History of England 1-6

monks: and dissolution of monasteries, ref 1

monopolies, ref 1

Montague, Henry Pole, baron, ref 1

Moray, James Stuart, 1st earl of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

More, Sir Thomas: praises Henry VIII, ref 1; persecutes religious heretics, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; as Speaker of Lower House, ref 1; raids Hanseatic merchants in Steelyard, ref 1; succeeds Wolsey as chancellor, ref 1, ref 2; resigns as chancellor, ref 1; consigned to Tower and executed, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; refuses oath upon Act of Succession, ref 1; education of daughters, ref 1; religious steadfastness, ref 1; on corruption, ref 1; Utopia, ref 1, ref 2

Morice, Ralph, ref 1

Morton, Margaret, ref 1

Mountjoy, Charles Blount, 8th baron (later earl of Devonshire), ref 1, ref 2

Mousehold Heath, Norwich, ref 1

Naworth, battle of (1570), ref 1

Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, A (the King’s Book), ref 1

Netherlands: Spanish force in, ref 1; Elizabeth’s reluctance to engage in, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; revolt against Spain, ref 1, ref 2; ‘Spanish fury’ in, ref 1; Anjou invades, ref 1; Walsingham proposes alliance with Protestants, ref 1; Elizabeth signs treaty with (1585), ref 1; Leicester commands in, ref 1; peace proposals, ref 1

Netley Abbey, ref 1

‘new ague’ (epidemic disease), ref 1

New Testament: Erasmus translates, ref 1

Newhall (manor), ref 1

nobility: distrusts commonalty, ref 1

Nonsuch Palace, Surrey, ref 1, ref 1

Norfolk: popular rebellion (1549), ref 1; Elizabeth visits on progress, ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 2nd duke of (and earl of Surrey): granted ducal title, ref 1; victory at Flodden Field, ref 1; invades France (1522), ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of (and earl of Surrey): treats with rebels in Norfolk, ref 1; on Katherine of Aragon’s bearing, ref 1; in Henry’s service, ref 1; threatens Wolsey, ref 1; on commission into treason, ref 1; requests Mary agree to Henry’s conditions, ref 1; and resistance of monks of Hexham, ref 1; opposes rebellions in North, ref 1, ref 2; appropriates monastic possessions, ref 1; in religious controversies, ref 1; quarrel with Cromwell, ref 1; and Cromwell’s downfall, ref 1, ref 1; as senior counsellor, ref 1; and Katherine Howard’s marriage to Henry, ref 1; on Katherine Howard’s infidelities, ref 1; loses Henry’s favour, ref 1; in war against Scotland (1542), ref 1; plots against Cranmer, ref 1; downfall, ref 1; discounted by Edward VI, ref 1; in Tower during East Anglian rebellion, ref 1; greets Mary Tudor as queen, ref 1; leads forces against Wyatt rebellion, ref 1

Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of: and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2; attends inquiry into Darnley’s murder, ref 1; on casket letters, ref 1; as prospective husband for Mary Stuart, ref 1, ref 2; correspondence with Mary Stuart, ref 1, ref 2; opposes Cecil, ref 1; confined in Tower, ref 1; released from Tower, ref 1; supports Ridolfi plot, ref 1, ref 2; returned to Tower, ref 1; tried, convicted and executed, ref 1, ref 2

Norris, Sir Henry, ref 1

North, Edward, 1st baron, ref 1

North of England: rebellions, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Henry visits (1541), ref 1; rising against Elizabeth (1569–70), ref 1; see also Pilgrimage of Grace

NorthWest Passage, ref 1

Northampton, William Parr, 1st marquis of, ref 1, ref 2

Northumberland, Henry Percy, 8th earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Northumberland, John Dudley, duke of (earlier earl of Warwick): acquires monastic lands, ref 1; at Henry’s death, ref 1; suppresses Kett’s rebellion, ref 1; plots downfall of Somerset, ref 1; dukedom, ref 1; as lord president of council, ref 1; religious convictions, ref 1; encourages Edward VI, ref 1; administration and rule, ref 1; returns Boulogne to French, ref 1; differences with Mary Tudor, ref 1; Somerset opposes, ref 1; and disarray in kingdom, ref 1; and threat of rebellion, ref 1; and succession to Edward VI, ref 1; and Edward’s death, ref 1; attempts to prevent Mary from succeeding, ref 1; arrested and executed, ref 1

Northumberland, Thomas Percy, 7th earl of, ref 1

Norwich: in Kett’s rebellion, ref 1

Nostradamus, ref 1

Nottingham, Charles Howard, 1st earl of (earlier 2nd baron Howard of Effingham): commands English fleet against Spanish Armada, ref 1; on sickness of seamen, ref 1; earldom, ref 1; leads attack on Spain (1597), ref 1; calms Essex in outburst against Elizabeth, ref 1; in Cecil’s court faction, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s ageing, ref 1

Nun of Kent see Barton, Elizabeth

nuns: and dissolution of convents, ref 1

oath: Whitgift makes compulsory, ref 1

Orsini, Cardinal Flavio, ref 1

Oxford: religious dissidents, ref 1; Elizabeth visits, ref 1

Paget, Sir William, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

papist: as term of contempt, ref 1

parish churches: design, ref 1

parish registers: introduced, ref 1

Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; consecrated as archbishop, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s distaste for marriage, ref 1; on Elizabeth’s treatment of Mary Stuart, ref 1; death, ref 1

parliament: called for 1529, ref 2; petition against Church, ref 1, ref 2; Henry seeks support, ref 1; religious opinions and discussions, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8; supports Henry over succession, ref 1; Reformation (1536), ref 1; discusses status of Mary and Elizabeth after Anne of Boleyn’s death, ref 1; called (1543), ref 1; inaugurated with Mass sung in English (1547), ref 1; assembles (January 1552), ref 1; under Mary Tudor, ref 1; Pole addresses, ref 1; demands free speech, ref 1, ref 2; meets after Elizabeth’s coronation, ref 1; Elizabeth’s relations with, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; debates succession to Elizabeth, ref 1; legislation under Elizabeth, ref 1; discusses Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1, ref 2; condemns Mary for role in Ridolfi plot, ref 1; legislates for Queen’s Safety, ref 1; votes moneys to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2

Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of: commands Spanish forces in Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; awaits Spanish Armada for invasion of England, ref 1

Parry, Thomas, ref 1

Parry, William, ref 1

Parsons, Robert, SJ, ref 1, ref 2

Paul III, pope: establishes Inquisition, ref 1

Paulet, Sir Amyas, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Paulet, Sir William, ref 1

Pavia, battle of (1525), ref 1

Peasants’ Revolt (1381), ref 1

Pembroke, William Herbert, 1st earl of, ref 1

Percy, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Peto, Father William, ref 1, ref 2

Philip II, king of Spain: betrothal to Mary Tudor, ref 1; marriage to Mary in England, ref 1, ref 2; welcomes Pole to England, ref 1; visits Elizabeth, ref 1; leaves England, ref 1; leadership in Spanish Netherlands, ref 1, ref 2; as invasion threat against England, ref 1; declares war against Henry II, ref 1; returns to England, ref 1; proposes recapturing Calais, ref 1; proposes marriage to Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; supports Elizabeth against France, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s prospective marriage to Dudley, ref 1; and French wars of religion, ref 1; Elizabeth’s relations with, ref 1; proposes assisting Mary Stuart to English throne, ref 1; sends army to Netherlands, ref 1; marriage (to Isabella of France), ref 1; defeats in Netherlands, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s neutrality in Netherlands war, ref 1; Elizabeth supports over Anjou’s invasion of Netherlands, ref 1; Elizabeth’s diplomatic dealings with, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s relations with Anjou, ref 1; promotes rebellion in Ireland, ref 1; on throne of Portugal, ref 1; finances pro-Mary plot, ref 1; orders assassination of William of Orange, ref 1; treaty with Guise against Henry of Navarre and Elizabeth, ref 1; ships captured by British adventurers, ref 1; and settlement in Netherlands, ref 1; and fate of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1; plans invasion of England, ref 1; and despatch of Spanish Armada, ref 1; and defeat and return of Armada, ref 1; power, ref 1; England provokes, ref 1; and Essex’s expedition against Cadiz, ref 1; sends further armadas (1596–7), ref 1; death, ref 1

Phillips, Thomas, ref 1

Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Pinkie Cleugh, battle of (1547), ref 1, ref 2

Pitcairn, Robert: Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, ref 1

Pius V, pope: excommunicates Elizabeth, ref 1

plague: (1537), ref 1; (1562), ref 1

Plat, Robert, ref 1

Plumpton, Robert, ref 1

Pole, Sir Geoffrey, ref 1

Pole, Margaret, ref 1

Pole, Cardinal Reginald: as papal legate, ref 1; and mother’s beheading, ref 1; returns to England, ref 1; persecutions, ref 1; Mary Tudor’s reliance on, ref 1; made archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1; death, ref 1; learns of Mary’s death, ref 1

Pontefract Castle: Aske threatens and occupies, ref 1, ref 2

Poor Catholics of the Humiliati, ref 1

poor laws, ref 1, ref 2

population: rural decline, ref 1; increase, ref 1

portents, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Portugal: Philip annexes, ref 1; Elizabeth provokes unrest in, ref 1; Drake sails against, ref 1

Potter, Gilbert, ref 1

Poverty, Captain, ref 1

praemunire, ref 1, ref 2

Prayer Book see Book of Common Prayer

predestination, ref 1

Presbyterianism: beginnings, ref 1, ref 2

prices: rise, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

priests: in Church of England, ref 1

privateering: against Spain, ref 1

privy council: restored under Northumberland, ref 1; Elizabeth meets on accession, ref 1; as authority on death of Elizabeth, ref 1

Profitable and Necessary Doctrine, A, ref 1

‘prophesyings’ (exercises), ref 1, ref 2

Protestant faith: and English Bible, ref 1; creed and practices, ref 1; persecuted under Mary Tudor, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; opposition to Mary’s Catholicism, ref 1; under Elizabeth, ref 1; professed in Scotland, ref 1; persecuted in France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; radical activists, ref 1; spread in England, ref 1; influential supporters under Elizabeth, ref 1; and war against Spanish in Netherlands, ref 1; in continental Europe, ref 1; and submission to secular authority, ref 1

Provisors, Statute of (1351), ref 1

Puckering, Sir John, ref 1, ref 2

Puritanism: beginnings, ref 1, ref 2; strength in universities, ref 1; Whitgift opposes, ref 1; members fight against Armada, ref 1; strength and influence, ref 1; opposition to, ref 1; portrayed on stage, ref 1; parliament legislates against, ref 1

Queen’s Safety, Act for (1584), ref 1, ref 2

Raleigh, Walter, Senior, ref 1

Raleigh, Sir Walter, ref 1, ref 2

Reading abbey, ref 1

rebellions and riots: (1549), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Wyatt’s (1554), ref 1; northern (1569–70), ref 1; see also Pilgrimage of Grace

recusant priests, ref 1

Reformation: beginnings, ref 1; effect on government, ref 1; as political and dynastic movement, ref 1; effect on individual and nation, ref 1; theology, ref 1; cultural effects, ref 1; see also Protestant faith

religion: affinity with agricultural changes, ref 1; disputes and controversies over, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; imagery attacked, ref 1; Henry deplores differences, ref 1; in England at Henry’s death, ref 1; restrictions under Edward VI, ref 1; reforms restored under Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; visitations under Elizabeth, ref 1; active practitioners, ref 1; and rise of extreme Puritans, ref 1; sects established, ref 1; popular indifference to, ref 1; see also Book of Common Prayer; Catholic Church; Protestant faith

Restraint of Appeals, Act of (1533), ref 1

Rich, Robert, 3rd baron (later earl of Warwick), ref 1

Richard II, king, ref 1

Richmond, Henry FitzRoy, Duke of (Henry VIII’s illegitimate son): birth, ref 1; Katherine of Aragon and, ref 1; as prospective successor to Henry, ref 1, ref 2; and death of Anne Boleyn, ref 1; death, ref 1, ref 2

Ridley, Nicholas: meets at White Horse tavern, ref 1; detained and interrogated, ref 1; degraded and burnt at stake, ref 1

Ridolfi, Roberto di, ref 1, ref 2

Ripon, ref 1

Rising of the North (1569–70), ref 1

Rizzio (or Riccio), David, ref 1, ref 2

Roanoke colony, North Carolina, ref 1

Roche Abbey, Yorkshire, ref 1

Rochford, George Boleyn, viscount (Anne Boleyn’s brother): executed, ref 1

Rochford, Jane, viscountess, ref 1

Rochford, Thomas Boleyn, 1st viscount (Anne’s father) see Wiltshire, earl of, 1763

Rogers, John, canon of St Paul’s, ref 1

Rokewood, Edward, ref 1

Rouen, ref 1

Rowlands, Samuel, ref 1

Rudd, Anthony, bishop of St David’s, ref 1

Russell, John, baron (later 1st earl of Bedford), ref 1

Rutland, John Manners, 6th earl of, ref 1

St Bartholomew’s Day massacre (14 August 1572), ref 1

St Bartholomew’s hospital, London, ref 1

St Margaret Pattens church, London, ref 1

St Nicholas priory, Exeter, ref 1

St Paul’s Cathedral, London: rood removed, ref 1; altar replaced, ref 1; damaged by lightning, ref 1

St Thomas’s hospital, London, ref 1

saints: as intercessors, ref 1

Salisbury, Margaret Pole, countess of, ref 1

Sampford Courtenay, Devon, ref 1, ref 2

Sander, Nicholas, ref 1

Santa Cruz, Don Alvaro de Bazan, marquis of, ref 1

Saxton, Christopher, ref 1

Scarborough: attacked by French ships, ref 1

schools: founded and endowed, ref 1, ref 2

Schorne, Master John, ref 1

Scotland: war with England (1513), ref 1; Cromwell proposes war on (1522), ref 1; allies with France, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4; dissolution of monasteries, ref 1; border raids into England, ref 1; war with England (1542), ref 1; Hertford invades and ravages, ref 1; Protector Somerset hopes for union with England, ref 1, ref 2; Somerset invades (1547), ref 1; attack on England (1557), ref 1; Elizabeth seeks agreement with, ref 1; request to Elizabeth to remove French, ref 1; professes Protestant faith, ref 1; treaty of Edinburgh settles peace with England (1560), ref 1; James VI proclaimed king, ref 1; rebel northern earls flee to, ref 1, ref 2

Scroope, Philadelphia, Lady, ref 1

seminarians (Catholic): in England, ref 1

Servetus, Michael, ref 1

Seymour, Edward see Hertford, earl of; Somerset, 1st duke of

Seymour of Sudeley, Thomas, baron, ref 1; marriage to Katherine Parr, ref 1; relations with brother, ref 1; counsels Edward VI, ref 1; interest in Elizabeth, ref 1, ref 2; on Protector Somerset’s invasion of Scotland, ref 1; ambitions, ref 1; arrested, charged and beheaded, ref 1

Shakespeare, William: use of English, ref 1; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ref 1; Twelfth Night, ref 1

Sharington, Sir Edward, ref 1

Shaxton, Nicholas, bishop of Salisbury, ref 1, ref 2

sheep: and change of land use, ref 1

Sheffield Castle, ref 1

Shrewsbury, George Talbot, 4th earl of, ref 1

Shrewsbury, George Talbot, 6th earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Sidney, Sir Philip, ref 1, ref 2

Simier, Jean de, ref 1

Six Articles, Act of (1539), ref 1; abolished, ref 1

Sixtus V, pope, ref 1, ref 2

Skelton, John, ref 1, ref 2

slave trade: beginnings, ref 1

Smeaton, Mark, ref 1

Solway Moss, battle of (1543), ref 1, ref 2

Somerset, Edward Seymour, 1st duke of (earlier earl of Hertford): burns Edinburgh, ref 1; at Henry’s death, ref 1; as religious reformer, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5; as Protector in Edward’s regency, ref 1, ref 2; tolerance, ref 1; hopes for union with Scotland, ref 1, ref 2; and national defence, ref 1; proclamations, ref 1; builds London palace, ref 1; invades Scotland (1547), ref 1, ref 2; warned of unrest in kingdom, ref 1; and arrest and execution of brother Thomas, ref 1; restores common land, ref 1; and Act of Uniformity, ref 1; and suppression of popular risings, ref 1, ref 2; deposed, ref 1; executed, ref 1; opposes Northumberland, ref 1

Somerville, John, ref 1

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of: in Ireland, ref 1; in Essex’s court faction, ref 1; and Essex’s rebellion, ref 1, ref 2; sentenced to life imprisonment, ref 1

Southampton, William Fitzwilliam, earl of, ref 1

Southwick, Anne, ref 1

Spain: in Holy League against France, ref 1; English troops in, ref 1; Pavia victory (1525), ref 1; invited to invade England, ref 1; invasion threat against Henry, ref 1; allies with France, ref 1; victory at St Quentin (1557), ref 1; rivalry with France, ref 1; force in Netherlands, ref 1; rift with England, ref 1; ships impounded in Falmouth and Plymouth, ref 1; support for Mary Stuart, ref 1; Netherlands revolt against, ref 1, ref 2; bullion from Latin America, ref 1; treaty with England (1573), ref 1; troops mutiny and massacre in Netherlands, ref 1; ships and treasure attacked by English, ref 1; trade with England, ref 1; and settlement in Netherlands, ref 1; prepares expedition against England, ref 1; Elizabeth orders attack on fleet (1597), ref 1; sends further armadas against England (1596–7), ref 1; supports Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland, ref 1; Essex’s 1596 expedition against, 551

Spanish Armada: prepared, ref 1; sails, ref 2; engagement, ref 1; losses, ref 1; retreat and return to Spain, ref 1

Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, ref 1

Spurs, battle of the (1513), ref 1

Stafford, Anne: as Henry’s lover, ref 1, ref 2

Stafford, Sir Thomas, ref 1

Standish, Henry, ref 1

Stanford in the Vale, Berkshire, ref 1

Star Chamber: instituted, ref 1; forbids treatises against queen’s injunctions, ref 1; tries Puritan, ref 1

Statute of Artificers (1563), ref 1

Stephano (assassin), ref 1

Stevens, Thomas, ref 1

Stonor Park, Oxfordshire, ref 1

Stow, John, ref 1, ref 2; Survey of London, ref 1

Strype, William, ref 1

Stuart dynasty, ref 1, ref 2

Stubbs, John: The discovery of a gaping gulf, ref 1

Submission of the Clergy, ref 1, ref 2

Succession, Act of (1534), ref 1

Suffolk, Henry Grey, duke of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Suffolk, Katherine, duchess of, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4

Suffolk, Thomas Brandon, 1st duke of: dukedom, ref 1; commands force against France (1523), ref 1; protests at delay to Henry–Katherine divorce, ref 1; in Henry’s service, ref 1; appropriates monastic possessions, ref 1

