Alexis de Tocqueville: “My Musings about English History.”

 

In October 1828, while staying “at Tocqueville, my old family ruin,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend—Gustave de Beaumont or possibly Louis de Kergolay—who had asked for his thoughts on English history. The Napoleonic Wars had concluded only in the last decade; the French and the English had hated one another for centuries, and only the rise of a newly united Germany would bring them into alliance, decades later. The two young men evidently intended to collaborate on an analysis of France’s old enemy: “I will write haphazard what I think for you to put in order if you can or will.”

This was more than a matter of knowing their enemy, however. Just as, a decade later, Tocqueville would study America not so much to know America as to understand democracy, which America then exemplified better than any other country, so he considers England for a broader purpose. “There is hardly anywhere better than England for studying the underlying factors and the details of the armed emigrations which overturned the Roman Empire, because there were more of them there and they lasted into a time when the barbarians in the rest of of Europe were already refinding civilization.” What is more, England in its early times put the much-touted revolutionary spirit that swept Europe in the nineteenth century very much ‘into perspective.’ In England, “revolution after revolution” wracked the country; by comparison, the revolutions “of our own time are trifles.” The Scots defeated the “British tribes”; the Saxons invaded and conquered both; the Danes followed, “a third race of conquerors.” It was only “until the Normans…endowed both with the impetuous energy of the Danes and with a higher civilization than the Saxons, united them all under one yoke.” The Tocqueville family estate was only a short distance from Barfleur, whence William the Conqueror embarked. “I am surrounded by Normans whose names figure in the lists of the conquerors.”

“One thinks with horror of the inconceivable sufferings of humanity at that time.” Yet it was also a time and place where one might find evidence of the origins of feudalism. France is not that place. Feudalism didn’t begin there. It originated more or less simultaneously in France, the Germanies, Poland, Spain, and Italy—in Europe north to south, west to east. “Clearly the feudal system of the twelfth century is but the result of an underlying cause,” just as democracy would be, centuries later. “If you want to understand the first underlying principles of the feudal system, and you need to understand them to see how the wheels work in the finished machine, you cannot do better than study the time before the Norman conquest, because…we know of no people nearer to their primitive state than the Saxons and the Danes. Nor other people show a clearer record of their institutions, and I am sure that deep research into those times would enable us to explain many things which cannot now be explained in the history of other peoples, as for instance certain maxims of legal procedure which have become laws throughout Europe, but of which we can neither trace the origin, nor account for the reason why people are so obstinately attached to them.” Far removed from the Romans, the Saxons “are precious as a type of the peoples from whom we all, such as we are, are sprung.” They alone are reason enough to study English history.

The problem is that neither Tocqueville nor his friend had engaged in such deep research. What he can discuss is “the history of England after the conquest.” William’s conquest was easy. The three “races” on the the British Isles were still at odds with one another; the capital city was small and the provinces unfortified; the Normans enjoyed “vast intellectual superiority” over the natives. But easy conquests don’t necessarily last. This one did because William introduced “the fully developed feudal system,” as distinguished from the haphazard collection of its elements that already existed there. William made feudalism in England “a more coherent whole than in any other country, because one head had thought out all the machinery and so each wheel fitted better.” If William wasn’t the founder of feudalism in England, he was its organizer, and his achievement prompts Tocqueville to consider the difficulties of that kind of effort. “There are two great drawbacks to avoid in organizing a country. Either the whole strength of social organization is centered on one point, or it is spread over the country.” If centralized, and the center does not hold (as in Paris in the 1790s), “everything falls apart and there is no nation left.” If spread out, “action is clearly hindered”—no “one head” can make an authoritative decision and coordinate the actions needed to implement it. “But there is strength everywhere,” and this may contribute to a nation’s longevity in the longer term. The loss of the capital city won’t ruin the country because capable and well-organized bodies of men pervade it, from border to border. A centralized people “will do greater things and have a more active life” than a decentralized people, “but its life will be poorer,” as the nation’s resources will flow to the capital, draining the provinces. 

