Government and conflict in the later seventeenth century

Abstract

The decades after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s were characterised in the last chapter as a period of at least partially successful government consolidation, assisted as noted by a widespread reaction against the real or feared violence and social destabilisation of the mid-century revolts. Royal or princely absolutism, for all its dynastic and bureaucratic inadequacies, became accepted in most parts of Europe as a bulwark against social and political anarchy, and, as we have also noted, appeared to serve well the interests of those with wealth and rank. In England, although its worst affected regions had experienced less violence than for example the Paris region, parliament seemed compliant and extraordinarily reluctant to use its recently acquired experience even to restrict the crown. In Sweden the representative machinery was an even more willing prop for absolutism, despite its considerable social breadth, whilst elsewhere monarchs rarely had any problems with those institutions that preserved any semblance of independence. Everywhere in Europe the arts, the printed word and rhetoric were used consciously and often systematically to convey messages of order, stability and pompous princely grandeur. For a time the economic environment, too, was more settled in many parts of Europe, helping to create an impression of relative prosperity, visible for instance in the early years of Colbert’s ministry in France.