Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (50 page)

And claim James did. As a young man, he had reacted against the teachings of his tutor, George Buchanan (1506–82), as well as a number of other Presbyterian, Huguenot, and Jesuit writers who, during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, responded to royal persecution of their respective faiths by arguing that an oppressed people had the right to oppose, depose, or even assassinate an unjust king. James, appalled, had spent most of his career loudly trumpeting the Divine Right of Kings; that is, the notion that, because kings received their power directly from God Himself, they were untouchable, having no one to answer to but God. Thus, kings were clearly above Parliament and the law, though a good ruler might agree to consult the former and abide by the latter. Above all, James argued that no subject had the right to resist a divinely appointed monarch, even if he violated the law or was a manifestly bad king. Only God could remove a king.

James had articulated his ideas in two influential works,
The Trew Law of Free Monarchies
(1598) and
Basilikon Doron
(
The King’s Gift,
written to edify his sons, 1599). To ensure that no one missed the point, both were reissued in 1603 upon his accession. The new king’s views and style may be inferred from the following speech to Parliament, delivered in March 1610:

The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods. … That as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy …, so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do in the height of his power. … I will not be content that my power be disputed upon; but I shall ever be willing to make the reason appear of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my laws … do not meddle with the main points of government: that is my craft: I am now an old King. I must not be taught my office.
⁶

Now, in fact, there is nothing really new here: both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I would have agreed heartily with the sentiment, at least in private. But compare this to Elizabeth’s “Golden Speech.” She would never have actually
said
this, nor called public or parliamentary attention so baldly to her “absolutist” notions of her office. James had dealt effectively for years with a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, but it was a far less powerful (and less prickly) body than its English counterpart. The new king was inexperienced in dealing with a strong legislature; his speeches to the English Parliament show him feeling his way, trying to retrofit his Scottish Divine Right to the English king-in-Parliament model. Unfortunately, his pedantry, clumsiness, and inexperience would provoke suspicion and even conflict in his first parliaments.

When Parliament met on March 19, 1604, both houses, and in particular the House of Commons, were already restive. Many members hoped that the new king would deal with complaints over monopolies, purveyance, and wardship left over from Elizabeth’s reign. A few seem to have read up on James’s scholarly work and so were on the defensive, fearing that he might wish to rule without Parliament. Their fears seemed justified, for all across Europe strong kings had circumvented, marginalized, or eliminated once powerful legislative bodies: the French
États Générals
lost its power to delay taxes by the 1580s and did not meet at all after 1614; the Aragonese (Spanish)
Cortes
had only very limited powers after 1592. As some MPs were to write later in the session, “[t]he prerogatives of princes may easily and do daily grow; the privileges of the subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand.”
⁷

In fact, James would soon come to feel that it was
his
prerogative which was being infringed upon. This was because a small group of MPs, led by the jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), believed that the English constitution, and Parliament’s privileges in particular, derived from the common law, not from the king. Drawing upon the research of a new generation of antiquaries and historians, such as William Camden and John Selden (1584–1654), they argued that the common law, based on custom and precedent, not royal proclamation, statute, or equity (see chapter 1), predated kings to time immemorial; and that Parliament descended from the Witan, the set of councilors who had elected and advised Anglo-Saxon monarchs. Parliament and the common law were thus part of something they called the Ancient Constitution of England – a historical myth based largely on a series of forged documents supposedly dating from Anglo-Saxon times. In the extreme view, this body of laws, agreements, and precedents limiting royal power had been ignored or suppressed at the Norman Conquest. The Norman and Plantagenet kings (1066–1154 and 1154–1399, respectively) had instead asserted their divinity and trampled on the ancient rights of Parliament and of Englishmen generally – a development referred to as “the Norman yoke.” Still, those rights, however obscured by time and tyranny, remained every Englishman’s birthright. Thus, study of the Ancient Constitution revealed to its adherents that Parliament was, at the very least, a body independent of the king and, so, ought to be his full partner in government. For a bold few, Parliament, like the common law, predated kings. The implications of this idea for the question of sovereignty should be obvious.

These conflicting interpretations of history and the constitution emerged at the opening of the 1604 Parliament around an election dispute known as Goodwin’s case. Briefly, the election of Sir Francis Goodwin (1564–1634) as MP for Buckinghamshire had been thrown out by the court of Chancery (a royal court of equity justice: see chapter 1) on the technical grounds that he was an outlaw because of an unpaid debt. But after hearing Goodwin at the bar of the house, the Commons decided to seat him on the grounds that it, not the law courts, had the right to determine its own membership. James objected to this because it placed the rights of the Commons above those of a royal court of law; he countered by arguing that they “derived all matters of privilege (such as the regulation of their membership) from him and by his grant.”
⁸
The more radical members, equally worried about James’s proposals for a Union with Scotland (see below), responded with a document entitled the
Form of Apology and Satisfaction.
In its most famous passage, they assert, respectfully but firmly, that:

[w]e most truly avouch, First, That our privileges and liberties are our right and due inheritance no less than our very lands and goods. Secondly, That they cannot be withheld from us, denied, or impaired, but with apparent wrong to the whole state of the realm.
⁹

