But how can I explain, how can I explain to you?
You will understand less after I have explained it.
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events: not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
History is not a narrative of events. The historian's difficult task is to explain what happened. The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. The dates are arbitrary, since they relate to the deaths of queens, not to the life of the community. Nevertheless, during the seventeenth century modern English society and a modern state began to take shape, and England's position in the world was transformed. This book tries to penetrate below the familiar events to grasp ‘what happened’ – to ordinary English men and women as well as to kings and queens or abstractions like ‘society’ and ‘the state’. What happened in the seventeenth century is still sufficiently part of us today, of our ways of thinking, our prejudices, our hopes, to be worth trying to understand.
It may help if we start with a bird's-eye view of the period. It begins with the accession of King James, who united the crowns of England and Scotland: in 1707 Parliament achieved that more solid union of the two kingdoms which James had failed to bring about. James succeeded by hereditary right, confirmed by Elizabeth's nomination; in 1714 George I owed his throne to an Act of Parliament which passed over many persons with a better hereditary claim. James, like the Tudors before him, chose ministers and favourites as seemed best to him; by the early eighteenth century ministers could not govern without a Parliamentary majority. James was still expected to ‘live of his own’, to finance government from crown lands, feudal dues, and the customs: no distinction was drawn between the public and private capacity of the King. Parliament, summoned at the King's absolute discretion, expected to vote taxes only in an emergency (though here theory already lagged behind practical necessity). By 1714 Parliament, in almost permanent session, had complete control of finance. In James's reign members of the landed class themselves admitted to being absurdly undertaxed; in Anne's the gentry paid for Marlborough's wars. By then Parliament had established a degree of control over the executive and over all its actions – including foreign policy, which early Stuart kings had regarded as their private preserve. James and Charles acted arbitrarily in matters affecting the stability of the country's economic life – raising or lowering the customs, granting industrial monopolies, controlling prices, prohibiting land enclosure. The economy was highly regulated. At the end of the period economic policy was formulated by Parliament, and laissez-faire had succeeded regulation in most spheres. This made possible the appearance of the Bank of England, the National Debt, and other modern financial institutions.
The England of 1603 was a second-class power; the Great Britain of 1714 was the greatest world power. Under James and Charles English colonisation of America was just beginning; under Anne England held a large empire in America, Asia, and Africa, and colonial questions were decisive when policy was formulated. The East India Company was formed in 1601; a century later it was the most powerful corporation in the country. At the beginning of our period men noted as evidence of the topsyturviness of the times that some merchants were as rich as peers; before the end, many a noble family had salvaged its fortunes by a judicious marriage in the City. Englishmen's diet was transformed in this century by the introduction of root crops, which made it possible to keep cattle alive and so to have fresh meat in winter. Potatoes and many new vegetables were introduced, as were tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco. Port- and gin-drinking became national habits. Plague was frequent in the first half of the century, extinct by the end. The modern arrangement of meals – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – dates from the seventeenth century. So does the modern pattern of male costume – coat, waistcoat, breeches.1 Calico, linen, and silk came in for clothes; leather went out. By the end of the century pottery and glass had replaced pewter and wood at table; many families used knives, forks, mirrors, and pocket handkerchiefs; at Chatsworth the Duke of Devonshire had installed a bath with hot and cold running water.
In 1603 all English men and women were deemed to be members of the state Church, dissent from which was a punishable offence. Heretics were still burnt at the stake, just as suspected traitors were tortured. By 1714 Protestant dissent was legally tolerated: the Church could no longer burn, the state no longer tortured. Church courts, powerful in all spheres of life since the Middle Ages, lost almost all their functions in this century. Under Charles I Archbishop Laud ruled the country; under Anne it caused a sensation when, for the last time, a Bishop was appointed to government office.
Under the early Stuarts Justices of the Peace were subjected to direction from Whitehall, and had to answer in Star Chamber for recalcitrance; by Anne's reign country gentlemen and town oligarchies were virtual dictators of local government, responsible only to men like themselves in Parliament. James I and his son dismissed judges who were too independent of royal wishes; after 1701 judges could be removed only by address of both Houses of Parliament.
James I preached that kings ruled by Divine Right, and many political writers argued that subjects’ property was at the king's disposal. Parliamentarians countered these positions by Biblical texts or medieval precedents. By 1714 politics had become a rational inquiry, discussed in terms of utility, experience, common sense, no longer in terms of Divine Right, texts, and antiquarian research. James wrote a treatise on witches, and was no more credulous than most of his subjects, with whom astrology and alchemy were still in high repute. The second half of the century saw modern science triumphant; by 1714 fairies, witches, astrology and alchemy were no longer taken seriously by educated men. The majestic laws of Newton made nonsense of the traditional idea that the earth was the centre of the universe in which God and the Devil intervened continuously. Shakespeare had thought of the universe and of society in terms of degree, hierarchy; by 1714 both society and the universe seemed to consist of competing atoms. A man like Richard Cromwell, who was born under Charles I and lived into the eighteenth century, ‘had seen the end of the Middle Ages, the beginnings of the modern world.… Between his birth and his death the educated person's conception of nature and of man's place in nature had been transformed.’2
So we could go on through every phase of life and thought. T. S. Eliot thought that a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ occurred during the century. For the ‘metaphysical poets’, from Donne to Traherne, Eliot argued, thoughts were experiences which modified their sensibility. By Dryden's time poets had lost this ability to devour and digest any kind of experience: there were ‘poetic’ subjects and there was poetic diction. ‘The language became more refined, the feeling became more crude’ as we pass from the tortured doubt of Donne and Shakespeare's tragic period to the superficial certainties of Pope. Prose became less poetic as poetry became more prosaic. At the beginning of our period the fashionable style was scholarly, leisurely, rolled out in the elaborate periods of Richard Hooker or Sir Thomas Browne. When it ends the plain, straightforward prose of Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe is unmistakably that of modern English. Under James I, Roger North says, ‘most sober families’ practised both instrumental and vocal music; by the end of the period household chamber music was ‘utterly confounded’ by public performances of opera, by virtuoso violinists and singers. It was a great century in English musical history; but by its end native creative talent appears to be dead. On the other hand, the first part of the century saw an increasing dominance of foreign masters and models in painting and architecture, the latter part the re-emergence of a native tradition and styles that were to survive.
The transformation that took place in the seventeenth century is then far more than merely a constitutional or political revolution, or a revolution in economics, religion, or taste. It embraces the whole of life. Two conceptions of civilisation were in conflict. One took French absolutism for its model, the other the Dutch Republic. The object of this book is to try to understand the changes which set England on the path of Parliamentary government, economic advance and imperialist foreign policy, of religious toleration and scientific progress.
1 I owe these points to Miss K. Briggs's The Anatomy of Puck (1959), p. 2.
2 H. Baker, The Wars of Truth (1952), p. 366.