Thomas_More
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I don’t know anything about Max Weber.
France had to wait for its overthrow of the Ancien régime, but monarchical centralisation was completed by Richelieu and Mazarin in the 17th century. In England monarchical centralisation was achieved by the Tudors. There were different elements within the bourgeoisie. You don’t have feudalism on Tuesday and wake up to capitalism Wednesday morning.The English Civil War was the struggle of the elements of the bourgeoisie who were tired of the royal monopoly on trade and royal restrictions, as they saw it, on their profiteering. The French Revolution was the equivalent of this, but with the feudal aristocracy still a hindrance, though servile to the king. The aristocracy was filled with bourgeois upstarts from the time of Louis XIV, called noblesse de la robe. These married into families of the feudal aristocracy, the noblesse d’épée, to secure titles, and some of these were to share the fate of the king come the Revolution. Most of the bourgeoisie however, being the Third Estate, wanted the aristocracy’s hold on land and the state out of the way. Even so, 80% of the guillotined were labourers, only 6% aristocrats, and the rest men and women of letters and miscellaneous proletarians.
But France wasn’t “waiting”; it had different circumstances and disputes of its own. Its intervening century was alive with ideas and as vital as in England.
More was a devout Catholic, and martyrdom for the faith is part and parcel of that. Because of his psychology he could not possibly have sworn to the Oath of Supremacy.
Winstanley and the others had no such religious commitment or way of thinking for sacrificing their lives.“Politically ahead” … The political reflects the material conditions. But you are being unfair to France if you don’t take into account the intellectual upheavals happening there in the 16th century.
The Wars of the Roses in England had left Henry VII Tudor and his family sole autocrats. There was no feasible feudal opposition left, even though his reign was beset by lords putting up pretenders. Henry defeated them all, abolished feudal liveries and demanded sole loyalty to Tudor centralised power. Under his successor land enclosures exploded as never before: a grand theft traumatising the people and rupturing the social fabric of centuries. The Reformation in England, spilling over into Scotland and Wales, was the ideological expression of this social and agrarian revolution. This is what overturned English society, beginning a century before the Civil War.
In France Louis XI had failed, unlike Henry VII of England, in his own struggle for monarchical centralisation of power against the feudality headed by the Duke of Burgundy. Even so, centralisation was to proceed tentatively, and in the face of powerful feudal resistance, throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The tolerant and progressive Francis I. presided over a vibrant intellectual scene, permitting religious debates which would enable many French reformists to remain within the Catholic Church. The Wars of Religion at the close of the 16th century resulted in the victory of Henri IV, a Huguenot and survivor until he became king of a lifetime of assassination attempts. Under his rule the Edict of Nantes would grant the protestants freedom of religion for nearly a century.
The Reformation in France was not a failure. It was able to take place within the Catholic Church via Gallicanism – autonomy from Rome without separation. Much was the same for the Church in Spain. In both countries the monarchs took precedence over Church affairs, without the need to separate from Rome.I don’t think we can blame Winstanley, Coppe, or anyone for keeping a low profile in later years. What sense is there in martyrdom?
Well yes, it is all political. I don’t think William, or Robert, Cecil feared much, but they knew the value of demonising Catholicism. At school we were told of a book at the time (1970s; I haven’t been able to locate it) presenting the Gunpowder Plot as a set-up. It certainly benefited the authorities.
Popophobia 😀 didn’t prevent Cromwell making war on the Dutch Republic, the strongest Protestant power in the world. Nor was the English crown deterred from fighting on Richelieu’s side in the Thirty Years War.
Like today, ideology/religion takes a back seat where economic gain is concerned.
The spur to colonial enterprise during the “Common-wealth” also saw the regular kidnapping of children in England for sale in the colonies as slaves, and commenced the transportation and sale in large numbers of convicts to the West Indies.
A word on those Puritans who established the Massachusetts colony, some of whom were friends of the young Cromwell: toleration was not in their Puritan lexicon.
Arrival of Puritan Calvinist "Christians" (Pilgrims) @ Plymouth Rock
byu/Snoo_40410 inHistoryMemesThere were two main groups of Puritans in England. They were originally united in their common disgust with the episcopal structure retained by the Church of England.
The Presbyterians were conservative parliamentarians in the Civil War, and were reluctant at first to do without the King, but definitely did not want his bishops, nor any bishops, and wanted the episcopal church gone. They were also afraid of the Independents, also Puritans, but attracting a less bourgeois and more revolutionary and republican element.
