The Last English Civil War - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

La última guerra civil inglesa

Francis Fukuyama

Abstracto: This essay examines why England experienced a civil war every fifty years from the Norman
Conquest up until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, and was completely stable after that point.
The reasons had to do with, primero, the slow accumulation of law and respect for the law that had occurred
by the seventeenth century, y segundo, with the emergence of a strong English state and sense of nation-
al identity by the end of the Tudor period. This suggests that normative factors are very important in cre-
ating stable settlements. Rational choice explanations for such outcomes assert that stalemated conflicts
will lead parties to accept second- or third-best outcomes, but English history, as well as more recent expe-
riences, suggests that stability requires normative change as well.

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In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries
are always the hardest.

–Gordon Brown

Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, Inglaterra

experienced a civil war roughly every fifty years.
These conflicts, often extremely bloody, continued
up until the great Civil War of the 1640s. The issues
underlying the latter conflict were not finally re-
solved until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689,
bringing about a constitutional settlement that es-
tablished once and for all the principle of parliamen-
tary supremacy. The last battle to be fought on En-
glish soil was the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685; de
that moment up until the present, England itself has
been peaceful and internally stable.1

Why was England so unstable in the nearly six cen-
turies following the Conquest, and so stable there-
después? To answer this question, we must look at the
history of those earlier civil wars, and compare their
causes and resolutions with the last civil war in the
seventeenth century. We can then compare this rec-
ord against existing general theories of civil conflict
and against specific interpretations of English history.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a Senior
Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Insti-
tute for International Studies and
the Mosbacher Director of the
Center on Democracy, Develop-
mento, and the Rule of Law at Stan-
ford University. He is the author
of Political Order and Political Decay:
From the Industrial Revolution to the
Globalization of Democracy (2014),
The Origins of Political Order: De
Prehuman Times to the French Revolu-
ción (2011), and America at the Cross-
caminos: Democracia, Fuerza, and the Neo-
conservative Legacy (2006).

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To anticipate the bottom line of this analy-
hermana, the durability of the 1689 settlement
proceeded from two primary factors: primero,
the slow accumulation both of law and re-
spect for the law on the part of English po-
litical actors; y segundo, the emergence of
an English state and a strong sense of En-
glish national identity. These explanations
depend heavily on normative changes that
took place in English political conscious-
ness during the late Middle Ages and, par-
ticularly, on innovative ideas about politi-
cal sovereignty that took hold in the second
half of the seventeenth century. Rational
choice explanations that assume that all
elites are maximizing predators, and see
stability as the result of elite bargains, son
insufficient to explain these outcomes.

This interpretation has important impli-
cations for our approach to the settlement
of civil wars today. The rational choice in-
terpretation suggests that settlements oc-
cur as a result of stalemated conflicts in
which the warring parties recognize that
their second- or third-best outcome–a ne-
gotiated political agreement–has become
more appealing than continuing to strug-
gle for their first-best choice (total victory
for their side). Economists Douglass North
and Barry Weingast have argued that the
Glorious Revolution produced a “self-en-
forcing” equilibrium due to the fact that
two monarchs had been removed by Par-
liament, forcing future monarchs to accept
limits on predatory behavior.2

There are several contemporary examples
of fragile stalemated settlements. In Cam-
bodia, the United Nations sponsored elec-
tions and then a power-sharing arrange-
ment including Prime Minister Hun Sen,
who succeeded, as soon as he was strong
enough to do so, in overturning the arrange-
ment through a coup in 1997. In Angola,
the peace accords negotiated in the early
1990s between the People’s Movement for
the Liberation of Angola and the National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola

fell apart after Jonas Savimbi decided he
was strong enough to resume the civil war.
In Bosnia, el 1995 Dayton Accords finally
brought an end to the civil war, with each
side accepting what, para ellos, was a sec-
ond-best outcome. The Bosniaks had to ac-
cept a semi-autonomous Republika Srpska,
while the Serbs did not succeed in either
separating or joining Serbia. While this has
brought stability to the Western Balkans for
more than twenty years, the Accords appear
to be fraying in 2017 as the weakening of the
European Union and the emboldening of
Russia have increased the self-confidence
of the Serbian community.

