Category Archives: democracy

by | 9 September 2023 · 2:57 pm

Roles of English Print Media in 1640s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The Protestation Oath [of allegiance to the King and Church of England] had now been printed and was being circulated around the country, and people in their thousands were swearing to it. Tonnage and Poundage [import/export duties] was soon abolished. So, too, was Star Chamber, the Councils of Wales and North, and the hated [ecclesiastical] court of High Commission. In the summer, Ship Money would be annulled, and knighthood fines declared illegal. Step by step, the apparatus of Charles’s Personal Rule was being picked apart.

Pamphlets were streaming off the presses, as an excited and literate capital tried to make sense of what had been happening down the road at Westminster. There are just over 600 surviving titles per year for the 1630s, and this figure had risen slightly, to 848 for 1640. In 1641, there are 2,042. It was an astonishing explosion of print. Henry Burton, who had experienced brutal censorship first-hand, recalled how ‘many mouths were stopped, many shut up’, but ‘Parliament hath opened their mouths…it has opened the prisons.’ Or, in the lavishly biblical allusion of another Puritan author, ‘the stone that made the stoppage of the well of Haran is now removed and the flocks of Laban may drink freely’. The works of Prynne, Burton, Leighton were now freely available.

Print helped bring a great flowering of new religious groups especially in and around London. In July, the Venetian ambassador reported drily that there seemed ‘as many religions as there were persons’. Even in the Parliamentary pulpit at St Margaret’s, in the small church under Westminster Abbey, radicals told of tearing down Babylon, building up Zion and the planting of a new heaven and a new earth. That summer, Burton declared that the Church of England had become anti-Christian, and advocated the creation of independent congregations, in which people gathered with no direction from above, to worship together as they pleased. Sometimes, so the reports went, groups met on the dark peripheries of the capital: Hackney Marsh and the hills around Hampstead and Highgate. Other congregations gathered in suburban houses, and by the end of the year there was even one led by the radical leather-seller Praisegod Barebone that met in his house on the Strand.

Religious enthusiasts from humble backgrounds, so-called ‘mechanic’ preachers, were giving sermons in public. One of Henry Burton’s followers, Katherine Chidley, scandalised readers by arguing that true ministers could be ‘tailors, felt-makers, button-makers, tent-makers, shepherds or ploughmen’. The press made the most of it all, and in the journalists’ insatiable desire for sensation, they contributed to a wider sense that old certainties were collapsing. While many stories about weird and worrisome radicals were undoubtedly written for laughs, more nervous readers still trembled at the lurid horror. There were reports of naked Adamites, of Anabaptists and Brownists, even Muslims and ‘Bacchanalian’ pagans, not to mention those worshipping the planetary deities of Saturn and Jupiter. One tract laughed at a mechanic preacher who spoke ‘like a Lancashire bagpipe’ so (fortunately) ‘the people could scarce understand any word’. Another delighted and horrified its readers in equal measure with its cast of concocted female radicals: ‘Agnes Anabaptist, Kate Catabaptist, Frank [< Frances] Footbaptist, Penelope Punk, Merald Makebate, Ruth Rakehell, Tabitha Tattle, Pru Prattle, and that poor silly, simple, senseless, sinless, shameless, naked wretch, Alice the Adamite’.

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by | 7 September 2023 · 10:38 am

Parliament Challenges Charles I

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-132:

Charles’s military preparations stopped. If he had been planning a coup against Parliament, then it had been outflanked. With his chief adviser under guard, the king was drastically weakened.

Now that [Thomas Wentworth, Earl of] Strafford was out of the way, and on the 25th had been moved to the Tower through a jeering crowd, Parliament could turn to business. Top of the agenda was the staging of huge public rehabilitations for those who had suffered during the king’s Personal Rule.

