Dictionary:

monarchy

  (mŏn'ər-kē, -är'-)

1. Government by a monarch.
2. A state ruled or headed by a monarch.

[Middle English monarchie, from Old French, from Latin monarchia, from Greek monarkhiā, from monarkhos, monarch. See monarch.]

ADVERTISEMENT

For more information on monarchy, visit Britannica.com.

If we accept Cerdic as founder, the English monarchy dates back to about 519. The Scottish monarchy may be dated from.c. 843, when Kenneth MacAlpin of Dalriada united Picts and Scots to form the kingdom of Alba. The role of the monarch was essentially that of battle-leader. As a consequence, strict primogeniture was slow to establish itself, since it could result in a child or a simpleton on the throne. Few monarchs lasted long enough for old age to be a problem. With expectation of life short, it was unlikely that the eldest son would be old enough for the task. Edgar's eldest son Edward was only 13 when chosen in 975 but the innovation was hardly encouraging since he was murdered within three years.

Apart from waging war—admittedly at times a demanding business—early kings had little to do. They attempted very few of the activities of the modern state. Justice was dispensed by landowners themselves; the king did not make law, though he might declare what it was; there was little revenue to collect, though he was entitled to support and hospitality. There was no economic or education policy to supervise.

But the great effort needed to push back the Danes in the 9th and 10th cents. produced important developments in the institutions of Wessex. Burhs, erected as strong points, had to be built and garrisoned, naval vessels commissioned and manned, and all had to be paid for. By the reign of Athelstan a much more complex governmental structure is apparent and the kingdom of England has emerged. Indeed, by the reign of Edgar, one can see the outlines of a claim to British sovereignty, with the monarch rowed on the Dee in 973 by kings from Scotland, from Wales, and of the British.

With the Conquest in 1066 the kingdom was once more in alien hands. The first three Norman rulers were powerful. Their significance is seen more in relations with the other rulers in the British Isles than in domestic reform. Scotland felt the change quickly. William I paralleled the expedition by Cnut in 1031 with his own march to the Tay in 1072, which brought about the submission of Malcolm Canmore. His son William Rufus reoccupied Cumberland in 1092. Into Wales, the incursion of Norman lords began, particularly in the south, as early as one year after Hastings. The Norman attack upon Ireland was postponed until the 12th cent. and the reign of Henry II.

Since medieval government centred on the king, its efficacy varied greatly. Under strong rulers, the monarchy advanced, royal justice was extended, revenue increased, local government reorganized. Under weak rulers, control became slack and important concessions were made to subjects— Magna Carta in 1215, even if the immediate beneficiaries were the barons. Monarchs were frequently in danger since they were still expected to lead in battle: Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI were deposed and killed, Edward V murdered, Richard III killed on the battlefield. Success in war, on the other hand, gave the king a strong, if not impregnable, position— William I, Edward I, Edward III, Henry V.

The prestige and standing of the monarchy was enhanced in a variety of ways. The coronation ceremony became more elaborate and more dignified. Some early coronations were so hasty that rehearsals could hardly have been possible. Henry I apologized to Anselm for his coronation three days after succeeding Rufus, explaining that ‘enemies would have risen up against me’. Monarchs were competitive. The kings of France were proud that, at the coronation of Clovis, an angel had appeared bearing holy oil: fortunately the balance was more than restored when the Virgin Mary herself presented Becket with holy oil, which was quickly incorporated into the English coronation ceremony.

It was also of value to a monarch to be associated with great buildings and great deeds. The Confessor built Westminster abbey, consecrated just before his death, and Henry III rebuilt it. Rufus built Westminster hall and Richard II embellished it. David I of Scotland founded the abbeys of Holyrood and Dunfermline, later turned into royal residences. Edward III's institution of the Order of the Garter was supported by a new chapel at Windsor, completed by Edward IV, and deliberately echoed the legendary deeds of King Arthur.

The Tudor period is usually regarded as the apogee of the English monarchy. Certainly it was stronger than in the 15th cent., when the Wars of the Roses produced frequent changes of ruler. Yet lawlessness and rebellion were not easily stamped out. Several of their policies returned to haunt their successors. The take-over of church powers added greatly to the patronage of the monarch but also involved him more directly in religious disputation at a time when the waves of controversy were beginning to run high. The Civil War, after all, began with Charles I's dispute over religion with his Scottish subjects. The vast proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries were not merely squandered by the crown but finished up with the nobility, helping to strengthen its position. Henry VIII's use of Parliament to effect the Reformation, and Mary and Elizabeth's use to adjust it, gave it confidence to challenge the monarchy in the following century.

Though at one level the Civil War was disastrous for monarchy—the king beheaded, the institution abolished—in the end it may have helped its survival. The role of the army in the 1650s and the social upheaval of the Commonwealth period sobered the gentry and nobility and prepared the ground for the peaceful restoration of Charles II in 1660. The complex negotiations of the early 1640s, in which Charles I had described the role of the crown as a balancing one, pointed the way to a compromise between crown and Parliament. From the melodrama of James II's reign, the monarchy emerged strengthened—limited certainly in its formal powers and prerogatives, but more in touch with the wishes of the nation.