The problem with the rational choice in-
terpretation is that several prior English
civil wars had produced a similar outcome:
the dethroning or effective political neu-
tering of a king by other elites, seguido por
a political settlement that put the monar-
chy under clear constitutional constraints.
Todavía, unlike the results of the Glorious Rev-
olution, none of these earlier settlements
were “self-enforcing”: the king imme-
diately sought to break free of legal con-
straints once the balance of power shift-
ed back in his favor. Second-best outcomes
were not preferable to maximal ones if the
latter seemed feasible. Two other things
are needed for durable settlements: a nor-
mative belief in the intrinsic value of con-
stitutionalism and the rule of law, and state
institutions that have some degree of au-
tonomy from the competing political fac-
ciones. Paradójicamente, the emergence of a
constrained state required the prior evo-
lution of a state made strong by its under-
lying legitimacy and capacity. Absent these
factores, political settlements are likely to
be nothing more than truces in prolonged
competitions for power, as they were for
the English over the span of many centu-
ries. This suggests that we need to lower
our expectations for the sustainability of
postconflict settlements and focus more
on bringing about normative change.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Last English Civil War

During the Middle Ages, the English

fought an extraordinary number of civil
guerras, here defined as a violent conflict in
which organized groups within a single so-
ciety seek to gain political power and, ul-
timately, dominance. In the English case,
these wars occasionally involved tens of
thousands of combatants on both sides,
and led to the deaths of equal numbers of
gente, especially when we include collat-
eral civilian casualties.

En esta sección, I present a brief overview
of English political history, together with
an analysis of the common characteristics
of English civil wars.3 Many of these con-
flicts had a structure like the last civil war
of the seventeenth century: they involved
a struggle for power between a king and
his “barons,” that is, powerful elites who
sought to limit the king’s power. Several of
these wars produced constitutional settle-
ments in which the parties agreed to a for-
mal legal specification of the rights and du-
ties of both the crown and its subjects. Todavía
none of these earlier settlements, incluido
the Magna Carta, proved enforceable over
a prolonged period of time.

England’s medieval history was punctu-
ated by its conquest in 1066 by a foreign,
French-speaking dynasty from Normandy
led by William the Conqueror. The Nor-
man Conquest itself was one of the caus-
es of subsequent instability: the Norman
kings had to manage territorial possessions
in both England and France, which gave the
French and other actors multiple opportu-
nities for meddling in English affairs. En
an age well prior to the rise of modern na-
tionalism, this situation nonetheless pro-
duced enduring problems with legitimacy,
as French lords ruled over English subjects
and English kings fought for French terri-
tory with money raised in England.

The first major post-Conquest civil war
occurred in the 1140s and 1150s. Henry I
(1100–1135), William’s son, died with-
out a male heir, and a struggle ensued be-

tween his daughter Mathilda and her hus-
band Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou, sobre el
one side, and Henry’s nephew Stephen of
Blois, en el otro. This civil war eventual-
ly led to the establishment of the Angevin
Plantagenet dynasty and the coronation of
Geoffrey’s son as Henry II. Henry II and his
son Richard I were strong authoritarian rul-
ers who provided domestic stability.

The second civil war occurred less than
a generation later in 1173, when Henry II’s
three oldest sons and wife took up arms
against him and, en efecto, sought to seize
the crown from him. The rebellion was put
down in about a year.

