Composite States, Representative Institutions

and the American Revolution

E A R L YM o D E R N European monarchies had two conditions in common: most of
them were composite, rather than unitary or national, states, and nearly all of them
had representative assemblies.' Both these conditions raised fundamental questions
for their conduct of government and for their political development. The con-
stituent parts of composite monarches always antedated their union. They there-
fore had different laws, rights, privileges and traditions. Most unions were
voluntary. Either a country chose a foreign prince, as the Sicilians did after the
Sicilians Vespers in 1282, when they overthrew their Angevin king, murdered his
French soldiers and offered the crown to Peter 111of Aragon; or, more commonly,
two or more counmes were joined by marriage or inheritance, as were most of the
dominions of the house of Habsburg, or as were England and Soctland by the
succession ofJames I in 1603.In all such cases the prince took an oath to uphold his
new country's privileges and laws.
If the union was achieved by conquest the new prince was, in theory, held to
have the right to dispense with existing laws and privileges in the conquered state.
But in practice his powers were limited by his need to reconcile at least an impor-
tant part of the ilite of the newly-conquered territory. Early modern conquests
were not napoleonic and early modern conquerors usually had some sort of
dynastic claim. Even Machiavellicounselled h s prince that he must either destroy a
new province, reside there himself or let it live with its own laws; for his best
possible fortress was not to be hated by the people?
The laws and privileges of an early modern state were usually defended by its
representative assembly, parliament, corte,, Landtag, sejm or whatever the meeting
of the estates was called. Men had learned to distinguish between dominiurn regale,
monarchies such as those of France and of many of the Italian principalities, where
the ruler could legislate and tax his subjects without their consent, and dominiurn
politicum et regale (on the Continent also often called Standestaat, monarchia mixta or
simply limited monarchy), where the ruler needed such consent and where this
consent usually had to be given by the representative assembly? Dominium politicum

' This article was first given as a paper at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians in July 1988. I
wish ro [hank Dr. Jennifer Carter, Professors Michael Kammen, Peter Marshall and Jack Pole, and Miss
Rosemary Tyzack for encouraging me to venture into the field of American history and for giving me most
valuable bibliographical advice. They are not responsible for any of my conclusions.
N. Machiavelli, IlPrintipe, chs. v, xx.
' I prefer the term dominium polititum et regale, which goes back to Chief Justice Forrescue in the I 5th
cenrury. to Standessraat which is a modern construct and which does not fit England very well. The word
political, in the sense of signifying a regime bound by law and conducted for the benefit of rhe people, goes
back a t least ro the rqrh century and perhaps even further, to the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics (cf.
136 COMPOSITE STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V E INSTITUTIONS

et regule implied that sovereignty was shared. But since in early modern Europe
virtually all men were both rulers and ruled, from the king claiming to be ruled by
God to the peasant lording it over his household, such shared sovereignty did not
seem at all contradictory and it left room for a wide variety of regimes. I t was
certainly not incompatible with a strong monarchy accustomed to getting its own
way in most of the things which mattered to it. The recent views of Professor Sir
Geoffrey Elton and other historians of the Tudors' effective domination of their
parliaments comes as no surprise to historians of continental parliaments and does
not affect the basic distinction between dominium regale and dominium politicum et
regule. But, of course, monarchies were not always strong and most of them suffered
from ups and downs.
The condition of dominium politicurn et regale was admirably adapted to composite
monarchies.A prince could add province after province, kingdom after kingdom to
his realm and rule each as its own prince under different laws and with varying
powers. Prerogatives whch he had in one dominion he did not necessarily have in
another and the same was true of his subjects' rights. Even the French monarchy,
the quintessential dominium regale in the contemporary view, found it convenient to
leave newly-acquired provinces, like Burgundy and Brittany, with their provincial
assemblies intact. There were, of course, points of friction. The prince would
naturally tend to rely on advisers from his original state and would wish to employ
them in his outlying or newly-acquired dominions. He would be inclined to favour
his own compatriots and his own closest friends when he dispensed patronage.
Against such practices his dominions would set their privilege of the ius indigenatus
by whch only natives of the province were allowed to be appointed to public
offices or ecclesiastical benefices. Quarrels over appointments contrary to the ius
itidigenatw were common enough, but by themselves did not usually lead to major
political crises.
Where the component parts of a composite monarchy were contiguous, it might
well be convenient to combine the meetings of their representative assemblies and
summon a states general. There has been surprisingly little systematic work by
historians on the functioning of states generals and their origins have too often been
lumped together with the origins of representative assemblies in single countries or
too readily ascribed to the initiative of the monarchies which found it convenient to
negotiate with their assemblies together. Such initiatives certainly did occur, in
France as early as the fourteenth century; but they could also come from the side of
the estates. In the Netherlands, under the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth
century, the initiative came from both sides. The dukes wanted to make palpable
their authority in their newly-acquired provinces and, somewhat later, to establish
a convenient venue for getting financial help from them. The cities and provinces,

Q. Skinner, The Foundations ojModem Political Thought, i (Cambridge, 1978). p. 54; P. Blickle, 'Kornmunalis-
inus und Republikanismus in Oberdeutschland', in Republiken und Rqublikanismus im Eitropa derfiulien
Nruzeif, ed. H. G. Koenigsberger and E. Miiller-Luckner (Munich, 1988); H. G. Koenigsberger,'Dominium
regale or dominium polificum el rqale', in Polificians and Virtuosi (1986). pp. 1-25).
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS 137
with already traditional trade links, were anxious to have a common coinage and
monetary policy and to present a common front towards the English who were
both their trading parmers and their commercial rivals. The dukes therefore
summoned combined assemblies of the estates of several of the provinces, with
everyone’s approval, from the fourteen-twenties onwards. In I 463 the estates issued
their own invitations to a states general in order to discuss a family crisis in the
ruling house which, they feared, would leave the whole country without effective
government. The duke was outraged by their initiative and quickly issued his own
summons-for the same deputies. By I 477, when Duke Charles the Bold was killed
in battle against the Swiss, the stares general was already so well established that, for
a time, it virtually took over the government of the whole country.‘
Even more clearly than in the Netherlands, the estates took the initiative for the
formation of a states general in Poland-Lithuania. The two countries, both of them
already composite and multi-ethnic, had been joined in a traditional personal,
dynastic union since the accession of the Lithuanian house ofJagiefio to the Polish
throne in 1386. Both countries had their separate laws, armies and sejms, that is
assemblies of estates. But the Lithuanian gentry wanted to raise their status and
their privileges to the level of those of the Polish gentry, the ulachta. In I 569, after
many years of political pressure, they agreed to a union .which regulated the
elections to the throne and adapted the unicameral Lithuanian sejm to the
bicameral Polish sejm in a new combined assembly (Union of Lublin). In the same
year, and again largely through the initiative and pressure from the lower nobility
and over the strong opposition of the towns, the deputies of Royal Prussia (West
Prussia) also joined the Polish sejm. T h e magnates and the lower nobility managed
to exclude the delegates from Danzig (Gdansk) and the other Prussian towns from
the upper chamber, the senate. A states general had been formed on the initiative of
the most powerful estate of the constituent countries and with the complacent
acquiescence of a relatively weak monarchy. The composite Polish monarchy
therefore became, more than ever, a ‘republic of the nobility’. I t was dominiurn
politicum et regale pushed to the extreme end of estate power. With the introduction
of the liberum veto, in 1652, it became possible for any member of the sejm to
dissolve it and nullify the previous acts of the session. Ths development fatally
weakened central authority, any sort of dominiurn, so that in the long run the
kingdom became the prey of its more effectively organized n e i g h b o ~ r s . ~
In the other states ofEurope, both monarchy and provincial estates were always
ambivalent about states generals. For the monarchies it might well be dangerous to
bring several representative assemblies together and perhaps increase their power.
This was the experience of Charles the Bold’s successor in the Netherlands, his son-
in-law, Maximilian of Austria, who constantly quarrelled with his states generals

