Читать книгу Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power - David Scott - Страница 11

But the Popular state, ever since the begynnynge of his maiestes gracious and sweete governement, hath growne bygge and audacious. And in every session of Parlement swelled more and more.

Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, ‘Speciall observacions touching all the

sessions of the last Parliament’ (1611)¹

Kings walke the heavenly milky-way,

But you in by-paths goe astray.

God and King doe pace together,

But vulgars wander light as feather …

Hold you the publick beaten way,

Wonder at Kings and them obey.

For under god they are to chuse,

Whats rights to take and what refuse:

Wherto if you will not consent,

Yet hold your peace, least you repent,

And be corrected for your pride,

That Kings designes dare thus deride

By raylinge rimes and vaunting verse,

Which your Kings breast shall never peirce.

James I, ‘The wiper of the peoples teares’ (1622–3)²

Dangerous distinctions

A mood of pessimism descended over western Europe during the 1590s. In the face of unabating religious wars and inflation, of massive plague outbreaks and bad harvests, it seemed that humans could merely hope to endure the flux of time rather than participate in God’s great redemptive drama. Christian humanist schemes for promoting civil society began to seem hopelessly idealistic, as fashionable opinion shifted towards an increasingly cynical, self-interested view of public life. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) looked to the narrowing political horizon, insisting that ‘a wise man ought inwardly to retire his minde from the common prease [press] … Publicke societie hath nought to doe with our thoughts.’³ Princes were the only legitimate source of public authority. Citizens – those capable of perceiving and acting on the public good, of exercising civic virtue – must learn to be passive subjects once again. Britain’s first two Stuart kings were quick to nose out and beat down ‘popularity’ – that is, the incitement or political empowerment of the people. Unlike Elizabeth, a pragmatist to the core, James Stuart, king of Scotland from 1567 and of England from 1603, and his son and successor Charles I were visionary monarchs. Theirs would be an age of ‘projects’ – grand designs to increase royal authority and revenues – and they themselves the chief projectors. The trend towards a more peremptory and exacting style of government that had begun during the 1590s would continue after 1603. But the new authoritarianism did not go unchallenged. The nobility and zealous Protestants, groups that had absorbed classical republican ideas from the humanists, developed sophisticated arguments to preserve a political space for the citizen and the patriot. James VI of Scotland had succeeded in taming these disruptive forces in Scotland. Could he do so again as king of England?

James was a man of strong likes and dislikes. His love of hunting, for example, rivalled that of his great-great-uncle Henry VIII. He spent weeks on end enjoying the pleasures of the chase, just he and a few select companions pursuing a stag across miles of country until it died of exhaustion, whereupon the king would dismount, cut it open, and ‘blood’ his fellow huntsmen. He hunted with hawks too, he even fished in the Thames using cormorants (a technique probably imported from China). This ‘perpetual occupation with country pursuits’, observed one foreign diplomat, often left government business at a standstill.⁴ On one occasion one of James’s favourite hounds was abducted and later returned with a note round his neck asking it to speak to the king, ‘for he hears you every day, and so doth he not us’, and urge him to return to his kingly duties in London.⁵ James thought this a great joke, and stayed on to hunt for another fortnight. When he was not out harrying animals himself, he and his courtiers spent many happy hours watching bears, bulls and lions being baited by dogs. Another of his great pleasures was alcohol. Indeed, he was so fond of binge-drinking that his queen, Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), feared for his life. His favourite tipple was ‘thick white muscatel’, which was diagnosed as the cause of his chronic diarrhoea. His dislikes were equally vigorous. Smoking was a particular bugbear, and he attacked it at length in print.

Yet even ‘so vile and stinking a custome’ as smoking was not as contemptible in his eyes as popularity.⁶ His own aversion to courting the mob was apparent from his very first days in England. As he neared London in May 1603 on the final leg of his journey from Edinburgh to claim the English crown, the common people flocked to see their new monarch, just as they had done during Henry VII’s journey down to London after the battle of Bosworth. How Henry responded to this plebeian throng is not known, but James was clearly discomfited by it and would have preferred the crowds to keep their distance. It would not be long before the ‘poore sort’ started grumbling that on public occasions he treated them ‘with a kind of kinglie negligence, nether speakeinge nor lookeinge uppon them’.⁷

Why did James, one of the age’s shrewdest political operators, disdain to work the crowd? The answer is complex. In part it was simply because he misread the nature of his welcome in England. James had never been formally acknowledged by Elizabeth as her successor, and he was by no means the only claimant to her crown. At the time it seemed little short of a miracle to the English that the king of one of their most ancient enemies had succeeded to the throne without violent opposition. The ‘papists’ had certainly been expected to mount some kind of a challenge, and perhaps they would have, had it not been for James’s diplomatic skill in persuading the Spanish not to field a Catholic candidate. The crowds that greeted him in England were therefore animated by sheer relief as much as anything else. James, however, attributed his rapturous reception to gratitude; had he not ended the ‘curse’ of female rule and given England a secure Protestant succession? In other words, he thought he was doing the English a favour, not the other way round. But it was not only James who was mistaken. The people had assumed, quite unreasonably, that he would show the same deft common touch that Elizabeth had, and would grace them with ‘well-pleased affection’.⁸ They took his aloofness so badly because it contrasted with ‘the manner of there laite Queene, whoe when she was publiquely seen abroad would often staye & speake kindlie to the multitud’.⁹

