54 Chapter III
sterdam profited from the 3,200 offices at their disposal. In France, in the eigh-
teenth century the King no longer commonly sold offices, which were now inher-
ited by their owners; but he could give pensions and gratifications to whom he
pleased. There was nothing specifically French in this practice. In England, too, the
government did not sell offices; it gave them away as a means of maintaining its
influence in Parliament or, in general, of mollifying the aristocratic class. In En-
gland by 1700 “the majority of great old families were drawing large income from
various sources—colonelcies in the army, pensions, ambassadorships, etc.”—which
for many families equalled their incomes from landed estates.^19 The income from a
mastership in chancery rose from £150 a year in 1620 to £6,000 in 1720. Shortly
after 1800 the office of Chief Clerk of the King’s Bench brought £6,200 a year to
its owner, who paid £200 a year to a deputy to do the work.^20
Thus while it is true that in some ways men governed because they were rich, it
is equally true, or more so, that men were rich because they governed. Either they
were able to perform public duties because they had private means, like the justices
of the peace in England, or army and navy officers of certain kinds and ranks in all
countries, whose salaries were too small to support the necessary manner of life.
Or government itself, or various emoluments incidental to government, formed a
source of income for people who were in a position to obtain them. And the peo-
ple in this position were not the small politicians and grafters on the fringes of
respectable society who derive a somewhat similar kind of profit from operations
of government today; they were definitely of the upper class, the very guardians of
liberty and of the state, peculiarly sensitive to considerations of honor; and such
income from government office, or from church benefices, was thought to be espe-
cially honorable for people of this kind.
The institution of nobility, or high hereditary social rank, had also become an
object to be used and manipulated by governments as a means of rule. Nobles
could be turned into courtiers, as at Versailles. Or a king could make use of their
great social prestige to awe the populace or impress foreign rulers, and incidentally
bind the nobles more closely to himself, by making them into ambassadors or lords
lieutenant or military governors with a good many ceremonial functions in addi-
tion to the practical ones. They also made good army officers, since they grew up in
the habit of command; there was the additional advantage, for the king, that a
nobleman turned into an army officer came under a measure of discipline. There
was an increasing tendency in the eighteenth century for royal governments, which
had usually established their authority in former times by drawing on the middle
class, to put nobles into important civilian office. Increasingly the French inten-
dants were nobles. In Prussia, it was in the reign of Frederick the Great that the
crown for the first time favored the nobility in high office, and this remained the
general practice thereafter.
Kings also could raise commoners to the nobility, or promote lower nobles to
higher grades. The Hapsburgs after the reconquest of Bohemia in the 1620’s had
created a new Bohemian nobility to help keep the country loyal. They did the same
19 Habakkuk, “English Landownership 1680–1740,” in Economic History Review, X (1939), 11.
20 K. W. Swart, Sale of Offices in the 17th Century (The Hague, 1949), 55–57.