as much attention to Spain as M. Mousnier has
done to France, I would prefer to suspend judgment. But even if
it is so, is creation and sale by the Crown a sufficient criterion, and
does Mr. Swart use "office" in the same wide sense as I do ? I
believe that it is a good rule that the foot knows where the shoe
pinches, and the literature of complaint shows every sign of
multiplication of office in the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV.
These offices may not all have been sold by the Crown, but if they
(or their reversions, which was perhaps more usual in Spain) were
sold from person to person, the effect upon society would be the
same. So in 1619 Philip III was urged to abolish, as a burden to
society, the 100 receptores created six years earlier, even though that
should mean repaying the price at which they had bought their
offices. In 1622 Philip IV, in his brief reforming period, declared
that since an excessive number of offices is pernicious in the state
("most of them being sold, and the officers having to make up the
price they have paid"), and since a great number of escribanos is
prejudicial to society ("and the number at present is excessive, and
grows daily") the number of alguaciles, procuradores, and escribanos
in Castile must be reduced to one-third, and recruitment must be
discouraged by various means. Such demands are regular in Spain;
they are repeated in the submissions of the Cortes, the consultas of the
Councils, the programmes of the arbitristas, the letters of statesmen;
they were officially granted in the famous Capitulos de Reformacibn
of 1623; but their constant repetition thereafter shows how ineffective
were the measures taken to satisfy them.
Moreover, whatever the case of lay offices, it is certain that offices
in the Church grew enormously. Socially, superfluous idle monks
and friars had exactly the same effect as superfluous, parasitic officials,

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS") 37

and in this sector Spain probably suffered more than France.

Philip III and the Duke of Lerma were praised by devout writers
for their foundations and privileges (Lerma alone founded eleven
monasteries as well as other obras pias), and those years were praised
as a revivil of "the golden age of St. Jerome"; and yet all the time
Philip III and Philip IV were being repeatedly begged to reduce
these foundations, which contained many persons "rather fleeing
from necessity to the delights of indolence than moved by devotion".
Thus, using "office" in the wide sense, as I have used it, it does not
seem to me that Spain was less burdened than other Western
monarchies. As Gondomar wrote to Philip III, the monarchy was
imperilled by "two powerful enemies: first, all the princes of the
world, and secondly, all us officers and courtiers who serve your
Majesty (todos los ministros y criados que servimos a V. Magd.)".
The point about the Church as a department of state is important
and I regret that I did not express myself more fully. It seems to
me that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church should
be regarded, sociologically, as an element in the bureaucratic structure.
The Reformation movement, Catholic as well as Protestant, was in
many respects a revolt against the papal "court" in the widest sense:
the indecent, costly, and infinitely multiplied personnel, mainly of
the regular orders, which had overgrown the working episcopal and
parish structure. One only has to read the records of the Council
of Trent to see this: the exclusion of the Protestants from that
assembly merely shows that, socially, Catholic demands were identical.
The difference is that, in Catholic countries, such demands were
ultimately defeated: the "Catholic Reform" may have been a moral
and spiritual reform, but structurally it was a positive aggravation.
On the other hand this aggravated clerical bureaucracy could also,
if it were reanimated, be made socially palliative, and this is what
happened in Catholic countries after the Counter-Reformation.
The new orders then created may on the one hand have doubled and
trebled the burden of "the court" upon society, but, on the other
hand, by evangelisation, they reconciled society to the burden which
they increased. They also physically strengthened the court. It
was partly for this reason, I suspect, that in the Mediterranean
countries the court was able to survive and stifle the forces of change,
so that Queen Henrietta Maria could regard Popery, and Italian
princes could regard the Jesuits, as the sole internal preservative of
monarchy. It was partly for this reason, also, that I described the
English court as the most "brittle", of all. There the oppressive
class of "courtiers", "monopolists", lawyers who composed "the