From 1688 onwards, though the monarchy retained fundamental powers, it was in slow constitutional retreat. The Bill of Rights removed the suspending power and the dispensing power as it had been employed. The right of veto fell into abeyance after Anne's reign. Though the choice of ministers remained an important prerogative it was increasingly limited by the growth of party loyalty, and the fiasco of Lord Bute at the start of George III's reign suggested that royal favourites would no longer serve. Even the granting of honours fell largely into the hands of the prime minister and new orders had to be invented so that the monarch could retain some personal control.

But there were compensations in the changing role and the crown's retreat opened the way for a more national function. After the first three Georges, who had revealed little desire to show themselves to their subjects, George IV introduced a new note, with well-publicized visits to Scotland and Ireland. Though Victoria was not a battle-leader, she undoubtedly became a symbol of the nation and of the empire, as her Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 demonstrated.

The 20th-cent. British monarchy survived when most others were swept away because it came to terms with democracy. The dangers that awaited it were, in the end, not red revolution or republican egalitarianism, but the more insidious difficulty of knowing what image to present in an age of rapidly changing standards, and how to do it. The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 appears in retrospect less a grave constitutional issue than an early warning of the problems that would arise if the monarch, or members of the royal family, were not prepared to do their duty. The monarchy was not helped by the growth of a vulgar, censorious, and meretricious press. Universal education produced a nation of critics, less respectful than their 7th-cent. ancestors.

[For a listing of kings of France] The election of Hugues Capet in 987 as king of France saw the start of a long line of monarchs who ruled territories that were enlarged and gradually welded together to form the French state. The Capetians were to survive in the direct line until 1328, when a Valois became heir, and the Valois kings were in turn succeeded by the Bourbons from 1589 to 10 August 1792. The Revolution abolished the monarchy in 1792, but it was re-established in 1814 [see Restoration] and was to last until the Revolution of 1848 [see Republics, 2]. Although contenders for a throne had no chance of success under the Third Republic, the monarchical principle re-emerged as a strong intellectual force in French politics at the end of the 19th c. with the formation of Action Française.

Throughout the ancien régime the precise limits of royal power were unclear. The close link maintained by the kings with the Church was an essential element in their authority. Kings were seen as God's lieutenants on earth and so had a sacred quality and a duty to defend the true (Catholic) religion. God was the supreme judge, and so too was the king in earthly matters. In popular tradition these qualities had been exhibited in exemplary fashion by St Louis (Louis IX) in the 13th c., and they were still emphasized, until the end of the regime, by the coronation ceremony, during which the new king was anointed with holy water. The popular definition of kingship hardly altered between the Middle Ages and the last decades of the regime: the king could do no wrong (although he might have evil advisers), was wise and blessed with the gift of ‘the royal touch’, curing scrofula by the laying on of hands. Learned juristic definitions wavered between an emphasis on the medieval seigneurial origins of royal power [see Feudalism], which was later buttressed by conciliarist notions applied to the secular sphere, and the revived Roman tradition, which attributed far wider powers to the king than the former, more contractual concepts.

From the late 14th c. onwards royal jurists tended to apply to internal affairs that maxim first exploited against papal pretentions: rex in sui regno imperator est, arguing that the powers of the king over his territories were akin to those of the Roman emperors. Although such claims were never incorporated into royal edicts, they gave rise to much learned debate, particularly during the Wars of Religion. However, in his Traité des seigneuries (3rd edn., 1610) Loyseau could still put into words what many had believed for a long time, namely that there were five regalian rights: the king could make laws, create offices, decide upon peace and war, have the final decision in judicial matters, and mint coin. Beyond these rights, which hardly amounted to a constitution (though many historians have indeed claimed that France did have an ‘unwritten, customary, constitution’), most other areas of the exercise of royal power were open to differing interpretations—according to political theory, local customs, or provincial and corporate privileges. For example, the right to tax people without their consent [see Taxation] remained contentious because many continued to believe that the king should live off his own estates except in wartime. Additionally, and fundamentally, all agreed that, because God had instituted rulers for the benefit of mankind, kings had a duty to defend the commonwealth and protect the life and security of their subjects.

Strictly speaking, no king was bound by the decisions of his predecessors. However, monarchical states need continuity between rulers and their laws must not die with them, so a fiction had developed that the king never died: ‘the king is dead, long live the king!’ In this way the royal office passed without interruption through the male line, and thus jurists solved the problem of the continuity or lapse of royal legislative acts over succeeding generations. In addition to its theoretical attributes, French kingship was a dynastic affair in which the interests of the royal family clearly counted for as much as any regalian duties.

