A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Many of James’s English subjects were convinced that both were involved. It was obvious that royal ministers were making record sums out of the profits of office: the countryside was studded with the palaces that they were building on the proceeds. All of the Tudors had kept decorous courts, but James’s was a drunken shambles by comparison. It became scandal-ridden to what may have been an unprecedented degree: by 1618 a former Lord Chamberlain, Lord Treasurer, Secretary of State, and Captain of the Gentleman Pensioners (a troop of royal guards) were all in prison because of misconduct in office. Reports flew around the political nation of events such as a party thrown by the current Secretary of State for the king in 1606, when a series of allegorical entertainments collapsed because the court ladies performing them were too intoxicated to cope. The worst (or best) moment was when the noblewoman representing Peace lost her temper with her attendants and beat them with her olive branch; the one taking the part of Victory had already passed out on the entrance steps, while those personifying Hope and Faith were throwing up in the vestibule. It was hard for people to believe that any administration run by people who permitted such scenes could be properly managed.

  On the other hand, Elizabeth’s extreme parsimony in making grants of land and money had created an enormous, pent-up demand for them, and James, the newcomer and outsider, had to weigh up whether he would incur greater unpopularity by refusing it or by giving lavishly and coping with the financial consequences later. He went for the short-term option. In his first year he trebled the number of knights in England, and by the end of the 1620s the size of the House of Lords had doubled: but all this merely restored the size of the peerage as a percentage of the population to what it had been in 1485. Furthermore, this was an age of conspicuous consumption and display among the English ruling elite, and the king was expected to lead in this respect as in all else. One Lord Treasurer once informed him that at the end of every evening the candles that lit his residence were burned down halfway. If, therefore, he lit them anew for each second night, then he would halve his expenditure on candles. James accepted the financial logic, but could not bear the possible damage to his reputation, of being known as a ruler too poor or mean to afford new candles every night; so the waste continued. It also mattered enormously that he was having to cope with the consequences of Elizabeth’s long run-down of the Tudor financial system, which by the time of his succession had become the most backward in Europe (at least apart from Scotland’s). The royal income had fallen by 40 per cent in real terms since the reign of Henry VIII; and even James could have managed comfortably within that extra margin of revenue. Two-thirds of the annual deficit was represented by the new subsidies to the Irish government, incapable by itself of supporting the soldiers needed to keep the island obedient after Elizabeth’s conquest. No provision at all for this was made either by the regular revenue or by English Parliaments.

  James made some real attempts to confront the problem. Three out of the four men whom he made Lord Treasurer – the Earls of Dorset, Salisbury and Middlesex – had financial ability. Salisbury was none other than Robert Cecil, Burghley’s younger son and Elizabeth’s last leading minister. In 1610 he attempted to give the whole system the overhaul that had been needed for forty years, by proposing a Great Contract whereby the king would surrender many of the traditional sources of Crown income in exchange for a more efficient and streamlined set provided by Parliament. This scheme eventually foundered because both James and the current House of Commons were too suspicious of each other’s good faith to reach agreement over it. Royal bankruptcy was only prevented because the government had decided to raise and extend the customs dues on its own authority, without taking a Parliament into partnership. This carried the price of embittering relations severely between James and his Parliaments, which never accepted his right to do this. Along with a range of similar emergency measures, it succeeded in bringing expenditure under control in James’s last eight years; but the basic problem of a failing fiscal system remained, along with a large royal debt and a political nation, represented in Parliament, which blamed the king and his servants for the whole situation. Perhaps the best verdict upon the matter is that the situation concerned, itself the responsibility of Elizabeth, would have severely tested the abilities of a king who was a born financier; but that James’s spendthrift nature made it considerably worse.

  By contrast, recent scholars have been generally admiring of James’s handling of the Church of England. He arrived as a reformer. When the English bishops informed him that their church had been stable for forty years, and so he should leave it alone, he replied, characteristically, that a man who had been sick with the pox for forty years could still be cured. He then humiliated the bishops by calling a conference at Hampton Court Palace at which they were forced to debate the condition of English religion with their Puritan critics. He did not, however, pick the finest speakers among those critics to attend, and at the actual event he supported the bishops. The result was that the most important reforms requested by Puritans were not implemented, but many minor changes were ordered to make the Church more administratively efficient and more obviously based on preaching and Scripture than before. These did something to assuage the disappointment of moderate Puritans; the most enduring feature of them was the production of England’s Authorized Version of the Bible. James now turned on the more obstinate Puritans, allowing the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, to demand that all beneficed clergy attest their acceptance of the whole Prayer Book and all the Elizabethan articles of belief. Both he and Bancroft, however, urged the bishops not to enforce this requirement on clergy who failed to use all the official ceremonies but did not make a fuss about them. The result was the ejection of up to eighty-three ministers, about 1 per cent of the whole, leaving many quiet or occasional nonconformists still in charge of their parishes.