On the 16th, Bishop John Williams was released from the Tower by the Lords. Even before that, after an emotional speech by a rather scruffy East Anglian MP called Oliver Cromwell, orders had been made for the release of Alexander Leighton and a spirited young polemicist named John Lilburne – imprisoned in 1638 for importing ‘scandalous’ books from the Netherlands. The biggest celebration, though, came on the 28th, when – on a crisp sunny Saturday – Henry Burton and William Prynne returned from imprisonment to the capital. Church bells chimed amid a chorus of cheers as the men processed slowly through town. There were so many followers, throwing flowers and herbs from their gardens, that it took the procession a reported three hours to pass Charing Cross.

Now, as winter approached, the work of unpicking Charles’s government could begin. ‘[T]here was never, I dare say, so busy a time in England,’ wrote one correspondent. Soon, though, Londoners staged a stunning intervention which threatened to disturb the whole project. On 11 December, braving the icy cold, a delegation of some 1,500 citizens crowded into Westminster Hall bringing with them a printed petition, signed by 10,000. It blamed the bishops for everything from problems in the cloth industry, to ‘whoredoms and adulteries’, to the ‘swarming of lascivious, idle and unprofitable books’. It asked not just for reform of religious abuses, but that the episcopacy itself be abolished, ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Here was the potential for a complete radicalisation of the reform agenda. More to the point, the sight of so many ordinary Londoners, petitioning publicly for the uprooting of the ecclesiastical order was staggering.

For now, Parliament carried on, confining itself to attacking the worst excesses of Archbishop Laud. Just five days after the London petition, the Canons of 1640 were declared illegal; Laud himself was impeached two days after that, and detained. The most far-reaching proposal in Parliament, though, was not a religious one. It came in the last week of December when, on Christmas Eve, the Devonian MP William Strode introduced a bill mandating annual Parliaments: if passed, it would ensure Parliament’s permanent sitting. The gauntlet had been thrown.

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by | 4 September 2023 · 1:52 pm

How Charles I Alienated Scotland

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-110:

By 1637 the outcry over the Book of Sports had calmed. In fact, that year had started with a victory for Charles. In February he had written to his 12 judges of the Common Law to shore up the legal case behind Ship Money. He asked two questions, clearly expecting a positive answer. The first question was whether, when the ‘good and safety of the kingdom’ required it, could he demand ships from his people. The second was whether it was he, as king, who was to decide what constituted a threat to that ‘good and safety’. Two of the judges were uncertain, but eventually all 12 fell behind the king and gave him the answer he wanted.

But then, in spring, the government committed a needless and damaging blunder. It was decided to make an example of three of the most clamorous Puritan writers. One was William Prynne, whose confinement in the Tower had done nothing to stall his literary career. The other two were the physician John Bastwick and Henry Burton, former clerk of the closet to Princes Henry and Charles, now a radical and thoroughly disgruntled Puritan. In early 1637, they were tried before Star Chamber for seditious libel and sentenced to pillorying, whipping and having their ears – in Prynne’s case the remaining parts of his ears – cut off. The three were then to be detained in far-flung corners of the realm: Jersey (Prynne), the Isles of Scilly (Bastwick) and Lancaster (Burton). The punishments were harsh, and their infliction on members of the social elite particularly offensive. More to the point, the men behaved like martyrs. Three times, shocked crowds watched as the blood poured down from the pillory, and the victims were cheered and garlanded as they progressed to their places of imprisonment. Far from instilling fear and respect, the government had managed to make themselves look like vicious tyrants.

What brought the king’s peace to a juddering halt, though, was not the prosecution of Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, but events in Scotland. Charles was born a Scot, but he’d left as a toddler and was seen there as thoroughly Anglicised. He didn’t help his reputation much in 1625 when he pushed a radical plan, known as the ‘Revocation’, to reclaim all lands granted by the Scottish crown since 1540, plus any properties owned by the pre-Reformation Kirk. It was a serious threat to the Scottish nobility, who had been the main beneficiaries of the land transfers, although the following year it was announced that they’d at least be adequately compensated. Charles had then waited nearly eight years before coming to Scotland to be crowned as their king, and when he did so – in 1633 – it had been a disaster. The Scottish Kirk maintained a much stronger Presbyterian tradition than the Church of England. In 1618, James had pushed back against this, bolstering the power of the Scottish bishops and trying to enforce such traditional practices as kneeling at communion and the celebration of Christmas and Easter. Charles wanted to go further. He wanted to draw Scotland closer to conformity with England and its now increasingly ceremonialist Church. It was a project that quickly provoked serious disquiet.