“I don’t know if a mean between these extremes can be found, but it would seem that William did find it.” He granted land and power of government “in return for a money rent and, more important, the obligation to provide an armed force for a stated time.” That is, he established an aristocracy which owed revenue and soldiers to the monarch in exchange for rule over local lands and the people living on them. Crucially, if a foreign army invaded and “extraordinary levies” of men and good were needed, the king needed the consent of the aristocrats, having “no other armies but those of his barons, and no revenue but that from his domains.” Understanding this, William, “master of all as conqueror of all, gave lavishly but kept still more. Power was so divided among the ruling class that a handful of Normans could hold down an unwilling country for a century; at the same time, the royal power was so strong that it could crush any individual baron who would have wished to break away from the king’s general supervision”; only “a general combination against him” could depose the king of feudal England. Had William’s successors to the throne proved capable, “his work would surely have lasted as he had conceived it, and in spite of the revolutions that followed,” thanks to tyranny of his line. And even despite the follies and other vices of his successors, “his version of the feudal system is nevertheless by and large the one which caused the least harm and left the smallest legacy of hatred.” For comparison, one need only consult Tocqueville’s treatment of French feudalism, The Old Regime and the Revolution. 

But to the tyrants. “There have been few worse rulers and, especially few rulers more inclined to abuse their powers than the Norman kings and the first Plantagenets.” “William Rufus was like a wild beast”; Henry I and Stephen were little better. The first Plantagenet, Henry II, was less just or prudent than fortunate, marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine and thereby acquiring “the whole Atlantic coast…without a sword being drawn.” A “hard, autocratic ruler as were all the rest of his family,” Henry II was succeeded by Richard, “a wild madman, one of those brilliant beings who burn but give no light,” exhausting his people by exorbitant taxes. Tocqueville re-emphasizes: “If William’s work did not produce the results we might have expected, the bad behavior of his successors is alone to blame.”

By the time of King John’s reign, not only had the monarchy caused restiveness among the aristocrats but a new class “was beginning to emerge” in England and throughout Europe. This was the mercantile class, the “third estate,” a class “which the kings of France took trouble to encourage in their domains.” Prudently so, for when the French king undertook the reconquest of occupied English provinces, he “met hardly any resistance.” 

“John’s tyranny grew no less through the loss of those provinces, for it is a law of all dominions past, present and future, to make greater demands in proportion as power decreases.” By 1214 the aristocrats had had enough, realizing “that, if they united, they would be stronger than the king though each by himself was still weaker than he.” John signed the Magna Carta in the following year. The old principle of government by the consent of the governed was formalized.

Tocqueville refuses to magnify the importance of the Charter. “Many people treat the words ‘Magna Carta’ as magic. They see the whole English Constitution in it; the two Houses [of Parliament]; ministerial responsibility; taxation by vote and a thousand other things that are no more there than in the Bible.” On the contrary, “Magna Carta served no national purpose, but was devised to serve the private interests of the nobles and to redress some intolerable abuses which harmed them. the few stipulations that affected the common people amount to so little that it is not worth talking about them.” Still, Magna Carta did cause “great things”: “it was decisive; it gave a clear shape to the opposition.” It proved that the aristocrats could organize themselves effectively against a monarchy that had veered into tyranny.

John’s successor, Henry III, was “a nonentity who let the revolution slide on.” It was his successor, Edward I, who took the steps necessary to prevent the balance from tipping too far against the monarchy. “He was a skillful ruler who knew that one has to tack in a storm,” taking “the measures which are almost always successful after a revolution, when there are a great many private disasters and the first need is for personal safety.” He established and enforced “good civil laws which, as you know, often make people forget good political laws.” Tocqueville is thinking of Napoleon, whose civil legal code stabilized French civil society without returning the regime to republicanism. Edward organized English legal procedure, encouraged trade, and generally “soothe[d] popular passion and succeeded pretty well”—a “bad man” but an “able” one. 

