A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  In fact, where early modern history was concerned, the result was a set of different perspectives. One was taken by John Morrill, who emphasized the common problems and crises of the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland by the mid-seventeenth century. Monarchs were judged in one by what they were doing in another, and politicians in each were all reacting to events in the others. None of them actively sought complete independence from the others, even under the greatest strains, and the nobility of all three was represented at the royal court and intermarried. Morrill acknowledged that the three kingdoms could be studied separately at times, but for a total of about one-third of the early modern period were so entangled that they could only be profitably considered as a whole. The second perspective was taken by Steven Ellis, who was pre-eminently a specialist in Tudor Ireland. He suggested that the early modern period was best characterized by an exercise in English state-building. He emphasized that until the 1530s English kings had mostly been concerned with their French lands, though in gaps between campaigns there their power had also expanded to leave large borderlands in Ireland, Wales and northern England, owing the monarch allegiance but run by their own magnates. This situation was altered by the final and complete loss of the French territories, plus a serious new problem of security created by the Reformation. The latter meant that the borderlands had to be taken in, a process which took almost 200 years and was completed in the early eighteenth century. By then Protestant, English-speaking elites were in control of the whole archipelago, and could harness its resources to create a superpower in the next hundred years.

  A third perspective consisted of a reaction against these ideas by Irish and Scottish historians, especially Brendan Bradshaw and Nicholas Canny among the former and Keith Brown among the latter. Bradshaw insisted that the Irish experience was unique, not just in the British Isles but in the whole of Europe. It opposed the whole thrust of early modern state formation, whereby ever stronger monarchies either absorbed outlying realms or drove them into independence. Ireland ended up neither absorbed nor subdued, the only place in Europe where religious conflict was left chronic at the end of the early modern age. To Bradshaw, Ireland was the ‘British Problem’. Canny complained that the ‘New British History’ was too narrowly political in its preoccupations. To him, the societies, economies and cultures of the different peoples of the islands were so distinctive that common political and religious problems could have radically different effects. The one thing, indeed, that they clearly all shared was the impact of English cultural and military expansion upon everybody else. Brown commented that the new kind of history was useful in inducing the English to take a greater interest in the other peoples, but that it should not divert the Scots and Irish from concentrating on the unique characteristics of their own nations. Behind some of these concerns lay the danger that if English historians got really good at writing Irish and Scottish history, then specialists in the latter could be out of a job.

  During the years around 2000, these fears more or less dissolved, to leave a general amity among the scholars involved and the recognition that a three-kingdom or archipelago-wide view was essential to an understanding of at least particular periods and episodes. By then, it was also apparent – at least to somebody detached from the debates concerned – that lumped together under the heading of ‘the British problem’ in the early modern period were actually four different, but simultaneously occurring, problems. The first was the problem of the union of Crowns, which was started in 1541 when Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland and ended in 1603 when James VI united all three realms under his rule. Multiple kingdoms were common in early modern Europe, as Conrad Russell reminded us, but this was a very unusual bundle. England was the most centralized and heavily administered monarchy in Europe, and also had a society much more open – individualist, capitalist and socially mobile – than the norm. Scotland was far closer to that norm, and Ireland a bizarre case of English institutions imposed on a much more fragmented society. The second problem was the English one, highlighted by Steven Ellis: of an English culture and state reaching out into what had hitherto been its neighbours and borderlands in the archipelago. In the course of the period 1530 to 1630, the Welsh native elite were brought into the English system with full rewards, the native Irish ruling class dispossessed or annexed, and the Scots sucked into a common Anglicized culture and a royal spoils system centred on England.

  The third problem was the Irish one, created by Ireland’s stunningly anomalous position as an independent state which was not visited by its royal rulers at all between 1399 and 1689. They never went there to be crowned, took no oaths to respect its laws, and were regularly deposed without any consultation of the Irish. The Irish government was a carbon copy of the English, in each detail, but with a completely invisible ruler. This did not mean independence in practice, but (from the 1550s) treatment as an English colony, with land and office being open to exploitation by a stream of Englishmen who worked the independent institutions for their own benefit. The English themselves were never sure of what they were doing there. They did not have a scheme for taking over Ireland directly, but spoke instead of giving it their own superior culture, which would in theory be open to all its inhabitants to enjoy. They treated the natives as full subjects of their Crown, with feudal titles and rights to formal justice; yet at the same time equated them implicitly or explicitly with Native Americans, as savages essentially different in kind from the British. They also increasingly regarded the Old English as traitors and backsliders in the work of cultural re-education and religious conversion. Unlike the Native Americans, the native Irish were allowed to remain on the land taken by the New English, because they were already assimilated into the economic processes needed to exploit their labour and skills. At the same time, almost as little effort was made to convert and re-educate them by their new masters. The result was that wars and rebellions in Ireland were much nastier and more protracted than those in Britain. The great change of the period between 1530 and 1630 was to produce two new identities in the land, a New British one, firmly linked to Protestantism and close ties with England, and a New Irish one, as firmly linked to Catholicism and greater independence.

