1983 seminar paper on Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (given at Birkbeck College to Barry Coward's M.A. class: copyright Christopher Thompson)
The Framework of the Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641
The contribution made by Professor Stone to the study of the economic and social history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been one of the outstanding features of post-war scholarship. Ever since the publication in 1965 of his major work, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641, we have been indebted to him for a new account of the fortunes of the landed elite in this period. The complex crisis which he detected in the affairs of the peerage helped to explain why the outbreak of the English Civil war became possible. The book was rightly recognised as one of the most important to appear on early modern English history for many years and the qualities of mind it displayed won widespread admiration. Professor Stone’s control over a mass of evidence, his willingness to employ the most up-to-date methods of enquiry and the striking insights to be found throughout his text together made the study a truly remarkable achievement. It was and is impossible to read the book without being profoundly impressed and constantly stimulated. The study of the peerage and, indeed, of the period as a whole was placed in an entirely new framework which no historian has since been able to ignore.
The declared aim of his study was to do two things: first, to describe the total environment of the landed elite, material and economic, ideological and cultural, educational and moral: and secondly to demonstrate, to explain, and to chart the course of a crisis in the affairs of this elite that was to have a profound effect upon the evolution of English political institutions. He accordingly set out to explain why, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the monarchy was eclipsed when Charles I lost his head, how the peerage lost its special privileges, its grasp on the executive and its influence over the electorate, and how the Anglican Church lost its monopoly of patronage and pulpit. The political breakdown of 1640-42 was explained as the result of three main causes. The first was a long-term decline in respect for and obedience to the monarchy, caused partly by the personal ineptitude of kings, partly by growing financial impoverishment, partly by structural defects in the Court system and by the widening gap between the moral standards, aspirations and way of life of the Court and those of the Country. The second was the failure of the Church of England to accommodate itself to moderate Puritan reform and its adoption of policies of repression under Archbishop Laud which eventually brought the whole edifice down. Finally, there was the crisis in the affairs of the hereditary elite, the aristocracy, which permitted the prolonged upheavals of the 1640s to develop. For a period, this group lost its grip on the nation and thereby permitted the political and social initiative to fall into the hands of the squirearchy. Its powers of physical coercion were taken over by an increasingly powerful state; it permanently alienated much of its capital resources in land; for a while, albeit not very long, its purchasing power declined absolutely and the subsequent decision to raise rents and entry fines cost it the loyalty of the tenantry; more and more of the commanding heights of administrative and political authority had to be shared with a confident and well-educated gentry; and, partly because of guilt by association with a corrupt, licentious and ultimately tyrannical Court, because so many peers belonged to the hated and feared Recusant minority and because the workings of the Puritan conscience weakened the bonds of deference, it forfeited much of its influence and prestige. Without these processes, the breakdown of monarchical and aristocratic government in 1640 would not have occurred.
The detailed arguments set out in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 are now well known. They are anchored on an analysis of the position of the peerage in English society at the accession of Queen Elizabeth and on the sociological proposition that titular status and wealth corresponded at that time. A complex (and controversial) statistical apparatus was devoted to showing how the peerage’s landed income and manorial possessions contracted by 1600 and how its economic recovery in the early seventeenth century left the aristocracy more dependent on Court office and less able to count on the loyalty of their tenantry than ever before. It was accompanied by an equally brilliant discussion of Elizabeth’s parsimony in granting honours and the dire consequences of early Stuart largesse in this field. With the peerage’s military power and aptitude in sharp decline and its political and religious affiliations under increasing suspicion, the crisis was inevitable. Of course, these arguments have been challenged but there has been no fundamental shift in Professor Stone’s position. He has, in fact, complained that no overall assessment of his work has been attempted. For this reason, I should like to subject some of his principal arguments to rigorous examination. This exercise may help to determine how far it is legitimate to go in accepting his case and whether there are issues still to be investigated.
