The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (42 page)

Enormous fines were imposed if a child was not baptized into the Protestant faith within a month of its birth. James’s royal favourites and the Exchequer soon got in the habit of exploiting Catholic recusant estates as a useful source of income, eagerly enforcing sequestration of two-thirds of their property for non-payment of fines. That worldlywise king Henry IV warned James I from across the Channel that religion was ‘a flame which burns with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence used to extinguish it’, and that such severe laws would lay him open to worse plots. But, strange to say, it did not. Catholics, perhaps because their religion encouraged them to turn the other cheek, sank meekly into second-class citizenship.

In fact it was from the Puritans that James had most to fear. Extremely well represented in the unruly House of Commons, they had the boldness to accost the new king on his journey south from Scotland to take up his new position, presenting what is called the Millenary Petition because it was signed by a thousand Puritans. This requested the king to end the Elizabethan oppression of their beliefs through the enforcement of uniformity and to make changes to the prayer book. Confident of his ability to debate with them and pleased with his theological learning James promised that the next year there would be a conference to debate all these issues. But when the meeting took place at Hampton Court the Puritan divines realized they had picked the wrong audience. Despite or perhaps because of his fierce Scots Presbyterian background, the new king was just as much the enemy of all attempts to introduce the Presbyterian system (from ‘presbyter’, the Greek for elder) to England as Elizabeth had been. In fact James was mightily in favour of bishops as a prop of royal authority, and had every intention of reintroducing them to Scotland. As he remarked to the divines, ‘Scottish Presbytery agreeth as well with monarchy as God with the devil.’ He would put it even more pithily in his summing up of the High Church position: ‘No bishop, no king.’

The best the Puritans got out of the king was the decision to undertake a new translation of the Bible. In 1611 the beautiful Authorized Version, the product of forty-seven scholars, which we know as the King James Bible became the universally preferred version in Protestant services and Protestant homes. Using much of William Tyndale’s wording, it is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and remains one of the masterpieces of English literature, its phrasing having had an incalculable effect on the English language.

To all the Puritans’ pleas for a more solemn way of life, especially on the Sabbath, the king made it clear that this was not what he had in mind for England. Indeed under him the Church of England began to take on a distinctly conservative tinge, especially when Richard Bancroft became Archbishop of Canterbury after Whitgift’s death. But the greatest exponent of movement back towards the Catholicism of Henry VIII’s time was William Laud, who became Bishop of London, and at lastin 1633, under James’s son Charles I, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Thanks to Laud’s influence the Church of England revolted against the overwhelming Calvinism of the Puritans. Instead it adopted the ideas of a Dutch professor named Arminius which stressed its fellowship with the ancient Church at Rome. Over the next twenty years as the battle for authority was waged between Parliament and king, Puritans tended to gravitate towards joining the House of Commons and pressing for their rights there, while the Church of England became the leading supporter of royal autocracy. Led by their bishops, parish priests preached that it was wrong to resist a ruler who was appointed by God and above the law. Thus religious and constitutional issues became completely interwoven as the Stuart kings made a habit of overriding the law of the land and ruling without Parliament.

It was really only around the time of Salisbury’s death in 1612 that James’s autocratic tendencies came more and more to the fore and his struggle to extend his power at the expense of Parliamentary liberties began in earnest. There had been some acrimonious skirmishes earlier in the reign: James was angered and amazed by Parliament’s refusal in 1607 to give Scotsmen the full rights of Englishmen or to agree to freedom of trade between the two countries. He was affronted when the Commons told him in no uncertain terms that his insufficiently Protestant foreign policy and his peace with Spain dismayed them, a peace made more suspect by his wife Anne of Denmark’s known Catholicism. James’s attempt to interfere in the election in Buckinghamshire of a felon named Shirley on the ground that all privileges derived from the king was successfully resisted. The Commons sent him such a vehement and furious petition insisting that its ancient liberties such as the right to free election had nothing to do with the royal power and were the longstanding birthright of the English people that he backed off. Under Elizabeth the Commons would never have dared address the monarch in this fashion, but James’s being a foreigner gave it a chance to assert itself, and indeed at first it attributed his behaviour to his ignorance of the way the country worked.