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by | 2 September 2023 · 1:20 pm

Forcing English Church Decorum, 1630s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 103-104:

[T]he most significant of [King] Charles [I]’s campaigns to bring order to his English realm was in the field of religion. Charles was personally devout, but religion was also intertwined with his wider project for social order. Charles wanted ‘peace and quiet’ in his Church just as he did in society as a whole. He wanted a ministry that was ‘peaceable, orderly, and conformable’, and subjects who would ‘demean themselves with all Christian reverence and devout obedience’. He didn’t want debate. Predestination, in particular, shouldn’t be ‘meddled withal’, since it was ‘too high for the people’s understanding’. His own preference was for a rich liturgy, with strong emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ so beloved of the ceremonialists. Critically, these were not to be days of latitude. Direction from the top, from the king, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the episcopacy, were to be followed. The Book of Common Prayer and the canons of 1604 were to be enforced in full. Parishioners would stand for the Creed and the Gloria Patri, kneel at the sacrament and bow at the name of Jesus. Those who, like Londoner and aspiring poet John Milton, preferred a ‘homely and yeomanly religion’ without a ‘deluge of ceremonies’, were deeply worried.

Charles promoted ceremonialists and Arminians. By the middle of the 1630s, Charles had created what was effectively an anti-Calvinist church establishment, particularly among his bishops, and not least when Richard Neile became Archbishop of York in 1631 and William Laud, finally, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 on the death of Abbot. The losers were men like John Williams, the Calvinist Bishop of Lincoln and sometime Lord Keeper. He fell out with Laud, was pursued in the courts and found himself fined by Star Chamber and imprisoned in the Tower.

The Church itself was suffering under long-standing economic problems, partly caused by inflation. Most visible were its crumbling buildings: indeed, much of Charles’s campaign for the beauty of holiness was really about stamping out the ugliness of neglect. The great London cathedral of St Paul’s was a case in point. Its spire had fallen down after a fire in 1561, and it was so overgrown with stalls and hawkers that it resembled a marketplace as much as a house of God. So unlike a church was it that one old Warwickshire farmer who was visiting London accidentally (‘in a beastly manner’) defiled St Paul’s ‘with his excrements’. He claimed that he did this ‘merely through ignorance & necessity being not able to go any further through his weakness & age’, and he found his explanation was accepted and was let off with a fine.

Charles and Laud’s aim was to bring back order and dignity to the Church. It was a programme that had real rationale, though some ministers took it to extremes, such as an Essex vicar who refused communion to menstruating women or those who had had sex the previous night, all in the name of decorum.

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by | 28 August 2023 · 8:01 am

Culture of Puritans

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 17-18:

The culture of Puritans, so their detractors thought, could be dangerously irreverent towards accepted hierarchies and social norms. Personal conversions were all very well, but they came from individual moments of revelation rather than participation in communal worship and ritual. And was it not suspiciously egalitarian for these people to go from place to place in search of sermons, critiquing them based on their own reading of Scripture, picking and choosing which preachers they listened to? Why not accept the minister they had been provided with in their own parish? Puritans believed that all members of the church were essentially equal, linked by their own personal conversion experience rather than deference to any worldly authority. They thought that ministers should be chosen by their congregations (though as one was at pains to point out, this meant that the ‘chief fathers, ancients and governors of the parish’ should do the choosing rather than the ‘multitude’). If they accepted bishops at all – and not all of them did – they certainly did not accept that their position existed by divine sanction. To some, indeed, the Puritan suspicion of earthly hierarchies represented a dangerous, even a revolutionary, ideology. Just like Catholics, so one sceptic alleged, ‘Puritans will have the King but an honourable member, not a chief governor in the churches of his own dominions.’

