The Cradle King (33 page)

James was secure enough in this new setting that he could allow room for another identifiable church party, sympathetic to continental Calvinism and better disposed to English Puritanism, whose leading figures were brothers George and Robert Abbot, and George Carleton. The fact that in time James would appoint George Abbot as Archbishop of Canterbury suggests something of his canny politicking in dealing with differences within the Church of England. After his years of juggling the Kirk and the nobility, he sensed that it was to his advantage not to let one church faction dominate utterly, even if he were personally predisposed to that side. At first the Puritans were cheered by the King’s attitude. James’s initial reaction to organised English Puritanism, in the form of the Millenary Petition, had been noncommittal but gracious – a stark contrast to the extremely hostile reactions from the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Oxford in particular ensuring that the analogy between English Puritanism and Scottish Presbyterianism was made for the King’s benefit. In reality, there was a huge gulf between the Presbyterians in Scotland and the Puritans in England, but it suited those opposed to Puritanism to play on James’s prejudices – and his deeply held and sincere fears. But as James embarked on a series of conferences, both formal and informal, with the English bishops, he began to gravitate towards this unsympathetic understanding of English Puritanism. A summer campaign of Puritan petitions served only to strengthen his growing belief that the English Puritans possessed a suspiciously Presybterianlike love of argument over the tiniest details of ritual and doctrine.

By October 1603, James was already worried enough to issue ‘a proclamation concerning such as seditiously seek reformation in church matters’, which effectively prohibited religious petitions. Ecclesiastical reform fell under the jurisdiction of the King, it asserted, and he was ‘persuaded’ that both the constitution and doctrine of the Church of England ‘is agreeable to God’s word, and near to the condition of the primitive church’. The proclamation condemned ‘some men’s spirits, whose heat tendeth rather to combustion than reformation’, through their use of ‘public invectives against the state ecclesiastical’, and the gathering of ‘subscriptions of multitudes of vulgar persons to supplications to be exhibited to us’. Instead, James desired ‘an orderly proceeding’ without ‘all unlawful and factious manner of proceeding’; he threatened punishment for offenders, claiming that ‘these reformers under pretended zeal affect novelty, and so confusion in all estates’.
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He instructed Archbishop Whitgift that those ministers who were using ‘new forms not prescribed by authority’ in their celebration of divine service, should be ‘severely repressed’.
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The proclamation also demonstrated, however, that James was willing to entertain one of the ideas of the Millenary Petition: a conference between Anglicans and Puritans. It appealed to his notion of himself as an intellectual. He had already attempted to show off his scholarship to the English, some of whom were less than impressed. Sir John Harington relates the performance he endured when ordered to come for an intimate audience in James’s closet. After making his way through the Presence Chamber (where he saw ‘the lordly attendants, and bowed my knee to the Prince [Henry]’, he waited nearly an hour in an outer chamber before being led by a special messenger up a passage, ‘and so to a small room, where was good order of paper, ink, and pens, put on a board for the Prince’s [James’s] use’. James finally entered into the closet, and after some small talk about Harington’s family, started to question him ‘much of learning, and showed me his own’. The royal grilling, Harington remarked sardonically, reminded him of his examiner at Cambridge.
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In religious matters, too, James indulged his intellectual curiosity. He became not only an avid attender of the court sermons every Sunday and Tuesday but actively involved himself in the choosing of preachers for court, and texts for their sermons. Eyewitness accounts of James at dinner in England almost always include a preacher or two standing behind his chair while he ate, debating with him ‘concerning some point of controversy in philosophy’.
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John Hacket, describing mealtime with James as ‘a trial of wits’, sardonically cast the scene in terms of another of James’s hobbies: ‘Methought his hunting humour was not off so long as his courtiers, I mean the learned, stood about him at his board. He was ever in chase after some disputable doubts, which he would wind and turn about with the most stabbing objections that ever I heard. And was as pleasant and fellow-like in all those discourses as with his huntsmen in the field.’ As with his hunting companions, his learned interlocutors might expect to benefit from the experience in more material terms. ‘They that in many such genial and convivial conferences were ripe and weighty in their answers were indubiously designed to some place of credit and profit.’
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His bishops were not so keen at the prospect of James displaying his learning in a semi-public setting, and Bilson advised the King not to risk such a conference: ‘Content yourself, my Lord,’ replied James condescendingly, ‘we know better than you what belongeth to these matters.’
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Originally scheduled for November 1603, the conference was postponed until the New Year, and took place at Hampton Court in January 1604. The royal conference would become a familiar sight over the next two decades. It was not an equal forum. James would preside on his chair of state, flanked by judges, councillors or churchmen, depending on what was to be debated. The plaintiffs (perhaps common lawyers, the Commons or as here Puritan ministers) elected a spokesman to make their case from the floor. James would respond as he saw fit, often peppering his earnest pronouncements with crude jokes. Although on occasion he became bored, he evidently relished these chances to display his intellect and wit.
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Our main source for the Hampton Court Conference, as it became known, is the ‘official version’ by William Barlow, Dean of Chester, blatantly partisan in its portrayal and occasional ridicule of what he calls the ‘opponents’, the Puritan ministers. But precisely because of its unguarded bias, it provides a wonderful account of a particular moment in English ecclesiastical history, when the leading figures of the Church of England found in their new King not only a champion but apparently a serious and learned champion. By the end of the second day’s conference James’s ‘singular readiness, and exact knowledge’ had ‘raised such an admiration in the lords’ that one of them was heard to say exclaim ‘he was fully persuaded, his Majesty spake by the instinct of the spirit of God’. Sir Robert Cecil affirmed ‘that very much we are bound to God, who had given us a King of an understanding heart’. As Lord Chancellor Ellesmere passed through the door of the Privy Chamber, he said to Barlow, ‘I have often heard and read, that
Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote
[a king is a mixture of a person and a priest], but I never saw the truth thereof, till this day.’ And Barlow himself wrote, ‘Surely, whosoever heard his Majesty, might justly think; that title did more properly fit him, which
Eunapius
gave to that famous rhetorician, in saying he was a living library, and a walking study.’