The next civil war involved King John.
While he is popularly remembered as a
great tyrant, he was not necessarily more
cruel or tyrannical than his two Angevin
predecessors.4 However, he exacted large
payments from his barons to fight an un-
successful war to expand his French posses-
siones, which he subsequently lost after de-
feat at the Battle of Bouvines. In May 1215, a
group of barons took up arms; the conflict
was stalemated and the two sides negoti-
ated, producing the charter at Runnymede
that came to be known as the Magna Carta.
The Magna Carta contained a large num-
ber of specific provisions to regulate be-
havior on both sides and embodied gener-
al principles that played an important role
in the development of property rights in En-
gland. Since the time of Henry II, only sub-
tenants enjoyed the benefits of the Com-
mon Law through the royal courts. The ten-
ants-in-chief, sin embargo, were subject to the
direct feudal jurisdiction of the king. El
Magna Carta brought these elites under the
jurisdiction of the Common Law, y por lo tanto
constrained the king from making arbitrary
exactions.5

The Magna Carta was thus the prototype
of a constitutional settlement that laid out
in formal legal terms the rights and respon-
sibilities of the king and barons, particular-
ly the former’s right to take property. Tiene

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147 (1) Winter 2018Francis Fukuyama

been regarded, properly, as the bedrock of
English liberties, and came about as the re-
sult of a civil war in which neither side won
an overwhelming victory. The specific pro-
visions constituted second-best outcomes
for both sides, who would have preferred
to win a crushing victory and impose their
will unilaterally.

The Magna Carta did not, sin embargo, cre-
ate a “self-sustaining equilibrium”; fue
more like a truce in an ongoing civil war.
Less than two months after its signing, Rey
John sought and received an annulment of
its terms from Pope Innocent III, y el
civil war continued until John’s death in
1216. His son Henry III did not secure the
kingship without further violence, culmi-
nating in the Battle of Lincoln in 1217; el
Magna Carta was, for him, far from an es-
tablished law.

The next civil war broke out in the 1250s.
Henry III proved to be a weak king who
alienated his court by bringing in a series
of foreign courtiers. It was again a foreign
policy debacle that triggered the uprising:
Henry’s failed and expensive attempt to
conquer Sicily. En 1258, he was confront-
ed, as was his father John, by his barons,
who demanded that the king cease further
taxation, and that he be constrained by a
council of twenty-four and a parliament.6
This charter was known as the Provisions
de Oxford, and was as wide-ranging, if less
well-known, than the Magna Carta. Fue
seen by its authors as an effort to, en efecto,
re-impose the latter charter on a recalci-
trant king.7

Like his father, Henry III immediately
tried to wriggle out of the constraints of
the Provisions of Oxford, and overt conflict
broke out six years later as Henry’s broth-
er-in-law, Simon de Montfort, launched
an attack on the king at the head of a baro-
nial coalition. He defeated Henry and his
son Edward at the Battle of Lewes, and re-
instated the Provisions of Oxford in a peace
known as the Mise of Lewes. De Montfort

was soon thereafter defeated and execut-
ed by a resurgent Edward, who secured
the kingship as Edward I. Mopping up the
rebels required Edward to accede to a new
charter, the Dictum of Kenilworth, cual
reaffirmed the Magna Carta and restored
lands to Montfort’s rebels.

Edward went on to become one of the
greatest kings in English history; great be-
causa, as a strong and vigorous military
leader, he provided stability throughout
his long reign, incorporated Wales, y
subdued Scotland. (This obviously was not
necessarily the perspective of the Welsh or
the Scots.) It was becoming something of
a pattern, sin embargo, that every other king
would prove weak or incompetent, y
hence trigger a new civil war. Such was the
case with Edward I’s son Edward II. De
the moment of his coronation in 1308, él
was widely despised as a degenerate, y
suspected of having a long-term homo-
sexual affair with the Gascon knight Piers
Gaveston. Parliament sought to impose a
new set of legal restrictions on him, cual
he evaded; por 1321, the conflict degenerat-
ed into civil war. Edward won the war and
launched a bloody retribution on his en-
emies, tearing up any prior constitution-
al understandings about the limits of his
fuerza. His reign ended when his queen, Es-
abella (sister of Charles IV of France), de-
fected back to France and, together with
her lover Roger Mortimer, launched an
invasion of England. Edward was forced
to abdicate in favor of his young son Ed-
ward III, who himself had to launch a pal-
ace coup to gain effective power from his
mother and Mortimer.

