Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (48 page)

Most of these books are little known today, but some have achieved immortality. We have noted the philosophical and historical works of Bacon, Foxe, and Ralegh, as well as the plays of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. In poetry, the English language made possible the works of Sidney noted above, Shakespeare’s
Sonnets
(1609), Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
(1590), the epic poems of Michael Drayton (1563–1631), and, later, the metaphysical poetry of John Donne (1572–1632) and George Herbert (1593–1633), and the cavalier lyrics of Sir John Suckling (1608/9–41?) and Abraham Cowley (1618–67). In geography, Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616) promoted new exploration in
Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation
(1589, 1598–1600), while William Camden (1551–1623) described the homeland in
Britannia
(1586, trans. into English 1610). English history was recorded in the
Chronicles
(1577) of Raphael Holinshed (ca. 1525–80?) and Camden’s
Annales
(1615, trans. 1635). In theology, Richard Hooker (1554–1600) provided the first thoroughgoing rationale for the Church of England in his
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
(many volumes published between 1593 and 1682). In a lighter and more popular vein, there was the satire of Thomas Nashe (1567–ca. 1601) and the doggerel of the “water poet” (formerly a Thames “cabbie,” i.e. a waterman) John Taylor (1578–1653).

But if one had to sum up the Elizabethan and Jacobean achievement in language and, indeed, in culture generally, one might best turn to a work commenced at the behest of the Crown which became the most widely read and influential book in the English-speaking world: the Authorized Version of the Bible. It was commissioned by King James I in 1604 and labored over by a panel of 54 scholars for seven years. The King James version was, in fact, heavily dependent on the scholarship of previous English translations – that of Coverdale and Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, etc. Whatever the source of its scholarship or theology, its language has captured the imagination of all users of English to the present day, from its opening “In the beginnings…” Consider these passages from Isaiah foretelling the coming of a savior, later set by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) in his great oratorio,
Messiah:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God, Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. … The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed .… The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 40: 1–5; 9: 2, 6)

Modern translations are more accurate to the ancient Hebrew and Greek, but it was language like this which captured the imaginations of contemporary English men and women and convinced them that their struggles against Spain, Catholicism, and the Devil were Biblical, if not apocalyptic. Its cadences and actual phrases still reverberate through our language and literature. Perhaps the most astounding thing about this document is that it was produced by a committee. There could be no more eloquent indication of how the vocabulary and cadences of Shakespeare, Hakluyt, Camden, and Hooker had permeated the educated classes.

We have ended our extended portrait of later Elizabethan and early Jacobean society with, perhaps, its greatest achievement. But even here, as in so many other aspects of the Tudor inheritance, there was cause for worry as well as selfcongratulation. This eloquent and powerful language was, like the Bible itself, able to inform, but also to inspire and inflame. The printing press which spread the Word of God and the First Folio of Shakespeare was capable of spreading more revolutionary ideas, such as the notion, embraced by some Puritans, that all who had a Bible were perfectly justified in interpreting it according to their own lights. It was no accident that the government soon reenacted censorship after the Edwardian experiment with a freer press: statutes of 1549 and 1554 forbade the publication of heretical or seditious books. In the 1580s, when fears of Catholic restoration and Puritan sedition were increasing, these prohibitions became capital. In order to enforce them, Star Chamber decreed in 1586 that all printing presses had to be based in London, apart from those of the two universities; that all such presses had to be licensed by the Stationer’s Company; and that no book could be printed unless it had first been perused, then licensed, by a bishop. In 1637, Star Chamber imposed even stricter censorship: new books had to be licensed and registered with the Stationer’s Company, printers were required to enter a bond of £300 in pledge that they would print only licensed books; and the number of master printers was limited to 20, most of them congregated on Fleet Street in London. These prohibitions were enforced: when in 1579 the unfortunately named John Stubbs (ca. 1541–90) managed to publish a piece questioning Elizabeth’s proposed French marriage to the Duke of Alençon (see chapter 4), she ordered the public removal of his right hand. In 1593 John Penry (b. 1562/3) was executed for his role in publishing a series of Puritan tracts critical of the bishops.

