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The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution, 1558-1660

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

J. H. Hexter
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“A landmark in the historical landscape” — The Economist; “A major contribution … an impressive achievement, which must in future put all historians in his debt” — The Listener; “A remarkable achievement … an outstanding study of a very real and great value” — History; “A mammoth and marvellous book” — American Historical Review; “Immense value” — English Historical Review; “A model” — Journal of Economic History; “A major historical contribution … a magisterial and seminal work” — Journal of Modern History; “A brilliant and original contribution” — New York Review of Books; “Social history at its absolute best” — Past and Present.

Such was the chorus of critical encomium that greeted the publication of Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Despite the chorus Stone could hardly have helped being disappointed at the actual reviews. One or two were almost as fatuous as they were brief. Others, sensible within their limits, were still too short. This seems to have been the fault of editors, so intimidated by the pejorative sense of the term “discrimination” that they refuse to discriminate between a work worth more than twenty pages and one worth less than twenty words, performing their editorial duties in the matter of book reviews with a sort of timorous and lunatic egalitarianism. Moreover, in considering Stone's work, many of the reviewers hastily plunged into what has come to be called “the gentry controversy” or “the storm over the gentry,” and some became almost totally immersed in it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , November 1968 , pp. 22 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1968

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References

1. Esp. Kenyon, John, “Decline and Fall,” New York Review of Books, July 7, 1966, pp. 23–24Google Scholar; Coleman, D. C., “The ‘Gentry’ Controversy and the Aristocracy in Crisis, 1558-1641,” History, LI (1966), 165–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Aylmer, G. E., Past and Present, No. 32 (1965), 113–25Google Scholar; see also the briefer, skillful review by Miller, Edward, “The Elizabethan and Early Stuart Peerage,” Historical Journal, IX (1966), 133–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 7Google Scholar.

4. The key words here are “concerted opposition to the actions of the ruler.” This phrase is intended to eliminate localized and uncoordinated revolts of peasants and other social groups. What is being pointed at is not so much the Civil War itself but the activities both in Parliament and in the country during the preceding twenty-one years, which along with the actions of James I, Charles I, and their officials and courtiers were constitutive of the situation from which the Civil War resulted. My three-point analysis of Crisis of the Aristocracy diverges slightly from Stone's own two-point analysis to make possible what I believe to be a more satisfactory account of what he has done. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

5. See below, pp. 70-71.

6. It is touched by one small bias that readers might keep in mind. In his category of “the aristocracy” Stone includes the rich gentry, some five hundred families in 1640, as well as the peerage. Much of his nonquantitative data, however, centers around the court and courtiers, and almost all of his quantitative data have to do only with the peerage. Proportionately the peerage was more heavily represented at court than the upper gentry were. Thus 25 per cent of the peerage held office between 1625 and 1642 as against 12 per cent of the knights. Aylmer, G. E., The King's Servants (London, 1961), p. 324Google Scholar. Since, however, peerage is hereditary, a considerable number of peers were too young to be courtiers, thus increasing the disproportion. Therefore, the available evidence and Stone's book provide a less distorted image of the peers' way of life than of the five hundred gentry families, except for the comparatively small proportion of the latter who were also courtiers.

7. Stone, , Crisis, p. 8Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., pp. 313-17.

9. Ibid., p. 315.

10. Ibid., p. 316.

11. Ibid., pp. 241-42.

12. See the earliest version of Hexter, J. H., “Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England,” read at the American Historical Association, Dec. 1948, and published in Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, II (1950), 128–40Google Scholar.

13. Initially Stone, L., “The Nobility in Business, 1540-1640,” The Entrepreneur [Economic History Society] (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 14–21Google Scholar.

14. Stone, , Crisis, pp. 338–55Google Scholar, esp. pp. 343, 348, 352.

15. Ibid., p. 382.

16. Ibid., pp. 378-80.

17. Ibid., p. 11.

18. Ibid., pp. 382-84.

19. With the following differences: grants of arms are tabulated over ten-year periods, 1560-1639 (ibid., App. II, p. 754); quantitative data for esquires are not available; higher ranks are tabulated over five-year spans; an exception in tabulation is made for the first two and three-quarter years of James I, the special circumstances of which resulted in an eccentrically profuse creation of knights and, to a lesser extent, of peers (ibid., App. III, p. 755).

