The Cradle King (37 page)

At the end of the session the Commons drew up an
Apology,
presented by Sir Edwin Sandys, MP for Stockbridge in Gloucestershire and a leading member of the Jacobean Commons, in which they instructed the King how to approach an English parliament. James was furious, and in his final speech to Parliament berated the Commons for their behaviour over the Union bill. In Scotland, he remarked, his counsel had been received graciously; in England, on the contrary, there was ‘nothing but curiosity from morning to evening, to find fault with my propositions’. In Scotland, everything emanating from the King was warranted; here everything was suspected.
¹⁹

Parliament was prorogued on 7 July, but James decided that if Parliament would not create the Union then he would create it himself. Over the summer months of 1604, the King took counsel on features that he hoped would make the Union a
fait accompli:
inventing coinage common to both countries; reducing the countries’ laws to a single law; designing a composite flag; implementing free trade between England and Scotland; attempting to pacify the Borders.
²⁰
The Venetian ambassador reported that the King was determined ‘to call himself King of Great Britain and like that famous and ancient King Arthur to embrace under one name the whole circuit of the island’, and indeed on 24 October at the great Cross in Westminster, James was ‘in most solemn manner proclaimed King of Great Britain, France and Ireland’.
²¹

The Union Commission of forty-eight Englishmen and thirty-one Scots assembled on 29 October 1604, without the King, who was in the country hunting. Their deliberations focused on four points: the repeal of laws in each country that were hostile to the other; the possibility of free trade between the kingdoms; the amelioration of justice in the Border regions, through the extradition of criminals; and the mutual naturalisation of James’s subjects. Only the repeal of hostile laws was straightforward. The English were scared of a free trade competition that would allow the Scots to undercut them in both cheap goods and cheap labour, and that raised the spectre of Scots gaining admission to the exclusive English trade guilds. The English also feared for any Englishman who would be extradited and exposed to what they perceived as a brutal Scottish legal system.

But it was on the key question of naturalisation that the debate hinged. James’s accession to the English throne in March 1603 had created two sorts of subjects: those born before that date, who were referred to as the ‘ante-nati’, and those born after, the ‘post-nati’. The ante-nati were subjects of the King of Scots, and thus aliens in England. But the post-nati, though born in Scotland, were also subjects of the King of England. These post-nati, it was argued, were already naturalised by the common law throughout all his dominions, and as such they could hold office in England, which the ante-nati could not. James objected to the matter being decided by the law rather than by him. Although he was quite happy to prevent the ante-nati from taking office in England – indeed, he would pledge to do so – he demanded that a clause be inserted that this was part of his royal prerogative.

The matter of the Union came to head in the parliamentary session beginning in February 1607. The Commons made known their view that the post-nati were not naturalised as English subjects by common law. Sir Edwin Sandys asserted that ‘Unions of kingdoms are not made by law but by act express’, and that a chance royal marriage a few generations back should not be allowed to mean the naturalisation of thousands of children now. Arguments were made on legal technicalities, but what came through the parliamentary debates on Union was a loud and vociferous prejudice against the Scots who were depicted as proud, violent beggars, lean and hungry cattle who would overrun England’s rich pastures.
²²
On 13 February the MP for Buckinghamshire, Sir Christopher Piggott, ‘with a loud voice’ and discourteously keeping his hat on, launched into ‘an invective against the Scots and Scottish nation, using many words of scandal and obliquy’. He claimed to be ‘astonished that any ear could be lent for joining a good and fertile country to one poor and barren, and in a manner disgraced by nature; and for associating frank and honest men with such as were beggars, proud, and generally traitors and rebels to their King. There was as much difference between an English and a Scots man as between a judge and a thief.’ The inevitable Scots complaint to the King was led by his current favourite, Sir John Ramsay, the hero of the hour at the Gowrie Plot; James summoned his Council and berated them ‘very harshly, declaring that he was a Scot himself and that nothing could be applied to the nation in general in which he had not his share’. Piggott was expelled from the House, but he had set the tone: on the 14th Nicholas Fuller proclaimed, in more moderate language, that England had no room for Scots: the universities were overfilled, London was being destroyed by new buildings, merchants had gone three years without profit, and trades were overstocked.
²³

