Sovereignty and Solidarity: Moral Obligation, Confessional England, and the Huguenots

Abstract

This article addresses the question of the emergence of sovereignty and moral obligation through a study of the Protestant English state and its relations with and policies towards the French Huguenots in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The authors take as their starting point the fact that the emergence of sovereignty in early-modern England was made possible by the consolidation of a confessional identity, and therefore cannot be divorced from the religious politics of the time. Their argument, based on such a historical reading of the gradual enforcement of territorial sovereignty and the simultaneous practices of solidarity with ‘outsiders’ beyond territorial boundaries, is that moral obligation played a role in the formation of English sovereignty, rather than being entirely exogenous to the process. This gives the authors reason to reconsider the relationship between moral obligation and sovereignty. The case demonstrates how the emergence of sovereignty led to the expansion of moral obligations rather than their narrowing. The main contribution of the article is to question commonplace assumptions about sovereignty and moral obligation, and to offer an avenue along which to re-think how one accounts for the emergence of sovereignty in the early-modern era and beyond.

Keywords:

• sovereignty
• Huguenots
• state formation
• moral obligation
• refugees
• confessionalisation
• religion

Notes

1. See for instance S.D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, 1999); T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as a Social Construct (Cambridge, 1996); C. Weber, Simulating Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995).

2. See D. Croxton, ‘The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty’, The International History Review, xxi, no. 3 (1999), 561–99; S.D. Krasner, ‘Westphalia and All That’ in J. Goldstein and R.O. Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, 1993), 235–65; S.D. Krasner, ‘Compromising Westphalia’, International Security, xx, no. 3 (1995), 115–151; A. Osiander, The States System of Europe 1640–1990 (Oxford, 1994); A. Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization, I. no. 2 (2001), 251–287; C. Gantet, ‘Le “Tournant Westphalien”: Anatomie d’une Construction Historiographique’, Critique internationale, ix (2000), 52–8; B. Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London, 2009).

3. Consider for instance the accounts of J. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereigny (Cambridge, 1995) and D. Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, 2001).

4. Such as, inter alia, H. Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge, 2002); R.B. Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International System (New York, 1999); C. Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, 1999); and D. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton and Oxford, 2009). A good overview is M. Skumsrud Andersen, ‘Legitimacy in State-Building: A Review of the IR Literature’, International Political Sociology, vi, no. 2 (2012), 205–19.

5. See B. de Carvalho, H. Leira, and J.M. Hobson. ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths that Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, xxix, no. 3 (2011), 735–58.

6. A notable exception is the recent D. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton and Oxford, 2009). To be sure, Hall, Reus-Smit, and Rae (see earlier footnote) do give religion a central place. However, while Reus-Smit and Hall tend to see changes at the level of the state as the result of systemic changes, Rae in turn is less concerned with the international ramifications of confessionalisation than with the states’ policies and practices towards their own subjects. Recent works have, however, tended to concentrate on how confessionalisation enforced rule or fragmented it. Taking the processes of confessionalisation as our starting point, we seek to broaden the focus offered by these studies by showing how it did both. For while states were able to make use of confessional strategies in order to forge collective national identities, the confessionalisation of the European polities simultaneously opened up a moral space for solidarities undercutting the making of national moral universes.

7. See R.B.J. Walker, Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, 1993) and D. Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, 1992).

8. M. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, 1996), 70, 71.

9. As historian Bernard Cottret points out, the French word Refuge refers to the Huguenot communities in exile, and the word ‘refugee’ was coined in reference to the thousands of French Protestant refugees who flocked to England in successive waves of immigration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. B. Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 7.

10. By ‘moral obligations’, we mean social practices that arise out of an impulse to come to the assistance or provide aid to a distant political community. It today's parlance, the word ‘humanitarianism’ is most often used to refer to this kind of activity. However, ‘humanitarian’ is a word that carries considerable baggage; its origins lie in the mid-nineteenth century and are associated with contemporary practices based on a belief in human dignity and natural rights. It would be anachronistic to apply it to this time period, so we use the more generic ‘moral obligations’.