’ See H. G. Koenigsbrrger,TheStater General ojtheNetherlmds in the 15th and I 6th CPnturier (forthcoming).
See the articles by G. Schranini and A. M p a k in Crown, Church and Erjlllterin CPntral Europe, 1526-171 I ,
ed. T. Thomas and R. J. W. Evans (1989); H. E. Dembkowski. The Union o j l u b l i n : Polish Federalism in the
Gulden Age (Boulder, GI..and New York. 1982). 1 wish to thank Dr. Robert Frost for drawing my attention
to this important work.
138 COMPOSITE STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V E INSTITUTIONS

and even went to war with them. Maximilian’s great-grandson, Philip II, was so
alarmed by his experience with the Netherlands states general of I 557-9 which
insisted on taking over the administration of the taxes it had just granted and which,
the king thought, was opposing his religious policy, that he determined not to
summon it again. This decision turned out to be just as much of a political mistake
as Charles I’s similar decision not to summon the English parliament after 1 6 2 9 .
Both decisions greatly enhanced the myth of the respective representative assembly
as the all-wise institution for dealing with all the country’s ills.
Nevertheless, the estates of the individual dominions of composite monarchies
had their own misgivings about states generals.The Austrian Habsburgs found that
the estates of their central European states were unwilling to send their deputies
outside their own boundaries. The Bohemians, for instance, refused to go to
Austria. The privileges which rulers had sworn to observe were always the local
privileges of the particular province and they usually included the privilege of
having the estates assembled only within the province. One did not set such
privileges lightly aside for fear they would be lost altogether; and if one did one was
all the morejealous of all other privileges.Thus, while in a states general the lead of
one or two of the richer provinces tended to be followed by the others, majority
voting was never an acceptable principle. States generals therefore tended to insist
on unanimity, especially in financial matters. At best, the monarchy could bypass
this insistence by itself taking over the contribution to a tax of a recalcitrant
province or town.
It is therefore not surprising that some monarchies did not even attempt to
summon states generals or gave up the attempt after a series ofbad experiences.The
dukes of Piedmont-Savoy never summoned a states general for their relatively
small composite monarchy and after I 560 they did not even summon the separate
provincial estates. The Spanish Habsburgs occasionally summoned the cortes of the
crown of Aragon to the same city, that is those of Aragon itself, Valencia and
Catalonia, but they never attempted to combine them with those of Castile, nor
these latter with those of Portugal during the period of the union of the Crowns,
I 5 8 0 - 1 6 4 0 . The French monarchy always felt uneasy about the ktats-gknkraux,
summoned them only intermittently and not at all between 1614and 1 7 8 9 .
Only when there was a very severe crisis, or one perceived as such when the estates
of the separate states of a composite monarchy felt their very existence threatened,
were they likely to come together entirely on their own initiative. The Netherlands
experience of 1 4 6 3 has already been mentioned. It was repeated in 1576 when the
estates of Brabant and Hainault met together and invited the estates of the other
provinces to a states general in order to deal with the mutiny of the unpaid Spanish
army. From then on the states general took over the role of policy-maker until it
became the dominant political authority in the independent union of the northern
provinces. The United Provinces of the Netherlands thus became a federal republic
with a parliamentary regime, that is with an executive set up by and dependent on a
representative assembly. In this case it was a composite assembly, a states general!

As for note 4. See also G. Parker, The Durch Revoh (1977).

 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS 139

Whether it was the assembly which was the seat of sovereignty or whether
sovereignty rested with the constituents of the assembly, the pamcian town
councils of the seven provinces, that was a matter w h c h continued to be debated
for a long time. Everyone however agreed that sovereignty no longer lay with the
executive of the union, the hereditary stadholderate which members of the house
of Orange-Nassau occupied throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries?
In the southern Netherlands dorninium politicum et regale was re-established
under the king of Spain; but because of the demands of the continuing war with
the United Provinces, the balance of power came to be weighted h e a d y in favour
of the monarchy. The last states general was summoned in 1632 and Philip IV
proclaimed that ‘les itats gknkraux sont yernicieux en tout temps et dans tous lcs
pays nionarchqucs sans exceptions’? The provincial estates of Brabant, Hainault,
Flanders etc., however, continued to be summoned. In 1789Joseph I1 abolished
thc ancient privileges of the estates ofBrabant and Hainault. Two or three months
before the outbreak of the French Revolution this act, quite apart from everything
clsc, was a masterpiece of bad timing. The estates reacted by summoning a states
general in 1 7 9 0 , on their part, too, with a breathtaking disregard of what was
going on ncxt door in France. First the Austrian army and then, even more
definitively, the French revolutionary army put an end to this last attempt to
recreate a classic dominium politicum et regale regime based on the medieval estates.
There was a moment when it looked as if the Habsburg dominions in central
Europe would have a history similar to that of the Habsburg Netherlands. In 1 6 1 8
the estates of Bohemia rebelled against their newly-elected king, Ferdinand of
Styria, soon to be Emperor Ferdinand 11. Ferdinand set about systematically
abrogating the privileges which his predecessors had granted to the Protestants
and replacing Protestant by Catholic officials,just as he had previously done in his
duchy of Styria. The Bohemian estates therefore felt themselves attacked in both
their religious beliefs and in their privileged position. Their fears were increased
when news leaked out of the secret Ofiate treaty between the Spanish and the
Austrian branches of the ruling house which futed the Habsburg succession,
regardless of the rights of election claimed by the estates. In 1619they summoned
a states general to Prague. It was attended by representatives of the estates of
Bohemia, Moravia, Lusatia (all these parts of the Crown of Bohemia) and also of
thc estatcs of the Austrian duchies and of Habsburg Hungary. They formed a
confederation and abjured their obedience to Ferdinand, just as the Netherlands
had abjured their obedience to Phlip I1 in 1 5 8 1 .
It was a most impressive initiative by the estates and,just as in the Netherlands, it
was a defensive action against the perceived aggression by the monarchy against the
prevailing balance of dominiurn politicum et regale. Also just as in the west, religious
passions gave an edge to political conflict, and, again as in the west, a common

