Chapter XVII - Constitutional development and political thought in western Europe

Summary

Along the western seaboard of Europe, the first half of the sixteenth century witnessed the consolidation of national states. The smaller countries were not affected. Scotland had to await the arrival of the Reformation in the 1560s and may be ignored in this survey; Burgundy was undergoing a process of centralisation which did not prevent her break-up and redistribution in the next hundred years; Portugal had already achieved all the organisation she was to have until the Spanish occupation in 1580. Thus the story must concentrate on three main units – England, France and the Spanish kingdoms. In all these countries, medieval kingship began to fail early in the fifteenth century. The Hundred Years War with attendant and subsequent civil wars wrecked both the French and English monarchies, while the kings of Castile and Aragon developed sudden weaknesses in the face of local and class independence. The second half of the century therefore saw simultaneous attempts to restore strong monarchy as the only safeguard of law and order. The Catholic kings in Spain, Charles VII and Louis XI in France, the Yorkists and Henry VII in England – all pursued much the same ends by much the same methods. But if these restorers of peace and good government naturally used the means to hand and were therefore ‘medieval’, it is not surprising that the next generation, proceeding from there, should have more consistently invented and innovated. In England the break with Rome involved a constitutional revolution in which the independent national state was deliberately set up, administration reformed, the principle of legislative sovereignty worked out in practice.