To protect their own interests and those of their subjects, and thereby fulfil their monarchical duties, the kings had evolved certain judicial, financial, and administrative structures. Most of these had made their first appearance during the 13th and 14th c., during the period of strengthening royal power before the Hundred Years War. Often built upon pre-existing areas of administration, either feudal or religious, these institutions had created a stable, if complex, administrative geography by the 16th c. During the 16th c. secretaries of state emerged and the royal council (Conseil d'État or Conseil d'en haut) developed. The extensive use of intendants from the 1630s reveals the need to control royal officials and coerce the population into paying heavier taxes. Many historians have seen the emergence of ‘the modern state’ in such administrative developments, and identify the notion of ‘absolute monarchy’ with these changes. However, the term ‘absolute monarchy’ was a description of the undivided nature of royal sovereignty—the ultimate power of decision lay with the king alone, and not, for example, with an aristocratic council or a representative assembly—and should not, strictly speaking, be applied to the institutional structures, while the word ‘absolutism’ is a neologism dating from the 1830s and best forgotten, so misleading is it.

There is an important distinction to be made between theoretical sovereignty in the ancien régime and the actual exercise of power; if royal sovereignty was in the theory ‘absolute’, royal authority was in practice very restricted in comparison with the modern state; its exercise was subject to a host of traditional, customary (but legal) checks. Even writers who interpreted royal authority as being truly unlimited stated that the king would never want to act unjustly, which was to say, despotically. The kings were therefore ‘absolute’ monarchs constrained by the laws of the land, not despots, and were not by any means all-powerful. For this reason, persuasion, propaganda, bluff, negotiation, and compromise were as much a part of the normal techniques of monarchical rule as were bureaucratic or administrative practices.

During the 16th and 17th c. the royal court greatly developed as an instrument of government, reaching its apogee under Louis XIV at Versailles. Far from being merely a place where the nobility was domesticated, the court was a crucially important central institution, the fount of patronage, the centre-piece of the financial system—it was an arena in which administrators were expected to be courtiers and where aristocratic values dominated. Louis XIV was as much a prisoner of the court as his leading servants, a fact which should cause us to question the orthodox view that his reign saw the triumph of an ‘administrative monarchy’. For the monarchy, in parallel with bureaucratic channels, patronage and clientage remained important instruments of government. Even so, royal power was so restricted by privileges that political crises of both a judicial and fiscal nature were frequent from the early 17th c. Political debate from the 1750s combined with religious scepticism to undermine the legitimacy of monarchical authority, so that it had few defenders by the late 1780s. The final crisis of the monarchy in 1787-9 revealed a monarchy unable to overrule privileged resistance to fiscal reform, in an age when the exercise of royal power was increasingly regarded as ‘despotic’. Unable to surmount the crisis, the ‘absolute’ monarchy collapsed in 1789, to be replaced by a constitutional monarchy until 1792.

[Peter Campbell]

Bibliography

• D. Richet, La France moderne: l'esprit des institutions (1973)
• P. R. Campbell, The Ancien Régime in France (1988)

We know a great deal about the monarchs of early modern Europe, but we know much less about monarchy, that is, the institution of personal rulership. Until the French Revolution, monarchy was usually taken for granted by Europeans. Since it was endorsed by the Bible and Aristotle, the touchstones of written truth, few thought to analyze it further. Those who did, like Jean Bodin or Thomas Hobbes, were viewed with suspicion by more cautious minds. The adjectives that we employ today to describe types of monarchy, such as "absolutist," "divine right," or "constitutional," were not used in a systematic way before the eighteenth century because they were notgreatlyneeded. Other terms, like "thaumaturgic kingship," "sacral kingship," "the king's two bodies," or "enlightened absolutism," were coined long after 1800. While they may be quite useful in understanding earlymodern monarchy, it would be a mistake to apply them too rigorously, as if monarchs adhered to them as underlying principles.

Institutions that everyone takes for granted tend to be conservative, and this was certainly the case with monarchy. It generally fostered a distrust of political change. Yet monarchs could sponsor the most daring innovations, which became more acceptable because of their support. Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable feature of early modern European monarchy was its recurring dynamism, its ability to create or adapt to new circumstances. Unlike its counterparts in many other parts of the world, European kingship between 1450 and 1800 was constantly changing in response to competition or crisis. By the eighteenth century, European monarchs possessed more effective means of communication and control than their rivals elsewhere, combined with better military technology. These advantages encouraged them to impose themselves on other parts of the world. Their systems of governance may not have been superior, but their organization was, however haphazard it may seem to us today. Thus, the transformation of rulership in early modern Europe had global consequences.

