Early Stuarts

From A Short History of England, by Simon Jenkins (Profile Books, 2011)

 

On 24 March 1603 Elizabeth died in her grandfather's palace at Richmond, saying that 'none but' the Protestant James, thirty-six-year-old son of Mary Queen of Scots, should succeed her. Tired though her reign had become, she passed away loved and mourned. Her private prayer was an apt epitaph: 'When wars and seditions with grievous persecutions have vexed almost all kings and countries about me, my reign hath been peaceable, and my realm a receptacle to Thy afflicted Church.' She had established the supremacy of the crown in her father's image and bonded the English nation under it. She had brought her nation glory and peace. Elizabeth was surely the greatest of England's rulers.

 

Early Stuarts 

(1603-1642)

 

Most people who met James I (1603-25) as he rode south in the summer of 1603 had known only Elizabeth as monarch. Loyalty to her person had soothed the conflicts of Henry's Reformation. Beyond the familiar confines of village and town, the queen had come to embody a united England, a nation at peace, at least with itself. She enjoyed what Macaulay called 'English king-worship', a consent which she deftly identified as a bond of love between herself and her country. 

How would James compare? He was short, garrulous, self-consciously a scholar and lacking in self-discipline. His upbringing was dreadful. His father had been killed, probably by his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who in turn had been killed by the English over whom he now ruled. As boy king of Scotland he had survived four regents dying violent deaths round him, not to mention an attempt on his life, a sadist for a tutor and a witches' conspiracy against him. To the English, he was an outsider from an enemy state. Cecil, fearful of Spanish plots, urged him to hasten south. 

As he travelled, James billeted his retinue of 'coarse and beggarly Scotsmen' on English grandees, dispensing his new prerogative at will. He hanged a man without trial in Newark and knighted any host who cared to ask. In London the new king indicated a break with the past. After the dowdy last years of Elizabeth's reign, he put London en fête. Shakespeare's now celebrated troupe was taken under royal patronage and became the King's Players. James patronised John Donne, Ben Jonson and the composer Orlando Gibbons. Masques on classical themes were ordered from Inigo Jones, as was the exquisite Italianate Queen's House at Greenwich, a gift to James's Danish wife Anne. What came to be called Jacobean architecture spread to every mansion and manor in the land, with long glazed galleries overlooking formal parterres. 

James I was a talented intellectual who patronised the arts and the new Bible, but his extravagance and advocacy of kingly divinity sowed the seeds of eventual civil war.

 

The new reign began with the best of intentions. At a Somerset House conference a year after his coronation James achieved what had eluded Elizabeth, peace with Spain. It silenced Spanish demands for a Catholic restoration in England in return for an end to English attacks on Spanish interests in Europe and the Americas. That same year, James declared a united monarchy of England and Scotland to be known as 'Great Britain', with a distinctive flag namesd after an abbreviation of his Latin name, the Union Jack, though he was unable to merge the two nations in one parliament, any more than he was able to bring Ireland to heel. 

Finally in 1604 the king summoned representatives of the bishops and the Puritans to Hampton Court in the hope of ending conflict between them. He was not a wholly impartial chairman. Despite a Calvinist upbringing he was an 'episcopalian', acknowledging the authority of bishops. He garrulously warned to all who cared to listen that, if bishops were replaced by assemblies, 'Jack, Tom, Will and Dick shall meet and, at their pleasure, censure me and my council.' It would be tantamount to a parliamentary republic. Yet the Hampton Court conference reconstituted a Church of England that has survived ever since. Bishops were entrenched. Matters such as baptism, ordination and the civil role of the church were agreed. James also ordered a new translation of the Bible, published in 1611, involving no fewer than fifty-four scholars, overseen by a commission of twelve. Though based on its precursors, the bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale, it remains one of the masterpieces of English literature and a tribute to the art of the committee. 'It lives on the ear,' said the Victorian theologian, Frederick Faber, 'like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forgo'.

As ecclesiastical diplomacy Hampton Court was less successful. Where Elizabeth convinced both sides she favoured them, James left both dissatisfied. His hectoring manner extended beyond theology to all aspects of the nation's welfare, with a treatise opposing tobacco smoking, a habit 'loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain'. Nor did James's tolerance extend to the Catholics, excluded from Hampton Court. In 1605 a group of them reacted to his failure to hear their pleas by taking the drastic step of plotting to blow up parliament. Only when a conspirator warned a friend to stay away on the night of 5 November was parliament thoroughly searched and Guy Fawkes, with forty barrels of gunpowder, found in the basement. There is little question that, had they exploded, the king and ruling class of England would have been wiped out. An appalling atrocity was averted.

 

 [Guy Fawkes mask. "Remember, remember, the fifth of November"]

The retribution was ferocious. The plotters' trial concluded that 'from the admirable Clemency and Moderation of the King ... he is graciously pleased to afford them, as well as an ordinary Course of Trial, an ordinary Punishment much inferior to their Offence.' This ordinariness meant each being drawn from prison backwards by a horse-tail, then hanged, cut down when still alive, 'have his Privy Parts cut off and burnt before his face, as being unworthily begotten and unfit to leave any generation after him. His Bowels and inlaid Parts taken out and burnt ... after to have his Head cut off.' Then his body was to be quartered. If this was ordinary, we could only wonder what 'extra-ordinary' punishment might involve.

