12

The Climax of Autocracy
1660–1715

The Sun King rises

Louis XIV (1643–1715) dominated his age. He was dubbed ‘le Dieu donné’, given by God, and spent a lifetime trying to outdo his Maker. He faced a continent exhausted by the Thirty Years War and supposedly pacified by Westphalia. This had ended Catholicism’s claimed sovereignty over the belief system of Europe. At the same time the energies of the Renaissance and Reformation had refreshed debate about the natural world and the human condition. Everywhere settled assumptions were challenged. The scientific revolution that had accompanied the Renaissance acquired new force. In 1642, the same year that Galileo died, condemned by the church, Isaac Newton was born. With him was born modern physics.

In France, Louis did not recognize any new Europe. Like a Roman emperor, he believed himself destined to ‘the great, noble and delightful trade of monarchy’. A short man with a quick temper, he ruled by fear, splendour and guile. He brooked no opposition and delegated no authority. Secretaries of state could sign documents only in his name. They had to report to him personally each morning, and did so throughout his life. The Sun King glorified the twenty million people of Europe’s most populous nation and left it a legacy of bankruptcy and revolution.

Louis’s command centre was a new palace built outside Paris on the site of a royal hunting lodge at Versailles, into which he moved in 1682. It was intended to be free of the influences and compromises of the capital. Unlike Philip II’s grim Escorial, Versailles was a prison of gaiety and ostentation. In England, Elizabeth made her barons leave court, to guard and develop their provincial estates. Louis wanted no renewed Fronde, scheming behind his back. A thousand French nobles were incarcerated as if for life in the 350 apartments of Versailles. The Noailles family was so large it inhabited a whole corridor, known as the Rue de Noailles. Here courtiers fawned daily on the monarch, who responded with compulsory hospitality and entertainment. Like rats in a golden sack, they degenerated into petty feuding, ridicule and servility.

Louis loathed Protestantism, but he paid no deference to the Catholic pope. He was the totality of the state. Bishops were his servants. In foreign policy, he was obsessed with the dynastic and territorial disputes that had cursed France since the Middle Ages. He was a reversion to the pre-Westphalian age. Aggrandizement, he wrote, ‘is the most worthy and agreeable of a sovereign’s occupations’. He pursued it recklessly and with little success. Most of his income not spent on Versailles went on a standing army of 250,000 soldiers. No other European nation had anything like as many.

The king placed his finances under a controller-general, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who had a feverish eye for detail and love of bureaucracy. A contemporary referred to him as having the accountant’s ‘chilly fixity of the northern star’. But even Colbert could not handle his monarch’s extravagance. The result was a national economy that, behind a veil of splendour, was unsustainable. The only question was, would it outlast Louis?

The Franco-Dutch War

The king sought an early triumph against both the Spaniards and the Dutch in the Netherlands. To this end he sought a secret treaty with England’s Charles II, signed at Dover in 1670. Charles was already finding Parliament as cheese-paring as had his father, and Louis mooted a large subsidy and the division of the Netherlands between France and England. In return, Charles promised sixty ships for an attack on Holland – and an English church brought back to Rome. These promises were absurd. Charles was so eager to ape Louis’s extravagance he became his pawn, the secret deal being covered by a fake treaty pledging just friendship.

Louis declared war on the Netherlands in 1672, ostensibly over trade but in truth to seize land. Charles sent his promised ships, but this evoked such opposition in Parliament that, two years later, he had to renege on his treaty with Louis. The Dutch proved equally resistant. When the French invaded, the Dutch opened their dykes and flooded the country in the French path. The new stadtholder, another William III, famously said his strategy was to fight ‘until the last ditch’. The French invasion stalled and was eventually driven back. Under the Treaties of Nijmegen in 1678–9, Louis achieved only moderate territorial gains. But the war devastated the Dutch economy, at the time considered the richest in Europe. The golden age of Dutch painting, of Rembrandt, Hals, ter Borch and Vermeer, came to an end.

In 1683 Austria was distracted by yet another Ottoman incursion, this time reaching the gates of Vienna. In the culminating Battle of Vienna, a combined Austrian and Polish-Lithuanian force conclusively defeated the Turks. The battle included reputedly the largest cavalry charge in history, when 18,000 Polish horsemen charged into the Turkish force. Louis’s France offered Austria no assistance in this resumed threat to the integrity of Catholic Europe. Yet again, Europe could not bring itself to co-operate.