  The fourth problem, which is another that has been highlighted by Steven Ellis, was the Celtic one, and it ran through all three kingdoms. They were, indeed, probably the only three kingdoms in the whole of Western Europe by 1485 to retain in each what was commonly regarded as a savage frontier, represented by those among their subjects who spoke either Welsh or Irish or Scottish Gaelic. Indeed, at that time it seemed as if the Lordship of the Isles, held by the Macdonald family, might grow into a fourth kingdom, thoroughly Celtic and spanning Northern Ireland and north-western Scotland. As suggested above, the subsequent policy of Anglicization was deeply destructive to Celtic identities. Between 1485 and 1603, successively, the Lordship of the Isles was conquered by the kings of Scots, Wales was peacefully assimilated to English government, and the military power of the native Irish chiefs was broken. The old link between the Gaelic-speaking populations of Ireland and Scotland was also broken, as religion separated the former into (mostly) Catholic, and the latter into (mostly) Protestant.

  By 1630, only Scotland’s Celtic hinterland, the Highlands and Western Isles, remained largely intact; and that is why by then it was at last starting to emerge as a problem for monarchs. This was very much a new development, for this had been the region which had produced the first rulers of a united Scottish kingdom, and until the end of the Middle Ages Gaelic culture had generally been admired. James V, indeed, seems to have been the first king who was not bilingual in Gaelic and Scots. The big shift occurred when James VI inherited the English throne and redefined his kingdoms as based on a common Anglicized culture, linked to the Continent, with barbarism and backwardness most clearly represented in them by the common Gaelic traditions of Ireland and Scotland. Between 1603 and 1621 his Scottish government passed a series of measures which s
tigmatized Gaelic culture and declared the need to modernize and civilize it according to Lowland Scots and English norms. National law was ordered to be enforced throughout the land, short-lived colonies of Lowlanders were planted in Gaelic areas, and certain clans, above all the Campbells, were favoured to act as the king’s peacekeepers. Highland culture was, however, no living fossil, left over from the dark ages, but tough, dynamic and adaptable: and that was really the issue.

  It lacked most of the trappings that became associated with Highlanders in modern times: the kilt, clan tartans, and the use of the bagpipes as the distinctive musical instrument. None the less, it had features which were just as distinctive, in Lowland eyes. It had its own costume for men: a long shirt with a long cloak wound over and around it. It had a strong and impressive poetic tradition, of verse composed in Gaelic by the native bards. Above all, it had the clan system, whereby land was divided into territories held by native lords whose tenants shared their surname and were in theory, though only at times in fact, their junior kin. These tenants owed them military service, ‘man rent’, in payment for their holdings, which meant that, in a still highly militarized society, the chiefs could gather war bands at great speed. It was itself not prehistoric but a late medieval system, built up in the late Middle Ages because of the relative loss of interest by the kings in their Gaelic hinterland and a resulting problem of keeping order there. When compared with the lordships of the medieval Lowlands, it differed only in a greater emphasis on kinship. By the seventeenth century, however, the waning of medieval systems of military lordship across the Lowlands, as in England, began to make the Highland clans look very different indeed. When the sixteenth century produced the triumph of firearms in warfare across Europe, the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland adapted in different ways. The former, led by Hugh O’Neill, took on the new gunpowder-based military technology from the Continent, so that he could engage English soldiers with the same weapons: guns and pikes (long spears), supported by horsemen. The Highlanders, not able to afford these, adopted an opposite response which slowly came into force in the first half of the seventeenth century. This was to throw away their heavy medieval armour and swords, and equip their men as light and mobile infantry, armed with leather shields and two-edged, one-handed broadswords. With the advantage of slope in their favour, they could charge fast enough to get among musketeers before they had time to fire off more than one volley, at long range, and so cut them down. Given the right terrain, in which the Highlands abounded, and a good commander, this ‘Highland charge’ could be devastatingly effective. By the middle of the century, therefore, the attempts by James VI’s regime to suppress traditional Gaelic Scottish culture had backfired; it had evolved into something that was in military terms much more dangerous than before, and even more distinct from the Lowland Scots, let alone the rest of the British. To the ‘Irish Problem’ created under the Tudors, a ‘Highland Problem’ had now been added.

  What all four aspects of the ‘British Problem’ had in common was a relationship of cores with peripheries, existing in every kingdom but with the basic dynamism provided by the greatest core of all, the Kingdom of England as defined by its original Anglo-Saxon heartlands east of Gloucester and south of York. In the long term it was the most serious knock-on effect of the end of the Hundred Years War, as English monarchs reluctantly turned away from France for the first sustained period in half a millennium, and sought realms to the west. This would probably not have occurred had England not produced a king as completely inept, and long-lived, as Henry VI. Its precise form was defined by the Elizabethan Reformation, which ensured that it would be characterized by cooperation, rather than enmity, between the English and Lowland Scots. This in turn would not have occurred had Mary Tudor produced a healthy son, or had Henry II of France not collided with a lance and so been able to make military interventions in both Scotland and England during the 1560s. All this is a reminder that, in an age of personalized monarchy, even powerful and sustained political, cultural and religious developments may turn on such human accidents.