The Presbyterians controlled Parliament after the first civil war, and controlled the king who had fled to Scotland.
The Levellers, whom the war had encouraged in demanding greater liberties, controlled the English army, compelling Oliver Cromwell to oust the Presbyterians and clear Parliament. Cromwell then went to war with the Presbyterian government in Edinburgh, and these panicked, handing over the king to him. But soon after the king’s defeat Cromwell turned on the Levellers, even though he was an Independent, and established martial law.
Independency in puritanism had encouraged a blossoming of communistic and other thinkers and groups by its very nature of having shown established authority was neither divine nor invulnerable. Hence arose the Diggers, Ranters etc. But Cromwell would crush them and also terrorise the army into submission via colonial ventures. Again “OUR revolution, not YOURS!”In Scotland the Presbyterians established the cruellest, severest and most misogynistic government of all.
Anabaptism was given an impetus in Europe in the 16th century but, unlike protestantism, it stressed mutual aid, good deeds and compassion. It was a movement of the poor, unlike protestantism, and its ideals entered England and influenced the “Ranter” sects – also suppressed by Cromwell.
I think it is simplistic to say Puritanism inspired proto-communism. Firstly, we should recognise there were two puritanisms, one extremely vicious and conservative, and bourgeois; the other, Independency, including as many theologies as there were individuals.
I think it is also important to recall that the English “Puritan” revolution was a minority phenomenon. The vast majority of the common people hated Cromwell’s rule and could not accept the killing of the king, in spite of all Milton & Co’s propaganda.
While Lutheranism also believes faith alone matters, and not deeds, Calvinism takes that further. It was even more suited therefore to the rapacity of the upstart class in England, where it had free rein.
Calvinism blames poverty on the poor. Bankruptcy used to get you excommunicated from the Presbyterian kirk in Scotland. The persecution of the propertyless after the Henrician enclosures, the Vagrancy Acts of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, are all justified in Calvinist theology, as was the terrorising of the working class via the “Protestant Work Ethic.”
It is the original root of even today’s guilt-tripping of the unemployed and benefit claimants.
Calvinism is the ultimate capitalist theology.
Even though capitalism developed in the Catholic world, Catholic monarchies prevented Calvinist protestantism from taking the helm – although Jansenism tried to “calvinise” Catholicism. The traditional “Christ friend of the poor” myth was just too strong in Catholicism, despite its own ferocity in other ways. The running of charity hospitals was also a strong medieval tradition bound up with monasticism – the first institution to be scrapped in England and Scotland. Elizabeth instead authorised workhouses, in which the poor could be worked to death.Cranmer was influenced more by Lutheranism than Cromwell. Cromwell kept his theological views to himself as chief hatchet-man for Henry, who burned both Catholics and Protestants.
Cranmer became more of an evangelical (Calvinist).
The two basic facts are, that protestantism, mostly of the Calvinist variety, was welcomed after Henry’s death and would only then influence the Church of England. But the expropriation of church lands, secession from Rome, and dissolution of the monasteries, with the mass eviction of the English peasantry, all took place in England BEFORE England became Protestant, under Henry VIII and his Church, which was NOT protestant until after his death.
Lutheranism prevailed in Scandinavia, but I don’t know any details on that.
English protestantism was Calvinist. Within this grew a plethora, beginning with Puritans within the Church of England wanting to “purify” the Church of its Catholic rituals. Unhappy with bishops, the Nonconformists left the Church and themselves divided into Presbyterians and Independents, both strict Calvinists. Never was Lutheranism on the English scene.
The proto-communists you associate with the Puritans, like the Diggers and Ranters, owe more to the Anabaptists than the Puritans. Anabaptists, and Quakers are not protestants and were persecuted by the established churches and by the Puritans. They may have been splinters from the Reformation but their kind are pre-protestant too, and owe more to the Waldensians and such groups.
I was tracing the Nazis back to both Luther’s anti-semitism and to the fossilization of the German princedoms caused by Luther’s revolt – a fossilization which put a 20th century Germany in conflict with the colonial powers of Britain and France.
I never said all or most of the German proletariat were anti-semitic, but a majority were, and responded as expected to the scapegoating of the Jews.
The evolution of the nation-state spans over the religious sects. Where Catholicism retained control did not mean feudalism did. Mercantile capitalism thrived in both Catholic and Protestant countries, and both amassed colonial territories and wealth.
There were protestant feudal rulers, in Germany and central Europe. The powerful Nadasdy-Bathorys in Hungary for instance.