Supremacy Act (1534), ref 1

Surrey, Henry Howard, earl of: imprisoned, ref 1

Surrey, Thomas Howard, earl of see Norfolk, dukes of

Sussex, Henry Radcliffe, 2nd earl of, ref 1

Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd earl of: differences with Leicester, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, ref 1; travels to Vienna to negotiate Elizabeth’s marriage with archduke Charles, ref 1; supports Elizabeth against northern earls, ref 1; Elizabeth considers giving Newhall manor to, ref 1

sweating sickness: Prince Arthur dies from, ref 1; in London (1517), ref 1; in England (1551), ref 1

taxes: under Henry, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; under Elizabeth, ref 1

Taylor, John (the ‘water poet’), ref 1

theatre see drama

Thérouanne, Flanders, ref 1

Thirty-Nine Articles (Church of England), ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Throgmorton, Francis, ref 1, ref 2

Tilbury: Elizabeth visits, ref 1

Titchfield Abbey, ref 1

Toorwoort, Henry, ref 1

Topcliffe, Richard, ref 1

torture: practice of, ref 1

Tournai, ref 1

transubstantiation, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6; see also Eucharist

Treason Acts: (1534), ref 1; (1547), ref 1; (1552), ref 1

Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of Durham, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Turkey: as threat, ref 1, ref 2; trade with England, ref 1

Turner, William, ref 1

Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, ref 1, ref 2

Tyndale, William: influenced by Luther, ref 1; New Testament translation, ref 1, ref 2; The Obedience of a Christian Man, ref 1

Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd earl of, ref 1, ref 2

Tyttenhanger (house), near St Albans, ref 1

Underhill, Thomas, ref 1

Uniformity, Acts of: (1549), ref 1; (1552), ref 1; (1559), ref 1, ref 2

United Provinces see Netherlands

universities (English): reforms, ref 1

universities (European): involvement in Henry’s divorce proceedings, ref 1

Vagrancy Act (1547), ref 1

vagrants and vagabondage, ref 1, ref 2

Wade, Sir William, ref 1

Walpole, Henry, ref 1

Walsingham, Norfolk: Henry’s pilgrimage to, ref 1; Wolsey’s pilgrimage to, ref 1

Walsingham, Sir Francis: joins queen’s counsels, ref 1; as spymaster, ref 1; Protestantism, ref 1; Elizabeth presents painting to, ref 1; restlessness, ref 1; campaign against Jesuits, ref 1; foils pro–Mary Stuart plots, ref 1; proposes alliance with Protestants of Low Countries, ref 1; drafts Bond of Association, ref 1; questions Parry, ref 1; accompanies Elizabeth on 27th anniversary of accession celebrations, ref 1; and cost of war in Netherlands, ref 1; opposes peace proposals for Netherlands, ref 1; uncovers Babington plot, ref 1; and trial of Mary queen of Scots, ref 1, ref 2; informed of plot against Elizabeth, ref 1; and Elizabeth’s signing Mary’s death warrant, ref 1; death, ref 1

Wandsworth, ref 1

Warham, William, archbishop of Canterbury: as chancellor, ref 1; grand manner, ref 1; death, ref 1, ref 2; denounces legislation against Church, ref 1, ref 2

Warwick, Ambrose Dudley, earl of, ref 1

Weelmaker, John, ref 1

Wentworth, Peter, ref 1

West Indies: Drake voyages to, ref 1, ref 2

Western Rising (Prayer Book Rebellion, 1549), ref 1, ref 2

Westminster Abbey: shrine of Edward the Confessor destroyed, ref 1

Westmorland, Charles Neville, 6th earl of, ref 1

Westmorland, Jane, countess of (née Howard), ref 1

Weston, Francis, ref 1

Wharton, Sir Thomas, ref 1

White Horse tavern, Cambridge, ref 1, ref 2

Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5

Whyte, Rowland, ref 1

Wilford, Sir Thomas, ref 1

William II (Rufus), king of England, ref 1

William of Nassau, prince of Orange, ref 1, ref 2; assassinated, ref 1

Wilson, Thomas: The State of England Anno Domino 1600, ref 1

Wiltshire, Thomas Boleyn, earl of (earlier 1st viscount Rochford; Anne’s father): peerage, ref 1; Henry confides in, ref 1; mission to pope, ref 1; supposed attack on John Fisher, ref 1

Wisbech Castle, Isle of Ely, ref 1

Wolf Hall, ref 1

Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas: early career, ref 1; and Henry’s expedition against France, ref 1; and inquiry into heresy case, ref 1, ref 2; and Standish case, ref 1; rise to power, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; and London unrest, ref 1; contracts sweating sickness, ref 1; reforms judicial system, ref 1; appointed papal legate, ref 1, ref 2; religious reforms, ref 1; burns Luther’s writings, ref 1; diplomacy, ref 1; and Anne Boleyn, ref 1; and execution of Buckingham, ref 1; and invasion of France (1523), ref 1, ref 2; raises taxes, ref 1, ref 2; reads Katherine of Aragon’s letters, ref 1; negotiates divorce of Henry from Katherine of Aragon, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3; Henry suspects, ref 1; and suppression of religious dissidents, ref 1; fall from favour and dismissal, ref 1; driven north, ref 1; arrest and death, ref 1; interviews Elizabeth Barton, ref 1

Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Elizabeth in custody at, ref 1; Elizabeth revisits, ref 1

Woodstock, Thomas, ref 1

Worcester, Edward Somerset, 4th earl of, ref 1

Worcester, William Somerset, 3rd earl of, ref 1

workhouses, ref 1

Wriothesley, Sir Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, ref 1, ref 2

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, the younger: rebellion, ref 1, ref 2, ref 3

Wycliffe, John, ref 1

York: and Pilgrimage of Grace, ref 1; Mary Stuart in, ref 1

Yorkshire: rebellion (1536), ref 1

1. Henry VIII at the time of his accession: a golden youth in his prime.

2. Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. She was Henry’s first unhappy wife.

3. A woodcut showing the English knights at Flodden Field, who fought in the absence of their king.

4. The Field of the Cloth of Gold – diplomacy at its height.

5. A letter from Henry to his ‘good cardinal’, Thomas Wolsey, when they were still close collaborators.

6. Wolsey in all his glory before his fall.

7. Thomas More, England’s conscience, who incurred the enmity of the king.

8. The king trampling on the pope, an allegorical depiction typical of the times.

9. Unlucky Anne Boleyn, who incurred the wrath of her husband.

10. Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, a courtier eventually charged with high treason.

11. The martyrdom of the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. Their bowels were ripped open before their eyes.

12. The Pilgrimage of Grace, a northern rebellion for the sake of the ‘old faith’.

13. Jane Seymour, mother of Edward VI, the only consort of the king who produced a male heir.

14. Bishop Latimer’s arguments against Purgatory, a fiction of the papists. Henry’s own thoughts on the matter are annotated in the margin.

15 Thomas Cromwell in his finery before he, too, was disgraced and killed.

16 Anne of Cleves, the king’s unsuitable bride who survived her husband.

17. Title page of the Great Bible of 1539, the first authorized edition in the English language.

18 Katherine Howard, wedded and beheaded in quick succession.

19 Katherine Parr, the last and most fortunate of Henry’s queens.

20. An allegory of the Tudor family, an example of royal propaganda.

21. Edward VI, pale and sickly.

22. Lady Jane Grey, the queen of nine days before the accession of Mary.

23. Mary I, stubborn and imperious.

24. Philip of Spain, Mary’s unwilling husband who deserted her at the first opportunity.

25. An allegory of Stephen Gardiner, the papist Bishop of Winchester. This was painted during Edward’s reign when papists were considered to be the spawn of the devil.

26. Cranmer burning in Oxford – one of Mary’s many victims.

27. Elizabeth I as a young princess. Her early life was fraught with danger.

28. Elizabeth’s glorious signature in which she reveals her forceful and magisterial character.

29. Elizabeth in coronation robes, the image of splendour.

30 Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. He was always Elizabeth’s favourite and their affectionate relationship caused much scandal.

31. Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, executed for plotting against Elizabeth.

32. Elizabeth in Parliament, a body which she alternately appeased and bullied.

33. Mary Queen of Scots, the perpetual conspirator.

34. The execution of the Scottish queen, who believed that she died a martyr.

35. The pope’s bull against Elizabeth in 1570, in which he excommunicated her as a heretic.

36. The arrival of Elizabeth at Nonesuch Palace, ‘none such like it’ in the kingdom.

37. The unhappy route of the Armada, trapped by the sea no less than by English ships.

38 Sir Francis Drake, captain victorious and navigator extraordinaire.

39. Ark Royal, the English fleet’s flagship against the Armada.

40. William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal councillor, known to her as ‘Sir Spirit’.

41. Francis Walsingham, spymaster general and confidential councillor.

42. Robert Cecil, the great survivor, known to the queen as ‘my pigmy’.

43. James VI of Scotland, who would eventually become James I of England.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T.S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography

Brief Lives

Chaucer J.M.W. Turner Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2012 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan

an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

List of illustrations

1. A new Solomon

2. The plot

3. The beacons

4. The god of money

5. The angel

6. The vapours

7. What news?

8. A Bohemian tragedy

9. The Spanish travellers

10. An interlude

11. Vivat rex

12. A fall from grace

13. Take that slime away

14. I am the man

15. The crack of doom

16. The shrimp

17. Sudden flashings

18. Venture all

19. A great and dangerous treason

20. Madness and fury

21. A world of change

22. Worse and worse news

23. A world of mischief

24. Neither hot nor cold

25. The gates of hell

26. The women of war

27. The face of God

28. The mansion house of liberty

29. A game to play

30. To kill a king

31. This house to be let

32. Fear and trembling

33. Healing and settling

34. Is it possible?

35. The young gentleman

36. Oh, prodigious change!

37. On the road

38. To rise and piss

39. And not dead yet?

40. The true force

41. Hot news

42. New infirmities

43. Or at the Cock?

44. Noise rhymes to noise

45. The Protestant wind

Photographs

Further reading

Index

Also by Peter Ackroyd

Copyright

List of illustrations

1. James I of England and James VI of Scotland (John de Critz the Elder / Mary Evans Picture Library)

2. Anne of Denmark, James’s spouse (c.1605–10, Gheeraerts, Marcus (c.1561–1635) (attr. to)) / Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

3. James in front of his lords, temporal and spiritual (Mary Evans Picture Library / Everett Collection)

4. The title page of the King James Bible (© Photo Researchers / Mary Evans Picture Library)

5. The title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica (Mary Evans Picture Library)

6. George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham (Mary Evans / Iberfoto)

7. Henry, prince of Wales (Oliver, Isaac (c.1565–1617) Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK Bridgeman Images)

8. The future Charles I, as prince of Wales (Royal Armouries, Leeds, UK / Bridgeman Images)

9. Elizabeth, daughter of James I (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

10. Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria (Alinari Archives, Florence – Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per I Beni e le Attivit … Cu)

11. Three out of seven of Charles I’s children, painted by Anthony Van Dyck (Alinari Archives, Florence – Reproduced with the permission of Ministero per I Beni e le Attivit … Cu)

12. A disapproving illustration of the Rump Parliament (Interfoto Sammlung Rauch Mary Evans Picture Library)

13. What the Cavaliers are supposed to have done with the Puritans (Mary Evans Picture Library)

14. Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Private Collection Bridgeman Images)

15. A plan of the Battle of Naseby (Mary Evans Picture Library)

16. Prince Rupert of the Rhine (© Bolton Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

17. The trial of Charles I in Westminster Hall (Mary Evans Picture Library)

18. Charles I’s death warrant (Interfoto Sammlung Rauch Mary Evans Picture Library)

19. Oliver Cromwell (Robert Walker / Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) U.K. / Bridgeman Images)

20. A contemporary tapestry celebrating the restoration of Charles II (© The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, UK)

21. Charles II (Sir Peter Lely / © Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

22. Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II (Mary Evans / BeBa / Iberfoto)

23. Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland (after Sir Peter Lely / © Geffrye Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

24. Nell Gwynne (studio of Sir Peter Lely / Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, UK National Trust Photographic Library John Hammond / Bridgeman Images)

25. Louise de Kérouaille, Charles’s French mistress (Mary Evans / Epic / Tallandier)

26. The earl of Rochester (Sir Peter Lely Private Collection The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images)

27. Samuel Pepys (Sir Godfrey Kneller Royal Society of Arts, London, UK Bridgeman Images)

28. Sir Christopher Wren (Interfoto Friedrich Mary Evans)

29. Sir Isaac Newton (Mary Evans Picture Library / Imagno)

30. Charles II in his role as patron of the Royal Society (Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

31. The members of the ‘Cabal’ (Sir John Baptist de Medina Private Collection De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images)

32. The duke of Monmouth (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

33. The duke of York, soon to become James II, with his wife and daughters (Pierre Mignard Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014 Bridgeman Images)

34. The covert arrival of an infant, to be passed off as James II’s son (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

35. James Francis Edward Stuart as a baby with his mother, Mary of Modena (Benedetto Gennari the Younger Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images)

36. James II throwing the great seal into the Thames (Mary Evans Picture Library)

1

A new Solomon

Sir Robert Carey rode furiously from London to Edinburgh along the Great North Road, spending one night in Yorkshire and another in Northumberland; he arrived at Holyrood Palace, ‘be-bloodied with great falls and bruises’ after a journey of more than 330 miles. It was late at night on Saturday 26 March 1603. He was ushered into the presence of King James VI of Scotland and, falling to his knees, proclaimed him to be ‘King of England, France and Ireland’. He gave him as testimony a sapphire ring that his sister, Lady Scrope, had thrown to him from a window at Richmond Palace immediately after the death of Elizabeth I. ‘I have’, he told his new sovereign, ‘a blue ring from a fair lady.’

‘It is enough,’ James said. ‘I know by this you are a true messenger.’ The king had previously entrusted this ring to Lady Scrope in the event of the queen’s death.

A body of prelates and peers had already met Sir Robert Cecil, the principal councillor of the old queen, at Whitehall Gate before they proceeded with him to the cross at Cheapside where Cecil proclaimed James as king; bonfires and bells greeted the news of the swift and easy succession. Cecil himself declared that he had ‘steered King James’s ship into the right harbour, without cross of wave or tide that could have overturned a cock-boat’. The councillor had entered a secret correspondence with James before Elizabeth’s death; he had urged the Scottish king to nourish ‘a heart of adamant in a world of feathers’.

On 5 April James left Edinburgh to travel to his new realm. He had been the king of Scotland for thirty-six years, ever since he had assumed the throne at the age of thirteen months after the forced abdication of his mother Mary Queen of Scots. He had been a successful if not a glorious monarch, managing to curb the pretensions of an argumentative clergy and of a fractious nobility. From his earliest years the restive and combative spirit of the Scottish lords ensured that, in the words of the French ambassador, he had been nourished in fear. Yet he had by guile and compromise held on to his crown. Now, as he told his followers, he was about to enter the Land of Promise. He had already written to the council at Westminster, asking for money; he did not have the funds to finance his journey south.

The king did not perhaps expect so effusive and jubilant a welcome from his new subjects. He recalled later how ‘the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me’. They came to gaze at him, since none of them had experienced the rule of a male monarch. He himself was impressed by the prosperity of the land and by the evident wealth of its rulers. He said later that the first three years of his reign were ‘as a Christmas’. It took him a month to reach London, largely because he wished to avoid the funeral of his predecessor. He had no great fondness for Elizabeth; she had prevaricated over his right to the succession and, perhaps more significantly, had ordered the execution of his mother.

He reached York by the middle of April, where Cecil came to greet him. ‘Though you be but a little man,’ the king told him, ‘we shall surely load your shoulders with business.’ At Newark-on-Trent he gave orders that a cutpurse, preying upon his retinue, should summarily be hanged; he had not properly been informed on the provisions of English common law. It is an indication that he was still, in many important respects, a foreigner. At Burghley-by-Stamford he fell from his horse and broke his collar bone. Slowly he made his way to London. For three or four days he rested in Hertfordshire at Robert Cecil’s country home, Theobalds House, at which seat he took pleasure in creating many knights.

He was so generous with titles that he was accused of improvidence. The reign of Elizabeth witnessed the creation of 878 knights; in the first four months of the king’s rule, some 906 new men were awarded that honour. The queen had knighted those whom she considered to be of genuine merit or importance; James merely considered knighthood to be a mark of status. He was said to have knighted a piece of beef with the words ‘Arise, Sir Loin’. On another occasion he did not catch the name of the recipient and said, ‘Prithee, rise up, and call thyself Sir What Thou Wilt.’ Other titles could be purchased with cash. The diminution in the importance of honour marks one of the first changes to the old Tudor system.

Those who were permitted into the king’s presence may not have been entirely impressed. He was awkward and hesitant in manner; his legs were slightly bowed and his gait erratic, perhaps the consequence of rickets acquired in childhood. One admittedly hostile witness, Sir Anthony Weldon, also described him as forever ‘fiddling about his codpiece’.

He was a robust and fluent conversationalist, who rather liked to hear the sound of his own voice, but the effect upon his English audience was perhaps impaired by the fact that he retained a broad Scots accent. If he was eager to talk, he was also quick to laugh. He could be witty, but delivered his droll remarks in a grave and serious voice. His manners were not impeccable, and he was said to have slobbered over his food and drink. He paid little attention to his dress, but favoured thickly padded doublets that might impede an assassin’s dagger; ever since his childhood he had lived in fear of assault or murder. He was said to have a horror of naked steel. He had a restless, roving eye; he paid particular notice to those at court who were not known to him.

On 7 May he rode towards London, but was greeted 4 miles outside the city by the lord mayor and innumerable citizens. He lodged at the Charterhouse for four nights, and then made his way to the Tower, where he remained for a few days. While staying in the royal apartments he began an excited tour of his capital, ‘secretly in his coach and by water’, as one contemporary put it; he was particularly struck by the sight of the crown jewels, held at the palace in Whitehall. Here was the glittering and unmistakable evidence of his newfound wealth.

Yet London was not a pleasure-dome. Even as he approached it, the plague began its secret ministry in the streets and alleys; by the end of the summer it had claimed the lives of 30,000 citizens. A grand state entry had been planned for 25 July, the day of the coronation, but the fear of infected crowds curtailed the ceremony; there would be a crowning, but no state procession.

Even in these early months of the reign conspiracies began to mount against his throne. A group of gentlemen, among them Sir Walter Raleigh and Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, were suspected of a scheme to depose James and to replace him with his cousin Arabella Stuart; like most conspiracies it was plagued by rumour, indecision and premature disclosure. Raleigh was arrested and consigned to the Tower, where two weeks later he attempted suicide; at his subsequent trial he was denounced by the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, as ‘a spider of hell’.

Raleigh: You speak indiscreetly, barbarously and uncivilly.

Coke: I want words sufficient to express thy viperous treasons.

Raleigh: You want words, indeed, for you have spoken the one thing half a dozen times.

This was the end of what was called ‘the Main Plot’. A ‘Bye Plot’ was also discovered, whereby the king was to be kidnapped by priests and forced to suspend the laws against Roman Catholics. It came to nothing, of course, except for the deaths of the principals engaged in it.