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 38 PAST AND PRESENT

court" lacked the massive support of the preach

English friars, the lecturers, were on the other side
fragility of the English court I entirely agree w
lacked the costly, but also effective outworks of th
The same point forces me to dissent from one remark by
Mr. Hexter. He asks whether the Dissolution of the Monasteries
was not also a great revolution. I answer, No: for a revolution is a
challenge to the whole structure of society, not a mere adjustment of
detail. The transfer of the legal ownership of some thousands of
acres does not seem to me revolutionary, if the land is managed
thereafter in the same manner (and often by the same people) as
before. Nor is it a revolution if a few thousand discredited monastic
parasites snore away on pensions instead of in intitutions. The
importance of the Dissolution seems to me to be not that it wound
up the old monastic system, which had pretty well wound itself up,
and which even the Catholic reformers wished to wind up in the
same way (see the Consilium . . . de Emendanda Ecclesia, of 1538),
but that, in Protestant countries, it prevented the creation of those
new, reinvigorated regular orders which, after 1560, reinforced the
lay bureaucracy in Catholic countries.
I agree with Mr. Hexter and Mr. Elliott that the final strain,
perhaps even the greater strain, was war. But can one separate the
impact and burden of war from the form of the society which sustains
it ? In the arguments in the Spanish Council of State before 1621,
those who advocated a renewal of war against the Netherlands
regularly appealed to a social fact: the fact that whereas the Dutch
had constantly gained strength and wealth throughout the years of
peace, the Spanish economy, even in peace, had as constantly declined;
and this decline, they admitted, was due to social, structural reasons.
War to these men was an expedient - a desperate, and as it proved,
a fatal expedient - to remedy a disease which was already perceptible
in peace-time. Although clearly there are many factors to consider,
I would still prefer to say that in the monarchies of Western Europe
there was a structural crisis which was general, although the transition
from structural crisis to revolution, which is not natural or inevitable
but requires the intervention of a political event, was effected here by
war, there without it.
Moreover, there is a further point to be made about war and
structure. Since my article was published, the late Vicens Vives
published the communication he proposed to make to the Eleventh
International Historical Congress at Stockholm. In this he argued
that the Renaissance Monarchies, as I have defined them, were

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 TREVOR ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 39

created by and for the necessities of war. In other words, it was in

order to make war and survive the burden of war, that they developed
their peculiar social structure. But if this is so, and if war in fact
imposed too great a strain upon them, then it follows not that war
was an unexpected burden to them, but that their social structure
was inadequate within their own terms of reference. And if war
created the burden of the Renaissance courts, equally it developed
and overdeveloped that burden. M. Mousnier has shown how the
French government, again and again, considered reform of that
venality of office which was the basic mechanism of the monarchy,
but on each occasion, faced by the threat of war, postponed its
projects and, instead of reforming, positively strengthened the
system. Richelieu at first (like Olivares in Spain) sought to combine
war and reform, but in the end (again like Olivares) sacrificed reform
to war. Marillac would have sacrificed war to reform. In both
countries, we may say that war not only created but extended th
system, until not war but its own weight overwhelmed it.
At one point I evidently over-simplified my argument, and I regret
that, in the cause of brevity, I omitted two paragraphs which would
perhaps have clarified it. This passage concerned the point, or
rather the social area, within which the opposite pressures of "court"
and "country" met. By excessive economy I have here exposed
myself, as I believe, to misunderstanding both by Mr. Kossmann and
by M. Mousnier. Both of them point out that in many cases, and
particularly in the French Fronde, the antithesis of court v. country
is not at all clear; and Mr. Kossmann requires me, rather summarily,
to state in which category, "court" or "country", I place the French
Parlements. But this is precisely what cannot be-done. If court
and country were absolutely separable, then, I submit, there would
not have been a social crisis. Social crises are caused not by the
clear-cut opposition of mutually exclusive interests but by the
tug-of-war of opposite interests within one body. Figuratively, they
are to be represented not by a clean split, but by an untidy inward
crumbling: the result of complex pressures on a complex body. And
this complexity is caused by the complexity of human interests.
"Court" and "country" in the seventeenth century, like bureaucrats
and taxpayers, or producers and consumers today, constantly overlap
A man feels himself part of the "country", a taxpayer, in one respect,
and then discovers that, in another hitherto forgotten respect, h
too is of "the court", dependent on taxes. The history of all
revolutions is full of such painful discoveries, leading occasionally to
painful apostasies. Sometimes they prevent revolution from breaking

