Popular Politics

1. Popular Politics Mark Knights

2. Picking up and introducing themes • Last week: Gabriel on authority and republicanism • And looking ahead: • Political Thought • Absolutism and its alternatives

3. The separation and convergence of social and political history • Trevelyan: social history as history with the politics taken out. • Manning: early modern English rioters ‘devoid of political consciousness’ [Villlage Revolts 1509-1640 (1988)] • But investigation of crowd activity in C18th (Rudé, Thompson) suggested otherwise. • Patrick Collinson called for ‘a new political history, which is social history with the politics put back in, or an account of political processes which is also social’.

4. What is politics? • power and power relationships? • But a danger we might see power everywhere. Adrian Leftwich: ‘Politics is a defining characteristic of all human groups, and always has been’. • Is religious conflict inherently political? • Or is politics to do with the state?

5. What type of state? Our view of the state changes according to how we approach it: Two models: • power/might that uses coercion; In this model popular politics is resistance to the state. Top down. [Marxism] • consent, collaboration or legitimated authority. In this model popular politics is negotiation with, even participation in, the state. Bottom up. We thus get two very different and conflicting concepts of the state

6. Re-thinking the early modern state • But 1980s forced rethinking – were states very strong, even if they seemed to be?

7. Was the strength of a state in fact determined by the extent to which central government co-operated with local power brokers and when they had popular legitimacy? In this scenario, legitimateauthority is what is important rather than power. • "If you have fortresses and yet the people hate you they [the fortresses] will not save you; once the people have taken up arms they will never lack outside help." Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

8. Legitimacy – political and religious • How coercive could the early modern state be? • The problem of voluntary office-holders in an era without a police force. • Where was the state? Was the centre in the localities? • The problem of the composite state.

9. Elite vsPopular? • Process of negotiation (concessions or attempts to influence policy and practice). • Local brokers: the ‘better sort’? Importance of office-holders: in GB not just deputy lieutenants, JPs, town magistrates, sheriffs and grand jurors, but also constables, beadles, tithingmen, nightwatchmen, vestrymen and churchwardens, overseers of the poor, petty jurors, local courts. • Mark Goldie: c. 1700 about 1/20th of the adult males in England were ‘governing’ in some sense. And because many were rotated frequently this meant very large scale inclusion.

10. Wayne Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700: ‘it is useful to regard politics as an ongoing bargaining process between those who claim governmental authority in a given territory (rulers) and those over whom that authority is said to extend (subjects)’.

11. Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003): ‘Popular politics simply refers to the presence of ordinary, non-elite subjects as the audience for or interlocutors with a political action …What defined popular politics, then, was not the social class of the people politicking, but rather the extent to which the governed played a role in their own governance. Popular politics presumed, in practice if not in theory, that issues of substantial importance to the life of the nation would be discussed and debated in public, and popular politics accepted, again in practice if not in theory, that those debates would significantly affect how the issues were decided’.

12. Choices and strategies • Varieties of resistance: • Riot [religious policy, taxation, foreign affairs] • Revolt [General crisis of mid C17th. Britain; France; Naples and Palermo in Italy; Portugal; Muscovy; Switzerland] • Rebellion • Seditious words • 1626 Austrian peasants sang : • The whole country must be overturned • For we peasants are now to be the lords • It is we who will sit in the shade • 1651 Fronde in Bordeaux said that ‘the real cause of sedition and political strife is the excessive wealth of the few’

13. But also varieties of dialogue and debate • Print

15. Petitions, addresses, oaths • Humble request or supplication that could carry popular demands or express popular loyalism; oaths of loyalty • 5209 in GB 1660-1715; 500 associations • 426 associations signed in 1696 – Norwich’s two rival texts (with only one word different) carry 6875 signatures, almost the entire adult male population • Process of dialogue within state

16. Loyalism as a form of popular politics • Rather than assuming politics is always about contest we can see it can also be about the process of creating loyalties to regimes and institutions • loyal to what? • Questions of authority and legitimacy created moral dilemmas

17. Women and popular politics • Religion could give women a role to intervene politically • Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent. Executed 20 April 1534 with five associates for blasphemy. She had visions believed to be direct revelations from God and these took a political turn. An angel commanded her to tell a monk ‘to ‘that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’. This was treason to king – even if loyal to her idea of God. • 1705 Coventry election crowd contained many women and was addressed by a speech from one Captain Kate who, slapping one of the Tory candidates on the back, proclaimed, ‘now, boys, or never for the Church’

18. Unintended consequences • The need to secure legitimacy and collaboration could also have the unintended consequence of creating a public debate and a popular politics. • Even absolute kings needed to display their power to the people

19. Conclusion • What is politics? • Different ways of conceptualising the state • Coercive power or consensual/negotiated authority • How does that process of dialogue work? • Was popular politics always radical?