A key goal for Puritans was to reform society more widely, to stamp out practices they felt were damaging to the commonwealth and offensive to God. Calvin himself had turned Geneva into a morally pure commonwealth by using secular authorities to crush sin. Puritans wanted to do the same in England. It would, they hoped, become a new Jerusalem, a shining city on a hill rid of vices such as illicit sex, excessive drinking and swearing. They wanted people to pray, read Scripture and give willingly to support the poor. A particular bugbear was therefore traditional festivities and pastimes, especially sport on the Sabbath but also festival days. Pancake day, Morris dancing, wrestling after church and, of course, rushbearings like that at Cartmel were all ‘heathenish’: the ‘storehouse and nursery,’ wrote one cynic, ‘of bastardy’. Traditional celebrations were both disorderly, and they had Catholic connotations, such as the marking of saints’ days. They may have been exceedingly popular, especially with younger folk, but they were an affront to God, and often themselves brought drunkenness and illicit sex.

Naturally this was a campaign which ensured Puritans were seen by their enemies simply as wretched miseries: cantankerous prigs who instead of socialising sat ‘moping always at their books’. The Puritan, someone quipped, was a person who loved God ‘with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart’. Puritans were therefore disruptive in ways that transcended fine points of theology. They went about telling people the things they enjoyed were offensive to God and they caused bad blood between neighbours. They put communities on edge, created cultural conflict that burrowed deep into society.

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by | 26 August 2023 · 6:11 am

King James I vs. Parliament

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 42-45:

From the 1530s, therefore, the royal household moved out of the Palace of Westminster and settled in a short distance north in the Palace of Whitehall. It meant they were physically separated from the law and from Parliament, for the first time.

Meanwhile, Parliament had evolved into a regular, if not permanent, fixture of the political landscape. Within the great complex of yards, buildings and cloisters that made up the Palace of Westminster, the House of Commons sat in the large chapel of St Stephen. Members of the Commons – of whom by the middle of the seventeenth century, there were well over 500 – were elected to represent the English people, although ‘election’ was a rather complex concept. In the majority of cases, the successful candidate was decided before the election day, and simply presented to voters who dutifully assented: selected rather than elected. In a minority of constituencies, albeit a growing one, there was a formal contest. In such cases, the electorate really mattered. Some 90 Members of Parliament, known as ‘knights of the shire’, represented counties, where voters comprised all freeholders whose land was worth more than 40 shillings (£2) a year. The vast majority of MPs, though, were burgesses or citizens, representing boroughs and cities respectively, and here the franchise might range from all male residents of the town in question to a tiny number of landowners.

All told, however, and partly because elections were only one part of a consultative process which included lobbying and petitioning MPs, the Commons existed as a powerful voice for ordinary Englishmen and (to a point) women, especially those of the literate gentry and middling sort. Parliament was therefore of real significance. Indeed, English government was held to be balanced, between monarchy, aristocracy (broadly represented by the House of Lords) and democracy (represented by the House of Commons).

Yet these were not equally poised. Parliament only sat at the behest of the monarch, and existed to pass laws and grant taxes, not to have any direct control of the actual government. Absolutists, meanwhile, believed that, in times of necessity, the king could override the law (and Parliament). Neither was the Common Law the only system in play. The church courts, for example, administered canon law, while there were also courts of ‘equity’ which based judgements not on precedent but on conscience. Star Chamber, meanwhile, was a criminal court whose jurisdiction came entirely from the royal prerogative. Such institutions could, in the wrong hands, act as bulwarks to royal power, even to royal tyranny. One maxim, drawn from the Roman scholar Cicero, had it that salus populi suprema lex esto: the health of the people was the supreme law. Taken to its logical end, this meant that, if necessity demanded it, the king could tax his English subjects without getting consent from Parliament. He could even imprison them without recourse to the Common Law. Ultimately the king might have an absolute right to his subjects’ property, if he needed it.