’See H. G. Koenigsberger, fitares and Rewlufionr (Ithaca, N.Y.. and London. 1971),pp. 204-8; H. H.
Howen, The Princes of-Orange:the Stadholdenin rhe Durch Republic (Cambridge, 1988).passim.
”Quoted in J. Giliswn. La r@i:gimereprismrarifavanr I 790 en Be/gique (Brussels, 1952) p. I 17.
140 c o M P Os I T E sT A T E s A N D R E P R E s E N T A T I v E I N sT I T U T I o N s

culture, common political traditions and religious sympathies overrode differences

in language. Where the actions of the Prague states general differed from those of
the Dutch was in the unwillingness of the central European nobility to associate the
towns and the peasants with their cause. It was a desperate weakness of the cause of
the estates. Whether it was decisive it is impossible to say because, in central just as
in western Europe, the struggle, once it had escalated into civil war attracted the
military intervention of the neighbouring states which immediately altered the
balance of the internal forces. In 1619-20the result was the complete defeat of the
estates and the effective defeat of dominium politicurn et regale in Bohemia and
Ausma.9 Only in Hungary, where the ever-present threat of Turkish intervention
forced caution on the monarchy, did the estates maintain their powerful position
for another hundred years.

In composite monarchies whose component parts were contiguous, it was

always possible, perhaps even likely, that their representative assemblies would be
combined in a states general, although it is important to realise that their
provincial assemblies always continued to function. In some German states, such
as Bavaria, the estates continued to meet together even when, in the German
dynastic tradition, the principality was divided between different lines of the
ruling family.'O Evidently Philip IV of Spain, when he made his categorical
pronouncement about states generals, had not heard of this practice or of the sta-
bility it gave to the German states in their kaleidoscopic dynastic unions, splits and
civil wars.
Where, however, the parts of a composite state were not directly adjoining
each other, neither princes nor the estates themselves normally made any attempt
to bring their representative institutions together. It seems likely that, with
ambivalent feelings about states generals on both sides, the sheer physical
difficulty of bringing delegates together in one place tipped the balance against
the summons of a states general. The Hohenzollern monarchy, with its three
centres, Brandenburg, East Prussia and the Rhineland duchies of Cleves and Mark,
never seems to have thought of summoning a states general for all of them. In the
eighteenth century t h s monarchy managed to achieve some administrative unity
by integrating at least some of the higher ranks of the civil service of the tripartite
country. Curiously enough the estates of Cleves and Mark continued to meet
jointly with their former associates ofJulich and Berg even after these two duchies
had definitely passed to a different house, the dukes of Palatinate-Neuburg, in
1666."
Where there was a stretch of sea between the parts of a composite monarchy the
obstacles to the summoning of a states general were even more obvious. No one
ever proposed a joint assembly for the estates of Aragon and of Sicily, let alone for

' See the articles by G. Schramm and 1. Auerbach in Crown. Church andfiiaies.
lo F. L. Carsten. Princes and Parliaments in Grmany: From fhe 15rh fo fhe 18fh CPnfury (Oxford, ~ysy),
pp. 352-3 and parrim.
Idem, The Origins 4Prusia (Oxford, 1954).pp. 232K
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS 141
those of Castile and the Netherlands. And yet, in special circumstances it was not
impossible.From the sixteenthcentury to the eighteenth the Finnish estates sent their
representatives across the Baltic to the riksdag in Sweden. One did not, of course,
travel overland via Lapland and the Arctic Circle. In fact, although Finland was called
a duchy and the Finnish estates were sometimes summoned separately in Finland,
Sweden and Finland were regarded as a unified monarchy, much as England and
Wales, with the same laws and privileges and with four estates, including the
peasants, represented both in the Finnish provincial assembly and in the riksdag
When the Swedes conquered an empire further south along the Baltic shores, in
Estonia, Livonia and Pomerania, the situation became more complicated. At the
turn of the sixteenth century Duke Charles of Sodermanland was disputing the
government of Lutheran Sweden with the king, his nephew Sigismund, who was a t
the same time king of Poland. Sigismund was defeated in Sweden and then both
sides tried to outflank each other by improving their position in Livonia and
Estonia. The duke, after 1607 King Charles IX, proposed to introduce Swedish law
into the two provinces and summon representatives of their estates to the Swedish
riksdag. His ministers argued that all who lived under one lord and regent should
live under one law. It was a common argument a t the time. The French said ‘un roi,
une loi, une foi’.
But this was precisely where Duke Charles’s proposals ran into trouble. The
Livonian nobility refused to give up its draconian rights over its peasants whom,
under Swedish law, they would have had to free from serfdom and allow to send
representatives to the riksdag. Worse still, many of the Swedish nobility had
acquired estates in these recently conquered provinces and were as unwilling as the
Livonian Junkers to give up their new economic and social power. Against such a
powerful opposition, and in the middle of wars against Poland and, later, the
emperor, neither Charles IX nor his son Gustavus Adolphus was prepared to press
such far-reaching constitutional changes.” When, as a result of the Thirty Years
War, Sweden acquired the duchy of Pomerania the monarchy made no serious
attempt to change the traditional pattern of composite monarchies and allowed the
duchy to enjoy its laws and traditional assembly of estate^.'^ After Charles XI made
his coup dFtat in 1680, which for nearly forty years transformed Sweden into a
dominiurn regale, he did try to assimilate the status of Pomerania to that of Sweden.
But there was strong resistance and the king was wise enough not to push his luck.
Pomerania, unlike Livonia, was a part of the Holy Roman Empire. Its estates could
always appeal to the emperor’s A u k Council (Reichsrat) or to the Imperial
Chamber (Reichskarnmergericht) to uphold their privileges. It happened in other
German states, notably in Wiirttemberg, and in the eighteenth century that