  Having thus tamed the Puritans, James proceeded to choose excellent scholars and preachers as bishops, usually men who had served in the dioceses concerned and knew them well. As a result, his leading churchmen were of a higher quality than those of Elizabeth, and when he came to appoint a new Archbishop of Canterbury he chose George Abbot, who emphasized the primacy of Scripture, hated Catholics and wanted an aggressively Protestant foreign policy. As a result, James’s primate was respected by most Puritans and popular in the nation, and especially in Parliaments. The king responded to the growing presence of the ‘Arminian’ faction in the Church, which stressed ceremony and physical beauty in religion and the possible salvation of all believers, by promoting some of its members to high clerical office; above all, Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Neile. He ensured, however, that they never took up more than a third of the bench of bishops, while most sees were filled by churchmen of Abbot’s kind. What the presence of the Arminian group represented for him was a policy that ensured that a range of viewpoints was represented among his leading clerics and that the bishops would never be able to unite against him over a contentious issue. In particular, he used the Arminian presence as a means of leverage against Abbot and his allies when the latter attempted to put pressure on him to adopt a more aggressively Protestant foreign policy towards the end of his reign.

  English Catholics initially had high hopes that he would end the Elizabethan persecution of them. He had encouraged these, to win further support for his accession, but soon reverted to the established policy, both because the weight of English public opinion had become so hostile to Catholics and the fines levied on them were so lucrative. As a result, a group of the wildest of them tried to blow him up, together with the whole of his current Parliament, in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Had the plot not been betrayed, it would have killed the majority of the political nation of the time, and destroyed the whole centre of Westminster; the appropriate modern comparison is not with the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001, but with the impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The knock-on result would probably have been a mass slaughter of English
Catholics. Instead, tough new laws were immediately rushed through against Catholicism, but the government did not intensify persecution in practice. Indeed, it executed only nineteen priests in the course of the reign, a sixth of the toll claimed by the Elizabethan regime in a comparable period. As in the case of the Puritans, having cowed the Catholics, James was content to let them survive. His government also burned two Protestants, for heretical views concerning the sacraments, but after 1612 it deliberately called a halt to this process, apparently because of the king’s own unease. In doing so, it ended the execution of heretics in England for all time. The Church of England that James left at his death was stable and flourishing, but still riddled with tensions, which had become more potentially dangerous because of the new prominence allowed to the Arminian minority. To modern eyes, it does the king credit that he was able to see virtue in both the mainstream ideas of his clergy and those of the Arminian avant-garde. What was ominous was that almost none of his churchmen were able to do so.

  In high politics, James also inherited a set of problems. They revolved around the fact that most contemporaries believed, and the Tudors had almost always ensured, that the monarch’s advisers needed to reflect a range of different political and ideological groups. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, however, the rebellion of her favourite, the Earl of Essex, had left church and state in the hands of a single faction, that of Robert Cecil and Archbishop Bancroft. James kept this faction in power, but, just as he showed the bishops that he was their master, so he doubled the size of the Privy Council by bringing in advisers to balance Cecil. This was done by introducing Scots and rehabilitating noble families and factions – those of the Dukes of Norfolk, and the Earls of Northumberland and Essex – which had been broken under Elizabeth. When Cecil died, James elevated another group of politicians, led by Archbishop Abbot and the Earl of Pembroke, to provide a further balance. So far, this looked like a return to business as usual, but James had to rule Scotland as well, so that the details of government would have been too much for him even if he had possessed any aptitude for them. He solved the problem by appointing leading courtiers as patronage-brokers, to hand out jobs and grants on his behalf. The reward to the brokers was to make money in bribes, or in outright payments for posts or titles, from those whom they favoured. To those on the outside of this system it could easily look corrupt, but the brokers could only retain their positions by getting good results: by filling offices with people who could carry them out effectively, and by giving titles of nobility to those who were socially qualified for them.

  There was, however, another factor operating at this time. Like Elizabeth, James had a weakness for handsome and charismatic young men, but in his case it became much more pronounced as he grew older and had ever more serious consequences. In part, this pattern seems to have been a response to emotional deprivation. As we know, the king had a wife, and three children who survived childhood. By the 1610s, however, he had become emotionally estranged from his queen, and does not seem to have found either of his sons, Henry or Charles, to be kindred spirits. In that decade, moreover, Henry died and James’s only surviving daughter, Elizabeth, married and left the country. It must have counted for something, too, that James aged badly. During the last ten years of his life he was obviously tiring, growing ever more frequently ill and thinking less clearly; the deterioration in his written works is marked. He was burning out, and increasingly felt the need of somebody to give him emotional and practical support. The new pattern first became obvious in 1607, when James formed an attachment to a young Scotsman called Robert Kerr, whom he made Earl of Somerset. Then, in 1615, he transferred his affections to an Englishman, George Villiers, whom he raised by degrees to the rank of Duke of Buckingham and to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life.