The time had come for the formal, if subdued, coronation of the king; the archbishop of Canterbury performed the ceremony expeditiously in the sight of an invited audience. James’s consort, Anne of Denmark, agreed to receive her crown from the archbishop; as a Catholic, however, she refused to partake of Protestant communion. Being of a complaisant and gregarious disposition she caused very little trouble for the rest of her husband’s reign. Her chaplain once remarked that ‘the king himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together’. After the ceremony the royal family left pestilential London for the healthier air of the country. James and Anne made their first ‘progress’ in the August of the year, making their way to Winchester and Southampton before turning north into Oxfordshire; in this, they were following the fashion of the king’s illustrious predecessor.

James had already established, however, the foundations of his court and council. In particular he took care to reward his Scottish nobles with the most prominent positions in his personal retinue. The centre of his rule lay in the royal bedchamber, which was almost wholly staffed by the entourage that had followed him from his native land. This was a source of much discontent and disquiet among the English courtiers; it was said that the Scottish lords stood like mountains between the beams of the king’s grace and themselves. Yet a new privy chamber was also established, half of Scots and half of English; the king revelled in his role as ‘the pacifier’, and this equal pairing evinced his moderation.

Among the English councillors the palm was awarded to Sir Robert Cecil and to the Howards. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, was appointed as lord warden of the cinque ports at the beginning of 1604 and, a year later, lord privy seal; in the previous reign he had sent what James called ‘Asiatic and endless volumes’ of advice to Edinburgh. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, was lord chamberlain. Cecil, soon to become Viscount Cranborne and then earl of Salisbury, was in fact pre-eminent; he was very small, with a hunched back, but he stood above the others. The king had told him that ‘before God I count you the best servant that ever I had, albeit you be but a beagle’. He often addressed him as ‘my little beagle’. Cecil managed parliament, and the revenues; he supervised Ireland and all foreign affairs. He was forever industrious, highly efficient and always courteous; he had borne with patience all the humiliating remarks about his appearance and physique. He was the ultimate civil servant and his cousin, Francis Bacon, once said of him that he might prevent public affairs getting worse but could not make them any better. That is perhaps too harsh; Cecil had so great a political intelligence that he may qualify as a statesman. Snapping at his heels, however, was Henry Howard.

Elizabeth’s council had comprised some thirteen members; James soon doubled its size, but took great pleasure in avoiding its meetings. He favoured private deliberations, in the seclusion of his bedchamber, where he could then delegate responsibility. He preferred intimate meetings where his wit and common sense could compensate for his lack of dignity. He did not particularly like London in any case, and always preferred to go hunting in the countryside beyond; from this vantage James once wrote a complacent letter to his councillors, imagining them to be ‘frying in the pains of purgatory’ upon royal business. Yet he made quick and sudden visits to the capital, when his presence was deemed to be indispensable; he said that he came ‘like a flash of lightning, both in going, staying there, and returning’.

The palace of Whitehall was a straggling complex of some 1,400 rooms, closets and galleries and chambers huddled together. It was a place of secrets and of clandestine meetings, of staged encounters and sudden quarrels. This is the proper setting for John Donne’s satires as well as for Ben Jonson’s two Roman plays on the nature of ambition and corruption. It is also the setting for the great age of the masque. A ball, or a comedy, was staged every other day.

Yet the court is also the most significant context for the collection of Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, which came to include the architectural drawings of Palladio as well as the work of Holbein, Raphael and Dürer. The great lords and courtiers also built elaborate houses at Audley End, Hatfield and elsewhere. The earl of Northampton furnished his house in the Strand with Turkish carpets, Brussels tapestries and Chinese porcelain; he also owned globes, and maps of all the principal nations. This is the burgeoning world of Jacobeanism.

*

On his progress to London from Edinburgh, at the beginning of his reign, the king was given a petition; it was an appeal from his puritan subjects that became known as the ‘millenary petition’, bearing the signatures of 1,000 ministers of religion. In moderate terms it suggested to the king that the sign of the cross should be removed from the baptismal ceremony and that the marriage ring was unnecessary. The words ‘priest’ and ‘absolution’ should be ‘corrected’, and the rite of confirmation abolished. The cap and the surplice, the vestments of conformity, were not to be ‘urged’.

The king himself liked nothing so much as doctrinal discussion, in which he could display his learning. The first important act of his reign, therefore, was to bring together a small number of clerics at his palace of Hampton Court where they might debate matters of religious policy and religious principle. Five distinguished and learned puritan ministers were matched against the leading ecclesiastics of the realm, among them the archbishop of Canterbury and eight bishops.

This was an age of religious polemic, perhaps prophesying the civil wars of the succeeding reign. On the side of the bishops were those generally satisfied with the doctrines and ceremonies of the established Church; they were moderate; they espoused the union of Church and state. They put more trust in communal worship than in private prayer; they acknowledged the role of custom, experience and reason in spiritual matters. It may not have been a fully formed faith, but it served to bind together those of unclear or flexible belief. It also suited those who simply wished to conform with their neighbours.

On the side of the puritans were those more concerned with the exigencies of the private conscience. They believed in the natural depravity of man, unless the sinner be redeemed by grace. They abhorred the practice of confession and encouraged intensive self-examination as well as self-discipline. They did not wish for a sacramental priesthood but a preaching ministry; they accepted the word of Scripture as the source of all divine truth. They took their compass from the stirrings of providence. Men and women of a puritan tradition were utterly obedient to God’s absolute will from which no ritual or sacrament could avert them. This lent them zeal and energy in their attempt to purify the world or, as one puritan theologian put it, ‘a holy violence in the performing of all duties’. Sometimes they spoke out as the spirit moved them. It was said, unfairly, that they loved God with all their soul and hated their neighbour with all their heart.

They were not at this stage, however, rival creeds; they are perhaps better regarded as opposing tendencies within the same Church, and their first formal confrontation took place at Hampton Court in the middle of winter. The proceedings of the first day, 14 January 1604, were confined to the king and his ecclesiastics. James debated with his bishops the changes suggested in the ‘millenary petition’. On the second day the puritan divines were invited to attend. John Reynolds, the first to be called, argued that the English Church should embrace Calvinist doctrine. The bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, quickly intervened. He knelt down before the king and demanded that ‘the ancient canon might be remembered’, by which he meant that ‘schismatici’ should not be permitted to speak against the bishops. James allowed the discussion on specific matters to continue.

In the subsequent debate the king seems to have been shrewd and judicious. He did not accede to the puritans’ demand for Calvinism, but he did accept their proposal for an improved translation of the Bible. This request bore magnificent fruit in the King James translation published later in the reign. The delegates then discussed the problem of providing a learned ministry, and the difficulties of dealing with issues of private conscience. The king was willing to concede certain matters to the puritans, in the evident belief that a middle way would encourage unity within the Church. In the bitter weather the fires of Hampton Court roared, while the king sat in his furs; the bishops, and even the puritan delegates, were also clad in fur cloaks.

All seemed to be proceeding without much incident until Reynolds recommended that the bishops of the realm should consult with the ‘presbyters’. At this, the king bridled. ‘Presbyter’, the term for the elder or minister of a Christian church, had for him unfortunate connotations. He had previously been outraged by the Presbyterian divines of Scotland, who did not always treat His Majesty with appropriate respect; they inclined towards republicanism and even egalitarianism. One of them, Andrew Melville, had called him to his face ‘God’s silly vassal’.

James now told Reynolds and his colleagues that they seemed to be aiming ‘at a Scottish Presbytery which agreeth with monarchy as well as God and the devil’. He added that it would mean ‘Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings’. He concluded with advice to Reynolds that ‘until you find that I grow lazy, leave it alone’. His motto from this time forward would be ‘no bishop, no king’. He observed, as the puritan delegates left his presence, that ‘if this be all they have to say, I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse’.

Two days later the king summoned the bishops for a further conference. He then called back the puritans, and ordered them to conform to the whole of the orthodox Book of Common Prayer reissued forty-five years before. The conference was over. The impending translation was the greatest benefit of the proceedings but, altogether, the conference cannot be counted a great success. It had now emerged that there was perhaps not one national Church, after all, but at least two Churches with different meanings and purposes.

The king was, as ever, delighted with his performance at Hampton Court. ‘I peppered them soundly,’ he said. The bishops had told him that he had spoken with the power of inspiration. ‘I know not what they mean,’ Sir John Harington wrote to his wife, ‘but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed.’ The king had said, at one point, ‘A turd for this argument. I would rather my child were baptized by an ape as by a woman.’ He also chastised the puritans by remonstrating ‘Away with your snivelling!’

He was, however, in many respects a learned man. All his life he had argued, and debated, with his Scottish clergy. He delighted in theological controversy, and according to an early observer ‘he apprehends clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory’. The king also believed himself to be a master of the written word and composed volumes on demonology, monarchy, witchcraft and smoking. On his accession medal he is crowned with a laurel wreath, a sure sign of his literary pretensions. He even replied to ‘rayling rhymes’ published against him with his own doggerel verse. In 1616 he collected all of his prose writings into a folio volume, the first English monarch ever to do so. So he became known, sometimes sarcastically, as ‘the British Solomon’.

John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, now close to death, realized that the conclusion of the Hampton Court conference was by no means the end of religious controversy. He knew well enough that parliament, about to meet, contained many lords and gentlemen of a puritan persuasion. The king had decided to ride in state through the capital four days before the opening of parliament on 19 March 1604. Now that the threat of plague had lifted it was declared that people from every ‘county, borough, precinct, city, hamlet’ had flocked to give praise to the new monarch. Seven triumphal arches, in the style of imperial Rome, were erected along the processional route from the Tower to Whitehall. Yet magnificence did not necessarily command assent.

It was a large parliament, eager to take the measure of James I. In his opening speech the king made some remarks upon the state of religion and admonished the puritans for ‘being ever discontented with the present government’. When it became clear that the Commons were more concerned with various matters of privilege and grievance, James rebuked them ‘as a father to his children’. Further causes of contention soon emerged.

A dispute had arisen over the election of a member for Buckinghamshire and the ensuing argument pitched king against parliament. On 5 April the Speaker delivered a message from James that he desired ‘as an absolute king’ that there might be a conference between the Commons and the judges. No monarch had spoken to parliament in that manner for years. Silence and amazement followed this peremptory request, whereupon one member stood up and said that ‘the prince’s command is like a thunderbolt; his command upon our allegiance like the roaring of a lion; to his command there is no contradiction’.

That was not necessarily the case. In the middle of April it was proposed that James should assume the title of king of Great Britain, with the union of his kingdoms; it might have been deemed a mere formality under the circumstances. But the Commons were not so easily to be persuaded. What kind of union was being proposed? Economic? Constitutional? By what laws will this ‘Britain’ be governed? There might be a flood of Scots taking up all posts and honours. How could the common law of England be consistent with the legal traditions of Scotland or even with the customs of Ireland?

The king himself was adamant. ‘I am the husband,’ he said, ‘and all the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body.’ Did they wish him to be a polygamist with two separate wives? The debate lingered into the succeeding year with what the king called ‘many crossings, long disputations, strange questions, and nothing done’. He had a vision of a united kingdom with one law, one language and one faith; yet the practicalities of the period rendered the ambition useless. The English demanded, for example, that the Scots be taxed at the same rate as themselves; the Scots demurred, pleading poverty. The Commons had already agreed that since ‘we cannot make any laws to bind Britannia … let us proceed with a leaden foot’. The king’s enthusiasm for the project was as great as his anger against the opponents of union.

Parliament then turned its attention to matters of religion, and in particular to the work of the Hampton Court conference. It was here, as we have seen, that Archbishop Whitgift sensed trouble from the great puritan gentry who had already taken their seats. By the end of May the Commons had brought in two bills, one of which was directed against pluralists and non-residents; these men, who held more than one clerical living or were keen to relegate their duties, included some of the most prominent members of the established Church. The bias of the Commons was clear enough. The second bill expressed the desire for ‘a learned and godly ministry’, a request tantamount to a demand for puritanism.

The king was vexed, and by way of justification a parliamentary committee drew up a ‘form of apology and satisfaction’, read to the Commons on 20 June, in which were defended such rights as freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. It was declared that ‘our privileges and liberties are our true right and due inheritance, no less than our lands and goods’. It was a parliamentary way, perhaps, of introducing a Scottish king to the peculiar constitution of England. Another section stated that ‘your majesty should be misinformed if any man should deliver that the kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to alter religion … or to make any laws covering the same’. The ‘form of apology’ was never presented to the king; it may have been rejected by a majority as too extreme.

Without doubt, however, James came to hear of it; he resented its implication and was angered at its impudence. He came down to prorogue parliament on 7 July, where in the course of his speech he berated some of its members for being ‘idle heads, some rash, some busy informers’. He said that in Scotland he was heard with respect whereas here there was ‘nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with my propositions’. In Scotland ‘all things warranted that came from me. Here all things suspected.’ He added that ‘you have done many things rashly, I say not you meant disloyally’. Then, at the conclusion, he advised that ‘only I wish you had kept a better form. I like form as much as matter.’

He was perhaps waiting for the assistance of Richard Bancroft, newly installed as archbishop of Canterbury, who was a firm upholder of the royal prerogative and no lover of puritans. Even then Bancroft was steering the convocation of senior clergy towards a statement of general religious conformity; the canons of 1604 gave nothing to the puritans but demanded that they submit to the Book of Common Prayer and to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The sectarian ministers must conform or be deprived. The more draconian penalties were in truth rarely applied, but the measures marked the first schism in the history of the reformed English Church.

So the king had prorogued parliament with a very bad grace, little or nothing having been achieved by it. He stated at a later date that it was a body without a head. ‘At their meetings,’ he is reported to have said, ‘nothing is heard but cries, shouts and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have allowed such an institution to come into existence.’ His opinion may have been shared by others. In the winter of 1604 Thomas Percy sub-leased a house beside the Palace of Westminster and, with the assistance of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators, began to excavate a tunnel.

2

The plot

In these early years the king was proclaimed as a Caesar, a David, a Noah, a Joash and even a Homer. He was a second Augustus, a true Josiah, a wise and religious sovereign. It is difficult to know what this bewildering wealth of parallels might signify, but one virtue soon became predominant. He was ‘rex pacificus’ or ‘Jacobus pacificus’. Blessed was the peacemaker. His was the reign of the fig tree and the vine.

Others were not so satisfied by the pleasures of peace. ‘Na, na,’ James is supposed to have said after his coronation, ‘we’ll not need papists now.’ He had wooed them in case of trouble, but could now afford to discard them. In February 1604, the Jesuit priests who owed all their obedience to Rome were banished from the realm. It was a sensible precaution, perhaps, but for fervent Catholics it was an ominous sign.

Among these was Thomas Winter, or Wintour, who had unsuccessfully appealed to Philip III of Spain for aid on behalf of the faithful. In the same month of February 1604, he visited his cousin, Robert Catesby, at Lambeth. Catesby was possibly a convert from Protestantism and therefore one in whom the Roman fire burned ever more brightly. It was he, rather than Guy Fawkes, who led what became known as the ‘powder plot’. Catesby informed his cousin of his grand plan to blow up parliament with gunpowder, but of course he needed allies in the work. In April Winter travelled to Flanders from which place he brought back Fawkes himself. We may now refer to them as conspirators. ‘Shall we always, gentlemen, talk,’ Thomas Percy said, ‘and never do anything?’ In the following month an oath of secrecy was sworn before they made their way to a house behind the church of St Clement Eastcheap, where they met a Jesuit by the name of Gerard who administered to them the Holy Sacrament.

It was now agreed that a dwelling conveniently close to parliament must be found, but it was not until the beginning of December that a suitable property became available. On the 11th of the month they entered the house, carrying with them a stock of hard-boiled eggs and baked meats. By Christmas Eve the conspirators had dug their way down and, in the words of Thomas Winter, ‘wrought under a little entry to the wall of the parliament house and underpropped it as we went with wood’. They believed that the next session would begin in February 1605, but now they learned that it was prorogued until the following October. They had more time. The gunpowder was being stored at Catesby’s lodgings in Lambeth but, under conditions of great secrecy and security, it was brought to the house at Westminster. They had already made some progress in penetrating the 9-foot wall, but their work was impeded by the influx of water.

One day, soon after the gunpowder had been acquired, they heard a rustling sound above their heads. Fawkes went out of doors and cautiously investigated. He was met by Ellen Bright, coal merchant, who informed him that she was leaving the premises; it so happened that her cellar or vault ran under the parliament house itself. The deal was quickly settled; Thomas Percy, another conspirator, secured the lease of the space. An iron gate between the basement of the conspirators’ house and Mrs Bright’s cellar was opened, and Fawkes was able to smuggle some thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into the neighbouring vault. There was enough powder to destroy many thousands of people.

By September fresh barrels of gunpowder were acquired in order to replace those affected by damp. Funds were running low, however, and it was deemed advisable to bring in three other conspirators with money or property. Thirteen men were by this time apprised of the secret, leaving thirteen ways for the secret to be betrayed. One of the newly recruited conspirators, Francis Tresham, pleaded strongly that his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, should be spared the general conflagration. Monteagle was a staunch Catholic who had already defended his Church in the House of Lords. The others demurred at the exception, however well meant. Monteagle was sitting down for dinner on 26 October, at his house in Hoxton, when a letter was brought to him by a messenger. He glanced at it and then requested one of his gentlemen to read it aloud.

‘My lord, out of the love I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this parliament…’ So it began. The correspondent then went on to warn that ‘they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them’. Monteagle immediately set out for Whitehall with the letter in his hand. He came upon Robert Cecil, now the newly created earl of Salisbury, sitting down to supper with some other members of the privy council.

Monteagle took Salisbury into an adjoining room, and showed him the document. Salisbury was at first inclined to dismiss the matter as a false alarm but, on his consulting his colleagues, the possibility of gunpowder as a ‘terrible blow’ was discussed. The lord chamberlain, the earl of Suffolk, knew intimately the interior of parliament; in particular he was aware of the damp and capacious cellars beneath the building. He, and other privy councillors, agreed that they should be searched before the beginning of the session that had been further postponed to 5 November; but they did not wish to act too precipitately for fear of scaring away the plotters.

The king had been hunting at Royston and, on his return to London at the beginning of November, the letter was shown to him. Instantly he agreed that it suggested ‘some stratagem of fire and powder’. On the afternoon of Monday 4 November, Suffolk and Monteagle began their search on the excuse that they were looking for some property belonging to the king. Guy Fawkes opened the door of the cellar.

Suffolk: To whom do these coals and faggots belong?

Fawkes: They belong to Mr Thomas Percy, one of his majesty’s gentlemen pensioners.

Thomas Percy was of course a known Catholic, at a time when there was some fear of Catholic disaffection. The king now ordered a further and more thorough search. At eleven o’clock that night a Westminster magistrate, Sir Thomas Knyvett, went down to the cellar with certain soldiers. The door was once more opened by Guy Fawkes. Knyvett then began to brush aside the coals and the bundles of wood only to discover the barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes made no attempt at flight or combat. He admitted that he intended to blow up the king and the two houses of parliament on the following morning. It seems that he was prepared to light a slow match and then to make his way to Wapping where he would take boat to Gravelines in France. When he was asked later, in formal questioning by the council, the reason for procuring so much gunpowder he replied that he wanted ‘to blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains’. The king was informed of Fawkes’s capture, and gave thanks for his miraculous deliverance.