The first surprising feature of the book is that the background to the period of study is only partially filled in by Professor Stone. There is no systematic description of the economic position of the early Tudor peerage or of the extent of their landed possessions or the size of their landed income. Their role in government and society and their involvement in the political and religious upheavals is the subject of widely scattered (and not always consistent) comments. Professor Stone characterised their fifteenth-century predecessors as “unenlightened factious territorial warlords” and described how they and their early sixteenth-century counterparts “dominated politics and local government by their command over their tenants, by their nucleus of armed followers, and by their command over the retained gentry who were drawn into their orbit by the need for protection and patronage in dangerous times.” “The first task of the Tudors”, so he argued, “was to rid the country of the over-mighty subject whose military potential came not far short of that of the monarchy itself. This meant destruction of individuals by attainder or confiscation; refusal to create new great families by gifts of land and swelling titles; encouragement of a counterpoise in the more numerous families of lesser rank and pretensions; diversion of noble time, energy, and money to royal service at the Court; and development of the monarchy as the one overriding focus of allegiance and loyalty.” It was in accordance with these policies that the “early Tudors” strove, “not without success, to undermine the strength of the nobility, which they ... regarded as a menace to quasi-absolute monarchy.”
The main elements of this argument – over-mighty subjects controlling national and local politics through the possession of property and the influence of their affinities until the strife of the Wars of the Roses was terminated by the Tudors – had been the staple fare of historical analysis for decades. But this stereotyped view was no longer credible by 1965. The studies carried out by K.B.Mcfarlane and others had already shown how cautious and reserved the bulk of the peerage had been during the latter half of the fifteenth century. Active and unswerving partisanship was shown by very few peers or peerage families. It was not, in any case, their martial prowess but their declining fighting spirit and increasing preoccupation with estate management and legal affairs that a contemporary observer like William Worcester so vehemently deplored. No peer in Yorkist or early Tudor England, not even Warwick the Kingmaker, had military resources comparable to those of the Crown itself. The 3rd Duke of Buckingham, who is the sole example of an over-mighty subject in early Tudor times cited by Professor Stone, was an oppressive landlord whose exactions alienated his tenants to the extent that he required the protection of a retinue of three to four hundred men raised by royal licence when he visited Wales in 1520: he was incapable of effective conspiracy against Wolsey, let alone against Henry VIII, and knew, as McFarlane pointed out, that no one would have supported him. No Lord could be absolutely certain of the loyalty of his feed men or his tenants at the height of the crises of the Wars of the Roses. And no King, not even Henry VII with his system of bonds and recognisances, was able to contemplate an attempt to undermine the strength of the nobility: on the contrary, the need to secure their help in the government of the kingdom was an axiom of late medieval political thought and practice. Monarchs had to ensure that the authority they entrusted to the peerage was properly exercised and not abused but this was part of the ‘good lordship’ which they owed to all their subjects and entailed a reciprocal acknowledgement of obligations right down the social scale. This explains why William Caxton described the government of the realm as a co-operative effort made by the King and nobles together. The point is elegantly made by Professor Stone himself: “up to about 1570 the Tudors were obliged to govern as had medieval kings before them, mainly with the co-operation of the aristocracy.” This is a direct contradiction of his initial argument. I cannot see how both can be sustained in the same work.
