The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (27 page)

Bohemia was, as Neville Chamberlain was to say dolefully four centuries later, ‘a faraway country of which we know little’. It was impossible for James to give any help to his son-in-law, even if he had been more eager to do so than he was. But his inaction was unpopular, as anti-Catholic feeling was vented. Indeed many thought it shameful. The reign of Frederick and Elizabeth in Prague did not last long; their forces were defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and they had to flee. They became known as the Winter King and Winter Queen. The glorious promise of their marriage had turned to dust. Worse followed. The army of the Catholic League pursued them, and drove them out of the Palatine itself. They fled as refugees to the Netherlands, where the Stadholder, Maurice of Nassau, a son of William the Silent, gave them sanctuary. They would remain there while the war raged about them, and Elizabeth would have a host of children. The second of them, Rupert, had been born while they were so briefly king and queen in Bohemia.

Many in England clamoured for war. The Protestant cause must be defended. James would have none of it. In any case war was expensive, he was in debt, and Parliament showed no eagerness to pay for the conflict its wilder spirits urged on him. The war cry was futile, an opportunity to vent emotion and feel good, nothing more. England had not mounted a successful campaign on the Continent for two hundred years. James let the cry exhaust itself. Meanwhile he was flattered by a suggestion from Spain that he should act as intermediary and peacemaker. The idea appealed to his vanity, but nothing came of it.

Negotiations for Charles’s Spanish match continued, but slowly – so slowly that Buckingham, eager to promote it, devised a madcap plan. He and Charles should go themselves to Madrid, travelling incognito like knights errant, to clinch the deal. They adopted, absurdly, as their aliases Mr Brown and Mr Smith, names that do not suggest chivalry. James, suffering from arthritis and other ailments, for he was ageing fast, reluctantly agreed. He was divided between a touching admiration for the bold romance of the enterprise and fear for their safety. ‘God bless you both, my sweet babes, and send you a happy and safe return,’ he wrote and sent a chain of 276 pearls from the Orient as a present for the Infanta. She, however, adamantly refused to marry a heretic.

Queen Anne had died in 1619. The love James had felt when she was a young bride had long since spent itself, but they had rarely been on less than good and friendly terms. If his relationship with Robert Ker had displeased her, at least he had been faithful to her in his peculiar fashion. Now that she was gone, he indulged his fondness for cosy domesticity with the female members of Buckingham’s family, especially his wife and sister. Indeed the Buckinghams had become the King’s extended family and he was happy to arrange marriages for the younger members. His matchmaking was uncritical; one of his dear Steenie’s sisters was married to an elderly knight, who had a fine estate but was known hitherto to ‘have loved none but boys’.

The King was weary, an old man already in his middle fifties. The storms of his early life were long past. He indulged himself and others. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Abbott, unfortunately shot a beater while out hunting, James excused him, saying an angel might have made the same mistake. His court remained as disorderly as ever. He had always been capable of being brusque when offended or bothered. ‘God’s wounds,’ he cried once, weary of the attentions of a demanding public, ‘I will pull down my breeches and they shall see my arse.’ In these final years, he tottered about, often a little drunk, followed by a train of small dogs and hounds, talking endlessly, now about politics, now religion, then sport, the Bible, and the men and women he had known. He was a great gossip and full of jokes, some bawdy, some sly, some very much to the point, and many even funny. A scriptural analogy would be followed by a vile pun, a quotation from Horace or Virgil by an anecdote about his grim youth in Scotland, a blast against ‘tobacco-drunkards’ by disquisitions on the art of hunting. He remained interested in everything. When he visited Stonehenge, he commanded Inigo Jones to investigate its origins. The conclusion was that it was a Roman temple to the God Caelus.

His dear boys – ‘my dog Steenie and Baby Charles’ – returned from Spain without the Infanta, but James was too pleased that they had come home safely from their adventure, which he thought ‘worthy to be put in a romanzo’, to care about the collapse of his foreign policy. Buckingham now had the management of everything. Yet the King’s acumen had not entirely deserted him. When Buckingham looked favourably on a move by the Commons to impeach the treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, James told him roundly that he was a fool and would soon have his fill of impeachments. In the same way he had long put aside his belief in witchcraft and grown skilled in detecting impostures, and had come to realise that most who pretended to practise the art were deluded.