20. The knights created by the 2nd Earl of Essex as commander of the Cadiz expedition of 1596 and of the Irish expedition of 1599 are an exception to this rule.

21. From 1631 through 1640, 22.4 p.a.

22. Sixty-five earls; forty-seven barons.

23. Not wholly new, but in her whole reign Elizabeth had created only three.

24. Actually 292. This figure excludes more than one hundred Irish and Scottish baronetcies.

25. Stone, , Crisis, pp. 93, 116Google Scholar.

26. Stone refrains from considering the implications of the egregious slump in baronetcy prices and the widespread unwillingness to accept knighthood at any price or no price at all, compared with the relative if more stable prices for peerages in the very late 1620s. The divergence at least suggests that the differential in price movement, the unevenness of the inflation, resulted from the situation on the demand rather than the supply side. It is what one might expect if, as Stone himself suggests elsewhere, legal innovations, reforms in estate management, and improved access to credit were of advantage principally to the greatest gentry landlords and not very readily accessible to the lesser. The improved economic position of the great landlords may have supported prices at the higher levels of honorsbuying, while an economic pinch and an excessive supply ruined the market for honors at the lower levels.

27. Stone, , Crisis, p. 120Google Scholar.

28. For example, “Statistics … compose the bony skeleton of this book …. This statistical frame is as necessary to the book as the bone structure to a vertebrate; without them both would be inert lumps of amorphous flesh.” Ibid., p. 3. “Statistical measurement is the only means of extracting a coherent pattern from the chaos of personal behaviour and of discovering which is a typical specimen and which a sport.” Ibid., pp. 3-4. “Statistics make a dry and unpalatable diet unless washed down with the wine of human personality. They have been used, therefore, merely as controls to check the significance of the tangled jetsam of anecdote and quotation thrown up by three talkative, quarrelsome, idiosyncratic generations of noble men and women.” Ibid., p. 4.

29. For criticism of some of Stone's inferences from his statistics, see esp. Aylmer, , Past and Present, No. 32, 113–25Google Scholar; Coleman, , “‘Gentry’ Controversy,” History, LI, 165–74Google Scholar; anonymous review, T.L.S., Apr. 17, 1966, pp. 285-88.

30. This is not to decry or deny the possible utility of an effort, by historians so inclined, to apply highly systematized structures of social-science generalization to specific historical situations with a view to testing the generalizations rigorously. Chacun à son gout.

31. As far as I have been able to determine, “The Inflation of Honours” has enjoyed the unanimous if occasionally grudging approval of all the reviewers who mention it.

32. Stone, , Crisis, pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

33. Thomas, 3rd Earl of Sussex, and Henry, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, to name two outstanding examples of the Elizabethan period.

34. Ibid., p. 618.

35. Ibid., p. 629.

36. Stone provides the pertinent evidence justifying my summary, in ibid., pp. 617-19, 627-32, and App. XXIX and XXX, p. 789.

37. In quest of the dispersion pattern of manorial values, Stone casually remarks that he scanned “some six miles” of Close Rolls, partly impelled thereto, I gather, by a remark of mine about the divergence in price between a property I once owned in Queens and the property on which the Empire State Building stands. Hexter, J. H., Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), p. 128Google Scholar.

38. The exceptions (and they are important) are political-constitutional and religious history.

39. Later two important exceptions to this statement, of which Stone himself was aware, will be noted. They are religion and the peerage in its corporate capacity as the House of Lords.

