It’s actually interesting to think about because in many ways the “tone” of English history in the 17th and early 19th century is that the Charles I, II and James II series, along with the various pretenders and Jacobites, were mostly negative forces for a number of reasons (not least their desire to emulate French absolutism.) But it’s hard to deny at least on the matter of religion the Stuarts were a lot more tolerant, they weren’t really seeking to fuck over Anglicans or non-conforming Protestant to the preference of Catholics, they were mostly just looking to remove civil and legal barriers to non-conforming Protestants and Catholics (admittedly out of self-interest) but the innate religious bigotry of the English ruling class can’t be denied as being on the wrong side of history.
Oh yeah? Tell that to the Irish.
I think you have a number of fundamental misconceptions about the nature of medieval and early modern monarchy, the concept of absolute monarchy in France and England in the 17th century, and the relationship between the English monarchy and Parliament through history.
However, this is all very far off topic, so I’ll leave it there.
Well that’s possible. Or it’s possible you were quite simply wrong. On your side you have no evidence and a bowing out of the thread. On my side we have about 150 years of widespread scholarship about the age of absolutism and the emergence of absolute monarchies in Western Europe in the early modern period. This scholarship traces its origins to the reign of Louis XIV, noting that throughout Western Europe as the traditional powers of feudal nobilities (particularly the power to levy independent armies) waned, the power was becoming centralized in the monarch, and that monarch throughout Western Europe took on increasingly centralized powers–oft justified with the emergent doctrine of the “Divine Right” of Kings. All of this same scholarship notes in about as many places as you care to read about it, that England (and a few other countries e.g. the Dutch provinces etc) was an exception to this trend because of the vested powers that Parliament had going back hundreds of years at this point. It is widely acknowledged the 17th century Stuarts attempted to establish absolute monarchy along French lines in England, and were even closely aligned with Louis in the end (Charles II partially was able to maintain his relatively brief personal rule with a secret subsidy Louis paid him, James II fled to Louis’ protection when he had to give up his crown.) However, against the weight of all this scholarship, including just about every Oxford historian whose works I’ve ever read on the period, we have your unsubstantiated opinion that Charles II and his brother James were “absolute monarchs” (despite regularly having their power arrested by other locuses of power in the country, and in spite of the fact Charles II was only king because Parliament requested he be, and James II lost his crown due to his squabbles with Parliament.) Yeah I’m going to go ahead and guess you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
Unfortunately you haven’t realised that wide overviews, often over-simplified, are not the same as deep understanding, and that theory and reality were often very different.
You also haven’t realised that understanding of history changes and is revised all the time. Views get discredited and become outdated.
Here’s a good paper to read on French absolute monarchy, for a start.
… The answers to these questions are not simple but they do suggest that the traditional views may need to be reconsidered. Perhaps the preoccupation with centralisation should now be regarded as an anachronistic question whose very asking oversimplifies the complex processes of compromise and negotiation that took place in this period between elites and the state.
… absolute monarchy, whose power to enforce its central will was somewhat illusory. …
… This form of monarchy should never be confused with arbitrary authoritarianism, and for this reason the use of the term ‘absolutism’ to describe this government continues to sow considerable confusion.
… Authority was limited by divine and natural law, and in 1519 Claude de Seyssel described the ‘absolute power’ of the kings of France as limited by three essential checks. …
… As we have seen, by ‘absolute’ power or authority, the mind of the old regime meant an authority that was rather limited: this sovereign power was first of all confined to the proper sphere of the monarch and within that sphere was subject to these further limitations. The existing laws – which might be as much customary as written, and certainly included the contracts made between crown and various towns and provinces – implied limits to taxation without consent. Different legal systems existed, seigneurial, customary and royal, making legal issues complex.
We shall see below that there were also significant practical checks on the exercise of royal authority. …
That paper barely even touches on the claims you’ve made, and a single paper by a random historian of no special renown, that according to Google scholar has only been lightly cited in the years since it was published, probably hasn’t changed the entire academic understanding of absolutism in the 17th century. Nice try though.
No, it’s presenting the current established understanding of absolutism. But I know well enough that you like to have the last word, and you don’t like to admit it when you’re wrong. 