In March 1625 he fell ill, and met death with a courage he had not always shown in life, affirming, argumentative to the last, that he approved of absolution ‘as it is practised in the English Church, but in the dark way of Rome I do defy it’. He had been a king for all but the first months of his fifty-eight years, and had shown a remarkable capacity for survival. Given his forebears’ history, it was no mean boast to be able to say, ‘Here [that is, in London] I sit and govern Scotland with my pen. I write and it is done; and by the Clerk of the Council now, which others could not do with the sword.’ If he had been less successful in England, he had nevertheless contrived to jog along pleasantly enough, and there is no reason to doubt his stated intention to ‘govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will’. The time would come when kings had to take more note of the latter, but not in ‘Old Jemmy’s’ days. The historian should resist the temptation to suppose that Charles I’s failure was a bitter harvest sowed by his father. For one thing, James, as a canny politician, knew when to give way, even though he grumbled as he did so. The oddest and most learned of British kings, he also managed, incongruous though it may seem, to combine the conviction that he ruled by divine right and the favour of the Almighty with a robust and sceptical sense of humour.

Chapter 11

Charles I (1625–49): The Martyr King

In his twenty-fifth year when he succeeded his father, ‘Baby Charles’ had overcome the childhood disabilities that had prevented him from walking till he was seven. Yet, probably on account of these ailments, he was very small, not much more than five foot in height. He had learned to control his stammer; indeed it had all but disappeared, emerging only at moments of stress. He had made himself into a fine horseman. Unlike his father he was no scholar, but he was an aesthete, whose collection of paintings would be one of the most impressive in Europe. The great Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens thought him the most knowledgeable of connoisseurs. Where James had been talkative and emotional, Charles was taciturn and reserved. He stood very much on his dignity; his father had had none. James was highly intelligent, Charles not very bright. They had however one point in common: neither was a good judge of men. Moreover, Charles had inherited his father’s conviction that he was the servant of God with a divine right to rule. Unfortunately, while in practice James did little more than talk about this, Charles acted on his belief. The self-assurance it gave him made him a tricky customer, one on whose word few could rely. Deception of others was permissible, because as king he could do no wrong. In matters of policy he was as free from moral scruples as Calvinists, conscious of their status as God’s elect, might be in conduct. Charles never understood how untrustworthy he seemed to others.

He was the first monarch to have been raised as a member of the Church of England, and he was utterly devoted to that Church as he understood it. It was his misfortune that his idea of the Church of England was much narrower than that of many of his subjects, and that in their view his commitment to a high and ordered Anglicanism smacked of popery. They were mistaken. He was the only Stuart, with the exception of his granddaughter Queen Anne, to be unwavering in his devotion to the established Church. On the night before his execution he made his two youngest children, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Princess Elizabeth, swear that they would remain loyal to the Church of England, and on the scaffold he declared that he died a faithful member of that Church as by law established. To call him the ‘martyr King’ is not unjust, for if he had been willing to offer a genuine, rather than merely tactical, compromise on the matter of religion, he might well have kept his crown, though with his power curtailed.

The early years of his reign were dominated by Buckingham. Charles had first resented his father’s favourite and, not surprisingly, disapproved of him. But Buckingham, conscious that Charles was the rising sun, had exerted himself to charm him, and his charm was compelling. The Prince was soon as devoted to the glittering Duke as his besotted father, though his language to the favourite was more restrained and free of terms of fond endearment, while his behaviour was unquestionably chaste. The quixotic trip to Spain in search of a bride had cemented the relationship, and for the first three years of the new reign Buckingham’s will was all-powerful. Charles, shy and still unsure of himself, drew strength from the Duke.