I2 J. Rosen, ‘Statsledning och provinspolitik under Sveriges stormaktstid: in Scandia, xvii (1946).
espccially pp. 233-41. I wish to thank Prof. Par-Erik Back for drawing my attention to this often-forgotten
fact and for the reference.
” P.-E. Back, Herzof und hndsckaji: PolifischeIdem und Verjassungsprograrnrnein Srhwedisch-Pommern urn die
Mine des 17./ahrhunder~(Lund, 1955). passim; idem. ‘Die Standr in Schwedisch-Pornmctrnim spaten 17. und
im I 8 . Jahrhundert’,in Standische L‘eflrerungen in Europ im I 7 . und I 8.jakrhunderf. ed. D. Gerhard (Gningen.
1969). pp. 120-30.
 142 C O M P O S I T E S T A T E S A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V EI N S T I T U T I O N S

arch-autocrat, Frederick the Great of Prussia, willingly gave support to estates

rights-provided they were outside his own dominion^.'^ It was not worthwhile for
the Vasa monarchy to provoke a crisis.
A stretch of sea between the parts of a composite monarchy, then, undoubtedly
made unification of both government and of representative assemblies difficult but
it was not in itself the most important problem. In a somewhat different form this
conclusion is borne out a t the other end ofEurope by the history of the parliament
of Sardinia. This island kingdom was conquered by the kings of Aragon from the
republic of Pisa in the fourteenth century. The kings gave many fiefs and estates to
their Aragonese and Catalan followers. Many of the native Sardinians were dis-
possessed and expelled. Several cities, notably Cagliari, were settled by Catalans, and
even now there are areas where Catalan is spoken, rather than the Sardinian dialect
of Italian. The Catalans set up a parliament which from the beginning was fully
formed, with three estates and with, apparently, the usual powers of granting taxes
and proposing laws (cupitoli) for royal approval. This was dominiurnpoliticurn et refale
which the Aragonese and Catalans had been used to in their home countries since
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
As in the case of Sweden and Livonia this dual, transmaritime position of the
parliamentary classes produced some curious results. As early as I 366 the Catalan
parliament, the corts, petitioned the king to revoke a law passed by the Sardinian
parliament. As far as 1 know, it was the first occasion that the parliament of one part
of a composite kingdom claimed authority over that of another, and the reason is
quite clear: it was overseas settlement and the colonial position of Sardinia with
relation to Catalonia which made such a claim seem reasonable. But the monarchy
had nothing to gain from such a claim, and the king refused it with the classic
dominiurn politicum et regule argument that it was unreasonable that laws approved in
the parliament of a kingdom should be revoked outside the parliament of that
kingdom. However, later, at the end of the fifteenth century, the lung quite casually
summoned the Sardinian parliament to assemble in Cordoba and Seville. As far as
we know, there was not a single protest from Sardinia. Almost everywhere else such
a summons would certainly have been refused.
The Sardinian parliament continued to be summoned sporadically and at times
there were bitter conflicts between the monarchy and the estates. During the
session of 1665-8matters came to such a pass that both the viceroy and the leader of
the noble opposition were assassinated.But all these conflicts remained within the
framework of dominiurn politicurn et regale. It was the absolutist Piedmontese
monarchy which abolished the Sardinian parliament in the eighteenth century and
it seems to have done so as much because the Sardinian klite were still largely pro-
Spanish as because the parliament represented a limitation of the powers of the new
monarchy in T ~ r i n . ’ ~

This brings me to the most interesting case of all, that of Britain and America.

I’ Carsren. f’rinces and Parliamenlc, pp. 140-2.

” Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi. pp. 46-51.
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V E INSTITUTIONS 143
They have usually been studied by themselves; but I now want to argue that they
should be seen in a European context, for they show all the aspects of the problems
we have discussed so far: a composite monarchy with both contiguous and overseas
components, with colonial problems and with regimes varying from dominium
regale to dominium politicurn et regale and parliamentary government.16
The case of England and Scotland was the most straightforward. Here were two
contiguous kingdoms, since 1603 under one ruler, each with their own separate
government and their own separate parliament, living under their own laws. It
was the classic example of a composite monarchy with a dominium politicum et
regale regime. Peaceful coexistence, although hardly brotherly love, depended on
the king, who resided in the bigger kingdom, governing the smaller one in the
way it had been used to, that is respecting the rights of its ruling tlite, especially in
the matter of religion and, in the absence of an effective civil service, running the
country with that klite’s advice and co-operation. When Charles I broke these
basic rules of composite kingdoms he provoked a rebellion in Scotland.Just so had
Philip I1 provoked rebellion in the Netherlands, Ferdinand I1 in Bohemia, and just
so would Philip IV provoke rebellion in Catalonia in 1640, only three years after
the beginnings of the Scottish rebellion. The three seventeenth-century rebellions
immediately sparked off and became involved in rebellions and civil wars in the
other dominions of the composite kingdoms in which they occurred, and the
skteenth-century one, the revolt of the Netherlands, got itself entangled with the
civil and religious wars in neighbouring France. Professor Conrad Russell has
recently shown, and I think most persuasively, how the ‘English‘ civil war must be
seen in terms of the complex interactions of the problems of England, Scotland
and Ireland.” In 1654 the recently-established Commonwealth summoned a
united parliament of England, Ireland and Scotland. This was not, however, a
matter of free agreement between the three parliaments but depended on
Cromwell’s English army of occupation in the other two kingdoms. Many
members of the united parliament were in fact army With the Restora-
tion in 1660, that is the restoration of monarchy and of dominium politicurn et regale,
the union of parliaments was immediately dissolved, apparently to most people’s
relief. Characteristically, Charles II showed no interest in parliamentary union
since he managed to control Scottish affairs at least as easily as English politics, if
not more so.
After the Glorious Revolution friction between England and Scotland increased,
especially in economic matters. The danger of Jacobite and French intervention,
which had already happened in Ireland in 1689-90, gradually convinced both the
monarchy and the English and Scottish parliaments that the revolution settlement
and the Protestant succession would only be safe if there were a closer union. What

