A History of Britain, Volume 2 (3 page)

A year later, though, with the pestilence finally in retreat, Dekker and Jonson got to stage their pageant after all. If anything, the postponement had only whetted London's appetite for the kind of festivity not seen since the accession of Elizabeth a half century earlier. Dekker was probably not entirely self-serving when he reported ‘the streets seemed to be paved with men . . . stalles instead of rich wares were set out with children, open casements [the leaded glass windows having been taken out] filled up with women'. With this king, however, public enthusiasm created a problem rather than an opportunity, since crowds made James decidedly nervous, wanting to be off somewhere else, preferably on horseback in the hills near Royston, energetically pursuing the stag. But the allegorical outdoor theatre, full of music and gaudy brilliance, disarmed, at least temporarily, the royal churlishness. In addition to the brotherly Andrew and George, Old Father ‘Thamesis', with flowing whiskers taken from his emblem-book personification, offered a tribute in the form of‘an earthenware pot out of which live Fishes were seene to runne forth'. And it was hard not
to be impressed by Stephen Harrison's immense wood-and-plaster triumphal arches, 90 feet high and 50 wide, punctuating the processional route. One of them was a three-tower trellis structure, thick with greenery, purporting to show James's realm as a perpetual ‘Bower of Plenty' and featuring ‘sheep browzing, lambes nibbling, Birds Flying in the Ayre, with other arguments of a serene and untroubled season'. On the arch, erected at Fenchurch, an immense panorama of London rose from a crenellated battlement (as though seen from a distant tower), with the pile of old St Paul's in its centre and looking a great deal more orderly than the chaotic, verminous metropolis of 200,000 souls it really was. Below this Augustan vision of New Troy was none other than Britannia herself, bearing the orb of empire on which was inscribed
Orbis Britannicus Ab Orbe Divisus Est
(a British world divided
from
the world). Sharp-eyed scholars of the classics – and perhaps there were some in the crowd – would have recognized an erudite allusion to Virgil, in particular to the pastoral poems of the
Fourth Eclogue,
in which the return of a new golden age was prophesied. Right at the beginning of
Britannia
, William Camden had already identified Virgil's lines as a recognition of Britain's historic destiny as a place apart. And much, of course, had been made of the identification by some of the foggier classical geographers of the British archipelago as the legendary ‘Fortunate Isles' of the western ocean. Until 1603 it was the English who had fancied themselves blessed by this priceless gift of insularity; Shakespeare's vision of ‘This fortress built by Nature for herself/Against infection and the hand of war' confirmed the national faith in a divinely ordained immunity from the rest of the world's sorrows.

Now, however, this happy insulation was to be understood as
British
, extended to lucky Ireland and Scotland (notwithstanding the fact that, historically, Scotland had always enjoyed closer connections with Europe than England). In October 1604, to a deeply suspicious English parliament (which had already bridled at being informed by the king that its privileges were a grant from his majesty), James promised that ‘the benefits which do arise of that union which is made in my blood do redound to the whole island'. When he spoke of his realm, he repeatedly referred to it, indivisibly, as ‘the Ile'. His apologists conceded that there had been unfortunate disagreements, even bloodshed, between the neighbours on either side of the Tweed, but much of that could be attributed to the wicked Machiavellianism of interfering continentals (especially the French and the Spanish), who had deliberately set them at each other's throats. Now, in the person of James – in whom English, Welsh, French and Scots blood flowed and whom God had
already
blessed with two healthy sons – the long, miserable wars of succession were done with.
‘The dismall discord,' Camden wrote, ‘which hath set these nations (otherwise invincible) so long at debate, might [now] be stifled and crushed forever and sweet
CONCORD
triumph joyously with endless comfort.' Enter masquers, piping tunes of peace; roll on the Stuart Arcady.

As it turned out, the ‘world divided from the world', the ‘Britain apart' so cheerfully anticipated by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Speed and William Camden, was the bringer not of concord and harmony but of havoc and destruction. The more strenuously that governments, both royal and republican, laboured to pull the pieces of Britain together, the more abysmally they fell apart. The obsession with ‘union' and ‘uniformity' that consumed both James and Charles I turned out to guarantee hatred and schism. In the first year of James I's reign no one (certainly not Jonson or Dekker) could have predicted this (although the high-handed remarks made by the king to parliament were not a good sign). It would take some time before the ‘British problem' became dangerously apparent. The clearest warnings came from Charles I's Scottish friend and ally the Duke of Hamilton as late as 1637, when he counselled the king to back off from his obstinate plans to impose religious uniformity in Scotland as well as England, lest a violent backlash north of the border spread throughout his other two kingdoms.