Louis now turned homewards and directed his obsessive aggression against his Huguenot population, supposedly protected by Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes. His view was that a single nation should have a single religion, that of its king. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes and ordered the Huguenots to convert to Catholicism or leave. The impact was traumatic. Estimates of the expulsion vary wildly, but between 250,000 and 900,000 Huguenots fled their homes for England, the Netherlands and Prussia. They thus blessed northern Europe with that boon to an emergent European capitalism, a network of skilled craftsmen, merchants and financiers.

The rise of William of Orange

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes cleansed England of any lingering traces of Francophilia, replacing it with a delight in all things Dutch. The French ambassador in London warned Louis that the only friend France had in England was the Stuart royal family. That too was not united. William of Orange was married to the then king James II’s Protestant daughter and heir to his throne, Princess Mary. As hero of the Franco-Dutch War, William’s eventual accession as Mary’s husband became in England the eagerly anticipated guarantor of a Protestant crown. This hope evaporated when, in June 1688, James II’s new wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, which made a presumed Catholic first in line to the throne. William and Mary were displaced and another Stuart crisis was at hand.

Parliament would not tolerate any return to royal Catholicism. The second thoughts of the 1660 Restoration had not turned out well. Third ones were required. The initiative was taken by William in the Netherlands. Within weeks of the new prince’s birth he secured, via his agent in England, Hans Bentinck, a letter from seven peers requesting him to invade and usurp James’s throne. British politics was dividing along lines going back to the Civil War, between supporters of parliamentary sovereignty and those of the Stuart monarchy. They were dubbed, respectively, Whigs and Tories, abusive terms for Scottish drovers and Irish outlaws. The Whigs were strongly behind William’s usurpation, while many Tories were Stuart sympathizers.

A Dutch invasion fleet of 463 ships and 40,000 men, three times the size of the Spanish Armada of a century before, set sail from the Netherlands in November 1688 and arrived off Dover, where a battery of guns boomed out a welcome. William did not land but cautiously headed west to Brixham in Devon. From there, the Dutch made their way across country to London, where the king’s army, under its young commander, John Churchill, turned traitor and joined the invaders. James fled down the Thames, throwing the Great Seal of England into the water, where it is believed still to lie. He was allowed to escape to France and Louis’s hospitality. William occupied London, and England was soon flooded with East India Company tea, ‘china’ porcelain, tulip-vases and red-brick gables.

William’s invasion was as brazen as that of his Norman namesake, but this time few objected. He disregarded the terms of female succession and demanded the crown for himself on equal terms with his wife Mary (1689–94), so becoming William III (1689–1702). Parliament agreed, but insisted in return on the constitutional restrictions imposed, with limited success, on Stuart monarchs for the past century. These culminated in 1689 in a Toleration Act and a Bill of Rights. They permitted freedom of worship, though not (at least publicly) to Catholics or extreme Puritans such as Unitarians, who were excluded from public office. Parliament would retain control of state revenues, the army and foreign policy.

The bargain added that ‘it has been found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince’. An Act of Settlement in 1701 formally declared the succession to bypass fifty-five Catholic descendants of the House of Stuart, to rest on the Protestant House of Hanover in Germany. Unless Mary or her sister Anne had a child, England’s sovereignty would thus follow a French, Welsh, Scottish and Dutch dynasty with a German one. William’s usurpation became sanitized as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, and set the seal on a turbulent half century since Cromwell’s rebellion. A mildly representative Parliament had moved closer to the heart of a monarchical constitution.

The Nine Years War

A restless Louis was now at odds with virtually all the major nations of Europe. After the Franco-Dutch War, a defensive league was formed against him, with Spain in improbable coalition with the Netherlands, England and the Holy Roman Empire. This resulted in another war, the Nine Years War, which started in 1688 with Louis’s armies pushing through the Netherlands into the Rhine basin, and into Savoy and Catalonia. They were also active in Canada, the West Indies and India, allowing historians to dub the conflict ‘the first world war’. France’s army was impressive, but without an overarching strategy, Louis was reduced to devastating towns and territory piecemeal and putting the university city of Heidelberg to the torch.

William was supposedly head of the alliance against Louis, but was opposed by Parliament in seeking English troops for service on the continent. It changed its mind only when in 1690 Louis dispatched an army to Ireland under the exiled James II, hoping Catholics would rally to the flag of rebellion. William defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne, north of Dublin, bringing ‘King Billy’ and the colour orange to grace, or curse, later Irish civil wars.