And James did need it. One of the first things that will have impressed him as he came to England will have been its wealth. On his way south he stopped at Newcastle, its stone buildings home to a growing and extremely lucrative trade shipping locally mined coal to London. From there he visited the great cathedrals of Durham and York, passing through the verdant arable fields of eastern England, skirting around East Anglia, the great breadbasket of the country. He passed thriving market towns, great new prodigy houses built by the landed rich, and hunted on great deer parks shaded by leafy oaks. As he travelled, aristocrats, townspeople, landed gentry and the dons of Cambridge University all came out to see him in their finest clothes. When he reached London he was welcomed by the richest men of the City. James could be forgiven for thinking, as he did, that it was just like Christmas.

The trouble was, while England was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, its monarchy remained chronically short of money. When James came to the throne, finance was being badly affected by population growth. Because it caused inflation, rising population increased the cost of basic government functions, most importantly warfare and defence. War was becoming more expensive anyway, thanks to the growing size of armies, to gunpowder weapons, elaborate fortifications and to the increased need for great warships with three enormous masts and broadside-mounted copper and iron cannons. In 1603, England was at war with Spain and in Ireland. Both conflicts James brought hastily to a close, but while this was a major saving, it was offset by the cost of his family and entourage, which was much larger than that of his unmarried predecessor. James also had the rather unfortunate habit of paying off his courtiers’ debts for them. Worst of all was in 1606, when he blew an astonishing £44,000 by paying off the debts of two Scots and an Englishman of the royal bedchamber. The consequence was to make much needed financial reform politically very difficult. People blamed the parlous state of the royal coffers not on long-term structural issues like inflation, but on the king’s own profligacy.

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by | 24 August 2023 · 9:23 am

Rise of the English Yeomanry

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

The yeomanry (not to be confused with the military uses of the term) were a class of affluent countryfolk with good farms and decent landholdings, but below the level of the gentry. They had a reputation for honesty, plain-speaking and credit. ‘The yeoman wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket’, it was said. He was the ‘main man’ on juries and though he seldom went far, ‘his credit stretches further than his travel’. The yeomanry thought of themselves, not completely without good reason, as the backbone of rural society.

In previous peasant uprisings, like those of Wat Tyler (1381), Jack Cade (1450) and Robert Kett (1549), many yeomen had joined forces with their poorer neighbours to oppose the very rich. But this group was now becoming very prosperous. Yeomen were able to benefit from the rising prices, rising land values and falling wages that came with population growth. In other words, they did well out of exactly the things that were harming their poorer neighbours like John Reynolds. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the second quarter of the seventeenth, yeomen saw their wealth rise fourteenfold. They were rebuilding their houses and investing in their farms, thousands of which still survive today.

Of course, in theory, England remained a strictly hierarchical society, with a ‘great chain of being’ from the king down through the 60 or so temporal lords, the rest of the nobility, the roughly 15,000 members of landowning gentry (accounting, with their families, for about 2 per cent of the population, but owning 50 per cent of the land), to the farmers, tradespeople and labourers who made up the rest of society. This had never been entirely static, but the changes of the sixteenth century were notably destabilising. The rise of the yeomanry was part of a more general improvement in the position of those in the middle of the hierarchy, whom historians call the ‘middling sort’. This included many small-town traders and manufacturers – like, say, Shakespeare’s father John, who died in 1601, a prosperous glovemaker at Stratford, living in the impressive rebuilt timbered town house on Henry Street.

Shakespeare himself would ascend from his ‘middling’ background and, as he became rich later in life through landholding, grain trading and a successful literary career, would purchase the coat of arms that allowed him to present as a gentleman. In this, he was like many members of the rising middle sort, buying their way into the next rung of the landed class. Indeed, many of gentry were doing very well, too. On average, their wealth increased sevenfold between about the 1550s and 1620s. Like the yeomen, they were able benefit from rising food and land prices.