As this implies, if places like London and the New World were safety valves, they were also sources of new, potentially unsettling perspectives and ideas. For example, experience of the American wilderness would promote in England discussions of natural law, and its relationship to statute and common law. Given the existence of wildly different societies in America, how could the English claim that theirs was the one best way, or that royal power and elite domination, paternalism, and deference were perfectly “natural” or “God-given”? London was itself a thriving example of a capitalistic society, one whose hierarchy was based not on birth but on wealth and hard work and, therefore, it could be argued, on merit. The very idea of mobility, both geographical and social, which London and America represented was revolutionary and, potentially, corrosive of the Great Chain of Being. Finally, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible might be used by King James himself to assert his Divine Right to rule; but it might be used with equal effectiveness to challenge that notion. Clearly, the English polity was full of tensions: local and national, political and geographical, economic and social, religious and cultural. Many of those tensions would come to a head in the next generation, during the first years of Stuart rule.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Early Stuarts and the Three Kingdoms, 1603–1642

The great triumph of the Tudor State was, arguably, not the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. That was as much a matter of luck as pluck, of poor Spanish planning and bad weather as English prowess. The great triumph of the Tudor State was, rather, the peaceful accession of their successors, the Stuarts, in March 1603. Despite war with Spain, division at home, and an ambiguous and foreign claim, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed Elizabeth’s successor as James I of England without a hitch.
¹
While Edward IV and Henry VII had won their crowns in bloody battle and were forced to rush to London at the head of their armies to make good their titles to the throne, James won
his
through delicate negotiation with the sitting government, specifically Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Robert Cecil. As a result, the new sovereign was able to take his time, embarking on a leisurely six-week progress south to his new capital. In the meantime, the Privy Council continued to run the country from London; the lords lieutenant, sheriffs, and JPs continued to run the countryside beyond it; and Cecil’s spy system continued to keep watch in between. It is a measure of the stability and competency of late Tudor government that all did so in the king’s name, but without the necessity of his actual participation. James finally arrived in London without incident, to cheering crowds, in May 1603. They cheered, in part, because, popular as Queen Elizabeth had once been, over a decade of economic depression, war, and high taxation, presided over by an increasingly miserly and reclusive head of state, had left many of her subjects yearning for something new.

Who could have guessed that within two generations, on the morning of 30 January, 1649, the son of the monarch they were cheering so wildly, Charles I (ascended 1625), would march through the streets of the capital to a very different end? Who could have imagined a royal procession accompanied not by acclamation, but by stony silence, punctuated by the muffled drums of a military guard; the undisputed king of England going not to a crown but to a scaffold, where he would be executed by parliamentary order in the name of the very people who had turned out so enthusiastically to greet his father? This event would be the climax of a series of bitter Civil Wars which would rage in England, Scotland, and Ireland for over a decade (1637–51), destroying many of the gains of the Tudor State and dividing those countries more thoroughly than the Wars of the Roses had done.

Because historians, blessed with hindsight, know that the British Civil Wars happened, they have had difficulty writing the history of these kingdoms under James I and Charles I with any objectivity: how can one judge their rule on its own merits knowing its disastrous end? For most of the last 400 years the early Stuarts were seen as directly causing the Civil Wars. In this view, every government policy, parliamentary debate, or local protest was part of a continuous struggle between the king and the forces of autocracy on one side and the people and the forces of liberalism and democracy on the other. This interpretation has been labeled “Whig,” after a political party which developed later in the seventeenth century and which was generally associated with limiting monarchical and promoting parliamentary power (see chapter 9). The Whig interpretation was especially popular during the nineteenth century, when liberal ideas and representative institutions seemed to triumph all across Europe and the Americas. British historians could not help but see these developments as rooted in the strife between king and Parliament which culminated in the British Civil Wars.