11. Recently, however, historians have made the case for a more ideological interpretation of foreign policy, motivated to a larger extent by confessional concerns and running all the way from the Reformation in the 1530s through Elizabeth's reign. England's foreign policy and interests after the Reformation, they argue, can largely be interpreted as the result of England's religiously based identity, inclining towards Protestant alliances under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and towards a Catholic alliance under Mary. Throughout the 1500s, confessional alliances were to grow in importance. Gerhard Müller makes the case for confessional alliances as early as the 1524 ‘alliance to combat the heretics’ between the Catholic polities of the Empire. See G. Müller, ‘Alliance and Confessio: The Theological-Historical Development and Ecclesiastical-Political Significance of Reformation Confessions’, Sixteenth Century Journal, viii, no. 4 (1977), 125.

12. D.J.B. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’ in S. Doran and G. Richardson (eds), Tudor England and Its Neighbours, (London, 2005), 153. His view echoes Andrew Pettegree, who in 1988 made the case for questioning the general presentation of the foreign policy under Elizabeth as ‘defensive and limited in scope’, as ‘policy-makers were clearly prepared to take aggressive, provocative initiatives.’ A. Pettegree, ‘Elizabethan Foreign Policy’, The Historical Journal, xxxi, no. 4 (1988), 972. Such a view stands in contrast to that held by for instance Ben Lowe, who claims that ‘the religious issues were perhaps most obvious, but were never the determining factor in making policy.’ B. Lowe, ‘Religious Wars and the “Common Peace”: Anglican Anti-war Sentiment in Elizabethan England’, Albion, xxviii, no. 3 (1996), 435.

13. Hans Morgenthau, for instance, describes sovereignty as ‘the appearance of a centralized power that exercised its lawmaking and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory’. H. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York, 1985 [1948]), 328.

14. See Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty, 2001; L.E. Lugo, Sovereignty at the Crossroads?: Morality and International Politics in the Post-Cold War Era (Lanham, 1996; R.H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge, 1990); Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995); C. Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge, 1995); T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge, 1996).

15. Biersteker and Weber, State Sovereignty as Social Construct, 1996; C. Reus-Smit, ‘The Consitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions’, International Organization, li, no. 4 (1997), 555­–89.

16. J.S. Barkin and B. Cronin, ‘The State and the Nation: Changing Norms and the Rules of Sovereignty in International Relations’, International Organization, xlviii, no. 1 (1994), 107.

17. A. Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization, lv, no. 2 (2001), 284. See also B. de Carvalho, ‘Keeping the State: Religious Toleration in Early Modern France and the Role of the State in Minority Conflicts’, European Yearbook of Minority Issues, Volume 1 (2001/2002) (The Hague, 2003), 5–28, and B. de Carvalho, ‘Den westfalske fetisj i internasjonal politikk. Om den suverene stat og statssystemets opprinnelse’, Internasjonal Politikk, lxiii, no. 1 (2005), 7–34.

18. For an impressive articulation of the view that the Reformations contributed directly to the emergence of sovereignty, see Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty.

19. D. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton and Oxford, 2009), 287.

20. R.L. Doty, ‘Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructing the Boundaries of National Identity’ in T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge, 1996), 121–147.

21. Ibid., 14.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 3.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 4.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. T. Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York, 1984), 254.

29. For a discussion of the advances of the Reformation, see G. Parker, ‘Success and Failure During the First Century of the Reformation’, Past and Present, cxxxvi (1992), 43–82.

30. A good account of the many complexities of this process in the Habsburg lands is found in R.J.W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1979).

31. H. Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society. Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden, 1992), 209. See also R.C. Head, ‘Catholics and Protestants in Graubünden: Confessional Discipline and Confessional Identities without and Early Modern State?’, German History, xvii, no. 3 (1999), 321–45, and H. Leira, ‘Justus Lipsius, Political Humanism and the Disciplining of 17th Century Statecraft’, Review of International Studies, xxxiv, no. 4 (2008), 669–92.

32. R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1992), 3.

33. Schilling draws upon the maxim employed by seventeenth-century jurists, religio vinculum societatis: religion is the unifying bond of society. H. Schilling, ‘Confession and Political Identity in Europe at the Beginning of Modern Times (Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, Concilium, vi (1995), 4.