The second theme he developed – namely, the deliberate destruction by attainder or confiscation of individuals and the calculated refusal to create new magnate families or to inflate the numbers of the peerage is no less questionable. It was through extinction rather than attainder and a failure to offset the process by new creations that the number of peerage families fell from 57 to 43 in Henry VII’s reign: of the nine peerage families suffering attainder between 1485 and 1509, five secured reversals from Henry VII and one under Henry VIII. The real contrast between the two Kings was in their attitude to creating new peers. Henry VIII’s greater generosity had by 1529, as Professor Stone points out, put the numbers back in the middle fifties. But neither he nor his father had been able to endow their new creations with major grants of land: Sir Giles Daubeney was alone in receiving a grant of five Somerset manors under Henry VII. It was more common for new peers to be given part of the estates of attainted or extinct families: the Duke of Buckingham’s lands went to four peers and to four future title-holders after his trial and execution in 1521. It was only in the 1530s with the acquisition of former monastic property that Henry VIII could afford to be much more generous. As Professor Stone himself explains in more than one place, former Church lands constituted the core of the estates held by a significant number of peerage families in 1558. Indeed, the wave of new creations between 1529 and 1554 transformed the composition of the peerage. His figures show that 26 of the 57 peerage families extant at the accession of Queen Elizabeth had gained their titles in the preceding twenty five years. The rate of creation was much higher than it had been since the third quarter of the fifteenth century. It would be possible for a plausible case to be put forward claiming that many major landowning families suffered severe losses between 1530 and 1560: the Hussey line was ended after the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Boleyns left no heirs in 1539: the de la Poles were brought down by the trials of 1538 and 1541: the Brandons and Courtenays were extinguished in 1552 and 1556 respectively: the Percy inheritance was in Crown hands between 1536 and 1557 and the Howard lands between 1546 and 1554: even the greatest beneficiaries of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformation – Thomas Cromwell, Edward Seymour and John Dudley – failed to do more than bequeath heavily depleted estates to their heirs in the aftermath of their political falls. This putative mid-Tudor crisis of the aristocracy still awaits its historian. But there is no doubt about the willingness of the Crown to create and to endow new magnate families in a period of tension. It is highly significant that Dr Leonard’s figures show a sharp increase in the number of knights over the same period, many of them military men without the landed resources customarily associated with the rank. Why this mid-Tudor inflation of honours left the social and political system apparently unshaken in contrast to the dire effects experienced in the early Stuart period is a question Professor Stone does no address. Nonetheless, his claim that the early Tudors forswore the creation of new noble families with extensive landed possessions is not sustained by his own analysis.
Of course, it would have been extremely useful if Professor Stone had provided estimates of the landed income of the peerage and of its manorial holdings on the eve of the dissolution of the monasteries for the purpose of comparison with his figures for later dates. He did, however, accept Miss Helen Miller’s findings about the relative accuracy of the subsidy assessments of the peerage between 1523 and 1547: in fact, he described the 1520s and 1530s as the period “when the estates of noblemen and gentlemen were taxed at their true value.” The material for such an estimate of the total and mean landed income of the peerage in the early 1530s was certainly available. The only figures he offered for the manorial holdings of the peerage between 1485 and 1547 came from Miss Miller’s thesis. These concerned the number of manors gained and lost by the 90 peerage families on which she had information. It has to be said that her analysis went much further than this and that she found that about a fifth of the early Tudor peerage held fewer than 20 manors and a further fifth held over 80. Only four of the families ennobled before 1485 fell into the small landowning group as she defined it while twelve of the early Tudor creations did so. “In this shift of balance”, she wrote, “it is possible to see the growth of a new phenomenon: the establishment of a new type of nobleman, the peer divorced from territorial power.” She identified royal servants like Henry, Lord Marney; Edmund, Lord Bray: and John, Lord Mordaunt as typical of this new category of peer relying upon income from office rather than from land. There were even peers other than the Greys, Earls of Kent, in severe financial difficulties: John Sutton, Lord Dudley was forced to sell the bulk of his estates in 1537 to meet his debts and both Viscount Lisle and Lord Audley faced acute problems of the same kind. The fact that she reached these conclusions is highly significant in assessing Professor Stone’s arguments about the novelty of aristocratic dependence on income from office rather than from land and about the effects of indebtedness in the succeeding period.