40. Stone, , Crisis, p. 6Google Scholar.

41. Hill, Christopher (ed.), The English Revolution, 1640 (London, 1940), pp. 80–81Google Scholar, 9.

42. Tawney, R. H., “The Rise of the Gentry, 1558-1640,” Econ. Hist, Rev., XI (1941), 6Google Scholar.

43. The various views originating in or engendered by the statistics offered by Tawney and Stone will be found in ibid., XI, 1-38; L. Stone, “The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy,” ibid., XVIII (1948), 1-53; H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The Elizabethan Aristocracy: an Anatomy Anatomised,” ibid., second series, III (1951), 279-98; L. Stone, “The Elizabethan Aristocracy: A Restatement,” ibid., second series, IV (1952), 302-21; H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, 1540-1640, ibid., Supplement 1 (1953); R. H. Tawney, “The Rise of the Gentry: a Postscript,” ibid., second series, VII (1954), 91-97; J. P. Cooper, “The Counting of Manors,” ibid., second series, VIII (1956), 377-89; Hexter, , Reappraisals in History, pp. 127–62Google Scholar.

44. See T.L.S., Apr. 17, 1966, pp. 286-88; Coleman, , “‘Gentry’ Controversy,” History, LI, 165–74Google Scholar.

45. Stone, , Crisis, p. 130Google Scholar. My italics.

46. Ibid., p. 131.

47. It will be put to such uses several times in what follows, where the use itself seems to keep the likely range error from markedly affecting the conclusion. The results of Stone's effort are summarized in ibid., App. VIII, pp. 760-61.

48. Ibid., pp. 144-50.

49. Ibid., App. XI, C, p. 766.

50. This can be seen by comparing the figures in ibid., App. XI, B, Col. IV, with those in App. XI, C. According to the former, thirty-three peerage families bought 141 manors between 1558 and 1602 and sold 756 manors, a ratio of only one recorded purchase for every 5.4 recorded sales. According to the latter table at determinable dates between 1561 and 1600, forty-two peerage families bought 133 manors and sold 571, a ratio of one dated purchase for 4.3 dated sales. Why sales should be less easy to date than purchases I do not know.

51. Generous since it assigns them an average of 50 per cent more manors apiece than Stone ascribes to the other thirty-three peers.

52. A further objection may be raised to die procedure here adopted. It is that to treat 2,354 manors as of 1558 as a base from which to make a series of deductions for net loss in each decade does not take account of gains and losses of manors from other sources than purchase and sale between 1558 and 1602 and thus distorts the rate of loss. It can be shown, however, that over the time span gains and losses from other sources did not markedly affect the relation between probable net losses and probable manorial holdings. Between 1558 and 1602, according to Stone, thirty-three families by means other than purchase and sale acquired four hundred manors and lost 186, a balance of 214 acquired. Ibid., App. XI, B, Col. IV. Correcting this by a factor of 1.4, that is , to allow for the estimated increase in manors ascribable to the addition of nine families gives an estimated net gain of three hundred manors for forty-two families between 1558 and 1602 by means other than purchase and sale. Against this, however, must be set what has been noted about the relation of dated purchases and sales to actual purchases and sales. A correction of 140 per cent in the combined net recorded losses of 615 (756-141) manors for thirty-three families between 1558 and 1602 takes into account the addition of nine families. From the result, 861 manors, is subtracted the net dated losses for forty-two families during the same period, 438 manors. (See Table 1.) This gives a net undated loss of 423 manors due to the excess of sales over purchases. By more than one hundred manors this counterbalances estimated net gains by means other than purchase and sale. The preceding computation of rates therefore has introduced no significant probable increase of error, and indeed it is likely that these computations minimize rather than maximize rates of disinvestment in manors by the forty-two peerage families between 1561 and 1602. Stone's own figures for the dated purchases and sales of the thirty-three families with 1,670 manors in 1558, were they available, would make unnecessary some of the above conjectural corrections.

53. There were only ten such families of which eight survived beyond 1603.

54. Stone, Crisis, ch. x.

55. Ibid., ch. v.

56. Ibid., ch. vi.

57. Ibid., ch. ix.

58. Ibid., pp. 481-87.

59. Ibid., App. XXI, p. 778.

60. Ibid., App. VIII, p. 760.

61. On Stone's I-to-VIII scale their average gross rental stood at 6 in 1602 as against 6.3 for all peers. Only 30 per cent of them were in the VII-VIII range as against nearly 60 per cent for the rest of the peerage. Ibid., App. VIII, B, p. 760.

62. Sales, £173,000+, debts, £150,000+, for seventeen peers. Ibid., App. XXI, p. 778. Rental, £140,000, for the entire lay peerage (fifty-eight persons). Ibid., App. VIII, B, p. 760.

