Personal Rule is Not Easy Even for A Man With Three Bodies

Charles I in Three Positions by Anthony Van Dyck 1635 (Royal Collection, London)

Last week’s post described some events in England in 1629 that related to the dissolution of parliament. Parliament was not recalled again for 11 years. The period from 1629 to 1640 is known as ‘Personal Rule’ because the reigning monarch, Charles I, governed without parliament. Although the fractious relationship between monarchs and parliament had in the past resulted in long gaps between parliaments, the situation in the 1630s was more serious than previously for two reasons. Firstly, the unprecedented assertiveness of parliament in the late 1620s posed substantially more challenges to the king’s sovereignty than ever before. Secondly, it seemed possible that in response to the new situation this particular monarch intended to dispense with parliament altogether. In principle, parliament had broad consultative and legislative roles, but in practical terms its function was to supply the king with finance and lend legitimacy to that transaction. Since no taxes could be raised without agreement of parliament, alternative methods of financing expenditure must rely on the king’s legitimate prerogative powers. Depending on how royal prerogative was interpreted by law courts, it would, therefore, have been feasible for Charles to rule alone (he would not need three bodies, not even two). 

From the perspective of political theory and political history it is tempting to remark that the name ‘Personal Rule’ suggests an interruption in the depersonalisation of government. There could be some truth in this if one accepted the viewpoint stemming from Geoffrey Elton that Tudor administrative reform in the 1530s had, in Quentin Skinner’s words, initiated “the development of a relatively impersonal and bureaucratic form of state apparatus” and a “fundamental conceptual shift” equating “the state” with “impersonal power”. The key move in political science was to identify for the first time a supremely impartial “public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled”. Harvey Mansfield (after some argument) agrees with Skinner that it was Hobbes who eventually completed the conceptual modernisation by creating the image of the “impersonal state as an artificial person”. 

But although it was Hobbes who worked most thoroughly on the conceptual problem at this time, paradoxically we see in his work Leviathan (published 11 years after the end of Personal Rule) a way in which the sovereign might choose, for convenience, to become the new state. Leaving aside whether belief in a king’s ‘divine’ right was ever true or genuine, it may be divined from his words and actions, his evident sense of duty, and his own and his servants’ sharp awareness of ‘public good’ and ‘public interest’ as distinct from ‘ private’, that Charles I saw himself as a natural ruler who -- were it not for the impertinence of some parliamentarians who had deliberately misinterpreted England’s customs of sovereignty for their private ends -- would be freely loved, chosen, and contracted by his subjects. In fact it was for the most part true that even when they criticised their king the subjects still wanted him. In no small measure this was because the king was quite a decent man, not a tyrant.

During the 1630s the monarch’s energetic efforts to rule personally and well -- both morally and efficiently -- were in various respects impressive. King Charles and his father King James may actually have taken to heart the admonitions of sixteenth century English humanists like More and Starkey against the “unscrupulous greed” of the nobility, the “conspiracy of the rich who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth”. 

Charles made a public effort to curb the private interests at court, to impose discipline and good manners among the privileged, and pushed his top civil servants to pursue bureaucratic priorities of public interest exemplified by the Book of Orders, the policy of ‘Thorough’, the drainage of the fens, or public works in London, in ways intended to avoid appropriations and distortions by private interests. More generally in his personal mode of governing and of arbitrating between factions (even between himself and his ambitious and opinionated French wife) he appears to have wanted to look managerial, detached, moral, and impartial.  

Charles failed mainly because governance is too complex to be personal. He consulted somewhat, but believed he could better define the public interest than the courts and councils. It turned out to be impossible to control a kingdom effectively from the centre to such an extreme degree. Even well intentioned projects, such as fen drainage, had unintended consequences, and became vehicles for abuse of office or abuse of property rights. The king, try as he might, could not stay sufficiently informed to adjudicate objectively. The energy of this two-bodied family man, natural and corporate, great though it was, was physically severely limited by his natural body. What he attempted was really extraordinary -- reading and annotating state papers, responding to petitions, negotiating, chairing committees, issuing running instructions, being accessible at all hours for piecemeal decisions, and having final say in appointments and patronage. Being so impressively decisive and confident in his decision making was also the cause of his undoing. Ruthless obstinacy made for catastrophic errors that would return to haunt him until the day of his execution. 

Conrad Russell wrote that Charles was “a king who did not believe in the political process … [His] inability to read the political map meant ... every decision was reached too late, and every attempt to calm feelings was made when they were already too aroused to be soothed”. I think the problem was more structural than that. No person can wilfully ‘read’ or be ‘read’ institutionally. Multiple institutions, not men, are the relevant readers. Institutions set the default language too. Diagnoses of England’s ills in the 1630s were fortunately not focused on an artificial man or a two- or even a three-bodied man. Instead, they were remarkably modern diagnoses. 

In brief, then, there was a paradoxical impersonal element to the Personal Rule. In the 1630s Charles may literally have attempted with good intentions to embody the artificial sovereign described so eloquently in Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651. The king provided raw material for later ideologists of the impersonal state only because he and his civil servants ran a systematic natural experiment in the application of humanist Renaissance distinctions between private and public domains. The fact that Charles failed miserably and polarised England to such an extreme degree should be a warning sign to historians and political theorists. Hobbes’s conceptual exercise was ultimately trivial. Even if he could be credited with creating the science of politics, as Skinner claims, Hobbes did not do for political science what Adam Smith did for economics. He did not bequeath to the world the essential insight about ‘division of labour’, a process as indispensable and efficient in politics as in the economy. 

How could Hobbes have done so? In the 1640s evidence for the superiority of division of powers was still not overwhelming. It would become so thanks not to the philosophers but to practical lawyers and parliamentarians who experimented with divided centres of power during and after Personal Rule. My short run objective in this online notepad is to publicly collect examples (evidence, if you will) that can prove the breakthrough of classical economic sociology described in my book Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development, which goes beyond the simple observation that the state is an impersonal body treating citizens impersonally. Our insight is bigger than Hobbes and more relevant to the modern world. It needs supplementing and deepening in new ways. I’ll be checking which ‘facts’ reveal how a state evolves internally by depersonalising its own processes and relationships. 

Michael G. Heller ©2014