The Pursuit of Glory, page 27
From every latent foe,
From the assassin’s blow,
God Save the King!
O’er him thine arm extend,
For Britain’s sake defend,
Our father, Prince, and friend,
God save the King!
If Hadfield’s aim had been better, the history of Great Britain would certainly have been different. Such was the case in Sweden, where the aristocratic conspirator Jacob Johan Anckarström shot King Gustavus III at a masked ball at the Stockholm opera house on 16 March 1792. Although firing at point-blank range, he only just succeeded, his target living on for another fortnight before succumbing to gangrene. This episode is best known for providing the plot for Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera, although the librettist, Antonio Somma, took little more than the actual fact of assassination. Far from being driven by the wrath of a cuckold (most improbable in view of Gustavus III’s homosexuality), the historical Anckarström was motivated by political hostility. Yet the actual circumstances were dramatic enough for any opera. Gustavus had been warned in advance that an attempt would be made on his life, but insisted on attending the ball, not even bothering to conceal his identity by donning a full mask. On arrival he stood in the royal box for a quarter of an hour watching the dancing, presenting an easy target, before observing to his equerry, Baron Essen: ‘They have lost a good opportunity of shooting me. Come let us go down; the masquerade seems bright and gay. Let us see whether they will dare to kill me!’ Once that hostage to fortune had duly been claimed, the mortally wounded Gustavus was quick to blame the French revolutionaries he detested so passionately: ‘I feel sure the Jacobins must have suggested the idea. Swedes are neither cowardly nor corrupt enough to have conceived such a crime.’
He was quite wrong, at least about Jacobin involvement. There was nothing revolutionary about his murder, it was just another of the aristocratic coups that were such a popular means of conflict resolution in the politics of early modern Europe. For this was not the action of a demented loner in the style of Damiens or Mrs Nicholson, it was a carefully planned attack involving many more than the forty conspirators eventually arrested. So was the even more momentous assassination nine years later in neighbouring Russia. Shortly after midnight on 12 December 1801, a group of Guards officers broke into the Michael Palace in St Petersburg and confronted Tsar Paul I in his bedroom. What then followed was very confused, not least because many of the assailants were drunk. It was their declared intention to force the Tsar to abdicate in favour of his son Alexander, although their leader, when asked what would happen if consent was not forthcoming, had grimly stated that to make an omelette it was first necessary to break eggs. In the event, Paul was dragged from behind the screen where he had tried to hide, and was then abused, beaten and finally strangled, his pathetic requests for a moment to pray being ignored. The news was quickly conveyed to Alexander, who always claimed that his support for the coup had been conditional on his father not being harmed. Not many believed that, and even fewer accepted the official version of the cause of death as ‘an apoplectic stroke’.
As most of the evidence as to what actually happened dates from a long time after the events, the true course of this squalid episode will never be established. What is certain is the heavy involvement of army officers. Of the sixty-eight conspirators identified, two-thirds were from the aristocratic Guards regiments, whose main purpose of course was to guard the life of their Tsar. It was on this occasion that a cynical Russian noble observed, ‘Despotism tempered by assassination–that is our Magna Carta.’ It was more than a quip, for it had both a long history and a bright future in Russia. Paul’s own supposed father, Peter III, had been deposed and then strangled in a coup connived at by his wife Catherine in June 1762. Of Paul’s successors, Nicholas I had to overcome an attempted military coup (the ‘Decembrist’ rising) on his accession in 1825, Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, Alexander III survived several attempts on his life before dying a natural death in 1894, and the last Tsar–Nicholas II–was murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918.