Ironically, then, the business of building a harmonized Britain was auto-destructive, creating discord both between the three kingdoms and within them. The historians who want us to think of the Stuart realm as an essentially docile polity, bound together by consensus, have contended that arguments about religion and politics, such as they were, could always be contained within the conventions and habits of the settled order of government and society. Stuart England (in common with so much of British history) was, in this view, ruled by a gentlemen's agreement. The governing classes were agreed on the powers and limitations of the monarchy, agreed that parliament's job was to supply the king with money, agreed on the fixed hierarchy of society and, under James, agreed on a broadly Calvinist religious consensus. When differences of opinion arose between parliament and Crown, most people wished them to be resolved rather than further polarized. But then again, perhaps the impression given by scholars that there was nothing so seriously amiss about the country as to push it towards disaster results from a narrowly English focus: historians have asked not so much the wrong questions, as the right questions about the wrong country. If the country concerned is England and the questions are about the governing communities of its counties, a case for the containment of conflict can be made (though not, I think, clinched). But if the country in question is not England but Britain –
Scotland and Ireland in particular – then very serious trouble did not suddenly pop up in the 1640s to disturb the calm of the English political landscape. It had been there for at least two generations. It was not as if, somehow, the English political commotions were suddenly and unaccountably aggravated by conflicts rumbling away somewhere remote on the storm-lashed Celtic fringe. The trouble
was
Calvinist Scotland and Catholic Ireland and their deep religious appeal for some factions in Stuart England. Those religious entanglements, as we shall see, carried with them not just theological but also political and even foreign policy implications, which an imperially assertive England attempted to iron out through the imposition of a ‘British' uniformity only at its own dire peril. The refusal of both Scotland and Ireland to do as they were ordered, except when coerced, brought about the British wars. Britain killed England. And it left Scotland and Ireland haemorrhaging in the field.

So if we return to those questions and put them to the
right
countries, a rather different accounting between long-term and short-term causes of the disaster becomes apparent. Ask yourself whether English Puritans were angry enough, or strong enough, by themselves, to bring down the Stuart monarchy and the answer is probably no, although they could certainly inflict punishing damage on its dignity and authority. Ask yourself whether Scottish Calvinists, in collusion with English Puritans (both of whom believed that kings were bound in a contract with their subjects), could bring down the Stuart monarchy and the answer is yes. When one of the militant Scottish Calvinist ‘Covenanters', Archibald Johnston of Wariston, met Charles I at Berwick in the 1639 negotiations that ended the first Bishops' War, he interrupted the king so repeatedly and so offensively that the normally reserved Charles, unaccustomed to this kind of temerity, had to command Johnston, a common advocate, to hold his tongue. The Scots would inflict far worse indignities on Charles Stuart before they were through. Ask yourself whether an Irish-Catholic insurrection could create a situation in which the king of England were suddenly revealed not as the defender but the subverter of Church and state, and the answer would again be yes. Had James been, say, Dutch or German (as kings were to be in the future), with no strong feelings about Scotland, would there have been a civil war?

But James was a Scottish king, and it mattered. James VI of Scotland, already in his late thirties, became James I of Great Britain with the heartfelt gratitude of a man who for many years has had to endure a stony couch and is at last offered a deep and welcoming featherbed. The stony couch had been James's painful and protracted education as the king of Scotland. With the unedifying and dangerous example of his mother,
Mary Stuart, very much on their minds, the Calvinist nobility who deposed her made sure that her infant son received a stern Calvinist education. In 1570 they consigned James to the frightening tutelage of George Buchanan, beside whom the fulminations of John Knox seemed light as a spring breeze. Buchanan's briskly undeferential attitude to kingship is best summed up by the story of his response to the Countess of Mar when she protested at his rough handling of the royal child: ‘Madam, I have whipt his arse, you may kiss it if you please.' No one was under any illusion that Buchanan was himself any sort of arse-kisser; quite the contrary. His view of monarchs, forthrightly expressed in
De juri regni apud Scotos
(1579), written to justify the deposition of James's mother, was that they were appointed to serve the people, who were entitled to remove them if they failed to live up to the contract made with their subjects. It naturally followed from this theory of resistance that Kirk and Crown were separate and coeval powers and that royal meddling in the affairs of the Church would also be a warrant for removal. For the Presbyterian Kirk was inimical to any kind of royal governorship. It was a national Church with a single, uniform doctrine, but that doctrine was arrived at, and policed by, a general assembly constituted from delegates of its many congregations.

