Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals by Niall Ferguson Page B

at their peak in 1639-40 - a time when a Catholic victory on the continent still seemed a real possibility. Moreover, the lawyers who had opposed Charles over his raising of ship money would have seized the opportunity of a retreat from Scotland to reiterate their arguments against the raising of revenue without parliamentary consent. Even if not a single shot had been fired, the expedition to Scotland would still have cost more than the Exchequer had anticipated. True, if Charles had still been able to rely on the City of London to advance him the additional costs of his abortive expedition, there would have been only limited cause for anxiety. Then again, failure in Scotland might also have precipitated a crisis in Charles’s relations with the City. That would have left him with only one option: to recall Parliament and abandon Personal Rule.
    For anyone who subscribes to a determinist theory of history, it is almost impossible to imagine what the consequences of such a climb-down might have been. We are so used to the idea of the Stuart victory over the forces of Puritanism and Coke’s legal conservatism that any other outcome seems inconceivable. Yet it was far from being inevitable that Charles would emerge from the Scottish crisis victorious and go on to reign for a further twenty years, presiding over that era of tolerance at home and peace abroad which we have come to associate with his name. On the contrary, failure in Scotland might have precipitated a similar crisis of governance in Ireland. It has even been suggested by some writers that, under those circumstances, a fully fledged parliamentary revolt might have broken out against his rule in the 1640s; and that this might have led Britain into just the kind of bloody civil war which had racked Europe in the preceding decades. Had the opponents of Personal Rule managed to recover a forum for their grievances in the form of a parliament, it is certainly clear which of Charles’s ministers would have been their first targets: Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford. It is even conceivable that the incompatibility of royal and parliamentary objectives could have led to outright rebellion.
    The consequences of what has sometimes misleadingly been called ‘Stuart absolutism’ have been debated often enough. Critics of the regime - especially the more backward-looking Puritan settlers in North America - alleged that the relative decline of the Westminster Parliament marked the end of ‘liberty’ in England, just as they never tired of predicting, quite wrongly, that Laud would one day reintroduce ‘Popery’ to the established church. However, it was precisely the decline of the rigid doctrine of the sovereignty of the crown-in-parliament that enabled the Stuarts to deal as effectively as they did with the problems of political ‘overstretch’ which inevitably arose as their territories expanded in the course of the eighteenth century. The Stuart polity - not unlike its Habsburg counterpart - was, in fact, a far less centralised system than that which developed under Louis XIV in France. Indeed, for all the fears of the older generation in the 1640s, Charles’s son was content to see an increased role for the parliaments of London, Edinburgh and Dublin after his accession.
    Yet precisely the non -absolutist nature of Stuart rule gave it a certain resilience and flexibility. The so-called ‘Restoration’ of parliaments in 1660 did not, after all, mean a return to the fraught days of James I’s reign, when the English House of Commons had been crowded with aggressive Puritans seeking to check the royal prerogative. By the 1660s, a new generation was represented in Parliament, for whom those days lay in the remote past. And where there was dissent on the periphery of Charles’s empire - dissent which might, under different circumstances, have boiled over into open warfare - this was contained by a judicious mixture of concessions and coercion. In Scotland,