Although most rulers died in their beds, theirs was an uncertain occupation, and nowhere more so than in the country normally associated with ‘absolutism’. Of the last nine kings of France, two were assassinated (Henry III in 1589 and Henry IV in 1610), one was executed (Louis XVI in 1793), one died in prison (Louis XVII in 1795), one was exiled (Louis XVIII in 1815) and two fled (Charles IX in 1830, Louis Philippe in 1848). The long period separating these two bursts of regicidal activity was less placid than might appear. Louis XIII fought three wars against his Protestant subjects and had to surmount a major conspiracy led by his brother Gaston, ducd’Orléans. His son, Louis XIV, never forgot the night of 9–10 February 1651, when he was obliged to feign sleep in the Palais-Royal, as a mob of rebellious Parisians forced their way into his room to see for themselves that he was still in the capital and still their hostage. Although they then left, it may safely be assumed that the boy-king–he was twelve years old–had been terrified by the experience. Certainly, his political mentors were sufficiently intimidated to make immediate political concessions to the opposition. On the following day, a royal order was signed releasing from custody three of the leaders of the Fronde, as the rebellion was known (Fronde means ‘sling-shot’), all of them closely related to the king–the prince de Condé, the prince de Conti and the duc de Longueville. And we have already noted that Louis XV survived an attempt on his life in 1757.
The beginning of our period was particularly volatile. It was in the very first year–1648–that the Fronde began when the sovereign courts united to resist royal policy, supported by more than a thousand barricades thrown up around the royal palace in Paris. Revolts against Spanish rule in Portugal, Catalonia and Naples were already raging, and were now joined by fresh disturbances in Denmark, Poland and Muscovy. In 1649 Charles I was beheaded. In 1650 a coup excluded the infant head of the House of Orange from any political role in the Dutch Republic. Even before this latest great insurrectionary wave began, Jeremiah Whittaker had exultantly told the House of Commons in 1643 that, ‘These are days of shaking and this shaking is universal.’ Robert Mentet de Salmonet, who enterprisingly published a history of the English Civil War in 1649, preferred a more static image, observing that he was living through an ‘Iron Age’ which would be ‘famous for the great and strange revolutions that have happened in it’.
LOUIS XIV AND ABSOLUTE MONARCHY
Conflict resolution by means of regime change proved to be rarely successful in the long run. Of the various insurrections listed, only the Portuguese bid for independence can be said to have achieved its objectives. Indeed, for monarchists everywhere, the turbulent 1640s proved to be the darkest decade before the dawn of a new era of authoritarian government, often characterized by historians as ‘the age of absolutism’. The lead was taken by France, where Louis XIV was declared to be of age on 7 September 1651, two days after his thirteenth birthday. Just over a year later, on 21 October 1652, he entered Paris in triumph. The return of his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief target of the frondeurs, the following February was proof positive that the civil war had ended with an unequivocal victory for the royalists. It was given visual expression by an unknown artist who depicted Louis XIV as ‘Jupiter, vanquisher of the Fronde’, clad as a Roman emperor and surrounded by the trophies of victory, his foot resting on the Gorgon’s shield, in his hand the bolts of lightning with which he has quelled her monstrous plots. In the background, Vulcan and his assistants can be seen, busily preparing further thunderbolts, just in case. This process was brought to a triumphant–and triumphalist–conclusion on 7 June 1654 when Louis was crowned in the Cathedral of Reims. On his entry to the city, the Bishop of Soissons greeted him with the assurance that all his subjects prostrated themselves
before you, Sire, the Lord’s Anointed, son of the Most High, shepherd of the flock, protector of the Church, the first of all kings on earth, chosen and appointed by Heaven to carry the sceptre of the French, to extend far and wide the honour and renown of the Lily [fleur de lys], whose glory outshines by far that of Solomon from pole to pole and sun to sun, making France a universe and the universe one France.
In the course of the coronation ceremony, Louis was anointed with the oil originally brought from Heaven by the Holy Ghost at the behest of Saint Rémy when he baptized Clovis, the Merovingian King of the Franks, as a Christian in c. 493 (aerial assistance in transporting the oil had been needed on that occasion because the crush of people prevented it being carried into the church by more conventional means). This ‘eighth sacrament’ raised the King above all other mortals by making him àroi thaumaturge’, that is to say, a king on whom the Almighty had conferred miraculous healing powers. Two days later, Louis ceremonially touched more than 2,000 victims of ‘scrofula’ (a tuberculous infection of the skin of the neck, nowadays easily cured by antibiotics) with the words ‘The king touches you: may the Lord heal you.’ As further evidence of the sacral nature of his kingship, he took communion in both kinds, a privilege normally reserved for priests.