These newly wealthy classes enjoyed richer lives. They bought more consumer goods, invested in businesses and farms and rebuilt their houses. Curtains, chimneys, glass windows, furniture and fashionable clothes all became markers of the newfound status of the gentry and middling sort. Reading and book ownership became much more common. Spurred by this growing wealth and by the ballooning of the population of London, ready markets developed for almanacs, pamphlets, polemics, plays, penny ballads, true crime, foreign treatises and books about everything from how to run an efficient farm to how to play chess, or even how to be a dutiful wife. Most of all, there was a torrent of books about faith: how to be a good Protestant, and on the finer points of the liturgy, not to mention Bibles, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, England’s Book of Common Prayer and catechisms.

There were more schools now than ever before, and more children of the gentry and yeomanry attended Oxford and Cambridge or the Inns of Court. The Inns, in which young men learned the basics of the legal trade, were in fact more socially prestigious than the universities. And London offered just as much of a lively student experience as old Oxford and Cambridge. Students at the Inns could sample the delights of the City, its drinking holes and theatres.

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by | 23 August 2023 · 6:52 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Hempe, Skimmington

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 12-14:

A change of leadership is always disorientating, but a change of ruling dynasty was all the more so. In March 1603, the last Tudor ruler of England, Queen Elizabeth I, died at Richmond Palace, the grand seat built by her grandfather Henry VII, on the winding banks of the Thames in the tree-shaded landscape of northern Surrey. With the country in a state of high alert, and watches placed on the coastal towns, the plan to bring in a peaceful succession was put into play. A messenger was sent north to Holyrood in Edinburgh, to King James VI of the Scots. Within a few days, the wily and coarse James was on his way south, following a grand procession down the eastern side of England as the great and good of his new southern realm flocked to give allegiance.

In Elizabeth’s reign, a prophecy had circulated widely: ‘When Hempe is spun, England’s done.’ ‘Hempe’ was an acronym for the Tudor monarchs since the break with Rome: Henry, Edward, Mary and Philip (II of Spain, Mary’s husband), and Elizabeth. Prophecies were taken seriously, as signs of God’s plan, and the belief was that once Elizabeth died, England would collapse into anarchy. But the peaceful accession of James allowed a more benign conclusion: now England and Scotland were under the same ruler. England was done: long live Britain.

There were other signs, though, that the older, more apocalyptic prophecy might still be the true one. Intellectuals and commentators of the day pored over cosmic events to assess whether the universe lay unbalanced and whether God’s wrath was imminent. What they saw did not bring comfort. They looked at England and saw a land full of witches: ‘They abound in all places,’ fretted the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Edmund Anderson. People tried to divine signs of the future in meteorological phenomena like unusual tempests, and strange biological prodigies, such as ‘monstrous’ human births, and saw warnings from God. For, as it was said, ‘God doth premonish before he doth punish.’ There were blazing stars in the heavens, which were sure to be signs of cosmic disturbance. Comets, such as those of 1577 and 1580, foretold trouble, and most worrying of all, there were great new stars that shone bright enough to be seen in the daytime. One had appeared in 1572 and another would shine in 1604. No one remembered anything like this ever before.

The Cartmel wedding was a joke about the collapse of the universe. It was about the uprooting of the social order and the world turned upside down. Specifically, it was celebrating the fact that the world was about to be set the right way up again. Momus was a character who symbolised disorder; his expulsion brought balance.

Raucous processions like this, in which humour was made out of the world turned topsy-turvy, were part of the culture of the age. The most famous kind of procession was the charivari, what in England was called the ‘riding’, or ‘skimmington’. Here, some poor local folk would have offended the parish, perhaps two were living together unmarried, or perhaps a wife dominated her husband. The skimmington, which took its name from a kind of wooden ladle with which a wife might beat her henpecked spouse, was a way of ritually humiliating such transgressors. A procession of villagers would pass through the streets, banging pots and pans and making horn gestures with their fingers, symbolising cuckoldry, and leading an effigy of the couple seated backwards on an ass. The disorder, the noise and the inversion of the expected order all symbolised the way in which the subject of the skimmington had turned the world upside down. It betokens a world where the fabric of order is seen as fragile, where small deviations from social norms could take on a cosmic significance.