That is, Parliament’s privileges do not derive from the king. Rather, they exist independently of him and are, instead, as inherent in the MPs as the ownership of their own property and goods. They are, in effect, rights. Historically speaking, this was nonsense, but the king was too inexperienced in English history, law, and practice to know that. The language of rights would have tremendous importance not only for Parliament’s relations with the king but for the future development of representative government in Great Britain and elsewhere, including the United States. The passage then goes on to assert that Parliament speaks not only for its own privileged members but for “the whole state of the realm.” Heretofore, the only body capable of making such an assertion had been the king himself. The authors of the
Apology
clearly saw Parliament’s role as being far more extensive than merely advising the sovereign or mouthing the secret agendas of councilors. In 1621 Coke would make this point more explicitly, claiming, “[w]e serve here for thousands and ten thousands”; another MP would add, “if we lose our privileges, we betray it [our country].”
¹⁰

The
Form of Apology and Satisfaction
was never formally presented to the king, although he knew full well what it said. When James prorogued Parliament, he thanked the Lords, but rebuked the Commons: “I will not thank where I think no thanks due. … You see I am not of such a stock as to praise fools.”
¹¹
Still, one should not exaggerate the degree of conflict between king and Parliament at this early stage: both sides soon backed down with James acknowledging Parliament’s right to regulate election disputes. For most of his reign, king and Parliament sought a partnership and no one would have suggested seriously that the former should not lead in the dance. Still, the question of sovereignty had now been framed. It would become more pressing as king and Commons clashed over a second long-term problem intimately related to the first: the royal finances.

The Problem of Government Finance

It was not James’s fault that he inherited an inadequate revenue. Nor can he be blamed for reigning during a period of rapid inflation bracketed by two periods of agricultural stagnation, even famine (the mid-1590s and the mid-1620s). Inflation made everything purchased by the Crown – from building materials to tapestries to muskets and uniforms – more expensive, rendering the royal revenue 40 percent less, in real terms, than it had been in 1509. Nor was it James’s fault that he had inherited from the Tudors an administration which, despite some growth during the war, was still ramshackle and inefficient. Its employees at the center were so poorly paid that they had to be allowed to engage in practices we would today call corrupt: fee-taking, bribery, sale of office, etc. As a result, the king’s servants mostly looked out for themselves, to his ever-increasing cost. In the countryside, he depended on the cooperation of local officials who tended to put their interests and those of their communities – also smarting under the effects of inflation and dearth – above those of the king. This meant, for example, that when asked to collect a tax, they tended to assess their neighbors’ wealth ridiculously low and were lackadaisical in collecting even those amounts. Such behavior maintained a degree of local consensus and minimized opposition to the Crown; but it did little to relieve the royal finances.

It was not James’s fault that his needs were in some ways greater than his predecessor’s. Most of his subjects were generally pleased that, after years of uncertainty about the succession due to Elizabeth’s single and heirless state, James brought with him a wife and children. But each member of the new royal family had to be supported out of the royal revenue, along with their personal – and quite extensive – households. The court of his eldest son, Prince Henry, alone cost
£
25,000. This was in sharp contrast to the unattached Virgin Queen, who was a relatively cheap date for her loving people. It was not James’s fault that he had inherited from his frugal predecessor a rapacious court, anxious to make up for lost time in the pursuit of riches. It was not James’s fault that Europe’s religious wars, combined with an ongoing military revolution, put increasing pressure on his government’s finances. Finally, it was not James’s fault that, for all her frugality, Queen Elizabeth had bequeathed him a situation in Ireland that would require money and troops for years to come: there would be no peace dividend.

If the new king inherited a difficult situation, it is unarguable that he made it worse by spending lavishly on himself, on his friends, and on his courtiers. Previously the ruler of a relatively poor country, the middle-aged James saw his accession to the English throne as “like a poor man wandering about forty years in a wilderness and barren soil, and now arrived at the land of promise.”
¹²
He made up for lost time, first, by spending vast amounts on fine buildings, commissioning the Banqueting House at Whitehall and the Queen’s House at Greenwich – both intended to be part of much larger projects – from Inigo Jones. He also employed Jones to design the scenery and costumes for the court masques noted in the previous chapter. These elaborate multimedia productions required actors, dancers, and musicians supported behind the scenes by armies of seamstresses and carpenters. All of this contributed to the general costliness of James’s English court: his Chamber expenses rose by 40 percent over Elizabeth’s, the expenses of his Great Wardrobe (which provided furniture) by nearly 400 percent!

James also spent freely on his favorites. As Sir Robert Cecil said, “[f]or a King not to be bountiful were a fault,”
¹³
and many saw Elizabeth’s penny-pinching as a failure of honor. But the new king was too honorable by half. In just his first four years on the throne he gave out
£
200,000 in pensions and gifts to courtiers. Much of this largesse went to Scots: by 1610 he had lavished nearly
£
250,000 on his countrymen. As a result, royal expenditure rose from Queen Elizabeth’s wartime figure of
£
300,000 a year to
£
500,000 a year under King James during a period of peace. The royal debt, which had stood at under
£
400,000 at the queen’s death in 1603, rose to
£
600,000 by 1608,
£
900,000 by 1618 – the largest peacetime debt in English history up to that point.