Fawkes's bomb did not explode, but a different fuse was lit, that of anti-Catholic frenzy. To show even-handedness, James persecuted Catholics and radical Puritans alike. The Church of England identified 'uniformity' with state security and treated dissent as treason. One consequence was a wave of emigration to the New World. It began in 1607 with John Smith's doomed colony of Jamestown, Virginia, named after the king, and culminating thirteen years later in the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower. By the end of James's reign 80,000 Britons had crossed the Atlantic in one of history's most significant migrations.

James regarded parliament as a compulsive spender might a tiresome bank manager, to be ignored except in time of need, and then resented. Yet times were always of need. The king suffered from the curse of the House of Stuart, extravagance, coupled with antagonism towards parliament when it refused him money. He told parliament that its privileges were at his disposal as a 'matter of grace'. His divine right to rule was not a matter of negotiation. Had he not written a book on the subject in which he stated explicitly, 'Kings are called gods, and are appointed by God and answerable only to God'? Those who obstructed him were 'spitting in the face of God'. Parliament begged to differ, with an 'apology' that the aforementioned privileges 'are at an everlasting stand ... being lost are not recovered but with much disquiet'.

After 1614 an exasperated James did not even summon parliament for seven years, turning to sources of revenue not dependent on the Commons. He sold honours much as Henry VIII had sold monasteries. He invented minor hereditary titles called baronetcies for  £1,095, cloaked as subsidies for troops in Ireland. By the end of his reign he was selling knighthoods for as little as £220. But he could not escape his judges. The lord chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, one of the first great exponents of common law against royal absolutism, ruled that even the king was subject to the law; 'The King cannot take any cause out of any of his Courts and give Judgement upon it himself ... the King ought not to be under any man, but under God and the law.' In 1616 James sacked him, but he could not sack his argument.

Robert Cecil, royal counselor since 1590, had died in 1612, as had the much-acclaimed heir to the throne Henry Stuart, who fell to typhoid at the age of eighteen. Henry was succeeded by his diminutive younger brother Charles. The court was dominated instead by the dashing George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who mesmerised the king and was called by him 'my dear, sweet Steenie'. Courtly behaviour took on a bizarre glamour, depicted by the artist William Larkin, in costumes of unprecedented brilliance. Never had the English male been so ravishingly adorned, with lace collars like wings, voluminous pantaloons, embroidered stockings and shoes with giant pompoms. Forced to recall parliament for funds in 1621, the king found it still intransigent, urging him to join a European Protestant alliance against Spain. James recklessly sought help from the latter, cavorgin openly with the Spanish ambassador. He had already, at Spain's bidding, executed Walter Raleigh, held in the Tower of London since Elizabeth's reign, putatively for treason.

Glamorous, devious, adventurous, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, held both James and Charles in thrall.

In 1623 James approved a wild venture by his son and Buckingham to visit Madrid with a view to Charles marrying the Spanish infanta. The two young men offered to convert England to Catholicism, or at least to raise future English kings as Catholics, an extraordinary suggestion within living memory of the Armada. The infanta took an instant dislike to Charles, who was told by her father he would have to receive mass and stay a year on probation in Madrid if he wanted her hand. The two Englishmen fled.

The king was now ailing and Buckingham, with Charles firmly under his influence, played with fire. He switched to supporting war with Spain, turned his attention to France and found Charles a wife in hte daughter of the French king, the fifteen-year-old Henrietta Maria, a pert girl no more than 5ft tall tall whose front teeth were said to be 'coming out of her mouth like tusks.' Before any marriage could be arranged, in 1625 James died, carrying with him the comment of a French courtier that he was 'the wisest fool in Christendom'. He was at first scholarly and sincere in seeking to resolve the conflicts inherent in the state bequeathed him by Elizabeth, but a nation rife with religious pluralism required a more subtle statecraft than James possessed. Nor could it tolerate his creed of divine kingship, which would soon bring the monarchy into collision with parliament and people.

Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. Their marriage was close but politically disastrous and ended on the scaffold.

James's son Charles I (1625-49) was an indecisive but cultured man, compensating for his small stature and stammer with a zealous love of art and an adherence to his father's belief in his divine appointment. He patronised Rubens and Van Dyck, and amassed one of Europe's great art collections. Rubens called him 'the greatest amateur of painting among the princes of the world'. He married Henrietta Maria by proxy and it was not until shortly before his coronation in 1626 that Londoners witnessed with dismay their new queen's arrival with a 200-strong retinue of French priests and papists. She infuriated the public by stopping to pray for the souls of Catholic martyrs at Tyburn. As a practising Catholic she and her party could not join the coronation ceremony, and Charles ordered his guards to limit her retainers to seven at state functions.