The coronation set the seal on the failure of the privileged orders to push France towards a mixed constitution. Out of the struggles of the mid-seventeenth century came, not a constitutional monarchy as in England, but an absolute monarchy that was to last until 1789, at least in its formal arrangements. As the sacramental nature of the coronation revealed, it rested most fundamentally on the word of God, as revealed in Scripture. The verse from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans quoted earlier in this chapter is a particularly uncompromising statement of the divine origin of secular authority. The Romans themselves could be enlisted in support, as their legal principles included ‘quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem’ (what pleases the prince has the force of law), or ‘princeps legibus solutus est’ (the prince is not bound by the laws). The former was given a pithy French paraphrase by a sixteenth-century jurist: ‘si veut le roi, si veut la loi’ (if the king wishes it, so does the law).
With this subordination of law-making to the royal will, we seem to have arrived at arbitrary tyranny, or ‘despotism’ as contemporaries called it. Yet advocates of absolute monarchy were careful to maintain that there was a difference in kind between the legitimate exercise of untrammelled authority and the capricious behaviour of a tyrant. The King of France, it was argued, enjoyed a legislative monopoly that could not be challenged by any other human individual or institution, but he was also subject to divine law, whether revealed explicitly in Scripture or implicitly in the form of natural law. For example, the Ten Commandments obliged the King to respect the true religion (Thou shalt have none other gods before me), to respect the lives of his subjects (Thou shalt not kill), to respect their property (Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s), and to respect contracts and the due process of law (Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour). Bishop Bossuet, Louis XIV’s most eloquent mouthpiece on religious matters, maintained that ‘Royal authority is sacred…God established kings as his ministers and reigns through them over the nation…The royal throne is not the throne of a man but the throne of God himself’, but he denied that this implied that the King could do as he pleased:
It is one thing for a government to be absolute, and another for it to be arbitrary. It is absolute with respect to constraint–there being no power capable of forcing the sovereign, who in this sense is independent of all human authority. But it does not follow from this that the government is arbitrary, for besides the fact that everything is subject to the judgment of God…there are also [constitutional] laws in empires, so that whatever is done against them is null in a legal sense: and there is always an opportunity for redress.
The laws to which Bossuet was referring were the ‘fundamental laws’ of the kingdom. Three could be defined quite precisely: the Salic law of succession, which excluded women, bastards and heretics from the throne; the integrity of the royal domain, which no king might alienate; and the maintenance of the Catholic faith. More shadowy were the ‘maximes du royaume’, a totality of laws, customs and principles which did not have full status as fundamental laws but which shared in their limiting nature. There was plenty of scope for uncertainty and disagreement here, especially when the frondeur spirit of the Parlements began to revive in the following century. The marquis d’ Argenson recorded in his journal in 1753 that the parlementary remonstrances presented to Louis XV were claiming that in a just monarchy the king must obey the fundamental laws, before commenting drily, ‘all that remains is for us to know exactly what these fundamental laws are’. Under Louis XIV, however, defeat in the Frondes was still too fresh in the minds of the defeated to allow such impertinence. As the intendant of Burgundy observed to Mazarin in 1660, ‘noises from the Parlement are no longer in season’.
It was one thing for the King and his apologists to stake a theoretical claim to absolute authority, quite another to translate it into action. What singled Louis XIV out from most other monarchs of the early modern period was his determination to be as good as his word. A crucial step was taken immediately after the death of Mazarin in 1661. Summoning the Council, he told Chancellor Séguier: ‘Sir, I have brought you together with my ministers and my secretaries of state, to tell you that until now I was willing to permit the late Cardinal to conduct my affairs. It is time that I govern them myself.’ He did just that. Crucially, he proved to have the necessary qualities of intelligence, application and sheer charisma to make a personal monarchy work. He dominated the kingdom’s supreme council, the Conseil d’en haut, from which he excluded the great and the good, notably the ‘princes of the blood’, in whose veins the blood of the Bourbons ran thickly enough to encourage independent political ambitions. He was not likely to forget the treason of the prince de Condé, who not only had led the second Fronde but had also subsequently lent his formidable military skills to Spanish forces against France. So for his most senior ministers he chose from the ‘robe nobles’, so-called because of their legal origins. As he told his eldest son the Dauphin, in a memoir drawn up for his instruction,
It was not in my interest to take subjects of more eminent quality. Above all things, I had to establish my own reputation, and let the public know, by the very rank from which I took them, that my intention was not to share my authority with them. I was concerned that they should not harbour for themselves higher hopes than it pleased me to give them: which is difficult for people of high birth.