James’s churlishness in public – he would often ‘bid a p[iss] or a plague on such as flocked to meet him’ – was not natural to his character.¹⁰ In less formal surroundings he could be affability itself. Indeed, he was as extravagant and indiscreet with his affections as he was with his money – or as some MPs liked to point out, taxpayers’ money. He was a good conversationalist too, and a man of formidable learning – ‘they gar [made] me speik Latin ar [before] I could speik Scotis’ he recalled of his boyhood tutors.¹¹ Perhaps afflicted by a mild form of cerebral palsy, and certainly in later life by arthritis, James was none too steady on his feet, which probably did little for his confidence in public. But fundamentally his distaste for crowds was a reflection of his political philosophy.

James brought a new and authoritarian style of kingship to England. He set much greater store than his Tudor predecessors had on the mystical claims of royal blood as a source of political authority, and hence he played up his descent from Henry VII and from the ancient kings of Scotland and Ireland. Hereditary kingship, he argued in his writings, was prescribed by the will of God as revealed in nature and the Bible. Royal authority was conferred by God alone, and in consequence kings were answerable to none but Him. Kings were like gods themselves, said James (taking his cue from the 82nd psalm), or the head of another supposedly divinely ordained institution, the patriarchal household. His intellectual and emotional investment in the divine right of kings far outstripped Elizabeth’s, and grew out of his tough political apprenticeship in Scotland, where he had endured the indignity of kidnapping by power-hungry noblemen, and of Presbyterian ministers berating him as ‘God’s sillie [weak] vassall’.¹² None of these affronts had troubled him as much, however, as the strictures and beatings administered by his principal tutor George Buchanan (1506–82). Buchanan had belonged loosely to a group of Calvinist writers whose arguments for contractual kingship, and the right of the people – or more usually their governors or political representatives – to resist tyrants were to prove hugely influential across Protestant Europe. He had argued for the duty of true citizens to depose and if necessary kill their king if he subverted the civil society he was appointed to preserve, defining these true citizens not in religious terms but as ‘Those who obey the laws and uphold human society, who prefer to face every toil, every danger, for the safety of their fellow countrymen rather than grow old in idleness …’¹³

The most radical arguments for popular sovereignty had been made by Huguenot writers in the aftershock to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572, when the French monarchy had become stained with the blood of its own people. Equally, it was French writers who had led the counter-reaction in favour of authoritarian, divine-right kingship, which had gathered pace following the recognition in 1584 of the Huguenot Henri de Bourbon (the future Henri IV), king of Navarre, as heir-presumptive to the French crown. James, in turbulent 1580s Scotland, had eagerly embraced this reaction against the political legacy of his old tutor. In fact the French wars of religion generated useful ideas and lessons for monarchs everywhere in the face of potent new challenges to their authority, whether it be Calvinist resistance theories or Catholic claims for papal superiority over secular rulers. Sixty years of religious war, of theological as well as physical iconoclasm, had turned Europe’s rulers into fanatics for order, and James was no exception.

Good order, for James, meant a narrowing of political participation, of subduing the crowd, not exciting it. Obedience to prescribed authority was his recipe for a well-ordered society, not the humanist emphasis on inculculating moral and civic responsibility in ordinary citizens. His dismissive attitude towards the people was reinforced by his conception of who ‘the people’ – meaning the political classes – actually were. Although Elizabeth had been just as determined as James was to keep the people in their place and to stifle public debate, she had at times relied heavily on the support of ‘baser personages’. Moreover, she had generally distrusted her great noblemen. By contrast, James was very indulgent of his nobility, even when they abused his trust, and thought that the only proper actors on the political stage were the great men of the realm. He regarded his people emphatically as subjects, not citizens. Popular participation in Church or state he associated with demagoguery and rebellion. In Scotland he had seen Presbyterian ministers – those ‘trumpets of sedition’ he called them – as the main agents of popularity.¹⁴ Once in England he broadened this category to include Puritans, lawyers and ‘free speakers’ in the House of Commons. He referred to a ‘vaine popular humour’ at work among such men, who ‘cannot be content with the present forme of Governement, but must have a kind of libertie in the people … and in every cause that concernes [the royal] Prerogative, give a snatch against a Monarchie, through their Puritanicall itching after Popularitie’.¹⁵