Institutional Definitions

If called upon to define "monarchy," we might say that it is rulership over a political entity by one person who inherits his or her position by hereditary succession, is crowned, reigns for life, and exercises authority by the will of God rather than by the choice of the people. While this may be a reasonable overall description, it does not fit most early modern European monarchies very precisely, because they were so diverse. To begin with, few of them were simple political entities. Most were composite states, amalgamations of regions, provinces, or even kingdoms, whose chief or only point of unity was the person of the monarch. Spain after 1516 was not a single administrative unit; rather, it was a collection of separate kingdoms united only by allegiance to a single ruler. The same was true of Great Britain between 1603 and 1707. Today, national states are held together by identities based on common values and impersonal institutions. It is hard for us to imagine a political body that would dissolve if a single office were vacant, but that was the case with most early modern monarchies.

This in turn complicated the meaning of rulership, which might relate to little more than the existence of a monarch at the head of a realm. The dayto-day direction of the polity might rest in the hands of the king only in an abstract sense. He was, to be sure, the ultimate source of authority in the kingdom. Yet nowhere did he make every political decision, either alone or in his council; and nowhere was his power unrestricted. Customs, privileges, traditions, laws, Estates, assemblies, and parliaments—all put boundaries on royal power, sometimes so severely that the king was able to do very little on his own. Besides, in the "age of the favorite," kings were often happy to delegate power to a leading minister, such as Olivares in Spain, Richelieu in France, Buckingham in England, Oxenstierna in Sweden, and Griffenfeld in Denmark.

Personal rulership was in flux during the early modern period. It was traditionally understood to mean two things above all: leadership in war and the administration of justice. Both roles had seriously decayed by the mid-1700s. Medieval kings regularly led troops into battle and were eager to intervene in strategic decisions during wartime. This began to change with the expansion of armies in the 1500s, and by 1750, generals and military experts were firmly in charge. Kings stopped regularly dispensing personal justice in the late Middle Ages and rarely exercised direct supervision of judicial systems, although they continued to use pardons as a means of exhibiting their final say over the law. The expanded mechanisms of war and impersonal justice were made possible by tax collection, which was carried out by officials acting in the king's name. Taxation became the most important practical function of government. Those who resisted taxes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries liked to claim that the ruler was ignorant of the tyranny and corruption of his officers ("if the king only knew . . ."), but by the eighteenth century this polite fiction had worn thin. The rumor that Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) was involved in a pacte de famine against his own people was a crucial factor in the erosion of his rulership over France. In some eyes, the warrior leader and font of justice had become little more than a chief bureaucrat.

Was monarchy always strictly hereditary? Poland, Bohemia (to 1627), Hungary (to 1688) and the Holy Roman Empire were elected monarchies, and nobles in other countries, notably Muscovy, Denmark, and Sweden, could fall back on the elective principle in times of crisis. The only nation where hereditary right was fixed in law was France, which was why some observers, like Claude de Seyssel, thought the French monarchy was more stable than any other. Yet in spite of its supposed virtues, the Salic Law, invented to keep English claimants off the French throne by ruling out inheritance in the female line, was not imitated in the rest of Europe. The English determined their own succession by armed struggle in 1461, 1471, and 1485, by usurpation in 1483, by the novel principle of female inheritance in 1553 and 1558, and by parliamentary statute in 1689 and 1714. The Swedes, whose Vasa kings were viewed as mere usurpers by their former Danish overlords, thrice chose a king by legislative approval. The Spanish royal inheritance of 1702 was dictated by the testament of Charles II, not by lineage alone. The Ottoman succession was never secure. In spite of Mehmed II's edict requiring a new sultan to execute his brothers, the empire suffered several usurpations and wars of succession before the "law of fratricide" fell into disuse in the seventeenth century.

Did a king rule for life? Not necessarily. Charles I of England was tried and executed in 1649; his son James II was deposed in 1688, although Parliament declared it an abdication. Queen Christina of Sweden really did abdicate in 1654 (she expected to be treated with royal dignity for the rest of her life). Philip V took the unprecedented step of first abdicating in 1724, then reclaiming the Spanish throne after the premature death of his son, Luis. Victor Amadeus of Savoy's abdication in 1730 was perceived as a devious ploy to regain the throne with more power (it failed when he was imprisoned). Ottoman sultans could not abdicate, but they were regularly murdered, particularly by rebellious Janissaries. The same grim fate was meted out to several Russian tsars, including the false Dmitry, Peter III, and Ivan VI.

Not all kings were crowned. The Ottoman Empire lacked a coronation ceremony, as did Castile; in both cases, the ruler was simply proclaimed, and banners unfurled. Elsewhere, the coronation ceremony was carefully observed, but the ordines or rules that governed the ritual were always subject to revision. The church had at first resisted the idea that coronation made the king into a holy figure, like a priest. By the early modern period, however, the clergy had given way to royal assertiveness. The coronation was now represented as an ordination, replete with holy oils and chrisms for anointing the king's body. It conferred an aura of sacredness on the royal person. Yet in hereditary monarchies, coronation did not initiate rulership, which began at the death of the preceding monarch. This contradiction was often noted, never resolved. In the eighteenth century, the legitimizing power of the coronation declined throughout Europe, and it became simply another occasion for display and panoply.