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The opening meeting of the conference took place on Saturday 14 January, significantly without the Puritans. James met first with the bishops, deans and the lords of the Privy Council in his Privy Chamber, sitting in his chair. He began with what Barlow called ‘a most grave and princely declaration of his general drift in calling this assembly’. It was, he claimed, ‘no novel device’ but typical of all Christian princes starting their reign who ‘take the first course for the establishing of the church, both for doctrine and policy’. Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth had, of course, all wanted to change the religious polity; James, he insisted, ‘was happier than they’ because as yet he saw ‘no cause so much to alter, and change anything, as to confirm that which he found well settled already’. This pronouncement, Barlow noted, ‘so affected his royal heart, that it pleased him to enter into a gratulation to Almighty God (at which words he put off his hat) for bringing him into the promised land, where religion was purely professed; where he sat among grave, learned and reverend men; not, as before, elsewhere, a King without state, without honour, without order; where beardless boys would brave him to his face’.
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However, while James did not intend ‘any innovation’, ‘nothing could be so absolutely ordered, but something might be added afterward thereunto’. In any state, just as in any body, ‘corruptions might insensibly grow, either through time or persons’, and he had received ‘many complaints’ since his accession, ‘especially, through the dissentions in the Church, of many disorders, as he heard, and much disobedience to the laws, with a great falling away to popery’. He purposed therefore, ‘like a good physician, to examine and try the complaints, and fully to remove the occasion thereof, if they prove scandalous, or to cure them, if they were dangerous, or, if but frivolous, yet to take knowledge of them, thereby to cast a sop into Cerberus’s mouth, that he may never bark again’ – in other words, ‘to give factious spirits no occasion, hereby, of boasting or glory’. This is why he had called the bishops in by themselves, without their Puritan opponents, so that if anything
did
need to be redressed it could be done ‘without any visible alteration’ – James repeated this point three times.
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He moved on to raise several points from the Petition that he wanted the bishops and deans to address: confirmation, absolution, private baptism and excommunication. When the King had finished, Whitgift knelt down, and said ‘how much this whole land was bound to God for setting over us a King so wise, learned and judicious, addressed himself to inform his Majesty of all these points’.
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James entered into the discussion enthusiastically, often proffering his views first and then seeking approval from the bishops. Frequently he would call for the Bible to check up on a particular passage. He was not afraid to challenge the opinion of the learned divines. When they reached the matter of private baptism, Whitgift told the King that the administration of baptism by women and lay persons was allowed neither in Church practice nor by ‘the words in the Book’. James objected to this, ‘urging and pressing the words of the Book, that they could not but intend a permission, and suffering [permitting] of women, and private persons to baptize’. The Earl of Worcester admitted that the words ‘were doubtful, and might be pressed to the meaning’ but Church practice suggested otherwise. James responded that this was a point on which the primitive Church need not be followed (it was not ‘sound reasoning from things done before a Church be settled and grounded, unto those which are to be performed in a Church stablished and flourishing’). It was ironic, he continued, that only fourteen months ago he had been criticising the divines in Scotland ‘for ascribing too little to that holy sacrament’. Then ‘a pert minister’ asked him, ‘if I thought baptism so necessary, that if it were omitted, the child should be damned? I answered him no: but if you, being called to baptize the child privately, should refuse to come, I think you shall be damned.’
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Barlow was impressed. The session lasted three hours, which flew by since his Majesty handled all the points so admirably, ‘sending us away not with contentment only, but astonishment; and, which is pitiful, you will say, with shame to us all, that a King brought up among Puritans, not the learnedest men in the world, and schooled by them: swaying a kingdom full of business, and troubles, naturally given to much exercise and repast, should, in points of divinity show himself as expedite and perfect as the greatest scholars, and most industrious students, there present, might not outstrip him’. Barlow was particularly struck by James’s assertion that, despite the fact that ‘he lived among Puritans, and was kept, for the most part, as a ward under them, yet, since he was of the age of his son, ten years old, he ever disliked their opinions; as the Saviour of the world said, “Though he lived among them, he was not of them.”’
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The following Monday, 16 January, the four Puritan plaintiffs were called into the Privy Chamber. Dr John Rainoldes was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Dean of Lincoln, a fine scholar who had tutored Richard Hooker at Oxford, but had declined to be raised to a bishopric by Elizabeth.
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Laurence Chaderton was Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Thomas Sparke was a prebend of Lincoln; and John Knewstubs a noted controversialist. James was already seated in his chair, surrounded by the Bishops of London and Winchester and all the deans and doctors, as well as his Scottish chaplain Patrick Galloway. Even ten-year-old Henry was present, ‘the noble young Prince, sitting by’ his father ‘upon a stool’. James made much the same speech to the Puritans as he had to the bishops and deans, ending by saying that since ‘many grievous complaints had been made to him, since his first entrance to the land, he thought it best to send for some, whom his Majesty understood to be the most grave, learned, and modest of the aggrieved sort, whom, being there present, he was now ready to hear, at large, what they could object or say’. As the four knelt, Rainoldes, whom Barlow identified as ‘the foreman’, presented the four heads of their argument: that the doctrine of the Church should be preserved in purity, according to God’s word; that good pastors might be planted in all churches to preach that doctrine; that the Church government might be sincerely administered according to God’s word; and that the Book of Common Prayer might be ‘fitted to more increase of piety’.