I6 The relations between England and the smaller islands under the Crown, i.e. the Channel Islands. the
Isle of Man and the West lndies are certainly also relevant to this discussion,but they cannot be dealt with in
the space of this article, nor would they affect its conclusions.
” C. Russell, ‘The British problem and the English Civil War’, His~ory,lxxii (1987),395-415.
’’ I wish to thank Dr. Ian Roy for drawing my attention to this important aspect of the union parliament.
144 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS

the two sides agreed on, in 1707, was not a states general but a unified parliament on
the Westminster model, with some, but not all, Scottish peers summoned to the
house of lords and with M.P.s elected to the house of commons, much as in
England. This union has, on the whole, been a success, although some people now
thnk that Scotland should retrieve some or all of its former independen~e.'~
The case of the Irish parliament was much more complex and much more
difficult to resolve and, indeed, some aspects of the problem are still very unhappily
with us. That Ireland, unlike Scotland, lies across a stretch of sea, was probably the
least of the difficulties. Henry VIII had declared it to be a separate kingdom; but was
it a conquered kingdom or had it voluntarily accepted allegiance to the English
Crown? There were differences of opinion on this point, depending largely on the
different interests of the protagonists. The matter was importanr, for from the
answer to it followed the arguments about the nature and extent of English
authority, if any, in Ireland. The matter was further complicated by the large-scale
English and, later, Scottish immigration into Ireland; for the immigrants claimed
the same liberties in Ireland which they had enjoyed at home. Their situation was
therefore very similar to that of the Catalan immigrants in Sardinia, with the added
complication that, by the seventeenth century, there was a threefold division of
religion: very roughly, Catholic for the native Irish and Old English, Anglican for
the more recent English immigrants and Presbyterian for the Scottish settlers in
Ulster.
It is therefore not surprising that the history of the Irish parliament and its
relations with the Crown and the English parliament showed some of the erratic
elements of the history of the Sardinian parliamenr, for many of its members not
only had estates in both Ireland and England but some were even members of both
the Dublin and the Westminster parliaments. Throughout most of the seventeenth
century relations between the Irish parliament and the Crown were regulated by
the famous Poynings' Law by which the English privy council had to approve all
acts of the Irish parliament. This was a perfectly traditional dominiurn politicurn et
rtyale procedure of composite monarchies, similar to that exercised by the kings of
Spain through the council of Aragon and the council of Italy with relation to the
capitoli proposed in the parliaments of Sicily, Naples and Sardinia, and through the
Spanish council of State with regard to the states general of the Netherlands.
Naturally, the English privy council would in most cases follow the advice it
received from the lord lieutenant and his Irish privy council, just as the Spanish
councils would usually follow advice from the Spanish viceroys and their local
councils. The English parliament had no say in such legislation, no more than the
cortes of Aragon or Castile. Nevertheless, we have seen that the Catalan corts at
times claimed legislative authority over Sardinia; and so it comes as no surprise to
find the Long Parliament, and especially Pym's party, claiming the same over the
Irish parliament in I 64 I ?O

'' T. C. Smout,'The road to union', in Britain ajiPrIheC/uriuusReVO!ufiun, 1689-1715, ed. Geoffrey Holmes
(1969). pp. 176-96.
C. Russell, 'The British background to the Irish rebellion of 1641'.mile, Ixi (1988). 166-82.
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V E INSTITUTIONS 145
After the Restoration the position returned to normal, just as in the case of
Scotland. Thus in 1671 an English attorney general maintained that no act of the
English parliament could bind Ireland unless the Irish parliament had agreed to ic
‘If a statute were made in England to forbid the transportation of wool out of
Ireland; yet a statute in Ireland might make it lawful again’.*’
The Glorious Revolution and the civil war in Ireland changed the situation. The
Catholics were now excluded from the Irish parliament and, after 1727,they were
not even allowed to vote. In the face of a hostile, or at best sullen, Catholic majority,
t h s made the Protestant minority more than ever dependent on England to
preserve its ascendancy. At the same time, because the Crown had become
dependent on the English parliament, the Irish parliament had now to deal with a
privy council or a cabinet deriving its authority from the British parliament. And it
was the British parliament which now claimed ultimate authority over Ireland.
The definitive statement of this position came as the result of a typical ancien
righe dispute between two courts claiming ultimate powers ofjurisdicaon: in this
case the British and the Irish house of lords. It involved, and was clearly seen to
involve, the independence of Ireland from Britain under the Crown. In 1720 the
Westminster parliament passed a declaratory act asserting its authority over the
Irish
For the first time anywhere the parliament of one country in a composite
monarchy had asserted its sovereignty over that of another in same monarchy, and
not only by implication, as between the Catalan corts and the parliament of
Sardinia, but by a formal declaration.(In the case of the Polish sejm and the Landtag
of Royal Prussia, at least the nobility of Prussia had been incorporated in the sejm.)
For a time, and largely because the English parliament chose not to insist on its
powers too blatantly, the relationship worked-although Jonathan Swift would
probably not have agreed with thisjudgment. But gradually many of the Protestant
ascendancy began to feel themselves more Irish than English and came to resent the
tutelage of Westminster. The American revolution showed the inherent danger of
the situation and French intervention in the insurrection of 1798 gave it added
urgency. The British answer was the classic answer which had worked well with
Scotland: the union of the two parliaments, in I 801.That this experiment also came
to grief had causes which were deeply rooted in the previous history of the early
modern composite British monarchy.

The American colonies were not states whc h had existed before their associa-
tion with England. Nor were they, in any European sense, conquered territories.
The indigenous Indians were conquered, of course; but politically, from the point
of view of the composite British monarchy, they might never have existed. On the
other hand, the colonists’ view of their association with England was essentially
similar to that of states which had entered a union voluntarily or through heredity.

L1 Quoted in F. G.James, Irelond in the Empire, 1688-1770 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). p. 42.
** This account of the history of the Irish parliament substantially follows the account by F. G.James, see
n. 2 1 .
146 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS

Just as the Anglo-Irish argued that the St. George’s Channel made no difference to
their hereditary rights and liberties as Englishmen, so did the American colonists
with regard to the Atlantic. In that classic of the hisroire des mentalitis of the English,
How to be an Alien, the author, George Mikes, tells of an English friend who, when
travelling in Hungary, talked of the Hungarians as foreigners. When it was put to
him that in Hungary it was he who was a foreigner he thought this argument
absurd. He was not a foreigner in England and the purely incidental occasion of his
travelling in Hungary could not possibly alter this incontrovertible and permanent
fact. The argument seemed even more convincing because one remained a subject
of the king of England. In one form or another it was made throughout American
colonial history and it was given ics most uncompromising form by the house of
burgesses of Virginia, in 1765:
Resolved, That the first adventurers and settlers of this His Majesty’s Colony and Dominion
of Virginia brought with them, and transmitted to their posterity, and all other His
Majesty’s subjects since inhabiting in His Majesty’s said Colony, all liberties, privileges,
franchises and immunities that have a t any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the
people of Great Britain?’
I n themselves there was nothing controversial about these sentiments and this
resolution. But what were these liberties and how were they to be preserved? The
answers to these questions were no more self evident for the American colonies
than they were for Ireland.
Very soon after the foundation of their colonies, often not more than a couple of
decades, the Americans had set up representative assemblies, usually with control
over taxation. The colonists’ memories of England, imitation of one colony by
another, and their own experience of the shared problems of life in the wilderness-
all these led the Americans to rediscover for themselves the old medieval maxim of
quod omnes rangir ab omnibus approbetur, what concerns all must be approved by all; or,
as John Winthrop put it in 1639: ‘No common weale can be founded but by free
~ o n s e n t ’ ?With
~ their assemblies and with royal governors, either appointed from
the beginning or soon replacing the company directors-deprivatization, you might
say-the American colonies were in truth governed in a regime of dominiurn
poliricum el regale within a composite monarchy.
The colonies differed in their social structures, their predominant economic
activities and in the traditions established in the specific methods of their
foundation. But all their political and constitutional problems before 1688 were the
classic problems of the regime of dominiurn poliricum e l regale: legislative initiative,
the level and the kind of taxation to be imposed, the control of the administration
of such taxation. The monarchy, that is the colonial governors, were in principle
most unwilling to give up this control. In practice and in the absence of a