The three most favoured robe families were those of Colbert (domestic affairs, commerce and the navy), Le Tellier (the army) and Phélypeaux (diplomacy), but whole dynasties of ministers were created. Of these, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) stood out for the scope of his activity and the magnitude of his achievements. The greatest of the latter was his reform of the country’s ruinous finances, which provided the means for the military victories and territorial expansion of the first half of the reign. Yet Colbert neither aspired to nor was permitted to become a first minister on the lines of Richelieu or Mazarin. When Louis XIV told his grandson ‘Do not let yourself be governed, be the master; never have either favourites or a prime minister’, he was summarizing his own practice. Colbert’s prudent advice to his own son was ‘Never, as long as you live, send out anything in the King’s name without his express approval.’
So Louis imposed his monopoly of decision-making at the centre. Outside the council-chamber he was equally imperious. The French institution most closely resembling a Parliament–the Estates General–which had last met in 1614, was simply not convened. The law courts, confusingly known as Parlements, together with the other ‘sovereign courts’, were deprived of their only political weapon in 1673, when they were instructed to register royal decrees first and voice any criticisms afterwards. The same sort of directive was issued to the provincial estates, now required to vote taxes first and present grievances after. In 1671 Mme de Sévigné reported from Brittany: ‘The meeting of the Estates will not last long; all that needs to be done is to ask what the King wants; then not a word is spoken, and it’s all wrapped up.’ By that time the King was well on the way to establishing a monopoly of legitimate force in his kingdom. The dark days of the civil wars, when the great nobles had run their regiments as if they were their own armies, were gone for ever. In 1643 Le Tellier had lamented to Cardinal Mazarin that ‘the army has become a republic, with as many cantons or provinces as there are lieutenants-general’. Its most recent historian (John Lynn) has described its state during the Fronde as ‘a nadir of indiscipline, pillage and mutiny’. Yet by the time Louis began his first war, against Spain in 1667, his army was very much his army and his army alone, with even such former frondeurs as Condé and Turenne recognizing their subordination. When the prince de Conti and the prince de La Roche-sur-Yon (both royal cousins) went off to fight for the Emperor Leopold I against the Turks without seeking permission, Louis promptly stripped them of their regiments. This royal army was for use as much inside the country as out of it, as Louis demonstrated when he sent an army to the Auvergne in 1665 to add the necessary muscle to the judges charged with putting an end to the ‘murders, abductions, rapes and extortions’ perpetrated by the nobility there.
In imposing his will on his kingdom, Louis’ most effective instruments were the ‘intendants’, the provincial officials who constituted ‘the king present in the provinces’. Their full title–‘intendants de justice, de police et de finances’–reveals the wide scope of their authority, ‘police’ in this context meaning virtually anything relating to the common good. First sent out by Richelieu after 1635 to speed up funding for the war with Spain, but abolished during the Frondes, they returned in the 1650s and 1660s to become permanent fixtures. By the time the last intendant was appointed, in Brittany in 1689, there were thirty-three of them, supported by around seven hundred assistants called ‘sub-delegates’. It used to be thought that these ‘commissars dispatched to execute the king’s orders’ represented a decisive breakthrough from a state-of-estates, in which authority was diffused through corporate bodies, to a modern state, in which authority is centralized and exercised through bureaucrats. The intendants were indeed appointed solely by the King, could not buy their offices, were not allowed to serve in regions where they had a vested interest, and were moved around at regular intervals to prevent them acquiring any sense of a local identity that might conflict with that of the centre. Their powers were such as to persuade some well-placed observers that they were the real rulers of the kingdom. John Law, the Scottish-born financier who was briefly controller-general of finance (the office once held by Colbert) in 1720, told the marquis d’Argenson: ‘Monsieur, I would never have believed what I discovered when I was in control of the finances. You should know that this kingdom of France is ruled by thirty intendants. There are neither Parlements, nor Estates, nor Governors, I might almost add neither King nor Ministers, but thirty men…on whom depend the welfare or the misery of the provinces.’