While coronation ceremonies usually retained some form of popular acclamation, they tended to reinforce the idea that early modern kings ruled by the will of God rather than that of the people. This was a consistent message, even in Poland, where the king was elected by the nobles and was frequently bullied by them. In practice, however, the will of God could be narrowly interpreted, as the Providence that maintained the king on the throne and gave him victories. It might also extend to acts of the king that directly invoked the deity, like the miracle of the royal touch in England and France; but when the king laid hands on sufferers to cure scrofula, it was God, not he, who performed the healing. Divine sanction did not mean that the king was a saint (although Russian tsars, Louis XIII of France, and the martyred Charles I of England were represented in that way), or that specific acts of royal governance expressed the intentions of the Almighty. It was often the opponents of monarchs, from the French Catholic League to Belgian patriots of the 1780s, who were most strident in appropriating heavenly favor for their political actions. Kings were usually more wary; after all, they had to deal with the guardians of religion, who resented claims to God's approval that were made without their explicit support. Even the Ottoman sultan was circumspect in his use of the title "caliph" or heir to the prophet.

Monarchs gradually became bolder in asserting control over the clergy and religion. This did not make them more sacred, but it did make them controversial. Tsars Alexis Mikhaylovich and his son Peter I (Peter the Great) outraged traditionalists with their religious reforms; so did James II in England. The regalism of the Bourbons, especially Louis XIV in France and Charles III in Spain, created many critics among devout Catholics. The attack against Jansenism that was initiated by Louis XIV and continued by his successor created a political furor that lasted sixty years. The most daring offender against religious sensibilities may have been Emperor Joseph II, who dissolved monasteries, gave toleration to Jews, and aroused bitter clerical opposition. As a result, traditionalist church parties formed throughout Europe. What they had in common was disillusionment with monarchy, causing a distrust that could feed into revolutionary sympathies after 1789.

Theories of Rulership

If we turn from institutional definitions of monarchy to the theories of political writers, we may be surprised to find how little connection there was between them. Inspired by the ancients, political philosophers usually wanted to write for the ages, not to address specific institutional questions. While they were deeply influenced by what was happening around them, they consciously sought to separate their writings from contemporary circumstances. The impact of their theories, however, was seldom what they had expected.

The main classical sources for European political theory were Roman law, Aristotle (often filtered through Cicero), and the Roman historian Tacitus. Roman law dealt directly with the question of imperium, which could be understood variously, as absolute sovereignty (the emperor was above the laws) or as some sort of limited rulership (the emperor was bound by the laws). The civil lawyers often regarded imperium as meaning both simultaneously: that is, the king normally had to observe the laws, but could in special circumstances dispense with them. This was the point of view of leading imperial jurists, like Dietrich Reinking. The breakdown of imperial power in the Thirty Years' War, however, led some legal writers, like Hermann Conring and Samuel Pufendorf, to deny that the Holy Roman Empire was descended from ancient Rome. As a result, sovereign authority was held by German territorial rulers, not the emperor. The empire survived, however, and by the eighteenth century, constitutional equilibrium rather than imperium was the main concern of its civil lawyers.

The impact of Aristotle was more pervasive and subtle. His emphasis on personal balance and selfrestraint informed countless manuals on lordly behavior, or "Mirrors for Princes." They appeared in Muslim as well as Christian lands; in fact, one of the first and most important of them was written by the Islamic scholar al-Ghazālī, in the eleventh century. Desiderius Erasmus wrote one, as did Justus Lipsius and, in the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great of Prussia. The reading of Aristotle and Cicero inspired an abhorrence of despotism and a belief in the public good as the ultimate end of government. Aristotelians from Thomas Aquinas to Francisco de Vitoria to the great Spanish Jesuit writers (Pedro de Rivadeneira, Juan de Mariana, Francisco Suárez) held to the view that kings should rule for the benefit of the people. Since most of them were priests, they also stressed the supremacy of the church over any secular monarchy. Protestant Aristotelians like Martin Luther himself and Henning Arnisaeus accepted the primacy of religion but were more willing to separate monarchy from popular approval.

The third classical strain in early modern European political thought was derived from the historian Tacitus, who excoriated the corruption and decrepitude of the Roman imperial state. His main follower in our period was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose books on princely amorality and republican virtue were formally despised, but rarely ignored, by other political writers. Admirers of Tacitus were not always critical of monarchy; like Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, in the eighteenth century, they might believe that only a strong, heroic ruler could restore decayed virtue. Similarly, Tacitus's view that empires must continually grow or necessarily decay could supply arguments to both opponents and defenders of imperial expansion.

The classical tradition gave only limited sustenance to those political writers who wanted a more "absolute" monarchy. In fact, Aristotle and Cicero could be read as consistent with an interpretation of the Bible that saw kings as responsible to the people rather than directly to God. This was expressed by certain followers of John Calvin, called "monarchomachs," notably the German Johannes Althusius, the Scot George Buchanan, and the Frenchmen François Hotman, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, and Hubert Languet. They vested ultimate authority in the magistrates, in legislatures, or in the people rather the king. Buchanan, like Mariana, even allowed that open resistance to a tyrant might be legitimate.