Edward III was a strong king; like his
grandfather, he maintained stability in En-
gland and launched what came to be known
as the Hundred Years War to regain Planta-
genet territories in France. The crown even-
tually passed to Edward’s grandson Rich-
ard, OMS, as Richard II, would prove to be a
weak king and poor military leader. En 1386,

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Last English Civil War

interelite conflict returned as the Wonder-
ful Parliament stripped him of his authori-
ty. En 1397, the king staged an internal coup
that consolidated his rule and led to a pe-
riod described by many as “Richard’s tyr-
anny.” Opposition to his rule coalesced
around Henry Bolingbroke, OMS, from ex-
ile on the continent, launched an invasion
of England and deposed him to emerge as
the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV.

Henry suffered from a crisis of legiti-
macy and had to fend off several violent
revolts early in his rule. His son Henry V,
crowned in 1413, proved to be a strong rul-
es, able to maintain stability in England and
expandir, in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415,
English rule in France. The same could not
be said of his son Henry VI, who gained the
throne as a child on his father’s untimely
death in 1422. The kingdom fell into a pro-
longed civil war, known as the Wars of the
Roses, between two branches of the Planta-
genet family, the Lancasters and the Yorks,
that lasted almost into the sixteenth cen-
tury. Observing this protracted conflict,
the Milanese ambassador Sforza de’ Betti-
ni wrote: “I wish the country and the peo-
ple were plunged deep in the sea, porque
of their lack of stability.”8

emerged in Wat Tyler’s rebellion, became
a more common source of violence. Estos
religious and class issues were exploited by
elites in their struggles over power and re-
sources, yet it was also the case that ideas
themselves were autonomous sources of
conflicto, with obscure matters like the doc-
trine of transubstantiation leading count-
less individuals to be tortured, beheaded, o
burned at the stake. En general, sin embargo, el
Tudor century was much more stable than
the three preceding it.

The great English Civil War of the 1640s
began in 1641 and was fought on and off for
a decade, leading to the beheading of the
Stuart monarch Charles I in 1649 y el
monarchy’s replacement by a quasirepub-
lican form of government under the Pro-
tectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The resto-
ration of the monarchy in 1660 did not re-
solve the underlying conflict, sin embargo,
especially with the accession of the Catholic
James II in 1685. The conflict ended when
William of Orange invaded England from
the Netherlands and deposed James, dirigir-
ing to the constitutional settlement known
as the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689.
This entire chain of events is here referred
to as the last English Civil War.

The nature of civil conflict in England be-
gan to shift in subtle but important ways
during the Tudor dynasty, which encom-
passed the reigns of Henry VII (1485–1509),
Henry VIII (1509–1547), Edward VI (1547–
1553), Mary I (1553–1558), and Elizabeth I
(1558–1603). The kinds of large noble up-
risings that culminated in the Wars of the
Roses became much less common as the
English state grew in size and authority,
especially during the reign of Henry VIII.
With the arrival of the Reformation, después-
litical conflict increasingly centered on re-
ligion, with Henry and his son Edward VI
establishing England as a Protestant coun-
intentar, Mary pulling it back into Catholicism,
and Elizabeth reestablishing Protestant-
ismo. Además, class conflict, which had

We can thus count at least nine major

interelite civil wars during the period from
the Norman Conquest to the Glorious Rev-
olution. While some were brief, others like
the Wars of the Roses lasted for two gen-
erations and involved many separate sub-
ordinate conflicts. Además, Había
at least three large popular uprisings: el
Wat Tyler rebellion in 1381, the Pilgrimage
of Grace under Henry VIII, and the upris-
ings under Edward VI. This list does not in-
clude dozens of individual armed conspir-
acies and attempted and successful coups
that took place over this period. If the En-
gland of that time were a contemporary
developing country, we would not regard
it as particularly stable.

