The politics of war finance in an age of confessional strife: a comparative Anglo-European view

The politics of war finance in an age of confessional strife: a comparative Anglo-European view The century after the Protestant Reformation was a century of warfare in Europe. The main conflicts were, of course, the long Hispano-Dutch straggle and the Thirty Years' War. W e now recognise war as a major historical catalyst and component of change in the early m o d e m world.1 It drove the state-building process and drew up the European religious map. It was fundamental to the seventeenth-century crisis insofar as w e can use that term.2 W a r finance—the funding and the economic support of war—was central in early m o d e m fiscal management and essential to the political scene. The funding of war often triggered a dramatic interaction of ideological, material and more purely political influences. This nexus is pertinent in understanding an era marked by extensive economic warfare and by tension between confessional politics and realpolitik.3 A study of war finance in this age demonstrates how a society organised its economic resources in the light of both its political structure and aims and its ideological context. Such relationships can thus shed light on the complex politics of the era, particularly those of the early seventeenth century. Early Stuart England has also become the subject of an eloquent revisionist argument according to which English society became vulnerable to political crisis and constitutional breakdown largely because it was * I thank John Morrill and his Cambridge seminar for their stimulating observations, the Earl Russell for his open-minded encouragement and discussion, and the late Sir Geoffrey Elton as well as David Underdown, John Gooch and Barbara Reeve for their thoughts on earlier drafts. I thank the Controller of H M Stationery Office for permission to use manuscript material. Some of the research for this article was funded by the Australian-American Educational Foundation in the form of a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, held at Yale in 1987-88. 1 See, for example, J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620, London, 1985; G. Parker, 77K; Thirty Years' War, London, 1985. 2 The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, ed. G. Parker and L. M . Smith, London, 1978, repr. London, 1985, pp. 14-15. 3 J. I. Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606-1661, Oxford, 1982; Parker, 77M: 27u'rry Years' War, pp. 219-21. P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 86 L. J. Reeve unable tofighta war, in the case of the 1620s a European war.4 This view, however, would appear to be in need of qualification.5 I will argue here that early Stuart England could effectively fight in, and influence the outcome of, such a war. This has implications for our reading of England's political crisis in the late 1620s, Charles I's retreat to personal rule, the nature of early Stuart political society, and the course of the continental wars. The argument to be presented here involves, of necessity, a comparative approach. In the Thirty Years' War, England participated in what was, materially and ideologically, a pan-European contest. National power was involved, not in absolute but in relative terms.6 Comparative analysis of England and other European states thus provides the essential perspective. This approach has not been sufficiently exploited in the study of early Stuart war-making. Yet it allows us to transcend the false and facile distinction between national and international history.7 Ideas know no frontiers, but the frequent myopia of national history is underlined by an age of religious conflicts and cross-currents: international themes so elegandy charted—within the Protestant world—by Patrick Collinson.8 H o w was war fought during this period? What did it cost? While the early m o d e m 'military revolution' is still being hotly debated, there is no doubt that, by the early seventeenth century, there was a revolutionary increase in the scale of war. States were attempting to raise ever-larger forces on land and sea. O n the battlefield, firepower was n o w dominant and * C. Russell, Parliaments...