Economic Change and Political Consolidation (^) ‹ 85
costly wars, led to a confrontation with Parliament. Having provoked the Scots into
invading England by threatening their religious independence, Charles I was forced to
call on the English Parliament for yet more funds. Parliament responded by making funds
contingent on the curbing of monarchical power. This led to a stalemate, which degener-
ated into the English Civil War (1642–1646). Forces loyal to the king fought to defend the
power of the monarchy, the official Church of England, and the privileges and prerogatives
of the nobility; forces supporting Parliament fought to uphold the rights of Parliament, to
bring an end to the notion of an official state church, and for notions of individual liberty
and the rule of law. The victory of the Parliamentary forces led to the trial and execution of
Charles I for treason and to the establishment of the Commonwealth period (1649–1660),
in which Britain was governed without a king.
France: The Construction of a State
Several key differences allowed for a far different outcome in France. A series of religious and
dynastic wars in the sixteenth century produced a kingdom in which the religious issue had
been settled firmly in favor of the Catholic majority, though the Edict of Nantes (1598)
which ended the religious wars, granted French Protestants religious tolerance and freedom
to worship. The lack of religious turmoil in the seventeenth century allowed the French
monarchy to cement an alliance with both the Catholic clergy and the merchant class, and
to use the great administrative expertise of both to begin to build a powerful centralized
government. Both Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643) and Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) relied on
well-connected Catholic cardinals to oversee the consolidation of royal power by transfer-
ring local authority from provincial nobility to a bureaucracy that was both efficient and
trustworthy.
As chief minister to Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu used the royal army to disband the
private armies of the great French aristocrats and to strip the autonomy granted to the few
remaining Protestant towns. More significantly, he stripped provincial aristocrats and elites
of their administrative power by dividing France into some 30 administrative districts and
putting each under the control of an intendent, an administrative bureaucrat who owed his
position, and therefore his loyalty, directly to Richelieu.Central and Eastern Europe: Compromise
Whereas the contests for power and sovereignty in Britain and France had clear winners and
losers, similar contests in the European kingdoms farther to the east resulted in a series of
compromises between monarchs and rival elites.
In general, European kingdoms in eastern and central Europe, such as Brandenburg-
Prussia, the independent German states, Austria, and Poland, were less economically
developed than their western counterparts. The economies of Britain and France in the
seventeenth century were based on an agricultural system run by a free and mobile peas-
antry and supplemented by an increasingly prosperous middle class consisting of artisans
and merchants in thriving towns. In contrast, the landholding nobility of the kingdoms
in central and eastern Europe during this period managed to retain control of vast estates
worked by serfs, agricultural laborers who were bound by the land. By doing so, they
were able to avoid the erosion of wealth that weakened their counterparts in Britain and
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