When the new king addressed parliament, it found his brevity a relief after his father, but was shocked by his demand for a larger subsidy. The Commons were strongly Protestant and dominated by independents such as John Pym and John Eliot. They now denied the king revenue from trade duties for more than a year at a time, and debated the impeachment of Buckingham, who retained his hold over the king. The confrontation led to the most explicit charter of political liberty since the Magna Carta, the 1628 Petition of Right. It was sponsored by the indomitable Coke, who declared that 'Magna Carta is such a fellow he will have no sovereign'. It told the king he could not imprison without trial, or tax without the will of the Commons. Nor could he impose his prerogative on parliament or support a standing army. The petition served as the foundation stone of all later declarations of civil rights, including that of American independence. Charles dismissed it on the grounds that 'kings are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone'.

That same year Buckingham was stabbed to tdeath in Portsmouth, an event that apparently jolted the king, after four years of marriage, to attend to his queen. She bore him an heir, also Charles. In 1629 he dissolved parliament, not calling another for eleven years of what some called personal rule and others 'the tyranny'. Charles relied instead for advice on his convervative archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, and a former parliamentarian, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The latter was sent to pacify Ireland and returned, that many put to that task, with a reputation for ruthlessness (and a nickname: 'Black Tom').

The tyranny was the last sustained test of English monarchical sovereignty. Charles could dispense with parliament but not with his need for money. In 1635 he used his prerogative to extend one of the few duties outside parliamentary control, 'ship money' levied on coastal towns for their defence. The king now declared it a national tax. A former MP for Buckinhamshire, John Hampden, refused to pay. 'Grant [the king] this,' wrote the radical John Milton at the time, 'and the parliament hath no more freedom than if it sat in his noose.' When at a subsequent trial the court fround for the king, Henrietta Maira reacted with such delight, creating an elaborate ballet in which she danced as Luminalia, or light defeating darkness. The gesture did little to increase her popularity or that of the tax. Ship money proved near uncollectable, only 20 percent being gathered by 1639.

When, in 1637, Charles had sought to impose Laud's new high-church prayer book on his Scottish subjects it led to riots in Edinburgh and a Presbyterian 'covenant' against bishops. Despite the pleadings of Strafford, Charles declared a 'bishops' war' on Scotland. He saw his under-resourced army beaten back to the gates of Newcastle, which had to be ceded to the Scots. Charles was desperate for funds and finally summoned the so-called Short Parliament to give him money. This it refused to do. A new parliament was elected, at which 399 out of 493 MPs, led by Pym and Hampden, declared themselves firmly opposed to 'the king's advisers'. This so-called Long Parliament of 1640 became one of the great institutions of English history. It lasted in one form or another through the English Civil War, displaying radical, republican and conservative phases until it oversaw the Restoration twenty years later. Its composition reflected the crucial shift in wealth that had taken place in provincial England and Wales under the Tudors, from the medieval church and territorial magnates to an emerging middle class of smaller landowners, city burgesses, merchants and the professions. As it argued with itself and grew in confidence, the Long Parliament was the key that unlocked the door to modern England.

This institution moved swiftly to assert its control over the king, impeach Laud and execute Strafford. When the king was forced to sign the latter's death warrant, Strafford remarked, 'Put not your trust in princes,' a pathetic echo of Wolesy's cry a century before. In 1641 the House of Commons recast the Petition of Right as a Grand Remonstrance with 200 clauses. It demanded that the prerogative court of Star Chamber be abolished, ship money ended and taxes regularised. A freely elected parliament should meet every three years and be dissolved only by its own decision. It should control the church, the appointment of ministers and judges, and the conduct of the army and navy. There should be no bishops in the House of Lords and the king should rule in name only. Such an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty was the most radical in any European state at the time, and was only narrrowly voted through. Even in the twenty-first century its programme has not been fully realised.

Charles now had to fight to save his crown. He responded hesitantly to the Grand Remonstrance, but was goaded by Henrietta Maria 'to pull these rogues out by the ears or never see my face again.' He did what no monarch had done before. On 4 January 1642 he tried personally to arrest the five most extreme MPs, including Pym, for treason, entering the Commons with armed men in attendance. Members stood amazed as the Speaker, William Lenthall, vacated the chair for the king, but refused to hand over the five, remarking famously, 'May it please your Majesty, I have either eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here,.' Realising the MPs had by now escaped, Charles abjectly declared 'all my birds have flown', and beat an ignominious retreat. No monarch was ever to set foot in the chamber again.

Within weeks, armed bands from the City invaded Westminster, rumoured to be seeking the queen's arrest. The royal family fled to Hampton Court and then to Greenwich, where Charles and Henrietta Maria spent a poignant night together at the Queen's House. Even today it seems a place of sadness, its curved steps like teardrops running down its facade. The queen gathered her children, seized the crown jewels and headed for Dover and the pawnshops of France. The king wnt north to Nottingham where, that August, he summoned his subjects to defend his rights on the field of battle. Consent had called the bluff of divine kingship and, after a century and a half, the horror of civil war returned to England.

The execution of Charles I, 1649

 

—oOo—