It was, perhaps, not a miracle at all. Francis Tresham and Lord Monteagle may have conspired in the production of the letter, as a device to gain the favour of the king. It has also been suggested that Salisbury himself was aware of the conspiracy but allowed it to proceed as a way of catching out the Catholics; this is highly unlikely, but not wholly impossible.

News of the arrest, and the intended treason, soon spread. Robert Catesby and the other conspirators fled from London, hoping to create the conditions for a Catholic rising; but the Catholic gentlemen were not about to commit suicide. The principal fugitives then took refuge in Holbeche House, on the borders of Staffordshire, where a lighted coal or stray spark ignited the gunpowder they were carrying with them. Two or three were injured, and were inclined to see in the accident a sign of divine displeasure. One of them cried out, ‘Woe worth the time that we have seen this day!’ They then knelt in prayer before a picture of the Virgin. The sheriff of Worcester was on their track; his men surrounded the house and fired on its occupants. Some were killed, while the wounded were taken back to London; Catesby was among those shot dead.

Other conspirators were found in hiding over the next few days. On 27 January 1606, Guy Fawkes and seven others were brought for trial to Westminster Hall where all but one of them pleaded innocence. They were executed a few days later. The Jesuits, who had condoned if not connived in the plot, were soon enough taken to the scaffold. So ended ‘the powder plot’. Seven years later the study of Robert Cotton, librarian and antiquarian, was found to contain certain sainted relics of the plotters, including a finger, a toe and a piece of a rib.

The king himself, despite his miraculous survival, was not comforted. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘the king is in terror, he does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him.’ James seemed subdued and melancholy, occasionally giving vent to his anger against the Catholics. ‘I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood,’ he said, ‘though sorely against my will.’ It did not come to that.

The members of the Commons had continued their ordinary business on the day they were meant to be destroyed; a committee on Spanish trade was established, and a petition was discussed from a member asking to be excused on account of gout. Yet by the end of May 1606, they had passed an Act ‘for the better discovering and repressing of popish recusants’; one of its provisions was an oath of allegiance, drawn up by Archbishop Bancroft, which acknowledged James to be the lawful king beyond any power of the pope to depose him. Catholics were obliged to attend the services of the established Church and to receive holy communion at least once a year; the penalties included fines or the impropriation of property. No recusant was to come within 10 miles of London, and a statute of the previous reign was revived prohibiting any recusant from travelling further than 5 miles from his or her home. No recusant could practise as an attorney or as a doctor.

These measures did not bring about the demise of the old faith. The Catholics merely withdrew from political activity during the reign of James and largely remained quiet or quiescent. Most of them were willing to accept the oath of allegiance in order to secure both peace and property; only the Jesuitically inclined were still eager to support the pretensions of the pope. James himself said of the oath that he wished to make a distinction between the doctrinaire Catholics and those ‘who although they were otherwise popishly affected, yet retained in their hearts the print of their natural duty to their sovereign’. The previous sanctions against the puritans had been only hesitantly or partially imposed; the same policy of caution was now pursued against the Catholics. James had no wish to make martyrs out of his subjects. It was in any case far easier, in the early seventeenth century, to make laws than to enforce them.

The court of James I, its excesses having already become public knowledge, was now notorious for its laxity; drunkenness and dissimulation, venality and promiscuity, were its most significant characteristics. Freedom of manners was the only rule. The earl of Pembroke was believed to have a horror of frogs, so the king put one down his neck. The king himself had an aversion to pigs, and so Pembroke led one into the royal bedchamber. One courtier took into the palace at Whitehall ‘four brawny pigs, piping hot, bitted and harnessed with ropes of sausages, all tied to a monstrous pudding’. The sausages were hurled about the room while the fools and dwarves of the court began leaping on one another’s shoulders.

In Sejanus, His Fall, a play performed in the first year of the king’s reign, Ben Jonson alluded to courtiers when he wrote that:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft and glutinous bodies that can stick

Like snails on painted walls …

‘If I were to imitate the conduct of your republic,’ the king told the Venetian ambassador, ‘and begin to punish those who take bribes, I should soon not have a single subject left.’

When the king of Denmark arrived in the summer of 1606 the courtiers of Whitehall were said by Sir John Harington ‘to wallow in beastly delights’ while the ladies ‘abandon their sobriety and are seen to roll about in intoxication’. A great feast was held for the two sovereigns, in the course of which was shown a representation of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The lady who played the queen carried various gifts to the two kings ‘but forgetting the steps arising to the canopy overset her caskets into his Danish majesty’s lap and fell at his feet … His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba, but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state.’ Other actors in the pageant, such as Hope and Faith, ‘were both sick and spewing in the lower hall’. Harington concluded that ‘the gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads’ and ‘I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety, as I have now done’. He yearned for the days of his godmother, the Virgin Queen, when a certain stateliness and severity touched the atmosphere of the court.

There could be no doubt that the new court differed markedly from its predecessor. The king was known to be devoted to his pleasures rather than what were considered to be his duties. He attended the fights of the Cockpit in Whitehall Palace twice a week, and, like his predecessor, loved to ride or hunt every day. When James rode up to the dead hart he dismounted and cut its throat with dispatch; he then sated the dogs with its blood before wiping his bloodied hands across the faces of his fellow horsemen.

It soon became clear that he did not enjoy the company of spectators at his sports. Quite unlike his predecessor he disliked and even detested crowds. When the people flocked about him he would swear at them and cry out, ‘What would they have?’ On one occasion he was told that they had come in love and reverence. To which he replied, in a broad Scots accent, ‘God’s wounds, I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.’ He would bid ‘A pox on you!’ or ‘A plague on you!’ As a result of outbursts of anger such as this he became, in the words of the Venetian ambassador, ‘despised and almost hated’.

He justified his exertions at the hunt on the grounds that his vigour was ‘the health and welfare of them all’, no doubt meaning both the court and the nation. Let his officers waste away in closets or at the council table. He must be strong and virile. In any case, he said, he could do more business in an hour than his councillors could manage in a day; he spent less time in hunting than other monarchs did in whoring. One day a favourite dog, Jowler, disappeared from the pack. On the following morning it reappeared with a note tied around its neck. ‘Good Mr Jowler we pray you speak to the king (for he hears you every day and so doth he not us) that it will please his majesty to go back to London, for else the country will be undone.’ When eventually James did return to Whitehall he feasted and played cards, at which sport he lost large sums of money.

James was continually and heavily in debt. He had thought to come into a realm of gold, but soon found his purse to be bare. Or, rather, he emptied it too readily. He bought boots and silk stockings and beaver hats in profusion. Court ceremonial was more lavish with the arrival of ever more ‘gentlemen extraordinary’. There was a vogue at court for ‘golden play’ or gambling. The king loved masques and feasts, which were for him a true sign of regality. He wished to have a masque on the night of Christmas, whereupon he was told that it was not the fashion. ‘What do you tell me of the fashion?’ he enquired. ‘I will make it a fashion.’

The king also purchased plate and jewels, which he then proceeded to distribute among his followers. It was said that he had given to one or two men more than his predecessor had given to all of her courtiers during the whole of her reign. The earl of Shrewsbury remarked that Elizabeth ‘valued every molehill that she gave … a mountain, which our sovereign now does not’. His generosity to favourites and to courtiers was by the standard of any age in English history exceptional.

One particular favourite emerged in the spring of 1607. Robert Carr, twenty-one, was a model of affability and deportment; he was also exceptionally handsome. He took part in a tournament in the king’s presence, but he was thrown from his horse and broke his leg. The king was much affected and ordered his own doctor to take charge of the young man; Carr was carried to the hospital at Charing Cross, where the king visited him every day. The patient was placed on a choice diet and, at the insistence of James, was surrounded by surgeons. It was clear to the courtiers that here was a man worth flattering. ‘Lord!’ one contemporary, Sir Anthony Weldon, wrote, ‘how the great men flocked to see him, and to offer to his shrine in such abundance…’ James had become infatuated with him and, by the end of the year, Carr had been knighted and appointed as a gentleman of the bedchamber. The king decided to educate as well as to promote him. He himself gave Carr lessons in Latin grammar and in the politics of Europe. And of course he lavished gold and jewels upon him. It was observed that the king ‘leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smoothes his ruffled garments…’

Sir John Harington was still seeking preferment at court after a lifetime of service to Elizabeth. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, took him aside and offered some advice. He was told that the king ‘doth wonderfully covet learned discourse’ and ‘doth admire good fashion in cloaths’. He was instructed to ‘get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it be not all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and bushy’. Eighteen courtiers had already been dismissed for not conforming to the king’s taste in male attire.

Suffolk suggested to Harington that in his conversation he should not dwell too long on any one subject, and touch only lightly on the topic of religion. Never say that ‘this is good or bad’ but modestly state that ‘if it were your majesty’s good opinion, I myself should think so and so’. Do not ask questions. Do not speak about the character or temperament of anyone else at court. Remember to praise the king’s horse, a roan jennet. You must say that the stars are bright jewels fit for Robert Carr’s ears, and that the roan jennet surpasses Bucephalus and is worthy to be ridden by Alexander.

Suffolk also advised Harington that ‘silence and discretion should be linked together, like dog and bitch’. The previous sovereign had always spoken of her subjects’ ‘love and good affections’, but James preferred to talk of their ‘fear and subjection’. Why did Harington wish to come to court in the first place? ‘You are not young, you are not handsome, you are not finely.’ So he must rely upon his learning, which the king would admire.

Soon enough James took Harington aside, and questioned him in his private closet. He quizzed him on Aristotle and other philosophers; he asked him to read out a passage from Ariosto, and praised his elocution. He then posed a series of questions to him. What do you think pure wit is made of? Should a king not be the best clerk [the most learned] in his own country? Do you truly understand why the devil works more with ancient women than with others? He told Harington that the death of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been foretold and that at the time of her execution a bloody head was seen dancing in the air; he dilated on the powers of prophecy and recommended several books on the matter. The king concluded by discussing ‘the new weed’, tobacco, and declared that ‘it would, by its use, infuse ill qualities on the brain’. So ended the audience. Harington passed through the court ‘amidst the many varlets and lordly servants who stood around’. Yet he had passed the test, and was appointed as tutor to the young Prince Henry.

Reasons other than favouritism can be adduced for the king’s indebtedness. The steady rise in prices, and the reluctance of landowners to pay further taxation, all contributed to the rise in the expenditure of the court above its income. The cost of an extended royal household, complete with wife and three children, was also very high. Queen Anne was extravagant and devoted to the delights of fashionable London; her husband had proposed that she might confine herself to the 3,000 dresses in the previous queen’s wardrobe, but she did not care for some of the old fashions. She would appear at court in the guise of a goddess or a nymph, an Eastern sultana or an Arab princess.

James was perpetually surprised by his debts, and continually promised to be more economical; yet it was not in his nature to be thrifty. ‘My only hope that upholds me,’ he told Salisbury, ‘is my good servants, that will sweat and labour for my relief.’ But where was the money to be found? Certain taxes had been levied ‘time out of mind’, or at least since the latter years of the fourteenth century. ‘Tonnage’ was the duty levied on each ‘tun’ or cask of wine; ‘poundage’ was the tax raised on every pound sterling of exported or imported goods. James decided to revise the book of rates, however, and to impose new levies that came to be known as ‘impositions’.

A merchant by the name of John Bate refused to pay. He drove a cartload of currants from the waterside before the customs officials had the opportunity to tax them; he was brought before the council, where he declared that the ‘imposition’ was illegal. His became a test case before the court of the exchequer which ruled that the king had absolute power in the matter; in all aspects of foreign trade, his prerogative was assured.

Nevertheless opposition arose in parliament, where there was talk of money being poured into bottomless coffers. In October 1607 James addressed his council on the pressing problems concerning ‘this eating canker of want’. He promised to abide by any ‘cure’ they prescribed and to accept ‘such remedies and antidotes as you are to apply unto my disease’. The case was not an easy one. Salisbury tried various expedients for raising money, by fining for long-forgotten transgressions or by extorting as many feudal ‘aids’ to the king as he could find.

Yet the Commons were not impressed by the measures. It was an ancient principle that the sovereign of England should ‘live of his own’; he should maintain his estate, and bear the cost of government, out of his own resources. It was also universally believed that taxation was an extraordinary measure only to be raised in time of war. The first parliament of James I was summoned for five sessions from March 1604 to February 1611, and in that long period it acquired the beginning of a corporate identity largely lacking during the reign of Elizabeth. More business was enacted, and parliament sat for longer. In 1607, for example, the Commons instituted a ‘committee of the whole house’. This committee could elect its own chairman, as opposed to the Speaker chosen by the sovereign, and could debate freely for as long as it wished. It was at the time seen as a remarkable innovation, and might be considered the harbinger of strife between court and parliament.

A group of disparate and variously inclined parliamentarians was not necessarily on the king’s side. Francis Bacon wrote to the king that ‘that opposition which was, the last parliament, to your majesty’s business, as much as was not ex puris naturalibus but out of party, I conceive to be now much weaker than it was’. This did not yet embody the partisanship of later struggles, or the creation of ‘parties’ in the modern sense, but it suggests a change in national affairs. Some of the disputatious details have been recorded. Sir Edward Herbert ‘plops’ with his mouth at Mr Speaker. John Tey complains that Mr Speaker is ‘clipping him off’ and proceeds to threaten him.

The king had another doughty opponent. A legal dispute had arisen. Was there a distinction between those Scots born before James’s accession to the English throne and those born after it? The king argued that those born after his accession were naturalized by common law and, therefore, could hold office in England. James turned to the judges whom he assumed to take his part. One of them refused to do so. Sir Edward Coke had been chief justice of the common pleas since 1605, and was an impassioned exponent of English common law. James had no real conception of common law, having been educated in the very different jurisprudence of Scotland. Coke believed, for example, that both sovereign and subject were accountable to a body of ancient law that had been conceived in practice and clarified by usage; it represented immemorial general custom, but it was also a law of reason. This was not, however, the king’s opinion. He had already firmly stated that ‘the king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto’. From this it could be construed that the king possessed an arbitrary authority. James alleged, for example, that he could decide cases in person. Coke demurred: a case could only be judged in a lawcourt. Coke’s own report tells the story of bad blood.

James: I thought the law was founded on reason. I and others have reason as well as the judges.

Coke: Although, sir, you have great endowments of nature, yet you are not learned in the laws of England. Causes are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law.

More debate followed.

James: So then I am under the law? It is treason to affirm that!

Coke: Bracton has said that the king should not be under man but under God and the law.

An observer noted that ‘his majesty fell in that high indignation as the like was never known in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike him, which the Lord Coke perceiving fell flat on all fours…’ Coke might yield and beg for mercy, but over succeeding years the debate between the Crown and the law continued with ever greater volume and seriousness.

The manoeuvres of the court were never still. The favourite, now Sir Robert Carr, needed land to complement his title. By Carr’s great good fortune Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated, had forfeited his interest in the manor of Sherborne; he thought that he had conveyed it to his son, but the king’s council believed otherwise. It was given to the favourite. Lady Raleigh, accompanied by her two sons, was admitted into the king’s presence where she threw herself at his feet. ‘I maun have the land’ was his only reply. ‘I maun have it for Carr.’ This is the true voice of the king.

3

The beacons

In 1605 one of the king’s ‘learned counsel’ presented him with a treatise that summoned up the spirit of a new age. Francis Bacon’s ‘Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human’ is better known to posterity as The Advancement of Learning; it can justifiably be said to have changed the terms of human understanding and the nature of knowledge. Bacon had been a royal servant for some years under the patronage of his uncle, Lord Burghley, and had been first enlisted in the court of Elizabeth. But the advent of a new king promised more tangible rewards and, soon after the accession, Bacon provided James with texts of advice on such matters as the union of Scotland with England and ecclesiastical polity.

Yet The Advancement of Learning was a work in quite another key, and one that helped to create the climate of scientific rationalism that characterized the entire seventeenth century. Bacon had first to clear away the clutter of inherited knowledge. In the early pages of the treatise ‘the first distemper of learning’ is denounced as that by which ‘men study words and not matter’. Yet words, and not matter, had been the foundation of traditional learning for innumerable centuries, whether in the rhetorical humanism of the Renaissance or in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages. Bacon declared, however, that ‘men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits’. It was time to look at the world.

He further observed that:

this kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or of time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books … cobwebs of learning admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

The clarity and cogency of his prose are the perfect instruments for his attack upon the ornateness and excessive ingenuity of the old learning. That is why Shelley cited Plato and Bacon as the two most influential of all the poet-philosophers.

Bacon was assaulting the methods and principles of previous human learning in favour of experiment and observation, which he believed to be central to true natural science. He was suggesting that the scholars and experimenters of the time should confine themselves ‘to use and not to ostentation’ and to ‘matters of common sense and experience’. He warned that ‘the more you remove yourselves from particulars, the greater peril of error you do incur’. At a later date this would be described as the ‘scientific’ disposition.

The purpose of all learning was, for Bacon, to promote the benefit and prosperity of humankind. The material world is to be understood and mastered by means of ‘the laborious and sober inquiry of truth’ which can be pursued only by ‘ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments’. This was a revolutionary statement of intent that places Bacon, and the Jacobean period, at the opening of the modern age.

Bacon desired an institutional, as well as an epistemological, change; he suggested that universities, colleges and schools be directed ‘by amplitude of reward, by soundness of direction, and by the conjunction of labours’. We may see here the origin of the attitude that was to guide the Royal Society and to inform the inventive energies that emerged in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. Bacon himself was of a puritan disposition. He believed in the power of individual agency above the manifold allures of tradition and authority; he believed in observation rather than contemplation as the true instrument of practical reason. The beacons of utility and progress were always before him.

Bacon hoped that by their bright light ‘this third period of time will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning’. It would be fair to say that he helped to change the pace and the direction of that new learning. He entitled a later work Instauratio Magna, ‘the great innovation’ or foundation; the frontispiece of that book shows a ship sailing through the two Pillars of Hercules that traditionally signified the limits of knowledge as well as of exploration. It is an emblem of a journey of discovery in defiance of the motto ‘nec plus ultra’, nothing further beyond. The reign of James I, therefore, can be said to mark the beginning of a voyage through strange seas of thought.

4

The god of money

The treasury was bare; the officers of the Crown were demanding their salaries, but there was no money to be found. Parliament was reluctant to vote taxes, and local officials in the counties were not zealous in collecting the proper revenues from their neighbours; much of the money raised on custom duties was diverted into the pockets of those who collected it.

When parliament reassembled in February 1610, it was in a fractious mood. Salisbury outlined the financial woes of the nation, but the members were more concerned to arrest the prodigal spending of the court rather than to vote new taxes. One of them, Thomas Wentworth, argued that it would be worse than useless to grant new moneys to the king if he refused to reduce his expenditure. He asked, ‘To what purpose is it to draw a silver stream into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks?’ Salisbury was not impressed. It was his understanding that the Commons had a duty to supply the needs of the king, after which their grievances might be addressed. The members, on the other hand, demanded that their complaints be answered before turning to the demands of the king.