Browbeating ‘free speakers’ was one way of trying to curb popular humours; another was to expand the claims for the king’s imperial or legally unfettered prerogative. The suppression of English Presbyterianism during the early 1590s had encouraged high-fliers at court and in the Church to talk up the idea of imperial sovereignty. However, from 1603 the absolute power of kings was openly espoused by the monarch himself and by those who would later be dubbed the ‘Regians’: the ‘great Dependents upon the Crown, both in Church and State, who swell up the Prerogative, preaching and distilling into the King, the Almightiness of his power’.¹⁶ James and the Regians insisted that where necessity, or ‘reason of state’, demanded, the king could use his prerogative power to override the common law. James could be alarmingly frank on this subject – ‘the King is above the law’, and although a good king, in a settled kingdom, would usually abide by existing constitutional arrangements, ‘yet is hee not bound thereto but of his good will’.¹⁷ The nature of kingship and the actions of kings were like the ways of God, he insisted, not for ordinary mortals to question. If, God forbid, a king was set on being a tyrant there was nothing his subjects could do to stop him. James was wise enough not to act upon his more ‘absolutist’ pronouncements, and England remained in practice a mixed monarchy. But he was prepared to resort to prerogative taxation – that is, taxation without parliamentary consent – more brazenly than Elizabeth had, and without her excuse of having a war to fight. To the ‘free speakers’ in James’s first English Parliament (which sat intermittently between 1604 and 1610) it seemed that tyranny was almost upon them, and they questioned whether they had secure legal title in anything, even their own lands.

By investing his office with this godlike aura the first Stuart king of England was trying to emulate the first Tudor king in restoring the monarchy’s majesty and mystery, for to foreigners like James it seemed that female rule and Elizabeth’s overfamiliarity with her people had diminished the standing of the English crown. This princely desire to preserve a proper distance from the rude multitude was taking hold across Europe. Monarchs were beginning to withdraw from the public gaze into the more private world of their courts, recoiling from anything that smacked of popularity. James’s preference for this more intimate style of royal deportment acquired a new institutional form and location at his court: the Bedchamber.

The Bedchamber began life in 1603 as a Scottish outpost at the heart of what was still effectively an English court. Thwarted in his desire to divide all court offices equally between Englishmen and Scotsmen, James settled for creating a new department of the royal household, the Bedchamber, and staffing it almost exclusively with his most trusted Scottish courtiers. The Bedchamber took over control of the monarch’s private apartment(s) from the privy chamber, and was off-limits to all but the Bedchamber men – the king’s gentleman body-servants. They dressed and undressed him, one slept every night on a pallet at the foot of his bed, and one attended him when he relieved himself on the ‘close-stool’. These might seem like menial jobs for a gentleman, but in a personal monarchy a great deal depended upon access and proximity to the king – the fount of all patronage – and a place in the Bedchamber offered both. James returned to his native Scotland just once (in 1617) after becoming king of England, so the Scottish presence in the Bedchamber, and the presents James lavished on its members, helped reassure the Scots that they would not be ignored by their absentee monarch. The Bedchamber therefore buttressed royal authority in Scotland. Nevertheless, to the English, who were largely excluded from this charmed inner circle, the Bedchamber attracted a great deal of suspicion and resentment.

The Bedchamber aroused fears among the English of sinister court intrigues against liberty. These fears had a grain of truth, inasmuch as the Bedchamber became an alternative focus of power to the privy council – as the privy chamber had under Henry VIII – reviving the dual-centred politics of council and entourage that had disappeared during fifty years of female rule. Leicester and the other Protestant heroes on the Elizabethan council, and their success during the 1570s and 1580s in eroding personal monarchy, had created the myth that Elizabeth ‘governed by a grave and wise counsell’.¹⁸ Although this brief period of conciliar assertiveness was out of the ordinary, an influential body of opinion in England came to believe that it was the right and proper template for royal government. James more than doubled the size of the Elizabethan council, adding English noblemen and Scottish courtiers, yet many of his English councillors, including his chief minister Sir Robert Cecil (created earl of Salisbury in 1605), struggled to adjust to the normal pattern of politics under an adult male monarch – that is, to having to vie for influence and favour with the king’s entourage. They resented the ‘base and beggarly’ Scots of the Bedchamber for supposedly encouraging James in his various experiments with prerogative finance, and certainly for profiting by them.

James’s failure to stick to ‘the publick beaten way’ did indeed cause wonder, but not necessarily obedience. His rancorous relationship with his English Parliaments owed a lot, as we shall see, to the crown’s ramshackle and overstretched finances. But what made this problem intractable was a lack of trust between the king and some of his leading subjects; and this, in turn, can be traced to the emergence during Europe’s wars of religion of two competing visions of ‘good government’. James and his senior legal adviser Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (1540–1617) championed the authoritarian model, with its emphasis on the unfettered power of kings, or what James called ‘free monarchy’. If he were to do his job properly and as God had ordained then James must have discretionary emergency powers that trumped all human laws. In the most advanced versions of this doctrine – which drew heavily on contemporary French writings on divine-right kingship – the monarch actually was the nation in a political and legal sense. Ellesmere certainly, and probably James too, distrusted the political models and lessons that the Essexians and other ‘popular’ politicians drew from classical antiquity. The ancient Greeks might have been ‘men of singular learning and wisdome’, Ellesmere conceded, but they had lived in ‘popular States: they were enemies, or at least mislikers of all Monarchies … their opinions therefore are no Cannons to give Lawes to kinges and kingdomes, no more than sir Thomas Moores Utopia, or such Pamphlets as wee have at everie Marte [market]’.¹⁹ Ellesmere probably detected such classical influences in the readiness of popular politicians to suggest that the people’s primary allegiance was not to the monarch’s person but to the crown.