Where did this lead the Third Estate in England? “They were composed of all the hard-working people of independent spirit who were put upon in every sort of way by the tyranny of barons and king.” Resisting, they organized what Tocqueville would later call civil associations in every town. “As time went on this class became, for that age, very enlightened and rich, as all commerce had gradually fallen into its hands. It gained what the others lost, for it was nearer than the others to the natural state of mankind.” If man is by nature a social animal, then he who animates civil society by exercising the capacity to organize it will prevail over his rivals in the long run—a point parallel to Tocqueville’s commendation of decentralization.

How did the Third Estate proceed? How did it exploit its natural advantage, which was by no means evident to anyone, including its own members? The monarch ruled in the capital city, but “the capital was of little importance in feudal days, so it was possible that, at same time as a baron, safe in his corner, struck money, held court and made war with his serfs and his liegemen, a bowshot away there might be a town, appointing its magistrates, managing its finances, and having its armed band under its own flag, in a word a real republic.” “An odd mixture of oppression and liberty, one can see no unity in [feudalism’s] variegated confusion, but everywhere centers of active life.” Republicanism or popular self-government by elected representatives fosters not only the commercial virtues of prudent bargaining and mutual trust among those tested for their reliability; it can also encourage sterner virtues. “In such republics there were often heroes worthy to have lived in Rome or Sparta,” men capable of standing up to monarchs and aristocrats alike.

And what if the gentler virtues of commerce and the tougher virtues of civic and even martial courage combine? “Suppose that two men have been engaged in a long and determined fight although one of them is a little weaker than the other. A third man comes up, weaker than either of the two but who, whichever side he took, would be sure to tilt the balance that way. But who will think of asking him for help, who will urge his claim for help most strongly? It is sure to be he who feels himself weakest.” Thus did aristocrats, monarchs, and merchant-citizens find themselves in a struggle in which the merchant-citizens, still the weakest, nonetheless held the balance. Just as William the Conqueror found the Aristotelian mean between the extremes of governmental centralization and decentralization, so the Third Estate acted as the Aristotelian balance-wheel, not between the few who are rich and the many who are poor (as in Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’) but between ‘the few’ aristocrats and ‘the one’ monarch. “There, my dear friend, is the whole history of France and of England in the story of those three men.” Typically, the king, “the weaker of the first pair,” would “call the Commons to his aid, and join forces with them and lead them, to use their help to destroy the feudal system,” as Philip the Fair did in France. “In the end” the monarchy itself “would be swallowed up” by the commoners “when the two were left face to face in 1789.” But in England, beginning with Lord Leicester in the early seventeenth century, it was the aristocracy that was the weaker; the feudal nobles took the initiative to bring the third estate into Parliament, “year by year to put forward claims in its interest as if they were their own, to build up its strength, promote and sustain it every time.” By 1640, the commons “threw over the nobility” and “established the republic.” True, “that revolution was not final.” In general, however, “in every case the weakest becomes the strongest, and the ally gets his master down.” This shows “that after all rational equality is the only state natural to man, since nations get there from such various starting points and following such different roads.” Rational equality is the natural equality revived under feudal aristocracy and monarchy by the Third Estate as it established republicanism under the noses of its rulers and then extended what began as civil-social associations to the political sphere. The fact that Tocqueville wrote from the old family ruin must have brought this point home; he lived in symbolic surroundings. 

“The third estate had to be called in to the management of affairs as soon as anything was to be feared or hoped from it. That’s the natural way for the world to go,” as Tocqueville would argue, famously, in Democracy in America. He had his thesis in hand a decade earlier.

Once Edward I took command in 1272, he saw an advantage in reorganizing and recalling the House of Commons, so long as “he chose who should represent them and united them under his control.” It was simple: he “needed money” and “the Commons were rich.” He elevated commoners to parity with the lords in Parliament, thus making it easier for him to raise taxes. Aristocrats nonetheless retained their ancient rights and privileges; England was not yet a modern, fully democratized civil society with a centralized administrative state. One still “needed the consent of all that lot of people to do a heap of things,” including “the imposition of all extraordinary taxes.” 