It is this background of confusion over the attitude of the early Tudors to the peerage, of contradictory arguments over the creation and endowment of new peers and of comparative silence over the position of the peerage in landed society before the Reformation that makes the choice of November, 1558 as the starting point for his study surprising. The place of the peerage in English society at the accession of Queen Elizabeth is obviously crucial to Professor Stone’s case. He is perfectly clear on the point: it comprised, so he asserted, “an exclusive club for the substantial landowners” and he assured his readers that “the upper ranges of society in 1558 were not very far off a position of status equilibrium.” Titular status and wealth, allowing for individual exceptions, went broadly hand in hand. If this were not so, then the system of stratification would sooner or later be discredited or overthrown. Within the peerage itself, moreover, there was a general financial distinction to be drawn between the Earls and Marquises on the one hand and the Viscounts and Barons on the other. The thrust of this argument about the correspondence between status and wealth is clear. Indeed, it underlies his entire thesis about the growing discrepancies between the two by the end of the sixteenth century and, in part, at least, about the consequences of the inflation of the peerage in the early seventeenth century. The difficulty with it is that Professor Stone has another, equally clear but fundamentally incompatible line of reasoning on this subject. For he also states that the peerage represented only “a reasonable majority grouping of the greater landowners in 1560” and that it embraced “about two thirds of the total families in this economic class.” In fact, “the baronage at any given time only represents the majority of the greater landowners of the country.” This evidently implies that there was a substantial group of greater landowners outside the ranks of the peerage in 1558. So titular status and wealth could not have been so closely linked as he attempted to argue. This point can be reinforced by examining the one piece of evidence offered to support the contention that there was a clear financial distinction between the upper and lower ranks of the peerage in 1559, namely, his estimates of their gross rentals. If his table is examined in detail, one Duke, six Earls and one Lord are certainly to be found in the top four income groups but there were six Earls and one Marquis together with one Viscount and seven Barons in the fifth income group and four Earls and one Viscount along with ten Barons in the group below that. There was one Marquis in group seven and one Earl in group eight. Put another way, eleven of the twenty individuals in the upper ranks of the peerage are to be found along with nineteen of the forty three Viscounts and Barons in groups five and six. Titular status and wealth on this evidence overlapped in 1559. If a further 30 to 40 families outside the peerage had comparable landed resources to those of the baronage, then the entire argument about the correspondence between status and wealth is unhinged: the discrepancies must have been clear even in 1559. On this basis, furthermore, the peerage is unlikely to have formed more than three fifths or two thirds of the greater landowning class in 1559. Quite how many greater landowners there were by 1600 is not at all clear although Professor Stone states that there was “an urgent need to admit new blood to maintain the close relationship of title to landed wealth.” If the baronage still represented the majority of the class and if the peerage still embraced two thirds of those in this economic category, then the total could not have been in excess of 100. If, however, it required the creations made by James I up to 1615 to restore the peerage’s position, then a total of 120 is conceivable. The peerage would then have formed between half and three fifths of the greater landowning class. By 1641, there were 121 peerage families and “probably another 30 to 40 families who were as rich as the middling barons and richer than the poor ones.” On this basis, the greater landowning class did not exceed 160 families in 1641. The peerage therefore comprised three quarters at least of the group of greater landowners on the eve of the Civil War and was in a more representative position than it had been in 1558 or 1602. This makes the outbreak of the Great Rebellion harder rather than easier to explain if Professor Stone’s premises are accepted. But it also raises considerable doubts about the conceptual framework within which he has attempted to analyse and to explain these events.
Admittedly, none of this affects Professor Stone’s contention that Queen Elizabeth’s reign witnessed the comparative impoverishment of the peerage and a contraction in its real income and in the size of its estates. On his own showing, there had been significant gains made by a section of the peerage as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries and the distribution of Church property. What is not clear is the extent to which this redistribution of property had affected the position of the peerage in landed society. There is some local evidence in Norfolk, for example, to suggest that modest gains were made but this is not conclusive of the country as a whole. To get a better perspective it is possible to compare the subsidy assessments of the peerage in 1534 analysed by Miss Miller and accepted by Professor Stone as reliable with the estimates of landed income offered first by him in 1965 and subsequently revised in 1972. To make this a fair comparison it is necessary to adjust the figures for inflation as measured in the Phelps-Brown price index for consumables. The results of this process can be seen in Tables 1 and 2.
Table 1: Comparison with Professor Stone’s 1965 estimates of Landed Income (L.I.)