In fact Buckingham’s influence and policy were disastrous. He provoked wars, first with Spain, then with France, where he allied England to the French Protestants (the Huguenots), whose privileges, assured by the Edict of Nantes, which had marked the end of religious wars in France, were now being challenged by the new First Minister, Cardinal Richelieu. The Spanish war was fought in support of Charles’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick, the deposed Elector, and in defence of the Protestant cause in Germany, something Parliament had long clamoured for. Spain was still the great European power, and its king, Philip III, financed the Catholic armies of his Habsburg cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand. Moreover, the Spanish empire included the southern Netherlands, modern Belgium, throughout history of strategic importance to England. Buckingham recruited an army, mostly composed of German mercenaries, with the intention of deploying it to drive the Habsburgs out of the Palatinate and restore Frederick to his throne. The enterprise was a dismal failure. England had no standing army, and the mercenaries Buckingham hired, though of poor quality, nevertheless expected to be paid. This Parliament was disinclined to do, despite its proclaimed enthusiasm for the defence of the Protestant cause in Europe. The war with France, incongruously following Buckingham’s success in arranging a French marriage for Charles in 1626, went no better. Attempts to support the Huguenots, besieged by the armies of the French king in their fortified town of La Rochelle, foundered. Buckingham had neither experience nor skill in generalship, though he fought with conspicuous and reckless courage himself. Despite the failure and the Commons’ attempt to impeach him, he was preparing another expedition when he was assassinated in 1628 at Portsmouth by a disgruntled officer called Felton.

Charles was distraught, overcome by grief. Hitherto his relations with his young queen, Henrietta Maria, had been bad. She loathed Buckingham, and there were religious differences, for the Queen was a devout Roman Catholic. Charles was infuriated by her French servants, and, without consulting her, had dismissed most of them and sent them back to France. She made scenes and stormed and raved, and Charles was embarrassed and at a loss; he had no idea how to deal with an angry and passionate woman, or how to appease her. He took refuge in cold reserve and silence. But Buckingham’s murder changed everything. In his grief he turned to his wife. She consoled him and he fell in love with her. He would remain in love, never looking at another woman; there was to be not even a rumour of infidelity. He now depended on Henrietta Maria even more completely than he had on Buckingham. She was everything to him. He was guided by her in all matters except his own religion; and it was unfortunate that her advice was nearly always bad. She had no understanding of England, English people or English politics; not only no understanding, but little sympathy for them either.

The first four years of Charles’s reign were marked by recurrent quarrels with Parliament. The King and those elected to the House of Commons had different views of Parliament’s function. For Charles, the main purpose in summoning a parliament was to obtain grants of money, and if Parliament did not oblige, he was ready to seek other means of raising funds from his subjects, by forced – that is, compulsory – loans or by the revival of feudal rights, many of which had withered from disuse. The Commons on the other hand saw itself as the guarantor of the liberties of the subject and increasingly claimed to be entitled to press policies on the monarch, especially in the field of foreign affairs. Charles’s third Parliament, summoned in 1628, presented him with a document called the Petition of Right, which declared taxation without parliamentary consent to be illegal, and protested against imprisonment without trial, martial law, forced loans and conscription – this for the French war that the same House of Commons had demanded. The question, one member said, was whether the King was above the law or subject to it. That question would run like a sore throughout the reign, and Charles’s refusal to recognise its validity would eventually destroy him. Equally ominously, another member, by name John Pym, raised the question of religion, expressing disapproval of the doctrine that went by the name of Arminianism, and which, he said, was infesting the English Church. Arminius was a Dutch theologian who, as John Milton would put it, ‘set up free will as against free grace’, challenging the Puritan belief in predestination; it was, they thought, one step on the downward path that led to popery. Charles determined to bring the parliament to an end, but in defiance of all precedent, for there could be no doubt that the monarch was entitled to dissolve Parliament at will, the Speaker was held down in his chair while the Commons voted that innovators in religion (as they considered the so-called Arminians to be) were enemies of the kingdom, as surely as those who levied taxes without the approval of Parliament. The stormy session was at last concluded. The King dissolved Parliament in 1629 and did without it for eleven years. Parliaments, he said, were ‘like cats; they grow crabbit with age’.