Initially, long before Edward’s reign, Parliament was composed of the leaders of the higher aristocracy, the lords, and representatives of the lower aristocracy or gentry class. Eventually, the Lords became dominant. “It was then that the Commons became strong enough and rich enough for others to have an interest in summoning them to Parliament,” as Edward did. After that, the same ‘triangulation’ strategy seen in the relations of aristocrats and monarchs to the commoners now began to occur in Parliament itself. Initially distrusted by both lords and gentry, restricted to voting on taxes and barred from the exercise of other governmental powers, eventually the landed gentry and the commoners in the towns joined to form the English House of Commons. Hence the English electoral system: each county elects two members from the lower nobility and every town or “borough” can send one or more members to Parliament, “choos[ing] them as it likes, that is its affair.” In addition, English clergymen, with their own revenues in the form of tithes and their own property, “took their places as of right in Parliament.” Parliament as a whole then consisted of “turbulent Lords and weak and timid Commons, themselves surprised at the part they [had] been called to play.” With the power of the purse, they enjoyed a powerful check on the monarchy, being “careful only to vote taxes for a short period.” Keeping an eye on the rival executive branch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons usually have collaborated—”two orders of men who, in the rest of Europe, have been irreconcilable enemies.”

The Commons gained the upper hand over the aristocrats and the clergy by declaring that only taxes approved by the Commons could be levied. Aristocrats and clergymen agreed in this, thinking of it as a guard against monarchic exactions. This enabled the Commons to establish the right to petition the king for address of grievances—essentially a formalized process of bargaining. Eventually, “several times the Commons bluntly declared that they would not vote a tax until their wrongs had been righted, and it was done.” “One must admit that there is much to admire in the English people at that time. Their constitution was famous already and was thought to be different from that of other countries. Nowhere else in Europe as yet was there a better organized system of free government,” and “no other country had profited so much from feudal organization.”

In 1307 Edward II succeeded his father. He made the mistake of marrying Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair; “few human beings have ever brought so much ill to the human race.” Isabella eventually “threw England into confusion” by siding with one of the barons against her husband and “had her husband assassinated” after he was captured by the insurgent forces. These acts eventuated in war with France. In 1328 Charles IV of France died without a male heir, ending the Capetian dynasty. Because Isabella’s young son was the late king’s closest male relative, the ambitious queen put in his claim to the French throne. Wanting no English king, the French nobility installed Philip, Count of Valois. Isabella waged war.

After a brief interregnum by Isabella and her lover and co-conspirator, Lord Mortimer, Edward III took the English throne, becoming “one of the greatest of England’s kings,” sitting “on his father’s throne much as Alexander after the death of Philip.” Unfortunately, he exercised his greatness in the war with France—the “most heroic, the most brilliant and the most unhappy time in our history,” wherein French “valor was always crushed by superior [English] discipline.” “Thence derives that often unreflecting instinct of hate which rouses me against the English.” In France, Edward “waged a war of devastation,” his forces defeating the French at Crécy and then at Poitiers. “Almost the whole of the French nobility fell into the power of the English in those two days,” and “the French commons and serfs who had nursed an implacable hatred” against the aristocrats “took this chance to seize power,” bringing on “a most terrible civil war” in addition to the war against the English.

What accounted for England’s superior discipline in the Hundred Years’ War? “This is it: Geographical position and freedom had already made England the richest country in Europe.”

That point is worth lingering over. Tocqueville fully acknowledges the hard fact of geography. The word ‘geopolitics’ has yet to be invented but he knows what it is, and if there’s such a word as ‘geo-economics,’ he knows what that is, too. But he never loses sight of the importance of political freedom. When it comes to understanding causation in politics, he knows that civil societies and political regimes count, too.