“Currently established understanding that does nothing to suggest the Stuarts were absolutists in the mold of the French monarchs” (which is what the article you linked to was about, and the historian whose profile I pulled has written almost exclusively about the French monarchy). And I know from past dealings with you that you like to assume expertise on everything you talk about but frequently present false information as fact or exaggerate information when you present it, so no real surprises here.
That’s called projection. You’re accusing me of exactly your own faults.
You have some real expertise in a few areas, which I acknowledge and respect, but you think that makes you an expert on absolutely everything.
I don’t think that, but if there’s one thing I do know about it’s history. That comes from 25 years of reading and participating in academic forums with professional historians, and reading large quantities of primary source material. That doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong about something, but it means I have a lot of depth of knowledge about some areas of history.
Not buying it. Charles I was in many ways a religious bigot, as he maintained the Church of England as a High Tory, Arminianist episcopalianism. He tried to force this on Scotland which led to the Civil War.
James II in particular called for religious toleration but only because he wanted to move the religious Overton Window at the time to gradually placing Catholics at the top and allow him to surround himself exclusively with Catholics.
I don’t think Charles II cared much for religion either way beyond trying to strike a balance between his diverse subjects in order to protect his throne.
The subject line has a typo, unless you’re tying the Regency period into this somehow.
Charles II is an interesting figure because I too would say I don’t know that he cared much about religion on a personal level. However, he certainly endangered his family’s hold on the throne with his religious activities–namely, he took multiple actions to shore up the ability of his Catholic brother to inherit, and to in fact try to weaken the Church of England and its independence so as to smooth things over for James (despite fathering many bastards in his near-constant whoring during his lifetime, Charles II had no legitimate male heirs and I suppose by this point he didn’t expect he would ever have any.) Given the experience of Charles’ and James’ father, I don’t quite understand how Charles II could have not foreseen some of the serious problems he was setting James up for, or the fact that if push came to shove James would be on the bad end of the stick.
Now, I don’t think Charles could have just disinherited James in favor of his niece (certainly Parliament would have gone along with it and passed appropriate legislation, but I just don’t think Charles had it in him to be so brazenly realpolitik), but fucking around with the Church of England and trying to cozy up to the Catholic Church was a clear loser proposition politically and Charles seemed either unable or unwilling to recognize that.
The fact that Charles himself converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, fulfilling a secret deal he made with Louis XIV has always firmly suggested to me that much of Charles actions were heavily based on Louis’ subsidizing him. In the many battles with Parliament Charles had, he was left starving for money, and Louis was a lifeline that let him keep going without having the issues with Parliament blow up into something much worse.
Charles II reign was mostly a good time in England for regular folk, while the religious authorities and some of the high gentry had oppositions to Charles’ behavior, there was nothing approaching the popular opposition to the king that Charles I experienced–probably largely again, because times were good, Charles wasn’t II wasn’t dealing with unpopular wars, and Charles wasn’t having to rely on nearly as many unpopular machinations as his father to fund his government, he certainly required some–like the hearth tax, the sale of Dunkirk to France etc, but because of the customs rights he was granted upon his restoration he had at least a somewhat more stable revenue base than his father had.
Well firstly–knowledge of history is not the same as entitlement to state opinion as fact. History is the study of, and knowledge of, the recorded past. Something like “whether or not the Stuart Kings of England were absolute monarchs” is not something which you can simply declaim as fact, it is a position you must support, and even with firm support it’s little more than an interpretation. If many experts agreed with you, it would be a well-supported interpretation, but even those don’t cross over into absolute fact–there are many topics in history in which different schools of historians actually have conflicting interpretations (look at how much the Battle of Jellicoe is still argued about to this very day by professional naval historians.) In support of your claim that the Stuarts were absolute monarchs you have provided essentially no evidence. You linked to an article from a historian of no real renown, that I believe from what I found was a restatement of matters he covered in his doctoral thesis, and that has not from any further research I’ve done exactly been received as any kind of seminal work.
