Why Absolutism Failed in England and the State Grew Stronger

The idea

The exam's first band pairs Louis XIV's France with the England that refused him, and the anchor's argument is that England's failure to build absolutism produced the stronger state. The failure came first. In sixteen hundred the crown was poor: a small bureaucracy, no standing army, and revenue only from taxes that a gentry-dominated parliament could refuse. Charles I claimed the prerogative and broke the peace, taxing without parliament, forcing loans, accepting the Petition of Right in sixteen twenty-eight and then ruling without parliament for eleven years. A Scottish prayer book ended the personal rule, because a Scottish army needed an English one, and an English army needed money, and money needed parliament. Once summoned, parliament declared his measures illegal, and war followed in sixteen forty-two. The New Model Army, disciplined and paid by London's money, won it; the king was tried and executed in sixteen forty-nine; and the republic that followed, a dictatorship under Cromwell as Lord Protector from sixteen fifty-three, proved as authoritarian as the king had been. The Restoration of sixteen sixty settled nothing, and when James II appointed Catholics against the law and produced a Catholic heir, parliament invited a Dutch prince and made him king on its own terms. The Bill of Rights of sixteen eighty-nine forbade taxes, a peacetime army and the suspension of laws without parliament, and required free elections and frequent sessions. That is the failure of absolutism: three attempts at the prerogative, one civil war, one execution, one deposition. The strength came next, and the anchor is precise about why. The earlier conflicts had come from the state's smallness and parliament's refusal to fund a crown it did not control. After sixteen eighty-nine the elites in parliament were the government, secure from royal usurpation, and they built the state they had starved. War with France from sixteen ninety demanded it; the Bank of England from sixteen ninety-four financed it, selling bonds backed by the state at interest investors trusted. Where Louis sold titles and died bankrupt, Britain borrowed and stayed solvent, and by the next century it was France's chief rival. Consent, not command, turned out to be the cheaper way to raise money and the surer way to keep it.