Date No.of Peers Total L.I. Mean L.I. Price Index Mean L.I. (1559 prices) % rise or fall from 1534
1534 54 £49,734# £ 921 60 £1,535 -
1559 63 £135,000 £2,140 100 £2,140 +39%
1602 58 £175,000 £3,020 179 £1,690 +10%
1641 121 £505,000+ £4,170+ 219 £1,904+ +24%
£630,000* £5,200* £2,360* +54%
# Calculated as: £921 x 54= £49, 734. + Excluding casualties. * Including casualties.
Table 2: Comparison with Professor Stone’s 1972 estimates of Landed Income (L.I.)
Date No.of Peers Total L.I. Mean L.I. Price Index Mean L.I. (1559 prices) % rise or fall from 1534
1534 54 £ 49,734# £ 921 60 £1,535 -
1559 63 £146,000 £2,320 100 £2,320 +51%
1602 58 £180,000 £3,100 179 £1,730 +13%
1641 121 £465,600+ £3,848+ 219 £1,757+ +14%
£582,000* £4,180* £2,200* +43%
# See note # to Table 1. + Excluding casualties. * Including casualties.
This pattern is quite different from that set out in Stone’s book. It involves substantial gains for the peerage between 1534 and 1559 followed admittedly by a fall in mean landed income in real terms: even so, the level of mean landed income in 1602 was still appreciably above that of 1534. The advance made by the peerage in the early seventeenth century apparently entailed some further gains.
It is also possible to make some calculations about the manorial holdings of the peerage if the Valor Ecclesiasticus sample offered by Professor Stone is accepted as a representative one applicable to their possessions.
Table 3: Comparison with Professor Stone’s 1965 estimates of Manorial Holdings
Date No.of Peers Estimated Total Manorial Holdings Average Holdings per family
1534 54 1,663* 31
1558 63 3,390 54
1602 57 2,220 39
1641 121 3,080 25 [pre-1602 peers: 34
post-1602 peers: 20]
*calculated as £49,734 divided by £29.9 = 1,663.44 rec.
Table 4; Comparison with Professor Stone’s 1972 estimates of Manorial Holdings
Date No.of Peers Estimated Total Manorial Holdings Average Holdings per family
1534 54 1,663 31
1558 63 3,250 52
1602 57 2,140 37
1641 121 3,290 27
Once again, the distinctive crisis in and around 1602 disappears. The peers of the early Stuart period do not, on the whole, appear to have been more poorly endowed with manors than their early Tudor predecessors although they do seem to have obtained a higher real income from their landed possessions. I am, therefore, reluctant to concede that the peerage found itself in an exceptionally exposed position at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The late J.P.Cooper once suggested that the period from 1540 to 1560 or possibly to 1570 could be seen as a high-watermark for the acquisitions of most of the Elizabethan peerage and that some falling of the tide was to be expected for demographic as well as economic reasons. It is perfectly clear that families like the de Veres, Earls of Oxford, who perhaps enjoyed the highest landed income in the country in 1558, were brought down by the extravagance of the 17th Earl. It is equally clear that service to the Crown seriously weakened the estate of Francis Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. Other families suffered from the vicissitudes of demography. Had Elizabeth’s attitude to the creation of peers been less like that of Henry VII and more like that of Henry VIII in the first twenty years of his reign, had she, indeed, been as generous in the 1590s as she was in the 1560s, it is unlikely that any semblance of a crisis at the end of her reign could have been suggested. It is important to remember, however, that her reign was shaped by the political and religious upheavals of the 1540s and 1550s and that she had to take account of the Crown’s financial difficulties throughout the period. Her conservatism over the creation of honours looks altogether different against this background and the exigencies of war finance to which she was subjected after 1585. In even a slightly extended perspective, the economic crisis of the peerage at the end of the sixteenth century looks more like an optical illusion.
