ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century English Revolution is often, and fruitfully, compared with the French Revolution of 1789. But there is one important difference. In France economic and political divisions roughly corresponded with social: the unprivileged Third Estate opposed aristocracy and monarchy; the aristocracy took no part in trade and industry. But in England wool, cloth, and agricultural production for the market split the ruling class itself: many gentlemen and even peers engaged in economic activities which would have been impossible for a French noble. ‘The landowner living on the profits and rents of commercial farming,’ concludes Professor Tawney, ‘and the merchant or banker who was also a landowner, represented not two classes but one. Patrician and parvenu both owed their ascent to causes of the same order. Judged by the source of their incomes, both were equally bourgeois.’ The division in England is not Third Estate versus gentry and peerage, but country versus court. Court and government offered economic privilege to some merchants (monopolists, customs farmers, ruling oligarchies in London and other towns); and perquisites to many members of the landed class. On the other hand, those gentlemen and merchants excluded from economic privilege – and they included some of the richest and most go-ahead members of these social groups as well as the middling men – thought that greater freedom of economic development would be of advantage to themselves and the country. They looked to Parliament and common lawyers to help them to get it. They looked for leadership to a group of peers excluded from court favour. In seventeenth-century France sale of offices diverted capital away from productive investment, thus delaying the development of trade and industry and widening the gap between
nobility and bourgeoisie. Similar social consequences might have resulted in England if the old regime had survived.
