French statesman and philosopher Montaigne remarked, was unlikely to
come into contact with the authority of the king more than once or twice in
his lifetime; if he was wise, he did all he could to avoid such contact. In
Britain, subjects of the king likewise were little affected by government. As
one modern historian of England has commented, it was what governments
did not do that was impressive.
Having limited aims, government was cheap. In England, the govern-
ment spent less than 7 percent of the estimated gross national product
(GNP) during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and spent
most of that on the army and navy. From the tiny force of just 9,000
in 1685 it still numbered only 27,000 just before the outbreak of the
American Revolution in 1775. It usually counted on being able to “rent”
foreign armies as needed. For instance, in 1747, during the War of the
Austrian Succession, it tried (but failed) to hire 36,000 Russians to fight
the French; instead, it hired (as it would do later during the American
Revolution) thousands of soldiers from the petty German principalities.
However, the British navy was the strongest in the world, with twice as
many capital ships as Spain and almost twice as many as France. It was the
English government’s biggest expense. France’s army in the eighteenth
century reached 170,000 men and could be doubled in time of war.
What the British and French governments did, other than fighting for-
eign powers, was “privatized.” Government was effected mainly through
proxies—contemporary inheritors of feudal fief holders, local authorities,
religious institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. Neither France
nor England had a national police force until well into the nineteenth cen-
tury. France relied upon paramilitary vigilantes, known as the maréchaussée,
who operated as though France were an occupied enemy country, while
England employed mercenary “thief takers” to suppress domestic enemies.
Thief takers made no attempt to prevent crime; all they did was (for a
bounty) catch those who had already committed crimes. Therefore, the
more affluent neighborhoods employed their own watchmen. Scores of
watchmen walked the darkened streets of London, but they had no official
standing and were mostly elderly, often feeble, and always unarmed. To avoid
confronting a criminal, they heralded their approach by thumping the cob-
blestones with their staves, swinging their lanterns, and calling out, hope-
Society and Wars in the Old Countries 65