The European World, 1500-1700
Rebellions
Naomi Pullin
naomi.wood@warwick.ac.uk
Focus of this lecture
Explore the different types of riot and rebellion in
early modern Europe and ideology that underpins
them.
1. Politics and popular politics
2. Different types of early modern European
revolts – elite and popular
3. Rhetoric of popular protest that underpins
conflict with states
4. The causes of European rebellions
Key themes
1. Socio-economic pressures.
2. The unstable politics of composite
monarchies
3. The context of the Reformation conflicting claims over people’s
allegiance.
1. Politics and Popular Politics
What is politics?
• Power and power relationships – between
rulers and the ruled?
• Is politics to do with the state?
• Is religious conflict inherently political?
• Is legitimate authority more significant than
power?
e.g. was the strength of a state determined
by the extent to which it had popular
legitimacy, by managing local factions and
regional interests.
Wayne Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in
European Politics 1500-1700:
‘it is useful to regard politics as an ongoing bargaining
process between those who claim governmental
authority in a given territory (rulers) and those over
whom that authority is said to extend (subjects)’.
Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early
Modern England:
‘Politics will be understood to occur where power is
reasserted, extended or challenged. Politics is
therefore the product of deliberate, human agency and
is pre-eminently about conflict and change. In this
analysis, politics does not occur where the distribution
of power remains static and unchallenged.’
2. Different types of early modern
rebellions
Aristocratic revolts
• Reaction against royal programmes for
administrative standardisation and political
uniformity
Spain:
• 1560s – Netherlands rebel after attempt to impose
Inquisition. Catholic Dutch aristocrats start to
petition court of Madrid – felt interests undermined
by centralisation.
• 1630s - main reaction lay in reforms under Philip
IV and Count Olivares (‘one king, one law, one
coinage’).
• 1640s – Portugal breaks from Spain – led by house
of Braganza
Aristocratic revolts
Britain
• Tudor centralisation projects in Ireland provokes
unrest from aristocratic families
• Kildare Rebellion (1534) and Desmond
Rebellions (1570s and 1580s) led by Fitzgerald
family – Lord Lieutenants of Ireland
• reaction against royal policy involves a
defence of traditional practises – fear of
encroaching royal administration – new
taxes, officials and new elites.
Popular revolts
Naples revolt, 1647-48
• June 1647 – major revolt against
Spanish governance in Naples
• Against high taxes and Spanish
rule
• Led by merchants, tradesmen and
apprentices - planned and
organised by Tommaso Aniello
• Demanded abolition of taxes and
reform in administration of the
city – declared city a republic and
asked for support of France
• Revolt Collapsed in April 1648
Social protest
• Link between poverty, vagrancy and social unrest
encapsulated in ‘many-headed monster’
• Christopher Hudson (Lancashire magistrate), 1596:
the poor ‘always apt to rebel and mutiny ... on the
least occasion.’
• 1590s – ‘riot’ = three or more people assembled to
an illegal end.
Food riots: England
• Affect urban areas of cloth trade, esp. vulnerable to
unemployment and trade depressions
• Bad harvests in 1580s and 1590s = major cause
• Crowds often requisition and seize supplies
Poverty and rebellion
Agrarian Riots: England
• Centres on enclosures – fences, hedges walls
• Enclosure a way of crown raising profit from
common land
• Levelling of fences, walls and hedges – pronounced
in 1530s and 40s
• Rumours of local protest could escalate into
regional rebellion, e.g. 1607 ‘Midland Revolt’ had
over 1,000 participants
Germany – ‘The Peasants War’
• Also begins as a response against enclosure >
sparks revolt across South-West Germany.
3. Rhetoric of Riots and
Rebellion
The moral economy of the crowd
George Rude, The Crowd in History (1964); E. P.
Thompson ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’
(1971)
• Popular protest stimulated by more than purely
material concern.
• Food rioters not just upset about loss of resources,
but identifying what customs and practises
violated
• Crowds see themselves authorities because
authority had been corrupted.
• ‘Law of custom’ seen in food riots in 1626 at Essex
ports, England; 1647 Naples rioters impale loaves
of bread on stakes
Grievances of major rebellions and
protests cut across social classes:
1536 Pilgrimage of Grace
• Major revolt against
Henry VIII following
Protestant Reformation.
• Revolts spread from
Lincolnshire, to
Yorkshire. Drew 30,000
men
•
Grievances of rebels covered local and national concerns
and issues affecting gentry and ordinary people, e.g.
religion, inheritance rights, food prices, sheep tax’
Conservative rebellions?
• Rebels often declare allegiance to the King, but claim
he has been corrupted by bad council
• Pilgrimage of Grace - protested against the ‘evil
counsellors’ who had misled the king.
• Naples rebellion 1647 – ‘down with the government’
combined with ‘long live the King’ – want to restore
old forms of governance under which Charles V had
ruled.
• Can be seen as an act of negotiation– seek good
government, not no government
• Claimed restoration, rather than revolution - linked to
humanist project of recovering greatness from the
past
4. The escalation of rebellions
Grey-area between what rebels are claiming to
do/stand for and what they are doing
No clear-cut ‘legitimate’ way of doing things
1. Representative Institutions
• Support for representative institutions as a check
upon the crown gives rise to alternative
conceptions of how a kingdom should be
governed.
• 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace re-establish ‘Council of
the North’.
• 1620s – Huguenot Rebellion – French Protestants
protest against rule of Louis XIII. See regional
parlements as preserving their religious liberties.
• 1560s – Dutch revolt against Spain. Invoke rights
of 17 provincial assemblies in Netherlands.
2. Invoking regional identity
Rebellions engender new conceptions of national identity
Dutch rebels
• Continually attack Spanish rule and see counterreformation as violation as ancient freedoms of Dutch
provinces.
• Mythology of Dutch nation linked to actions against
Spanish (anthem, the Wilhelmus)
Ireland
• Language of Irishness created in opposition to English
crown policy
1590s – Nine Years’ War against English rule
• Invoke association between Catholicism and Gaelic
culture (Catholic Priest - Geoffrey Keating ‘History of
Ireland’)
3. Religion
• Many rulers ruling over populations of mixedreligious composition
• Faithful have a duty to overthrow ungodly rule >
tensions of conscience – to whom should obedience
be owed?
John Knox (1544):
Questioned ‘whether obedience is to be rendered to a
magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true
religion’.
Regnans in Excelsis (1570): issued by Pope Pious V.
Declares Elizabeth I a heretic and Catholics commanded
to orchestrate overthrow
3. Religion
German Peasants War 1524-25
• followed Protestant
Reformation – stress on
individual faith and attack
clergy abuses in Twelve
Articles.
Pilgrimage of Grace, England,
1536
• Full of religious imagery, e.g.
‘pilgrims’, banner with five
wounds of Christ
• Rooting out of heresy, restoration of monasteries
and convents, renunciation of royal control over the
church
4. Winning outside support
Cam transform rebellions into political revolutions
• Involvement of foreign powers escalate conflicts, e.g.
Neapolitan Rebels of 1647
• Often exacerbated by religious affiliation.
• Irish Rebellion against English rule centred on
appeal to foreign Catholic powers: 1596 Spanish
troops brought into Ireland
• Dutch revolt – English and German states support
Dutch rebels, in hope of destabilising Spanish
dominance in Europe
Conclusions?
• Rebellions can be escalated for a number of
reasons: representative institutions, regional
identity, help from outsiders and religion.
• Real effort on part of rebels to stand for the
forces of tradition
• Rebellion presented as negotiation and a
legitimate part of politics.
• BUT dividing line between conservatism and
radicalism often very thin.