Parliament readily put English wealth “at the king’s disposal,” enabling him to pay his army, “that is to say an army of men who had to obey all his orders, which he could keep in being as long as he wanted and use as he wanted.” The French king was hobbled by the older practice of the feudal system, whereby the barons were bound to his service only forty days at a time. “Chance alone decided which men they assembled, so that they were but an impetuous ill-disciplined mass.” Only after “bitter sufferings had taught the nobility to obey” and “the people had been toughened by all manner of affliction,” and “above all when the money provided by the States General had enabled Charles V to buy the courage of plenty of brave and disciplined adventurers,” did the French muster the strength needed to throw the invaders out of the country in 1378—the English “leaving nothing but their bones behind,” as the young patriot writes, grimly satisfied. Thus, after the English victories under Edward III and the French victories under Charles V, Edward’s successor, his grandson Richard II, found himself embroiled in domestic controversies spurred by “the turbulence of the Commons” and “the insolence of the Lords.” 

Richard would “try to destroy that dangerous constitution, as yet ill defined, which made the strength of skillful princes, but which threw the unskillful from the throne.” Calling Parliament to assemble, he “made it choose from its body commissioners to represent it when it was not assembled”—representatives of the representatives, so to speak. Except the new body was too small and weak to resist monarchic dominance and “national representative was then only a name,” as “Richard ruled without control.” This spread seeming calm over England. But when Richard imposed a tax not enacted by the full Parliament, that “proved the drop of water which makes a glass overflow.” Henry of Lancaster rallied a one hundred thousand-man army in revolt, capturing the king “without a fight.” and installing himself as Henry IV, with popular support. “As I think about all this…and about the fearful consequences of these events. I feel that the history of this time should be written in huge letters in all public places and in the palaces of all kings. Perhaps the peoples would realize what it costs to sacrifice the principle of legitimacy, and doubtless their rulers too would learn that one cannot make sport of the rights of nations unpunished, and that triumphs of that sort do not always last long.” Henry V succeeded “the usurper.” Although “the English regard [him] as a hero of their history,” Tocqueville, being French, does not. Henry “made use of the best means of distracting the restless energy of a people still shaken by the after-effects of a revolution; he decided to break the truce with France and profit from the internal disturbances which were again rending our unhappy country.” Landing in Normandy, winning “the decisive battle of Agincourt,” he “had himself crowned king of France.” But upon his death the French struck back, with Joan of Arc leading them. Hers is an “incredible story,” which “one cannot understand but can still less question.” The English “began to retreat and for the second and last time France was saved.” England soon descended back into civil war, with the houses of Lancaster and York fighting “for the throne through fifty years of unparalleled bitterness” in the War of the Roses. “Each party triumphed in turn more than ten times, and each time the vanquished suffered all manner of punishments and confiscations.” The war burnt itself out; “the whole tyrannical and cruel race of the Plantagenets vanished from this world”; the peace of exhaustion was solemnized when a Lancastrian man married a Yorkist woman.

It is impossible not to see that Tocqueville’s account of this period of English history tracks more recent French history, with the Plantagenets standing in for the state-centralizing Bourbons, the Lancastrian rebellion standing in for the French Revolution, Henry V for Napoleon. Although France in the eighteenth century suffered nothing like the War of the Roses in the fifteenth, some of the combustibles for such a civil war were there, and French politics remained embittered by struggles over the regime for more than a century. Tocqueville hoped that the Orléanist line would restore legitimacy, reigning over a mixed regime with a strong republican element. But France had nothing like the English constitution.