  Were these men the king’s lovers? With such a separation in time it is impossible to say, but it is worth noting that James had earlier condemned physical homosexual acts in his published work as a detestable crime and a sin. How far he subsequently compromised these views can never be known, but two things are beyond doubt. The first is the sheer power of his emotional infatuation with these men, and especially with Buckingham. The second is that this provoked, in many of his subjects, that disgust with homosexuality which was a hallmark of the age. It did not help matters that neither of James’s ‘toy boys’ had any real gifts for politics or government. Somerset fell in 1615 because he was accused and convicted of being implicated in the murder of a fellow courtier by poison. Whether he was guilty will, once more, never be known; the king was by now tired enough of him to let his enemies handle the prosecution. After Somerset’s conviction, however, James got the worst of both worlds. What was needed to restore the confidence of his subjects in him after such a scandal was to put his former favourite to death, as a demonstration that nobody was above the reach of justice. Instead, whether swayed by lingering affection or by doubts over the truth of the charge, he commuted the punishment to a term of comfortable imprisonment and so did his own reputation further damage. Buckingham was more intelligent than Somerset, and had better political survival skills, but was even greedier, enriching both himself and his relations from the royal bounty. Nobody since Cardinal Wolsey had combined the roles of chief royal executive agent and personal favourite so completely.

  Neither favourite dominated the king politically. Roger Lockyer has proved that Buckingham, the more important of the two, kept himself aloof from factions of politicians and acted as the patronage agent of the king instead. He could only get men jobs if James did not already have his own candidates, and only delay their dismissal if they were revealed as unworthy of office. He had, moreover, to work within the whole formal system of rights and reversions that had accumulated under Elizabeth. It is also now plain that James made policy and Buckingham then followed it. All told, the role of the favourite was to take much of the strain of administration from the ailing monarch. To those on the outside of government, however, it looked very much as if Buckingham was doing the governing, and with no other qualification than the king’s sexual passion. He and Somerset did a great deal to worsen the reputation of the regime for sleaze and corruption.

  An interim verdict on James can be proposed at this stage: that in hindsight he appears remarkable and in some ways admirable, with many personal and political virtues. His essential problem was that, like Henry VII, he was an able ruler who did not correspond to the model of what the contemporary English expected a king to be. This becomes still plainer when examining the two remaining areas of royal activity: parliamentary affairs and foreign policy.

  Crown and Parliament under the Early Stuarts

  The topic of English parliamentary history between 1603 and 1629 may be described as a minefield, in both an economic and a military sense, a situation resulting from the perceived importance of the issues that have become bound up in it and the number and high quality of the historians who have clashed over them. The ‘classic’ view of it was established in the late Victorian period by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, who portrayed it as a contest between the Stuart kings, who aimed at a stronger monarchy and a more narrowly defined and closely controlled national Church, and the House of Commons, which strove for greater influence over Crown policy by the people’s elected representatives, and a more accommodating and decentralized national religion. Between 1975 and 1978 Gardiner’s picture was attacked by a group of scholars, most prominently Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky, who were given the nickname of ‘revisionists’. They argued that neither monarchs nor Members of Parliament were striving for greater power over each other, and that no consistent and coherent opposition to royal policies existed in Parliaments. They emphasized the continuing crucial importance of the House of Lords and suggested that apparent struggles between the Crown and a parliamentary opposition were usually contests between different factions among royal courtiers and councillors. Those quarrels that occurred, they suggested, were the product of m
isunderstandings and practical problems, rather than deep-rooted ideological differences. In the 1980s a group of historians emerged who disputed several aspects of the revisionist case: its most prominent members were Derek Hirst, Thomas Cogswell and Richard Cust. They held that ideology was still very important in the struggles inside Parliaments, and that the tensions that it generated were serious. They insisted that more than mere bickering within the government was at stake, and that profound issues of trust and responsibility were being raised.

  This summary of a famous debate generates three obvious questions: to what extent have the contending historians in it been proved right or wrong?; what were the problems that vexed early Stuart Parliaments?; and were the Stuarts genuinely different from the Tudors in their relations with the representatives of their people? The third may be answered most easily, and with a resounding affirmative: the year 1603 marks a genuine watershed in British parliamentary politics, because of two huge new issues that began to emerge in that year. The first was the need to reform the royal financial system, while reckoning with a political nation completely unaware that reform was needed. The second was the crowning of a king of Scots as monarch of England and Ireland; and one, moreover, who wanted a true union of his Scottish and English realms. This immediately made MPs much more wary than before of the extent of royal power and the manner in which it intermeshed with, or overruled, parliamentary consultation and consent. As in the case of the financial problem, the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland added a further strain to the situation. James blatantly manipulated the Irish electoral system to change the composition of Ireland’s House of Commons, creating many new boroughs in Protestant areas to reduce Catholic representation to a minority. This probably made English MPs even more sensitive to possible royal attempts to exert control over the composition of their own house.