The critical economic issue that affected the standing of peers in society was their relationship with their tenants and the development of their leasing policies. The fact that tenants could be pressed too hard even in years of agricultural prosperity was well known to landlords and to preachers. The attempt of the 1st Earl of Cumberland to increase the returns from his estates in the 1520s and 1530s alienated the gentry as well as his tenants. In the early Elizabethan period, according to Professor Stone, the end of military service left nobles and squires “with time lying heavily on their hands, for administration was no longer a very time-consuming occupation now that most of the estate was let out on long lease, and little was kept in hand.” Even after the rapid price inflation of the 1540s and 1550s, he argued that there was no sign of a movement away from leases at customary rents. Elsewhere, however, he maintained that price inflation, which transferred a larger and larger share of the profits of agriculture to the tenant, was the vital factor in breaking this pattern of conservative estate management. In this period of “rapid change in the agricultural scene the personal attention of the landlord was of crucial importance.” Absentee Courtier landlordship imposed a penalty that ‘Country’ peers with nothing else to do did not have to pay. From the 1590s onwards, the rise in rents stimulated by demographic pressure, price inflation and revised leasing policies transferred the balance of advantage from the tenants to their landlords. By the 1630s, a movement to rack or full economic rents was under way. This argument appears more attractive still when the estimate showing that estates comprising half the number of manors they had in 1558 were producing a slightly larger average real income in 1641. In fact, no systematic examination of leasing policy on any one peerage family’s estate was undertaken. Where it would have been possible – on the Howard of Audley End estates, for example, Professor Stone has baldly and incorrectly denied in his later book Family and Fortune that the material is available. Because of the length of leases in the second half of the sixteenth century, which in most parts of the country ran for 21 years, the process of moving from a low rent-high entry fine system was a slow process. On the estate of the Rich family in Essex, for example, it took over four decades mainly because no more than four or five leases expired in any one year. Nor does it seem generally to have exacerbated landlord-tenant relations. For the tenant the rent was a cost that had to be met from the return on production. This return inevitably varied from year to year as conditions in the market, his own performance and the weather changed. The determination of rent levels involved both landlord and tenant taking a medium-term view of the return to be expected. It had to be adequate for it to be worthwhile for the tenant to accept the lease. When the level of return contracted, as it did in the 1640s, this was reflected in a rising level of arrears of rent and leasing practice had to be adjusted by shortening the terms and transferring the burden of repairs to the landlord in the following decade. To talk of rack-renting is a contradiction in terms: the length of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century leases makes such a concept unrealistic. Professor Stone’s famous and much praised description of tenants’ approval for the system of beneficial leases with a rationale comparable to a lottery is without real substance: leasing was based on a careful evaluation of advantages to both landlord and tenant. On the estates with which I am familiar, admittedly mainly in the south-east of England, at least one third of all new leases went to former tenants or their children and some of the rest went to their married daughters and their husbands. Where an estate disintegrated altogether as did that of the de Veres, it took at least a generation for the tenurial connection to be unravelled precisely because the leases were still running. This element of continuity amongst the tenantry makes Stone’s account of a dramatic switch of advantage away from tenants to landlords after 1600 highly questionable. Indeed, his entire account of the subject rests on an over-simplified view of where the balance of advantage lay and on a failure to recognize how estate accounts like those of the 2nd Earl of Salisbury reflect such changes.