  THE EARLY STUARTS (1603–42)

  James VI and I

  The family that took the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603 had long been known in Scotland as ‘Stewart’. It was Mary, Queen of Scots, who adopted the French form of the name, ‘Stuart’, when she became Queen of France, and south of the border it is this version that has stuck. When James VI inherited the English and Irish thrones from Elizabeth, he acquired not just a different number (as James I) and a different dynastic name, but a different historical personality. I myself first encountered that as a child in two nursery rhymes by Eleanor Farjeon: ‘James I had goggle eyes, and drank more often than was wise’, and ‘James I, I must make plain, was ugly, greedy, gross and vain’. He featured in the gallery of English kings as its buffoon. James VI, on the other hand, retained his reputation as one of the best monarchs that Scotland ever produced. During the past thirty years, various historians, above all Jenny Wormald and Pauline Croft, have laboured to bring these two different kings back together. To a great extent, they have now arrived at a consensual result.

  According to this, James was of all British monarchs the one best suited to be an academic: a genuine intellectual and a very good author, with an adventurous and enquiring mind and a witty and realistic style. He really understood history, theology and classical literature, and had a natural interest in, and respect for, other points of view to his own. He was no coward, being a keen huntsman and reckless horseman, with a terrible temper and sharp, witty tongue. He could be cunning and devious, and it was difficult either to manipulate or to bully him. These virtues were balanced, for contemporaries, by his physical awkwardness and lack of dash: he was ungainly, untidy, informal and shy of crowds. As a result he lacked that apparent accessibility which the Tudors had cultivated so effectively, and with it their ability to project an image: today he is the only Tudor or Stuart monarch who reigned longer than ten years to whom the modern British public seems to have difficulty in putting a face. His subjects themselves worried about the scarcity of portraits of their king: in representation, as in the flesh, James managed to lack both a majestic presence and a common touch. As a politician he had real ability, loving debate and man-management, but was bored by administration. It remains now to see how he fared in different aspects of government.

  The first is Anglo-Scottish relations. On taking the English throne, James had to reckon with a widespread dislike and contempt for Scotsmen among his new subjects, accumulated over centuries of suspicion and open conflict. He had both to woo his new nation and to keep his old one content, and the double burden was a severe one. Every time he gave his attention to Scottish affairs, the English would accuse him of neglecting theirs. His initial solution to the problem was a complete political union between the kingdoms. After five years it had become clear that no English Parliament would accept this on any terms that approached equality for the Scots. In revenge, and to compensate Scotland for his now almost constant residence in England, he gave individual Scotsmen large sums from English revenues and privileged places at his court. In particular, he created a new and enlarged entourage of personal servants, the Bedchamber staff, which was almost completely Scottish. This angered many of the English in turn. From 1615 onwards, James delegated supervision of much of the practical work of government in each kingdom to a favourite courtier. This relieved him of much of the administrative burden, but created a new one, especially in England, of public resentment of the favourites concerned. James’s greatest achievement in this area was to preserve the union of the two British Crowns, successfully enough for it to become permanent. He did so largely by spending most of his time in England, by compensating the Scots with cash rewards and court offices, and by more or less ignoring Ireland.

  The second area of activity was finance, and here both James’s subjects and historians have faced a problem: that although James ended Elizabeth’s wars against Spain and the Irish rebel
s, the English Crown continued for years afterwards to run deeper into debt. The obvious question is whether this was due to the king’s mismanagement or to problems in the fiscal system – and there is no easy answer. It is clear that James did not understand the concept of limits to what he could spend; a story was subsequently told of him that one Lord Treasurer, faced with yet another royal warrant for expenditure, took the king to a room in which he had piled up the cash represented by the sum concerned. James was allegedly amazed by the quantity of money that the amount that he had signed away on paper actually meant. Unlike Elizabeth, he had a family to support – his Danish wife Anne, two sons, Henry and Charles, and a daughter Elizabeth – and royal households did not come cheap. This royal fertility was a huge asset: it had been over two centuries since an English monarch had been crowned with one male heir already in being, let alone two. On the other hand, a king who did not pay much attention to his clothes somehow managed to quadruple the royal wardrobe account in the first five years of his reign. His inner ring of household staff, the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, numbered eighteen in 1603 and forty-eight by 1624, all drawing salaries. In his first eleven years as king he managed to quadruple expenditure on fees, annuities and pensions. The pension list actually came to eat up a third of all royal expenditure, making James’s court one of the most overstaffed and extravagant in Europe. Elizabeth’s last Parliament had granted enough money to pay off three-quarters of the current royal debts, while expenditure on the armed forces shrank by six-sevenths between 1602 and 1607, with the ending of the wars. All this suggested incompetence or corruption.