A conference was called in which Salisbury put forward a long-meditated plan that became known as the ‘great contract’. The king would give up his feudal dues and tenures in exchange for a guaranteed annual sum; the Commons offered £100,000, only half of the amount James required. Parliament still seemed to believe that he should and could be as economical, or as parsimonious, as his predecessor. The negotiations were suspended.

On 21 May the king summoned both houses of parliament into his presence and upbraided them for sitting fourteen weeks without relieving his necessities. He would listen to what they had to say about increased taxation, but he would not be bound by their opinions. They must not question the royal prerogative in such matters. The members answered that, if this were the case, then the king might lawfully claim all that they owned. A deputation, armed with a petition of right, met James at his palace in Greenwich. Realizing that he had perhaps gone too far, he welcomed them and explained that he had been misunderstood. He always knew when to draw back from confrontation, a lesson never learned by his two more earnest sons.

The debate on the great contract resumed on 11 June, with the concomitant issues of supplies, revenues, grievances and impositions. When the grievances were presented to the king on a long roll of parchment, he remarked that it might make a pretty piece of tapestry. Concessions were yielded on both sides, but there was no end in sight. On 23 July James prorogued the parliament, and the members dispersed to their constituencies where the details of the great contract would further be discussed. Naturally enough the towns and counties were more concerned with their injuries than with the poverty of the king. The whole debate had served only to demonstrate the gulf between king and country, between court and realm.

The king was irate at the lack of progress. He resolved that he would never again endure ‘such taunts and disgraces as have been uttered of him’. If they came back and offered him all he wished, he would not listen to them. James had in any case already made a speech which rendered the political situation infinitely worse. In March 1610 he had assembled at Whitehall the Lords and the Commons. ‘The estate of monarchy’, he proclaimed, ‘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.’ He went on to claim that kings ‘exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth’. The sovereigns of the world can ‘make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down; of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only’. He admonished them that ‘you cannot so clip the wing of greatness. If a king be resolute to be a tyrant, all you can do will not hinder him.’ Did they really want him to be a mere doge of Venice?

James’s sentiments were not necessarily very welcome to the members of parliament. A contemporary news-writer, John Chamberlain, noted that they were ‘so little to their satisfaction that I hear it bred generally much discomfort’. If the parliament acquiesced in this bravura statement of kingship, ‘we are not like to leave to our successors the freedom we received from our forefathers’.

James did not understand common law, as his confrontations with Coke had suggested, and seemed to be unaware that the principle of absolute sovereignty was not one the English would even remotely entertain. It was noted that ‘the king speaks of France and Spain what they may do’. He did not realize, or pretended not to realize, that the sovereigns of those two countries were in a position very different from his own. He maintained the theory of divine right without any clear understanding of how it would operate in the context of parliamentary authority and the common law.

He may have adopted his position for less theoretical reasons. His hatred of the Presbyterian elders of Scotland derived from the fact that they directly challenged his authority. The nobility of that country, also, had been inclined to treat him as if he were one among equals. So his statements about his own powers are likely to have been in part a response to his difficult and sometimes dangerous position as king of Scotland. He had once observed that ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.

He might also have been acutely aware that his temperament and behaviour were not always impeccably regal; he slobbered and walked at an odd angle; he kissed and slavered over his handsome favourites. In compensation for his apparent weaknesses, therefore, he may have been all the more eager to maintain the doctrine of divine right.

Yet in truth his theoretical understanding was very different from his practical grasp of political realities. He never did behave like an absolute prince, and with rare exceptions took care to remain within the fabric of the laws; he was neither arbitrary nor erratic in his exercise of power. In return no serious attempt was made by the parliament to undermine his authority or to question his sovereignty.

The fate of kings was also an immediate concern. On 14 May 1610, Henri IV of France was assassinated in Paris by a Catholic zealot who believed regicide to be his religious duty. Ever fearful for his own life, James responded with a kind of panic. On hearing the news, according to the French ambassador, James ‘turned whiter than his shirt’.

In the following month Prince Henry, the king’s oldest son, was formally invested as prince of Wales. He was of an heroic or militant character, and a fierce proponent of Protestantism. Francis Bacon remarked that his face was long ‘and inclining to leanness … his look grave, and the motion of his eyes rather composed than spirited, in his countenance were some marks of severity’. Henry’s court eschewed the prodigality and drunkenness condoned by his father; it was a model of formality and propriety, where the sentence for swearing was a fine. At a time when the morals and manners of the king’s court were known to be in decline, many believed that he was a true Christian prince who might save the nation for righteousness.

Henry was surrounded by men of a military bent, men of action; he had a keen interest in maritime affairs, and in the progress of colonial exploration. He immensely admired Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated in the Tower, and remarked aloud that ‘none but my father would keep such a bird in a cage’. He had an equally keen dislike of his father’s bosom companions. Of Carr himself he is supposed to have stated that ‘if ever he were king, he would not leave one of that family to piss against the wall’. If ever he were king … that was the overwhelming question for the country. Henry IX would no doubt have followed the martial example of Henry V. James, noting the popularity of his son’s court, is supposed to have asked, ‘Will he bury me alive?’ When the king’s fool, Archie, remarked that James looked upon Henry as a terror rather than as a comfort the king burst into tears.

Another royal imbroglio, albeit of a minor kind, emerged in the weeks after Henry’s investiture. Arabella Stuart was the cousin of the king, and for the first six years of his reign she had enjoyed all the comforts and considerations of the court. She had even been considered as a replacement for James himself, by Raleigh and others, but she had taken no part in the plot. It was still of the utmost importance that she married wisely and well. At the beginning of 1610, however, she came to a pre-contractual arrangement with William Seymour, who by indirect and circuitous route had some small claim to the throne. This always aroused the horror of princes.

The couple agreed to renounce their plans but, in June, they took part in a secret ceremony of marriage at Greenwich. On hearing the news, the king raged. Seymour was instantly confined to the Tower while Arabella was taken to Lambeth before it was decided to send her further north to Durham. En route, at Barnet, she planned her escape. She disguised herself, according to a contemporary chronicler, John More, ‘by drawing a pair of great French-fashioned hose over her petticoats, putting on a man’s doublet, a manlike peruke, with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloak, russet boots, with red tops, and a rapier by her side’. She took ship for France at Leigh, but was overtaken by a vessel sent from Dover to arrest her. She was escorted to the Tower, where her reason gave way under the oppression of her trials, and she died insane four years later. It is a sad story of the perils and perfidies that attended anyone of high estate.

*

When a new session of parliament opened in the autumn of the year it was clear to everyone that Salisbury’s idea of a ‘great contract’ between the king’s necessities and the country’s generosity was not to be obtained by any means. The Commons abandoned discussions on the matter by 8 November, with repeated animadversions against ‘favourites’ and ‘wanton courtiers’. The Scots were also attacked as men with open mouths. The king was in a fury, and told the privy council that ‘no house save the house of hell’ could match the House of Commons. He went on to say that ‘our fame and actions have been daily tossed like tennis balls amongst them’. He was inclined to blame Salisbury for putting too much trust in a parliament which he dubbed ‘this rotten reed of Egypt’; he continued in biblical mode when he told him that ‘your greatest error hath been that you ever expected to draw honey out of gall’. He adjourned and then dissolved parliament within a matter of weeks.

The economic woes of the king were not all of his own making. The fiscal system of England had to a large extent been formulated in the fourteenth century, and it could not deal with the problems attendant upon the seventeenth century. It simply did not work, especially in times of warfare, and all manner of fiscal expedients had to be found. Thus in the spring of the following year James offered to sell hereditary titles to any knights or esquires who desired them. The title of baronet could be purchased for £1,080 in three annual payments, but the overall gain to the exchequer of approximately £90,000 was not enough to balance the profusion of the king’s expenditure. Peerages were put on the market four years later. When in 1616 Sir John Roper made over the sum of £10,000 to become Lord Teynham, he was given the nickname of Lord 10m. A seventeenth-century historian, Arthur Wilson, remarked that the multiplicity of titles ‘made them cheap and invalid in the vulgar opinion; for nothing is more destructive to monarchy than lessening the nobility; upon their decline the commons rise and anarchy increases’.

The king had another scheme to raise money. It was proposed to him that his oldest son might be pleased to accept the hand of the Infanta Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III of Spain; at once James sent one of his envoys to Madrid. Robin Goodfellow in Ben Jonson’s Love Restored, performed at court on Twelfth Night 1612, complained ‘’tis that impostor, PLUTUS, the god of money, who has stolen love’s ensigns; and in his belied figure, reigns in the world, making friendships, contracts, marriages and almost religion’.

In the spring of that year James joined the Protestant Union that had been established four years earlier with the coalition of German states such as Brandenburg, Ulm, Strasbourg and the Palatinate; in this matter he was following the sympathies of his people. At the same time he agreed formally that his daughter, Elizabeth, should be engaged to Frederick V of the Palatinate. This was a large territory in the valley of the Rhine, and included cities such as Heidelberg and Düsseldorf; it had been a centre of Protestantism since the middle of the sixteenth century, and Frederick himself was the leading Calvinist in all of Europe. It seemed, therefore, to be an expedient union for a king of England who believed that he himself might become the champion of Protestantism.

He had the appropriate credentials. The King James version of the Bible had emerged in the previous year; it was the fruit of the Hampton Court conference of 1604, and quickly supplanted the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible. Indeed it still remains for many the key translation of the Scriptures and the model of seventeenth-century English prose. It also became a touchstone for English literary culture: in ‘On Translating Homer’, Matthew Arnold remarked that there is ‘an English book, and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible’. Its influence can be traced in the work of Milton and Bunyan, of Tennyson and Byron, of Johnson and Gibbon and Thackeray; the power of its cadence is to be found everywhere. The King James Bible invigorated the consciousness of the nation and inspired some of its most eloquent manifestations.

It also prompted a great wave of religious publications in English and, as Robert Burton said in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, of books of divinity there was no end. ‘There be so many books in that kind, so many commentaries, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons, that whole teams of oxen cannot draw them.’ There was also a glut of cheap religious pamphlets that espoused the wonders of God’s providence and the evil fate of His enemies.

James consolidated his Protestantism with another measure. In the spring of 1611 George Abbot had been appointed archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Richard Bancroft. His principal qualification for the post, after the assassination of Henri IV, was his persistent and rigorous opposition to Roman Catholicism; he had already taken a leading role in the prosecution of two priests who were subsequently executed at Tyburn.

So it was that in the early spring of 1612 the last two persons convicted for heresy were condemned to death. Edward Wightman published his belief that Christ was ‘a mere creature, and not both God and man in one person’, and that he himself was the Messiah of the Old Testament. Bartholomew Legate had preached against the rituals and beliefs of the established Church, and had admitted to the king that he had not prayed for seven years. The king kicked out at him. ‘Away, base fellow! It shall never be said that one stayed in my presence that hath never prayed to our Saviour for seven whole years together.’ Legate was taken to the stake in Smithfield in March 1612, while Wightman followed him to the fire at Lichfield one month later. Wightman had the distinction, if it can be so called, of being the last heretic burned in England.

Another enemy of the state, or at least of convention, may be mentioned here. John Chamberlain relates that in February 1612, Moll Cutpurse, ‘a notorious baggage that used to go in man’s apparel’, was brought to Paul’s Cross ‘where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent; but it is since doubted that she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three quarts of sack before she came to her penance’. It is an apt vignette of Jacobean London.

5

The angel

In the summer of 1612 King James went on a ‘progress’ of a month’s duration, taking in Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham and Newark. All around him he could see evidence of a prosperous and tranquil nation. A peace with Spain, and a commercial treaty with France, had encouraged trade while a series of good harvests maintained that happy condition. Dairy produce flowed into London from Essex, Wiltshire and Yorkshire; wool for export arrived at the ports from Wiltshire and Northamptonshire; cattle from North Wales and Scotland, sheep from the Cotswolds, were herded to the great market of Smithfield.

Other trades were also rising. ‘Correct your maps,’ the poet John Cleveland wrote, ‘Newcastle is Peru.’ Coal, in other words, was as plentiful and valuable as silver; its production was rising rapidly each year, and the coal traders bargained noisily at the Exchange in Billingsgate. In the hundred years from 1540, the production of iron also increased fivefold. From the port at Bristol sailed cutlery from Sheffield and tin from Cornwall in exchange for sugar and cereals from America and the Indies. Norwich was a safe haven for exiled weavers from France or Germany, while Chester dominated trade with Ireland.

The struggle against monopolies, begun late in the reign of Elizabeth, played its part in the economy of the country. A declaration of the House of Commons, in 1604, stated that ‘merchandise being the chief and richest of all others, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few’. Yet patents were still given for such activities as the draining of the fens, the manufacture of paper, the making of salt from sea water, the production of sword blades, and the production of iron without charcoal. The wealth of the monopolies testifies, if nothing else, to the variety of new products and techniques.

The yeomen were constructing bigger and better dwellings, while the poor left their huts of reed or wood and built cottages of brick or stone. Kitchens and separate bedrooms were introduced, while stairs replaced ladders and chairs took the place of benches; the vogue for more comfortable living continued after the reign of Elizabeth with the taste for crockery rather than wooden platters, and eventually for knives and forks rather than daggers and spoons. It is unwise to exaggerate the general prosperity of the country; areas of the direst poverty still existed, especially among the class of landless agricultural labourers and the wandering workmen of the cities. But the conditions of social and commercial life continued to improve.

One minister had no part in the king’s progress of 1612. Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, died towards the end of May from an illness of unknown cause; his infirmity might perhaps have been compounded with his knowledge of the king’s displeasure at his failure to improve the royal finances. He had preserved among his papers a letter, written in Italian, which compared those who loved the great and the powerful to the heliotrope ‘which while the sun shines looks towards it with flowers alive and open, but when the sun sets closes them and looks another way’. In the end he longed for his life, ‘full of cares and miseries’, to be dissolved. In any case he was not mourned for long. The London news was that, even if he had lived, he had already lost all authority and credit. He had no friends left. Ben Jonson dismissed Salisbury by saying that he ‘never cared for any man longer than he could make use of him’.

With the death of any great administrator, there was always a scramble for place and office. Francis Bacon was one who hoped that the demise of Salisbury would prove a blessing. The king himself was not unhappy to have been freed from the yoke of his councillor; he could now, as it were, rule for himself. He could be his own principal secretary. In the following year he discovered, much to his disgust, that Salisbury had for a long time been in the paid employment of Spain. Whom could James ever trust?

Robert Carr, now created Viscount Rochester, was the king’s confidant while Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton, had become the principal minister of the new administration. Howard gathered about him a group of peers and other noblemen, some of whom were secret Catholics and almost all of whom favoured the Spaniards. Against them, in the counsels of the king, was a Protestant and anti-Spanish party under the nominal leadership of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. With the balance of these divided counsels James might be able to steer the nation forward. Different men were given different responsibilities. John Chamberlain wrote, in the summer of 1612, that the king ‘hath found the art of frustrating men’s expectations, and holding them in suspense’.

Another death occurred at court. All had seemed well with the heir to the throne. Prince Henry was an assertive and athletic young man who excelled in masques as well as martial sports. But at the end of October 1612, he fell sick. He was playing cards with his younger brother, Charles, and a bystander, Sir Charles Cornwallis, noticed that ‘his highness for all this looked ill and pale, spake hollow, and somewhat strangely with dead sunk eyes’. A doctor was called but over the next eleven days could do nothing to curb the slow invasion of a disease that has since been tentatively diagnosed as porphyria or, perhaps, typhoid fever.

A dead pigeon was put on the prince’s head, and a dead cock at his feet, both freshly killed and still warm, to draw out the noisome humours. He died raving, to the authentic dismay and dejection of the court. He had been the emblem of England’s future destiny and had promised an age of heroic adventure in the Protestant cause. Queen Anne wept alone, and a year later it was still not safe to mention her son to her; James mourned aloud with ‘Henry is dead! Henry is dead!’ The crown was now destined for Charles, a silent, shy and reserved prince quite unlike his brother.

A strange incident occurred soon after when, in the words of John Chamberlain, ‘a very handsome young fellow, much about his age, and not altogether unlike him, came stark naked to St James’s, while they were at supper, saying he was the prince’s ghost, come from heaven with a message to the king’. He was questioned, to no effect, and was deemed to be either mad or simple. After two or three lashes of the whip, he was dismissed.

The king was temperamentally averse to protracted mourning, and had a natural distaste for a gloomy court. In February 1613, he celebrated with great splendour and spectacle the marriage of his only surviving daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick V of the Palatinate. No one beneath the rank of baron was admitted to the ceremony, and the members of the royal family were stiff with the jewels embroidered onto their clothing. Twentyfive diamonds glittered from the king’s velvet hatband. The crown jewels were also on display, among them a pendant of rubies and pearls known as the ‘Three Brothers’ and a ‘great and rich jewel of gold’ called ‘the Mirror of Great Britain’. The princess herself seemed to mar the solemnity of the occasion by indulging in a low titter that eventually became a loud laugh. She was, perhaps, overwhelmed. On the following day the king visited the newly wedded couple and asked them what had happened in their ornate bed. It is believed that Shakespeare introduced the masque into the fourth act of The Tempest in order to celebrate their union.

A more sinister marriage was about to take place. In the middle of April 1613, Sir Thomas Overbury was committed to the Tower of London. This was on the face of it surprising since Overbury had been the close companion and confidant of the king’s favourite, Viscount Rochester. It was reported, however, that Overbury had been confined on the king’s realization that it was ‘a dishonour to him that the world should have an opinion that Rochester ruled him and Overbury ruled Rochester’.

Yet there was more to it than that. Rochester had become enamoured of the young countess of Essex, Frances Howard, but was thwarted by the inconvenient fact that the lady had been married for seven years to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. She had been a child bride who now regretted her early union. They had in any case always been a reluctant and resentful pair; with the prospect of Rochester before her, she grasped at the chance of freedom. She asked that her marriage be declared null and void on the grounds that Essex was physically incapable of siring a son. Her father, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, enthusiastically took her part; his daughter’s marriage to the king’s favourite could only raise his already high standing at court.

Essex was naturally aggrieved that his manhood had been questioned, especially since it might affect his chances of finding another wife. So it was intimated that, although Essex had not been successful with his first partner, he suffered from no disability that might prevent him from marrying again. A solemn commission was established to test the case and, like most solemn commissions, it took the easiest way out.

The king was in favour of the divorce, not least because it would delight and satisfy Viscount Rochester. When Frances Howard declared that her husband’s impotence might have been a bewitchment, James was altogether on her side; had he himself not written a tract on witchcraft? The archbishop of Canterbury objected. But James had packed the commission. One churchman asked Essex ‘whether he had affection, erection, application, penetration, ejaculation’ to prove the consummation of the marriage; the hearings were filled with what one contemporary called ‘indecent words and deeds’. A jury of twelve matrons examined Lady Frances herself for evidence of her virginity; the lady wore a veil throughout the proceedings, and it was suspected that a true virgin had taken her place. The divorce was of course granted according to the wishes of the sovereign. It was considered to be a notable instance of court corruption, and one that was widely noted and condemned.