I’ Sources and Documvntc illustrating the American Revolution, ed. S. E. Morison (2nd edn.. Oxford, 1929).
P. 17.
M. C. Kammen. ‘The origins of representative government i n British North America’, in Liber
Memoridis Georges de Laprde: Studies presented ro the International Commisrionjr the Hislory u/RPpresentative and
Parliamentary Imtitutions. xxxviii (Louvain and Paris. 1970).pp. I 33-200, especially pp. 186 and 191.
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS 147
professional civil service or of any assured way of paying for it, even if there had
been, they had time and again to compromise with their assemblies and allow them
to set up their own financial machinery-just as many otherwise very autocratic
German princes had to compromise with their Landtage and as the Spanish
monarchy had had to compromise with the provincial estates of Brabant, Flanders
and Holland long before the revolt. The colonial governors were beset by problems
very similar to those which beset governors-general and viceroys in European
composite monarchies. Their major lines of policy were strictly laid down for them
by the metropolitan government. Much of their detailed administration was
supervised by the ‘lords of trade’, a permanent committee of the privy council, set
up in 1675:’just as the administration of the viceroys of Naples, Sicily, Milan and
Sardinia was supervised by the Spanish council. Often enough their instructions
were impossible to follow. Thus the governors were ordered to remain above local
politics. In practice they could no more do this than the European viceroys. In
several states their salaries depended on the assemblies and, inevitably, they had to
make deals with the most powerful men in these assemblies. As a recent historian
has put it, such practices ‘demonstrated that the crown was in no,way prejudiced as
to whom it surrendered its impartiality-it did not discriminate in its discrimina-
tion’.% Professor RichardJohnson might have been talking about Sicily as much as
Massachusetts. Most of all, and again like their European counterparts, the
governors complained that the metropolitan government kept control over
patronage and therefore made it difficult for them to reward support for govern-
ment policy in the assemblies. As late as 1774 Governor Dunmore of Virginia
claimed, perhaps a little too simplistically, that if he had had control over patronage,
‘I should have had the means of keeping down the attempts of party and faction
which have put the public affairs of this colony in the alarming situation in which
they actually stand’?’ Many governors did their best in often difficult
circumstances. But many also used their position to ‘squeeze Provinces, and make
the most they can of them, during the Time of their Administration’.28T h s is what
the European hstorian would expecr, for did not a Spanish viceroy of Naples
remark that no one should wish to hold that office because of the intense pain it
would cause him when he had to leave it at the end of his term of office? For their
part, the assemblies tried to bypass the governors and they sent agents to the capital
to lobby the English government, just as the provinces and cities of the Spanish
monarchy in Europe had been doing since the sixteenth century.
As usually happened in the context of dominium politicum et regule, the major
confrontations between monarchy and assembly were due much more often to a
political offensive by the monarchy than by the assembly. The English civil war
provoked relatively little reaction in America. The first real crisis was the setting up

” J. P. Greene, I’eripheries and Center: Conclitutionol Deuelopment in the Extended Polities ofthe British Empire
and the UniredStates, 1607-1788 (Athens, Ga. and London, 1986).p. 1 3 .
K. K. Johnson. Adjusrment to Empire: the Npu, England Colonies, 1675-1715 (Leicester, 19x1). p. 329;
Greene, p. 47.
’’Quoted in B. Bailyn. ’I‘lteO n g i m cfAmerican Politics (New York, 1969).p. 73. n. I I.
Quoted in Greenr, p. 2 1 .
148 C O M P O S I T E STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V EI N S T I T U T I O N S

of the Dominion of New England. It was clearly a part of the dominium regale
policies of the last years of Charles I1 and of the reign ofJames 11. In New England
the Crown proposed to combine Massachuserts, New Hampshire, Maine and
Plymouth under one governor, ruling without an elected assembly. The governor
of Virginia was told that the lung resolved ‘to reduce all Proprieties and Indepen-
dent Government to an Immediate Dependence upon the Crown’.B James I1
appointed Sir Edmund Andros, a military man, as the new governor of New
England. Andros tried to make the Puritan New Englanders pay for an Anglican
ministry. There were plans for a Catholic mission-popery! The governor
systematically interfered with local self-government, imposed new taxes in order to
pay his troops and in the process called into question all titles of landed property
and told those who remonstrated: ‘Either you are Subjects or you are Rebels’.30The
New England of the sixteen-eighties was not the Netherlands of the fifteen-sixties.
Andros was no duke of Alba. There was no inquisition and no ‘Council of Blood’.
But constitutionally Andros’s policies bear a definite family resemblance to those of
Philip 11’s Iron Duke.
The resolution of the crisis came largely from outside New England, and that,
too, was typical: early modern composite states were, by definition, never closed
structures. In this case it was the English revolution of 1688 whch led to the end of
the only attempt to impose dominium regale in English-speaking America.
As a result of the revolution in England the forced union of the colonies was
abandoned and their constitutions returned to the traditional dominium politicum et
regale regime. But it was, at least in theory, a condition at the extreme royalist end of
the wide spectrum of this regime. Professor Bernard Bailyn has grouped the
extraordinary powers of the royal governors under three heads: firstly, they could
exercise a veto over the legislation of the colonial assemblies and they frequently
did so, even whle the monarchy no longer exercised such a right in Britain.
Secondly, they could and did frequently dissolve the lower houses of the assemblies
and they were under no obligation to summon them after given intervals. By
contrast, the Crown in Britain was bound by the Triennial, later the Septennial.
Acts and, even more strictly, by the financial controls exercised by the house of
commons. Thirdly, the governors could set up courts of law and not only appoint
but also dismissjudges. In Britain the monarchy had lost this last power with the
Act of Settlement, in 1 7 0 1 . ~ ’
One may well doubt whether this particular balance of dominium politicum et
reg& could have survived the long-run economic and demographic development
of the colonies, even if no other problems had arisen. That it survived as long as it
did, for more than two generations, seems to have been due to two conditions. One
was the fact that the monarchy, and hence also the royal governors, exploited their
constitutional advantage only very sporadically. The Whig government in Great
Britain was unlikely to push the royal prerogative to the full, let alone extend it. The