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147 (1) Winter 2018Francis Fukuyama

We can make several broad generaliza-
tions about the causes of these conflicts.
Whig historians have often argued that
the broad underlying issue from at least the
Magna Carta on was the effort to force des-
potic kings to abide by the law and to make
them ultimately accountable to Parliament,
and thereby to the whole English people.

While there is truth in this account, es
also clear that Whig history gravely dis-
torts the record. In the end, virtually all
the civil wars in England were triggered
by a loss of legitimacy by the monarch.
But that loss was not necessarily tied to ty-
rannical or excessively predatory behav-
ior. The most significant common cause
for the civil wars was the king’s perceived
weakness or incompetence, particularly
in foreign policy: John’s loss of Norman-
dy, Henry III’s debacle in Sicily, Edward II’s
travails in Scotland, Richard II’s failures in
Scotland and France, and Henry VI’s loss of
the French territories acquired under his fa-
ther and great-great-grandfather. Charles I
found himself with a bankrupt state and
was forced to turn to extraordinary mea-
sures like demands for ship money (a tax
that skirted parliamentary review). por estafa-
contraste, a level of taxation that had triggered
a rebellion in earlier times was grudgingly
borne if the monarch put those resources
to good use by expanding the realm, as in
the case of Edward III’s extended wars in
Francia. En otros casos, the loss of legitima-
cy was tied to domestic issues, como el
courtiers kept by Henry III and Edward II,
or Henry VI’s general incompetence.

Por el contrario, England experienced great
stability under strong and often tyrannical
kings, especially those who achieved for-
eign policy success: Henry II, Richard I, Ed-
ward I, and Henry V. Each imposed ruin-
ous taxes on the realm and yet maintained
their legitimacy. Henry VIII was not par-
ticularly successful overseas, but over his
long reign he centralized power dramati-
cally, extracted onerous taxes, and carried

domestic tyranny to new heights. Yet Henry
VIII died peacefully in his bed, without pro-
voking an armed backlash from other elites.
The history of these conflicts was therefore
no, contrary to Whig history, a struggle to
achieve ever-higher levels of liberty.

The conflict of the seventeenth century

bore some resemblances to previous civ-
il wars, insofar as it pitted a monarch–al-
ternatively Charles I and James II–against
various elite opponents centered in Parlia-
mento. As in the case of the Magna Carta or
the Provisions of Oxford, it led to a formal
political settlement that imposed greater ac-
countability on the king. And as in the case
of the military confrontation surrounding
the Magna Carta, the outcome was ambig-
uous: while the parliamentary side initially
prevailed and managed to depose Charles I,
Cromwell’s Protectorate became increas-
ingly dictatorial and unpopular. By the time
of the Restoration, the two sides were dis-
enchanted both with the idea of absolute
monarchy and of republican government.
The Glorious Revolution produced neither
outcome, but rather a state that was consti-
tutionally limited in its powers, under the
principle of “no taxation without represen-
tation.” Sovereignty was vested in the “king
in Parliament,” though, en la práctica, the Glo-
rious Revolution maintained the principle
of parliamentary supremacy and remained
a durable political settlement for the next
four centuries.

Critical to the durability of the 1689 settle-

ment was the growth in the belief by all En-
glish political actors in the sanctity of con-
stitutional government and, more broad-
ly, that the sovereign should be “under the
law.” North and Weingast have suggested
that the Glorious Revolution was critical to
the establishment of English property rights
and contract enforcement, and therefore to
the economic growth and material prosper-
ity that emerged in the next two centuries.9

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Last English Civil War

But English property rights had been firmly
established centuries earlier. The Stuarts at-
tempted to turn back the clock on law; su
failure was the product of deep normative
changes in the way the law was understood.
European political development was dif-
ferent from other parts of the world be-
causa, of the three basic political insti-
tutions–a modern state, rule of law, y
accountability–it was law that emerged
first.10 Of all European countries, Inglaterra
saw the most precocious development of
the rule of law. But it also began to create a
modern state early on, and the histories of
the two were closely intertwined.