Sir Thomas Overbury now enters the plot. As Rochester’s close companion he despised the idea of this marriage, no doubt in part because he might lose his friend to the Howard cause at court. When it was believed that Overbury might know some infamous secret about Frances Howard, the king intervened. He asked Overbury to become one of his envoys in Russia, effectively banishing him from England. Overbury refused to take up the appointment, and was committed to the Tower; although in poor health, he was to be kept in close confinement until the marriage itself had been celebrated. That, at least, seems to have been the plan.

Frances Howard was of a different mind, however, and had determined to murder Overbury even before he stepped out of the Tower. She had an accomplice, Mrs Turner, who was skilled in the management of poisons; Mrs Turner had a servant, Richard Weston, who by means of influence or bribery was appointed to be the keeper of the prisoner. Rochester was in the habit of sending wine, tarts and jellies to Overbury; it has been suggested, but not proved, that a poison was included in the sweet provisions. It is more likely that, with the connivance of Weston, the unfortunate man was slowly fed quantities of sulphuric acid or ‘oil of vitriol’. Whatever the method of dispatch Overbury died at the beginning of autumn 1613, and was buried in the Tower. John Chamberlain wrote that ‘he was a very unfortunate man, for nobody almost pities him, and his own friends speak that indifferently of him’. It was reported that all was calm and quiet at court; the talk was of masques and feasts and coming noble marriages.

On 26 December Frances Howard and Robert Carr, created earl of Somerset in the previous month, were united in marriage. This was four months after the death of Overbury, and no suspicion of malfeasance had emerged to trouble their marital bliss. At the ceremony the new countess of Somerset appeared with her long hair flowing down her shoulders as a token of virginity; she was, in the phrase of the time, ‘married in her hair’. The king and the archbishop of Canterbury were among the congregation in the Chapel Royal, and rich gifts were showered upon the newly married couple. Soon enough, however, the revelation of their conduct would excite the greatest scandal of the king’s reign.

*

It was time to summon a new parliament. The parlous state of the king’s finances demanded it. All the departments of government were in urgent need of money; the ambassadors had not been paid their salaries, and the sailors of the fleet pleaded in vain; even the fortifications of the nation were in a state of disrepair. The councillors were voluble with suggestions and recommendations, but they were irresolute and uncertain. The nobles and lords around the king determined to ensure that court candidates were returned to parliament; they became known as the ‘undertakers’ but suspicion about their activities meant that few constituencies were willing to take their advice. They sent missives to the various towns and regions, but the practice became known as ‘packing’. The constituencies wanted new men, untainted by connection to the court, and in fact two-thirds of the Commons were elected for the first time. This did not bode well for the king.

James opened the proceedings on 5 April 1614, with a conciliatory speech that promised reform while requesting more revenue. The Commons chose to ignore the message and instead complained that the ‘undertakers’ had violated freedom of election and the privileges of parliament. They did not wish to vote supplies to the king but preferred instead to challenge the king’s right to levy ‘impositions’ or special taxes on imports and exports. In a second speech three days later James asked for a parliament of love; he wished to demonstrate his affection for his subjects, while the Commons must manifest their devotion to their sovereign. Yet the Commons were in restless and unyielding mood, full of hissing and jeering. One member, Christopher Neville, declared that the courtiers were ‘spaniels to the king and wolves to the people’. There had never been a more disorderly house. It was compared to a cockpit and a beargarden; the members were called ‘roaring boys’, street hooligans.

When the members refused James’s order to debate supplies alone, he quickly dissolved parliament and committed five members to the Tower of London. The session had lasted less than three months and not one bill had received the royal assent. Thus it became known as the Addle or Addled Parliament. No assembly met again for seven years.

Supplies had not been granted to the king and, in his need for revenue, he redoubled his matrimonial negotiations with both Spain and France; the prize on offer to both parties was Charles, prince of Wales. Yet business of that nature takes time and, in the interim, he approached the City for a large loan; the City refused, on the indisputable grounds that the Crown was not worthy of credit. Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk, was now appointed lord treasurer and immediately began to raise money by whatever means available; he levied fines, for example, on any new buildings erected within 7 miles of London.

At the time of the dissolution of parliament some of the bishops and great lords brought to the Jewel House of the Tower their best pieces of plate, for the purposes of sale, and the king determined that their example should be followed by the whole nation. So he requested a ‘benevolence’ from every county and borough in the land. The results, however, were not encouraging. Oliver St John, a gentleman of Marlborough, refused to send the king money on the grounds that the ‘benevolence’ was contrary to Magna Carta. He was brought before the Star Chamber and committed to the Tower. Eventually he was sentenced to a fine of £5,000 and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure.

In the absence of parliament all eyes turned towards the court as the proper centre of affairs. The earl of Somerset, the favourite, was still the cynosure. He had been appointed lord chamberlain in 1614 and was in constant attendance upon the king; correspondence with the ambassadors and other worthies passed through his hands, and he controlled the vast machinery of patronage that acted as the engine of the court. Yet his association with the Howards through his marriage earned him the enmity of many courtiers, and it was widely rumoured that the rule of one man over the king was improper and undesirable.

It was time to introduce to the king another fair-faced minion. In the summer of 1614 a young man of twenty-two was presented to James. George Villiers, the son of a knight, had already been trained as a courtier; he had become practised in the arts of dancing and of fencing. He had also spent three years in France, where he had acquired a good manner further to adorn what was called ‘the handsomest-bodied man in all of England’. He also had powerful allies, among them Archbishop Abbot and the queen. Abbot supported him in the hope of diminishing the influence of Somerset and the Howards, who favoured Catholic Spain. The queen, influenced by Abbot, pressed her husband to show favour to the young man. Villiers was accordingly appointed to be the royal cup-bearer, in constant attendance upon his sovereign, and in the spring of 1615 was knighted as a gentleman of the bedchamber.

Somerset, sensing a rival, protested. He alienated the king still more by constant complaint and insolent argument, leading James to remonstrate with him. ‘Let me never apprehend that you disdain my person’, the king wrote, ‘and undervalue my qualities (nor let it not appear that your former affection is cold towards me).’ He rebuked him for his ‘strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride’ as well as his ‘long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary’. It is a strange letter for a sovereign to write to a subject, reflecting as it does the once extraordinary intimacy between them.

Villiers may already have interposed himself between the two men. In the summer of 1615 James travelled to Farnham Castle, home of the bishop of Winchester, where he was joined by his new gentleman of the bedchamber. At a later date Villiers questioned the king ‘whether you loved me now … better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. It is an ambiguous reference, but it is at least open to an interesting interpretation.

Sir Francis Bacon, observing the workings of the Jacobean court, once wrote that ‘all rising to great place is by a winding stair: and if there be factions, it is good, to side a man’s self, whilst he is in the rising’. Bacon therefore attached himself to Villiers. He told him that, as the king’s favourite, he should ‘remember well the great trust you have undertaken. You are as a continual sentinel, always to stand upon your watch to give him true intelligence.’

In the summer of this year Somerset, sensing numerous plots rising against him, drew up a general pardon for himself for offences which he may or may not have committed. It was said by his enemies, for example, that he had purloined some of the crown jewels. At a meeting of the council, held on 20 July, the king ordered the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon himself, to seal the pardon ‘at once, for such is my pleasure’. Bacon fell to his knees and begged him to reconsider. ‘I have ordered you to pass the pardon,’ James said as he walked out of the council chamber, ‘and pass it you shall.’ But as always he was hesitant and irresolute; the queen and other councillors argued against the decision which would allow Somerset to keep any of the jewels or other goods he might have taken from the king. It would set an unfortunate precedent. Eventually James left Whitehall without forming any certain decision.

This was only the beginning of Somerset’s woes. In the early autumn of 1615 reports began to emerge that Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in the Tower. One of the minor accomplices, an apothecary’s boy, had fallen gravely ill and confessed to his part in the affair. It did not take long before the secret plot began to unravel. The lieutenant of the Tower was questioned. It was discovered that Richard Weston had been procured as the keeper of the prisoner. It was then revealed that he had been a servant of Mrs Turner. The trail now led in turn to Frances Carr, countess of Somerset, and to her husband.

The king, now thoroughly alarmed at a turn of events that might even touch the throne, asked his lord chief justice, Edward Coke, to make out a warrant against Somerset. Somerset remonstrated with James about this insult to his name and family. ‘Nay, man,’ the king exclaimed, ‘if Coke sends for me, I must go.’ He was supposed to have added, as the quondam favourite left his presence, ‘The devil take thee, I will never see thee mair.’

Coke conducted a thorough investigation, and eventually reported to the king that Frances Carr had in the past used sorcery both to estrange her previous husband, the earl of Essex, and to inveigle her new lover. He further revealed that she had procured three different types of poison to be administered to Overbury.

On 24 May 1616, the countess of Somerset stood in front of the grand jury at Westminster; she was dressed all in black, except for ruff and cuffs of white lawn. Some of her letters were read out in court, apparently of an obscene character; when the crowd of spectators pressed forward to gaze at the magic scrolls and images she had employed in the course of her secret work, a large ‘crack’ was heard from the wooden stage. The crowd now believed that the devil himself had come into the court and that the noise signalled his anger at the disclosure of his wiles. Panic and confusion followed that could not be quelled for a quarter of an hour. Witches and demons were still in the Jacobean air.

The countess pleaded guilty to the charge of murder, perhaps on the understanding that the king always favoured clemency to the members of the nobility. Her husband appeared on the following day and declared himself to be not guilty of the crime, but his judges did not believe him. Man and wife were sentenced to death. They were spared the final penalty on the orders of the king, and instead were taken to the Tower where they remained for almost six years. The exposure of their fraud and betrayal, their profligacy and hypocrisy, served only further to undermine the court and the status of the king whose intimate associates they once had been. Mrs Turner, condemned to death for her part in the poison plot, said of the king’s courtiers that ‘there is no religion in the most of them but malice, pride, whoredom, swearing and rejoicing in the fall of others. It is so wicked a place as I wonder the earth did not open and swallow it up.’

At the beginning of the spring of this year the heir apparent, Charles, in the garden of Greenwich Palace, turned a water-spout ‘in jest’ upon Villiers. The favourite was much offended. Whereupon in an unusual show of anger the king boxed his son’s ears, exclaiming that he had ‘a malicious and dogged disposition’. Villiers was now known to his sovereign as ‘Steenie’, a babyish rendition of St Stephen; the reference was to the fact that those who looked upon the face of the saint declared it to be the countenance of an angel. The angel would soon be in charge.

6

The vapours

The most colourful and compelling account of early Jacobean London can be found in The Seven Deadly Sins of London, published in 1607. It is a work, little more than a pamphlet, written by Thomas Dekker in a period of seven days with all the vivacity and immediacy of swift composition. Dekker himself was a playwright and pamphleteer of obscure life and uncertain reputation, but in these respects he does not differ from most writers of the time.

He announces, to the city, that ‘from thy womb received I my being, from thy breasts my nourishment’; in which case London must be judged a harsh nurse or mother. He complains that of all cities it is ‘the wealthiest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest.’ At the time of James’s accession it had been the ‘only gallant and minion of the world’ but ‘hadst in a short time more diseases (than a common harlot hath) hanging upon thee’.

He paints the scene of the capital at midday where

in every street, carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran on wheels: at every corner, men, women and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down. Besides, hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water tankards running at tilt in a fourth: here are porters sweating under burdens, there merchants’ men bearing bags of money, chapmen (as if they were at leap-frog) skip out of one shop into another, tradesmen (as if they were dancing galliards) are lusty at legs and never stand still: all are as busy as country attorneys at an assizes.

Yet the city takes on a different aspect at night. Dekker has a vision of London by candlelight, the companion ‘for drunkards, for lechers, and for prodigals’. This was the time when ‘mercers rolled up their silks and velvets: the goldsmiths drew back their plate, and all the city looked like a private playhouse when the windows are clapped down, as if some nocturnal or dismal tragedy were presently to be acted before all the tradesmen’. The bankrupt and felon had kept indoors for fear of arrest but, at night, ‘began now to creep out of their shells, and to stalk up and down the streets as uprightly, and with as proud a gait, as if they meant to knock against the stars with the crowns of their heads’.

The prosperous citizen who in the day ‘looked more sourly on his poor neighbours than he had drunk a quart of vinegar at a draught’ now sneaks out of doors and ‘slips into a tavern where either alone, or with some other that battles their money together, they so ply themselves with penny pots [of ale] … that at length they have not an eye to see withall, not a good leg to stand upon’. They reel into the night, have an altercation with a post on the way and end up in the gutter. Their apprentices, despite the oath of their indentures, ‘make their desperate sallies out and quick retires in’ with their pints. The three nocturnal pursuits of the city are drinking, dancing and dicing.

The prose of Thomas Dekker is crisp, strenuous and elliptical. He observes the Londoners at a bookstall in St Paul’s Churchyard ‘looking scurvily (like mules chomping upon thistles) on the face of a new book, be it never so worthy: and go (as ill favouredly) mewing away’. He notices the fact that the brothels of London have painted posts before them, and that their keepers always serve stewed prunes to their customers. He reports that the lattices for the windows of the alehouses are painted red. He observes the hackney men of Coleman Street, the butchers of Aldgate and the brokers of Houndsditch.

The dress of the Londoner ‘is like a traitor’s body that hath been hanged, drawn and quartered, and is set up in several places: his codpiece is in Denmark, the colour of his doublet and the belly in France: the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy: the short waist hangs over a Dutch butcher’s stall in Utrecht; his huge slops [hose for the legs] speaks Spanish: Polonia gives him the boots’. It is a typical complaint concerning London’s variegated fashions.

Dekker observes the disagreeable habits of other citizens. He alludes to the various ‘tobacconists, shuttlecock makers, feather-makers, cobweb lawn weavers, perfumers’ as manifesting the qualities of ‘apishness’; each one is ‘a fierce, dapper fellow, more light-headed than a musician: as fantastically attired as a court jester: wanton in discourse: lascivious in behaviour; jocund in good company: nice in his trencher, and yet he feeds very hungrily on scraps of songs’.

Dekker abhors the common practice of marrying a young bride to a rich old man, ‘though his breath be ranker than a muck-hill, and his body more dry than a mummy, and his mind more lame than Ignorance itself’. He complains about London landlords ‘who for the building up of a chimney, which stands them not above thirty shillings, and for whiting the walls of a tenement, which is scarce worth the daubing, raise the rent presently (as if it were new put into the subsidy books) assessing it at three pounds a year more than ever it went for before’. This has all the bitterness of personal experience. Welcome to the world of Jacobean London.

Greed and avarice were also much on the mind of another Londoner. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair was first performed in the Hope Playhouse at the end of October 1614; it was a long play, of some three hours, and began at two in the afternoon. On that stage the essence of London was quiddified. The Hope was also used for bearbaiting, on which occasions the stage was removed, and in the induction Jonson compares the theatre to the venue of the fair itself, ‘the place being as dirty as Smithfield and as stinking every whit’. The stench of the dead or dying animals still lingered. The hazel nutshells and apple-cores might not have been swept away. Bartholomew Fair has the soul and substance of the Jacobean city somewhere within it. Its characters are the flesh and bone of London, in which all the people are merely players.

Canvas booths have been erected on the stage to give a simulacrum of the fair. A character comes on, and is soon joined by another, and then another, until a concourse of citizens is visible. They jeer, they swear, they laugh. They fight. They are obscene. They piss. They vomit. They cheat one another. A couple of them burst into song. Various plots and stories emerge only to fall back into the swelling tumult of the fair. Prostitutes and cutpurses rub against ballad-singers and tapsters.

Some of the characters adopt disguise, but in the end their true identities are revealed and their pretensions crossed or crushed. All authority is reviled. That is the way of the city. There is no real power except that of money, and no real considerations other than those of aggression and appetite. ‘Bless me!’ someone calls out. ‘Deliver me, help, hold me! The Fair!’ Mousetraps and ginger bread, purses and pouches, dolls and puppies, all are for sale. ‘What do you lack, gentlemen? What is’t you buy?’ All the world’s a fair. ‘Buy any new ballads? New ballads?’ A puppet show brings a conclusion to the play that has revealed London to be a panoply and a pageant, a prison and a carnival.

One of the guardian spirits of the fair is Ursla, the fat seller of ale and roast pig who is also a part-time bawd.

Ursla: I am all fire and fat, Nightingale, I shall e’en melt away to the first woman, a rib, again, I am afraid. I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great garden-pot, you may follow me by the Ss I make.

She has also a firm line in abuse.

Ursla: You look as you were begotten atop of a cart in harvest-time, when the whelp was hot and eager. Go snuff after your brother’s bitch, Mistress Commodity.

In the words of the play, she has a hot coal in her mouth.

The other great character of the fair is Jonson’s parody of the puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy.

Busy: Look not towards them, hearken not. The place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby horses and trinkets … They are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth …

He turns out to be, of course, an arrant voluptuary and hypocrite, amply confirming the suspicions that some people conceived of the godly in this period.

Jonson had said that he wished to present ‘deeds and language, such as men do use’. He knew of what he wrote. By his own report he was ‘brought up poorly’ in London and when his mother took a second husband, a master bricklayer, the small family moved to a house in a lane off the Strand. He attended an elementary school in the neighbourhood before Westminster School and may have been about to attend a college at Cambridge; shortage of funds, however, did not permit the move. Instead he took up his stepfather’s business of bricklaying, in which trade he laboured intermittently for some years. He later saw service in the Low Countries and, on his return to London, entered the world of theatre. So he was a child of the city, and Bartholomew Fair is his tribute to its teeming life.

Here are your ‘pretenders to wit! Your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men.’ These three taverns were the haunt of poetasters and men of supposed good taste. ‘Moorfields, Pimlico Path or the Exchange’ are mentioned a few moments later as places of resort for tired Londoners. In the puppet play at the close of the proceedings, the myth of Hero and Leander is set in the city.

Littlewit: As, for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son, about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one morning to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs.

It is remarkable that ordinary Londoners were supposed to be wholly familiar with the old story, perhaps from Marlowe’s poem published sixteen years earlier.

Many of the play’s allusions are lost to us, and many of the words are now strange or unfamiliar. A ‘hobby-horse’ was a prostitute. An ‘undermeal’ was a light snack. To ‘stale’ was to urinate. When one character discloses that ‘we were all a little stained last night’, he means that they were drunk. ‘Whimsies’ were the female genitalia. A ‘diet-drink’ was a medicine. A Catholic recusant was derided as ‘a seminary’.

The visitors to the fair often refer to ‘vapour’ or ‘vapours’ that can mean anything or nothing. To vapour is to talk nonsense or to brag; a vapour is a frenzy or a passing mood or a mad conceit of the town. In the popular ‘game of vapours’ each participant had to deny that which the previous speaker had just said. London seethed with vapours.

Quarlous: Faith, and to any man that vapours me the lie, I do vapour that. [Strikes him].

It is in a sense like watching a foreign world, except that there are still flashes of recognition and understanding. And then once more we are part of the Jacobean city.

7

What news?