The transformation that these economic changes are said to have caused in relations between landlords and tenants had its parallel in the decline in the peerage’s military potential. As late as the 1540s, the Crown was forced to rely “on the usual indentured retinues, raised thanks to the continued enforcement of the obligation of tenants to serve their lords in war.” There was, indeed, what Professor Stone described as “a menacing revival of aristocratic military power” under Edward VI and Mary culminating in the issuing of licences to favoured supporters of their regimes to enable them to recruit retainers. In moments of crisis, Elizabeth was still obliged to turn to her magnates for assistance. It was only in the late sixteenth century that the threat from noble military power evaporated and that a truly national system of raising forces for the Crown came into full effect. It has to be said that this account rests upon a number of misconceptions. There is no evidence whatsoever of the use of indentured retinues after 1512. The quasi-feudal system described by Dr Goring rested on the ability of individual lords to raise contingents not just from their tenants but also from their friends, relations and neighbours. In face of the demands of the French wars of the 1540s and the extension of summonses to more and more small gentry as a result of the disappearance of the monastic contingents, it failed to perform adequately. The rising cost of military equipment, the increasing reluctance of tenants to serve and the administrative problems that arose brought its survival into question. There are signs that the Crown – which had successfully used the system without arousing fears of a challenge to the throne – was already engaged on reform. Thomas Cromwell is known to have considered a plan to reform military recruitment in 1539 and men were certainly levied on a national basis for the Boulogne expedition of 1544. In 1545, the militia was mobilized to meet the threat of a Scottish invasion. Muster Commissioners empowered to inspect each shire’s able-bodied men were appointed from 1535. A ‘national system’ was being put in place however slowly in the mid-Tudor period. Its coping piece was the instruction to muster commissioners in January, 1558 to raise troops for Calais without exempting the tenants of any lord and the passage a few weeks later of the Militia Act. The “old dichotomy” as Dr Goring puts it had gone. What had determined the shape of the country’s military system in the early sixteenth century was the nature and level of the Crown’s demands. When the throne was successively occupied by a minor and then by an insecure woman, faction at the centre stimulated the growth of noble armouries and their willingness to appeal to force. It is this that lies behind the gendarmerie of 1551-52 and the use of licences by the Duke of Northumberland and Queen Mary’s supporters. The development of the office of Lord Lieutenant in the 1550s and the emergence of the trained bands enabled Elizabeth to dispense with Henry VIII’s methods. In the emergencies of her reign, forces raised by the peerage supplemented the shire levies. In any case, the relatively pacific foreign policy she followed until the 1580s denied not only the peerage but the rest of the ruling elite military experience. It is not therefore surprising that the performance of English forces in the Netherlands and elsewhere was of mixed quality. Much the same can be said for the much enlarged peerage in the wars of the late 1620s and again in the Civil Wars of the 1640s. The key changes had taken place by the middle of the sixteenth century and not, as Professor Stone would have it, at the end. Not until Charles I embarked upon his Scottish adventure did the loyalty of the militia bands come into question. By then, the peerage, like the rest of the ‘political nation’, was deeply divided.
It would, of course, be wrong to claim that Professor Stone was only concerned with the economic fortunes and military resources of the peerage. His argument extended much further to encompass the more intangible attributes of influence and prestige. Admittedly, he argued that “the shrinkage of the territorial possessions of the aristocracy seriously constricted their zone of influence.” “Under Elizabeth, their capital holdings and their incomes deteriorated, both relatively and absolutely, as a result of which respect for their titles and their authority was diminished.” This argument rests upon insecure foundations: it is underpinned by an exaggerated view of the power and influence of the mid-sixteenth century peerage, a false antithesis between the interests of the Crown and the nobility and a no less fallacious dichotomy between the aristocracy and the gentry. By what might be termed Stone’s law of social gravity, the fall of the peerage is counterbalanced by the rise of the gentry. This is an unconvincing line of argument for a number of reasons. First of all, it fails to establish that the titular differences between the peerage and the rest of the landowning elite had any significant effect on the attitudes or performance of either in government at local or national level, still less on their economic interests. The peerage encompassed a heterogeneous group, some of whom were great landowners, others of whom definitely fell outside that class. At least 25 had gross rentals in 1559 that were lower than the average landed income of the peerage in 1534. How these peers sustained a way of life “based on a country house, financed mainly from agricultural profits, and supported by a huge train of servants” is never properly explained. They fail to meet the stereotype that Professor Stone has erected. In any event, he has another argument that bears on this point. He stated equally categorically that “the peerage in 1615 still retained its full dignity and respect.” If this is true, then the economic tribulations alleged to have afflicted the late sixteenth century peerage, including the contraction of its landed possessions, must have left its prestige unimpaired. It was on this proposition that professor Hexter built his own interpretation in 1968, an interpretation later endorsed by Professor Stone. The connection between the economic crisis of the late sixteenth century and the political crisis of the mid-seventeenth century appears, prima facie, to have been severed. The argument that the Tudors had had to undermine the powers of the peerage in the sixteenth century because the monarchy’s control of the country was threatened is neatly reversed in the early Stuart period when the Crown had to prop up the peerage by lavish grants and concessions only to find itself fatally weakened by 1641. Neither will do. A significant section of the Crown’s opponents in the political crisis of 1640-42 consisted of peers like the 4th Earl of Bedford, the 3rd Earl of Essex, the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Say and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke whose prestige and influence had grown rather than diminished in the preceding period. The sources of this influence and prestige are not fully explained by Professor Stone’s arguments. It was in any case the military defeat of Charles I in the ensuing conflict that explains the institutional collapse of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England.