Neither did the English, at least not in that constitution’s well-established condition. “There are many people, both among those who have studied English history and those who have not, who suppose that the English constitution has passed through various regular, successive stages until it has reached the point it now is. According to them it is a fruit which every age has helped to ripen. That is not my view.” On the contrary, England’s “forward movement” toward constitutionalism has suffered from numerous interruptions and even times of “a most marked retrogression.” This is what happened after the Plantagenet dynasty disintegrated. The Tudor Dynasty which replaced it saw “something like a general agreement by all orders in the state to throw themselves into servitude.” What British constitution, then? The aristocrats “seemed reduced almost to nothing,” with “all the descendants of the Normans…dead or ruined.” “New unstable families without roots in the nation had risen in their place.” Without the support of the Lords, the Commons “lost all that republic energy which had marked their fathers,” hoping “that what they lost in freedom, they had gained in security.” England was far from the only country so afflicted. “A similar movement was taking place all over Europe,” as “all monarchies were tending to become absolute,” replacing “the oligarchic liberty which had been enjoyed for two centuries.” The statist monarchs crushed the feudal aristocrats and removed many of “the vices of the feudal system,” but at the price of the liberty aristocrats had taken for themselves and, acting in their own interests, advanced among the commoners, at the same time.

This clearly shows (it should be noted, in passing) that Tocqueville is no more a historical determinist than he is a geographical determinist. Causation isn’t that simple. He always leaves room for statecraft and for human freedom, generally. This makes it possible for him to offer lessons to statesman, as he does in his next remark.

The movement toward state-centralizing or ‘absolute’ monarchy “was more marked in England than anywhere else” because in England it took on the veneer of legality. “Note that well; nothing gives more food for thought. When a despot forces his way to sovereignty, his power, however great, will have limits, be they only those imposed by fear. But a sovereign clothed in power to do everything in the name of law is far more to be feared and fears nothing.” “I know no more complete tyrant in history than Henry VIII.” (Tocqueville is thinking also of Napoleon and his legal code.) If a Plantagenet imposed a tax, it had no support of the full Parliament; “when one of the Tudors asked the people for an exorbitant tax, it was the people themselves who granted it, for Parliament had voted for it,” and “when the blood of the highest fell on the scaffold,” the monarch could again rest on the appearance of legality, as the Lords had signed off on the execution. “Thus [liberty’s] own instrument,” the rule of law, “was turned against liberty.” The Tudor regime established the device of Bills of Attainder, “a diabolical invention which even the Tribunal of the [French] Revolution never revived,” whereby a legislator may impose the death penalty without the defendant being afforded the benefit of trial. 

Although Thomas Hobbes saw the possibility of a peaceful religious settlement under new regime, no such thing happened. “When I see the English people change their religion four times to please their masters, and when I think that almost in our own day we have seen the French clergy nearly in mass prefer exile, poverty and death to the mere appearance of a schism, when I see that, I am prouder to be born on this side of the channel than I should be to claim that the blood of Plantagenets and Tudors ran in my veins.” Religious instability breeds political strife. “Men need authority in questions of religion.” “They go astray when they lose a sure basis and appeal to their reason alone.” 

How, then, to explain the Revolution of 1688, which reinstated a better balanced, constitutional regime in England? “What was able to raise the English people from that state of degradation” they had reached under the Tudors? “The same thing as had thrown them down”: “The spirit of the constitution had been broken, but the forms remained: it was like the corpse of a free government,” but a corpse that did not rot. “When spirits stupefied by the disasters of the civil wars began little by little to revive, when numbed hearts beat again, when the passage of time had given the Commons the strength they lacked or thought they lacked, in a word, when the nation awoke, it found the tools for regeneration to hand, and with the spirit of its ancestors all the means to be like them.” By 1688, “the spirit of argument introduced by the Reformation began to bear fruit: the Commons already began proudly to take thought of their power and their wealth,” and the monarchy, “which had lost its foundations in the hearts of Englishmen,” collapsed.

Tocqueville ends his letter with that. What began as an inquiry into the origins of feudalism, and therewith of the aristocracy which was now declining, quickly turned to a discussion of the origins of the modern state and of the democratic civil-social conditions that undermined aristocracy, whose works were literally crumbling around Tocqueville as he wrote. For the rest of his life, he would plan the architecture of a new home for aristocracy, a home in but not entirely of modern political conditions.