63. Ibid., App. VIII, C, p. 761.

64. Bourchier, Hastings, Ratcliffe, Stourton, Talbot.

65. Percy, Vere, Manners, Seymour, Somerset, Wharton.

66. Tawney, , “Rise of the Gentry,” Econ. Hist. Rev., XI, 12Google Scholar.

67. On Stone's scale of rental income it climbed from an average place of 6.3 in 1602, the lowest point reached during the whole period by any grouping of peers chronologically delimited, to 5.7 in 1641. Ibid., App. VIII, B and C, pp. 760-61.

68. Again on Stone's range I-to-VIII table of gross rental income for a gross view, despite the crisis that resulted in a heavy disinvestment of manors, the median shift downward by 1602 was zero; that is, more peers had either gained or not lost in real income than had lost. Only four families had slipped more than one place in the table, the Veres, the Stanleys, the Herberts, and the Berkeleys. Ibid.

69. The creations considered here are those from the accession of James I to the creation of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Ibid., App. V, p. 757. For some reason demographic attrition in this group was very high, about 45 per cent in 28-38 years. See 1641 list in ibid., App. VIII, C, p. 761.

70. In Stone's range table they average 4.6 in 1641. No other considerable group stands so high. Ibid.

71. Stone's argument for a continuity between the financial crisis and the crisis of prestige of the peerage is not highly persuasive. Ibid., pp. 163-64. The evidence he offers to connect the two is exiguous and unconvincing compared with what he provides to connect that second crisis with circumstances on which he does not focus so effectively. See below, pp. 58-70. That the adaptive moves of individual peers to meet their temporary financial embarrassment around 1602 significantly affected the prestige and power of the whole order at the time or three decades later is not impossible, but Stone's evidence that they did so is thin.

72. Ibid., p. 6.

73. Ibid., pp. 748-49.

74. Ibid., p. 10.

75. Hill, , English Revolution, p. 9Google Scholar. This is not to argue that it is impossible to reduce Stone's complexities to the early simplicities. It is to suggest that those who wish to reduce the “explanation” of the English Revolution in this or any other way to a simplicist pattern address themselves to those complexities and not merely prescind from them on the grounds that they are unimportant. The practice of deciding in advance on meta-historical grounds and without consideration of the record of the past what is important and what is not is itself now hopelessly passe and (hopefully) past.

76. The following observations are based on a fairly extensive, if desultory, reading in sources and secondary works on the period. In almost every detail the observations themselves require direct confirmation from a systematic study of the sources.

77. Stone, , Crisis, p. 103Google Scholar. My italics.

78. Most of the data for the following paragraphs are drawn from ibid., ch. iii, “The Inflation of Honours”; App. Ill, p. 755; App. VIII, C, p. 761; App. XXIX and XXX, p. 789. Only creations from Buckingham's own accession to the peerage to the end of 1628 are counted as “Buckingham peers.” The choice may be faulted on several points: 1) Buckingham's accession to favor antedates fay two or three years his promotion to the peerage, leaving some peers in no man's land between Somerset's fall and Buckingham's creation. Actually, however, there are only four such peers. Ibid., App. V, p. 757. 2) It does not include promotions within the peerage during the Buckingham era. It may be argued, however, that while these promotions may have resulted in the embitterment of relations within the peerage, as far as impact on the country gentry is concerned, the major harm was done only by promotion to the peerage, since it was that promotion which exalted the status and precedence of those who received it over baronets and/or knights. 3) The list is extended beyond Buckingham's death to the end of 1628 on the grounds the Duke's influence here reached from beyond the grave, and that the braking process on creations does not become evident until 1629 at the earliest. Ibid.

79. The figures as Stone gives them already mark a sharp distinction between the landed position of the “old” and “new” peerage in 1641, the former with an average of thirty-four manors apiece, the latter with twenty apiece, the former with proportionally twice as many families as the latter holding forty or more manors. Ibid., App. XI, p. 764. With the creations of 1603-13 added to their number, the first group would almost certainly appear with double the average manorial holding of the peers created during the Buckingham ascendancy and with four times as many holders of forty or more manors among an approximately equal number of peers.

