Plausibility check: Absolutist England?

What would be the best POD for England to have a government more in the vein of Louis XIV's France? Or is it implausible?
 
Keep the Stuarts on the throne. No Glorious Revolution would make Parliament a little bit weaker, without the 1689 Bill of Rights which firmly ended the battles between the crown and parliament in favor of Parliament. The Hannoverians (especially George I, who spoke no English) also contributed to this. If James II isn't so open about favoring Catholicism, he might be able to maintain his throne; or perhaps Charles II has a legitimate son. Assuming down the line they can push through toleration for dissenters and Catholics, the Stuarts would have a base loyal to them. They could possibly revive the Court of the Star Chamber as an arm of royal policy to further weaken Parliament. In Britain I can't see Parliament being abolished as it is such an important institution to Britain, but I can certainly see it's powers greatly reduced.

An absolutist Britain wouldn't be quite akin to the Absolutism as France, but it'd be somewhat similar. The crown would be more important, Parliament rather weakened. Probably a lot of arbitrary use of royal power; Parliament might still exist to raise arguments against royal power, but it would be less able to affect any changes.
 

elder.wyrm

Banned
What would be the best POD for England to have a government more in the vein of Louis XIV's France? Or is it implausible?

You'd have to go pretty far back. The aristocracy had a very long history of expecting the monarch to give them a wide berth on certain issues.

A good place to start is to find a way to stop the English monarch from selling off crown-lands as fast as the Throne did IOTL. Less dependence on Parliament for funding means more freedom of action for the King.
 
You'd have to go pretty far back. The aristocracy had a very long history of expecting the monarch to give them a wide berth on certain issues.

A good place to start is to find a way to stop the English monarch from selling off crown-lands as fast as the Throne did IOTL. Less dependence on Parliament for funding means more freedom of action for the King.

How about England not getting screwed up enough that King John doesn't have to sign the Magna Carta? It was the first step in weakening the king, after all.
 
If you go back as far as John's reign, the England you could plausibly have by the 18th century would be a very different place.

I thought the obvious place to look is the English Civil War and Charles I. Better yet, Charles doesn't let a Civil War break out at all. (What good are absolute monarchs if they can't prevent a civil war?)

So, my knowledge of just what factors were at work in getting that ball rolling, just a couple short generations after Elizabeth was ruling so very effectively, is kind of sketchy and hazy. As a progressive type, I've always pretty much accepted that Charles stood in the way of progress and was therefore an idiot and it's a darn good thing that England did not go in an absolutist direction.

But let's say we want the English monarchy to become absolutist, and presumably, if we aren't doing this in the spirit of pulling wings off of flies, it is because we have the notion that an absolute monarchy can be a good thing somehow. How plausible is it that the king, by judiciously granting favors and boons here and preemptively cutting off heads or hanging commoners there, that he secures sufficient power to himself to act pretty much freely of Parliament (or secures a compliant Parliament somehow), if we are willing to grant Charles I as much wisdom as he needs to do this, provided we don't make him too superhumanly Solomonic--it's OK if he is a little above the common cut, that's what monarchism is all about right, the king is supposed to be better than common?

What does it take for Charles I to hold on to at least as much discretionary power as Elizabeth had, and to adapt that power to the changing needs of England as it gets well into the 17th century? What prices does England have to pay--does it lose all opportunity to expand in America for instance, or get a foothold in India, or are both these projects actually furthered by the power of the King? Can Britain still lead the way in agricultural innovation (with its dark side to be sure, the ongoing pauperization and eviction off the land of the surplus workforce--or do the Kings have a creative answer for that?) and eventually industrial development, or will that perforce be the province of those regimes that manage to retain or invent representative government? If England falls behind in some spheres can she pull ahead in others, thanks to the discretionary power of a sovereign?

As I say, my gut feeling is that the sooner you limit or get rid of monarchs, the better.