34. H. Schilling, ‘Reformation and Confessionalization in Germany and Modern German History’ in Secularization and Religion: The Persisting Tension. Acts of The XIXth International Conference for The Sociology of Religion, Tübingen 187 25–29 August (Lausanne, 1987), 202. Such a view is also supported by Fernand Braudel, when he argues that ‘the state had to participate in that spiritual life without which no society could remain standing.’ F. Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, vol. 1, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century (London, 1982), 516.

35. L. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 347.

36. W. Reinhard, ‘Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessement’, The Catholic Historical Review, lxxv, no. 3 (1989), 398. ‘In Nassau, the introduction of the Reformed religion was an act of state. The Calvinist Church existed to legitimize the state. To reinforce the power of social control of the church, lay officials took an active part in synodal affairs.’ Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750, 71.

37. H. Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’ in T.A. Brady Jr, H.A. Oberman, and J.D. Tracy (eds), Handbook of European History 1400–1600 (New York, 1995), 659.

38. Schilling, ‘Confessionalization in Europe – Causes and Effects for the Church, State, Society and Culture’.

39. Figures from J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (London, 2000), 90, 99. These figures are estimates. For more on the topic, see G.F. Nuttall, ‘The English Martyrs, 1535–1680: A Statistical Review’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxii, no. 3 (1971), 191–97 and W.H. Summers, ‘List of Persons Burned for Heresy in England’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, ii (1905–6). See also the discussion in P. Jenkins, ‘The Execution Rate in Early Modern England’, Criminal Justice History, vii (1986), 51–71.

40. M.C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), 166.

41. See for instance R.B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex: A Study of the Enforcement of the Religious Settlement, 1558–1603 (Leicester, 1969).

42. Quoted in Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689, 83. See also J. Hurstfield, ‘Church and State, 1558–1612: The Task of the Cecils’, in G.J. Cuming (eds), Studies in Church History (Cambridge, 1965), 119–40.

43. Schilling, ‘Reformation and Confessionalization in Germany and Modern German History’, 208.

44. See O.P. Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot, 1996), 4.

45. A. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), 2.

46. Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 5.

47. B. van Ruymbeke, ‘Minority Survival: The Huguenot Paradigm in France and the Diaspora’ in Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, (Columbia, 2003), 6.

48. C. Littleton, ‘Acculturation and the French Church of London, 1600-circa 1640’ in Memory and Identity, 107.

49. L. Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Sliens in Elizabethan England (London and New York, 1996), 1.

50. A. Zolberg, ‘The Formation of New States as a Refugee-Generating Process’, Annals, May 1983, 33. See also D. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, 1995), 172–4.

51. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, 26.

52. R. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage (Brighton, 2001), 55.

53. Hunt Yungblut, ‘Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us’, 73.

54. Pettegree, 1986, 2.

55. Zolberg, ‘The Formation of New States’, 33.

56. For discussion on the details of these bills’ passage, see S. Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion, 1558–1603 (London/New York, 1994), 10–13.

57. See Hunt Yungblut, 82–5; R.B. Wernham, The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603 (Berkeley, 1980), 23–7.

58. For some typical examples of this view, see E.I. Kouri, ‘For True Faith or National Interest? Queen Elizabeth I and the Protestant Powers’ in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, (Basingstoke, 1987), 411–36; R.B. Wernham, The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558–1603 (Berkeley, 1980).

59. S. Adams, ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’ (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1973).

60. See S. Doran, England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1999), 9–10, 97–101; S. Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy (London and New York, 2000), 64–6. Doran has also written more generally the relationship between religion and Elizabeth's domestic and foreign policies. See Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion, 1558–1603; S. Doran, ‘Elizabeth I's Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, li, no. 4 (2000), 699–720.

61. D.J.B. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–85’ in S. Doran and G. Richardson (eds), Tudor England and its Neighbours, (Basingstoke, 2005), 139, 143.

62. Cecil quoted in Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’. For more on Scotland, see e.g. J.E.A. Dawson, ‘Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley, and Anglo-Scottish Relations in 1565’, The International History Review, viii, no. 1 (1986), 1–24. Similarly, we do not touch upon the situation in Ireland, where France was operating at the expense of the English. See e.g. D. Potter, ‘French Intrigue in Ireland during the Reign of Henri II, 1547–1559’, The International History Review, v, no. 2 (1983), 159–80.