The debates continued into March 1607 with the business being referred to a conference with the Lords, then to the Upper House judges, then back to the Commons, the main point of contention being whether the post-nati should have equal rights in England with the English. The Lower House concluded that neither ante-nati nor post-nati should be naturalised, nor given the rights enjoyed by English citizens. If they enjoyed English benefits, who was to ensure that they paid English taxes, obeyed English law? No: a piecemeal situation was unworkable. The Commons saw only one solution: a single, united legal system with one Parliament and one law, so that practices could not diverge – what they called a ‘perfect union’. The King and his government were less idealistic and less patient: James argued that the perfect union would come about over time, a marriage that must be preceded by a courtship – after all two parties could not be put to bed on such short acquaintance (an image that he presumably did not relate to his own marital experience). To advocate a perfect union was to pay lip service, and not to speak from the heart.
²⁴

Eventually, on 2 May, James spoke to the House somewhat exasperatedly. What did they need to do? He
was
the Union. ‘It is merely idle and frivolous to conceive that any imperfect union is desired, or can be granted. It is no more unperfect, as now it is projected, than a child that is born without a beard. It is already a perfect union in me, the Head.’ James was disappointed in his Commons. ‘I looked for no such fruits at your hands; such personal discourses and speeches; which of all other I looked you should avoid, as not beseeming the gravity of your assembly. I am your King. I am placed to govern you, and shall answer for your errors. I am a man of flesh and blood, and have my passions and affections as other men. I pray you, do not too far move me to do that which my Power may tempt me unto.’
²⁵
But it was clear that the Commons would not consent to the King’s proposals, and the suggestions were postponed.

For James, this was more than a parliamentary defeat. It demonstrated to him that his dreams of a Great Britain were not shared by his Commons, and that they would go out of their way to oppose him when they saw fit. The only success met by the pro-Unionists in James’s lifetime was the passing, as late as 30 June 1607, of a bill repealing hostile laws; the passing of the Union would wait for another century.

*   *   *

Bruised by the failure of the Union, the attacks of Puritans, and the increasingly uncooperative Commons, James felt his popularity to be at an all-time low. At the same time, he had to come to terms with the popularity of his heir. Artists and writers portrayed Henry as an emphatically active, martial prince – and it does appear that Henry had a real hands-on interest in all things warlike. One account describes how

he did also practise tilting, charging on horseback with pistols, after the manner of the wars, with all other the like inventions. Now also delighting to confer, both with his own, and other strangers, and great captains, of all manners of wars, battle, furniture, arms by sea and land, disciplines, orders, marches, alarms, watches, strategems, ambuscades, approaches, scalings, fortifications, incampings; and having now and then battles of headmen appointed both on horse and foot, in a long table; whereby he might, in a manner, view the right ordering of a battle …

He even played host to a Dutch engineer named Abraham van Nyevelt who instructed him in ‘all manner of things belonging to the wars’.
²⁶
Whether from his own inclination or from the wishful thinking of others, Henry had become an icon of everything James was not.