But seven years into his reign the king was no longer so foreign and he was much less timorous. By 1610 he had had enough of Parliament’s hectoring him, and was determined to raise his income. Following a decision in the courts that it was legal for the king to change the rates of customs charges without reference to Parliament, James took the opportunity to issue a whole new slew of taxes on his own authority. And when there was an outcry from the Commons he simply closed Parliament down. It would become the pattern in the reigns of both James and his son Charles to live by raising money outside Parliament so as not to have to deal with the Commons. In 1614 James tried to manage it through what were called ‘Undertakers’, MPs who would attempt to influence votes on the king’s behalf, but this ‘Addled Parliament’ was so enraged by the Undertakers and recalcitrant in its attitudes that he dissolved it after three weeks. For most of the next eleven years he ruled without Parliament.

Nevertheless, the king could not rule without money. At first he resorted to bribing gentlemen to become baronets if they gave him a thousand pounds; if they paid 10,000 pounds they could become lords. But his extravagant lifestyle forced him into more desperate courses. When the Spanish ambassador Gondomar dangled the prospect of a six-figure marriage dowry if James’s second son Charles married a Spanish infanta, the king became increasingly fixated on the thought of the great dowry which would get him the income to enable him never to call Parliament again–and he grew obsessed with developing a foreign policy to please Spain. The death of his elder son, the talented, deeply Protestant and popular Prince Henry, in the same year that Salisbury died, removed a last restraining influence on the king, for the new Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, was shy and retiring, and spoke with a stammer. Disregarding the fervent anti-Spanish feeling in England, James allowed Gondomar to become one of his most influential advisers.

For all his pomposity, James was also frivolous and rather lazy. He preferred to spend most of his time hunting and, after Salisbury’s death, left government business in the hands of a stream of inappropriate favourites like Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester. Ker was a handsome aristocrat chosen like all James’s favourites for his looks rather than his grasp of English foreign policy. Leading a hermetically sealed existence at the court, the Earl of Somerset (as he became in 1613) saw nothing wrong with the growth of Spanish power at court and in fact encouraged it. Somerset and his notorious wife Frances soon involved James in scandal when they were both tried in the House of Lords for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Though both were found guilty and condemned to death, even greater odium was incurred when the king used his royal powers to pardon and free them.

The sense that English standards were being unacceptably lowered and corrupted was reinforced when in 1616 the lord chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Edward Coke, was dismissed for trying to prevent the king from interfering in law cases. According to James, divine right entitled him to suspend the law when it suited him. He was backed up by his lord chancellor, the ambitious Sir Francis Bacon, who believed that judges should be the supporters of the royal prerogative or will. But Coke, who was immensely influential among lawyers and MPs both in his lifetime and after, had arrived at the conclusion from his study of jurisprudence that even the king should be subject to the common law.

The last nail in the coffin of James’s reputation was the execution in 1618 of the Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh on trumped-up charges relating to the Main Plot of fifteen years before. The real reason Raleigh, the last relic of the golden years of Elizabethan England, was executed was to please Spain. To quench James’s thirst for gold Raleigh had been released from the Tower to search for the treasure said to be at the bottom of a lake in the fabled land of El Dorado, somewhere in Guiana, and the old Elizabethan had been unable to resist burning a Spanish settlement that was blocking his route. It was now evident that the king would do anything to placate the Spanish. English policy seemed to be in the hands of the Spanish ambassador.