I have suggested that the perspective in which Professor Stone viewed the history of the period between 1558 and 1641 needs to be reconsidered. It is questionable whether the peerage ever played so prominent or dominant a role in landed society as he has argued or that they posed such a threat to monarchical control of government in the sixteenth century. It is not even clear on the evidence he has put in court that they were a homogeneous group of landowners. The distinction drawn between peers and gentry as the governing and ruling classes seems wholly false. The symptoms of declining noble income and of diminishing social prestige are not convincingly sustained by his own analysis. The work is riddled with contradictory statements on its major hypotheses. Ironically, such light as it does shed on the origins of the English Civil War sustains traditional views. It structure, however, rests on the neo-Harringtonian concepts imbibed from R.H.Tawney. They were not plausible in the 1950s and I venture to suggest that they were not convincing in 1965. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 is a magnificent piece of imaginative writing. But its arguments cannot ultimately be sustained. The late Tudor and early Stuart peerage still awaits its historians and the Civil war its social explanation.
Christopher Thompson
Titular rank and wealth
Crisis, p.52. “Within very broad limits, and admitting many individual exceptions to the rule, the hierarchy of ranks corresponded very roughly to categories of income, though unfortunately for the historian anomalies are too numerous to allow the generalization to be applied to individuals without careful investigation of the particular circumstances. ... For in the long run, if the hierarchy of titles does not coincide fairly closely with the hierarchy of wealth, the system of stratification will sooner or later be discredited and overthrown.”
Crisis, p.139. (Re: his estimates of the peerage’s gross rentals in 1559 (Appendix VIII A, p.760): “The financial distinction between earls and marquises on the one hand and barons and viscounts on the other comes out very clearly from the table. All but one of the lower peerage were in the bottom four groups, all but one of the upper peerage in the top six.” (Cf. Ibid., p.59)
Appendix VIII A
£
I 6,000 1 Duke (Howard)
II 5,000 – 5,999 1 Earl (Talbot)
III 4,000 – 4,999 3 Earls (Herbert, Percy, Stanley)
IV 3,000 – 3,999 2 Earls (Fitzalan, Vere) 1 Lord (Berkeley)
V 2,000 – 2,999 6 Earls (Clifford, Hastings, Manners, Russell,
Seymour, Wriothesley), 1 Marquis (Paulet),
1 Viscount (Browne), 7 Lords (Dacre of the
North, Mordaunt, Nevill, Paget, Rich,
Sandys, Windsor)
VI 1,000 – 1,999 4 Earls (Bourchier, Neville, Ratcliffe,
Somerset), 1 Viscount (Devereux), 10 Lords
(Blount, Brydges, Darcy of Chiche, Fiennes
[Dacre], Fiennes [Clinton], Lumley, Nevill
[Latimer], Scrope, Sheffield, Stourton)
VII 500 – 999 1 Marquis (Parr), 1 Viscount (Howard
[Bindon], 17 Lords (Brooke, Burgh, Carey,
Darcy of Aston, Eure, North, Ogle, Parker,
St John, Stafford, Stanley [Mounteagle],
Touchet, Vaux, Wentworth, Wharton,
Willoughby, Zouche)
VIII 1 – 499 1 Earl (Grey [Kent]), 5 Lords (Cromwell,
Dudley, Grey [Wilton], Hastings
[Loughborough], Howard {Effingham])
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