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 40 PAST AND PRESENT

out; sometimes, when it has broken out

making it bloody and indecisive: inste
surgical operation upon society, men find
among unpredicted organs. It is not on
sees this. The English parliament, which
grievances of the country, consisted also
interest in the system against which t
Spanish Cortes were similarly divided;
towns might be mere functionaries, "c
they did also, at times, represent "country" grievances. The
spokesmen of a society in crisis represent not its separate
compartments, but its inmost contradictions.
Mr. Hobsbawm seems chiefly concerned to defend his theory of
the "bourgeois", "capitalist" revolution in England. His argument,
if I understand it correctly, is that even if nobody consciously aimed
at such a result, the Puritan revolution did in fact lead to such a result,
and moreover that a revolution was necessary to produce such a
result: reform of the kind that I envisaged - viz. administrative
reform of the state and "mercantilist" reform of the economy -
might (he says) have brought on certain improvements, but it could
not have led, as the revolution did, to England's industrialisation and
economic supremacy in the world. I can only repeat my original
objection to this thesis, viz. that, as far as I can see, no one has ever
produced any positive evidence necessarily connecting the uniqueness
of English economic progress in the eighteenth century with the
Puritan Revolution. Until that is done, I shall continue to consider
the theory not an argument but a dogma; and I shall persist in
thinking that English puritanism was not "unique". The argument
that since mere "mercantilist" reform did not lead to industrial
triumph in France, it could not have done so in England seems to me a
non sequitur. Colbert operated in a society which was already very
different from that of England, and his reforms were anyway
ephemeral: the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the
multiplication of venal office as a means of war-finance were an
effective structural counter-reformation. The limits of his
achievement were peculiar to France, not inherent in his aims.
M. Mousnier remarks that the general crisis of the seventeent
century was a crisis of ideas as well as of structure. Of course
agree with him (and with Mr. Hexter who implies the same poin
But to embark on this topic would be another task and any summar
might prove grossly simplified. So I will only say that whereas
believe that experimental science, mysticism and the witch-craze can

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 TREVOR-ROPER'S "GENERAL CRISIS" 41

all be related to the social and structural revolution, I do not believe

that they can be equated with any single social force or party in that
revolution. I believe that here too they are to be related rather to
the formation or disintegration of the church-state than to any
particular interest which contributed to either process. I believe
that the sociologists who (for instance) equate experimental scienc
with puritan opposition are guilty of over-simplification only a little
less gross than those who equate the witch-cult with protestantism.
I hope I may some time say something on this subject, but not here.
Finally, a few small points. I quoted contemporaries to illustrate
the sense of universal revolution, and those contemporaries included,
in their catalogues, Catalonia and Portugal. But I did not myself
pursue the cases of Catalonia and Portugal because I do not consider
them to be comparable. In Catalonia and Portugal local separatism
and particular forces exploited the weakness of Castile; but it is the
structural weakness of the Castilian crown, not the forces which
exploited it, which is relevant to my analysis. A better comparison
is between Catalonia and Portugal on one hand and Scotland on the
other. Equally I did not say anything about "the important
Ukrainian upheaval", mentioned by Mr. Hobsbawm, partly through
ignorance of its details, partly because I very much doubt whether
general conditions in Eastern Europe were sufficiently similar to
justify comparison. On the other hand, if I did not deal with Italy,
this was merely through lack of space. I believe that (mutatis
mutandis) my analysis is as valid (or invalid) there as in France,
Spain and England, and I gave references to works by Chabod and
Coniglio which sufficiently illustrate the phenomenon in Milan and
Naples. In Rome the phenomenon hardly needs illustration. Venice,
of course, is the exception - and sought to preserve its exceptional
character by excluding those religious orders which, elsewhere, were
the buttress of the princely, bureaucratic system. I certainly do
not accept Mr. Kossmann's statement that I have merely applied to
Europe a hypothesis put forward in the first instance for England
only.
When I wrote this essay, I little expected that it would have the
honour of exciting so many distinguished historians to reply.
Naturally I am delighted that it has done so. These replies confirm
me in my belief that there is still much to be done in this field, and
that there are many historians willing to do it, among whom I
certainly would not dare to assume the lead so generously offered to
me by M. Mousnier. But these replies, by two great gaps, remind
me also of two great losses. What M. Mousnier has done for France,

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42 PAST AND PRESENT

Federico Chabod did for Italy, Vicens

the work of these three which, more tha
me to attempt a comparative study alo
death, within a month of each other, of b
is a loss which we shall find it very diffic

Oriel College, Oxford H. R. Trevor-Roper

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