Popular Politics

Mark Knights

Picking up and introducing themes

• First term’s exploration of social structure• Penny Roberts and Humfrey Butters on

popular ands elite culture• And looking ahead:

– Next week: The Political Landscape– The following week: Absolutism and its

alternatives– Week 10: Political Thought

The separation and convergence of social and political history

• High political concern with certain institutions of the state• Social history’s recovery of the world of the everyday.

Trevelyan: social history as history with the politics taken out.

• More recent re-integration:– Political history and the public– Religious/cultural history: Patrick Collinson called for

‘a new political history, which is social history with the politics put back in, or an account of political processes which is also social’.

– Social history and the state

What type of state and hence what type of popular politics?

Our view of the state changes how we might conceive popular politics:

i) The state appears as hugely powerful, with power concentrated in the hands of the executives, with little choice but submission; or the state as impersonal machine, administered by magistrates; the state is the legal system = power/might. In this model popular politics is resistance to the state.

• 1626 Austrian peasants sang : The whole country must be overturnedFor we peasants are now to be the lordsIt is we who will sit in the shade• 1651 Fronde in Bordeaux said that ‘the real cause of sedition and

political strife is the excessive wealth of the few’

• ii) the state is more consensual, needing agreement of its members; the number of such members who count increases to include those with votes and other forms of influence = authority and legitimacy.

• In this model popular politics is negotiation with, even participation in, the state

Re-thinking power• But 1980s forced rethinking –

were states very strong, even if they seemed to be?

• "If you have fortresses and yet the people hate you they [the fortresses] will not save you; once the people have taken up arms they will never lack outside help." Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

Negotiation? Participation?

• How was power legitimated? Ideology; display; gesture;

points of intersection between elite and popular• Local brokers: the ‘better sort’? • Importance of office-holders: in GB not just deputy

lieutenants, JPs, town magistrates, sheriffs and grand jurors, but also constables, beadles, tithingmen, nightwatchmen, vestrymen and churchwardens, overseers of the poor, petty jurors, local courts.

• Self-governance. Goldie estimates that c. 1700 about 1/20th of the adult males in England were ‘governing’ in some sense. And because many were rotated frequently this meant very large scale inclusion.

• Wayne Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700: ‘it is useful to regard politics as an ongoing bargaining process between those who claim governmental authority in a given territory (rulers) and those over whom that authority is said to extend (subjects)’.

• Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003): ‘Popular politics simply refers to the presence of ordinary, non-elite subjects as the audience for or interlocutors with a political action …What defined popular politics, then, was not the social class of the people politicking, but rather the extent to which the governed played a role in their own governance. Popular politics presumed, in practice if not in theory, that issues of substantial importance to the life of the nation would be discussed and debated in public, and popular politics accepted, again in practice if not in theory, that those debates would significantly affect how the issues were decided’.

Choices and strategies• Varieties of resistance:

– Riot [religious policy, taxation, foreign affairs]– Revolt [General crisis of mid C17th. Britain; France; Naples and

Palermo in Italy; Portugal; Muscovy; Switzerland]– Rebellion– Seditious words

The importance of print

Petitions, addresses, oaths• Humble request or supplication

that could carry popular demands or express popular loyalism; oaths of loyalty

• 5209 in GB 1660-1715; 500 associations

• 426 associations signed in 1696 – Norwich’s two rival texts (with only one word different) carry 6875 signatures, almost the entire adult male population

• Process of dialogue within state

Loyalism as a form of popular politics

• Rather than assuming politics is always about contest we can see it can also be about the process of creating loyalties to regimes and institutions

• Though loyalty was a contested term – loyal to what? To the old or new church? To the monarch or the church? To the monarch or custom?

• Questions of authority and legitimacy created moral dilemmas – a series of choices requiring compliance or resistance - amongst the people. Do you take down an image when the government tells you to, or resist? Do you initiate the process of taking down the image? ie can you co-opt state power to do what you want?

Women and popular politics• Religion could give women a role

to intervene politically

• Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent. Executed 20 April 1534 with five associates .She had visions believed to be direct revelations from God and these took a political turn. An angel commanded her to tell a monk ‘to burn the New Testament he had in English’; and then to tell the king ‘that he take none of the pope’s right nor patrimony from him, the second that he destroy all those new folks of opinion and the works of their new learning, the third that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’. This was treason to king – even if loyal to her idea of God.

Unintended consequences

• The need to secure legitimacy and collaboration could also have the unintended consequence of creating a public debate and a popular politics.

• Redefined notion of the ‘people’?