Elizabeth’s long reign had encouraged her ministers to think and act in ways that reinforced this distinction between crown and monarch. They had defied her will on the grounds that they were acting as she would have done had she not been incapacitated by her sex. Obviously this argument would not wash under a competent male monarch such as James, and Ellesmere thought that the ‘dangerous distinction betweene the King and the Crowne’ was merely a cloak for rebels and extremists.²⁰ He was convinced that a faction of unscrupulous MPs, sitting in a ‘rebellious corner’ in the House of Commons, ‘kept secrette and privye Conventicles and Conferences, wherein they devised and sett downe speciall plottes’ for turning their fellow Parliament-men against free monarchy.²¹ From the distinction that some MPs made between king and crown flowed other, more controversial, ideas: that the king possessed no power above or beyond the law; that even in emergencies he could not levy taxes without the consent of Parliament; and that he should govern through the privy council, relegating the Bedchamber to a purely domestic role. There was even talk at Westminster of contractual kingship. This commonwealth agenda overlapped with the combination of aristocratic constitutionalism and belligerent patriotism pioneered by Essex and his circle. Indeed, former Essexians figured prominently in the popular challenge to free monarchy.

With these contending agendas of free monarchy and ‘commonwealth courses’ went rival demonologies. James equated opposition to his will with puritanical popularity, while his critics came to regard free monarchy as a manifestation of popery. Popularity and popery – although conspiracy theories for the most part – seemed to make sense of the forces that menaced European society, and as solvents of traditional loyalties and constitutional niceties they would have no equals.

New Jerusalem

‘First for the countrey I must confesse it is too good for them that possesse it and too bad for others to be at charge to conquer it, the ayre might be wholsome but for the stinckinge people that inhabit it …’ was how one of James’s English courtiers began his Discription of Scotland, and he was just warming up.²² The strain of having to be polite about the Scots soon began to tell on the English. The Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605 was only the most extreme example of this disenchantment with England’s new Scottish king.²³ Even in James’s first English Parliament some MPs attacked his countrymen as beggars and traitors. English contempt for the Scots (as for the Irish) was a combination of xenophobia and chauvinism. Humbling the Spanish had strengthened the English people’s belief in the superiority of their laws and national character over those of other nations. Yet their Scotophobia also reflected a fundamental truth about the relative power and wealth of the component parts of the Stuart dynastic union. It was hard for the English to respect a nation five times smaller, and with a crown twenty times poorer, than their own.

The Scots were not only poorer than the English but also, like ‘the Irish’, had an identity problem. When James transferred his court from Edinburgh to London in 1603 he left behind a kingdom of just 750,000 people, divided ethnically between Anglo-Scots-speaking Lowlanders and Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. The cultural gap between these two groups was growing in the seventeenth century as Lowlanders increasingly embraced notions of Protestant civility and derided their Highland neighbours as lawless savages, given to feuding and raiding. One Lowland poem described how God had created the first Highlander from a horse turd. Similarly, Highlanders tended to think of Lowlanders as a different race, the Gaill (non-Gael or foreigner), and resented them for having driven the Gaels from the fertile Lowlands. Another important difference between the two regions of Scotland centred on their relationship to the crown. Lowlanders participated in and attempted to manipulate central government. Most Highlanders, by contrast, although they acknowledged themselves subjects of the Scottish crown, preferred to ignore royal authority altogether.

Significant differences existed within as well as between the two regions of Scotland. Irish Franciscan friars created pockets of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the western Highlands during the early seventeenth century, particularly among the clan enemies of the zealously Protestant Campbells of Argyllshire in the south-west Highlands. In the Lowlands, Ayrshire and the surrounding region was the heartland of Presbyterianism, whereas Aberdeenshire was noted for its episcopalian sympathies.

Although James extended the reach of his government deep into the Highlands and islands, Scotland remained a highly decentralised kingdom. Even the most powerful instrument of royal authority, the Scottish privy council, relied for local enforcement not upon crown officials but the landed elite. The heads of Scotland’s 2,000 or so lairdly families dominated all aspects of public life. The crown could not rule effectively without their cooperation. James had increased royal control over the Scottish national Church – known as the Kirk – by reintroducing bishops in the late sixteenth century, but the Kirk remained more or less Presbyterian in structure, and therefore difficult for him to bend to his will.

