Conflicts of Power

Abstract

Uncertain of the limits and durability of their real power, both government and the social elite would try, in the ensuing years, to ensure its permanence and re-establish its boundaries. Yet the power of the two was not always complementary. The elite thought it was: England’s traditions of self-government meant that ruling was largely a matter of close co-operation between central government and the local aristocracy and gentry, both in making laws in parliament and in executing them in the country. Almost every law, every convention, was underpinned by the notion that English government was in practice a collaborative affair. For the Crown, however, those traditions, laws and conventions might be seen as part of the problem. It was, after all, possible to take the view that England’s system of self-government was largely responsible for the collapse of royal power in the 1640s — as, indeed, had Thomas Hobbes. The Earl of Peterborough made the absolutist’s point early on after the Restoration: ‘these old notions, of mixed governments, privileges and conditions have by several accidents of state been put out of the essence of things, and they are not to be practised any longer’.¹