1 - The administrative threshold

Summary

The sixteenth century has been recognized as being an age of lawyers, bringing a litigious dimension into daily life. From the perspective of the infant sovereign state the century can be viewed also as an age of secretaries, the mere clerks of an earlier period, who, as portals to the king's attention and bearers of his business, strained toward the defining of those later ministries and departments that have become such a dominant feature of modern existence. For among the innovators of the age–and there were others beside Martin Luther–is the striking presence of the state secretary–Francisco de los Cobos in Castile, Florimond Robertet in France, Thomas Cromwell in England.

All this is well known and need not engage the attention of the historian except perhaps for the parallelism of developments in western Europe during the first half of the century. What is less well recognized is that the emergence of these super-clerks, bearing with them the seeds of modern bureaucracy, occurs at the expense of a great medieval institution – the chancellorship. For if the century was good for secretaries, it was bad for chancellors. The fate of Wolsey and of More comes readily to mind, followed thereafter by the whirlwind of bureaucratic activity that marked the career of Cromwell. But the case of France, where the office of chancellor was as old as the monarchy itself and would only perish with that monarchy, presents a fairer test of the point being made here.