Despite the many disparities and differences between England and Scotland, James dreamed of turning the 1603 union of crowns into a union of laws, Parliaments and churches. ‘I am the Husband, and all the whole Island is my lawful Wife,’ he told his first English Parliament, ‘I am the Head, and it is my Body … I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I … should be a Polygamist, and Husband to two Wives.’²⁴ His scheme for merging his two British kingdoms into a new monarchy of Great Britain was overambitious, however, and proved unacceptable to both the Scots and the English. There were, admittedly, some Scottish Protestants, and not a few English ones, who got excited by the idea that the dynastic unification of Britain heralded the Apocalypse: the climactic confrontation between ‘true religion’ and the popish Antichrist supposedly foretold in the Bible. But most Englishmen thought James’s union scheme favoured the Scots too much, ‘fearing that the Scots (creeping into English Lordships, and English Ladies Beds, in both which already they began to be active) might quickly make their least half the predominant part’.²⁵ In practice the only kind of union most Englishmen would consider was that of incorporating Scotland into a greater English state, as their Tudor forebears had with Wales. England was constituted essentially by its laws, argued MPs, so that merging them with those of another country was effectively to abolish the kingdom itself. In taking this line, MPs were straying close to Ellesmere’s ‘dangerous distinction’ between king and crown, and it is not hard to see why the union project was an early flashpoint in the running battle between James and the ‘popular spirits’. The Scots, more realistically, thought in terms of a federal union that would preserve their own laws and the purity of their reformed Kirk. But the English Parliament had effectively killed the whole idea by 1607. It grudgingly accepted the naturalisation of the king’s Scottish subjects, and free trade between England and Scotland, but little else. James had to introduce his new title of ‘King of Great Britain’ and a new flag for the king’s ships, the Union Flag, solely on his own authority.

One king ruling separate kingdoms was not unusual in early modern Europe. The Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburg family each ruled composite monarchies, and their experience suggested that unity was best achieved by tolerating a fair degree of diversity. That said, it was widely believed that any prince who failed to impose religious uniformity on his subjects was asking for trouble. It was ‘A generall Opinion received by all men’ that ‘One religion is the author of unitie, but from a confused religion, there alwaies groweth dissention … it giveth boldnesse to subiectes not onely to forsake God, but likewise to spurne against the Prince, and to live in contempt of his lawes and proceedinges’.²⁶ The fact that the Puritans were denied the kind of reformed church government that operated in Lowland Scotland, or that English Catholics did not have the religious leeway that their co-religionists enjoyed in Ireland, seemed to bode disaster. James’s plan to bring the established churches – and in the long term, religious loyalties – in his three kingdoms more into line with each other was entirely understandable therefore. In England he turned a blind eye to what the godly got up to at parish level so long as they recognised episcopal authority, which they mostly did, and therefore Puritanism was safely contained within the Church. However, from north of the border, royal policy came to be viewed in a more sinister light, as a process of creeping Anglicisation that threatened to sully the purity of the Kirk and to reduce Scotland to the status of an English province.

James’s gradualist approach to religious reform, and his far from empty boast that he could govern Scotland by pen from England, ensured that discontent in his northern kingdom did not get out of hand. It also helped that he had been raised, and remained, a doctrinal Calvinist, as distinct from the ‘practical’ Calvinism of the Puritans with their inward and outward war against ungodliness. Nevertheless, he had developed a taste for ornate ceremony in his own Chapel Royal even before he had succeeded to the English crown, and once ensconced in London he came to favour the Church of England, with its dutiful bishops and pre-Calvinist liturgy, as a model for reform in Scotland. However, when he tried to foist English church ceremonies upon Scotland in 1618 he encountered bitter opposition from the Kirk and in the 1621 Scottish Parliament. Only the Scottish bishops’ quiet non-compliance with his orders kept the Kirk from open division.

James’s efforts at ‘rooting out of all barbaritie’ in the Gaelic Highlands gave him some inkling of the problems he faced in Ireland.²⁷ Thanks to English victory in the Nine Years War there were no internal frontiers for the crown to defend. On the other hand, of course, the war had left Ireland’s huge Catholic majority even more resentful and alienated. The solution as far as James was concerned was essentially more of the same, in particular plantations. When, in 1607, Tyrone and his supporters were either panicked into exile or fled to avoid royal punishment (there are signs they were up to their necks in treasonous intrigues with the Spanish), James authorised a massive plantation in Ulster that involved Scottish as well as English settlers. Besides allowing James to move his ‘British’ agenda forward in Ireland (if not in Britain itself), the scheme had the advantage from the crown’s perspective of driving a Protestant wedge between the Irish and Scottish Gaels, although at the cost of creating a hostile Catholic underclass in Ulster.