Henry II laid the basis for what would
come to be known as the Common Law and
a centralized English state in the twelfth
siglo. Contrary to a line of interpreta-
tion that stretches from Edward Coke to
Friedrich Hayek, the Common Law did
not emerge in an evolutionary fashion out
of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman cus-
tomary law.11 Rather, “the custom of the
king’s court is the custom of England, y
becomes the common law.”12 In regard to
secure property rights, as historian Joseph
Strayer has pointed out, the king would fre-
quently take the side of the tenant against
the lord in a society in which cases had
been typically tried in seigneurial courts,
through institutions like the assize of nov-
el disseisin (“recent dispossession”).13 El
ability to dispense impartial justice helped
establish the legitimacy of Henry’s king-
barco; it also earned the crown substantial
revenue in an age before any form of cen-
tralized taxation.

In the centuries after Henry II’s reforms,
institutions gradually took shape. Inglés
judges and lawyers began to receive spe-
cialized training and recognized them-
selves as a separate profession beginning in
the twelfth century, and there was steady
codification of informal rules and the cen-
tralization of case law under the principle
of stare decisis (precedent).14 Edward I, en

particular, was critical in establishing a
number of major statutes, including the
first Statute of Westminster (1275), el
Statute of Gloucester (1278), and the Stat-
ute of Mortmain (1279).15

By the early seventeenth century, el
role of law in English life had changed be-
yond recognition. As historian J. GRAMO. A. Po-
cock has pointed out, the first decades of
that century saw the emergence of what
he labels the “common law mind,” which
held that English law was not legislated but
had existed from time immemorial.16 The
parliamentary side did not see itself inno-
vating with respect to the law, but taking
a profoundly conservative position in de-
fense of law and tradition.

Además, there was a dramatic shift in
the understanding of the nature of rights
and liberties between the early seventeenth
century and the Glorious Revolution. A me-
dieval right or liberty was a particularistic
privilege that was either customary or le-
gally defined in feudal law as the result of a
contract between parties of unequal pow-
er and social status. These were the sorts of
rights defended at Runnymede: a pesar de
the barons claimed to be speaking on behalf
of the whole realm, they were most interest-
ed in their own privileges as a social class.
This understanding changed dramati-
cally in the second half of the seventeenth
siglo, in part as a result of the experience
of the Civil War itself. Thomas Hobbes’s
treatise Leviathan, written in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the first phase of the Civil
Guerra, was critical to this transformation.
Hobbes argued that human beings are fun-
damentally equal because they are equally
vulnerable to violent death; the state is a
social contract that protects the right to
life in a way that cannot be accomplished
in the state of nature. While he argues in
favor of absolute monarchy, that monar-
chy exists only to protect the right to life.
Hobbes thereby upended completely the
medieval understanding of rights: ellos son

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147 (1) Winter 2018Francis Fukuyama

not inherited or contractual, but rather in-
here in human beings qua human beings,
and become the basis for state legitimacy.
These ideological changes were critical to
understanding why the parliamentary side
was willing to abide by a constitutional set-
tlement that limited its own ability to ex-
tract rents and violate the restrictions it had
agreed to in the settlement. The state was
no longer seen as a form of private proper-
ty that could be seized by elites for private
benefit; it was sovereign, but only because it
“represented” the whole community and it
exercised that sovereignty as a public trust.
The elites represented in Parliament, in oth-
er words, had come to recognize in princi-
ple the modern idea that private and public
interests are sharply separated, and that the
state only existed to serve the latter. Mientras
previous civil wars were fought to defend
the diverse “rights of Englishmen,” the
great Civil War was fought under the ban-
ner of the “rights of man.”

Parallel to the growth of law and respect

for the law was the slow consolidation of
a modern English state to which all citi-
zens owed loyalty, and which was power-
ful enough to maintain a legitimate mo-
nopoly of force throughout the territory
of England. This kind of state did not re-
ally emerge until the late Tudor period at
the end of the sixteenth century.

