Three forms of government
Fortescue's time in France had given him the opportunity to compare the English and French systems of government. He identified three 'natural' forms of government:
- dominium regale, or absolute monarchy
- dominium politicum, or republicanism
- dominium politicum et regale, limited or constitutional monarchy.
He argued that England was a dominium politicum et regale, while France was a dominium regale. In practical terms, this meant that, in England, the monarch was himself subject to the law, which he could not make or pass judgement on alone but could only introduce with the consent of Parliament and implement through the courts of law. Nor, by and large, could he levy taxes independently, but again could only do so with the approval of Parliament.
Poor monarch, rich subjects
The Magna Carta settlement forced on the crown by the nobility in 1215 had left the English monarchy with few autonomous tax-raising powers. This meant that, with very limited reliable sources of revenue, a medieval English king was almost always short of funds. Fortescue considered this to be a good thing – better a poor monarch with rich subjects, he believed, than the other way around.
He had two main reasons for thinking this. First, poor subjects were more likely than prosperous ones to be rebellious. (He explained the apparent lack of rebellion among the poverty-stricken French peasantry as stemming from 'cowardisse and lakke off hartes and corage, wich no Frenchman hath like unto a Englysh man'. The French were even too cowardly to steal, he observed: 'But the English man is off another corage.') And second, Fortescue argued, an impoverished citizenry would produce poor soldiers. Not only were they likely to be sickly and undernourished, but they would be unable to equip and train themselves for war as the English did at their own (not the king's) expense.
A matter of affinity
The limitations on the power of a medieval English king are illustrated by the way Edward IV had to deal with the lands of his opponents after his final victory over the Lancastrians at the battle of Tewkesbury in the same year that Fortescue completed The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy. The huge estates of the Neville family – headed by the earl of Warwick, who had died three weeks earlier at the battle of Barnet – may have fallen into Edward's hands, but he could not simply confiscate them for himself. Under the English system of monarchy, the king was only the foremost among the country's great magnates. He was not even the richest; others were far wealthier and had used their wealth, as Warwick had, to act as 'kingmakers'.
Each noble in the medieval period was effectively the ruler of his own domain. His power was a matter of 'affinity', and each magnate enjoyed a loyal following of lesser nobles, knights and squires. Bound by unwritten ties of mutual obligation to their lord, each of these might wear the lord's livery and, when called upon, fight on his behalf. In a pre-industrial age, all power and wealth devolved from the land, and the land was shared among the nobility, not vested in the monarch alone.
Keeping the 'king's peace'
Just as each lord's principal task was to settle disputes among his affinity, moreover, the king's role was to arbitrate land disputes among the magnates and keep the 'king's peace'. The nobles wanted and needed a strong king as a protector of their rights and possessions, but it was dangerous for a king to trespass on these rights. It was, after all, the seizure of Lancastrian lands by Richard II that had turned Henry Bolingbroke from a rebel into a usurper, the act that had led to a century of dynastic strife.
So, rather than confiscating the land of the Neville family after the Lancastrian defeat at Tewkesbury, Edward opted to marry his youngest brother Richard to the earl of Warwick's daughter Anne before settling Warwick's estates on him. It was a solution that caused problems with Edward's other brother George, who had also married a Warwick daughter. But it preserved the appearance of propriety and placated the Neville affinity.
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