80. Stone's data for 1641 are based mainly on royalist compounding papers. This should minimize relative error among considerable samples of peers. One cannot discount the likelihood that men took a chance on understating the value of land for the release of which they had to pay a mulct proportional to its worth, but there is no reason to suppose that there was a marked differential in mendacity quotient as between the peers created up to 1613 and those created from 1618 through 1628.

81. Ibid., App. XIX, C, p. 775.

82. The model suggested derives from the one which Robert Walcott found necessary in order to make some sense of English politics from the 1670s to the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty. Walcott, Robert, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1956), pp. 155–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83. I know of no effort to discover whether and in what number members of the upper country gentry stood high in more than one such hierarchy; I have only a vague and unverified impression that such men were few, and that even those who had estates in more than one county concentrated their struggle for influence and pre-eminence in one county only.

84. No study has been made of the role of the more or less pure country peers in local affairs. It is evident that a peer like Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, exercised large if not paramount power in Essex. To the south in Kent, however, affairs seem to have been in control of a gentry oligarchy, and just to the north the gentry dynasty of the Barnardistons with Sir Nathaniel as its head dominated Suffolk.

85. The contrast between the situation of France and England in this respect emerges in stark and dramatic vividness from the pages of Mattingly, Garrett, The Armada (Boston, 1959)Google Scholar.

86. Some of the debates in the later Elizabethan Parliaments over issues not specifically related to religion suggest the earlier date. So does the extraordinary and rapid response of the House of Commons, beginning on the very first day of James's first Parliament, evoked by the case Goodwin vs. Fortescue.

87. Its earliest embryonic expression in England was perhaps pre-Reformation. There are elements of it, at least, in Thomas More's Utopia, with the appropriate Christian overtones but, of course, without the emotional charge generated by the conflict with Popery, and without the special rhetoric that that conflict engendered.

88. Hexter, J. H., The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), pp. 84–88Google Scholar.

89. BM, Anne Barnardiston to Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Jan. 1641, Harl. MSS, 384, fol. 27. This document came to my attention through Kenneth Shipps. I hope and expect that Shipps's doctoral dissertation on the relations between the clergy and laity in early Stuart East Anglia will firm up or blow up some of the framework above outlined. Meantime, I thank him for permission to publish this letter.

90. Stone could well justify it on other grounds: that enough — or fourteen years' work — is enough. I would heartily agree.

91. That politically passive busybody, John Chamberlain, was already counting the votes of the bishops in the Addled Parliament of 1614. There are subsequent intimations of awareness in the House of Commons of the influence of the court “bloc” in the House of Lords, and in crucial matters it was clear that the bishops provided the court with the controlling votes in the upper house in the Short Parliament. Firth, C. H., The House of Lords during the Civil War (London, 1910), pp. 36, 48, 66Google Scholar.

92. As late as 1607, with surprising docility, the House of Commons swallowed without protest the Earl of Northampton's view that only the upper house was institutionally qualified to deal with “matters of state” such as foreign affairs. As representatives of purely local interests, he alleged, the House of Commons was institutionally disqualified, regardless of any accidental qualifications of some of its members in such matters. Ibid., pp. 34-35.

93. Consequences inverse to the intention of the revolutionaries should not count, for example, bureaucratization in Soviet Russia, Bonapartism in nineteenth-century France, or the increased secularization of politics in England after 1660. These may have been in part consequences of what the revolutionaries did; they were not at all what the revolutionaries wanted.

94. For the notion of the fabric of imperatives, see Hexter, J. H., “The Loom of Language and the Fabric of Imperatives: The Case Il Principe and Utopia,” A.H.R., LXIX (1964), 945–68Google Scholar.

95. The worst that can be said for the estimates of Thomas Wilson (1601) and Gregory King (1688) is that they provide no ground for believing otherwise The estimates are given in Stone, , Crisis, App. XII, p. 767Google Scholar.

96. The trajectory of expectations could probably be traced with reasonable accuracy by a study of the successive terms of political settlements proposed or deemed acceptable by the various Puritan groups, excepting only small clusters of apocalyptic chiliasts.