By 1697 European exhaustion at Louis’s desultory adventures had set in on all sides, with the Treaty of Ryswick costing him most of his earlier gains. He was forced to withdraw from east of the Rhine, lose Lorraine and return Luxembourg and Barcelona to the Spanish crown. He also had to acknowledge his enemy William as king of England. Pope Innocent XII sent a plea to the Protestant states to allow freedom of worship for Catholics. With memories of the Thirty Years War still raw in many minds, few were inclined to oblige.

The War of the Spanish Succession

For Louis, Ryswick was a setback, but a grander bone of contention loomed over the dynastic horizon. Years of intermarriage meant that French Bourbon and Austrian Habsburg blood flowed through most of the royal houses of Europe. The marital diplomacy pursued by Maximilian I, intended to bring familial concord to Europe’s incessant conflicts, led to the opposite, a matrix of competing claims whenever a crown was vacant. Hardly a battle was fought that did not have first or second cousins on both sides. Louis said, ‘If I must fight, I would rather fight my enemies than my grandchildren.’ It was not easy to distinguish them.

Soon at issue was the succession to Spain’s invalid king, Charles II, victim of generations of obsessive Habsburg inbreeding. Half of thirty-four Spanish Habsburg children died before they were ten. Charles was mentally disturbed, impotent and with an enlarged tongue that rendered his speech incoherent. Imprisoned in the Escorial, he lived under the control of a secretive cardinal. In 1697 as he approached death, his empire was disputed by three Habsburg minors. They were the twelve-year-old Charles, son of the current Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I; the fourteen-year-old grandson of Louis XIV, the Duke of Anjou; and a compromise candidate, the five-year-old Habsburg, Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria.

The parties initially agreed on the Bavarian child, since Bavaria was an old ally of France and thus an Austrian–Spanish Habsburg empire was less likely to emerge and threaten Paris. The deal sustained what was a three-way balance of power in western Europe. But a year later the boy died and the deal was off. No new compromise candidate emerged and, despite frantic efforts on all sides, the parties resorted to force of arms.

The emperor Leopold was determined to win Spain for his son, and thus restore Charles V’s united Habsburg empire. To what he saw as dangerous encirclement, Louis was adamantly opposed. In November 1700, Charles of Spain died and his will granted his throne to Louis’s Duke of Anjou. An overjoyed Louis could thus envisage a French empire stretching from the Ardennes to the Straits of Gibraltar and the Americas. He recognized his grandson as Philip V of Spain and, for good measure, heir to his own French throne. He declared, ‘Henceforth there are no Pyrenees.’

This was too much for the allies of Austria’s Leopold. In March 1701 the Austrians, Dutch and English met in The Hague to form an alliance against Louis, despite Leopold’s ambitions being hardly less grandiose than those of the French. In England, William III delegated negotiations to his commander and former ally, John Churchill, now Earl (later Duke) of Marlborough. Churchill was put in charge of the allied armies, and instructed that, ‘in conjunction with the Emperor and the States General [the Netherlands], for the Preservation of the Liberties of Europe, the Property and Peace of England, and for reducing the Exorbitant Power of France’, the allies would support the Holy Roman Emperor in his claim to the throne of Spain on behalf of his son.

The War of the Spanish Succession was a rerun of most previous wars. Louis returned to the familiar starting line of Flanders. Against him, the allies were hamstrung by disunity. Austria’s constant and primary concern was with its eastern border with the Ottomans, while England’s Marlborough lacked the support of anti-interventionist Tories in Parliament, some of whom still harboured Jacobite sympathies with James II’s French patron.

Louis was in his sixties and isolated in Versailles. With Colbert dead, he lacked wise counsellors to challenge his supposedly divine decisions. War between France and Austria’s allies was formally declared in 1702, and saw Louis’s army advancing up the Rhine towards Austria. The French hoped to join their Bavarian allies on the upper Danube and make a joint Franco-Bavarian assault on Leopold’s Vienna. It was a brazen aggression against the capital of Europe’s greatest power.

The 1704 campaigning season opened with the arrival of Marlborough on the Rhine with a small army of some 20,000 British soldiers. He joined a larger allied army and staged what became a famous forced march of 250 miles in five weeks. He made a rendezvous with the other allied commander, Prince Eugene of Savoy, recent victor over the Ottomans in Hungary at the Battle of Zenta. With an army now grown to 52,000, Marlborough and Eugene met the French at the village of Blenheim in Bavaria, securing a crushing victory and forcing the French to retreat. Marlborough returned to an England ecstatic with war fever. Queen Anne made him a duke and awarded him the unique right to a ‘palace’, a term usually reserved for royals and bishops. It was designed in the baroque style by Vanbrugh on crown land at Woodstock. As Blenheim Palace, it stands to this day.