There are suggestions that James was not wholly happy with this state of affairs. Henry was less than committed as a scholar, studying ‘not with much delight, and chiefly under his father’s spur’, as the Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin reported in June 1607. For this, he continued, Henry was ‘often admonished and set down’. Molin tells of how one day James taunted Henry that if he did not pay better attention to his lessons he would leave his crown to his brother Charles, a far better scholar. Henry made no reply, out of respect for his father, but later when his tutor tried to make the same point, he said: ‘I know what becomes a Prince. It is not necessary for me to be a professor, but a soldier and a man of this world. If my brother is as learned as they say, we’ll make him Archbishop of Canterbury.’ When this was reported to James, he took it ‘in no good part’, continued Molin, ‘nor is he overpleased to see his son so beloved and of such promise that his subjects place all their hopes in him; and it would almost seem, to speak quite frankly, that the King was growing jealous; and so the Prince has great need of a wise counsellor to guide his steps’.
²⁷

In time, Henry tired of his rural retreat at Oatlands. On 16 December 1608, the fourteen-year-old Prince declared to his father that he was living too far away from court. James replied that he could make whatever arrangements he liked, and Henry took him at his word, ordering the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke to vacate their lodgings and stables at the palace so that he could move in, and then, when they refused, simply removing their possessions.
²⁸
There were moments when Henry stood up for what he believed. When his servant and friend Phineas Pett was accused of wrongdoing in naval matters, Henry stood by him during his trial, and bitterly attacked his accusers when Pett was ultimately found innocent. He befriended his father’s
bête noire,
Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been shut up in the Tower of London since 1603, and was reputed to have said that ‘None but my father would keep such a bird in a cage’.
²⁹
Anna’s chaplain, Bishop Goodman, wrote that Henry ‘did sometimes pry into the King’s actions, and a little dislike them … and truly I think he was a little self-willed’.
³⁰

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Terrible Blow

F
IVE YEARS AFTER
the Gowrie Plot, in 1605 James unearthed another conspiracy against his life, although this one was undoubtedly real.
¹
The Gunpowder Plot seems to have been the brainchild of an English Catholic gentleman named Robert Catesby who, as early as 1603, was discussing with his friend Thomas Percy the possibility of assassinating the new King. By the spring of 1604, the conspiracy had widened to include three other men: Catesby’s cousin Thomas Winter, a friend named John Wright, and a mercenary recently returned from the Low Countries wars named Guy Fawkes. The plot was startling in its audacity – and its simplicity. As James later put it, Catesby and his fellows intended ‘not only … the destruction of my person, nor of my wife and posterity only, but of the whole body of the State in general; wherein should neither have been spared, or distinction made to young nor of old, of great nor of small, of man nor of woman: the whole nobility, the whole reverend clergy, bishops, and most part of the good preachers, the most part of the knights and gentry; … the whole judges of the land, with the most of the lawyers, and the whole clerks’. This they would accomplish in a single blow by planting barrels of gunpowder under the Parliament House in Westminster – poetic justice since Parliament was where ‘the cruel laws (as they say) were made against their religion’, so ‘both place and person should all be destroyed and blown up at once’.
²
Practical planning commenced in May of 1604 with the renting of a house that backed on to the Parliament building; from there the conspirators started to dig a tunnel, a difficult and back-breaking task that necessitated the recruitment of more men. It was only after ten months of toil that they discovered that the house next to their own had a cellar that ran directly under the Parliament building. Once they had rented that house, it was a simple matter to break down the wall between the two cellars, and to move twenty barrels of gunpowder under the relevant chamber. It was Fawkes who carried out this work, covering the barrels with iron bars and faggots.

But Catesby’s plans didn’t stop at the dynamiting of Westminster. An explosion at the opening ceremony might carry off James, Anna and Henry, but that still left two heirs to the throne still alive, Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth. Elizabeth was being raised at the Haringtons’ estate at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, which happened to be only twenty miles from Catesby’s mother’s house at Ashby St Leger. The plotters resolved to snatch the princess ‘by drawing friends together at a hunting’ strategically located between the two houses at Sir Everard Digby’s at Dunchurch.
³
Thomas Percy would use his position as a gentleman pensioner to abduct Prince Charles, under the pretence of taking him to a safe hiding place.
⁴
In order to organise all this, more recruits were needed, and, by October 1605, some thirteen conspirators knew about the plot. It was only a matter of time before someone betrayed the elaborate conspiracy.