What Jane Thornborough organised at Cartmel was a skimmington against Protestantism. Momus, who was widely known from the bestselling Aesop’s Fables, was the Greek god of satire. He represented a world turned upside down. He, the discordant music and the transgressive wedding were saying something straightforward enough: Protestantism had overturned the natural order, it had turned things topsy-turvy. After the procession had left the church (very symbolic), a mock-proclamation announced the end of Momus’s time. The Protestants were being cast out of Cartmel church, fittingly enough a former priory. Their unnatural religion would reign here no more, and the old order could return. Such were the hopes of Catholics like Jane Thornborough when James I came to the English throne.

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by | 19 August 2023 · 6:17 am

Rise of Nationalism in the Danish Empire

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-274:

It appears that distinctive Norwegian and German (Holstein) identities can be traced during this period. Furthermore, an unmistakable Danish identity arose in the second half of the eighteenth century. The government in Copenhagen at the time of Frederik V was, as before, dominated by many foreign-born who had entered the service of the Danish king. The majority of the members of the King’s Council as well as the heads of the administration and at the court were born outside the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, especially in Germany. Often they did not speak Danish at all. This internationally oriented aristocratic elite, which formed the leadership of the state, pursued an ambitious and cosmopolitan cultural policy. This included convening foreign-born cultural personalities to hold illustrious positions in Denmark (i.e. the educator Basedow and the poet Klopstock). Furthermore, it awarded civilian and military posts as well as business privileges to foreign-born protégés. This international orientation had been the case for a long time, but it was increasingly perceived by the growing middle class, especially in Copenhagen, as an omission and oversight of local talent. The middle class was growing, and as it became more involved in foreign trade, it gained increased weight in society during the flourishing trade period, particularly in opposition to the great aristocratic landowners. After the middle of the eighteenth century, the middle class began to cultivate the Danish language, culture, and history as a protest against the internationally oriented aristocratic state leadership. The German-born Struensee, who in his short reign from 1770 to 1772 introduced radical reforms, which, however, had been ill-prepared and revealed his lack of knowledge of Danish conditions and traditions, just as his relationship with Queen Caroline Mathilde had aroused public indignation. His actions further fueled the development of nationalism. Unlike Struensee, his successors, Frederik V’s Dowager Queen Juliana Maria, her son, the king’s half-brother, Prince Frederick and her closely connected statesman, Ove Høegh-Guldberg, understood that they had to appeal to public opinion and to win the favor of the frustrated urban middle class.

Immediately after coming to power, they made Danish the administrative language for Denmark and Norway rather than German, and the following year Danish was made the command language in the army and in 1775 Danish was made a formal subject in the grammar schools. The crown jewel of their efforts was the Naturalization Act of 1776, which stated that only those who were born within the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, i.e. the empire, could in the future hold public offices. This law seems to have been met with spontaneous enthusiasm in Copenhagen and other cities across the country. How should this Danish identity be interpreted? The question is whether the Danish-German national antagonisms that tore apart the entire Danish state in the nineteenth century can be traced as far back as the eighteenth century. Perhaps in the eighteenth century it was first and foremost a matter of contradictions between an aristocratic and internationally oriented upper class and a more domestically oriented bourgeoisie (middle class), whose importance in social and economic was growing. Germans made up approximately a fifth of the capital’s population, a representation of the fact that Copenhagen was the center of the entire empire and not just the kingdom of Denmark. Yet, the Naturalization Act was not aimed against these people since it was applying to everyone in the empire and was aimed at foreign-born, in practice Germans, but—significantly—not at German-speaking Danish citizens from the duchies or Copenhagen. In 1790, however, a heated debate unfolded: the so-called “German feud.” The German-speaking fellow citizens and their alleged dominant position were conceptualized as a threat. The feud, however, ceased again, presumably because other problems on the political agenda took precedence, such as agricultural reforms. These national identities ultimately led to the dissolution of the empire, but the question is whether secession from the empire was an idea that originated in the eighteenth century or, whether the dispute at that point solely concerned the distribution of rights, duties, burdens, and privileges between the various nationalities within a perennial empire. There was not necessarily anyone at the time who thought nor desired that these schisms would eventually lead to dissolution, although in hindsight it may certainly seem the case. The development towards an identification with those whose nationality, language, culture, and country one shares, rather than identification by status and as a subject in a particular territory under a particular prince, and where the language was secondary, was an expression of the unitary state. Here, as in the conglomerate state, the empire was not held together by the subjects’ duty of obedience to their prince, but by the loyalty of the citizens to their fatherland, state, and nationality (Feldbæk 1992).