Louis did not admit defeat, and the war degenerated into a series of battles, mostly in the Low Countries during successive summers. Marlborough won a clear victory at Ramillies in 1706. Further French defeats followed at Oudenaarde and Lille in 1708. Louis was now driven from the Netherlands, and the Savoyards and Austrians forced him out of northern Italy. England, however, grew tired of the war and, in 1707, realized Queen Anne’s passion, the formal union with Scotland in a new ‘Great Britain’. Henceforth English mostly becomes ‘British’.

The Treaty of Utrecht

The chief obstacle to peace was Louis’s refusal to concede the Spanish throne, and hostilities took on the relentless character of the Hundred Years War. In 1709, a set-piece battle at Malplaquet on the Belgian border saw two armies with a combined strength of 190,000 fight each other to a bloody but indecisive finish. Though Marlborough drove the French to retreat and accounted it a victory, allied losses of 25,000 dead and wounded were double those of the French. A French general remarked to Louis, ‘If it please God to give your majesty’s enemies another such victory, they are ruined.’ Louis could only wail, ‘Has God forgotten what I have done for him?’

From 1710 Louis was eager for peace, and it was the allies who could not agree. The maritime states were content just to have France evicted from the Netherlands, which had now been achieved. Leopold wanted nothing short of the Spanish throne. In England an election saw the anti-war Tories win a majority, caused in part by revulsion at the bloodletting of Malplaquet. The argument staggered on until negotiations between the Tory Earl of Oxford and the French culminated in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

The war ended with the armies of all parties depleted. Under the treaty, the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI of Austria, lost his claim to the Spanish throne, which was a victory for Louis and his candidate, Philip V. On the other hand Louis had to concede the formal separation of the French throne from that of Spain, along with France’s withdrawal yet again from the Rhine. Austria was compensated with Spain’s former territories in Italy and the Spanish Netherlands (roughly western Belgium and Luxembourg).

Utrecht’s principal achievement was thus to restate a balance of power between the old foes, Bourbon France and Habsburg Austria. Despite the roles of Marlborough and Oxford in the outcome, Britain had no continental territory at stake. Its interest lay overseas, where it won Gibraltar, Minorca and Newfoundland, as well as a thirty-year monopoly on trading African slaves with the Spanish colonies, a trade that had become hugely lucrative. With each redrawn boundary, each new shift in sovereignty or marital alliance, the kaleidoscope of Europe grew ever more complex. Like Westphalia, Utrecht was not so much a peace treaty as a storing up of trouble for another war.

Britain’s Hanoverian dawn

Utrecht coincided with a seemingly trouble-free shift of power in the new Great Britain. In 1714, as the Stuart Queen Anne lay dying, a group of Tories staged a half-hearted bid to restore the Stuart succession through James II’s son, known as the Old Pretender, in Paris. But the law was clear and Parliament upheld it. The succession to the British throne lay with the fifty-four-year-old German, George of Hanover. When he arrived for his coronation, he spoke little English. He had already incarcerated his wife in a castle as punishment for infidelity and brought with him two mistresses, fat and thin, known as the Elephant and the Maypole. He played cards with each on alternate nights. His major hobbies were military activity and hunting, and chief gift to his new nation was the composer Handel.

A more significant blessing emerged with time. George cared little for government or politics. He said he preferred Hanover, where his subjects did what they were told. He tried to chair cabinet meetings in French but soon gave up, and left them to the Whig Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury from 1715. This genial Norfolk landowner was the first Englishman to be titled ‘prime minister’. British monarchical authority thus decayed, not through revolution but through lack of interest. Party government, the key to properly accountable democracy, was born of a power vacuum. There now began a long ‘Whig supremacy’, almost continuous, from 1714 to 1760, initially dominated by Walpole. The liberties for which Britons had fought in the seventeenth century were entrenched not by further petitions, rights and constitutional statutes but by custom and practice.

In 1715, a year after George was crowned, Louis XIV lay dying. Aged seventy-six and tormented by the misery he felt he had inflicted on his country, he advised his bemused great-grandson and heir, the five-year-old Louis XV, ‘Above all, remain at peace with your neighbours. I loved war too much. Do not follow me in that, or in overspending.’ Repentance was too late. At the king’s funeral, the bishop pronounced the pointed banality, Mes frères, Dieu seul est grand, My brothers, God alone is great.

