By the mid-seventeenth century, several major European monarchies were collapsing. Battered by incessant war and religious rebellion, rulers clashed with landowners and clergy on whom they relied for territorial and spiritual support. Nicholas Henshall argues that from this crisis emerged a new deal[...]
Conventionally, ``absolutism'' in early-modern Europe has suggested unfettered autocracy and despotism -- the erosion of rights, the centralisation of decision-making, the loss of liberty. Everything, in a word, that was un-British but characteristic of ancien-regime France. Recently historians have[...]