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by | 18 August 2023 · 6:09 am

Iceland’s Dark 18th Century

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 260-262:

While the eighteenth century in Denmark and Norway was considered a period of peace, progress and prosperity as reflected in expressions such as “the flourishing trade period” in Danish history and “the golden age” in Norwegian history, Iceland’s eighteenth century became a dark time. All land in Iceland was owned either by the crown, the church, or an elite mainly consisting of civil servants leasing it to the peasants: in other words, an agricultural system that did not differ much from that known in the Kingdom of Denmark. The country was characterized by social and occupational stagnation, which the trade monopoly that Iceland was subject to greatly contributed. When Bishop Ludvig Harboe 1741–1745 resided on the island, attributes of the unitary state were increasingly introduced. His work led i.e. efforts to increase the population’s literacy, but also with increased social control, i.e. restrictions on people’s right to move. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, factories were set up by Icelandic initiative, but with financial and other support from the royal power in Copenhagen, to promote Iceland’s economic and social development. These were mainly wool processing factories. However, there were many initial difficulties: deliveries did not occur, deficits necessitated large subsidies from Copenhagen, until the factories were for a time transferred to a private trading company headquartered in Copenhagen, before taken over by the state. Nevertheless, this initiative was of great importance for the modernization of Icelandic society. A factory was built near Reykjavik, and around this a settlement grew, which in 1786, when it had approx. 300 inhabitants, received a municipal charter. Iceland had thus gained its first city. The central government in Copenhagen intervened again in the early 1770s and sought to secure the social and legal rights of the peasant population vis-à-vis Iceland’s elite landowners. It was also a result of these efforts that in 1774 the state took over the monopoly of trade from a private company. 12 years later in 1786, the monopoly was abolished, trade was now free, but admittedly only to the king’s subjects. But between 1774 and 1786 something terrible also happened in Iceland. In 1783, the island was hit by a volcanic eruption that has been characterized as “one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recent millennia of Earth’s history.” (Thorsteinsson 1985, 190). Large areas were flooded by lava, toxic ash rained down over most of the island and the sky was covered with volcanic mists. All this, together with violent earthquakes, destroyed the vegetation and thus Iceland’s agriculture in the following years. It is estimated that approx. 20% of the population died as a result of these natural disasters, and a smallpox epidemic in 1785 deepened the crisis. All the previous decades’ attempts to commercially develop Iceland were now in ruins. It was in that context that the trade monopoly was abolished. The following decades saw the sale of land to tenant farmers, an action that was also done in the Kingdom of Denmark. This, too, can be seen as an attempt to bring the social and occupational structures within the Danish empire closer together, although there were undeniably large differences and the basic conditions were highly disparate. The old Althing (unicameral legislature in Iceland) was moved from the historic Tingvellir to Reykjavik in 1798, and in the year 1800 the Althing was abolished in favor of a national court and judicially trained judges. Thereby, a century-old institution had been erased. Both the move and the abolition two years later were justified with practicalities. Reykjavik was considered easier to reach than Tingvellir, and the replacement with a national court can be seen as an expression of bureaucratization and another attempt to streamline the systems throughout the different parts of the empire. Iceland in the eighteenth century came to witness first-hand the intrusive unitary state, but compared to other parts of the empire there were hardly other places where the opportunity for growth of the unitary state was greater.

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