Appeasing the Catholics was not a priority for James’s longest-serving lord deputy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester (1563–1625), who seems to have suffered from the constitutional schizophrenia common to most English governors of Ireland. When Englishmen thought about their own government they tended to become misty-eyed about its antiquity and legal integrity, but when they thought about government in Ireland they were far more open to schemes for uprooting ancient customs, trampling upon civic liberties and applying extra-legal force. Chichester, one of Ireland’s ‘wasters and destroyers’, was no exception.²⁸ He made little distinction between the native Irish – ‘beasts in the shape of men’, he called them – and the Catholic Old English, terrorising both in the name of Protestant civility.²⁹ The Old English pleaded their loyalty to the crown, but their religion was tantamount to treason in James’s eyes, and the New English minority continued to usurp their place in public office. With the English doing little to endear themselves to the Catholic Irish it is not surprising that the established Protestant Church in Ireland proved no match for Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Seminary priests, trained mostly in the Spanish Netherlands, and Franciscan friars revitalised Catholicism in Ireland (especially in the towns) to such an extent that the Dublin administration had no choice but to turn a blind eye to the activities of a Catholic ministry, complete with bishops, operating alongside the official Protestant church establishment. Ironically, this Catholic ministry tried to imbue the native Irish with much the same notions of civility as those demanded by James and Chichester.

British colonisation of Ireland consumed cash and human resources that might otherwise have gone into planting colonies in the Americas. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people (about 30,000 Scots, the rest English or Welsh) migrated from Britain to Ireland in the early Stuart period. Yet by 1640 there were probably less than 30,000 British settlers in North America. The unspectacular pace of transatlantic expansion before 1640 was also in part a by-product of the Elizabethan privateering war. In the long term, certainly, the war helped to fashion the tools of empire – developing the skills, the ships and the investment structures needed for colonisation. But in the short term it encouraged would-be colonial adventurers such as Ralegh to go in for get-rich-quick solutions. Colonial pioneers might have to wait many years to see a return on their investment, which was not an appealing prospect to a generation of English merchants and seafarers accustomed to the quick profits to be had from privateering. Within fifty years of losing the last remnant of their medieval empire in France (Calais), the English had become global seafarers capable of rivalling the Spanish. Yet most of this expansion was commercial, not colonial, and was related to developing markets in Europe or the emerging trade routes with the Far East. It was the smaller traders and planters, men excluded from more profitable markets by the big boys in London, who dabbled in colonial ventures.

Public interest in overseas expansion was equally limited. News from the New World was avidly consumed but soon forgotten, ‘as if were nought els, but a pleasing dreame of a golden fancie’.³⁰ Although the English no longer expected or perhaps even wanted to regain their continental empire, their sights remained firmly fixed on Europe and the unfinished business of stemming the flood-tide of Habsburg popery. Of course the main problem under the early Stuarts, as under Elizabeth, was lack of government support. The crown’s only consistent colonial policy during the early Stuart period was to avoid being seen to do anything likely to anger the Spanish or the French. James was more interested in the Ulster plantation than in the settlement established in Virginia in 1607 and named Jamestown in his honour. The kind of men who did see the advantages of a new English empire across the Atlantic were generally not welcome at the courts of James and Charles I. James had Ralegh executed in 1618 after his last voyage to the New World – to find ‘El Dorado’ on the Orinoco River – had degenerated into a raiding party against Spanish settlements.

Because early colonial enterprises were largely private undertakings they were inspired by a wide variety of motives. Militant Protestants saw the setting up of colonies as a weapon in the war against Spain, hence their focus on the Americas, the source of Spain’s great wealth. In 1630 a group of leading English Puritans formed a company to settle Providence Island, off what is now the Nicaraguan coast, as both a godly commonwealth and a privateering base against Spanish shipping. At their head stood Robert Rich, earl of Warwick (1587–1658), the son of a great Elizabethan privateer and himself the operator of England’s largest privateering fleet. At its worst, this eagerness to batten on the Spanish Indies was driven by greed ‘for golde, for prayse, for glory’.³¹ At its best it was inspired by the hope of ‘freeing the poor Indians from their devourers’ – meaning the Spanish – and spreading ‘the grace of Christ among those … that yet sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’.³² Another Puritan colonising project, the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in the late 1620s with the support of Warwick and his friends, had the nerve to depict on its seal a group of Indians waving a banner with the words ‘Come over and Help Us’.³³

Yet, as in Ireland, the colonists’ desire to plant civility and ‘true religion’ was undermined by their lack of sympathy with the indigenous cultures. Either the ‘savages’ must submit to English civility for the good of their souls or they must submit to English muskets. In Virginia, for example, relations between the English and the equally proud and ethnocentric Powhatan Indians quickly deteriorated into mutual incomprehension and mistrust, and then into a vicious conflict over territory and resources. The colony’s first governor, Lord De La Warr, arrived at Jamestown after the terrible winter of 1609–10, or the ‘starving time’, when lack of food and a siege by the Indians had reduced the colony’s population from 600 to about 90. De La Warr was ready, if necessary, to apply the terror tactics he had learned on campaign in Ireland, where soldiers routinely killed enemy civilians. But his main job was not to fight the Indians but to lick the colonists into shape for confronting the Spanish. He was followed by another officer who had served in Ireland, the sadistic Sir Thomas Dale, and 300 heavily armoured English musketeers, veterans of the fighting in the Low Countries. Dale divided his time between disciplining the colonists, strengthening Virginia’s defences against possible Spanish attack, and killing Powhatans. By the 1620s the Virginian colonists talked openly of effecting ‘the extirpation of the Indians’.³⁴ The coastal tribes had been dispersed or subjugated by the English in Virginia long before the end of the seventeenth century. The settlers in New England dealt similarly with the Wessagussets and Pequots – most notoriously when they surrounded and burnt a Pequot village in 1637, killing 400 or more men, women and children. It was a ‘fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same’, but the settlers consoled themselves that they were meting out divine retribution on a ‘proud and insulting people’,³⁵ and that they had ‘sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings’.³⁶