A modern state began to consolidate
under Henry VIII, and particularly during
the period from 1532–1540 under Hen-
ry’s powerful secretary Thomas Crom-
Bueno. The view that there was a “revolution
in government” at this time is associated
with historian Geoffrey Elton, who argued
eso, prior to this period, the realm was run
like a large private estate;17 after Crom-
Bueno, it became bureaucratic, national,
and uniform with direct consequences for
stability.18 The specifics of the Elton thesis
have been much debated, but it is clear that
England participated in a process of mod-

ern state-building that was taking place all
over Europe in that period.19

In England, the primary driver of this
transformation was the English Reforma-
ción. The Catholic Church owned perhaps
one-fifth of the land in England at the be-
ginning of the sixteenth century; that land
and the Church’s moveable wealth were
confiscated by the crown and the substan-
tial taxes sent to Rome went to the Exche-
quer instead. Cromwell created a bureau-
cratic system for managing this wealth and
shifted the system of taxation to more reg-
ular levies not linked to the revenue needs
of specific wars. The king and his immedi-
ate circle of courtiers became increasingly
detached from the day-to-day administra-
tion of the government, and were replaced
by a Privy Council with regular member-
ship that controlled access to the king.20

Just as important as these administrative
changes was the creation of a distinctive
English national identity as a result of the
break with Rome. Medieval kings did not
regard themselves as sovereign; God was
sovereign, and kings shared authority with
God’s vicar, the Pope. Henry’s Reformation
made the English monarch sovereign over
all aspects of his subjects’ lives, both ma-
terial and spiritual; the shift from Catho-
lic ritual to Protestant worship through the
promulgation of works like Thomas Cran-
mer’s Book of Common Prayer established a
distinctive English national language and
cultura. This was reflected as well in En-
glish foreign policy, where Tudor England
became the dominant Protestant power
balancing would-be Catholic hegemons in
Spain and France. The normative belief in
the existence of a single English communi-
ty was reinforced by events like the defeat
of the Spanish Armada, and by the materi-
al interests of the nobility and gentry that
had profited from the sale of confiscated
Church lands.

The creation of a unified sovereignty by
the end of the sixteenth century then laid

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesThe Last English Civil War

the basis for the novel theories of the sev-
enteenth century: after Hobbes, sovereign-
ty came to mean a social contract in which
absolute power was vested in the monarch
only insofar as he was representative of the
whole community. Kings, and particular-
ly the early Stuart monarchs, could no lon-
ger rely on their personal wealth and had to
seek money either from bankers or by ca-
joling the elites in Parliament to pay taxes.
The various Stuart monarchs sought to re-
turn to the situation in which kings ruled
rather than reigned, but found they did not
have the resources to do so. After the Glo-
rious Revolution, the monarch became an
increasingly ceremonial figure attached to
Parliament and a large bureaucratic ma-
chine; capturing the kingship, which had
been the object of civil wars before the Tu-
dors, was much less of an elite objective.
The often incompetent Hanoverian kings
of the eighteenth century did not provoke
civil conflicts because their prime ministers
and Parliaments were the effective rulers
of a Britain that was becoming territorial-
ly consolidated.

English stability after 1689 was the by-

product of several slow-moving political
condiciones: increasing respect for the law
and constitutionalism, and the growth of
a modern state that could administer the
realm even if the king were weak or incom-
petent.

English stability was the result of an elite
bargain, but it was a pact that took hold only
over the course of six centuries. Comienzo
with the Magna Carta, such pacts were seen
by elites as no more than momentary truces
that could be upended the moment they felt
they could get the upper hand. The stability
of the settlement coming out of the Glori-

ous Revolution, por el contrario, was rooted in
normative or ideational commitments by
those elites to constitutionalism and legal
tradition, to a clearly perceived English na-
tional identity, and to a new understanding
of sovereignty that was vested in the equal
rights of all citizens.