The core thrust of the article addresses what the author believes are misconceptions about French absolutism under Louis XIV, and maybe (although you don’t bother to make an argument) you believe that these “misconceptions” about Louis’ reign and the author’s “clarifying” that Louis’ absolutism had limits, somehow opens the floodgates to calling all pre-constitutional monarchs absolute monarchs.
I reject that on a number of grounds. For one, the fact that Louis had limitations to his powers is not something Dr. Campbell discovered in 2011 when he wrote that article, in fact the existence of France’s historical regional Parlements and their prerogatives has been known, established history since…the actual time of Louis XIV. The quasi-independence of the Church has likewise…been known and continually written about for the entirety of history since Louis’ reign.
I frankly think this “new understanding” of absolutism is a new understanding required only by people who are unfamiliar with the historical background of calling the “new monarchical forms” of the Renaissance “absolute monarchies.” There is a difference between a High Renaissance absolute monarchy and a totalitarian state, the absolute monarchs were not totalitarians, the scope and scale of the State was nothing akin to more modern totalitarian states.
Jean Bodin who predates Louis and is seen by many as the first to flesh out the philosophical framework for Renaissance absolutism believed that the ideal sovereign is a hereditary monarch not subject to the Pope or other religious authorities, but who still has to respect the courts and certain institutions like the Parlements.
There are some modern historians who reject the existence of absolutism as it is typically expressed by the “traditional/common” pedagogy on this period, specifically because the absolute rule wasn’t really that absolute and certainly not by comparison to modern day (c. 20th century onward) despotism/totalitarianism.
I don’t really buy into that because the term absolute monarchy, as far as I can tell, was never intended to mean the monarch had absolute power over any and all things. Rather it meant they were the absolute authority in their country, with no clear check on their power, but there might be limits on their power. Louis XIV is often pointed to as the poster child for this because it fits his reign quite nicely–Louis had plenty of limits to the scope of his royal power, but he did not have any checks on it, certainly no formal checks akin to those the Stuarts had on them. Louis had some cultural and bureaucratic checks on his power, in the form of influential nobility and high church officials who Louis probably could have brushed aside, but would have had headaches from doing so. Louis also had many structural limits to his power because the scope of the state was just quite limited by modern standards, largely due to technological limitations, states of the time lacked the means and scale to regulate much of what the State does today (modern democracies like the United States have far more day-to-day control over its citizens lives than Louis did over his.)
Also mind–I’m investing a lot of time in voicing my opinions about some interpretations of absolute monarchy, without you ever having actually expressed an opinion it is difficult to evaluate how germane any of it is to the discussion.
At the end of the day, under the traditional pedagogy around the term absolute monarchy, Louis XIV is quite properly seen as the poster child for it, and a number of other Western European monarchs and Central and Eastern European monarchs that ruled similarly to him in subsequent years follow in that tradition. The tradition largely constituting:
-Reduced or completely eliminated “hard power” of the nobility, i.e. no more feudal levies and nobles with their own armies
-Emergence of royally funded, standing armies as the primary military power of the State
-Centralization of decision making in and around the capital and the King’s court
-Rejection of any active requirement for Church support for the King’s authority, and adoption of the idea that the King is directly responsible to God, not a religious authority
-Removal or lack of any formal alternative institutions of national sovereignty within the State
I posit that on most of these grounds the Stuart monarchs simply do not fit the definition. The Stuart monarchs were not constitutional monarchs, but neither were they absolute monarchs. They were also not feudal monarchs either, as that era of English history largely ended when Henry VII wiped out most of the real traditional feudal powers of noble families in his victory in the Wars of the Roses. I would rather say these monarchs were “transitional” monarchs who had “shared sovereignty” with a powerful Parliament, but they had a monopoly on all executive and military authority, as contrasted with the later era of constitutional monarchy in Britain in which Parliament had outright supremacy, and the monarch only weakened reserve powers (weakened to the point of non-existence by the end of the 19th century.)
As I mentioned, I think Henry VIII, and the other Tudor monarchs (particularly Elizabeth) were actually much closer to fitting the definition of absolute monarchy that is common pedagogy, but that’s not worth getting into unless it’s seen as a salient point of contention.