ABSTRACT
Like most historical accounts of government, this chapter presents a distorted picture; for it is written almost entirely from the standpoint of the rulers, not of the ruled. Inevitably it is the rulers who provide the sources, both in the mass of documents left over from the process of government and to a great extent in the descriptions of what happened. But it is worth remembering that though government often seems to be a world of its own, concerned with the people outside it mainly in order to make them support an existing regime, it mattered only because of its effects on its subjects. Another distortion is the concentration on central rather than local institutions. In this historians are beginning to mend their ways: more is being written about the government of provinces, cities, and villages – and at a higher level of scholarship -than ever before. The seventeenth century was an age of centralization; nevertheless in 1700 government meant, for the great majority of people, the local tax-collector, the local law-court, the local organizers of armed forces, sometimes the local priest. The distinction between central and local authority was never simple. The state could function only through men who exercised power in smaller units. How far they felt themselves to be agents of the state and how far they were or became independent of it was a complex social as well as political question. Where subjects collectively continued to play any formal part in government, through representative assemblies, it was often provincial rather than national bodies that survived. Only in preparing and making war did the state become during the century truly ‘absolute’; and even there it had to face the danger that armies, or those who commanded them, could become more powerful than the monarch and his civilian counsellors.