’’ William Blathwayr ro Governor Lord Howard ofEftingham, 8 Dec. 1684, quoted in Johnson, p. 5 3 .
Ibid., p. 8 I .
” Bailyn, pp. 66-9.
 C0M P 0SITE STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T 1 V E IN S T l T U T l O N S I49
other was the emergence of a pattern which is again familiar from composite
monarchies in Europe. It was the machiavellian ploy of allowing governors to
become locally unpopular and then simply replacing them.’2 The Spanish
monarchy had raised this game to a fine art already in the sixteenth century,
especially in Sicily. The game deflected potentially dangerous constitutional
conflicts into personal politics which, however acrimonious they might become,
made for political and constitutional stability. Had it been combined with a more
adroit patronage policy, the way Governor Dunmore suggested, the system just
might have been more durable.
The break in the balance, however, did not come over the question ofthe powers
of the governors nor over patronage. It came because the English revolution had
changed the British regime of dorninium politicurn et regale into something quite
different, parliamentary government. By parliamentary government I mean a
regime in which there is no longer a balance between the monarchy and parliament
as two basically independent authorities, however much political weight might be
on one side or the other, but a regime in which the monarchy cannot function at all
without the consent of parliament. We are now aware that this result was neither
intended by those who made the revolution of 1688nor that it w& an immediate or
even necessary consequence of this revolution.” But I would suggest that it was
very likely to happen. For it happened also in the Netherlands and in Sweden.
Dominiurn politicurn et regale, with whatever political balance, can work only if there
is a minimum of trust between the parties, that is the monarchy and the representa-
tive assembly (and, of course, the ‘political nation’ represented by this assembly). In
the Netherlands this trust broke down when the king and the duke of Alba swept
the existing regime and all public law away, and when the estates of Holland and
Zeeland realized that they could not effectively defend their religion and their
newly-won self-government by going back to the pre-crisis regime of dominiurn
politicurn et regale. The princes of Orange who headed the new executive accepted
from the beginning that their authority derived from the estates.34
In Sweden Charles XI’Scoup of 1680 effectively abolished dominiurn politicurn et
regale as it had existed in that kingdom since the fourteenth century. But when the
Vasa absolutism collapsed after the death of Charles XI, in 1718, Sweden turned to
a fully parliamentary regime which, apart from a relatively short period of
absolutism after another royal coup, has survived to the present.J5
What made the seventeenth and eighteenth-century retreat from dominiurn
politicurn et regale into either royal absolutism (the eighteenth century version of
dominiurn regale) or to parliamentary government intellectually acceptable was the

32 Examples, for instance, in Johnson, pp. z77&

J. Carter, ‘The Revolution and the constitution’, in Britain ajerthe GloriousRevolution, pp. 39-58.
H. Horwin, ‘1689 (and all that)’, ParliamentaryHist.. vi (1987). 23-3Z;H. G. Koenigsberger. ‘Why did the
states general of the Netherlands become revolutionary in the 16th century!’, in Politicians and Virtuosi.
pp. 63-76.
” H. G. Koenigsberger,‘Riksdag. parliament and the srates general in the 16th and 17thcenturies’, in The
Swedish Ribdag in Inremarional Persppctiw. ed. N. Sqernquist (Stockholm, 1989);A. Upton, ‘Absolutism and
the rule of law: the case of Karl XI of Sweden’,in Parliaments, &fates and Representation. viii (1988). 31-46.
150 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS

triumphal march of Bodin's doctrine of sovereignty throughout Europe. I t was

formulated in different ways, sometimes Hobbesian, and by the eighteenth century
usually without Bodin's name. But it always amounted to the theory of the
sovereign authority of the state as unlimited in competence and in time. In the
Netherlands they argued already in the late sixteenth century that, in a parlia-
mentary regime, this concept had logically to be attached to the representative
assembly or, possibly, to its constituents?6In Britain it came to be widely accepted
before the middle of the eighteenth century that such absolute authority rested
with the king in parliament?' Blackstone in his Commentaries put it quite un-
compromisingly, declaring that there had to be 'a supreme, irresistible, absolute
uncontrolled authority, in which jura summi imperii, or the rights of sovereignty,
reside'.j8 One could hardly be more bodinian than that.
The situation of the British composite monarchy was now something quite
new.39 An absolutist metropolitan parliamentary regime was facing dominium
politicum et regale regimes in Ireland and in the American colonies. Not surprisingly,
it took some time for the implications of this situation to be fully understood. After
all, in England liberty had mumphed over royal absolutism. In practice, the central
government had largely withdrawn from local government. Those who now
completely dominated the counties and the boroughs were also those who were
represented in parliament."' The monarchy would still get its way over most issues;
but it was able to do so only because it had joined its opponents, so to speak. The
non-Jacobite tories could now happily transfer their penchant for non-resistance to
an authoritarian divine-right monarchy to non-resistance to a bodinian king-in-
parliament." A mixed constitution, the judicious combination of monarchy,
aristocracy and democracy, seemed to have been vindicated and was much admired
in the rest of Europe. Even such an intelligent and perceptive observer as
Montesquieu could simply not imagine that the apparently free English regime
might be more absolutist than the French monarchy with its fundamental laws and

Koenigsberger. Errares and Revolurionr, pp. 204-7.