Where could defenders of a stronger monarchy turn? To the Bible, of course, and to Roman history. For the French lawyer Jean Bodin, the sovereignty of a monarch could not be divided, shared, or legally resisted because it rested on the patriarchal power exercised by an all-powerful God as well as by ancient Roman fathers. The Englishman Robert Filmer carried Bodin a stage further by making patriarchal power "arbitrary," so that the father-ruler could do whatever he wanted, without any right of resistance. Most apologists for royal power, like Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, did not go so far as either Bodin or Filmer; they simply maintained that the authority of the king was derived from God, to whom he was solely responsible. This did not entirely rule out some sort of original agreement with the people; but as the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius pointed out, once such an agreement was made, the people surrendered their sovereignty and had no right to reclaim it. Thomas Hobbes repeated the point in his Leviathan of 1651, which presented government as the convergence of individual wills in an "artificial man," the state. Hobbes's unorthodox religious and philosophical views ensured that few in England would acknowledge his contribution for the next century. On the other side, only the most radical political thinkers, like John Locke, continued to argue for a right to resistance to monarchs by the end of the seventeenth century, and Locke was not very clear about how it could be activated.

The Enlightenment added a new dimension to these debates, by introducing a critical, comparative method. It was best exemplified in Montesquieu's L'esprit des lois (1748; Spirit of the laws), which sought to replace the ideal categories of classical philosophy with observations of the ways in which peoples were actually governed. The aristocratic Montesquieu was often read as a proponent of a mixed constitution based on the post-1688 English model. Admiration for England was widely held, but it did not wholly sway every enlightened mind (Voltaire, for example, continued to praise Louis XIV's powerful, activist monarchy). Foreign observers, moreover, tended to misinterpret the centralist English constitution.

By the late eighteenth century, many enlightened writers (Cesare Beccaria and Denis Diderot among them) had decided that the form of government was less important than what it accomplished in terms of the public good. Kings, it was hoped, would become reformers: "the first servants of the state," in Frederick the Great's memorable phrase. They would abolish torture, establish religious toleration, grant freedom of expression, and spread education among the masses. They might even transform the European empires into federations of sovereign states, a sentiment expressed by several prominent Spanish reformers.

The American Revolution complicated such aspirations because it associated reform with republicanism. At the same time, some proponents of economic change, like the Marquês de Pombal of Portugal, had proven themselves to be less than enlightened in other areas. A renewed threat to monarchy emerged in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who scorned the "despotism" of kings and suggested that sovereignty rested not in them, but in an abstract conception of the "general will" determined by the whole people. Few read Rousseau's Du contrat social (Social contract) when it first appeared in 1762, but it made a great impact on the subsequent generation. By the early 1790s, some enlightened thinkers throughout Europe held the view that, if kings were not willing to lead the nation and the people into a golden age of reform, they might not be necessary after all.

Courts and Display

The works of political philosophers shaped educated minds, but until the late 1700s, they made little difference to the conduct of royal courts. The court was the main arena of royal display and magnificence. In the absence of bureaucratic institutions, it was also the center of monarchical government. Leading members of the king's councils usually held prominent positions at court. Local officials often had to go to court to transact important business. Aristocrats jockeyed at court for positions, titles, honors, and the prestige of personal proximity to the sovereign.

The courts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often peripatetic, moving between royal palaces and cities, or installing themselves temporarily in the houses of prominent nobles. By the late 1500s this had become too expensive and complicated, so courts became more or less fixed in a few big palaces, in or near administrative centers. They also grew. The salaried officials of the French court numbered around one thousand under Francis I; they swelled to eight to ten thousand under Louis XIV. The Spanish court remained at around fifteen to seventeen hundred persons during the same period, and the English court included about one thousand officers until the Civil Wars. The much smaller Austrian Habsburg court did not exceed six hundred persons from the late 1400s to the late 1600s, but by the second quarter of the eighteenth century it had reached twenty-five hundred. None of them, however, compared with the 95,000 employees and officers of the Ottoman court, among them 68,000 soldiers, 2,146 doorkeepers, 5,003 gardeners, and 1,372 cooks.

The main purpose of the court was to bring together the king's principal servants, both government officers and members of his household, in one place. This was particularly vital in composite monarchies, where high-ranking royal officials came from disparate regions and might even speak different languages. The king could not live in all his territories, so he had to call their leading men to him. A court where rewards were to be had was one to which they would flock; a feeble court would indicate a lack of cohesion in the kingdom. Thus, the court was above all a point of contact between the crown and the elite.