The trial of Somerset and his wife marked the beginning of a deterioration at court, where it was believed that the king had become both more cunning and more cowardly; his learning had once been praised but now behind his back he was called a pedant. His new fancy for Villiers provoked scorn, jealousy and even disgust. His own health also showed signs of decline. His doctor wrote subsequently that ‘in 1616 pain and weakness spread to knees, shoulders and hands, and for four months he had to stay in a bed or in a chair’. He became impatient and morose and bad-tempered. The doctor went on to say that ‘he is extremely sensitive, most impatient of pain; and while it tortures him with violent movements, his mind is tossed as well, thus augmenting the evil’.

James drank frequently and immoderately. He perspired heavily, and caught frequent colds; he was always sneezing. His face had become red; he was growing fat, and his hair was turning white. At the age of fifty, he was rapidly ageing. He was still averse to business and preferred to hunt, but now he rode more slowly and allowed his horse to be guided by grooms.

So the eyes of aspirants turned more often to the heir. Charles, at the age of fifteen, had acquired many of the virtues of a prince. He was a champion at tennis and at tilting; he delighted in horses and in masques; he was already a connoisseur of art and music. Yet he was also pious and reserved; he was silent and even secretive; he blushed at an indelicate word. He was 5 feet 4 inches in height, and had a pronounced stutter.

The Venetian ambassador reported that his chief endeavour ‘is to have no other aim than to second his father, to follow him and do his pleasure and not to move except as his father does. Before his father he always aims at suppressing his own feelings.’ So Charles grew to be uncertain and hesitant, apt to cling to the few maxims that he had already imbibed. He was too modest for his own good, perhaps stunned by the loquacity of his father and the beauty of Villiers. When he did try to act forcefully, in later life, he often descended into rash action without any thought of the consequences. His piety, and sense of divine mission, also rendered him humourless and strict.

In the summer of the year the king turned upon his judges. Edward Coke, the chief justice of the king’s bench, had often angered James by his continual assertion of common law over the claims of royal power. The king called the judges before him in June 1616, and accused them of insubordination; they fell on their knees, pledging their loyalty and obedience. The king then asked each of them in turn whether they would consult with him before pronouncing on matters of the prerogative. All assented, with the notable exception of Coke himself, who simply answered that he would behave in a manner fitting for a high judge. The king turned upon him, calling him a knave and a sophist. James proceeded to the Star Chamber a few days later, where he delivered a long speech on his zeal for justice. ‘Kings are properly judges,’ he told his councillors, ‘and judgement properly belongs to them from God … I remember Christ’s saying, “My sheep hear my voice”, and so I assure myself, my people will most willingly hear the voice of me, their own shepherd and king.’ It was not the most modest of his pronouncements.

Coke was not destined to remain in the king’s service for much longer. He was removed from the privy council and ordered to desist from his summer circuit of the kingdom; he was told to revise his law reports ‘wherein (as his Majesty was informed) there were many exorbitant and extravagant opinions’. Five months later, in November 1616, he was dismissed from office. He was, in a phrase of the time, ‘quite off the books’. The king had rid himself of a turbulent judge but, in the process, he had turned Coke into a martyr for the rule of law and the liberties of the people.

The nature and the character of the ‘people’, however, could be understood in a multitude of ways. The population itself was growing rapidly until 1620, with the consequence that the number of the poor also began to rise. As late as 1688 it was reported that over half of the population, both rural and urban, were below the level of subsistence. The purchasing power of the wages of agricultural labourers or minor craftsmen was in relative terms at its lowest point for generations. In 1616 it was recorded that in Sheffield, out of a population of little over 2,000, 725 persons were ‘not able to live without the charity of their neighbours’; they were all ‘begging poor’. There were 160 others who ‘are not able to abide the storm of one fortnight’s sickness but would thereby be driven to beggary’. Their children ‘are constrained to work sore to provide them necessaries’.

The inequalities of society were such that, in this same period of want, the prosperity of the rural gentry and the wealthier citizens increased dramatically; this in itself may help to account for the great period of building and rebuilding that culminated in the Jacobean country house with its elaborate ornamentation and astonishing skyline.

It also became plain that, as the gentry increased in wealth and status, so the members of the old aristocracy lost some of their authority. The rise of the country gentleman in turn materially affected the power and prestige of the Commons, of which they were the most considerable element; it was said that they could buy out the Lords three times over. In a later treatise, Oceana, James Harrington stated that the work of government was ‘peculiar unto the genius of a gentleman’. The decline in the fortunes of the old lords, in favour of the rising gentry, has been variously explained. It had to do with the loss of wealth and territory; but it was also the natural consequence of diminished military power. The king in any case had been selling peerages and the new baronetcies for cash, thus diminishing the honourable worth of any title.

As the gentry rose in influence, so there was a corresponding increase in what might be called the professional classes. The number of lawyers rose by 40 per cent between 1590 and 1630, in a period when doctors and surgeons also multiplied. The merchant class, too, was now thriving and was no longer considered to be a demeaning connection; the younger sons of squires were happy to become apprentices with the hope of an eventual rise to partnership. The division between rich and poor had been sharpened while, at the same time, the wealthier elements of society were drawing together.

The gentry now also controlled the machinery of local government. The lords-lieutenant and deputies, the sheriffs and justices of the peace, were indispensable for the order and safety of the country; the king and his council wholly relied upon them for such matters as the collection of taxes, the regulation of trade and the raising of troops for any foreign war. In turn a form of local government grew up at the quarter sessions, where the most important men of the county or borough met to discuss the business of the community. They were collectively known as the commission of the peace, and their clerk was called the clerk of the peace. Their authority filtered down to the high constables in the hundred and to the petty constables, the churchwardens and overseers of the poor in the parish.

The country gentry had also in large part taken against the court. In a local election of 1614 both candidates claimed to represent ‘the country’ and denied charges of ‘turning courtier’. Soon enough ‘court’ and ‘country’ factions would manifest themselves. The ways of Whitehall were already deeply suspect. The king’s extravagance required higher taxation. The practice of purveyance, by which the court could effectively seize goods and services for royal use, had become iniquitous. Rumours of the king’s homosexual passions also circulated through the nation. At the beginning of 1617 George Villiers, now Viscount Villiers, was created earl of Buckingham and appointed Master of the Horse. His lands were extensive, his income immense, but he had also acquired a monopoly of patronage. Any aspirant for office had to transact his business with the earl, and Buckingham insisted that all his clients acknowledged him as their only patron. Lucy Hutchinson, a memoirist of puritan persuasion, wrote that he had risen ‘upon no merit but that of his beauty and prostitution’.

An office was considered to be a family property. The great officials were permitted, and expected, to appoint their successors; of course they made their choice after an appropriate fee was exacted. Negotiations took place between the incumbent of the office, the favourite for the post and the various aspiring candidates. Some officials were the private employees of other officials. All that mattered was who you knew and how rich you were. When the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster fell vacant in 1618, forty-three competitors vied for the post which was being sold for approximately £8,000. The administrators of the navy were particularly corrupt, taking bribes, appointing private servants as public officials, diverting supplies, paying themselves double allowances, ordering inferior material and pocketing the difference in cost, employing ships for merchant journeys and charging accordingly.

All transactions under the aegis of the Crown – gratuities and perquisites, annuities and pensions – came at a price. Samuel Doves wrote that ‘on the 2nd of February last past, I had a hearing in the Court of Chancery and for that hearing, there stood one in the crier’s place; to whom being demanded, I gave him eight shillings … and two men more which kept the door would have eight shillings more, which I paid. And when I was without the door, two men stayed me and would have two shillings more, which I paid.’ You paid to have a stall in the marketplace; you paid for the right to sell or manufacture cloth. When a group of monopolists was granted the maintenance of the lighthouse at Dungeness, being rewarded with the tolls on all shipping that passed by, they provided only a single candle.

*

What’s the news abroad? Quid novi? ‘It were a long story to tell all the passages of this business,’ John Chamberlain wrote, ‘which hath furnished Paul’s and this town very plentifully the whole week.’ ‘Paul’s’ was the middle aisle of the cathedral where gossips and men known as ‘newsmongers’ met to discuss all the latest rumours. It was customary for the lords and the gentry, the courtiers and the merchants, as well as men of all professions, to meet in the abbey at eleven and walk in the middle aisle till twelve; they met again after dinner, from three to six, when they discoursed on politics and business or passed on in low voices all the rumours and secrets of the town. A purveyor of court secrets was called ‘one of our new principal verbs in Paul’s, and well acquainted with all occurrents’. So the busy aisle became known as the ‘ears’ brothel’ and its interior was filled with what a contemporary observer, John Earle, called ‘a strange humming or buzz mixed of walking, tongues and feet’.

It was said that one of the vices of England was the prattling of the ‘busie-body’, otherwise known as an ‘intelligencer’. Joseph Hall, in Characters of Virtues and Vices (1608), describes one such creature. ‘What every man ventures in Guiana voyage, and what they gained, he knows to a hair. Whether Holland will have peace he knows and on what conditions … If he see but two men talk and read a letter in the street he runs to them and asks if he may not be partner of that secret relation.’

So we might read that ‘the world is full of casting and touching Fabritio’s great affair’ or ‘at the worst, the world is of opinion, that if they should come to jostle, both of them are made of as brittle metal, the one as the other’. The world says this; the world thinks that. ‘Now-a-days what seems most improbable mostly comes soonest to pass.’ ‘There is a speech, of the king’s going to Royston.’ ‘It is current in every man’s mouth.’ ‘We were never at so low an ebb for matter of news, especially public, so that we are fain to set ourselves at work with the poorest entertainment…’ ‘There is some muttering of the change of officers … by which you may smell who looks and hopes to be lord chancellor.’ The watermen regaled their customers with the news; the humble citizen sitting in the barber’s chair heard the news. Some men made their living by sending manuscript newsletters into the country. Rumour could travel at a speed of 50 miles per night.

And so what news of court? The king travelled north in March 1617. He told his privy council in Scotland that ‘we have had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soil and place of our birth and breeding’; he called it, charmingly, a ‘salmon-like instinct’. On his slow journey he was attended by many hundreds of courtiers who ate their way through the land like locusts before their arrival at Edinburgh in the middle of May. No one was sure how the visit was to be financed, and those on his route feared the worst. No English king had come this way for hundreds of years. When James reached the border he dismounted and lay on the ground between the two countries, proclaiming that in his own person he symbolized the union between Scotland and England.

Many of his councillors and nobles had not wanted to accompany James to his erstwhile home. They took no interest in, and had no happy expectations of, Scotland. For them it was an uncouth and even savage land. The queen herself declined to go with her husband, pleading sickness. One English courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, wrote that this foreign country ‘is too good for those that possess it, and too bad for others … there is a great store of fowl – as foul houses … foul linen, foul dishes and pots … The country, although it be mountainous, affords no monsters but women.’

The king brought with him candles and choristers as well as a pair of organs; he was intent upon making the Scottish Kirk conform to the worship of the Church of England, but he had only limited success. The Scottish ministers were wary of these ‘rags of popery’. ‘The organs are come before,’ said one Calvinist divine, ‘and after comes the Mass.’ James also alienated many members of the Scottish parliament. In his speech at the opening of the session James expatiated on the virtues of his English kingdom; he told his compatriots that he had nothing ‘more at heart than to reduce your barbarity to the sweet civility of your neighbours’. The Scots had already learned from them how to drive in gay coaches, to drink healths and to take tobacco. This could not have been received warmly.

And what other news? In the summer of 1617 Sir Walter Raleigh, newly released from the Tower for the purpose, sailed to Guiana in search of gold. The king had expressly ordered him not to injure the Spanish in any way; he was still seeking the hand of the infanta for his son. When Raleigh eventually reached the mouth of the Orinoco he sent a lieutenant, Lawrence Keymis, up the river to determine the location of a fabled mine of gold. On his way, however, Keymis attacked the Spaniards who held San Thome and, after an inconsequential combat in which Raleigh’s son was killed, he was eventually forced to return to the main fleet. There was now no possibility of reaching the mine and Raleigh made an ignominious return to England. Keymis killed himself on board ship. The wrath of the king was immense and, sometimes, the wrath of the king meant death. James believed that he had been deliberately deceived by Raleigh on the presence of gold and that the unlucky explorer had unjustifiably and unnecessarily earned for him the enmity of Spain.

The Spanish king of course made angry complaints, through the agency of his notorious ambassador, the count of Gondomar. As a measure of conciliation or recompense, James sent Raleigh to the scaffold in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. It was commonly believed that he had sacrificed him for the honour of the king of Spain. ‘Let us dispatch,’ Raleigh told his executioner. ‘At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear.’ On viewing the axe that was about to destroy him he is supposed to have said that ‘this is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries’. As the executioner was poised to deliver the blow he called out, ‘Strike, man, strike!’ He never did have time to finish his History of the World which he had begun to compose in 1607 while held in the Tower. He had started at the Creation but at the time of his death had only reached the end of the second Macedonian War in 188 BC.

What is the new news, smoking hot from London? In November 1617, the king issued a declaration to the people of Lancashire on the matter of Sunday sports and recreations; in the following year the Book of Sports was directed to the whole country. Archery and dancing were to be permitted, together with ‘leaping, vaulting or any other such harmless recreation’; the king also graciously allowed ‘May-games, Whitsun-ales and Morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles’. Bearbaiting, bull-baiting and bowls, however, were forbidden. Clergy of the stricter sort were not favourably impressed by the pronouncement, which soon became known as ‘The Dancing Book’. It came close to ungodliness and idolatry. One clergyman, William Clough of Bramham, told his congregation that ‘the king of heaven doth bid you to keep his Sabbath and reverence his sanctuary. Now the king of England is a mortal man and he bids you break it. Choose whether [which] of them you will follow.’ Soon enough those of a puritan persuasion would become the principal opponents of royal policy.

Ben Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue was performed before the court at the beginning of 1618. It did not please everyone, and it was suggested that the playwright might like to return to his old trade of bricklaying. At the close of the performance, in the scene of dancing, the players began to lag. ‘Why don’t they dance?’ the king called out. ‘What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!’ Whereupon Buckingham sprang up and, in the words of the chaplain of the Venetian embassy, ‘danced a number of high and very tiny capers with such grace and lightness that he made everyone love him’. James himself demonstrated ‘extraordinary signs of affection, touching his face’.

Yet Buckingham’s enemies, most notably the Howard family, were determined to supplant him. They introduced another handsome youth to court by the name of Monson. They groomed him for the role, dressed him up and washed his face every day with curdled milk to improve its smoothness. But the king did not take to this new suitor. The lord chamberlain took Monson to one side and informed him that James was not pleased with his importunacy and continual presence; he ordered him to stay away from the king and, if he knew what was best for him, to avoid the royal court.

Buckingham began to use one of the first sedan chairs ever to be seen in the country; the people were indignant, complaining that he was employing men to take the place of beasts. Yet he was still in the ascendant, at which high point he would remain for the rest of the reign.

8

A Bohemian tragedy

In April 1618 a little book, bearing the royal arms, was published. It was entitled The Peacemaker, and it extolled the virtues of James as a pacifier of all troubles and contentions. The ‘happy sanctuary’ of England had enjoyed fifteen years of peace since the time of the king’s accession, and so now ‘let it be celebrated with all joy and cheerfulness, and all sing – Beati Pacifici’.

Contention, however, was about to manifest itself in the distant land of Bohemia (now roughly equivalent to the Czech Republic) which was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. In the month after the book’s publication certain Protestant nobles of Bohemia stormed the imperial palace in Prague and threw the emperor’s deputies out of the windows; Matthias had tried to impose upon them the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, a fierce Catholic and a member of the Habsburg family. The Bohemian rebels were soon in charge of their country, posing a challenge to the Catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, which included Philip III of Spain.

The German Calvinists of course took up their cause, thus posing a problem for the king of England. The head of the Calvinist interest was none other than James’s son-in-law, Frederick of the Palatinate. Yet James was also seeking the daughter of Philip III for his son. What was to be done? Was James to side with the Spanish Habsburgs against the Protestant party? Or was he to encourage his son-in-law to maintain the Bohemian cause? He prevaricated by sending an arbiter, but none of the combatants was really willing to entertain his envoy. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, remarked that ‘the vanity of the present king of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by his means, so that his authority will be increased’. It did not quite work out like that.

In March 1619 Matthias died, and Archduke Ferdinand was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The Bohemians took the opportunity of formally deposing him as their sovereign and invited Frederick to take his place. Frederick hesitated only for a moment. James complained that ‘he wrote to me, to know my mind if he should take that crown; but within three days after, and before I could return answer, he put it on’.

After Frederick had accepted their offer, he travelled to Prague in October in order to assume the throne. The Protestants of England were delighted. Here at last was the European champion they had needed. A great comet passed across the skies of Europe in the late autumn of 1618; its reddish hue and long tail were visible for seven weeks, and it became known as ‘the angry star’. It was of course considered to be providential, a token or warning of great change. Could it portend the final defeat of the Habsburgs and even the Antichrist of Rome?

James’s opinion was not entirely in keeping with that of his Protestant subjects. He was angered by what he considered to be Frederick’s rashness in accepting the crown of Bohemia; his son-in-law was in that sense an aggressor flouting the divine right of kings. ‘You are come in good time to England,’ he told Frederick’s envoy, ‘to spread these principles among my people, that my subjects may drive me away, and place another in my room.’ More significantly, he did not wish to drop the Spanish connection he had so carefully fashioned. And yet his daughter was now queen of Bohemia. Surely there was glory in that? It was the greatest dilemma of his reign, combining in deadly fashion his amity with Spain and his relationship with his fellow Protestants in Europe; he had tried to conciliate both forces, but now they threatened to tear him apart. So he prevaricated. The French ambassador reported that ‘his mind uses its powers only for a short time, but in the long run he is cowardly’.

Relations with the Spanish were in a difficult and delicate balance. The business of the marriage of Prince Charles to the infanta was infinitely protracted, and popular opinion in England was one of dismay at a possible liaison with a Catholic power. In the event of marriage, therefore, the king was likely to be estranged from his subjects; but James was too eager for a vast Spanish dowry to heed any warnings. The Spanish in turn required that English Catholics be allowed to practise their religion freely, but the change in law would need the consent of parliament. Parliament would never concede any such request. All was in suspense. When a gentleman from the Spanish embassy rode down a child in Chancery Lane, a crowd developed and tried to seize him; he spurred his horse but the crowd of citizens, now swelled to the number of 4,000 or 5,000, followed him to the ambassador’s house. They besieged it, breaking the windows and threatening to force the doors, until the lord chief justice arrived and took away the offender.

It was possible, to put it no higher, that Spain was planning to invade the Palatinate. James was in an agony of indecision, at one moment promising to send a large army to help his son-in-law and at another claiming that he was in no position to aid anyone. He did not wish to meddle in the matter. He could not afford a war, and the country was not ready for military action. Was the election of Frederick, in any case, legally valid? If not, any war on Frederick’s behalf might then be unjust as well as unnecessary.