Charles of Sweden

Utrecht fixed west Europe’s borders for half a century, but east Europe enjoyed no such stability. States had been marked out by the rough imposition of kingship over tribes, stretching from the Baltic and Estonia down through Poland to the Balkans, Hungary and Ukraine. To their east lay Russia, to the south, the Turks. To the north, Sweden had seen the eccentric, dazzling reign of Queen Christina (1632–54), daughter of the hero of the Thirty Years War, Gustavus Adolphus. A lesbian intellectual and supporter of the arts and sciences, she made Stockholm a Protestant Athens of the North. Then, in 1654, at the age of twenty-eight, she abruptly abdicated after an argument with her courtiers over her refusal to marry. Dressed as a man, she left for Rome, where she set up home as a Catholic with a lavish personal court. Her celebrity was much enhanced by a papal indictment calling her ‘a queen without a realm, a Catholic without faith and a woman without shame’.

Christina’s reign was followed by monarchs as meteoric as they were catastrophic. Charles X (1654–60) was tactless and lacking in judgement, but had a genius for battle. He overran Denmark, Poland and Estonia, securing the enmity of all his neighbouring powers. His ambitions were capped by his grandson, Charles XII (1697–1718). In 1700 he confronted a Russian army four times the size of his own at the Battle of Narva in Estonia, crushing it utterly. He killed 10,000 Russians for the loss of just 660 Swedes. Europe saw the emergence of a new power to its north.

Charles was determined to topple the tsar of Russia no less, hoping for the assistance of a revolt by the Cossacks, a militarized local gentry, that failed to materialize. He now came face to face with Peter the Great (1689–1725), one of those occasional Russian leaders with a charisma and ability to match the scale of their country. In 1707 Charles declined Peter’s offer to grant him sovereignty over Poland, but by the winter of 1708 his army was suffering severe losses in the worst weather in living memory. The following summer the Swedish army, depleted to half its original size, reached the Russian fortress of Poltava in Ukraine, where Peter annihilated it. Charles fled for his life to Turkey. What might have been a Swedish empire was now divided between Russia and Prussia. Peter realized the strategic significance of the Baltic, announcing that the defeat of Sweden ‘laid the final stone in the foundations of St Petersburg’.

Peter the Great

As Sweden subsided, Russia rose. Peter had inherited a country that was still in the Middle Ages. It was ruled by the tsar through regional barons or boyars, under whom Cossacks owned and farmed much of the land. Beneath them was a population of some twenty million serfs. Education was virtually non-existent and women lived in seclusion. The tsar ruled as an autocrat, with no parliament or civil rights. Men wore long beards and dressed traditionally in coats down to the ground.

Peter, like Vladimir in the tenth and eleventh centuries and Ivan in the sixteenth, was eager to bring his country into what he saw as the European mainstream. In 1697, before the Swedish war, he had set out on a year-long ‘grand embassy’, ostensibly incognito, to Amsterdam, Dresden, Vienna, London and Oxford. He studied everything from military strategy to city planning and art history. On his return, he imitated Constantine and planned a new capital at St Petersburg. It was designed by Swiss and French architects in the classical style, built on the labour, and reputedly the corpses, of Russian peasants and Swedish prisoners-of-war. It was formally founded in 1703 and its white palaces, gilded churches, squares and canals made it one of the handsomest cities in Europe. It remains so to this day.

Peter established a modern civil service, a reformed Orthodox church, a school system and a Russian navy. He abolished the boyars’ council or duma, and replaced it with a twelve-man senate and a new aristocracy, based on service to the state. Peter removed eight letters from the Russian alphabet, and ordered males to shave and wear shorter western-style jackets. For all that, Peter remained Russian to the core. He was brash, high-living, persistently drunk and unable to brook opposition or contradiction, a Sun King of the steppe. He could adapt his country to western innovation, but he was immune to political reform. He opened Russia’s door on Europe’s emerging intellectual enlightenment, but never stepped through it.

In foreign policy was there a sort of symmetry between Peter’s Russia and Walpole’s Britain. Both sat on the continent’s geographical extremities, and both viewed its conflicts with some detachment. But there the similarity ended. Britain’s outlook was maritime, global and commercial. It behaved as if it was supreme over every ship at sea. Russia’s ambitions, on the other hand, were land-based, with half its gaze towards the vast territories of Asia and the riches of the Orient. Between these two pillars of what was to become a global imperialism lay a new Europe.