But since you want a POD, I'd say look at the situation in James I reign, for that matter look at what worked for Elizabeth I, ask whether the slippage (from a monarch's point of view) that obviously left Charles I in a tighter place happened because of silly human frailties on James I or Charles I's own watch, versus deep and major social trends that can't be casually butterflied away. And then ask how Charles I could deal with the latter (and what reasonable measures could any dynasty take against the former too), and turn the situation to his advantage, and choose your POD in the early 17th century accordingly.
 
This is always a great question cos it opens up so many different options.

Firstly for me one of the the major steps to a Parliamentary Monarchy (that Britain has today) isn't the Civil War or the Glorious Revolution but the Henrician Reformation. Without Henry's break with Rome the Tudors would have been far less reliant on Parliament and in turn the Stuarts would have had more flexibility of movement - you'd have to make character changes to James I and VI and to Charles I to do it though. It also was the single biggest transfer of wealth - as so many of those parliamentarians directly benefitted from the dispersal of church property (it founded their fortunes and lead to the creation of an aristocracy that was less reliant on direct royal favour and had an abiding understanding that there were two routes to power the fast and often dangerous life of the court and royal service or through Parliament).

There are numerous other butterflies you'd need primarily a different financial system enabling the King to raise taxes and armies without consulting parliament - a long lasting semi autonomous aristocracy that were eventually drawn to the crown or crushed by them for example.

The Civil War wasn't so much about the Stuarts move to absolutism as an amalgam of dissatisfaction with the Crown, growing protestant religious dissent (that had grown pretty much unchecked), the failed attempts of both Stuart Kings (James I and Charles I) of imposing the preferred Anglican system on Presbyterian Scotland), a corrupt and financially embarrased court etc.

The three great Tudor monarchs had governed Parliament through sheer force of personality and in the case of both Henry VIII and ELizabeth I through a strong position of public popularity. Ironically they both viewed themselves as 'absolute' by the conventions of the day but they still faced checks on their power by Parliament and it limited their movement to a certain extent. Elizabeth turned her final crisis over Parliament's criticism of the monopolies that were enriching her court into the final golden moment of her reign.

To get a real autocracy you'd need to go back probably to the Norman Conquest at the very latest and have a much stronger and longer surviving feudal system - you would need the creation of a much stronger and more powerful semi royal aristocracy such as in France and you would need a less mobile and less afluent middle section (country gentlemen and yeoman farmers) and you would have to limit the power and autonomy of cities such as London.
If you left it to a POD in the 15th and 16th Centuries - then I think you'd need an England much more similar to France.





 
Just have King Henry VIII appropriate most of the lands seized from the Dissolution of the Monasteries for the Crown. In OTL, there was very little royal foresight in the process of distribution, and a lot of lands were granted unnecessarily to royal favorites or sold off to gain large sums in the short term (then again, this seemed to be the general rule throughout the monarchy's history).

With the majority of Church lands now part of the Crown's estates, the Tudors have very little reason to summon Parliament for taxes as often as in OTL. Yes, Parliament had gained some new powers by some dangerous precedents set in King Henry's reign (Act of Supremacy, the succession acts, etc.), but I still think that this can be avoided if the Crown's finances are taken care of enough to keep it from needing to summon Parliament as often as in OTL.

You'll probably need a secure (i.e. male) succession for a few generations, too, just to ensure stability and the proper force of will to continue the trend of absolutism. A more stable regency after Henry's death with Edward VI living to old age will do it.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
The Tudor period is indeed probably the best time after Magna Carta - the wars of the roses had massively decimated the aristocracy to the point where barely 40 or so of the old feudal magnates were left, and they were al pretty deep in debt. The part about dissolution of the monasteries is pretty accurate too in terms of finances - I would actually be counter to historical wisdom on one point and suggest a reinforcement of feudalism: keep the nobility in the hands of landed magnates on the basis of "per baroniam" tenure, but still allow some sort of increase of the peerage on a non-feudal basis. You can easily build up tensions between the robe and sword nobility that way, and tensions within the nobility are good for an absolutist divide et impera approach.
 
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