" H. T. Dickinson,'The 18th-century debate on the sovereignty ofparliamenr', Tram. RoyalHisr. Soc., 5th
ser., xxvi (1976). 189-210.
'* Quoted in Greene, p. 101.
' 9 There was, however, a similar siruation as between Sweden. with its absolute parliamentary govern-

ment after 1720, and Pomerania, with its traditional dominium poliricum ef regale regime. But after the
disastrous wars of Charles XI1 and the loss ofhalf of Pomerania to Prussia in the Peace of Stockholm (1720).
the Swedish riksdag was unwilling to push any bodinian claims to absolute sovereignty over the remainder
ofthe Swedish overseas dominions. One may wonder whether. if Britain had lost the Seven Years War and
half the American colonies to France, the Westminster parliament would have been as confidenr in its claims
to sovereign authority over the remaining American colonies or Ireland as in fact it was after a successful war
and huge territorial acquisitions? For Sweden and Pomerania see Back, 'Die Stande in Schwedish-Pommern'.
Characteristically. the constitutional conflict between Sweden and Pomerania was rekindled when Gustavus
111 re-established royal absolutism in 1772.But this was again a traditional conflict between a dominium refale
regime and a dominium polititurn er regale regime, a conflict which did not have to be fought i ourranre. It
continued until Swedish Potnerania became Prussian in 1815. By that time Sweden had reverted to
parliamentary government.
do Carter, pp. 53-4.
" Dickinson, pp. 195-6.
 C O M P O S I T E STATES A N D R E P R E S E N T A T I V E I N S T I T U T I O N S Is1

its parlement of Paris, claiming to act as a kind of independent supreme constitu-

tional court. Montesquieu was driven to theorize that England had a much more
definite division of powers than was actually the
Understandably, the Americans were also for a long time taken in by the appear-
ance of the British regime and its day-to-day practice of politics. The myth of
parliament fighting royal tyranny was strong in America and most especially in
Puritan New England. The whgs who had made the revolution of 1688 were seen
as the natural allies of the colonial assemblies. For a long time the colonists thought
of themselves as still fighting the constitutional battles of the seventeenth century;
which accounts perhaps for the elevation of an overrated George 111 into the
pantheon-I should say pandemonium-of American popular demonology.
There were many causes of friction between Britain and the colonies and it is
not the purpose of this article to pursue this well-known story. My argument is
that there was a fundamental conflict between political regimes and that this
conflict could not be resolved peacefully because no one had had any experience
of it. Many contemporaries understood its nature perfectly well; but, without
experience or precedents to guide them no one was able to work out any other
solution than that which eventually occurred, the complete separation of the
two systems. And this separation involved, and was virtually bound to involve,
war.
The specific crisis w h c h became the flashpoint for rebellion, repression and war
certainly had its precedents: a long and successful but very expensive war against
third parties was followed by continuing disputes over the costs of defence. In the
seventeen-sixties both the British and the Americans felt strongly that the other had
not been pulling their weight. Just so, in the fifteen-sixties. the Spaniards and the
Netherlanders had felt about each 0ther.4~At that time escalating bad feeling about
money became indissolubly linked with religious passions and the question of the
extent of the king's sovereignty. In the seventeen-sixties escalating bad feeling
about money became indissolubly linked with passions about political liberty and
the question of the extent of parliament's sovereignty.
For the great majority of the British ruling class and for nearly all members of
parliament the position was clear from the beginning. George Grenville, in
proposing the Stamp Act, maintained quite specifically that parliament had the
right to tax the colonists, for revenue as well as for the regulation of imperial trade,
which meant for any purpose whatever. The Declaratory Act of 1766 confirmed
this claim,just as the Declaratory Act for Ireland had done in 1720.The debates in
parliament were not over this principle but only over the tactics the government
should pursue and, sometimes, over the arguments it should use. Inevitably, there
were hawks and doves, those who wanted to impose obedience on the colonists by

" Curiously enough, Swedish Ponierania had a supreme court, the Tribunal of Wisniar, which adjudi-
cated issues between the duke (i.e. the king of Sweden) and the estates. Some of its judges were appointed by
the estates (Back. ' I h Stande in Schwedish-Pommern', pp. 125-7).
" M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado. The Chanling Face OfBmpirr: Qarlvr V, PMip II and Habsbuy Authority, 1551-9
(Cambridge, 1988).
152 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS

military force and those who wanted to conciliate. Burke, for instance, wrote in his
notes for the Declaratory Act:
To state the right of Great Britain to Tax the Colonies. This speculative Idea of a right
deduced from the unlimited Nature of the supreme Legislative authority, very clear and
very undeniable, but, when explained proved and admitted little to the purposeu

In his Thoughts on the Present Discontent (1770)~~and again in his great parliamentary
speech of 1774 Burke never wavered from his belief in the bodinian powers of
parliament and of the utter folly of enforcing them.& It seemsjust possible that, if
Burke's advice had been followed, the crisis might have been smoothed over. 1 do
not think, however, that it could have been avoided in the long run. Burke's think-
ing provided no solution to the fundamental problem of squaring the bodinian
sovereignty of the lung in parliament with the conviction of the need for limiting
political authority, which the Americans derived both from their experience of
dominiurn politicurn et regale and from their mythology of liberty.
Inevitably, because they affected people more directly, the intellectual argu-
ments in America were more varied than those in England, just as they had been
more varied in the Netherlands than in Spain. Only those who thought it possible
to send representatives across the Atlantic to a superparliament could accept the
bodinian argument. They were few and they were bound to change their minds
when they contemplated not only the physical and psychological problems of
sending their representatives 3,000 miles from their constituents but when they
met with a complete lack of sympathy for such a course in the metropolitan
parliament. Time and again they were, of logical necessity, driven back to the
traditional solution of the composite monarchy made up of states with equal rights
and held together only by a common allegiance to the Crown, bilateral trade
agreements and sentiment. But for the British such a course would have meant
going back on a hundred years of their own history and re-establishing the
independent position of the monarchy. The formula of a virtually powerless
monarchy presiding only ceremonially over a multitude of absolutist parliamentary
regimes became possible only in the twentieth century and, by now, it works only
in the Burkean sense that nobody takes any political notice of it.
In the eighteenth century there was therefore for the American colonies no
alternative but submission to an absolutist parliamentary regime on the other side
of the Ocean or complete independence-just as had been the case with the Nether-
lands and Spain in the sixteenth century. In both cases the struggle involved foreign
intervention. In both cases it forced the individual provinces to come together in a
regional states general, or congress; and in both cases it forced them to consider two
parallel problems of political regime. The first was the relation of the constituent
states of the union to their central political authority. The second was the nature
and the powers of this political authority itself. The Dutch solution came near to

The Writingscrnd SpeechesofEdmund Burbe. ii. ed. P.Langford (Oxford, 198I). p. 47.
" Ibid., pp. 281,293-4.
The Work {Edmund Burke (8 vols., 189c-7), i. 418.432-5.
 COMPOSITE STATES A N D REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS 153
the English situation after 1688 but only in some respects: a parliamentary regime
in which the executive derived its authority ultimately from the representative
assembly but this assembly itself derived its authority from the estates of the
separate provinces. Until the end of the Dutch Republic, in 1794, the central
assembly was therefore a states general and not a unified parliament. In America the
first problem was solved by the federal constitution of 1788. The second was solved
by a clear rejection of bodinian parliamentary sovereignry and of parliamentary
government in the British sense in favour of the division of the three powers of
executive, legislature and judiciary. It was a modernized and, as it has turned out, a
very effective version of dominium politicum et regale.
H . G. K O E N I G S B E R G E R