Politics, and diplomacy, could not be separated from the issues of religion; all were intimately related in a continent where the division between Catholic and Protestant was the single most important fact of the age. There were of course divisions within the ranks of Protestants themselves. At the end of 1618 a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church was held in the city of Dordrecht, known colloquially as Dort, to which came six representatives from England. The debate was of vital interest to the king. It was concerned with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which was denied by a Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius, and his followers. Arminius also condemned religious zealotry of the kind practised by his opponents. He declared that religion was about to suffer the same fate as the young lady mentioned by Plutarch; she was pursued by several lovers who, unable to agree among themselves, became violent and cut the woman to pieces so that each could have a portion of her. The Calvinists, holding the dominant faith of Holland, called Arminius and his supporters to account. The arguments, impassioned and even bitter, lasted for seven months.

An English puritan, Thomas Goodwin, noted that the reports of the synod ‘began to be every man’s talk and enquiry’ and another English theologian, Peter Heylyn, stated that the debates ‘wakened Englishmen out of “a dead sleep”’. Theologians were then of the utmost consequence in political as well as spiritual affairs; religion was, in this century, the principal issue by which all other matters were judged and interpreted. At the conclusion of the synod the Calvinists emerged triumphant and their opponents were either imprisoned or deprived of their ministry; 700 families of Arminians were driven into exile. For James it seemed to be a victory for the purity of religion, and one English divine, Francis Rous, excoriated Arminianism as ‘the spawn of the papists’. The battle lines of Protestantism were set ever more firmly in stone. Arminianism would emerge in England at a slightly later date, with fatal consequences for the next king.

James was growing sick with the strain and tensions induced by Spain and the Palatinate. He was suffering from an unhappy combination of arthritis and gout together with what was called ‘a shrewd fit of the stone’. The death of his wife, Anne of Denmark, in the early spring of 1619 caused a further decline in his health. The king’s doctor noted ‘continued fever, bilious diarrhoea … ulceration of his lips and chin. Fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness, intermittent pulse.’ The king voided three stones and the pain was so great that he vomited. He seemed likely to die. Charles, Buckingham and the leading councillors were summoned from London to Royston, where he was staying, and he delivered what was considered to be a deathbed speech. Yet this was premature. Within a few days he began to recover, although he was still too weak to attend his wife’s funeral in the middle of May. He had been informed that the best remedy for weak legs was the blood of a newly slaughtered deer; so for some weeks he was to be found, after the hunt, with his feet buried in the body of an animal that had just been brought down.

He returned to London at the beginning of June, dressed so luxuriously that he was said to resemble a suitor rather than a mourner. He had some cause for celebration. The new Banqueting House was about to be completed, one of the few physical memorials of his reign that survive intact. It had been designed by Inigo Jones in the novel and controversial neoclassical style, conceived in the spirit of Palladio and of the Italian Renaissance; it was devised to represent the twin concepts of ‘magnificence’ and ‘decorum’, with the king presiding in its ornate and mathematically correct interior as both judge and peacemaker. The Banqueting House was the seat of majesty. It was also considered to be a suitable setting for the eventual reception of Charles and the infanta. Sixteen years later Rubens completed the canvases for the great ceiling; James here is depicted as a British Solomon, uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland, while on the oval canvas that acts as centrepiece he is raised into heaven by the figures of Justice, Faith and Religion.

The cost was very high, approximately £15,000, at a time when the royal treasury was almost bare. The country itself was also suffering a financial crisis. The growing preference on the continent for cheaper local cloth, as opposed to the more expensive English woollens, and the competitive power of Dutch traders meant that there was a significant fall in economic activity. ‘All grievances in the kingdom are trifles,’ Sir Edwin Sandys told the Commons, ‘compared with the decay in trade.’ Lionel Cranfield, who became lord high treasurer in 1621, explained that ‘trade is as great as ever, but not so good. It increases inwards and decreases outwards.’ The balance of trade, in other words, was not in England’s favour. This was one of those spasms of economic distress that have always hit the English economy, but in the early seventeenth century no one really understood what was happening.

Cranfield added that ‘the want of money is because trade is sick, and as long as trade is sick, we shall be in want of money’. Too many manufactured goods were entering the country, among them the import of what were widely regarded as vain and unnecessary items such as wine and tobacco. The luxurious world was one of velvets and satins, of pearls and cloth of gold. Yet elsewhere economic failure had become endemic. The export of London broadcloths, in 1622, had fallen by 40 per cent from the figures of 1618; the hardship was compounded by the failure of the harvest in 1623. ‘There are many thousands in these parts,’ one Lincolnshire gentleman, Sir William Pelham, wrote, ‘who have sold all they have even to their bed-straw, and cannot get work to earn any money. Dog’s flesh is a dainty dish, and found upon search in many houses.’ This is the context for the unrest and disturbance of the last years of James’s reign.

It is also one of the principal causes for the number of English colonists seeking a new life in America. In the autumn of 1620 the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth; some of its passengers were religious separatists who had come from Leiden, in Holland, but the majority were English families looking for land and for material improvement. It has been estimated that over the next two or three decades some 60,000 left English shores, one third of them bound for New England. When they cross the Atlantic, they are lost from the purview of this history.

*

It was becoming increasingly likely that the Spanish would invade the Palatinate in revenge for Frederick’s assumption of the Bohemian throne. A successful attack would have serious consequences for Protestantism in Europe and might well lead once more to Habsburg domination; an ambassador was sent to England, therefore, from the princes and free cities of the Protestant Union in Germany. The envoy did not receive a warm welcome from the king. James, divided in his loyalties, decided to do nothing. The archbishop of Canterbury, horrified at this desertion of the Protestant cause, pleaded with him to allow voluntary contributions from the clergy for the sake of their co-religionists. To this the king reluctantly assented.

He was of course still pursuing Spain for the hand of the infanta. He called the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, to him. ‘I give you my word,’ he said, ‘as a king, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as an honest man, I have no wish to marry my son to anyone except your master’s daughter, and I desire no alliance but that of Spain.’ He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had made an implicit admission, to the effect that he desired no alliance with Frederick or the German princes. What did Bohemia mean to him? It was a distant land of which he knew nothing, remarkable only for the scene of shipwreck in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, performed nine years before, in which it was miraculously granted a sea coast.

Gondomar quickly sent a message to Philip III that he could invade Frederick’s territories without risk of a war with England. Thus began the struggle which eventually became known as the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive conflicts in early modern European history that ravaged much of the Holy Roman Empire and spread to Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

At the end of July 1620, the king set out on a progress. The Venetian ambassador reported that he seemed glad to leave London behind. He added that ‘the king seems utterly weary of the affairs that are taking place all over the world at this time, and he hates being obliged every day to spend time over unpleasant matters and listen to nothing but requests and incitements to move in every direction and to meddle with everything’. James had remarked, ‘I am not God Almighty.’

A few days later news reached him that a Spanish army of 24,000 soldiers was moving against the Palatinate; at the same time the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, whose throne had been usurped, was marching upon Prague. ‘What do you know,’ James asked an adviser who had questioned him on the perilous situation. ‘You are ignorant. I know quite well what I am about. All these troubles will settle themselves, you will see that very soon. I know what I am talking about.’

Yet he was troubled by what he now realized was Spanish duplicity. Gondomar had talked of conciliation while all the time Philip III had been planning for war. James summoned the ambassador to Hampton Court, where he raved about his double-dealing. Gondomar politely replied that he had never said that Spain would not invade the Palatinate, whereupon the king burst into tears. Could he not be allowed to defend his own children? His policy of compromise, bred out of vacillation and indecision, was in ruins.

The Spanish were victorious in November 1620, at the battle of White Mountain just outside Prague. The Protestant army was devastated, and Frederick was removed from his temporary kingdom of Bohemia. On the following day he fled for his life into the neighbouring region of Silesia; he could not even return to his homeland, since in the following summer the Spanish occupied half of the Palatinate. He and his wife, Elizabeth, were effectively exiles. In turn the Bohemian leaders of the Protestant rebellion were led to the scaffold and a new imperial aristocracy rose in triumph. The news alarmed and enraged the English public in equal measure, and it was not long before all the blame was being laid upon James.

The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘tears, sighs and loud expressions of wrath are seen and heard in every direction’. Letters against the king were scattered in the streets threatening that if he did not do what was expected of him, the people would soon display their anger. All sympathies lay with his daughter Elizabeth, who had been forced to flee without the assistance or protection of her father. Prince Charles, in agony over the unhappy situation of his sister, shut himself in his chambers for two days. The king himself was said to be in great distress but, having recovered from the initial shock, was heard to murmur that ‘I have long expected this’.

He very soon took on his favourite role as arbitrator or peacemaker. He devised a plan that might prove acceptable to all sides. Frederick would submit to the emperor and renounce any claim to Bohemia on condition that his Palatinate was returned to him untouched. There ensued a process of elaborate diplomatic negotiations that achieved nothing. A parody of the time noted that James would present his son-in-law with an army of 100,000 ambassadors.

It was time to call a parliament; it assembled in the middle of January 1621. It did not augur well that the king had to be carried to its opening in a chair. His legs and his feet were so weak that it was believed he would soon lose the use of them. He did not in any case desire to consult with the Commons on matters of policy. He was there to deliver his demands. He ordered them not to ‘meddle with complaints against the king, the church or state matters’. He himself would ensure that the proposed Spanish match between his son and the infanta did not endanger the Protestant religion of England; he also stated that he would not allow his son-in-law’s Palatinate to be broken up. And for that he needed money. It was the only reason he had summoned them. He had once said that he was obliged ‘to live like a shellfish upon his own moisture, without any public supply’. It was one of James’s arresting similes.

A committee of enquiry had already estimated that a force for the protection of the Palatinate would cost approximately £900,000 each year; James, sensing the outrage such a sum would cause, asked for £500,000; parliament granted him £160,000 before turning its attention to such domestic grievances as the abuse of patents and monopolies by unscrupulous agents. It was the first meeting of parliament for almost seven years and, as such, became a clearing house for all the complaints and problems that had accrued in the interim. In the course of this first session some fifty-two bills were given a second reading.

The weather outside the chamber was bitter. John Chamberlain wrote at the beginning of February that ‘the Thames is now quite frozen over, so that people have passed over, to and fro, these four or five days … the winds and high tides have so driven the ice in heaps in some places, that it lies like rocks and mountains, and hath a strange and hideous aspect’.

The depression of trade was the single most important theme for the assembly beside the frozen river. The gathering of members of parliament at Westminster gave the opportunity for the exporters, landlords and graziers among them to vent their complaints about falling prices and unsold wool. It was declared that poverty and want were rife. One member told his colleagues that ‘I had rather be a ploughman than a merchant’. Disorderly interventions did not quell the embittered speeches. No parties had as yet emerged, in the modern sense, only individuals expressing vested interests or local grievances. It was becoming clear, however, that the political initiative was being grasped by parliament rather than by the king and council.

In the same session parliament drew up a petition against ‘Jesuits, papists and recusants’. It was the only way they knew of unravelling the Spanish connection that the king favoured. The member for Bath, Sir Robert Phelips, raised the temperature by saying that if the papists were not checked they would soon comprise half of the king’s subjects. So parliament acted. All recusants to be banished from London. All recusants to be disarmed by the justices of the peace. No subject of the king should hear Mass. James was in a quandary, suspended between his parliament and the king of Spain; it was reported that he would accept the principal recommendations but would reserve the particulars for further consideration. This was widely believed to be an evasion.

The feeling of the people against the Spaniards was now palpable. A caricature had been circulated at the beginning of 1621 that depicted the king of Spain, the pope and the devil as conspirators in another ‘powder-plot’. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, was proceeding down Fenchurch Street when an apprentice called out, ‘There goes the devil in a dung-cart.’

One of Gondomar’s servants responded. ‘Sir, you shall see Bridewell ere long for your mirth.’

‘What! Shall we go to Bridewell for such a dog as thou!’

Eventually the apprentice and his companions were whipped through the streets, much to the indignation of the citizens.

Parliament itself was enthusiastic for Frederick’s cause. When one member made a speech advocating war against the imperial forces the Commons responded with a unanimous vote, lifting their hats high in acclamation, and vowed to recover the Palatinate. James seemed for the moment to share their enthusiasm, but he was too shrewd or too wary to commit himself to a European war against the Catholic powers. He had in any case grown impatient with parliament. It had sat for four months, and spent most of its time in delivering to him requests and grievances. It had not addressed the necessities of the king, or his request for a further grant of money. So at the beginning of June 1621, he adjourned it.

At a later date a notable parliamentarian, Sir John Eliot, reflected upon the failure of this assembly. The king believed that the liberties of parliament encroached upon his prerogative, while in turn parliament feared he ‘sought to retrench and block up the ancient privileges and liberties of the house’. So both sides became more intransigent, the king maintaining his royal power and the parliament standing upon its privileges. Eliot believed that there was a middle ground, but at the time it was overlooked.

This was the rock upon which the constitution would founder. An eminent nineteenth-century jurist, John, Baron Campbell, wrote that ‘the meeting of parliament on 30 January, 1621, may be considered the commencement of that great movement, which, exactly twenty eight years afterwards, led to the decapitation of an English sovereign, under a judicial sentence pronounced by his subjects’. A portrait of the king, completed in this year by Daniel Mytens, shows James in his robes of state; he has a preoccupied, or perhaps a perplexed, expression.

When parliament met once more on 20 November, it was clear that its zeal and anger had not noticeably diminished. Its members were in a sense liberated by the absence of the sovereign; James had decided to leave London and, with Buckingham, travelled to Royston and Newmarket. The chamber was united in its horror of recent policies. Sir Robert Phelips was once again on the attack. The Catholic states of Europe were England’s enemies, while in England the Catholics had grown so bold that they dared to talk of the Protestants as a ‘faction’. Let no supply be granted to the king until the dangers, home and abroad, had been resolved. Edward Coke, now a leader of the malcontents, then rose to remind his colleagues that Spain had sent the Armada, that the sheep scab which destroyed many flocks came from the same country, and that the most disgusting disease to strike humankind – namely, syphilis – had spread from Naples, a city controlled by Spain. That country was the source and spring of all foulness.

The Spaniards were also attacked in violent terms when John Pym, soon to become the fiercest opponent to the pretensions of the Crown, rose to speak against the Catholic threat in England itself, where ‘the seeds of sedition’ were buried beneath ‘the pretences of religion’. The Venetian ambassador reported that the members ‘have complained bitterly because his majesty shows them [the Catholics] so much indulgence’. The sovereign was indeed the problem; he had asked for a supply, but had not properly disclosed his policy. What could his supporters say on his behalf? The parliament had also raised the matter of the prince’s marriage. If the infanta of Spain eventually became the queen of England, one of her offspring would at a future date assume the throne; this would mean the return to the rule of a Catholic king. The members of the Commons drew up a petition in which they asked James to declare war on the Catholic powers of Europe and to marry his son to a Protestant.

When the king received word of this petition he is supposed to have cried out, ‘God give me patience!’ He wrote to the Speaker of the Commons complaining that ‘some fiery and popular spirits’ were considering issues that were beyond their competence to resolve; he demanded that no member should in the future dare to touch upon issues ‘concerning our government or matters of state’. The Spanish match was not open for discussion. He then issued a threat that he felt himself ‘very free and able to punish any man’s misdemeanours in parliament as well during their sitting as after’. He had effectively denied them any rights at all. Phelips described it as ‘a soul-killing letter’.

The Commons then drew up a petition in which they asked the king not to believe ill-founded reports on their conduct; they also requested him to guarantee their privileges. When they came with the document to Newmarket, he called out, ‘Stools for the ambassadors!’ He realized now that they did indeed represent a separate power in the land. In response to the petition, however, he warned them not to touch his sovereign power. One member, Sir Nathaniel Rich, objected to these commands. He took offence at such royal demands as ‘Meddle not with this business’ or ‘Go to this business first’. ‘When I speak of freedom of speech,’ he declared, ‘I mean not licentiousness and exorbitancy, but speech without servile fear or, as it were, under the rod.’

On 18 December 1621, by candlelight in the evening, the Commons issued a ‘protestation’ in which they asserted that their privileges, and indeed their lives, ‘are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’. They had every right to discuss foreign affairs. Any matter that concerned the defence of the realm, or the state of religion, came within the scope of their counsel and debate. They demanded freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. James, now thoroughly exasperated, adjourned and then dissolved parliament. He called for the journal of the Commons and with his own hand ripped out the ‘protestation’; it now had no status. ‘I will govern’, he said, ‘according to the commonweal, but not according to the common will.’ The ‘commonweal’ was the term for the general interests of the nation. He then consigned Coke and Phelips to prison and confined Pym to his house. ‘It is certain,’ Gondomar wrote, ‘that the king will never summon another parliament as long as he lives.’

The dissolution marked the beginning of the end of James’s authority in England. His policy had been a dead failure, and he had alienated all the citizens and gentry who took the side of the Commons. He had no money to fight any war on behalf of the Palatinate, and he was obliged to continue negotiations with Spain. It was also widely believed that Buckingham’s advice lay behind the king’s intransigence; the favourite was even more distrusted than before. The times were dangerous and uncertain.

The reputation of the king was now constantly under attack. He was accused of being lazy and improvident; his will was weaker than water. He was no more than the king of Spain’s viceroy. In January 1622, a man was put upon the rack ‘for saying that there would be a rebellion’. A manuscript libel by ‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ passed among the people, saying that James may be ‘defender of the faith’, according to his title, but the faith was that of the Catholics; he was head of the Church dormant, not the Church militant or triumphant. ‘Tom’ added that Gondomar had the golden key to the king’s cabinet of secrets and that James himself had committed the most hideous depravities of which a human being was capable. This was a reference to the king’s relationship with Buckingham. A preacher at Oxford, a young man named Knight, declared that it was ‘lawful for subjects when harassed on the score of religion to take arms against their Prince in their own defence’. Soon enough James issued ‘directions concerning preaching’ in which the clergy were forbidden to make ‘bitter invectives and indecent railing speeches’ against the Catholics and were told to avoid ‘all matters of state’. ‘No man can now mutter a word in the pulpit’, Buckingham boasted to the Spanish ambassador, ‘but he is presently catched and set in straight prison.’

With the same wish to silence dissent the king proclaimed that ‘noblemen, knights and gentlemen of quality’ should return to their rural estates. It was claimed that this was a measure to promote hospitality in the countryside but it was widely believed that it was aimed at the gentry who, while residing in London, compounded their discontent by sharing their grievances.

The lawyers of Gray’s Inn had decided to take some small cannon from the Tower in order to celebrate Twelfth Night. They shot them off in the dead of night, but the report was so loud that it awoke the king at Whitehall. He started out of his bed crying, ‘Treason! Treason!’ The whole court was in alarm, and the earl of Arundel ran to the royal bedchamber with his drawn sword in his hand. The false alarm had arisen from the king’s own fears. He seemed to lack both moral and physical courage. The Venetian ambassador reported that he was ‘too agitated by constant mistrust of everyone, tyrannized over by perpetual fear for his life, tenacious of his authority as against the parliament and jealous of his son’s obedience, all accidents and causes of his fatal and almost desperate infirmity of mind, so harmful to the general welfare’.