It was also a locale for royal and aristocratic display. Kings lived out much of their daily lives in public, and their every move, from rising in the morning to dining to walking in the palace gardens, could be accompanied by elaborate ceremony. Religious observances were particularly important occasions for ritual. The Russian court, for example, was highly ritualized until the reign of Peter I, because the tsar was expected to perform endless religious duties. Every member of the high aristocracy (between 24 and 153 men) had a part in these ceremonies. For similar reasons, the Spanish court under the Habsburgs was obsessed with ritual, partly derived from the ordinances of the dukes of Burgundy. The king of Spain's cousins at the imperial court of Vienna, however, were much more relaxed—the emperor even dined privately, with his wife! The ritual of the French court waxed under Henry III and waned thereafter, until it was reestablished by Louis XIV at Versailles. English court ritual was never formalized to the same extent, with the exception of the annual Garter Ceremony, a favorite duty of Charles I.

Participation in the rituals of the court was determined by etiquette—not a list of behavioral rules, but a ranking of courtiers by precedence. Etiquette dictated who sat or stood near the king, who handed him his clothes or his towels or his food, who had a right to wear a hat in his presence. A courtier's position might be determined by office, by birth, or by some other distinction, such as the holding of a chivalric order. The king was the ultimate source of precedence, and he could manipulate the system of etiquette as he could the distribution of political positions. Few monarchs, however, made dramatic changes in etiquette or used it arbitrarily to control the aristocracy. They tended to reward those who already had influence, wealth, and social prestige. The court was not a self-enclosed social system; rather, its etiquette reflected the wider hierarchical society beyond it.

Artistic patronage was also based at court. Most kings enjoyed theatrical performances—plays, ballets, operas, masques—that were designed to edify the court nobility. They might call for the ruler to appear directly on stage, surrounded by obeisant courtiers. Some kings, like Philip IV of Spain or Charles I of England, assembled magnificent collections of paintings, both religious and secular. A few, like Louis XIV at Versailles or Frederick the Great at Potsdam, wanted to make their courts into artistic centers for the whole kingdom. In evaluating the impact of court art, however, we should remember how restricted the audience usually was. Monarchs spent far more on clothing than on paintings, and no court dominated artistic life as completely as its royal patrons hoped.

By the eighteenth century, there were signs that the larger royal courts were in decline. The English court was reduced in size after 1660 and lost its centrality in art patronage after 1688. The king's old palaces were not updated, and in the end George III had to purchase a new one, Buckingham House, from a subject. Versailles remained magnificent, but under Louis XV its ceremonies became increasingly empty of significance, and it gained a reputation for luxury and corruption. Philip V's palace at La Granja and the new Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn near Vienna were designed for the private relaxation of the ruling family, an indication that royalty was no longer willing to live fully in the public glare. The Swedish court in the "Age of Liberty" was perceived as geriatric and moribund. There were exceptions: the Russian court, removed to St. Petersburg and stripped of much of its Orthodox ritual, presented a brilliant show, albeit one with limited relevance to the wider nation. It was still possible for a royal court to transform a city, architecturally and culturally, as the kings of Sardinia did at Turin after 1730.

Courts were never universally admired, even by those who frequented them. Throughout the early modern period, they were criticized for waste and vice. It is difficult to judge how effective they were in impressing a sense of royal grandeur on the minds of the people. Yet they were vital instruments of royal power, and it is impossible to imagine early modern monarchy without them.

Monarchy Beyond the Court

What did the people of Europe know about monarchy? Even in France or Russia, only a fraction of the nobility went to court. As for townspeople and peasants, they may not even have known where the court was. Yet they were exposed to various images of monarchy, and kings made a definite mark on their lives. Over time, the ruler's control over them appears to have increased.

Subjects who did not live near the court might see the monarch during a royal entry into a town or a progress through the countryside. These were more common in the sixteenth century when courts were peripatetic, but they continued into the eighteenth century. The events of a monarch's life, from birth and baptism to accession, coronation, and eventual death, were marked by public celebrations or mourning. Royal funeral ceremonies involved lyings-in-state, processions, grand catafalques, and numerous religious ceremonies that affected large numbers of people. The churches took an active part in almost every public ceremony of monarchy, as well as in the dissemination of royal messages. In France, Te Deum services proliferated in the seventeenth century to commemorate occasions of importance to the crown. The Ottoman sultans were regularly blessed at Friday prayers in mosques throughout their empire, just as the English monarchs were on Sundays in Anglican churches. In return, the king took every opportunity to associate himself with religion. Marching behind the Host in the Corpus Christi procession was an important annual ritual for many Catholic monarchs.