63. Quoted in Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 21.

64. The English intervention was largely instrumental in securing a compromise between the Crown and the Huguenots. While the intervention helped the French Calvinists against the Catholic crown, it was nevertheless legitimised to the Spanish as an attempt at regaining lost territory in France. Especially telling of the connection between England and the Huguenots, is the fact that the Huguenot leaders Condé and Coligny asked for military aid from England even before asking other Huguenot churches. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 150–1.

65. These events came to strongly influence the implementation of English pro-Protestant policies on the Continent for the next decades. See M.C. Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642 (London, 2001), 137.

66. Quoted in Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 97

67. According to Trim, the change of direction England's foreign policies undertook in the mid-1560s were not caused by the fact that England abandoned its co-religionaries on the Continent, as is often assumed, but that England realised that major military reforms had to be undertaken before England could muster the strength necessary to confront either of the major Catholic powers military: ‘Open war had to be avoided until the country was rearmed.’ Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 154–5.

68. See D. Trim, ‘The “Secret War” of Elizabeth I: England and the Huguenots during the early Wars of Religion, 1562–77’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, xxvii, no. 2 (1999).

69. See Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642, 137.

70. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 168. While the draft treaty of 1578 between England and the Dutch Estates General which promised English support to the tune of 5,000 troops and 1,000 horse was never ratified, more than 4,000 English mercenaries served in the Dutch Army in the summer of 1578. According to Trim, an average of 3,000 English troops were in Dutch service between 1579 and 1585. See also D.J.B. Trim, ‘Calvinist Internationalism and the English Officer Corps, 1562–1642’, History Compass, v, no. 6 (2006), 1024–48.

71. D.J. B. Trim, ‘The “Secret War” of Elizabeth I: England and the Huguenots During the Early Wars of Religion, 1562–77’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, xxvii, no. 2 (1999), 189–199.

72. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 164–5. For more on early-modern practices of privateering, see H. Leira and B. de Carvalho, ‘Privateers of the North Sea: At Worlds End—French Privateers in Norwegian Waters’ in A. Colás and B. Mabee (eds), Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits, and Empires: Private Violence in Historical Context (New York, 2010), 55–82.

73. Fissel, English Warfare 1511–1642, 142.

74. N.L. Jones, ‘Elizabeth's First Year: The Conception and Birth of the Elizabethan Political World’ in C. Haigh (ed), The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984), 50.

75. See Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569, 189.

76. Ibid., 194.

77. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 156.

78. Quoted in ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 158–9. This time, England achieved a formal agreement with the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, and the Duke of Brunswick in the form of the Articuli praecipi foederis, quod Sereniss. Regina Angliae que cum Evangelicus Germaniae Principius iuire constituit. Even more telling of the desire to obtain a pan-European Protestant alliance is a draft treaty between Elizabeth, the electors Palatine, of Saxony and of Brandenburg, the Duke of Brunswick, and the Landgrave of Hesse. Elizabeth was willing to deposit £20,000, an amount to be matched by the Germans in proportion, in order ‘that the confederates may not be oppressed for their religion by the […] Pope of Rome and his adherents [and] that the said Pope and his adherents […] may be restrained from spreading the limits of their authority’. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 157, 60.

81. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588–1595.

82. Doran, England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 99.

83. Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 160.

84. Adams, The Protestant Cause, 130–1.

85. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 65.

86. Quoted in Trim, ‘Seeking a Protestant Alliance and Liberty of Conscience on the Continent, 1558–1585’, 148.

87. Grell, Calvinist Exiles, 1, 34.

88. Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c. 1550–1700, 46–7.

89. Pettegree, 1986, 265.

90. Ibid., 266.

91. Pettegree, 1986, 206. See also 210–11.

92. Ibid., 206–7.

93. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 65.

94. Pettegree, 253–4; Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, 65.

95. Grell, Calvinist Exiles.

96. This dovetails with the argument in Trim, Seeking a Protestant Alliance

97. E. Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, 2008).