How harmful this was was thrown into relief at the outset of the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618. James’s son-in-law Frederick, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in Germany and a notable Protestant, was offered the crown of Protestant Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) in place of the Catholic Habsburg overlord the emperor Ferdinand II. At the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 Frederick and the Bohemians were defeated, and with the Spanish having invaded the Palatinate, he and James’s daughter Elizabeth now found themselves without a home. Their plight aroused enormous popular interest in England. By 1622 the Commons was formally petitioning for war with Spain, for a Protestant marriage to be arranged for Prince Charles, and for further penal laws to be imposed on Catholics. In spite of all these straws in the wind, James remained so anxious to ally himself with wealthy Spain and arrange the ever tantalizing Spanish marriage for which he had sacrificed Raleigh that he continued to negotiate with Gondomar. He believed that only by such means could the Spanish be persuaded to withdraw from the Palatinate and restore Frederick to his throne.

Meanwhile accurate rumours began to circulate that the price to be paid for the Spanish infanta was the conversion of England by the back door: the conditions laid down by Spain were that the marriage was to be no hole-and-corner affair. It had to have the approval of Parliament, and the penal laws against Catholics had to have been suspended for three years before it could take place. All the children of the marriage were to be brought up as Catholics, and their Catholicism would not interfere with their right to the throne.

Public feeling deepened against the king with the rise of his new favourite, the vain and frivolous Duke of Buckingham, whose notoriety eclipsed even that of the Somersets and whose willingness to accept bribes became a byword. By the end of James’s reign the all-controlling Buckingham seemed to be the real ruler of England, not least because he was coming to have just as great an influence over the future king Charles I as over his father. Undeterred by the popular hostility to the Spanish marriage, in 1623 Buckingham and Charles set off in disguise on a madcap romantic adventure to speed up negotiations which had been hovering in the balance for eight years and bring back the Spanish infanta. But neither the glamorous Buckingham nor the small, nervous Charles had any success in Madrid. There were just more delays while the stiff Spanish court made it clear that it was displeased by the lack of formality of the young Stuart and his friend and laid down further conditions for the Catholic education of the royal children and the composition of the infanta’s personal household: a bishop and no fewer than twenty priests were to be constantly in attendance.

In the end the marriage came to nothing, owing to the predicament of Charles’s sister Elizabeth (known as the Winter Queen after her brief seasonal reign in Bohemia). Although James clearly could not quite bring himself to sacrifice the Spanish marriage for his daughter’s happiness, his son Charles could. When the Prince of Wales finally asked point-blank whether Spain would fight the emperor Ferdinand to restore the Palatinate, and was given the answer no, Charles lost his temper. To the great relief of the English public he sailed home without the infanta, and now that diplomacy had failed was furiously determined on war to save his sister.

The House of Commons, which had been dreading the Spanish match for years, fearing that it would spell the end to Protestantism both in England and abroad, delightedly voted supplies. An alliance against Spain was made with France, for Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief adviser, had ambitions to see his country advance at the expense of the Habsburg influence in Spain and Austria. Instead of the infanta the Prince of Wales was engaged to Henrietta Maria, the French king’s sister, who like the king was small, but gay and spirited.

Nevertheless, the attempts to send help to the Palatinate in 1624 were unsuccessful. The expedition did not go well, even with French help under the leadership of the German soldier of fortune Count Mansfeld. It was poorly prepared, without proper quarter mastering, so that food supplies and clothing were inadequate and thousands of soldiers died without even fighting. Its failure seemed of a piece with the general hopelessness of the administration and with its poor calibre, given that government positions were secured by bribes to Buckingham. The Commons longed to call the gorgeous favourite before them to account for his actions, but he was untouchable.

Instead James I’s reign drew to an end with further quarrels: the Commons once more demanded a check to the monopoly system, which in the licensing of public houses was becoming a serious source of income for royal courtiers. The Commons also impeached the lord chancellor Sir Francis Bacon for taking bribes. Bacon admitted the offences, resigned and was imprisoned, only to be released by James–who, whatever his failings as a king, was kind to his friends. The king died in March 1625, leaving the Commons determined to remove Buckingham from power.