This suggests that there can be no stable
democracy without a normative commit-
ment to democracy and to the rule of law;
en efecto, there cannot be a stable state un-
less there is a shared understanding of na-
tional identity underpinning the state’s le-
gitimidad. Elite bargains will buy time and
temporarily reduce conflict, but they will
not necessarily result in either a stable
state or liberal democracy.

Many contemporary conflicts will there-
fore continue until greater normative com-
mitment to state, law, and democracy come
acerca de. Both Afghanistan traditionally and
Iraq since the American invasion in 2003
have suffered from weak states and weak
national identities. While U.S. asistencia
could help create certain visible institutions
of government (such as armies and police,
schools and clinics), these initiatives alone
did not foster a new sense of national iden-
tity, commitment to the law, or states that
could command authority throughout the
territory of these countries. It is not neces-
sarily the case that building such normative
commitments will take six centuries, as in
the English case, but the ability to effect
such changes within the short time frame
dictated by the patience of American and
European taxpayers is questionable. Este
means that the burden of sustainable in-
stitution-building necessarily will fall on
the local elites themselves, who will have
to draw upon their own traditions to cre-
ate legitimacy and political order.

notas finales

Author’s Note: I would like to thank Leah Nosal for her help in researching this essay.

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147 (1) Winter 2018Francis Fukuyama

1 This does not count the violent conflicts of the twentieth century in Ireland (the Easter Re-
bellion of 1916) or in Northern Ireland (prolonged conflict with the ira and its offshoots);
while occurring under British sovereignty, they did not take place on English soil.

2 Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution
of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic
Historia 49 (4) (1989): 803–832.

3 This historical account deliberately leaves aside several other major categories of violent con-
conflicto. I am not covering pre-Conquest England for simple lack of space and knowledge. In addi-
ción, I am not going to deal with the innumerable wars and rebellions connected with England’s
incorporation of Wales, Escocia, and Ireland. For much of England’s premodern history, estos
were regarded as foreign conflicts and belong in the domain of international relations.

4 Ralph K. Tornero, “England in 1215: An Authoritarian Angevin Dynasty Facing Multiple
Threats,” in Magna Carta and the England of King John, ed. Janet S. Loengard (Woodbridge, United
Kingdom: Boydell Press, 2010).

5 James C. Holt, The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King John (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961);
David Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (Londres: Hambledon Press, 1996); and Caroline Burt,
Edward I and the Governance of England, 1272–1307 (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2013).
6 F. METRO. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Cen-

tury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947).

7 R. F. Treharne, Simon de Montfort and Baronial Reform: Thirteenth Century Essays, ed. mi. B. Fryde

(Londres: Hambledon Press, 1986).

8 Dan Jones, The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors (Nueva York:

Viking, 2014), 235.

9 North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment.”
10 Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Nuevo
york: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); and Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay:
From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (Nueva York: Farrar, Straus and Gi-
roux, 2014).

11 j. GRAMO. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in
the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1957); and Friedrich A. Hayek,
Law, Legislation and Liberty (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

12 Frederic W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I,

volumen. 1, 2y ed.. (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1898), 163.

13 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1970); and Frederic W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock, The History of English Law Be-
fore the Time of Edward I, volumen. 2, 2y ed.. (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1898), 29–79.

14 Maitland and Pollock, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, volumen. 1.
15 Michael Prestwich, Edward I (Londres: Methuen, 1988); jones, The Wars of the Roses; and Dan Jones,
The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England (Nueva York: Penguin Books, 2014).

16 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law.
17 Geoffrey R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry
VIII (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 1953); and Geoffrey R. Elton, England Under the
Tudors (Londres: Methuen, 1974).

18 Penry Williams, “The Tudor State,” Past and Present 25 (1) (1963): 39–58.
19 See Joseph S. Block, “The Rise of the Tudor State,” in A Companion to Tudor Britain, ed. Roberto

Tittler and Norman Jones (Malden, Masa.: Blackwell, 2004).

20 Roger Schofield, Taxation Under the Early Tudors, 1485–1547 (Malden, Masa.: Blackwell, 2004).

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