Virginia was joined in the early 1630s by another Chesapeake colony, Maryland, which was founded by the Catholic nobleman Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, and named in honour of Charles I’s queen, Henriette Marie (1609–69). The ‘Indian Golde’ in the Chesapeake would turn out to be tobacco – not the bitter stuff grown locally but the hybrid developed in the early 1610s by John Rolfe, the man who married the Indian princess Pocahontas and was consequently snubbed by James I for presuming too much above his station. Tobacco was easy to grow and required little investment, but it was land-intensive, and here lay the root of the tension between the colonists and the region’s Indians. Overproduction of the ‘vicious weed’ caused a significant drop in the price of Chesapeake tobacco in the mid-1620s. Nevertheless, Virginia and Maryland were attracting about 1,000 colonists a year in 1640, the vast majority of them poor young Englishmen who came over as contract labourers to work on the tobacco plantations that straggled the riverbanks of the Chesapeake. Living mostly in isolated one-roomed wooden shacks, amid the heat and humidity of the coastal plains, one in three of these new arrivals perished of malaria and other diseases well before they had realised their ambition of becoming tobacco planters themselves.

Five hundred miles to the north of the Chesapeake was the more bracing climate (moral as well as meteorological) of the Plymouth colony, founded by the Mayflower Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. Today it is famous as the setting for the first Thanksgiving celebrations, but at the time it was overshadowed by its larger neighbour, the Massachusetts Bay colony. The 14,000 or so colonists in New England by 1640 were grouped mainly in small towns near the coast and eked out a living by farming and fishing. Most of the population was made up of Puritan families from England’s ‘middling sort’, eager for the chance not simply to own their own land but to create a godly, disciplined commonwealth, a New Jerusalem in a new world, free of what they saw as the spreading stain of popery back home. This conviction – that England’s rulers and churchmen were failing God’s cause – would help to build Britain’s transatlantic periphery even as it undermined kingly power at the centre.

The crisis of Parliaments

One of the driving forces behind the Puritan exodus to the New World was fear that the rising tide of popery had all but washed away the greatest bulwark of English liberties – England’s Parliament. The war against Spain had forged an unbreakable link in popular imagination between Parliament and the defence of Protestantism and national autonomy. But this almost mystical understanding of Parliament’s place in national life was lost on James I and his successor Charles I, who held stubbornly to the view that Parliament’s main role was to vote them taxes. Money – who should provide it and how it should be spent – was central to the relationship between the early Stuarts and their English Parliaments.

A characteristic of most European states during the early modern period was their governments’ drive to build the necessary institutions, industries and political relationships – particularly with their nobilities – to raise money for and to fight wars. This process, as we have seen, had begun in England under the Plantagenets, but had then stalled after defeat in the Hundred Years War and the Tudors’ failure to find a politically acceptable way either to levy taxes without parliamentary consent, or to scrap the convention that the crown should ask Parliament for cash only to meet the extraordinary demands of war or national defence. The rise of the fiscal–military state elsewhere in Europe was accelerated by the Reformation – which created new and bitter divisions among Christians – but also by the escalating costs of war itself. The limited range and accuracy of early modern firearms meant that they had to be used in mass formations to be effective, which meant more men, training and equipment, and consequently more cash. Building the latest in artillery-proof fortifications – complex polygonal structures of brick and earth – could bankrupt smaller states, while at sea, the gradual shift in naval tactics during the period 1580–1650 from boarding to broadside fire required specialised, and very expensive, warships. Elizabeth could use the prospect or the fact of war with Spain to wring taxes from her Parliaments. But James I faced the problem that had confronted Edward IV and Henry VII: peace. No war meant little or no money from Parliament.

James brought this problem upon himself to some extent by presenting himself in the role of Europe’s peacemaker. The great enemy to European order in his view was religious intemperance, whether Protestant or Catholic. One of his first acts as king of England was to make peace with Spain. The Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1604 ended the privateer war, at least in the Channel, and allowed for the formal restoration of England’s lucrative commerce with Spain and its outposts in Europe. But there would be ‘no peace beyond the line’ – that is, outside of European waters. Indeed, it is a measure of how well the English had performed in the war that the Spanish could not bring them to recognise Spain’s claim to exclusive dominion in the Americas. Even so, Elizabeth had done little to carry the fight against Spain across the Atlantic; and James would do nothing at all. As far as his subjects were concerned, he had made peace, and in peacetime they expected him to live largely off his own revenues from crown lands and customs.