Graphic images of kings became more available in the late sixteenth century through engravings and woodcuts. Queen Elizabeth of England tried in vain to prevent the sale of unauthorized pictures of herself. The market for prints was concentrated in towns, among the urban nobility and bourgeoisie. Peddlers, however, carried prints into the countryside, along with printed chapbooks that might contain idealized images or descriptions of rulers. By the late eighteenth century, newspapers had spread throughout western and central Europe, and the doings of courts were among their favorite topics. While they were often heavily censored, and could be prosecuted for seditious libel even in a relatively tolerant kingdom like Great Britain or Prussia, newspapers gave a regular insight into court life that had previously been available only to a select few. They complemented the often scandalous court memoirs that became popular reading material. It would be unwise to argue that the growing awareness of the doings of courts bred disillusionment with royal government, but it certainly encouraged critics, including those French pornographers who invented lurid (and wholly fictitious) accounts of the orgies presided over by Queen Marie Antoinette.

Ordinary people often looked to the king's law courts for justice against their aristocratic overlords. In Tudor England, the Court of Star Chamber meted out cheap justice to the poor; and in 1665–1666, Louis XIV's Assizes of Auvergne passed eighty-seven sentences against gentlemen, "to rescue the people from the oppression of the powerful." Even as the Holy Roman emperor's power was declining after 1648, his Aulic Council continued to hear two to three thousand lawsuits every year. It made a big impression when Joseph I deposed a German prince after the council had investigated his execution of a peasant without a trial. Distrust of the nobility explains why ordinary people generally seem to have favored a stronger rather than a weaker monarchy. In Stockholm in 1743, for example, crowds eager for a Danish rather than a Russian successor to the throne called out, "One king and not many! No Russian puppet!" Unfortunately for them, they got almost thirty more years of aristocratic domination.

Subjects could prove more rebellious if the king tried to implement policies that were perceived to be despotic or impious, as the revolts of the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries demonstrated. After 1660, however, the privileged classes seem to have become less willing to support serious rebellions. This permitted monarchs to extend the state controls that had been building up for the previous two centuries. Their measures mainly involved military organization, conscription, and taxation; but state interference could spill over into new areas like social welfare, peasant labor services, comprehensive school systems, or even the structure of composite monarchy (for example, the union of England and Scotland, the dissolution of privileges in Aragón, or the annexation of the Ukraine). Reform did not always work; the French monarchs were amazingly ambitious in setting out plans for improving the economic conditions of their kingdom, but almost all of them ended in spectacular failure, due to the power of vested interests.

Did European monarchs lay the foundations of the modern state? In a fiscal and military sense, they certainly did; and they came up with the winning formula of controlling the individual by creating allegiance to a distant authority wearing a human face. Nevertheless, most rulers were resistant to the next, crucial step in state formation: the dissemination of national identities. A few, like George III of England and Gustav III of Sweden, were happy to be seen as patriot kings, although both made political havoc by overplaying the role. Frederick the Great was hailed as a German patriot by his admirers, but did not take the idea seriously. Joseph II tried to force the German language on his recalcitrant Hungarian subjects not because he was a patriot, but because he thought it would be more efficient. Charles III of Spain failed to appreciate the patriotic opposition to his Italian advisers, until riots in 1766 forced him to dismiss them. Catherine the Great and Louis XVI wanted to have nothing to do with national sentiments. Catherine was lucky enough to rule over a country where they were embryonic. Louis XVI was not so fortunate; his people wanted a patriot king, and when it became evident that he was not prepared to be one, popular disillusionment contributed to revolutionary anger.

In the next century, of course, monarchs would willingly become national icons. Their initial hesitation to commit themselves to nationalism, however, was well considered. Identification with a particular nation meant the end of the composite state with which early modern monarchy was so closely associated. It also meant that the ruler was now beholden to a national community, that is, to the people; and if he failed them, as so many monarchs did at the end of World War I, he could not expect to retain their allegiance.

Bibliography

Adamson, John, ed. The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750. London, 1999. Beautifully illustrated collection of important essays.

Asch, Ronald G., and Adolf M. Birke, eds. Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650. Oxford, 1991. Contains a wide selection of articles on court rituals and politics.

Bertelli, Sergio. The King's Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Translated by R. Burr Litchfield. University Park, Pa., 2001. Wideranging theoretical approach to monarchy.

Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch. Translated by J. E. Anderson. New York, 1989. Hugely influential study of thaumaturgic power to heal scrofula in England and France.

Dickens, A. G., ed. The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty, 1400–1800. London, 1977. The first significant collection of articles on court history in English.

Giesey, Ralph E. The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France. Geneva, 1960. Interprets effigy in funeral ceremony as representing king's undying, corporate body.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, 1957. Highly influential work; argues that European kings were endowed with both a natural and an immortal corporate body.

Monod, Paul Kléber. The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715. New Haven, 1999. A comparative study.

Oresko, Robert, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott, eds. Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997. Handsome collection of important essays.

Wortman, Richard S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. I, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I. Princeton, 1995. Authoritative work on tsarist rituals.

—PAUL MONOD

A system of government in which one person reigns, usually a king or queen. The authority, or crown, in a monarchy is generally inherited. The ruler, or monarch, is often only the head of state, not the head of government. Many monarchies, such as Britain and Denmark, are actually governed by parliaments. (See absolute monarchy and constitutional monarchy.)