But James Stuart was, when all was said and done, his mother's son, and he was not about to spend the rest of his life as the doormat of Presbyterians. Unlike Mary, though, he would pave his road to sovereignty with arguments rather than adventures. His chosen tactics were more like Elizabeth's: subtlety, pragmatism and flexibility. From the time of his majority in 1587, James, whose intelligence and taste for learning were already evident, began to restore the authority of the Crown over both the general assembly (an institution created to govern the Kirk while a Catholic queen was on the throne) and the perennially factious nobility. Without any kind of standing army, his appeal was necessarily that of a Solomonic adjudicator, and James knew how to make his authority work through gestures heavy with symbolic meaning. To celebrate his majority, he made sure to provide liberal entertainment for the notoriously feud-prone Scottish nobility at Market Cross in Edinburgh. When the wine had them sufficiently relaxed, James asked them to walk hand-in-hand down the High Street to the royal residence, Holyroodhouse, where parliament sometimes met. They went like lambs, and did so dressed in the more formal costumes that the king had encouraged for parliamentary sessions. He also knew when division, as well as unity, might work in his favour. By making some small concessions to the Kirk, James managed to split his Presbyterian enemies into those who were prepared to work with
him and hard-line Calvinists such as Andrew Melville, for whom any royal interference in the Kirk was a presumptuous abomination. Once strengthened by a ‘royal party' inside the Kirk, he began to make further moves, determining, for example, the timing of general assemblies. By reinventing the episcopacy to look much less grandiose than its English counterpart James even managed, for five years at any rate, to reinsert bishops into the Kirk. In 1591 he felt strong enough to mint a gold piece bearing a Hebrew inscription referring to his Maker, ‘Thee Alone Do I Fear' – a premature gesture, since the very next year Melville managed to get the Scottish parliament to do away with the bishoprics, and James was forced to consent. There was never a time when James would feel completely relaxed about his personal safety. Although he banned Buchanan's books, the old flogger continued to haunt his royal pupil, visiting his dreams as late as 1622 to inform James that ‘he would fall into ice and then into fire' and that ‘he would endure frequent pain and die soon after'. Not only Buchanan but the Ruthvens haunted him. It had been a Ruthven who had pointed a pistol at him
in utero;
a Ruthven descendant had held him hostage in 1582; and as recently as 1600 another of the family, the Earl of Gowrie, had abducted him, tied him up and threatened his life again. No wonder James was always a little jumpy.

For those who trade in thumbnail sketches of the British monarchy – blood-and-thunder Henry VIII, the Virgin Gloriana and the like – James I is bound to seem a baffling mixture of characteristics that have no business inhabiting the same personality: the hunt-mad scholar who would pursue Calvinist theologians and the stag with the same energetic determination; the slightly sloshed reveller, noisily demanding in the middle of an interminable masque and in his thick Scots accent to see the dancers, especially his queen ‘Annie' (Anne of Denmark), who loved to perform in them; the long-winded, blustering master of disputation, battering preachers and parliamentarians over the head with his bibliography. But James's dominant characteristics (not least his sexual preferences) resist glib classification. Drunk or sober, shallow or deep, gay or straight, there certainly was no other prince who felt so repeatedly compelled to theorize about his sovereignty and to do so on paper. James, of whom it was accurately said ‘he doth wondrously covet learned discourse', published no fewer than ten treatises dealing with various matters he considered weighty, including the evils of witchcraft and tobacco. Two of them, the
Basilikon Doron
(the ‘Prince's Gift', written in 1598, but published in 1599, for his son Henry, and consisting for the most part, like its model, Charles V's advice to Philip II, of practical advice on the conduct of kingship) and
The True Law of Free Monarchies
(published in 1598), appeared in
the immediate period before his arrival in England. At least until they attempted to read them (for neither work, while succinct, could be fairly described as a page-turner), his new subjects must have been eager to see whether James's books provided any clues to the character of their king, because between 13,000 and 16,000 copies were sold in the first few months after his accession.