What many overlooked, or were not aware of, was that the sale of crown lands to finance war – notably in the 1540s and 1590s – had severely reduced the size and value of the royal estate. Inflation had bitten deep too, so that royal revenue by 1600 was 40 per cent less in real terms than it had been a century earlier. Peace would of course reduce James’s outgoings. On the other hand, he had three courts to maintain – his own, his wife’s, and his eldest son Prince Henry’s – to Elizabeth’s one; and royal households were ruinously expensive. James’s only way round the resulting financial shortfall was to do as Henry VII and VIII had done in similar circumstances, and that was exploit the crown’s prerogative rights for all they were worth. These financial expedients brought some short-term relief, but were merely ‘patchings and plasterings of a ruinous edifice’.³⁷ And whereas Parliament had just about tolerated Elizabeth’s resort to prerogative taxation in wartime, the same practices in time of peace were bound to meet with resistance from a body newly sensitised to the monarchy’s financial needs and assertiveness. MPs had only to look at France to see how enfeebled representative assemblies became when kings had the power to raise taxes by their own command.

Any prospect of James living off his own ‘proper’ revenues, however, was skewered by his utter fiscal incontinence. He thought that balancing the books was a matter for his privy councillors to sort out, and was not really his problem. He had been profligate as king of Scotland, but once he succeeded to the English crown, with its vastly greater revenues, his largesse knew no bounds. Royal debts rose from £387,000 in 1603 to £775,000 by 1606, and by 1610 he had handed out some £90,000 in gifts and £10,000 a year in pensions to his Bedchamber men and other Scottish courtiers. It was generally accepted that kings, and especially newly enthroned kings, needed to splash out on gifts and sweeteners in order to cement the loyalty of their subjects, but there were limits, and James completely overstepped them. On one occasion in 1621 he laid on a feast for his Scottish friend Viscount Doncaster that consisted of 1,600 dishes and was rumoured to have cost £3,000, or 300 times what the average labourer earnt in a year.

The unseemly scramble for the delicacies that tumbled from the royal table did nothing for the court’s already unsavoury reputation. The factionalism of the 1590s had destroyed any vestigial notion of the court as a forum for virtuous reform. It was now seen as a place of unbridled ambition and vice, where honest men were corrupted or destroyed. Yet if the late Elizabethan court glowed and shone like rotten wood, to borrow Ralegh’s phrase, its Jacobean successor was positively incandescent. It was not only the fact of James’s extravagance that drew criticism but also its objects. James’s choice of royal favourites was invariably unfortunate. He was probably bisexual, but after he had done his dynastic duty and fathered two sons and a daughter – Henry (1594–1612), Elizabeth (1596–1662) and Charles (1600–49) – his preference was for handsome young men. His first favourite as king of England was a ‘comely visag’d’ Scottish pageboy, Robert Kerr, who caught James’s eye during a court tournament and was made a groom of the Bedchamber.³⁸ Kerr dominated James’s affections from 1607 until 1615, when he was implicated in a murder scandal at court for which he was tried and very nearly executed. He was quickly succeeded by another young gentleman – only this time English – George Villiers (1592–1628), whom the king created viscount and eventually (in 1623) duke of Buckingham. A legal student, Simonds D’Ewes, who got a close-up look at Buckingham, found ‘everything in him full of delicacy and handsome features; yea, his hands and face seemed to me, especially effeminate and curious’.³⁹ James’s extraordinary affection for Buckingham prompted his astonishing remark that ‘as Christ had his John, so he [James] … had his George’.⁴⁰

James’s aversion to dealing with petitioners and court suitors meant that he was happy to allow Buckingham to take over and exercise royal patronage on his behalf. The young favourite had been groomed for his role by a court faction bent on using him to manipulate the king, but he quickly developed a political will of his own, and it was not long before he had eclipsed his court patrons in influence. With James’s approval he set about packing the Bedchamber with his friends, and got so many of his kin and clients jobs or sinecures in Ireland that it became almost his private fiefdom. Inevitably, he was deeply resented by those who were unable or unwilling to ride his coat-tails. And as always with court upstarts, he was despised by members of the ancient nobility for usurping what they saw as their rightful place in the king’s favour. As for James’s fawning upon such a creature, that worried contemporaries more for what it supposedly said about his fitness to govern than as a sign of perceived sexual deviance. Effeminacy was equated with wilfulness, an inability to govern one’s passions. In a political context it was associated with tyranny.

The sight of James heaping affection and rewards on his minions was a major reason his English Parliaments were so unwilling to vote him taxes. Why, asked MPs, should the king be granted public money to squander on ‘private Favourites’?⁴¹