More recently, during the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist historians saw the Civil Wars as the climax of a struggle between the landowning and the merchant classes which dated back to medieval times. According to Marxist theory, the Civil Wars were the most dramatic stage of a long-drawn-out fight between a feudal aristocracy, trying to retain its hegemony over British society, and a rising class of merchants and professionals, trying to seize that hegemony and remake England, in particular, into a bourgeois society. Toward the beginning of the last century, another group of historians, influenced by the writings of Max Weber, attributed the causes of these wars to primarily religious factors, in particular the rise of an aggressive Puritanism. According to this view, Puritans emphasized property, rationality over tradition, and individual conscience – first in religion, but then in civil matters – over obedience to institutions like monarchy. They demanded reform not only of the Church of England but of society itself. Since the Stuart kings were apparent enemies to Puritans and to such reform, they had to go.

The trouble with these conflicting interpretations is that hindsight is 20/20. More recent historians, examining a wider array of sources with more circumspection, have largely abandoned earlier assumptions. First, it does not follow that the Civil Wars were ever inevitable, whether in 1588 or 1603 or even in 1640. A different turn of events, a different royal personality or education for the young Prince Charles, a slowdown of the inflation discussed in chapter 6: all might have led to a different result. Second, no one anticipated or wanted a civil war, nor, before its outbreak, were king or Parliament striving consciously to increase their respective power at the expense of the other. Rather, more recent work has argued that early Stuart kings and parliaments (and the wider constituencies they represented) were both striving throughout the period for mutual agreement and cooperation, not dominance. Third, no early Stuart social group was homogeneous in viewpoint or united in aim. It is therefore ludicrous to speak of “Parliament,” or “the merchants,” or “Puritans” as being monolithic parties made up of individuals who all sought the same thing – let alone fought to dominate their society. Finally, it should not be assumed that most ordinary English men and women had long-cherished hopes of overthrowing royal power and establishing some sort of democracy. As we learned in chapter 6, the English people were, by and large, a traditional and deferential lot. The vast majority were content that the king should rule and they should obey. Admittedly, they wanted the king to rule wisely and justly, with respect for the law. But even when Charles I was perceived as failing to do so they would oppose him only gradually and reluctantly – though perhaps a bit less reluctantly than they would have done Queen Elizabeth.

From the 1970s onwards, an influential group of historians has sought to revise the old Whig, Marxist, and Weberian interpretations by arguing that early Stuart policies and politics should be judged on their own merits, without reference to the Civil Wars. After all, James I and Charles I ruled three kingdoms, successfully, for nearly half a century. These historians, often labeled Revisionists, argue that the Civil Wars were not a product of a long-term conflict between king and Parliament or king and people, let alone aristocrats and merchants, or Puritans and more traditional members of the Church of England. Rather, these groups rarely disagreed over basic principles or constitutional ideology and for most of the early Stuart period the king and his ruling elite worked in close partnership. Revisionist historians deemphasize the role of parliaments, pointing out that they met only rarely and always at the pleasure of the monarch. They clashed with the king even more rarely. These historians argue that the only permanent venue in which the king had contact with his subjects and their problems was the court; that this was the great arena for the pursuit of conflict and, more often, the forging of consensus. They also emphasize that James I and Charles I were not merely kings of England but of Scotland and Ireland as well. Indeed, to the extent that the Civil Wars (or “Wars of the Three Kingdoms” as many Revisionists would style these conflicts)
did
have any long-term causes, they can be found in the ramshackle structure of the triple crown that the Stuarts wore. That is, the early Stuart state(s) was (were) eventually overwhelmed by the difficulties inherent in ruling three different peoples, each with a different majority religion, legal system, social structure, and culture. These new explanations have re-energized research on the period, but they raise their own problems – not least because they are often better at explaining why the Civil Wars should
not
have happened than why they did!