Historians have long debated the effects of war on state formation in early modern Europe. Did military competition increase rulers' power over their subjects and forge more modern states, or did the strains of war break down political and administrative systems? This book seeks a rounded answer to these questions by comparing England and the Netherlands in the age of warrior princes such as Henry VIII and Charles V. It examines the development of new military and fiscal institutions, but goes beyond them to ask how mobilization for war changed political relationships throughout society. Towns in England, such as Norwich, York, Exeter, and Rye, are compared with towns in the Netherlands, such as Antwerp, Leiden, 's-Hertogenbosch, and Valenciennes, to see how the magistrates' relations with central government and the urban populace were modified by war. Great noblemen from the Howard and Percy families are set alongside their equivalents from the houses of Croÿ and Egmond to examine the role of recruitment, army command, and heroic reputation in maintaining the power of the nobility. The wider interactions of subjects and rulers in wartime are reviewed to measure how effectively war extended princes' claims on their subjects' loyalty and service; their ambitions to control news and public opinion and to promote national identity; and their ability to manage the economy and harness religious change to dynastic purposes. The book presents picture of societies and polities tested and shaped by the pressures of ever more demanding warfare.

This article re-examines Henry VII's use of the king's chamber as the principal means of managing royal revenue. This is done in the light of the rediscovery of a series of account books belonging to two clerks of John Heron, treasurer of the chamber. This article challenges the assumption that Heron's account books are straightforward ledgers of royal income and expenditure. It also argues that stories of Henry's great wealth were not fables of Tudor propaganda and that the machinery of the chamber allowed the first two Tudors to employ effectively the private, as well as public, revenues. Moreover, Henry VII's methods of revenue management were not merely developments of Yorkist innovations but a concerted attempt to address some of the deep-rooted fiscal problems of late-medieval monarchy.

This chapter concludes the book by testing its findings against various models for the process of state formation in early modern Europe. In England and the Netherlands, it seems that war did shape the state in significant ways not only in the development of taxation, armies, and navies, but also in changing political relationships of many sorts. War was not the sole force for the concentration of power, but interacted with judicial, religious, ideological, and social drivers. Many differences in the impact of war, not only between the two polities but between different parts of each polity, can be attributed to geopolitics. Others highlight the differences in the political institutions each polity had inherited; the differences in the economic and social configuration of the two societies; the different dynastic traditions of the Habsburg and Tudor houses; or the different dynamics of their respective multiple monarchies.

While the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe has ranged widely, the participants have not answered its most fundamental question to the satisfaction of most historians. The difficulty has been how to assess whether war was more important than other factors as a driver of state formation. In practice it is more fruitful to study the role of war within a multi-causal model, but to do this the interaction between war and other factors such as judicial, religious, ideological, and social change must be studied, preferably in detail but in comparative context. A t first sight it might be thought that the debate on the role of war in state development in early modern Europe is quite wide enough already. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries between history, sociology, and political science. It subsumes the ever more ramified debate on the 'military revolution' thesis first propounded by Michael Roberts in 1955 and elaborated by Geoffrey Parker in 1988. 1 It has spread its influence geographically: from at least Parker's intervention it has been tied to the origins of European global dominance, and recently attention has been focused on what eastern European developments can tell us that western European cannot, and on why China did not have the same sort of state-building military revolution as Europe. 2 Discussion has drawn in the fourteenth century as the proposed site for an infantry revolution, the fifteenth century as the scene of a gunpowder revolution, the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the locus for a more convincing all-round military revolution than Roberts's, and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the 1 M.

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